Native American Performance and Representation

3. Owners of the Past: Readbacks or Traditionin Mi’kmaq Narratives

chapter 3 Owners of the Past Readbacks or Tradition in Mi’kmaq Narratives1 Anne-Christine Hornborg in the 1960s, many Canadians could watch a television series produced in Halifax, Nova Scotia: The Adventures of Glooscap. The main character , Kluskap,2 was a mighty culture hero,3 depicted in old myths among the Mi’kmaq and their neighbor tribes on the east coast of Canada. In the old stories he transformed the landscape by hunting a beaver,4 and many Mi’kmaqs knew of his mighty power. But in the 1960s the oral storytelling tradition was looked upon by the dominant white society as emanating from the past, when the Mi’kmaq were hunters and education had not distanced them from premodern beliefs and animistic notions. Thirty years later, in 1989, Grand Chief Donald Marshall asked one of the Mi’kmaq warriors to investigate if there was any truth to the rumors about a proposed granite quarry at Kelly’s Mountain on Cape Breton Island.5 The rumors were found to be true and, in response, some Mi’kmaq traditionalists organized a peaceful chanting and drumming ceremony in Englishtown, a little village close to Kelly’s Mountain.6 To establish a quarry on the mountain would be an insult to Mother Earth, said the Mi’kmaq, also asserting that the mountain and its cave were the home of Kluskap and the place where he was expected to return to his people. Did the Mi’kmaq still really believe in fairy tales? Or was their knowledge about Kluskap acquired only through contemporary readbacks of texts by non-Native authors? “Readback” is a concept, defined here as “the phenomenon of native informants giving anthropologists information on their ancestors’ way of life that they themselves acquired from reading anthropological reports and publications.”7 The dispute over the quarry awoke an enduring debate between constructivists and essentialists as to how tradition is transmitted. In this case the debate also had political implications, 62 Anne-Christine Hornborg since a constructivist approach might have questioned the authenticity of the Kluskap stories, thereby threatening the mountain. This chapter seeks to examine the Mi’kmaq relation to that Kluskap tradition, which has been depicted by non-Native authors in books and television series and performed in theater plays. How do the modern Mi’kmaq themselves evaluate the dominant society’s texts about their culture hero? Let us go back in time and look at the stories of Kluskap. White Society and the “Discovery” of Kluskap The first to write down Kluskap stories and the one who is credited with “discovering” him is Silas Rand.8 He was a missionary who came to know about the Mi’kmaq culture hero at the middle of the nineteenth century, when he was trying to convert the Catholic Mi’kmaq into Protestants. He writes that “the most remarkable personage of their traditions is Glooscap. The Indians suppose that he is still in existence, although they do not know exactly where.”9 Since Rand considered it his mission to work for a Protestant evangelization of the Mi’kmaq, he preferred to dismiss their stories as nonsense. However, he had to admit that these stories spoke of a world that was, at the time, still very important to the Mi’kmaq.10 Rand is the first to admit the continuous transformation of the stories. He gives many examples of European influences in the stories—money, iron, kings—and stresses that at that time the Europeans had inhabited the American continent for more than four hundred years.11 But at the same time, in The Prince and the Peasant­Girl, he also gives examples of how European culture has been integrated into Mi’kmaq lifeworlds. Two neighboring kings live so close to each other that a prince could bring his princess bride home within the same day. Furthermore, it is the king’s duty to look after the poor, so that they will not starve but have access to seed potatoes. In both cases, the king reminds the reader more of a Mi’kmaq chief than of a European monarch. A poor peasant girl’s lack of education or status does not meet with any obstacles at the court. As long as she is kind, beautiful, and well dressed, she is completely suitable “to set before the king.”12 Note that Rand tends to conclude that these unlikely elements derive from Mi’kmaq society rather than from European folklore. Another famous collector of Kluskap stories was...