Mi Kmaq Landscapes

This book seeks to explore historical changes in the lifeworld of the Mi'kmaq Indians of Eastern Canada. The Mi'kmaq culture hero Kluskap serves as a key persona in discussing issues such as traditions, changing conceptions of land, and human-environmental relations. In order not to depict Mi'kmaq culture as timeless, two important periods in its history are examined. Within the first period, between 1850 and 1930, Hornborg explores historical evidence of the ontology, epistemology, and ethics - jointly labelled animism - that stem from a premodern Mi'kmaq hunting subsistence. New ways of discussing animism and shamanism are here richly exemplified. The second study situates the culture hero in the modern world of the 1990s, when allusions to Mi'kmaq tradition and to Kluskap played an important role in the struggle against a planned superquarry on Cape Breton. This study discusses the eco-cosmology that has been formulated by modern reserve inhabitants which could be labelled a 'sacred ecology'. Focusing on how the Mi'kmaq are rebuilding their traditions and environmental relations in interaction with modern society, Hornborg illustrates how environmental groups, pan-Indianism, and education play an important role, but so does reserve life. By anchoring their engagement in reserve life the Mi'kmaq traditionalists have, to a large extent, been able to confront both external and internal doubts about their authenticity.

The ancient landscapes of Eastern North America are reflected in the language and cultural expressions of its Indigenous peoples, the Mi'kmaq. The rhythms, sounds and patterns of their language are inextricably bound with the seasonal cycles of the animals, plants, winds, skies, waterways and trade routes. The Language of this Land, Mi'kma'ki is an exploration of Mi'kmaw world view as expressed in language, legends, song and dance. Using imagery as codes, these include not only place names and geologic history, but act as maps of the landscape. Sable and Francis illustrate the fluid nature of reality inherent in its expression - its embodiment in networks of relationships with the landscape integral to the cultural psyche and spirituality of the Mi'kmaq. Language has sustained the Mi'kmaq to the present day, a product of a lineage of Elders who spoke it, who danced the dances and walked this land, Mi'kma'ki, carrying its traditions forward despite centuries of cultural disruption, discrimination and degradation.

Issues of identity figure prominently in Native North American communities, mediating their histories, traditions, culture, and status. This is certainly true of the Mi?kmaw people of Nova Scotia, whose lives on reserves create highly complex economic, social, political, and spiritual realities. This ethnography investigates identity construction and negotiations among the Mi?kmaq, as well as the role of identity dynamics in Mi?kmaw social relationships on and off the reserve. Featuring direct testimonies from over sixty individuals, this work offers a vivid firsthand perspective on contemporary Mi?kmaw reserve life. Simone Poliandri begins First Nations, Identity, and Reserve Life with a search for the criteria used by the Mi?kmaq to construct their identities, which are traced within the context of their different perceptions of community, tradition, spirituality, relationship with the Catholic Church, and the recent reevaluation of the iconic figure of late activist Annie Mae Aquash. Building on the notions of self-identification and ascribed identity as the primary components of identity, Poliandri argues that placing others at specific locations within the social landscape of their communities allows the Mi?kmaq to define and reinforce their own spaces by way of association, contrast, or both. This identification of others highlights Mi?kmaw people?s agency in shaping and monitoring the representations of their identities. With its theoretical insights, this richly textured ethnography will enhance understanding of identity dynamics among Indigenous communities even as it illuminates the unique nature of the Mi?kmaw people.

The Mi’kmaq of eastern Canada were among the first indigenous North Americans to encounter colonial Europeans. As early as the mid-sixteenth century, they were trading with French fishers, and by the mid-seventeenth century, large numbers of Mi’kmaq had converted to Catholicism. Mi’kmaw Catholicism is perhaps best exemplified by the community’s regard for the figure of Saint Anne, the grandmother of Jesus. Every year for a week, coinciding with the saint’s feast day of July 26, Mi’kmaw peoples from communities throughout Quebec and eastern Canada gather on the small island of Potlotek, off the coast of Nova Scotia. It is, however, far from a conventional Catholic celebration. In fact, it expresses a complex relationship between the Mi’kmaq, Saint Anne, a series of eighteenth-century treaties, and a cultural hero named Kluskap. Finding Kluskap brings together years of historical research and learning among Mi’kmaw peoples on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. The author’s long-term relationship with Mi’kmaw friends and colleagues provides a unique vantage point for scholarship, one shaped not only by personal relationships but also by the cultural, intellectual, and historical situations that inform postcolonial peoples. The picture that emerges when Saint Anne, Kluskap, and the mission are considered in concert with one another is one of the sacred life as a site of adjudication for both the meaning and efficacy of religion—and the impact of modern history on contemporary indigenous religion.

The image of the “land” is an ongoing trope in conceptions of Canada—from the national anthem and the flag to the symbols on coins—the land and nature remain linked to the Canadian sense of belonging and to the image of the nation abroad. Linguistic landscapes reflect the multi-faceted identities and cultural richness of the nations. Earlier portrayals of the land focused on unspoiled landscape, depicted in the paintings of the Group of Seven, for example. Contemporary notions of identity, belonging, and citizenship are established, contested, and legitimized within sites and institutions of public culture, heritage, and representation that reflect integration with the land, transforming landscape into landmarks. The Highway of Heroes originating at Canadian Forces Base Trenton in Ontario and Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site in Québec are examples of landmarks that transform landscape into a built environment that endeavours to respect the land while using it as a site to commemorate, celebrate, and promote Canadian identity. Similarly in literature and the arts, the creation of the built environment and the interaction among those who share it is a recurrent theme. This collection includes essays by Canadian and international scholars whose engagement with the theme stems from their disciplinary perspectives as well as from their personal and professional experience—rooted, at least partially, in their own sense of national identity and in their relationship to Canada.

This book has been initiated by the workshop on Cultural heritage in changing landscapes, held during the IALE (International Association for Landscape Ecology) European Conference that started in Stockholm, Sweden, in June 200 1 and continued across the Baltic to Tartu, Estonia, in JUly. The papers presented at the workshop have been supported by invited contributions that address a wider range of the cultural heritage management issues and research interfaces required to study cultural landscapes. The book focuses on landscape interfaces. Both the ones we find out there in the landscape and the ones we face while doing research. We hope that this book helps if not to make use of these interfaces, then at least to map them and bridge some of the gaps between them. The editors wish to thank those people helping us to assemble this collection. First of all our gratitude goes to the authors who contributed to the book. We would like to thank Marc Antrop, Mats Widgren, Roland Gustavsson, Marion Pots chin, Barbel Tress, Tiina Peil, Helen Soovali and Anu Printsmann for their quick and helpful advice, opinions and comments during the different stages of editing. Helen Soovali and Anu Printsmann together with Piret Pungas - thank you for technical help.