{"id":185,"date":"2020-12-07T13:09:52","date_gmt":"2020-12-07T13:09:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/site.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=185"},"modified":"2020-12-07T13:41:16","modified_gmt":"2020-12-07T13:41:16","slug":"the-culture-of-nature-in-cape-breton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/site.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=185","title":{"rendered":"The Culture of Nature in Cape Breton"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What does it mean for a small island at the eastern edge of Canada to colour its nature ‘Celtic’, as it does with the heavily promoted, annual international festival called Celtic Colours<\/a>?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Cabot Trail<\/a> winds its rollercoaster-like way along or near the coastline, offering views of mountains, cliffs, stunning drops to the shore and its expanse of ocean, and of roadside gift shops and hints of the (now much quieter) fishing villages that still span much of the coast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As the road\u2019s eastern arm crosses northward across the park boundary, an interesting transformation occurs, as all traces of \u2018lived culture\u2019 disappear and are replaced by what Alex Wilson (1992) referred to as \u2018the culture of nature\u2019:<\/a> signs directing visitors to scenic overlooks, roadside parking areas, and numbered trailheads, all stitched together by the familiarly minimalist semiotic of yellow-on-brown National Parks signs \u2013 a question mark indicating an information booth, an upside-down \u2018V\u2019 for a camping area, a stick-figured, circle-headed, binocular-holding \u2018man\u2019 indicating a lookout point, and so on. As the highway winds through the area of North Mountain and South Mountain, both the lookout points and the cars in their parking lots increase in number, and, at the height of fall, the foliage blazes in remarkable colours from the wall of highlands facing the cars and onlookers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A dozen or so scenic viewpoints later, as the visitor departs the park\u2019s western boundary,<\/a> the landscape seems suddenly \u2018real\u2019 again, with the white and pastel-coloured Acadian homes, with their gently-pitched, seaward-sloping roofs, straddling the road, and the hardware stores, doughnut shops, and bed-and-breakfasts of the seaside village of Ch\u00e9ticamp<\/a>. It is almost as if a black-and-white \u2013 or green \u2013 screen has suddenly burst into living colour, abounding in the lived culture of human livelihoods being made, with even the optimistic economic sign of fishing boats in the harbour.<\/a> Or is it the other way around, with the national park\u2019s muted signage highlighting the living colour of its scenery, while this thoroughly \u2018cultured\u2019 world outside it serves as its black-and-white foil?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Cape Breton as a New World Scotland<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historian Ian McKay<\/a> (1992, 1993, 1994) has exhaustively documented how urban-based cultural producers and government tourism managers, during the second quarter of the twentieth century, produced the image of Nova Scotia as a \u2018New World Scotland\u2019 and a \u2018timeless\u2019 place of rugged, hearty, but simple \u2018country folk.\u2019 . . . With the steel and coal industries centred around Sydney Harbour and its vicinity, Cape Breton at the time housed the largest industrial complex in the Atlantic Provinces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Premier Angus MacDonald<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Following his ascent to the premiership, Premier Angus MacDonald<\/a> vigorously pursued this vision of Nova Scotia as the \u2018last great stronghold of the Gael in America\u2019 (MacDonald 1937) and \u2018greatest outpost of Celtic Scotland in the whole world\u2019 (MacDonald 1948). To make Cape Breton more attractive to that \u2018whole world,\u2019 MacDonald developed the Cabot Trail highway, deeded a part of the northern cape to the federal government for the creation of Cape Breton Highlands National Park,<\/a> and presided over the founding of St Ann\u2019s Gaelic College<\/a> (with its nostalgic-romanticist Hall of the Clans) and the construction of the Lone Shieling, a replica of a Scottish Highland crofter\u2019s cottage designed after one mentioned nostalgically in the anonymous poem \u2018Canadian Boat-Song,\u2019 a poem which had already been recited by generations of Nova Scotia school children. MacDonald went so far as to suggest to his minister of mines and resources, J. A. McKinnon, that Cape Breton Highlands National Park foresters wear Scottish kilts and replace the green forester\u2019s bonnet with the \u2018Scottish blue\u2019 (McKay 1992:29). Nature was thus to be firmly associated in the visitor\u2019s mind with the tartan and the kilt, the cultural trappings of an ethnicity reconstructed in response to the pressures of tourism (McKay 1992:45).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paradoxically, while a \u2018merry tartanism covered Nova Scotia,\u2019 the official neglect of the needs of Gaelic speakers led to a near-disappearance of the Gaelic language in the province (McKay 1992:34). As McKay puts it, MacDonald wrote the \u2018saga of the Scottish soul into the province\u2019s collective memory \u2013 on its roads and signs, its festivals and gatherings\u2019 (19).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Celticity Ablaze<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Celtic Colours<\/a> is the third largest Celtic festival  in the world, topped only by Glasgow\u2019s Celtic Connections<\/a> and the Festival Interceltique de Lorient<\/a> in Brittany, France.  The \u2018colours\u2019 are a play on the implied interpenetration of the island\u2019s cultural and natural heritage, both of which will greet visitors to the island in full bloom at this autumnal harvest of artistic events, ceilidhs (gatherings), square dances, and celebrations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what makes the music \u2018Celtic\u2019? Is it the instrumentation, its tonal qualities and sonorities, its vocal delivery, its lilting, dance-like rhythms and repetitive variational forms? If instrumentation, is it the bagpipes, tin whistles, and fiddles, or the strumming guitars, electric pianos, and synthesizer washes that increasingly fill in its textures? Or is it the ethnic affiliations, languages spoken or sung, or \u2018temperaments\u2019 of its performers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The festival is a place Celticity and pan-Celtic identities are displayed, performatively enacted, and transformed. \u2018Celticity\u2019 is redefined both more tightly or centrifugally — with pride of place given to\u00a0Cape Breton<\/a>, with its unique and localized fiddle-playing styles, pianistic accompaniment, and step-dance traditions that have disappeared even in the Scotland in which they ostensibly originated \u2013 and, at the same time, more expansively, extending outward into the Latin Transatlantic (e.g., via Spain’s bagpiper Carlos Nunez, who claims to have met Celtic bagpipers while traveling in Cuba), the American South (through the Acadian<\/a> Diaspora, whose musical culture shows mutual influences with and on Gaelic musical traditions), the multi-ethnic world of \u2018Aboriginal music\u2019 (through such artists as Mi\u2019kmaq Cape Bretoner Lee Cremo), and into the by-roads of \u2018world music\u2019 through the various collaborations of such \u2018Celtic music\u2019 giants and crossover artists as The Chieftains and Afro Celt Sound System.

Cape Breton Island is thereby repositioned from being a \u2018rural backwater\u2019 or, at best, a peripheral outpost of cultural conservatism to what is now a lively and progressive cultural crossroads \u2013 a place that seems on its way to becoming what Bruno Latour calls an \u2018obligatory passage point\u2019 within the transnational networks of Celticist cultural marketing. What were once local, family- and community-based performance traditions have been extended or mutated into global networks of musicianship, fandom, style, and commerce. Renamed \u2018Celtic,\u2019 the music of Cape Breton performers, from the vocal stylings of Rita MacNeil to the rocked-up performance antics of Ashley MacIsaac, comes to signify the \u2018timeless\u2019 tradition, expressive energy, and natural and cultural \u2018colours\u2019 of the island itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
The famed Red Shoe Pub in Mabou, Cape Breton<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

“Before we were Celtic,” writes Frances MacEachen (1997b), editor of the English-Gaelic quarterly Am Braighe<\/em>,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

we were Scottish. Not so long ago the promoters wanted us to adorn kilts and bellow clan cries. Now, it seems, we are more photogenic with fiddles and perhaps a less ethnic look: cosmopolitan rhythms linked with ancient tunes\u2026 world music\u2026 now we\u2019re talking. Of course, the almost-fallen-down barn makes a nice backdrop now and then. The point is that all these images are based in myth and marketing, nothing real<\/em>.”  <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But what is real<\/em> and what isn’t? The pre-Columbian Mi\u2019kmaq population maintained trading networks extending down the coast and into the interior of the continent. When they entered into trading relationships with Europeans, their fur trapping activities became nested within an international network that resulted in substantial reduction of fur-bearing species and in other ecological transformations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nineteenth and early twentieth century Cape Breton rural life was similarly integrated into larger market networks. Livestock, butter, crops, and timber from more prosperous \u2018frontland\u2019 farms were sold to markets supplying the coastal fishing and mining settlements (as well as Halifax and St. John\u2019s, Newfoundland), which in turn supplied international markets with cod, coal, and other staples. Farmers and squatters on the less prosperous \u2018backlands\u2019 barely eked out a living and regularly resorted to seasonal migrant labour in coastal fishing towns, coal mines, or as far away as Halifax and Boston. Beef farmers faced competition from the American Midwest, just as local fishing and mining industries responded to the rise and fall in world prices for their goods (Hornsby 1992; Donovan 1990; Pryke 1992).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Myth and marketing\u2019 may seem less real than the musical and cultural traditions passed down from generation to generation because those cultural traditions were never marketed to larger consumption networks the way the staples of Cape Breton\u2019s economy have been. Today that situation has changed: song and dance have become the new cod and coal for many Gaelic Cape Bretoners. This point is neatly underscored by the fact that the current Minister of Tourism, Culture, and Heritage for Nova Scotia, Rodney Macdonald<\/a>, happens to be an excellent young fiddler from Inverness County. [Note: Macdonald served in this role in the early 2000s, and from 2006 to 2009 was the Premier of the Province of Nova Scotia.]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n