In the Blood: Cape Breton Conversations on Culture

In the Blood

779-7_InTheBloodINT.indd 1 6/24/10 7:17 AM

Kinnon Beaton and Colin Grant, Celtic Music Interpretive Center, Judique


In the BloodCape Breton Conversations on Culture

Burt Feintuch Photographs by Gary Samson

Utah State University PressLogan, Utah

Cape Breton University PressSydney, Nova Scotia

2010


To the memory of Jerry Holland, 1955–2009

Copyright © 2010 Burt Feintuch and Gary SamsonAll Rights Reserved

Utah State University PressLogan, UtahCape Breton University PressSydney, Nova Scotia

A subvention from the New Hampshire Institute of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, supported publication of this book.

Manufactured in China

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feintuch, Burt, 1949- In the blood : Cape Breton conversations on culture / Burt Feintuch ; photographs by Gary Samson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87421-779-7 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-0-87421-780-3 (e-book) 1. Cape Breton Island (N.S.)--Biography. 2. Cape Breton Island (N.S.)--Social life and customs. I. Title. F1039.C2F45 2010 971.6--dc22 2010015138


Contents

Introduction 1

1. Frank MacdonaldJournalist, writer, Inverness 19

2. Richard MacKinnonFolklorist, Sydney 29

3. Ginette ChiassonRadio announcer, French cultural activist, Petit Étang 39

4. Alistair MacLeodWriter, emeritus professor, Dunvegan 57

5. Rita JoePoet, Eskasoni 69

6. Danny MoranRetired coal miner, New Victoria 77

7. Buddy MacMasterMusician, Judique 91

8. Jerry HollandMusician, composer, Georges River 99

9. Paul CranfordLighthouse-keeper, musician, publisher, composer, North Shore 115

10. Margie and Jimmy MacInnisDance organizers, Mabou 127

11. Kay MacDonaldGaelic educator, singer, New Waterford 141


12. Mary Jane LamondGaelic singer, co-chair of the Gaelic Council of Nova Scotia, Glendale 149

13. Frances MacEachenGaelic language and culture advocate, Mabou 159

14. Evelyn Moraff DavisBusiness owner, Whitney Pier 171

15. Iris and Rhonda CrawfordRetail and hospital worker; social service worker, Whitney Pier, Sydney 179

16. Duncan SutherlandFishery worker, Port Hood 193

17. Bob MacEachernBroadcaster and owner, CIGO-FM, “The Hawk,” Port Hawkesbury 205

18. Gerry DeveauMusician, dancer, entrepreneur, Belle Côte 217

19. Keith BrownTourism, marketing, and development specialist, Sydney 227

20. Rodney MacDonaldPremier of the Province of Nova Scotia, Mabou 235

21. Joella FouldsExecutive director, Celtic Colours International Festival, Sydney 245

22. Kimberley FraserMusician, dancer, Sydney Mines and Boston 259

Afterword 274Photographing in Cape Breton 276Acknowledgments 280The Author and the Photographer 282


1

Introduction

I.The Strait of Canso separates Cape Breton Island from the Nova Scotia mainland in the Canadian Maritimes. Until 1955, a boat or ferry was necessary to reach the island. In 1955, the 4,583-foot-long Canso Causeway opened, and cars and trucks replaced the ferry at the primary point of access. The 2006 census tells us that 142,298 Cape Bretoners live on the island’s approximately four thousand square miles. Fundamental to under-standing them is that they live on an island.

Other routes and conveyances might bring you to the island. Large ferries cross between North Sydney, on Cape Breton, and Newfoundland, often a difficult crossing. The island’s largest city, Sydney (2001 population 24,115), has a small commercial air-port, expensive to reach, the weather often unreliable.

But start by driving across the Causeway, as most people do. Pass the visitors infor-mation center; then you have decisions to make. You’re in Port Hastings. Decide to turn left, and Route 19 leads you along the island’s western side. The sea is on your left, the views often spectacular, the communities small. Some of the towns welcome you with signs announcing that they are home to musicians whose reputations have spread throughout North America and into Europe. The signs are likely to feature a fiddle. Stop at the new Celtic Music Interpretive Centre in Judique. Pass through Port Hood, the county’s administrative center. Fishing boats are in the harbors. Slow down for Mabou, these days one of the focal points of Gaelic culture on this island, which was settled in significant measure by people who left the Highlands and western islands of Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Throughout, place names are indicated in English and Gaelic. Route 19, in fact, is named the Ceilidh Trail. Ceilidh is a Gaelic word for a neighborly house party, often featuring song, music, and stories.

Pass through Inverness (2001 population 2,496), a former coal-mining community. Above a magnificent beach, old duplex company houses sag, appearing to lean against each other for support. Pick up a copy of the Inverness Oran, the weekly paper. In the


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height of the summer season the arts and entertainment section is likely to be bigger than the sports section in hockey-mad Canada. Much of the terrain feels quiet, empty, and wooded, with some agriculture, the sea, and the fishery.

Keep going, and beyond Margaree Harbour, Gaelic place-name signs vanish and French begins. The architecture changes, with the houses often painted in bright colors. Come to Chéticamp (2001 population 3,145), the largest Francophone community on the island, its imposing stone church looming over a low business district, wharves, and fishing boats. Continue and you enter the Cape Breton Highlands National Park. Travel magazines routinely name Cape Breton one of the most beautiful places on earth, refer-ring mostly to the sinuous Cabot Trail, which traverses the park and the small communi-ties, such as Pleasant Bay and Meat Cove, that lie outside it. You’ve pretty much driven the length of Inverness County, one of the island’s four counties. It is a lovely place, but between 1991 and 2006 the Inverness County population declined 12 percent, to roughly nineteen thousand people.

Or make another choice back in Port Hastings. Be in a hurry. Cross the Causeway and shoot up the middle of the island. You’re on the TransCanada Highway, Route 105. The

Meat Cove, Inverness County


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road bisects Whycogomagh, Wagmatcook—First Nations communities. People are in motion here, often on foot along the roadside. There are churches, basket shops, smoke shops, a cultural center or two. The road is better here than on the western side. Water appears on your right, part of the extensive Bras d’Or Lakes that take a huge bite out of the island before giving way to the sea. Come to Baddeck, with its small resorts and motels, many named to reference things Celtic or Scottish. Alexander Graham Bell built an estate here, Beinn Bhreagh, which is now a national historic site. Soon you’ll pass St. Ann’s. The Gaelic College there, established in 1938 to teach Gaelic language and arts, attracts visitors and residents. You can enter the other end of the Cabot Trail around here. But keep going on 105. The road climbs, and you’re crossing Kelly’s Mountain, with its dramatic look-offs and sobering S-curves.

You’ll next cross the Seal Island Bridge, high and narrow. You’re heading to industrial Cape Breton. Sydney Mines, North Sydney, Sydney itself, New Waterford, Glace Bay—these urban places were defined by coal and steel. Were is the operative word. Those two old industries are entirely gone from Cape Breton. Sydney once had eastern Canada’s larg-est steel mill. More recently, it has had some of eastern Canada’s most toxic waste sites, and the steel mill itself has been dismantled and carted away. Small cruise ships dock in the harbor, where the new Sydney Marine Terminal features a huge fiddle towering over the two-story building. Cape Breton University, with its new Centre for Cape Breton Studies, is in Sydney. So is the Membertou First Nations community. You can continue on to Port Morien, where North American commercial coal mining began in 1720. Or go to Fortress Louisbourg, a rebuilt version of the fortified community and fishing station that came about as a result of France’s early occupation of that part of the island.

You have a third choice when you cross the Causeway. You can go to the right, passing Port Hasting’s cluster of motels, cruising through Port Hawkesbury, and then, in a general sense, traversing the island’s other side. Port Hawkesbury is a busy place of about 3,900 people. It has a new civic center, a major investment in community development. Just off Port Hawkesbury, though, is Point Tupper, where a large pulp and paper mill is the eco-nomic lynchpin of a region that never recovered from the demise of the old industries. Arguably, it never recovered from the potato famine that began in 1845, either. Route 4 goes through St. Peter’s, once a population center, now fairly placid and quiet. The road bypasses Isle Madame, the island’s other Francophone area. Here was once a significant economy based on cod, especially in Arichat, although, as elsewhere on the island, the fishery isn’t what it once was. With Bras d’Or on the left, you’ll drive through Big Pond, the home community of Rita McNeil, another Cape Breton musical sensation, a vocalist. Let the small community of Irish Cove stand for a significant historical presence, the people who fished and worked in the mines. You’re approaching the urban area again, but before you get there you can choose to turn off at East Bay and head to Eskasoni, the largest First Nations reserve east of Montreal. Continuing toward Sydney, though, you might notice a house painted in the Cape Breton tartan. Identity matters here. And soon you’re back in Sydney, on King’s Road, marking where New England loyalists helped create the town.


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I first came to Cape Breton in 1996. Music drew me. A folklorist and a fiddler, I’ve been fortunate to be able to combine passions—vocational and avocational—writing scholarship about traditional music, producing CDs, and otherwise being thankful for the opportunities academic life has provided. Attracted by reports that Cape Breton’s traditional music scene was flourishing, with the fiddle at its heart, I enrolled in a week-long class taught by master musicians, just outside of Inverness. That was an introduction to a world of local music unlike anything I’d experienced. Every night that week I would find people dancing in small halls to deeply rhythmic fiddle music, or a concert or festival would feature that music. I had never been to a place in North America where old music, local music, was so vital, so treasured, and so much a part of everyday life. I remember walking into a bank in Inverness to get some Canadian currency; instead of Muzak, fiddle music was playing softly. You could hear it on the radio, read about it in the newspaper, buy locally produced CDs in drug stores, groceries, and gift shops. If you lived there, the musicians were both your neighbors and heroes.

That music drew me, and that led to romance, if deep affection for a place can be called romance. I kept coming back, feeling, first, the pull of the music and then, in a

Fortress Louisbourg


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more general but no less compelling way, drawn by the culture itself. As a scholar, I do ethnographic research, research based on interviews, observation, and participation. My scholarly reflexes kicked in early and, with no plan or agenda, I began asking musicians if I could interview them. Part of that impulse was connected, I’m sure, to my conviction that folklorists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and oral historians have an obliga-tion to flesh out the documentary record to include ordinary life and the people who live it. Another part of it had to do with how much I like Cape Breton and how generous people there have been to me. And I am convinced that there is something about Cape Breton that encourages people to value good talk. I discovered that I love to listen to that talk, and that led me to try to provoke some. I am also fascinated with how a small island can be both so economically stressed and so culturally productive and active.

I went back the next summer, and the next, and then the pace of my visits accelerated. I was smitten, and, in the course of sharing my enthusiasm, I found that Smithsonian Folkways Recordings was interested in my producing a CD documenting the music. Pete Reiniger, a Grammy-winning engineer, and I spent eight summer days and nights in a van equipped as a mobile recording studio, recording dances in small halls, other perfor-mance venues, and the Broad Cove Scottish Concert, which had begun more than forty years earlier. The result was The Heart of Cape Breton: Fiddle Music Recorded Live on the Ceilidh Trail. The indirect result was this book.

To produce the album necessitated writing an extensive set of notes about the music and the contexts where you hear it. To do that required more interviews. So I came back in the fall, visiting musicians and talking to others who could help me understand how the music grows from and strengthens life in Cape Breton communities. More good talk ensued, and with microphone and digital recorder, I documented it.

An album needs art. My photographer friend and colleague, Gary Samson, who had visited Cape Breton decades earlier, agreed to shoot portraits of the musicians and to try to capture, visually, the feel of the place for that first album. We came back together, the first of more than a few trips. We discovered, over the course of working together on vari-ous projects associated with sound recordings in Cape Breton, that we were both besot-ted and fascinated. We began talking about another project, combining Gary’s interest in environmental portraiture and my continuing, and broadening, fascination with the interviewing process. Now you have the full genesis of this book.

Begin with the music as a way to talk about the culture. Nova Scotia’s tourism lit-erature proclaimed 1997 as “The Year of Music.” Destination Nova Scotia’s Doers and Dreamers Guide, a large promotional publication, featured the much-loved Judique fid-dler and Order of Canada honoree Buddy MacMaster on the cover. Cape Breton’s tra-ditional music was finding international prominence, and tourism efforts highlighted the music as part of their economic development initiatives. The music was in the limelight, thanks to the accomplishments of two young musicians. Natalie MacMaster, Buddy’s niece, from Troy, had fiddled and stepdanced her way into major venues in North America with a sparkling and charismatic stage presence and remarkable musicianship.


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For a time she was Canada’s busiest concert performer in any genre. Ashley MacIsaac, from Creignish, had released an album that reached number 9 on Canadian charts. Hi, How Are You Today? blended MacIsaac’s traditional fiddling with a wide range of rock and other contemporary sounds. It went platinum in Canada and received significant college radio airplay in the United States. A track with Gaelic vocals by Mary Jane Lamond did especially well.

Natalie’s and Ashley’s fame built on the achievements of other Cape Breton musicians. The late John Allan Cameron, a singer and guitarist, also from Inverness County, had brought the music of his homeplace to national prominence, releasing his first album in 1968 and eventually being tagged Canada’s “Godfather of Celtic Music.” He was related to influential fiddlers, by the way, and he hosted national television shows that featured Cape Breton musicians. Rita MacNeil, the country-inflected singer from Big Pond, reached national stardom in the 1980s. Sydney Mines’ Barra MacNeils, a family band playing Celtic music from Cape Breton and beyond, released their first album in 1986 and developed an international following. Then, in 1992, Capitol/EMI re-released an

Fiddler Andrea Beaton accompanied by her grandmother, Elizabeth, Mabou


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album, originally self-produced, by the Rankin Family, and Fare Thee Well Love reached the #1 position on Canadian charts. Blending Gaelic song, fiddle music, stepdancing, and their own compositions, they were a major presence in the Canadian music indus-try until they disbanded in 1999. Growing out of a Mabou family of twelve children, the band drew deeply on local musical roots. A couple of years ago they reunited, although brother John Morris Rankin, a much-loved fiddler and influential piano accompanist, had died in a road accident in 2000.

Natalie MacMaster, Ashley MacIsaac, Buddy MacMaster, John Allen Cameron, and the Rankins all come from Inverness County, growing up within about thirty miles of each other in an area remarkable for its musical riches. Add Rita MacNeil and the Barras and think about a small island producing so many musical stars. And realize, too, that the level of musical activity in many Cape Breton communities, particularly rural ones, is extraordinary; for every star, there are many other locally celebrated, highly accom-plished players.

As a result, in the late 1990s music seemed, for some, to have the potential to pull an economically distressed island out of its doldrums. You will notice as you read this book that many of the interviewees talk about the achievements of these musicians, gener-ally referring to them by their first names. The music often connects to economics and the growth of tourism. It helped create an international image of Cape Breton as a hot-bed of cultural production. Film and video crews from elsewhere in North America were appearing at local dances, shooting for television and for documentaries. The New York Times, the New Yorker, and many other publications wrote about Cape Breton, often beginning with its music. People who worked in community development and tourism began talking music.

Then fiction writer Alistair MacLeod, generally recognized as one of Canada’s leading authors, deeply rooted in Cape Breton, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award—the world’s most valuable prize for fiction—for his 1999 novel, No Great Mischief. Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, set largely in industrial Cape Breton, was an Oprah selection. Other Cape Breton writers—such as Beatrice MacNeil, Lynn Coady, Frank Macdonald, and D. R. MacDonald—and Mi’kmaq poet Rita Joe, who had received the Order of Canada in 1989, published work deeply grounded in Cape Breton life. CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) Radio in Sydney began broadcasting live from book release parties for Cape Breton writers. The National Film Board of Canada produced a documentary, Reading Alistair MacLeod, in 2005.

There is something extraordinary about an island of 142,000 people giving rise to such riches. When I’ve asked Cape Bretoners to help me understand it, a number have told me, “It’s in the blood.” In fact, I’ve heard that expression so much there that for me it has come to stand for how intensely people regard and value culture on the island. To put it differently, there is a common sentiment on the island that the place and its traditions—no matter which of the cultural communities we’re talking about—are so deeply rooted that culture, like heredity, is part of a person’s essential being. That, in


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turn, helps account for the island’s remarkable cultural creativity. And there is nothing surprising about the efforts to tie economic development, particularly tourism, to that creative efflorescence. An island once known primarily for its spectacular scenery and, before that, for a time as an industrial powerhouse, is now something somewhat differ-ent. People continue to come, of course, for the Cabot Trail and Fortress Louisbourg. But many of them also want to dance to the local music, attend one of the many summer fes-tivals, sign up for traditional music classes.

As tourism and economic development began to zero in on Cape Breton ways of life and artistic production, I set out to interview a broad range of Cape Bretoners, all of whom were engaged in some self-conscious way with culture. My goal was to ask them to talk about that culture, at a moment when there was some chance that it would become a commodity. Culture is a term notoriously difficult to define. In a general sense, it has to do with the ways in which people in particular places live their lives. It is underlying patterns, some of them articulated, some not. It is what you have to know to live in com-munity with the people around you.

Those creative and artistic aspects of life that folklorists call expressive culture often symbolize or act out key components of group identity and world view. The fiddle music in Cape Breton, for instance, represents much of what matters in the communities where people produce it. The music is the tip of the iceberg; underlying it is the way Cape Bretoners value getting together in small halls, a sense of connection to neighbors that matters in communities. It is about family. It is about identity. Similarly, efforts to revive Gaelic, once the majority language on the island, connect to identity and to social val-ues. Likewise, the successful effort, some years ago, to allow for the possibility of going to school in French in the vicinity of Chéticamp is also a representation of values. In the Francophone instance, the emphasis on language connects to a desire to link a small island community with a much broader North American and European speech community.

This book, then, consists of edited transcriptions of conversations I had with Cape Bretoners from around the island. They represent a variety of experiences and perspec-tives. One way or another, though, each of these conversations is about important aspects of the island’s culture and its people’s sense of identity. For the most part they are about the present, though sometimes they are informed by the past. By and large, I don’t think of them as oral history, because they don’t focus on recovering the past. For Cape Breton oral history, I heartily recommend the magazine and books published by Ron Caplan (www.capebretonbooks.com).

This book’s interviews focus on the present; most are ethnographic interviews. A few are more oriented to the past, as in the interview with retired miner Danny Moran, where historical information provides a glimpse of important aspects of life on the island. The conversations were generally open-ended; I asked people to talk about their lives, their work, and their aspirations, and I let them guide the talk. I recorded each of the conversations. All those recordings will find their way to archives, where, in unedited form, they will be available to researchers. I’ve written short introductions for each of


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the interviews, trying to put them into context, to provide the background necessary for understanding and appreciating them, and to point out some of their significance.

From the start, I envisioned this book as lying between a traditional work of scholar-ship and an art book. So I thought of these interviews as spoken art as I edited them. People trusted me with their words, and I wanted those words to represent them in ways that they thought fair, accurate, and appropriate. Working with verbatim transcripts, I edited the interviews for continuity and intelligibility, frequently consulting with the interviewees. In an early decision, I removed my voice so as to focus on their words.

Of course, Gary Samson’s photographs go a long way toward making this an art book. Sometimes immediately after an interview, or at other times on subsequent visits, Gary made portraits of the speakers. His goal was always to show them in surroundings that are a part of their everyday lives, in places that mean something to them. He talks about the photography in this volume’s afterword.

II.The first inhabitants of Cape Breton Island were almost certainly Algonquian people, an unnamed group who, according to historian Robert J. Morgan, probably arrived within a few thousand years of the melting of the last glaciers. Mi’kmaq people replaced these Maritime Archaic Indians, living mostly off the rich marine environment that sur-rounded them. When the first Europeans arrived, it is likely that about two thousand Native people inhabited the island. How to mark that first European arrival is difficult. Legend has Norse exploration, which began in the tenth century, touching the island at some point, but that is unverifiable. The scenic Cabot Trail through the island’s upland region commemorates the possibility that Cape Breton was John Cabot’s first landfall, at the very end of the fifteenth century. Cabot was an Italian navigator and explorer, often credited as the first European to reach North America; historians tend to favor Newfoundland as his first landing. Nonetheless, maps from the early sixteenth century show Cape Breton, and regardless of whether Cabot or anyone else made landfall on the island, European fishermen were reaching the waters rich in cod in the fifteenth century. Portuguese and Spanish fishermen salted cod taken from those waters, and it seems likely that a Portuguese fishing station was the first European settlement on the island. British and French fishermen, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-turies, established outposts on the island, which enabled them to process fish with salt they harvested locally. That also began systematic contact and trade relations with the island’s indigenous people.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French and English laid various claims to the island. To the French, it was Île Royale, part of the larger colony of Acadia. The British granted the island to other groups as well. The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht gave France ownership of the island at the same time that they abandoned significant claims to other parts of Acadia. The fishing station and fortification they


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established in Louisbourg after the treaty is today a tangible reminder of their intention to establish a significant presence on the island. It was one of the most important com-mercial ventures in New France. In 1745, New Englanders, assisted by the British, cap-tured the fortress, but it remained a French colonial possession until the 1763 Treaty of Paris, which gave the island to the British. At that point the British merged the island with their holdings in mainland Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Irish settlers arrived after the treaty was signed, fishing and interacting with the French.

The island was governed for about twenty years from Halifax, as part of the colony of Nova Scotia, until Britain established it as a separate colony, with Sydney as its seat of government. That lasted until 1820, when it once again became part of Nova Scotia. But as geographer Stephen J. Hornsby writes,

although numerous small Nova Scotian merchants became involved in the fishery, a handful of merchants based on the English Channel Islands soon controlled much of the industry. They established large fishing stations on the island … outfitted Acadian, Irish, and Scottish settlers for the fishery, and exported dried fish to overseas markets. By the early nineteenth century, a series of staple enclaves, each heavily dependent upon external capital and markets but marked by considerable individual cultural distinctiveness, had been created around the coast of Cape Breton. (xxv)

Thus by the early nineteenth century, much of what we might call the cultural pattern-ing of Cape Breton was established. It was French. It was Scottish. It was Mi’kmaq. Irish people, many by way of Newfoundland, and Loyalists from New England rounded out the population. Pay particular attention to the Scottish part for a moment.

The first Scottish settlement on the island was at Judique, on the western shore. In the late 1700s, emigrants of Highland Scottish descent arrived, making their way from mainland Nova Scotia and from Prince Edward Island. One, Michael Mor MacDonald, may have been the first of a long chain of Gaelic poets on the island. He composed a song about the area called “O’s alainn an t-aite,” which translates as “Fair is the Place.” Scots were leaving the western Highlands and islands of Scotland, displaced by eco-nomic changes, especially the Clearances, which forcibly moved agricultural people off the land, creating a diaspora of Gaelic-speaking émigrés. Some went to the Scottish Lowlands. Many went to North America. Thousands came to Cape Breton, mostly in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Scots who came followed a pattern known as serial or chain migration. People from one community of origin tended to follow kin and neighbors and settle together in new communities in the New World. Today the preponderance of particular family names in certain places is evidence of families migrating together or at least following one another. Hornsby reports that in 1818, in the area between McKinnon’s Point and Judique in Inverness County, 27 percent of the Scottish families shared the surname MacDonald. And seven family names were shared by 68 percent of the Scottish arrivals. North of there, around Broad Cove, 32.5 percent were named MacIsaac. In the vicinity


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of Southwest Margaree in the late 1820s, the majority of the population was rooted in the Morar and Moidart districts in Lochaber, Scotland. They were named Gillis, MacLellan, or MacDonald (76). Immigrants were either Catholic or Protestant, and communities today tend to be one or the other, with Catholics in the majority. For a time, Gaelic—the settlers’ original language—was the island’s dominant language. In fact, for a time, Gaelic was Canada’s third language, after English and French. Gaelic declined dramati-cally in the twentieth century, and today its revitalization is an important cultural issue on the island.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, perhaps 2,500 people lived on Cape Breton Island. Shortly after that, the island’s population doubled, and Gaelic began to supplant French as the most common language. Numbers are imprecise, but it seems that approximately thirty thousand Scots came to Cape Breton from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. By 1851, Cape Breton was home to nearly fifty-one thousand people. But in 1845 potato blight appeared, carried from Ireland and Scotland. Years of famine, often desperate, followed, and Scottish settlement virtually ended. Outmigration, a pattern that continues today, began.

The nineteenth century also saw Cape Breton coal mining transformed from essen-tially a pre-industrial mode to a heavy industry. First in the area roughly encompassed by Sydney Mines and Glace Bay and then, on into the twentieth century, spreading to other locations on the island, coal became a major player in the island’s economy. Mines often extended out under the sea. In fact, in Inverness the mines were closed down because it proved impossible to keep the sea out. The industry was plagued with difficulties. The coal itself was bituminous. It didn’t burn as cleanly as anthracite from Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and it often proved unprofitable. For a time, the towns that were the centers of the mining—New Waterford, Glace Bay, Dominion, Sydney Mines, and others—were magnets for people from rural Cape Breton, who had found much of the land difficult or unsuitable for agriculture. The mines were also a magnet for labor from abroad, contrib-uting to the pockets of ethnic diversity on the island.

Coal fueled the steel industry, which began in Sydney and Sydney Mines at the close of the nineteenth century. The two industries are tied to the development of railroad and shipping facilities on the island. Like coal, steel changed the character of the places where it was produced. At the height of the industry, Sydney claimed to be eastern Canada’s largest steel producer. Driven by steel and coal, for part of the early twentieth century Cape Breton was a remarkable center of industrial and technological develop-ment. Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first transatlantic radio message from Glace Bay to England’s King Edward VII in 1902. In 1907, Sydney Mines had the first dial tele-phone in Canada. The first controlled, powered air flight in Canada, not to mention the entire British Empire, lifted off the ice on Bras d’Or in 1909.

Steel, like coal, also attracted workers from abroad. Today Sydney’s Whitney Pier area, probably the most ethnically diverse part of the island, reflects a history of recruit-ing labor from Newfoundland, Europe, and the Caribbean. Both industries experienced


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considerable labor conflict. And they both were subjected to a series of private and public ownership or management entities. Today, both are entirely gone—although there have been recent efforts to reopen some of the mines and the communities they supported are struggling economically. In fact, those communities struggled throughout much of the twentieth century, as the industries, organized labor, and government interventions ebbed and flowed. Outmigration was a fact of life in twentieth-century Cape Breton, just as it was in the second half of the nineteenth century.

In his very influential book, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia, Ian McKay writes about a fundamental tension that characterizes much of twentieth-century Cape Breton. For a large part of the century it was seen as a highly industrialized place, yet it was also seen as a place populated by mostly-Celtic people who lived a simple rural life, friendly people living in beautiful surround-ings. The latter formulation is not innocent—it comes from intentional efforts on the part of government, tourism, and culture workers. In the early twenty-first century, it is the enduring image of Cape Breton, although it seems largely a twentieth-century creation.

Sign at toxic waste site, Sydney


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While coal and steel declined, tourism increased on the island, as it did for Nova Scotia as a whole. Angus L. MacDonald (1890–1954), served as Nova Scotia’s premier from 1933 to 1940. Born in Dunvegan, in Inverness County, McDonald stewarded the growth of tourism in the province. The MacDonald government provided loans to entrepreneurs to establish an infrastructure for visitors. His government helped create the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, building a luxury resort, the Keltic Lodge, complete with a golf course. The government helped fund the Gaelic College in St. Ann. Advertisements invited visitors to experience a place of remarkable beauty, portraying the island as popu-lated largely by people whose lives represented a step back in time to a simpler, purer era.

McKay describes this as the tartanization of Cape Breton and Nova Scotia. He is partic-ularly interested in the work of Helen Creighton (1899–1989), an amateur folklorist who collected and published a great deal of material in Nova Scotia, contributing, in McKay’s view, to the romanticization of the province. Creighton’s work on Gaelic song in Cape Breton is still influential among singers and others interested in that genre. McKay points out that the Gaelic College was established by someone who spoke no Gaelic and that the celebrated craft tradition of hooked rugs in Chéticamp was deeply influenced by out-side interests. Today, tourism promotion generally emphasizes the island’s Scottish heri-tage, but other cultural communities have put themselves in the mix. As Chéticamp’s website tells prospective visitors,

what better describes simple pleasures and old school hospitality than the Acadian culture found on the world-renowned Cabot Trail of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Chéticamp has proven to be one of the most active Acadian communities that have developed in the Atlantic Provinces. In the years after the Deportation, it was the mountains and the ocean which drew Acadians from the south coast of Cape Breton and from Prince Edward Island to this area. Today it is the rugged beauty of the landscape, the distinctive cul-ture and unparalleled hospitality which attracts tourists, making this one of Nova Scotia’s most visited areas. This charming village offers visitors a taste of French heritage, beautiful scenery and a friendly bilingual reception from its inhabitants. (http://www.cheticamp.ca/en/home.php)

It is hard to imagine that a place’s image is ever innocent. Nor is it static. The work of promoters, advocates, developers, authorities, and others inevitably folds back into local life, complicating cultural identity and authenticity. A number of interviewees in this book talk about the ironies and complexities of cultural boosterism. Development spe-cialist Keith Brown chronicles how, in his view, tourism development in the latter part of the twentieth century built on community life and traditions as they existed at that point. Journalist and writer Frank Macdonald, on the other hand, says that tourism immediately threatens the authenticity of whatever it focuses on. Joella Foulds, executive director of the Celtic Colours International Festival, a major cultural project on the island, talks about how the festival built on the island’s artistic assets, taking a next step in profession-alizing and marketing them. Nowadays, she says, the many small performance venues on


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the island have been professionalized; the festival has been integrated into local notions of how to present music.

Cape Breton today is itself a paradox. It is in real trouble economically, thanks to the decline of industries based on natural resources as well as its distance from markets. It is depopulating, as work is invariably located elsewhere. It has some of the worst health statistics in Canada; a recent Cape Breton Post article speaks of the “wretched health sta-tus of Cape Bretoners as a population” (February 10, 2008). But Cape Bretoners report unusually high rates of satisfaction with life. Cultural production—especially music and writing—are flourishing extraordinarily. Despite the vicissitudes of North American economies, tourists continue to come, attracted by scenic beauty, cultural vitality, and the gentle ambiance of local life.

III.In the documentary Reading Alistair MacLeod, one of the writer’s children, Marion, says about her life in Cape Breton: “I want to be here because I feel like I belong here. And everyone knows me almost better than I know myself—knows me generations ago. I feel safe, like nothing really seriously wrong will ever happen here.” This deep attachment and affection for place is one of the threads that run through the interviews that com-prise this book. Talk to a Cape Bretoner, and the sense of home—island, community, and family—is almost invariably strong. It is a powerful rootedness, based, as Marion MacLeod says, in a history that recedes into the generations. People tend to know their family’s history, in many cases back to the first generation on the island. They often can recite complicated chains of kinship. Join connection to place with family history, and one of the results is the way in which identity is so strong on the island. People are Cape Bretoners first, but they are also part of the Gaelic, or French, or First Nations commu-nity. Even if the details differ, smaller groups in, say, Whitney Pier, are every bit as con-nected via that sense of identity as are the larger communities.

Identity is also tied to language issues in Cape Breton. The Francophone community has had considerable success in maintaining the vitality of its language. Less successful, the Gaelic-heritage community struggles with the near demise of its original language. Efforts to revitalize languages are close to the heart of identity. Language, as a number of this book’s interviewees remind us, has to do with ways of being in the world. Many Cape Bretoners articulate a deep satisfaction with the way they are able to live their lives on the island, even if the economics challenge them. Some, in the French community or in former Gaelic communities, worry that living primarily in English diminishes the texture of their lives.

This is a place of strong local character arrayed on a relatively small patch of ground. Grow up in Sydney, and you may never visit Inverness. Likewise, grow up in Mabou, and you may never go to Glace Bay or Arichat. Local identities are strong, in significant measure because many Cape Breton communities have remained fairly stable in their


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historical connections and demography. If you live in one of those communities, you probably know well the value of gathering in local venues—the local hall, the church. And you probably know your neighbors. Many Cape Bretoners have a very strong sense of what writer Robert D. Kaplan calls community-mindedness. This is a feature, he says, of places where local identities are real, not constructed or ignored. It is a quality of well-integrated community life. Go to an ethnic festival in Whitney Pier or a dance in West Mabou and you will likely see a cross-section of the full community, as age, gender, and class are mixed. Stratification is less palpable than in many other North American places.

In a sense, life is also lived on a small scale. But it is not an insular life. Every young musician I know—every player of the old music that is so current in Cape Breton—is fully conversant with the broader world of popular music. Cape Breton culture has been reinforced by local media, but global media are not distant. I keep in touch with some of my Cape Breton friends on Facebook. Somehow, even in an era in which critics tell us that locality is diminishing, the rootedness, the caring for place, that characterizes Cape Breton seems not to be diminishing.

This is all the more remarkable because the other side of that connection to home is the fact that most Cape Bretoners have to go away (i.e., off the island) to find work. If you are born in Cape Breton, you grow up with that awareness. Someone once told me that if every Cape Bretoner who lives off the island returned, the island would sink. Reading the employment ads in the Oran over the past few years, I’ve been struck by how often it is the case that every single advertisement is for a job in western Canada. Pipe fitter, line cook, electrician, laborer—there’s not likely to be work at home. The oil sands of Alberta’s Fort McMurray are, or were until recently, another story. Statistics are imprecise, but it is clear that nearly everyone on the island has family members who live elsewhere. And it is striking how many of the interviewees in this book have lived away from the island for a time. One consequence of outmigration is that the population is aging. People will tell you how fortunate they feel to be able to live at home. Recently, in the face of an international recession, even work in the west has become harder to find, and Cape Bretoners are coming home, returning to what Alistair MacLeod describes as the “region of their hearts.”

In a beautiful place with daunting economic challenges, Cape Bretoners have pro-duced extraordinary bodies of art. Tourism promotion and economic development efforts celebrate those achievements, while people leave the island to find work. Bill McKibben’s 2007 book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, argues that the developed world may have reached a point at which maximizing economic growth is no longer to the benefit of most of the population. In fact, McKibben claims that growth is often detrimental to the quality of life, and he points to an increasing disparity in incomes and to environmental degradation tied to growth. According to McKibben, unlimited growth destroys rich social relationships that are at the heart of community. This notion resonates for me when I think about Cape Breton, a place where the eco-nomic indicators are discouraging but where people report an unusually high degree of


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happiness in life. Think of Cape Breton’s cultural richness as growing from the fullness of its social life. Consider good talk as one of the ways to maintain good connections with family, friends, and neighbors. Read this book appreciating good talk and thinking about what Cape Breton may be able to teach us about good lives.

Recommended ReadingCaplan, Ronald, ed. 1988. Cape Breton Lives: A Book from Cape Breton’s Magazine. St.

John’s, Newfoundland: Breakwater Books.———, ed. 2005. Views from the Steel Plant: Voices and Photographs from 100 Years of

Making Steel in Cape Breton Island. Wreck Cove, Cape Breton Island: Breton Books.———, ed. 2006. Talking Cape Breton Music: Conversations with People Who Love and

Make the Music. Wreck Cove, Cape Breton Island: Breton Books.Chiasson, Anselme. 2003. Chéticamp: Histoire et Traditions Acadiennes. Wreck Cove,

Cape Breton Island: Breton Books.Donovan, Kenneth, ed. 1985. Cape Breton at 200: Historical Essays in Honor of the

Island’s Bicentennial, 1785–1985. Sydney: University College of Cape Breton Press.Coady, Lynn. 2002. Saints of Big Harbour. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Creighton, Helen. 1979. Gaelic Songs in Nova Scotia. Ottawa: National Museums of

Canada.Dunn, Charles. W. 1991 (1953). Highland Settler: A Portrait of the Scottish Gael in Cape

Breton and Eastern Nova Scotia. Wreck Cove, Cape Breton Island: Breton Books.Gillis, Donald L., and Ned MacDonald. n.d. Inverness: Centennial 1904–2004.

Antigonish, Nova Scotia: Donald Gillis-Ned MacDonald Publications.Graham, Glenn. 2006. The Cape Breton Fiddle: Making and Maintaining Tradition.

Sydney: Cape Breton University Press.Hornsby, Stephen J. 1992. Nineteenth-Century Cape Breton: A Historical Geography.

Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.Joe, Rita. 1996. Song of Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi’kmaq Poet. Halifax: Nimbus

Publishing.Kennedy, Michael. 2002. Gaelic Nova Scotia: An Economic, Cultural, and Social Impact

Study. Halifax: Nova Scotia Museum.MacDonald, D. R. 2001. Cape Breton Road. New York: Anchor.Macdonald, Frank. 2005. A Forest for Calum. Sydney: Cape Breton University Press.MacInnes, Sheldon. 2007. Buddy MacMaster: The Judique Fiddler. Lawrencetown

Beach, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield Press.MacLeod, Alistair. 1999. No Great Mischief. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.———. 2001. Island: The Collected Stories of Alistair MacLeod. Toronto: Emblem

Editions.———. 2004. To Everything There Is a Season: A Cape Breton Christmas Story. Illustrated

by Peter Rankin. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.


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MacNeil, Beatrice. 2007. Where White Horses Gallop. Toronto: Key Porter Books.McKay, Ian. 1994. The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in

Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.McKibben, Bill. 2007. Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable

Future. New York: MacMillan.Morgan, Robert J. 2001. Early Cape Breton: From Founding to Famine. Wreck Cove,

Cape Breton Island: Breton Books.———. 2008. Rise Again! The Story of Cape Breton Island—Book One. Wreck Cove,

Cape Breton Island: Breton Books.———. 2009. Rise Again!: The Story of Cape Breton Island—Book Two. Wreck Cove,

Cape Breton Island: Breton Books.Shears, Barry. 2008. Dance to the Piper: The Highland Bagpipe in Nova Scotia. Sydney:

Cape Breton University Press.


f Frank Macdonald at the Inverness Oran office, Inverness

Frank MacdonaldJournalist, writer Inverness

October 19, 2000

I went to Frank Macdonald to learn about Cape Breton, and this interview, nearly a decade old, turned out to be formative. At the time, I was working on the liner notes to The Heart of Cape Breton: Fiddle Music Recorded Live on the Ceilidh Trail, a project I was doing with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. I wanted to understand the social and economic context of the music, to get a better understanding of life on the island, especially in Inverness County, where this music was so prominent. The interview we did that day is among the most important contributions to the way I have come to know the island.

Until his recent retirement, Frank was publisher of the Inverness Oran, the weekly newspaper for the western side of the island. He and his two partners wrote about everything and took most of the photographs, but Frank tended to be the one to cover music and other aspects of culture. He continues to write his weekly column, “Frank Macdonald’s Comment,” which ranges widely and humor-ously over cultural, economic, and environmental topics. A selection of those columns, from 1976 to 1989, has been published as Assuming I’m Right: Comments by Frank Macdonald. A second selection, How to Cook Your Cat, followed in 2003. He has published poems, and his work has been the basis for theatrical produc-tions. And in 2005, Frank published his first novel, A Forest for Calum, which was very well received.

We did this interview in a basement conference room in the Oran building, on Central Avenue in Inverness. Inverness is a market town for much of Inverness County, which encompasses the western side of the island. It’s a town in trouble, a former coal-mining town left in dire economic straits after the mining closed down. Some fishing remains, and there are signs of revitalization. Macdonald speaks of efforts to build a world-class links golf course on reclaimed mining land fronting the


In the Blood: Cape Breton Conversations on Culture

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