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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 8, 2006
Scotch
It has become dangerous to use the word “Scotch” in this country, as I’ve learnt to my cost. Every time I do it, I get a bunch of letters from smart people, telling me that, if not referring to whisky, my choice of adjectives is necessarily limited to “Scots”, “Scottish”, or at a stretch, “Caledonian”. This is because, I fear, the Scotch are a shrinking part of Canada’s social fabric. A diminishing number know that among the meanings of the word “Scotch” is, “deeply-rooted Scottish-Canadian”.Were I referring to the current inmates of Scotland itself, or recent immigrants therefrom, I would call them Scottish. But in speaking of the “Scotch” I refer to my own race, on my mother’s side. We were once, and may by the grace of God still be, Canada’s third largest ethnic constituency, after English and French (counting original Highlanders, Lowlanders, and the Scotch-Irish together). But our assimilation is so far advanced, that the Gaelic language has almost disappeared. My mother’s people were unilingually Gaelic-speaking Highlanders and Islanders -- Clan Graham to the last, but including among my mother’s forebears sprinklings of Macleans, Macdonalds, Macleods, and inevitably, Frasers. (All were fecund, but the Frasers spread like rabbits.) I’ve been thinking of them this week, while unpacking and repacking much family clobber that has washed my way. They emerged from a dark ancestral past not entirely unlike that of Afghanistan, to flourish in our New World. Breaking news: it would appear at least one of my ancestors arrived on the Hector, which was the Scotch Mayflower. Stern Calvinists they were, but there were also Recusant Catholics aboard that ship, to say nothing of the rats. She sailed from Loch Broom in the summer of '73. (That would be 1773.) They left because the English had made their lives impossible, first insisting on the disbandment of their private armies (and enforcing this, too, as our NATO troops have been doing with those Afghans). But the English also banned their tartans and kilts, their skein dhus and dirks and broadswords, and made it a criminal offence to blow on a bagpipe. The last straw for my Fraser ancestor was the seizure of his whisky, whenas he refused to pay the stinking English tax. (Have we not yet thought of doing a similar number on the poor Afghans, cultivating their poppies?) The Hector was a ship in a fairly advanced state of decay. Three-masted, square-rigged, she were large enough to accommodate more than 200 souls, however; and they painted gunports on her hull since they couldn't afford cannon. She nearly foundered in gales off Newfoundland. About 20 were lost to smallpox and dysentery (aggravated by starvation) on the North Atlantic, mostly small children. The rest revived and survived the long passage, on oatcakes and psalms. According to official legend, as the ship was about to embark at Loch Broom, some ragged cottar with a cart of illegal bagpipes tried to board. When the captain ordered him ashore, the ship's complement voted he was a good omen, and several volunteered to share their provisions with him. So board he did. This proved a prudent decision, for a large party of Micmac Indians were waiting for our settlers, when finally they landed at Pictou. The men waded ashore with a skirl on those bagpipes; the shivering women and children floated behind them in ship's boats. The Micmac, hearing the bagpipes, melted into the woods. My people went on to infest Pictou and environs, then tracts east into Antigonish, and up into Cape Breton. As we know from feelgood multicultural propaganda, Canada’s native peoples were all peace-loving, democratic, earth-nurturing innocents; and anyone whose ignorance of history and anthropology is complete, will be capable of believing that. In fact, the story of almost every encounter between two breeds of tribal exotics, such as the Micmac and my ancestors, is a mixed bag. Sometimes we trade amicably, and sometimes we just exterminate one another. In one fine multicultural moment, the Micmac were our allies in dispossessing Acadian French; in another, vice versa. They hardly noticed they were being dispossessed themselves. Some centuries earlier, they had themselves displaced the more agricultural Abenaki and Maliseet. You’ve got to be really sharp to survive history. My own ancestors were savages, lagging badly in Britain, though with a slight head start on their New World competition. Everyone’s ancestors were savages, some even more recently. We ought to take some pride in that, to look back and laugh. For we all fade, too. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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