by Dr. Brad King

Last week I’d heard that an old friend of mine, Lewis MacKinnon, has become the first non-Scot to be named Poet Laureate of the Royal National Mod in Scotland.

Photo: Corey LeBlanc, originally posted on http://www.thecasket.ca/leisure-and-living/gaelic-poetry-book-released/

Since our days at university playing together in a small traditional music group, Lewis has made it his life’s work to preserve the Gaelic language in Nova Scotia and has pursued that vision relentlessly via his music, his poetry and his day job as CEO of the Nova Scotia Office of Gaelic Affairs.

Lewis’s story brings to mind the issue of cultural preservation, even as culture changes continuously all around us. Any attempt to preserve an all-but-dead language with no more than a few hundred native speakers remaining might appear like a last-ditch effort to save something long gone, but the fact that there’s even such a thing as an “office of Gaelic affairs” is evidence of the cultural shifts that have occurred on the East Coast and in Canada as a whole over the past thirty years. It’s cultural change that makes someone like Lewis possible – and in turn, he has made it possible – and it has to do with the rediscovery and reclamation of the traditional as a marker of identity.

When I was a teenager growing up in Cape Breton in the 1970s, traditional culture was to be avoided and shunned. It persisted and it had its flagbearers, but it made teenagers of my generation cringe. We identified with the modern, the up-to-date, the “now”, and longed to be better connected to the currents of the dominant North American urban culture.

And then, by the early 1990s, it was “cool” for a group of university students like us to form a band that played nothing but two-hundred-year-old Robbie Burns songs or fighting songs sung by the early 20th century IRA. And we were at the bottom rungs, the grassroots. In the more mainstream culture, all things Celtic were suddenly “in”, making it possible for performers like Natalie MacMaster, the Rankins or the incredibly talented Ashley MacIsaac to become international stars. So what happened? read more »