As Lady Isabella described them, the Chalmers were a quirky frontier family with remarkably strong Scottish covenanter ancestral ties. Through Isabella’s letters home, we were able to explore those uncommon Scottish ties, albeit through the eyes and pen of a very particular Englishwoman loaded with her own opinions about the world.

In her thoughts about the Chalmers, Lady Isabella described the settler experience on the edge of the western frontier in 1876. She had other much different experience with North America however, as she had visited more than 20 years prior.  So to continue our exploration of early Scottish immigrant life, we are going to travel backward in time and place to a much different frontier to meet Isabella Bird in 1854. She is about to disembark the paddle wheel steamer Canada of Cunard steam lines at Halifax Harbor following a “nine-day and five-hour voyage” from her Liverpool departure. We pick up the story in Isabella’s remembrances of the trip published as The Englishwoman In America.

Backward In Time To Halifax 1854.

In 1854 Halifax is the bustling capital of Nova Scotia (New Scotland), which is itself a self governing British province. It would not become part of the Canadian Confederation until 1867.  Nova Scotia had originally launched in 1621 in part as a Scottish scheme to occupy and settle the Crown’s lands in Canada but mostly to financially and socially benefit one Sir William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling.  By 1625 Sir William and the Crown were actively selling newly sanctioned Nova Scotia Baronetcies in exchange for a vow to arm, apparel and victualize six colonists for two years (or Buy Now! for a one time payment of 2,000 Merks to the Crown and Boom, you’re a Scottish Baron – Sir Whatnot - True story). There is also, of course, the 1,000 Merks that were payable directly to Sir William for his prior services in ‘discoverie’ of the area. Because there is ever so much ‘discovering’ that has to occur before Crown subjects can be turned loose on a wild land.

Unfortunately for Sir William, and the Crown, and the newly minted Nova Scotia Barons, the French snatched the entire province for their own over the course of three battles between 1629 – 1632.  By 1633 Scots in Nova Scotia were rare as hens teeth. The province had been melodiously renamed Acadia, French not Scottish.  Things remained thus until the worm turned again in 1763 at the end of the French and Indian War and Scotland, now Britain, once again claimed large portions of Canada in the Treaty of Paris.

Fast-forward ninety-one very fast paced years and Isabella Bird steps onshore at Halifax Harbour. It doesn’t take long before she reports contact with exiled Gaels.  During the course of less than 100 years of British rule, the Canadian land mass had become soaked with Scottish immigrants and most of those were Gaelic speaking exiles from the highlands and islands, sometimes by way of intermediate immigration to the Scottish lowlands or even England.

On the international superpower market, lands and towns switch names, allegiance, and sovereignty quickly with nothing more than the scratch of a pen across treaty parchment.  Following the official transfer of Canada to Britain at the Treaty of Paris in 1763, there was a period of practical transition of everything French to everything British. Interestingly, however, almost immediately after the practicalities would have occurred, Nova Scotia began receiving the human overage that Scotland was actively casting off.  From the end of the 18th century through the end of the 19th century, Nova Scotia, together with what was then called Upper Canada – generally southern Ontario on today’s map – served as a type of Gaelic refugee camp for the Highland exodus that was following agricultural improvement and weaponized land use policies of the post-Culloden era.

Halifax and Pictou began accepting hundreds of Gaelic refugees in the early 1770s as clearance, famine, hopelessness – and hopefulness – drove Scots toward the New World.  Although North American history is peppered with bursts of Scottish immigration emanating from various parts of Scotland, those who arrived in the mid to late 19th century were largely Gaels, displaced directly by eviction notice or indirectly by loss of ancestral way of life and relentless cultural oppression in their homeland.

Isabella’s Scots.

The North American lands and towns that Lady Isabella visited during this particular adventure were far from exclusively Scottish of course.  Yet mentions of immigrant Gaels, Scots, Highlanders and “Anglo-Saxon” Lowlanders are numerous and contemporary census numbers bear out the inference that Canada was fairly soaking with Scots in the middle part of the 19th century.  Nevertheless, Lady Isabella perceives successes in Canada as tribute to the Anglo-Saxon English blood and way of life.  Indeed, she rarely uses the terms Britain or Great Britain, or the United Kingdom, but prefers plain old England, as in her mind, England is the kingdom.

At this time in her life, Lady Isabella Bird had acquired a limited respect and affection for the “highlander” and the Gaelic language and culture, but largely by virtue of her English family’s capacity to send a sickly daughter to the Scottish Highlands for a landscape and environmental cure.  In that role, Isabella knew Gaels only so far as she was allowed to know them. With the threat of upper class punishment or retribution always present in the Highlands of the day, it is likely that most Gaels showed Isabella and her vacationing family only those aspects of Gaelic life and culture that pleased them, and then, only in a very congenial not to mention deferential delivery. It is not surprising that Lady Isabella came away from that limited introduction to Gaelic world with affection and a certain degree of respect.  It is, however, somewhat surprising that she also came away with at least a conversational level of knowledge of the Gaelic language.

While Lady Isabella paints a fun introduction to the early Canadian Scottish immigrant, there is much more to be learned about the world that the emigrant Scot actually faced by listening closely enough to discern the gross stereotypes and social hierarchy that color everything that our lady does and says.

She came to the New World well armed with the stereotypes of the Old World.  Perky and determined, Isabella is also the product of a Victorian world view in which nothing can really measure up to England and the English way.  This yields a clear ‘us and them’ approach to the world and like many during her time, Isabella is eager to ensure that everyone is placed well within their proper social spot in life, with the appropriate life story hung around their neck.

“The Irish are the noisiest of the enemies of England, and carry with them to Canada the most inveterate enmity to ‘Sassanach’ rule.  The term ‘slang-whangers’ must have been invented for these.”

“The Irish are a turbulent class, forever appealing to physical force, influencing the elections, and carrying out their ‘clan feuds’ and ‘faction fights.’”

Slang-whangers? That’s a new one to me but clearly, Lady Isabella does not speak reverently about the Canadian Irish immigrant.

While in North America on this trip, aside from her own English countrymen and women, Isabella generally described four groups of people:  Irish, Scottish Gaels, Indians and Americans.  To Isabella, the Irish and Indians were distasteful but endurable and occasionally could be capable of performing useful service, although inevitably not very well.  Scottish Gaels met along the route in Canada rated better in Lady Isabella’s reflections likely because of her affectionate memories of summers spent with them in the Highlands.  But also because Scottish families often came with some wealth and had been able to establish a vigorous mainstream base for themselves and their Gaelic community. Gaels, on the whole, did not come to Canada as servants but as farmers. Isabella seemed to accept that more readily.

 Isabella Had The Gaelic.

Having spent summers in the Scottish highlands as a child, it is not entirely surprising that the young English woman would have been encouraged to learn the local language.  It is somewhat more surprising that she had maintained some fluency in the Gaelic language into her twenties at least but then, Isabella Bird had her reasons. Sometimes, speaking Gaelic provided the keys to the kingdom:

“Crossing the suspension bridge we arrived at the VR custom house, where a tiresome detention usually occurs; but a few words spoken in Gaelic to the Scotch officer produced a magical effect, which might have been the same had we possessed anything contraband.”

Lady Isabella remarks on many occasions during the Canadian part of her journey regarding the use of Gaelic in social situations.  She regales in Gaelic with the lonely Highlands widow in the Canadian wilderness and exchanges clever quips with the Captain of the ship Peerless, a vessel that the good “Scotch” Captain brought from the Clyde to the Niagara country in 6,000 pieces. At least in the middle of the 19th century, Isabella makes it clear that Scottish Gaelic maintained a significant and respectable role in Canadian Scottish society.

On many occasions while in North America, Lady Isabella found the benefit of breaking the ice with Gaelic strangers using their native tongue.  More than anything else, to the Gaels hearing Gaelic spoken, there was the possibility of news from home. It’s not that news was scarce. Given the strong inflow of immigrants, it was common. Nevertheless, things were changing very rapidly in the highlands in the 1850s and each day might bring news that some dreadful thing had happened to some one or some family or some village that was loved and missed.

Why You Should Read Isabella’s Account. 

A great deal of The Englishwoman In America sheds light directly on the life of the immigrant Scot of the Victorian period and for that it is valuable. But it is also valuable for its descriptions of the world in which those immigrants lived. Lady Isabella was curious as well as plucky, determined and creative and she visited slums in Quebec as well as Governor’s mansions. She traveled by land and sea in comfortable vessels and deadly ones and she describes her adventures with a dry sense of English humor, a forever bright outlook and a stiff upper lip. Her accounts are charming and effective in conveying the look, smell, sound and feel of the mid 19th century North American Scottish immigrant’s environment and society. It’s a fun read, very educational and available on Kindle e-reader for not all that many Merks.

Epilogue: Listening To Gaelic Immigrants In Their Own Words.

Gaelic was widely spoken on Prince Edward Island until the turn of the 20th century.  In the 2011 census, 10 individuals on the island reported that Gaelic was their mother tongue with less than 100 claiming to speak the language.

Lady Isabella Bird’s account of Scottish and Gaelic immigrants in mid 19th century Canada is intriguing and a great way to begin to get a feel for life in a different place and time while learning about Scottish and Gaelic heritage.  But the story told by Isabella and others like her fails to explain the tragic statistics like those in the paragraph above regarding the drastic, almost complete, loss of Gaelic language and cultural markers in a place where previously they flourished.  The best place to look for answers to such a question is in the words of the Gaels themselves.  Those words are out there but they have, until very recently, been forgotten by historians and social commentators particularly because the language and the culture is incomprehensible unless carefully and specifically studied.

We now have an initial resource, based upon Gaelic language resources and translated for English readers, that will help begin to unravel the story of the Gael in Canada more clearly. Published just last September, Seanchaidh na Coille: Memory Keeper of the Forest is an anthology of the Scottish Gaelic literature of Canada.  It is edited by Dr. Michael Newton, an outstanding researcher, scholar, writer and fluent in Scottish Gaelic and entirely comfortable translating and interpreting Scottish Gaelic language resources of all kinds.. This book complements his earlier work on North American Gaels We’re Indians Sure Enough: The Legacy of the Scottish Highlander in the United States (2001).

The poems, songs and narratives included in Seanchaidh na Coille offer new and important insights, for the English language reader as well as the Gael, into the mind and experience of the North American Gaelic immigrant.  Indeed, in one small but instructive instance, the reader is placed directly at the moment of Gaelic diaspora when a Gaelic family that had travelled together from the Highlands disburses into the vast Canadian world:

 ”From Quebec we came by boat right into the heart of Upper Canada.  The Tiree people went their own way to Brock.  The Perthshire people to other places on the way, but the majority of the Kilmartin people stayed together until they arrived at Port Stanley.  From there they branched off among the rural townships of Yarmouth, Dunwick, and Southwold.”

We have so few resources that allow us to get to know our Gaelic ancestors through their own Gaelic words.  Seanchaidh na Coille is one little resource with an enormous effect that should be on the desk of every member of the Scottish North American diaspora who is serious about understanding their Gaelic diaspora heritage.

Dr. Newton’s work is grounded in existing scholarship, where it exists on the subject, but because the story is told through careful analysis of Gaelic language literature, his work tends to explode old myths and assumptions of the Gaelic experience and supplant them with the voice of the Gaels themselves. You may believe you know the story of Gaelic immigration to North America. If you haven’t yet familiarized yourself with Dr. Newton’s work on the topic, you simply do not fully understand that story because you haven’t heard it from the Gaels themselves.

So dig in! A copy of Lady Isabella Bird’s An Englishwoman In America paired nicely with Seanchaidh na Coille: Memory Keeper of the Forest, a nice glass of wine, er .. whisky, and a quiet snowy weekend. Got one coming up! How’s that for a plan for a weekend without Outlander?

The post A Victorian View Into Scottish North America: Part Two Of Lady Isabella Bird’s Encounters With Scots In Canada And America appeared first on ScotClans | Scottish Clans.

Gaelic Scotland faced the world from a fundamentally different angle than did the Normans or the Anglo Saxons. The differences were especially apparent prior to the wide scale erosion of Gaelic-ness that began following launch of James I’s official fatwa against Gaelic culture in the 17th century. Gaelic was not just a bits and pieces society, but rather, a well developed culture with a future:

Indeed, politics, economy, marriage, kinship, possession of land and of property, were all woven together into an inextricable web in Highland society, to produce a culture which was both dynamic and self-perpetuating.

– Rosemary Ommer, Journal of Historical Geography (1986)

This broad distinct Gaelic identity is what makes Scottish Gaelic its own culture and ethnicity, worthy of separate study and understanding.

How do you say “Its the Economy Stupid!” in Gaelic?  So here we are in these end of 2015 days that are so liberally seasoned with holidays of various sorts. Economics might seem to be an odd choice for a discussion topic for a holiday Gaelic post, but, as Gaels we should know by now that not everything is as it first appears to be. True here. For history’s Gaels, the economy was a child of Gaelic morals and spirituality.

Profit and Love.  As we finally begin to work through this year’s celebrations, we are hit with a barrage of two primary ideas: Capitalism and Love. Across much of the world, those two seemingly disparate ideas are melded easily together at this time of year because Capitalism is based upon the idea of production and sale of surplus goods and services for personal profit while Western expressions of Love are best made by buying great stuff and giving it to those that you … love.

It’s almost magical in its elegance but this western European enlightenment approach has left many people unsatisfied with life, despite apparently having played the game in the correct manner all these years and by the rules. Depending upon which news channel one watches, the idea of runaway capitalism and the decline of community can dominate entire newscasts. Many people are looking for the right way forward but not enough of them are looking to the past for some direction.

So, for a moment, lets peek behind Scotland’s Anglo-Norman veil and take a look at the very different approach taken by Gaelic society regarding “the economy.”

Subsistence and Community. One of the things that some have loved to call “barbaric” about Scottish Gaels was their habit of maintaining a sustainable, subsistence economy. Although we have been taught that such an economy is a strong indicator of great poverty and oppression, Gaels did it as a strategy that was directly adapted to the land upon which they lived and the resources at their disposal. Individuals in Gaelic communities produced almost everything they needed. They did not, on the whole, produce surplus for cash trade outside of the community.

A clan’s wealth ultimately depended upon the amount of productive territory under its control, but productivity was measured in terms of social value rather than surplus for export.

– Michael Newton, Warriors of the Word (2009) at p.141

Yes, good years did produce surplus but the Scottish Gael didn’t just stand there in the middle of his field and marvel at all the potatoes. As a matter of Gaelic policy and practice, surplus was distributed to those in the community who needed it. And this was not done as capitalism disguised as social enterprise. Sharing was a critical pillar of Gaelic economics.

Writing of his own 20th century experience as a youth fishing for his family and “the neighbours” on Lewis/Harris, Alastair McIntosh reveals some of the last agonal breaths of what he calls “Gaelic vernacular economy.” In the 1960s, few households owned freezers or even refrigerators and the reason had little to do with the nasty Hebridean weather.

Whenever I came back with a good catch, I’d share it out as I cycled home the 5 miles through Ranish, Crossbost and Leurbost villages.  This was the late 1960s and even then few people had fridges; still fewer freezers. There was just no demand for them. Neither was there money to buy such hardware. If you had a supply of something perishable, you shared. When your neighbours had a surplus, you received. People’s ‘deep freezes’ were, in effect, the village itself – with the advantage that what you got was always fresh and there was no need for nuclear power stations or defrost disaster insurance policies.

– Alastair McIntosh, Soil and Soul (2001) at p.28

In Soil and Soul, McIntosh uses a term taken from social thinker Ivan Illich to describe traditional Gaelic economy. In the Hebridean vernacular economy that dominated Lewis/Harris in those days, “people understood themselves to be responsible for one another.” (Soil and Soul at p.29)  McIntosh has packaged the idea of a Gaelic vernacular economy into three traditional concepts – mutuality, reciprocity and exchange (barter) – and one introduced idea – cash.

In the twentieth century Lewis underwent an economic transition such as more ‘developed’ parts of the world had experienced much earlier in history. The island shifted along the spectrum of mutuality, reciprocity and exchange, headlong into the cash economy. Once surpluses were shared and this yielded goodwill. Mutual dependency was the glue that facilitated social cohesion. Now, because money (unlike fish and eggs) does not rot, it can be invested, yielding interest, a dividend or capital gains. Money thereby takes on second-order characteristics over and above its primary accounting role; it makes money out of itself. This has the effect of shifting benefit away from the community and towards individuals. It assists the concentration of wealth, and that leads to an increasing rigidity in access to resources for the majority.

Whereas the vernacular economy is necessarily mindful of the human biological processes by which goods and services come into being, the new way – capitalism – reduces human labour and nature’s providence to figures  on the London or Tokyo stock exchanges.

– Alastair McIntosh, Soil and Soul (2001) at pp. 30 – 31

So as not to unnecessarily cause heartburn for our many Capitalist friends, while this wee post does identify a traditional Gaelic approach to an enduring human subject, it does not argue the merits of the past versus the present.  However, like my far more talented kinsman Alastair McIntosh, I believe that the past “should be carried forward to inform the future. In this way, fresh light can be shed on the story of modern times and wisdom harnessed to knowledge.”  Like Alastair, we should all recognize the tremendous value in not only saving our access to Gaelic cultural wisdom and experience but in exploring, learning, understanding and applying it to this rather prickly period of human history. We might find a few helpful ideas.

The post Behind the Anglo Norman Veil: A holiday message about Gaelic vernacular economics appeared first on ScotClans | Scottish Clans.

Lady Isabella Bird was an Englishwoman who spent summers in Scotland as a child and who would eventually marry an Edinburgh doctor and settle down in Edinburgh as a base when she was not traveling. Prior to marriage, in 1854, at the age of twenty-two, she left England and began traveling as a hopeful cure for her vaguely ill health.

As we find her in 1873, she is a strong-willed, opinionated, completely independent, remarkably level headed and extraordinarily determined young woman focused on seeing the most fascinating things about the world first hand. This particular 1873 sojourn to the western U.S. was only a part of Isabella Bird’s grand tour of that year, having opened in Hawaii, continuing to the California Sierra and eventually enduring a winter spent in the log and chink settler’s camp at about 7,500 feet at the foot of the final 6,750 or so feet of the mightily impressive Longs Peak (14,256′).

Our window into Lady Isabella’s frontier frolic is given through the wonderful collection of letters that she wrote to her sister back home in England, crafted absolutely contemporaneously with the adventures themselves. The collection has been published as a little book titled A Lady’s Life In The Rocky Mountains and it is wonderful holiday or anytime reading. [NOTE: $2.99 on Kindle now!]

Through parts of the third to sixth letters, we are in the company of the Chalmers family, a Scottish American frontier family with a rather pronounced Scottish identity and somewhat of a special story. Lady Isabella spends a few days with this distinctive family, and it is the Chalmers family that forms the focus of this post. 

Meet the Chalmers: Proud descendants of Scottish Covenanters in the middle of nowhere. 

Many readers will have visited the quaint mountain village that today hosts the popular Longs Peak Scottish Festival but no state highways led the way to Estes Park in 1873. Indeed, the best indication that a pilgrim might find would be a single track game trail, if that pilgrim knew where to look or was able to scare up a competent guide, of which there were precious few. Lady Isabella set out from Fort Collins, Colorado Territory in September to attain the mouth of a canyon, that she had been locally advised contained a boarding house and a sawmill and some of the most magnificent Rocky Mountain country to be seen. The canyon was also a few miles closer to Estes Park so it seemed a step in the right direction and Lady Isabella took it.

There was no boarding house in the canyon and the sawmill was in very poor repair. Isabella did find, in the mouth of the canyon, the Chalmers family. The Chalmers owned 160 acres of land there and had built the rudimentary sawmill nine years ago. They currently sold milk and butter to an assortment of people who had come to the canyon to enjoy the dry Colorado climate as a recommended cure for Tuberculosis. The current Chalmers patriarch brought his family from Illinois to the place in 1864 for that very purpose. The remedy worked and within two years, Chalmers was healthy and the owner of a 160 acre plot of land acquired under the Homesteading Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1862. (More about the Homestead Act below.)

Here is some of what Lady Isabella Bird relates to her sister about these lightly peculiar early members of the Scottish American diaspora – and our focus - the Chalmers:

Chalmers Homestead:

A rough and shaky bridge, made of the outsides of pines laid upon some unsecured logs crossed the river. … On the other side was a log cabin partially ruinous and the very rudest I ever saw. It’s roof being of plastered mud being broken into large holes. It stood close to the water among some cottonwood trees. A little higher there was a very primitive sawmill, also out of repair, with some logs lying about. An emigrant wagon and a forlorn tent with a campfire and a pot were in the foreground.

Chalmers Cabin:

… I got down and found a single room of the rudest kind with a wall at one end partially broken down. Holes in the roof. Holes for windows. And no furniture but two chairs and two unplanned wooden shelves with some sacks of straw upon them for beds. There was an adjacent cabin room with a stove, benches and table, where they cooked and ate, but this was all.

“Life,” said Isabella, “was reduced to its simplest elements.”  As for the Chalmers family members themselves? Lady Bird tells us that they “repelled [her] by their faces and manners.”  Mrs. Chalmers was a “hard, sad looking woman” “lean, clean, toothless.”  There was a daughter, an “awkward girl of sixteen with uncombed hair and a painful repulsiveness of face” and “a sour repellant looking creature with as much manners as a pig.” A grown son (“a shiftless melancholy looking youth’) and three “hard unchild-like” small children. “They wear boots, but never two of one pair and never blacked of course, but no stockings.”

They are a queer family. Somewhere in the remote highlands I have seen such another. It’s head is tall, gaunt, lean and ragged and has lost one eye. On an English road, one would think him a starving or a dangerous beggar. He is slightly intelligent, very opinionated and wishes to be thought well informed, which he is not.

Chalmers’ religion:

He belongs to the straightest sect of reformed Presbyterians, psalm singers, but exaggerates anything of bigotry or intolerance which characterizes them. … His great boast is that his ancestors were Scottish Covenanters.

And finally, England:

He hates England with a bitter personal hatred and regards any allusions to the progress of Victoria as a personal insult. He trusts to live to see the down fall of the British monarchy the disintegration of the Empire.

In all, Isabella Bird did not say all that much about the Chalmers family but she certainly said enough to paint a picture of them and their frontier life as she met them in early fall of 1873. What she does not address is the Scottish American background story. What particular set of facts – in Scotland and America - gave birth to this family and brought them to their hard scrabble life?

Lady Isabella’s Colorado Chalmers are likely second or possibly third generation Scottish immigrants that were still defined by their Scottish story and clinging to their Scottish ancestral identity, prejudices and spirituality. We are not told which Chalmers’ Covenanting ancestors came to America or when. We do not even know for certain that Chalmers himself is not the immigrant, however a close reading of Isabella’s letters advises against that. The letters do give us some very juicy clues that allow us to fill out the Chalmers’ likely story, Sherlock Holmes style.

Chalmers: Frenchified Gaels Return as Lowlanders. 

The name “Chalmers” itself carries an interesting history. Present understanding is that the name derived from a Scot carrying the surname “Cameron” who entered the French military service and assumed the name of Camerarius/Camerario (in French: De La Chambre), or Chalmers, as to be more ‘agreeable to the language of that country.’ At least one of this fellow’s progeny returned to Scotland and became the ancestor of Chalmers of Aberdeen-shire and other parts of Scotland. Chalmers today is considered a sept of Clan Cameron and the name itself was used as a code name for various Camerons during the 1745 Jacobite Rising.  Interestingly then, the Scottish name “Chalmers” carries a Gaelic highland heritage filtered through France and reintroduced to Scottish lowlands as protestant, civilized and very zealous Scots. A double helping of Scottishness.

Scottish Covenanters – You don’t see those everyday. 

While somewhat known in America, the story of the Scottish Covenanters who were forced out of Scotland at various times between the 16th – 18th centuries is typically overshadowed by the more popularly understood immigration episodes such as the Highland Clearances and the general long term aftermath of the battle of Culloden.  Yet our early Colorado Chalmers’ are of a different migration. Their greatest claim to fame, as they inform Lady Isabella, is that their ancestors were Scottish Covenanters and that they, centuries on and a continent away, steadfastly remained psalm singing reformed Presbyterians with a deep hatred of all things English and imperial.

Scottish Covenanters were 17th century protestants who refused the Stuart kings’ claim to Divine Right and instead believed that the spiritual head of the Scottish Church was religious and not the king. Many of these strong willed dissenters signed the National Covenant to that effect in 1638 and from then until the Glorious Revolution in 1688 they suffered a range of punitive persecution from the Stuarts as well as Cromwell, including transportation as indentured servants to British North America. Others made their way to Ulster in Ireland only to become part of the early 18th century tsunami of Scots-Irish immigration to the American colonies. Provinces such as East New Jersey accepted hundreds of Covenanter refugees during the 1680s who came to the New World initially under the burden of indenture and who worked, eventually, to gain freedom once again.

Although the Glorious Revolution and actions of King William essentially obviated the context for Convenanting Prebyterianism in Scotland, the zealous fervor and prejudices followed immigrants to America and Mr. Chalmers appears to be everything that might be expected of their progeny – even after the intervention of two centuries.

Scottish American Homesteaders.

Lady Isabella describes the Chalmers operation in fairly unflattering terms and in particular she highlights the abysmal failure of their life as Colorado homesteaders.

They have 160 acres of land. A squatters claim and an invaluable water power. He is a lumberer and has a sawmill of a very primitive kind. I notice that everyday something goes wrong with it and this is the case throughout. If he wants to haul timber down one or other of the oxen cannot be found. Or if the timber is actually underway, a wheel or part of the harness gives way and the whole affair is at a standstill for days.

The cabin is hardly a shelter but is allowed to remain in ruins because the foundation of a frame house was once ‘a-dug’. A horse is always sure to be lame from want of a shoe nail or a saddle to be useless from a broken buckle and the wagon and harness are a marvel of temporary shifts, patchings and insecure linkings with strands of rope. Nothing is ever ready or whole when it is wanted.

Yet Chalmers is a frugal, sober hardworking man and he, his eldest son and a hired man rise early, going forth to their work and labor till the evening.

The Chalmers’ homesteading failure is certainly not due to the strict and deep Presbyterian faith and dogma that Mr. Chalmers imported from Scotland. Indeed, Lady Isabella describes the Chalmers as the frontier equivalent of the modern workaholic, sparing little time for anything other than work and religious devotion. Yet they seem never to get anywhere.

The Chalmers sawmill is described as having become decrepit after only nine years of operation and as soon as one thing is fixed another two are broken at the homestead. We are not told what line of work Mr. Chalmers was in while in Illinois. He may have been, like so many others, unprepared by background, skill and knowledge to succeed on the Colorado frontier, even though the United States Government and various private interests aggressively solicited men like Chalmers to give the frontier a try. If so, he would not be the only Scottish American and Scottish immigrant lured west by the offer of “free land.”

In the late 1850s and early 1860s the United States was engulfed in issues surrounding slavery, free labor, small versus large landholders and civil war. In 1862 the U.S. Congress passed the Homestead Act as part of that conflict.

The Homestead Act of 1862 provided that any adult citizen (or person intending to become a citizen), including free slaves, who headed a family could qualify for a grant of 160 acres of public land by paying a small registration fee and living on the land continuously for five years and by making necessary improvements to “prove up” a homestead clam. If the settler was willing to pay $1.25 an acre, he could obtain the land after only six months’ residence. Families picked up what they had and gambled it on free land in the west.

Despite an aggressive campaign to draw Americans and fresh immigrants to the western frontier, the law ultimately did not provide the catalyst to create a new class of small landholding farmers and such from the stock of eastern and Midwestern urban dwellers. While an enormous amount of land was transferred from First Nations, to the U.S. Government and into white private landholders, much of the land granted under the 1862 Homestead Act fell quickly into the hands of speculators. Some land was hoarded into huge land owning conglomerates and much was resold at great profit while new immigrants were left wondering how to make it in the New World.

The Chalmers sawmill story smacks a little of all too this common homesteading story. The mill itself was likely constructed as a necessary improvement to prove up a homestead claim. Following issuance of the homestead “patent” that granted private title to the land, Chalmers seems to have dropped the ball and allowed the mill and homestead to fall into serious disrepair. While he got his mill built, no one, it seems, told Mr. Chalmers how to run it.

These were the Chalmers, one of so many Scottish American families who brought their ancestry and added what they were able to a new nation. They may not have succeeded at the sawmill business but perhaps that “invaluable water power” ultimately brought prosperity to a deserving psalm singing Presbyterian Covenanting family carrying on Scottish traditions in America.

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When land and water combined well in the late 19th Century, endless American prairies produced the grass that fed the cows that fed a growing nation and then some. The iconic American cattle industry was a multi-ethnic team sport in the nineteenth century west, involving First Nations folk, Black Americans, Spanish and Mexican vaqueros and others. But the basic shape and direction of the western beef industry was in no small part the work of a handful of first and second generation Scottish immigrant company managers and their Scottish right hand men.  They were dispatched to a land as freshly cleared of conflicting human settlement as Scotland was. They went to spend enormous amounts of Scottish/British imperial wealth and enlightenment ingenuity to overcome all obstacles and achieve success breeding, growing and moving “beeves” from west to east and south to north to feed an insatiable America.

Most of the profit of these huge and complex operations was sent back to Scotland to build Scottish infrastructure and baronial mansions. But many of the Scots cattlemen lingered on the prairie. They sprouted American families who have remained in the west, often still working in western agriculture. Scottish cowboys and cattlemen who came here to create a new industry have left a most indelible mark on the American west.

Murdo Mackenzie (1850 – 1939)

From one cleared landscape to another.  Perhaps the greatest of the immigrant Scottish American cattle barons was born in 1850, the second of eleven children of Gaelic tenant farmers in Ross-shire in northern Scotland. The area around Scotland’s oldest royal burgh, Tain, had been a ground zero for brutal clearance and removal of Gaelic communities in Scotland since 1792 when Sir John Lockhart-Ross introduced the first sheep into the area and cleared a corresponding number of Gaelic tenant farmers from his Balnagowan estate. Clearance of Ross County continued throughout the next century and almost sixty years later, during the same year that Murdo Mackenzie was born, his own clans folk, Mackenzies, were brutally cleared from Strathconon, just down the road.

Though Murdo Mackenzie’s parents were tenant farmers in Ross County, the family apparently did not itself suffer clearance and they were able to send their second born to the Tain Royal Academy where he could acquire skills to compete in the new highland economy. Even though Murdo’s family did not suffer removal, the tragedy of others’ lives was forever visible. The infamously cleared community of Strathnaver was less than sixty miles from the Tain Tollbooth where much of the administrative work of the clearances was done. No doubt, at the Tain Royal Academy, Murdo learned the best English grammar and the newest improved agricultural and economic ideas as they were sweeping across Scotland’s highlands and islands in the heady enlightenment atmosphere of the second half of the 19th century.

While it might make for a better rip roaring Wild West frontier saga if Murdo Mackenzie had led a young life more like a Rob Roy or if he had a bit of that outlaw William Wallace in him, the truth is that Mackenzie was groomed for clerking and law. And management. He didn’t like guns and made a strong argument that carrying one, even in the gun toting American west of the early 20th century, put a man at a distinct disadvantage. As a fellow who had more than once found himself looking down the business end of another cowboy’s hand gun, Mackenzie maintained that “A man who carries a gun is no man.”  Lack of a sidearm was no disadvantage and Murdo Mackenzie was not a man with whom to trifle:

“He is is heavy-set. Physically, he is a man whom it would be hard to move. And when he looks straight at you out of his gray eyes, you cannot doubt that it would be still harder to move him from a course of action which he had decided was right.”  

       – From “Do you use fair play or gun play to gain your ends”, American Magazine, by Neil M. Clark (1922).

The man who would one day build and run a vast American cattle empire in the still largely wild American west was taken from the Scottish legal and banking industry to begin his first adult agricultural job as an assistant factor on the Balnagowan estate of Sir Charles William Frederick Augustus Lockhart-Ross, 8th Baronet, possessing Scottish lands extending to an estimated 500,000 acres and 500 tenants. By Scottish standards, that is an awful lot of land. By the measuring stick that young Murdo Mackenzie would learn to use in America, it was a drop in a bucket.

Having performed well as assistant factor for ten years at Balnagowan, Murdo Mackenzie earned enough respect and confidence to attract the attention of some of the wealthiest Scottish investors of the period. Sir Charles Ross died in 1883, the same year that the Highland Land League was formed. Things were beginning to change in the highlands but not until they had become a sad and divided battleground pitting old ways against new. When those investors tapped Mackenzie to take his young family to the American frontier to help build great cattle empires, Mackenzie said yes.

The scholarship is not available to tell us for certain what Murdo Mackenzie was involved in during his decade long tenure as assistant factor on the Balnagowan estate. It seems unlikely though, that he was an active advocate of highland land reform, especially in light of the great trust he had gained from highly placed investors during that tenure. It is clear however, that Murdo Mackenzie’s early years were spent at the very heart of the new agricultural practices that were pushing his own Gaelic people out of the lands they had occupied from time immemorial. Undoubtedly, Mackenzie took these lessons and ideas with him to the wild American west where another episode of human clearance had also been underway.

The challenges Murdo Mackenzie met in the American southwest were very different from the chores of raising sheep and managing land and men in the Scottish highlands. Indeed, the Scot who Theodore Roosevelt would one day call “the most influential cattleman in America” had no personal experience with the type of environment he found in America. Yet it was the application of the lessons learned from a wider Scottish experience – one heavily influenced by Scottish enlightenment ideas, for good or ill – that Murdo Mackenzie likely used to shape new long lasting land use and ownership patterns across a great American frontier.

Yee Haw! In 1885 Murdo Mackenzie removed his family from Ross County to the new town of Trinidad in the frontier state of Colorado. He was to help grow and market tens of thousands of cows in an unsettled and largely unimproved desert. Mackenzie’s first job was an unromantic one: watching over the finances of the already very substantial Prairie Cattle Company, based out of Trinidad. But the especially cold and snowy winter of 1885-86 saw thousands of Prairie Cattle Company stock perish as the cold and snow bunched the cows up along the endless ‘drift fences’ that southwestern cattlemen had erected to stop northern cows from drifting down to munch southern grass. It was called “the big die-up.” The winter storms drove the cows south into the fences and when the animals could go no further they piled up against the fences and simply died there by the thousands. In early 1886 the old Prairie Cattle Company ranch manager had left and Murdo Mackenzie took the reins of a very large but very young cattle operation.

Based out of southern Colorado, the Scottish owned Prairie Cattle Company ran around 100,000 head of cattle across range that covered a 300 mile section of land between the Canadian River and the Arkansas River. It would become Britain’s largest investment company, finally dying out in 1916, but it wouldn’t hold Murdo Mackenzie very long. As he continued to learn more about cattle, cowboys and American grass and water, other opportunities came his way.

Murdo Mackenzie left the Prairie Cattle Company in 1890 to become the general manager of the new Matador Land and Cattle Company. Though the Matador was based in Texas, Mackenzie chose to remain in Colorado with his family. He brought a great deal of the administration of the Matador operation to Trinidad in order to allow him to stay in that dusty and diverse little town. With Scotland firmly in his past, Mackenzie became a naturalized American citizen at the earliest opportunity and eventually was elected mayor of the roughly 3,000 citizens of the town of Trinidad, Colorado, where he remained for the majority of his long American life.

The Matador Land and Cattle Company, Trinidad, Colorado.  Before Kansas soil grew corn, wheat and soy beans, it sprouted short and medium grass prairies that fed migrant cattle.  These were cows that Murdo Mackenzie had set in motion from Texan hills as part of his innovative – and braw – Matador herd management scheme in the 1890s. While the Kansas prairies did not ultimately prove the grazing panacea that Mackenzie sought, there were plenty of other places to try – and succeed – Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, North and South Dakota and Saskatchewan, Canada. Eventually, he would use them all, including several “indian reservations” where native bison had been replaced with Matador Herefords. The idea was to get two year old Matador cows off of dry Texans plains way down south and up to richer grass farther north for their third and fourth years with the least amount of expense to the cow and the cowman. According to Mackenzie’s plan, this would deliver the fattest and most profitable four year old steers to slaughter at Chicago. It did.

Before the cows got there, however, that same Midwest soil grew the grass and forbs that fed vast herds of buffalo, elk, antelope and other animals. Thus, it also fed the First Nations peoples who lived there until they were cleared, along with the buffalo, under order of the U.S. Government and by settlers, with and without governmental sanction. The Natives and the buffalo and a great deal more were cleared to make way for cattle.

The pattern is hard to ignore when considering the perspective of an immigrant from Tain, Scotland in the 1890s. Like the Scottish highlands where Mackenzie was born and grew into adulthood, married and began a family, the American west was still in the process of being cleared for men like Murdo Mackenzie to recast as they thought best, for the alleged betterment of mankind, completion of Manifest Destiny and all that. It still bore the fresh marks and reminders of several very recently cleared societies when Mackenzie arrived about ten years following General George S. Custer’s bad day at Little Big Horn. The same year that Murdo Mackenzie undertook the management of the Matador Ranch, troops of the United States Army committed the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The Matador would a few years later graze cows on the Pine Ridge reservation. By removing the people and the buffalo, the land had been made ready to accept an American cattle industry of a grand scale.

The numbers of Scottish beef cattle on the prairies are greatly reduced today and the ranches are no longer the play things of Scottish empire builders. But the defining marks of immigrant Scotsmen on land use and management west of the Mississippi River remain in place long after the giant Scottish cattle empires have blown away with the dry cold prairie winds.

We’re not at Falkirk anymore – driving cattle on an American scale. It seems a paradox that western American grass had, for centuries, richly supported herds of bison so large that it was reported early in the 19th century that entire days passed before the end of a migrating herd of native buffalo rambled through a valley. Yet Murdo Mackenzie reported cheerfully to Dundee shareholders at the close of the 19th century that portions of the Matador range could support one cow on every 15 acres. Back in Scotland the cattle to land equation was more along the lines of how many cows could be fed on each acre of grass instead of how many parched American acres were needed to carry one cow. America was definitely not Scotland, and it was not even especially well suited to growing fat cattle. But it possessed advantages that could, if rather mercilessly exploited, overcome all of the disadvantages and provide returns on investment to Scottish investors that satisfied their appetites.

Yes, it could be dry, cold, windy and blazing hot in ways that often conspired to kill cows by the hundreds and sometimes thousands. Yes, Americans were none too pleased that British bankers were buying up king sized portions of the American western frontier for their own foreign advantage. In response, Washington D.C. politicians were enacting limiting regulations that squeezed Scottish cattle profits. Railroads didn’t yet reach everywhere and where they were, the railroad men drove very hard bargains. Nonetheless, Mackenzie was determined to find ways to make cattle profitable on the high, dry American prairies.

One big thing that the American frontier gave Mackenzie to work with during the last decades of the 19th century was mind boggling geographical vastness. The incredible scope of the available landscape was accompanied by  broad seasonal diversity across that land. In ways that were similar to the ancient Gaelic practice of moving cows from one landscape to the next according to seasonal variations, Mackenzie devised a network that would put the enormous western American landscape to work growing fat Matador cows and even fatter Matador profits. The Matador’s Scottish financiers were generally pleased with the results and Mackenzie continued to grow this king of American cattle companies stretching from Trinidad, Colorado to his namesake town of Murdo, South Dakota.

Mackenzie’s network of Matador pastures strung from Texas to the Dakota country, west to Montana and back down south through Wyoming and Colorado. His Matador cowboys began moving cows along that plan in the 1890s and the practice continued until 1928 when Mackenzie himself suggested to the shareholders that conditions had changed enough that the Matador should release its vast network of pastures and grow cows entirely on Texas grass.

The numbers associated with these early livestock operations are amazing. From his headquarters in Trinidad, Colorado, Mackenzie directed not only the Matador’s home division in Texas but the leased divisions as well. The leased pastures included 500,000 acres on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, a Sioux preserve in South Dakota, 500,000 acres along the Milk River on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in northern Montana, 150,000 acres along the north bank of the Saskatchewan River in Canada, and 300,000 acres on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Closer to home, in 1902 the Matador purchased 210,000 acres of the XIT Ranch in Oldham County, Texas. Subsequent acquisitions increased the size of this home Alamositas Divisions to approximately 800,000 acres. That year, when the ranch counted 69,213 head of stock including 600 horses, the ranch hands branded 17,647 calves with the Matador “Flying V”, a brand that was chosen to reflect the original 50,000 pound capital investment made to begin the outfit.

More to learn. There is no scholarly study of Murdo Mackenzie’s early life yet available and we do not know all of what motivated and influenced him. Of what impact were those ten years with Sir Charles Ross at Balnagowan, during active local clearances and removals? Was the tragedy possibly overshadowed by the excitement of the success of new agricultural improvement and every growing profits gained from the changes? We do not know how those infamous Scottish experiences affected Mackenzie or influenced his decisions and ideas on the American landscape. But it is difficult to believe that those vivid Scottish land and landlord experiences did not, in some ways, color America’s early cattle industry and the ultimate development of the American west.

• Highland Cowboys by Rob Gibson (2003)
• The Matador Land and Cattle Company by W. M. Pearce (1964)
• Frontier Scots: The Scots Who Won The West by Jenni Calder (2010)

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• Gaelic tradition introduces community oriented and inclusive perspective in an increasingly exclusive and inward looking modern world.

• Study of Gaelic culture encourages appreciation of diversity and an open, curious nature in a world with growing numbers of closed minds and an intolerant outlook.

• Gaelic tradition recognizes and celebrates the fact that humans are an integral part of the “natural” world and because we depend upon it for a vast array of values, we should pay very close attention to its health.

There is little question that Scottish Gaelic identity remains distinct from other cultures existing within the UK and Scotland. Certainly it bears a distinct history and tradition. To some observers, Gaelic distinctiveness shows most clearly through Gaelic society’s indigenous characteristics and experience and its historical existence within a larger not-very-indigenous dominant culture.

From the perspective of some in the Gaelic Diaspora, these indigenous characteristics of Gaelic tradition are of great interest. They allow us to begin to place our Gaelic heritage more closely and honestly within the histories of our own nations. Approaching Gaelic history and culture from an indigenous perspective opens windows and invites wonderful discussion.

But before diving too deeply into discussion of particular aspects of indigenousness, it is worth taking a moment to understand what it is, exactly, that links indigenous peoples’ experiences across the world, today and in their respective histories. What is an indigenous culture? It does not necessarily mean the first or only humans to set foot on certain soil.

The United Nations 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples includes this description:

Peoples … are regarded as indigenous on account of their descent from the populations which inhabited the country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs, at the time of conquest or colonization, who retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions.

Further guidance from the United Nations:

Considering the diversity of indigenous peoples, an official definition of “indigenous” has not been adopted by any UN-system body. Instead the system has developed a modern understanding of this term based on the following:

• Self-identification as indigenous peoples at the individual level and accepted by the community as their member.
• Historical continuity with pre-colonial and/or pre-settler societies
• Strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources
• Distinct social, economic or political systems
• Distinct language, culture and beliefs
• Form non-dominant groups of society
• Resolve to maintain and reproduce their ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities.

You can read more about what the United Nations has to say about indigenous people and characteristics here.

A Few Things To Consider. Regarding consideration of Scottish Gaelic as an indigenous culture, here are five things – from a Diaspora perspective - that might be worth keeping in mind:

1. Gaelic Culture Is Not Just About Language and DNA. Although language and DNA can be seen as the entire shelf rather than just useful bookends, Gaelic identity is about so much more than language and DNA. In the void existing between those two things one finds all the rest of culture, socio-political institutions and spiritual outlook and learning, and basic life ways. Much of that has already been swept away in prior Scottish de-Gaelicicization efforts. What remains is threatened. Ultimately, however, these kinds of cultural markers are the things that remain of interest and about which we are still learning and trying to reclaim. Language is an incredibly important and enlightening element of culture but not the only one. It is important in its own right and for what it tells us about its mother culture. Language is also the key that opens the treasure chest of Gaelic historical perspective. If you cannot understand what Gaels have said in their own language – through your own study or by accessing some other reliable study – you cannot understand all of what you need to understand. Nevertheless, although language is the key tool, the ultimate prize is deeper cultural understanding.

2. Indigenous Does Not Mean Isolated. Indigenous cultures are not necessarily genetically pure or isolated from the outside world and from the additive cultural influence that warfare, trade and social interaction bring. Gaelic culture has enjoyed immigrant and trade influence as has almost every human culture and society including many indigenous ones. Pictish and Norse and Welsh and Irish influences make Gaelic a very rich and diverse culture today – but the admixture is still called Gaelic and diverse cultural influences do not necessarily argue against indigeneity nor do they make recognition of Gaelic less important.

3. “There can be only one.” NOT. Indigenousness is not a geopolitically exclusive status. Recognition of one culture as an indigenous culture does not mean that it has claimed exclusive right to that status throughout, in this case, Scotland and the UK. The many coexistent indigenous cultures in the US provide good examples, as does the history of North Britain itself to a certain extent. Fear of wiping out recognition of, or interest in the people that pre-dated and co-existed with the Gaels is unsupported. There is nothing about the idea of a recognized indigenous Gaelic culture that should lead to such an outcome. That, however, leads to the next really important thing to remember about indigenousness.

4. It’s Alive!!!! Indigenousness is, primarily, an element of a living global cultural structure that is actively and physically present today. Discussion of indigeneity is firmly hooked to living people and their contemporary lives. As demonstrated by the UN resources quoted above, whether there exists a logical basis for a culture to self-determine its own indigenous status is typically measured by historic continuity and status of living people. Reasonable claims to real rights are involved and so the determination is an important one not made lightly.

It is certainly wonderful news that some cultures that had gone missing from contemporary Earth have been successfully revitalized in recent years and even reclaimed from “sleeping beauty” status.  Check out this great article on language (cultural) revival and video about the experience of the Barngarla people in Australia. These movements are difficult and sincere and they often demonstrate best how much is lost when a culture and society are thoroughly and intentionally suppressed as well as what amazing things can be achieved by people today who work to bring them back.

5. “I’m Gaelic, We Suck” Said Nobody Ever. Erosion and Anglicization of Gaelic culture and society did not happen without the need for consistent episodes of severe repression applied by various non-Gaelic kings over the course of several centuries to force ethnically stubborn Gaels to accept Anglo/Scottish incentives – or to leave Scotland. Near loss of Scottish Gaelic culture has not been an accident of history. In the largest of all nutshells, Gaelic culture and society have been specifically targeted for eradication and if not that, then severe containment. Gaelic society has been historically perceived by most Anglo, (non-Gaelic or anti-Gaelic) Scottish, and many American observers as barbaric, savage, uncivilized, backward, etc. Thus, under the general guise of “civilizing” the uncivilized, national policies have openly attempted to rid Scotland and America of significant and meaningful Gaelic influence. Culture-killing policies and projects have been clothed as beneficent reform and improvement. Such has been the imperial pattern across the globe.  Did you watch that video linked above? You should. Gaelic culture, like many others, survives today because it has proven extremely stubborn in the face of centuries of repression.

In the event.  Clearly, the Scottish Gaelic indigenous experience was broadly similar to other indigenous experience, but also different in a few stand-out ways. Scottish Gaels were some of the very earliest victims of the invasive Anglo influence flowing up from the south. Gaels are also closer geographically to England than indigenous people on other continents. Perhaps more interestingly than all of this, however, is the fact that Gaels look like the Europeans that they are and that makes the Gaelic indigenous experience its own. Gaels aren’t the only white indigenous people on the planet, but there aren’t all that many left.

Light skin and European features did not automatically provide keys to Anglo respect for Scottish Gaels. Nevertheless, those European physical traits did place Scottish and Irish Gaels in a peculiar posture as far as Anglo imperial victims generally go. Anglicized Gaels could be more readily and somewhat more deeply accepted by Anglos than were Anglicized dark skinned aboriginal peoples. Yet there is no evidence that suggests that giving up an ancient culture and way of life, pulling up roots and leaving a homeland under varying levels of duress was always easier or created less loss for Gaels than for other victims of similar cultural pressure elsewhere in the British empire.

There are many great reasons why it makes sense to examine Gaelic culture with an indigenous lens. In the end, it may be impossible for some people to attach the label “indigenous” to Scotland’s last remaining distinctly pre-Anglo culture. If so, at the least take a moment to appreciate the great variety of experiences and cultural characteristics that Scottish Gaelic culture shares with those people across the globe who have chosen to join the indigenous family.

One important indigenous marker has to do with the question of how humanity understands itself relative to the non-human world and how humans interact with that world. Questions such as whether we will continue to fuel extreme climate instability and how we adapt to climate changes that we fail to avoid are perfect opportunities to consider and integrate indigenous ideas. There are a growing number of people on the planet who recognize great personal and global value and potential in indigenous ideas and approaches to the world and are therefore keen to understand them more completely. Scottish Gaelic offers opportunity in this regard.

Speaking of land, heritage and indigenous souls, a far better McIntosh than I, Alastair McIntosh, along with a handful of other scholars in Scotland and North America, have been forging new ideas on the topic of Gaelic relationships with landscape. Especially through interdisciplinary insight and understanding offered by Alastair McIntosh’s climate and human ecology perspective, exploration of traditional Gaelic relationships to land and other “indigenous” Gaelic qualities has already contributed not just to the interests of Gaelic heritage but to humanity’s better understanding of itself and the planet.

More on this topic coming. In the meanwhile, some really great reading:

Soil and Soul: People Versus Corporate Power by Alastair McIntosh (2004)

Warriors Of The Word: The World Of Scottish Highlanders by Michael Newton (2009)

Seanchaidh na Coille / The Memory-Keeper of the Forest: Anthology of Scottish-Gaelic Literature of Canada by Michael Newton (2015)

We’re Indians Sure Enough: The Legacy Of Scottish Highlanders In North America by Michael Newton (2001)

On The Other Side Of Sorrow: Nature And People In The Scottish Highlands by Jim Hunter (1996)

White People, Indians And Highlanders: Tribal People and Colonial Encounters In Scotland And America by Colin Calloway (2010)

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Scottish Gaelic culture is an indigenous culture as well, but unlike the natives with whom I share our North American landscape, Gaels are not so well recognized for their indigenousness and do not universally recognize themselves as one of the world’s remaining indigenous people.

The label “indigenous” is not deeply understood by most and there is not popular agreement as to the word’s meaning. Merriam – Webster Dictionary provides this definition: “produced, living, or existing naturally in a particular region or environment.” Clearly, that works better with plants than humans. Coincidentally though, the Merriam – Webster online dictionary also provides the following example of the proper use of the word indigenous:

“Viking invaders quickly subdued the indigenous population, known as the Picts.” —Jared M. Diamond, Collapse, 2005

As far as official definitions go, the global indigenous community has been rightfully reluctant to subscribe to a universal definition of indigenousness, understanding that no single definition could capture the vast diversity of indigenous peoples across the planet. The U.N. has not adopted a specific definition and does not maintain a list of who is and who is not indigenous. Indeed, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (“UNDRIP”) mandates that self-determination of indigenousness is a human right, an approach that itself prohibits any “official” listing.

There is, however, some widely supported scholarly guidance and this working definition is worth quoting in its entirety, especially since we are wasting no trees in doing so, here at ScotClans.com:

Working definition of indigenous peoples by Jose R. Martinez Cobo

Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal system.

This historical continuity may consist of the continuation, for an extended period reaching into the present of one or more of the following factors:

• Occupation of ancestral lands, or at least of part of them
• Common ancestry with the original occupants of these lands
• Culture in general, or in specific manifestations (such as religion, living under a tribal system, membership of an indigenous community, dress, means of livelihood, lifestyle, etc.)
• Language (whether used as the only language, as mother-tongue, as the habitual means of communication at home or in the family, or as the main, preferred, habitual, general or normal language)
• Residence in certain parts of the country, or in certain regions of the world
• Other relevant factors.

On an individual basis, an indigenous person is one who belongs to these indigenous populations through self-identification as indigenous (group consciousness) and is recognized and accepted by these populations as one of its members (acceptance by the group). This preserves for these communities the sovereign right and power to decide who belongs to them, without external interference.

UNDRIP also recognizes the paramount importance of self-determination:

Article 33 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

1. Indigenous peoples have the right to determine their own identity or membership in accordance with their customs and traditions. This does not impair the right of indigenous individuals to obtain citizenship of the States in which they live.

2. Indigenous peoples have the right to determine the structures and to select the membership of their institutions in accordance with their own procedures.

People like to argue about technical details of which culture is indigenous to a place and which is not. As we’ve already seen, dictionary definitions do not provide much direction.  Without rehashing the facts, how about this: Scottish Gaelic is classified as an indigenous language under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Works for me. Scottish Gaelic is an indigenous culture, but how did it get to be something separate and apart from the rest of Scotland and what have been the consequences of marginalization?

A national divorce. The Scottish kingdom was a Gaelic kingdom before it was Scottish. Of course Scottish and Gaelic are very different things in this and other contexts. By the opening of the 10th century, the Dal Riata Gaels and the still mysterious Picts were united under an Alban flag and there began the kingdom of Alba. From a significant original land base the PictoGaelic realm expanded into almost all of what we know as Scotland today. Gaelic place names are found everywhere in North Britain. At its zenith Gaelic influence was ubiquitous and easily distinguished from English society to the south.

Eventually however, following several centuries of waging hot and cold war against invasive Anglo-Norman influence, the Gaelic kingdom of Alba had succumbed to a new Scottishness and the sphere of continuing Gaelic influence had retreated to the Highlands and Islands. Outside of the remote Gaelic heartland, Scottish Gaelic culture and institutions were largely replaced with Anglo-Norman norms. One of the most unfortunate aspects of this separation was the prejudicial animosity and acrimony that accompanied this divorce of Scotland’s Gaelic and non-Gaelic (highland-lowland) pathways. This is where Gaelic became indigenous and Scottish became something new.

Unfortunately for cultural diversity, even within the Highlands and Islands, traditional Gaelic communities joined their lowland neighbors in having to deal with fundamental changes in the Gaelic socio-economic building blocks. Among other things, Anglicization has been highly erosive of the primary markers of Gaelic indigenousness. By the 14th century, Lowland Scots and English commenters began to interpret and label Gaelic identity as “savage”, “barbaric” and “uncivilized” and the popular Scottish policy was, by hook or crook, to civilize the Erse savages. Today we recognize that same identity as a native or indigenous culture persistently existing within Scottish political boundaries.

One of the things that changed the most was the relationship between Gaels and the land upon which they and their ancestors lived. A society’s approach to and behavior in the natural world - including land - is a good marker of indigenous perspective. Indigenous people often tend to enjoy a more direct connection and interaction with the natural world, placing themselves squarely within nature as an interconnected part of it, as opposed to separate from, and dominant over, the natural world. According to those who are beginning to study the subject, Gaelic culture did a good bit of that.  Erosion of that cultural marker turns an affectionate cohabitation with natural landscape into fear and a drive to dominate and improve the bleakness and danger of an undeveloped wilderness. Hello Scottish “civilization,” good bye indigeneity.

Historian Jim Hunter spends a bit of time contrasting a traditional Gaelic outlook toward nature and a typical Anglo-Norman outlook as part of his book On The Other Side Of Sorrow: Nature and People in the Scottish Highlands. Hunter’s aim in the book, which was re-released just last year, is to support the characterization of Gaelic society as what we would today call “green”. He presents a convincing case. Other works, including Alastair McIntosh’s Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power, have begun to explore the Gaelic relationship to land, resources and place in a more systematic and focused and modern way. I will take a closer look at these new interpretations, as well as the North American perspective coming from scholars Michael Newton and Colin Calloway in a future post. For now, lets just try to deal with the reality of how much Gaelicness was actually lost to modern Scotland.

Almost all of the land. We are fortunate to have Andy Wightman’s excellent reminder of the What, How, When and Why of the great Gaelic land loss. In his definitive book The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who owns Scotland and how they got it  Wightman catalogues a massive legal and cultural conversion of land use and control that is as complete as if it had followed a violent conquest. As it turns out the Anglo-Norman tinged Scottish conversion of Gaelic land law and custom into its own feudal law and practice is manifested today with plenty of legal cover. Nevertheless, Wightman clearly demonstrates the varied ways in which the decision to hit the reset button on the Gaelic world was made by a small handful of powerful non-Gaelic elite.

In Wightman’s own words, his book follows on from prior scholarship focusing on “the legal and political mechanisms that enabled vast areas of Scotland to be appropriated by private interests.” Additionally, appropriation of land from the commons and conveyance into new private ownership was not just a highland occurrence. Wightman continues, “Equally, whilst for good historical reasons land issues have become associated with the Highlands and Islands almost to the exclusion of the rest of the country, the historic struggle for land rights took place across the whole country.”

The acquisitive processes and outcomes described in The Poor Had No Lawyers were more than just a rearrangement of who owns land. They were part of a larger cultural conversion from a Gaelic kingdom to a Scottish kingdom, one that was influenced largely by Anglo-Norman law and institutions and less by old Gaelic versions.

Today Scottish land law bears little resemblance to the Gaelic system it replaced and a tiny number of people continue to own and control the vast majority of Scottish land. For many reasons, it is important to try to understand what was lost as that process developed through history. Andrew Wightman notes that this is at least part of his intent in The Poor Had No Lawyers:

“But what I want to convey is how the theft of Scotland’s commons has robbed us not only of extensive communal interests in land but of a sense of connection with place which is leading to all sorts of social and economic problems.”

That’s plenty for this Sunday. There is more to the story of Gaelic relationships to land and natural resources in Scotland and in diaspora countries. Stay tuned and Get Your Gaelic On!

The post Looking at Scottish land with an indigenous Gaelic eye appeared first on ScotClans | Scottish Clans.

Well, that living breathing Scottish Gaelic community has been rockin’ over the last few weeks. In fact, so many good things have been on the move that a general update is warranted. So an update it will be in no particular order of awesomeness. Here’s a little of what’s going on in Gaeldom.

Gaelic USA

Over the last ten days, many folks have gotten their first sight of an important new initiative called The Scottish Gaelic Foundation USA, or Gaelic USA for short – and they’ve liked it.  For those who missed it, Gaelic USA is a new organization in the process of formation with the Gaelic American heritage and community at its heart. Gaelic USA aims to help reclaim and revitalize the language and heritage of the Gaels in North America at a formal level and to build bridges between communities of all sorts, including academia. Thanks to all who have left comments, ideas and offers of support. Good things continue to chug along. For instance …

The Gaelic USA formation committee is happily morphing into a great little Board of Directors. Gaelic USA Board of Directors’ award-winning Director Liam Alastair Crouse (more on Liam and a brand new 2015 Scottish Gaelic award below) is working on an outstanding new logo for Gaelic USA that captures important ideas from the Gaelic homeland as well as critical links with the Gaelic Diaspora. We can’t wait to share.  Beyond logos, formal incorporation and application for tax exemption for The Scottish Gaelic Foundation USA are expected prior to the end of the year.

In the meanwhile, the Gaelic USA website continues to expand with new information and dimensions regularly. Keep an eye out for new Gaelic USA membership opportunities as well as that important and popular “Donate” button coming soon to GaelicUSA.org.  Make sure to follow Gaelic USA to keep up to date on progress.

2015 Scottish Gaelic Awards – Go Rhode Island!

Just a few years ago, Scottish Gaels began to formally appreciate their own heroes through a big annual awards event called the Scottish Gaelic Awards. This year’s Scottish Gaelic Award winners were announced just a few days ago and they featured a big win by a great son of … Rhode Island!

Yes, it’s true - an American lad deeply involved in Scottish Gaelic revival on South Uist. Since April this year, Liam Alastair Crouse hailing from the great little state of Rhode Island has been an important part of the creative team supporting the innovative and energetic program called Ceòlas Uibhist. In addition to being a new Director at Gaelic USA, Liam is the Gaelic development officer for the award winning Hebridean music and culture project located on South Uist.

Ceòlas snagged the 2015 Scottish Gaelic ”International Award” for it’s work drawing participants and visitors to a range of varied Gaelic music school and events in the western isles.  Ceòlas draws people from Europe, Canada, China and Sri Lanka and, say this year’s Gaelic Awards judges, “stands tall on the international stage”.  According to its website, “Ceòlas is committed to transmitting a vibrant Gaelic culture to future generations. Since its establishment in 1996, Ceòlas has grown from a week-long music and dance school to become one of Scotland’s leading Gaelic culture, heritage and arts organisations.”

Good Old-fashioned Gaelic American Radio

Guth nan Gàidheal (Voice of the Gael) and Rèidio A-Màireach.

Here is a potentially very exciting Gaelic American initiative that plans to bring Scottish Gaelic radio to the United States in just a few days on December 1, 2015. What a concept. According to its website, Rèidio A-Màireach (“Tomorrow Radio” in English) is a “Baltimore-based, 24×7 streaming internet radio station dedicated to bringing you the best in Celtic and Folk music from the UK, Ireland and Nova Scotia as well as Folk/Americana from the United States and Canada. Our Celtic music collection includes a considerable amount of music sung in Scottish Gaelic and while that tends to be our main focus, we also play many tracks sung in English by artists from all over the world.”

As part of its regular schedule Rèidio A-Màireach also plans to feature Scottish Gaelic programming from Guth nan Gàidheal, (“GnG”) a radio co-venture between Rèidio A-Màireach and An Comunn Gàidhealach Ameireaganach (The American Scottish Gaelic Society, “ACGA”). It is anticipated that programming on GnG will include music, story-telling and current affairs primarily in the Scottish Gaelic language, and while some content will be presented in English, the focus is always on Gaelic music and culture.

Some folks may remember Guth nan Gàidheal from it’s brief inaugural flight during the first few months of 2015. GnG broadcast from January through May this year prior to it’s host radio station closing its doors. Rèidio A-Màireach provides new wind for ACGA’s innovative project to help make Gaelic American culture and language a living, breathing presence across America’s infamous and always hip radio waves. Can’t wait.

Scottish Diaspora Digital Museum

This is by far the most innovative and important Scottish heritage project seen in a long, long time. It is a project that is sorely needed and that others, including yours truly, have often dreamed of because the primary historical resources of the Scottish Diaspora are at risk of loss.

The remarkably talented and just plain cool Dr. Tanja Bueltmann’s Scottish Diaspora Digital Museum provides the beginnings of the safety net that is desperately needed to locate, preserve and assess the Scottish historic treasures that are collecting dust waiting for the bin in Grannies’ attics all over the world.

Here’s how it works: ordinary folks who are blessed to possess physical reminders of their Scottish ancestry – Dr. Bueltmann calls them “Objects” – can now digitally preserve their heirlooms (scan them photographically) and deposit them with the Scottish Diaspora Digital Museum, where they are preserved, organized and made available for others to enjoy and, importantly, study.  The idea of “Objects” is broad – letters, jewelry, clothing, medals, old haggis pelts, everyday items, bibles – the list of mementos of a Scottish migrant’s life is inexhaustible. The Scottish Diaspora Digital Museum will allow us all to explore the history of Scottish migration and the Scots abroad through these previously unavailable “objects” and their stories – this is the idea behind the Scottish Diaspora Digital Museum and it is a marvelous one.

So, got Gaelic or Scottish stuff?  Start digitally preserving it! The technology is easier than you might think. You can do this. At least hop over to the Scottish Diaspora Digital Museum Contributions Page to learn what it takes to digitally preserve your family’s treasures for future generations. Be a part of the world’s Gaelic heritage! How cool is that?

The post Great Gaelic Goings On – You Need An Update! appeared first on ScotClans | Scottish Clans.

The good news is that there is an uplifting side to the rather somber “State of Gaelic in America” type reports. Many of the comments that have come in on recent Gaelic culture and language posts have identified the need to do something helpful and have pondered about what that might be. The need is fairly inescapable. After a great deal of group discussion and individual cogitation, an impressive and excited group of Scottish Gaelic scholars, artists and activists have come together to support the creation of a new organization called The Scottish Gaelic Foundation of the U.S.A., or simply Gaelic USA.

Creation of a national Gaelic support organization like Gaelic USA can achieve many very positive changes within the Gaelic community on behalf of Gaelic culture itself as well as outside the Gaelic community, within the larger mainstream Scottish American heritage community. There is little question that the mainstream Scottish American heritage community could be representing the diversity of Scottish heritage much better. Gaelic is certainly not the only valid heritage experience that should be better acknowledged, understood and expressed. Perhaps the long overdue recognition and development of the living Gaelic culture and heritage will highlight the potential for increased awareness of Scots language heritage and other cultural expressions that have grown from what we today call Scotland.

Another popular discussion thread seeks alternative, truly Gaelic ways to celebrate Gaelic heritage; ways to supplant or to complement those mainstream expressions of Scottish heritage that do not portray Gaelic culture and heritage with accuracy, integrity and equity. Among other initiatives, Gaelic USA will support and complement the outstanding Scottish Gaelic cultural groups already engaged in these kinds of activities on local and regional scales, such as the awesome work and energy of Slighe nan Gaidheal operating in the Seattle, Washington area.

So please hop over to the new Gaelic USA website. It is a new and developing site, but you will find a great deal of outstanding information already there. Most importantly, as Gaelic USA is still on its journey of creation, we would love to hear your ideas and reactions. You will find plenty of substance to discuss and consider and opportunity to comment.

So check it out and discover who is already backing the Mission and Scope of Work for this new, inclusive Gaelic ethnic organization. Add your name to a growing list of supporters and begin to follow along as Gaelic culture and heritage enters a new era in recovery and revitalization in the United States.

Click here to visit Gaelic USA and don’t forget to leave your thoughts and ideas! Happy exploring!

The post Doing Something Good For Gaelic: The Scottish Gaelic Foundation of the U.S.A. is underway! appeared first on ScotClans | Scottish Clans.

Somhairle died in 1996. Had the Gaelic people, culture and kingdom not been overtaken and marginalized (i.e. stolen) by Anglo aggression, ethnic cleansing and forced assimilation, October 26th would likely be a national Gaelic holiday. Somhairle Mac Gill-Eain was a living, breathing 20th century Gaelic hero. He was relevant and influential. But he is largely forgotten by the Gaelic diaspora.

Here is how the Sorley MacLean Trust describes Mac Gill-Eain’s work:

“His poetry is characterised by its innovation and boldness, both in its approach and subject matter. In his seminal work Dàin do Eimhir, his poetry speaks of love, choice, suffering and injustice, and simultaneously considers the seismic political events that were to shake Europe to its foundations in the 1930s and 1940s. Events such as the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Fascism were welded together with his own intense personal feelings to produce poetry that has attracted national and international acclaim.”

Instead of national celebration, Scotland and the Scottish diaspora – including the highlands and islands Gaelic diaspora – allow October 26th to pass by each year in sad, defeated silence. After all, Burns Nights are not that far away. Now there’s something to celebrate, right? Pull on that philabeag (wi’ hope it still fits) and dust off the Prince Charlie and piper’s hose and claim your Scottish highland heritage at your local Burns Supper. Even though Robert Burns was no Gael. Not even close.

Why does the Gaelic diaspora celebrate other people’s heroes at the expense of our own? It is done because that is what we have learned to do from those who have crushed our own Gaelic language and heritage and supplanted it with theirs. It is time for that craziness to stop. Fondly remember Robert Burns if you like. But if you are a Gael, it is time to discover your own heroes. Celebrate them.

You can read Somhairle’s words today and you should. The Sorley MacLean Trust website is a fantastic place to begin (don’t worry, you can read it all in English!). But you can listen to his thoughts as well. Do not allow this day to pass without hearing Somhairle Mac Gill-Eain’s own voice:

Niteworks’ “Somhairle”

This is a fantastic recording backed by a haunting musical soundtrack. Great work. Did you hear what the great man said directly to you? He does not allow the Gaelic diaspora off the hook in terms of the root causes of the forced Gaelic march toward extinction.

“Our culture is vitiated by the sentimentality of those who have gone away,” he says. Mac Gill-Eain’s word “vitiate” means to spoil, destroy and ignore the validity of a thing.

Yep. That’s us celebrating Robert Burns. That’s us teaching our children to dress up in Victorian costumes and dance the Anglo created knock off called “Highland” dancing and telling them it’s Gaelic. That’s us utterly failing to pass-on our Gaelic language and culture to the next generation of Gaelic Americans and instead filling our children’s wee heads with Anglo baloney and celebrating non-Gaels who actively marginalized Gaelic culture. The kids aren’t buying it by the way.

That’s us helping to murder our own culture and heritage, year in and year out. Do you think Gaelic revitalization is something that only people in Scotland need to think about? Do you think we Gaelic Americans have no part in it?

Think again.

The post “Our children are bred for emigration” appeared first on ScotClans | Scottish Clans.

If one looks at Scotland from a certain perspective, it is completely possible to identify two distinct worlds co-existing under one Alban sky. A close reading of north Britain human history reveals about 1,300 post-Roman years of a multi-cultural, multi-lingual, dynamic melting pot of Gaelic, Pict, Norse, Briton and finally Anglo Saxons and Normans. Rich, diverse, cultural intersection. So long as your village wasn’t burned, but even then … every century has one or two of its own challenges.

Eventually, however, history runs into an 18^th century nation that has been steadily reduced to a bi-cultural, bi-lingual majority/minority society that even today hosts a societal element that prefers to reduce cultural diversity even further. An onlooker can see a Scotland that has been assimilated and strained of its former native cultural richness in such a way as to yield only two distinct products. Gaelic. Not Gaelic.

Sadly, Gaelic is the only non-Anglo culture that heavily influenced Scotland throughout history that actually persists as a vibrant human community in Scotland, natively speaking it’s own language. That is a tremendous achievement. Today’s Gaelic community in Scotland is remarkable for its tenacity in the face of an astoundingly backward opposition to Gaelic language speakers’ rights.

Now, hop across the pond. In the United States we find the Scottish diaspora suffering the same unbalanced and troublesome cultural pattern. Today’s Scottish American heritage tradition developed in the 19^th and 20^th centuries largely without contribution from scholarly Gaelic study and increasingly outside of native Gaelic culture including language.

In the United States, genuine understanding of Gaelic immigrant history and culture simply does not exist as the history is almost entirely yet to be written. What an awful – but real – state of affairs: Scottish Americans do not yet have access to resources necessary to understand and appreciate the reality of our distinct Gaelic heritage and identity. And we have largely lost our language, despite the thousands of Gaels who emigrated here living and speaking Gaelic when they arrived. What we can see of the culture is awesomeness. There is so much more yet to reveal.

In light of the lack of Gaelic influence, it isn’t surprising that it has been effectively argued that the Scottish diaspora is the world’s leading brand ambassador for the classic Scottish image of romanticized Tartanry and military Highlandism. That is not the sin. This is the sin: Contrary Gaelic intrusions into the popular story lines are usually discouraged as being political or, boring, or quaint, or worse yet, absolutely useless and of no interest, as Gaelic is often misunderstood to be a dead end that was properly deposited in the unrecoverable past ages ago.

My Gaelic immigrant ancestor came to America in 1776 from Inverness. He was almost certainly bilingual, speaking at least Scottish Gaelic and English, possibly Scots and likely other languages as well. Many like him came here as Gaels with Gaelic families that were left behind in Scotia. Once in North America, Gaelic immigrants spawned families each of which now number in the multi-hundreds, if not thousands in some cases. Sadly, we descendants have largely been reduced to blandly monolingual Scottish Americans, speaking English only – because that is what Americans are supposed to do.

So how should I approach today’s tartan clad, country dancing, claymore swinging Scottish heritage tradition that is so unlike my own actual Gaelic heritage? Simply stated, the Scottish heritage celebrated today is not a celebration of my culture. In many ways, it is a celebration of the marginalization of my culture.

The trend is this: studies have found that those who have become deeply interested in their real Gaelic heritage simply do not mix, by and large, with the highland games and Burns Supper crowd which is where so many people go to learn about and celebrate a Scottish heritage that is new to them. Two Scotlands; two Diasporas.

Today’s active mainstream Scottish Americans understand and celebrate a snapshot of Scotland. A slice only, and too much of it just simply made up or terribly misinformed but understood to be real and perpetuated. The Scottish American community could easily be moving to change, adapt, innovate and update to integrate new scholarship and to support new research as well as to aggressively support and encourage Gaelic language learners. A strong Gaelic American movement could help that to happen.

The truth is, the mainstream stuff is not selling very well to most Scottish Americans, especially the very savvy younger ones. On the other hand, the Outlander stuff is attractive, not in small part because it portrays Gaelic language and culture in a primary, accurate and unromanticized form. And Jamie Fraser.

The active and interested Scottish American heritage community is aging and by all indications it is not growing. As a leader in that community I used to be quite concerned about the internally acknowledged fact that younger people aren’t buying it as much as they need to. Young folks are staying away from what can often be a rigid unwelcoming sometimes nonsensical Scottish American world in droves. Oh the hand wringing.

The good news is, I no longer care so much about that part of the Scottish American world that is rigid, unwelcoming, and nonsensical, because there is an awesome true Gaelic heritage scurrying about in the wings and ready to explode with new awareness and youthful vitality. This is where Gaels’ work should focus. It is not antithetical to the Scottish clan heritage but it is not satisfied with Anglo-centrism or fantasy.

Today’s Anglo-Scottish tradition may be a valid cultural and heritage expression. It is a tradition of fairly recent birth. It doesn’t celebrate my Scottish heritage; it shuns or is indifferent to Gaelic heritage. Accepting it is like asking someone of Lakota Sioux ancestry to be satisfied describing themselves as an “early American”. It simply is not in my DNA.

For today’s Gael, congeniality with the dominant Scottish tradition is one thing; celebration of it is yet another. Everyone is free to choose. But continuing to allow today’s form of Scottish heritage to overshadow and prevent further understanding of Gaelic heritage is a third thing altogether and comes with very negative consequences for Scottish cultural celebration. The solution is more focus and initiative on Gaelic culture and language – Gaelic heritage.

Here is what is in my DNA: Gaelic history and heritage. Despite it being overshadowed and largely forgotten for so long, Gaelic culture in America is not gone. Further, the historical and cultural resources necessary to recover and reclaim Gaelic American history, culture and language are available and bursting with new information – much of it written in Gaelic. We can do this.

It is critical to understand that for my family and many others, the loss of Gaelic culture happened on our side of the Atlantic. People came to British North America and then the United States as Gaels but the culture failed to make it past the first two or three generations here. It is completely appropriate that I be interested in – not to mention a bit disturbed by – the loss of our family’s Gaelic culture particularly because it happened here, and not so very long ago.

Now as much as ever, Americans who have Gaelic ancestry should be delighted to understand themselves as Gaelic Americans. We should see and hear that term more and more often. In addition to or exclusive of Scottish American identity. And it’s not a bad idea for me and other Gaelic-Americans to spend time and interest in reconnecting with our Gaelic past. And supporting Gaelic language and culture revitalization initiatives that will help us give those young cousins who come after us a better understanding of their Gaelic heritage and identity.

Get Your Gaelic On!

The post Gaelic, Not Gaelic: Two Scotlands two Diasporas appeared first on ScotClans | Scottish Clans.