In the Blood: Cape Breton Conversations on Culture by Burt Feintuch (review)

Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, with its Scottish Gaelic culture, has been a place of interest for many people in recent decades. Due in part to the island’s relative isolation, the language and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century immigrants from the Scottish highlands flourished, and Gaelic was widely spoken through the mid-twentieth century. The distinctive style of traditional Celtic fiddle music is for some people an introduction to this fascinating place. Burt Feintuch, a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire who specializes in folklore and ethnography, as well as being an accomplished fiddler and author of In the Blood: Cape Brenton Conversations on Culture, was drawn to Cape Breton first because of its music.

This book of twenty-two interviews with residents of Cape Breton follows on Feintuch’s work as recording engineer and producer of the audio CD, The Heart of Cape Breton: Fiddle Music Recorded Along the Ceilidh Trail (Smithsonian Recordings, 2002). An excellent introductory essay covers important points of Cape Breton history and geography and provides context on topics discussed in the interviews. Each of the interviewees was selected as representative of what Feintuch regards as “expressive culture.” He says this ethnographic term refers “to creative and artistic aspects of life” that “symbolize or act out key components of identity and world view” (8). Seven of the subjects are musicians, and these interviews include Gaelic singers and fiddlers, such as Jerry Holland, to whose memory this book is dedicated. Curiously, there are no interviews with bagpipe players, even though that instrument has a venerable history in Cape Breton. An interview with a Mi’kmaq or Irish fiddler would have been interesting to gain some insight into why they play tunes in the local Cape Breton Scottish style (as do also many of the French-Acadian fiddlers). What about country music, which has long been popular in the region? Rock, jazz, and music by other ethnic groups also have a real presence on the island, as does the performance of classical music. Even in the interviews with non-musicians, the topic of music frequently arises. Other interviewees include writers, poets, radio broadcasters, and cultural activists. The interviews with a fisherman and a coal miner give great insight into the legacy of these once prominent professions that are all but gone from Cape Breton.

While his book largely concerns the Scottish-Gaelic culture, there are excellent interviews with people outside of that heritage. Ginette Chiasson is an advocate for the Francophone community. The Mi’kmaq poet Rita Joe sheds light on a dark past of attempted forced assimilation of First Nations people. In the early twentieth-century, many immigrants from the West Indies arrived to work in the steel plants. Mother and daughter Iris and Rhonda Crawford trace their family history to that earlier time and talk about the sizable black community. All of the interviewees share a love of their culture and a deep attachment to the land of Cape Breton.

Feintuch says of the interviews, “I don’t think of them as oral history, because they don’t focus on recovery of the past,” yet he acknowledges that some are oriented to the past (8). He also says that all of the original unedited interview recordings will be archived and made available to researchers, but he makes no reference to where they may be housed. Whether the interviews meet a strict definition of oral history, they do have essential qualities that are expected in oral history: in-depth accounts of personal experiences, reflections on specific topics, and broader contextual life histories. Feintuch calls them “conversations” or ethnographic interviews, and he says he “thought of these interviews as spoken art . . . editing them for continuity and intelligibility, [and] consulting with the interviewees” (8–9). Further describing the book, he says, “From the start, I...