In the Province of History: The Making of Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (review)

In 1994, Ian McKay published The Quest of the Folk, his influential Gramscian analysis of how anti-modernist cultural producers reinforced their own neoliberal perspectives by generating images of twentieth-century Nova Scotia as a land of folk innocence. In the Province of History, coauthored by Ian McKay and Robin Bates, focuses this critique more sharply by analyzing how the creators of the province’s ‘heritage’ reshaped Nova Scotia’s past to advance a particular racialized view of the region. In this detailed yet highly readable volume, the authors examine how the discourse of history – which should exist in ‘a public sphere of open, democratic debate’ – has been systematically co-opted by ‘tourism/history [which has] created a closed commercial sphere in which the significance of any given historical issue [is] boil[ed] down . . . to generate saleable commodities.’ McKay and Bates document how a complex and complicated provincial history has been reified, objectified, and commodified to serve a growing tourist industry. In particular they trace how the past has been recast through a particular racial lens: ‘Nova Scotia’s tourism/history was an exercise in essentialist ethno-racial re-description, attributing to one group an essential worthiness implicitly denied to others.’ They make a compelling case.

There are several reasons why In the Province of History is persuasive. The narrative voice, which is unusually uniform given its co-authorship, is precise, pointed, and able to draw from a wide range of cultural allusions to engage the reader. The evidence for their claims is extensive and meticulously documented. Finally, the structure of the argument is wonderfully balanced. The preface and the opening chapter, ‘How a Land without Antiquities Became a Province of History,’ provide an overview of the diverse and complex history of Nova Scotia. It is always risky to provide summaries, but McKay and Bates manage to clarify the key distinctions between history/heritage and racialization/racism while reviewing the major events of the pre-confederation era, which are ‘more complicated than commonly supposed.’ The authors carefully note how ‘critical historiography has repeatedly qualified, questioned and subverted [dominant] narrative patterns,’ and the complexity they capture contrasts with the simplifications generated for tourist consumption.

Having reminded the reader of Nova Scotia’s complex history of immigration, settlement, expulsion, and conflict, McKay and Bates explore the work of the three men most responsible for commodifying history into saleable heritage. Will Bird and Thomas Raddall were the two ‘cultural cartographers who mapped the Province of History.’ Bird argued that men ‘are not born equal’; they ‘are inheritors of different bloodlines that assign them their place in creation.’ And Thomas Raddall weighed the ‘various ethnicities and races’ on his ‘finely calibrated scale, evaluating them according to their respective divergences from the liberal norm.’ Angus L. Macdonald was the long-serving premier who took up the cause of tourist promotion and refashioned the province into a land of Scottish mythology. As McKay and Bates trace the influence wielded by these three through their myriad of stories and policy decisions, we come to understand how the province deftly fed a growing tourist trade while simultaneously silencing the Acadian, native, black, and ethnic communities whose own stories were misrepresented, marginalized, or ignored.

The Province of History is a superb book whose challenge to the reified myths of identity will be of significance not just to academics interested in history and tourism but to any person who wants to understand how the current hegemonic structures emerged. While I might wish, for my own interests, that the term ‘liberalism’ had been more fully defined in the opening sections or that a selected bibliography had been included, these are minor quibbles about a text which will make a significant contribution to the fields of Atlantic studies and Canadian cultural studies. Readers from various disciplines will find refreshing the author’s explicit desire to...