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For months after I had completed my presentation at the American Academy of Religion meeting, I was haunted by the elusive figure who had been standing in the background throughout. It seemed to me for a while that my search for contemporary Kluskap stories had been a fruitless exercise. I had spent a good part of a summer looking for stories, but those with whom I spoke never really got around to telling me any. In every case, what looked to be a preamble to a story became the focus of our conversation. Often when I asked for a story, I was told that Kluskap was a figure who was associated with landscape. But rather than hearing a story, I heard about aquatic parasites and oysters, broken treaties, aspirations for the study of science, and the Supreme Court of Canada. I concluded at the time that the myths simply were not being told any more, and I started to wonder if perhaps they had never been as important as earlier non-Native writers would have had us believe. But something about all this immediately seemed wrong. First, although the stories had undoubtedly been colored by the people who recorded them, these writers had nonetheless heard them from actual people. Some, like Rand and the Wallises, provided broad citations for their myths. Others, however, were much more meticulous in giving credit to those who had shared them. Speck’s myths, for example, came from a number of persons whom Speck named; and those whom I have cited in this book were given to him by Chief Joe Julian of Sydney and John Joe of Whycocomagh in the early 1920s. Arthur Fauset collected stories from a kluskap and aboriginal rights 2 28 finding kluskap number of Mi’kmaq living in Laquille, near Annapolis Royal, in 1923; and Elsie Clews Parsons specifically credited those who had shared stories with her in the 1920s: Isabelle Googoo Morris (Whycocomaugh), Mary Madeline Newall Poulet (Chapel Island), and Lucy Pictou (Laquille).1 It started to occur to me that the salient issue might not be the exaggerations of earlier folklorists, missionaries, and ethnographers but the relationship between what appears to have been an earlier interest in the telling of Kluskap stories of some form or another and the more recent ebbing of interest in doing so. This shift in focus would ultimately lead me to an appreciation of Kluskap as a figure who is indelibly linked to a series of eighteenth-century treaties negotiated by the Mi’kmaq and the British government. But I am getting ahead of myself. At that moment, my interest was in understanding the apparently dwindling interest in telling these stories. A number of explanations for the earlier popularity of Kluskap myths have been suggested. They have been said to have embodied “laws, morals, and wisdom” that were necessary for the survival of the Mi’kmaw people;2 to have made the natural and social landscapes “intelligible”; and to have provided “mental shelter” and comfort during times of difficulty, especially during the nineteenth century, when annihilation of the Mi’kmaq seemed to be looming.3 There is undoubtedly truth in all these explanations, but they provide only a part of Kluskap’s morphology. Comfort, obviously, was necessary in the nineteenth century, as the Mi’kmaq faced loss of land, rampant disease, and starvation of unprecedented magnitude. Beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century, encroachment on Aboriginal lands became widespread and unrestrained. In 1783, for example, a New Brunswick band obtained a license of occupation from the government of Nova Scotia for twenty thousand acres along the Miramichi River.4 Between 1785 and 1807 the band repeatedly requested that the license be confirmed in the face of excessive encroachment by non-Native settlers, and the result of their continued effort was the establishment of a land reserve in 1807. The reserve, however, was half the size specified in the original license. During the same period, another Mi’kmaw community was granted four thousand acres of land on the eastern side of the Wagamatcook River in Cape Breton Island. By the 1860s, all that was left of the tract was seven hundred acres containing a village, a burial ground, and a grove of sugar maples.5 Along with encroachment, the Mi’kmaq had to contend with unparalleled deprivation and disease during the period. In 1831, for example, Mi’kmaq at Rawden, Nova Scotia, possessed ten blankets for fifty people, and in 1834, those of...

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