Finding Kluskap: A Journey into Mi'kmaw Myth

Introduction

introduction The Mi’kmaq of eastern Canada were the first indigenous North Americans to encounter colonial Europeans. As early as the mid-sixteenth century, they were trading with French fishers, and by the mid-seventeenth century, large numbers of Mi’kmaq had converted to Catholicism. That association would persist to varying degrees to the present day. Mi’kmaw Catholicism is exemplified by the community’s regard for the figure of Saint Anne, the grandmother of Jesus.1 Each year for a week, coinciding with the saint’s feast day of July 26, Mi’kmaw peoples from communities throughout Quebec and eastern Canada gather at a small island off the coast of Nova Scotia. The island of Potlotek is the site of Canada’s oldest Christian mission, and the celebration of Saint Anne on the island each July is a focal event for the community . It is, however, far from a conventional Catholic celebration. In fact, it expresses a complex set of relationships that exist between the Mi’kmaq, a cultural hero named Kluskap, a series of eighteenth-century treaties, and Saint Anne. This set of relationships is the focus of this book. In the following chapters I will relate how my desire to know something about the figure of Kluskap turned into a kind of pilgrimage. That journey ended up at Potlotek. Getting there, however, was not at all straightforward and, once I was there, the return to an original starting point was impossible. Kluskap himself, for instance, eluded me for a long time. I came to him in the way a Western scholar often approaches an indigenous cultural form—through the lens of academic classifications. Kluskap is customarily 2 finding kluskap typecast as a trickster, one of a class of mythic figures who have haunted scholarship on non-Europeans since the anthropologies of Daniel Brinton , Henry Schoolcraft, and Franz Boaz.2 Tricksters have been described as funny characters who are lacking in conventional morality, at times benevolent and at other times unscrupulous. They are satirical figures who often mock human ways, cultural institutions, religious figures, the gods, and even themselves.3 They are credited with creating crucial aspects of the human world, but what they create is as much a result of stupidity as it is of conscious intention. In a sense, they epitomize the highest and lowest points of human possibility: they create the world, but they also complicate it for us through their questionable behavior.4 In recent years tricksters have found their way into other discourses, aside from the strictly anthropological. They have, for example, been recast as embodiments of postmodernism, slippery beings who defy classical constraint . Emerging largely from nonindigenous sectors, this interpretation has relied on a kind of exoticism that has blurred the cultural contexts out of which tricksters have emerged.5 They have also surfaced among indigenous writers and artists, cast as contemporary models for political and social action. In this work, trickster stories are no longer simply mythic tales set in the primordial past but are “parables” reflecting contemporary social contingencies and choices for action. They provide templates for resistance among indigenous peoples and, as such, are said by some to provide the trickster with a kind of ongoing animacy.6 Kluskap is generally classified as a trickster.7 While it took me a while to learn anything constructive about him, one thing became clear rather quickly as I began pursuing him: if I held on to the trickster as my interpretive lens, I was going to find myself falling into a position frighteningly close to what the Métis writer Christina Fagan has characterized as fundamentally dishonest. Cultural symbols like the trickster, she writes, “can easily become labels, commodities, and stereotypes, ways of explaining and controlling that which is unfamiliar.”8 I knew from the outset of my journey to find Kluskap that the trickster moniker simply was not going to hold. Although he clearly had a hand in the creation of the human world, and he had a dynamite sense of humor, he has never been unscrupulous or stupid. And I would later learn that while he can provide a model for action, this is not the primary source of his “animacy .” He is, rather, a kind of mnemonic presence who not only invokes archaic structures of creation but also emerges in the modern period as a champion of Aboriginal and treaty rights. In this most important work of [3.142.144.40] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 23:40...