Afterword Cape Breton as Microcosm of Capitalist Modernity

Alvin Finkel

The Mi’kmaw region of Unama’ki, the Acadian outpost of Île Royale, the partially Gaelic-speaking island of Ceap Breatainn: the names all speak to the uniqueness of Cape Breton. And the peoples of this wondrously beautiful island have certainly produced unique communities and a sense of belonging that the island’s famous bard Rita MacNeil expressed in her song, “Could This Be My Island Too?”

The chapters in this broad-based collection speak to that sense of belonging. But they also speak to the ways in which, as Karl Marx put it, people “make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”1 Indeed, because Cape Breton in the “long twentieth century” was integrated into the modernizing capitalist industrial world, its people, while remaining social actors, found that the stage upon which they acted was shaped by external forces over which they exercised increasingly limited control. The result is that the economic, social, and cultural phenomena that the chapters describe prove to be as much a microcosm of the fate of communities across the world engulfed by an increasingly monopolistic and all-reaching capitalist system as emblems of a unique society. Economic life, cultural life, and social life within Cape Breton, while reflecting the unique efforts of its people to maintain autonomy and dignity, have also followed patterns that mimic the impact of modernity wherever it has arrived. So these fine chapters collectively tell a story of industrialization and modernization that, while focusing on the people of Cape Breton, becomes a lens in terms of economics, society, and culture for the broader industrial capitalist world that the long twentieth century produced.

This afterword tries to capture some of the ways in which what has happened to Cape Breton parallel what has happened elsewhere in Canada and beyond. The unequal battle between the power of capital, direct and indirect, and the efforts of everyday people to preserve their heritages and traditions emerged throughout Cape Breton in the Long Twentieth Century. It is a battle that is global and has some victories for underdogs, but overall the practices and ideology of global capital have remained hegemonic.

Those who have lost most within Cape Breton are the people whose history on the island and within today’s Canada dates back over ten thousand years. The Mi’kmaq once composed an egalitarian nation of integrated communities across the Atlantic provinces and the Southern Gaspé region of Quebec—Mi’kma’ki—that had cooperatively developed seasonal uses of land throughout their collective territory. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly after the British defeat of their French allies in 1758, their autonomy and their integration across a wide region were limited by the efforts of Europeans to take control of the geography and use the lands in ways that suited imperial strategies on the one hand and settler goals for individual prosperity within an imperial framework on the other.2 Ironically, in Cape Breton, the mainly Scottish settlers who largely displaced the Mi’kmaq were themselves, as we note later on, victims of capitalist dispossession. In an imperial capitalist world, where intersecting hierarchies of class, race, and religion determined entitlements, some groups of dispossessed white people could re-establish rights to land by dispossessing nonwhite, non-Christian Indigenous peoples. For the masters of the imperial world, such displacement made sense both because they viewed Indigenous people in a settlement context as resistant to abandoning traditional land use in favour of imperial objectives and because the export of peoples deemed surplus to capitalist goals in European homelands reduced social tensions at home.

In Cape Breton, European diseases, followed by settler encroachments—about thirty thousand Scottish settlers arrived on the island from 1815 to 1838—had marginalized a once thriving Mik’maw population whose communities counted only about five hundred souls by the mid-1800s.3 They managed to maintain separate, if poverty-stricken, communities despite the encroachments on their lands and livelihoods by blending their traditional ways with adaptations to the colonial society that had enveloped them: “Flexible and mobile, Mi’kmaw families were engaged in a mixed economy, in which men and women deployed some of their labour, some of the time in new ways—working for wages, selling ‘handy work’—while maintaining older practices of seasonal family migration and ties to an economically and culturally significant locale.”4

Martha Walls’s contribution to this collection, chapter 5, “The Disposition of the Ladies: Mi’kmaw Women and the Removal of Kun’tewiktuk / King’s Road Reserve, Sydney, Nova Scotia,” illustrates starkly that the land pressures on the Mi’kmaq did not let up in the twentieth century. Indigenous people continued to be viewed as lesser human beings who could be compelled to move to inferior locations if white people wanted that land for expanding cities or some other purpose. Walls provides a penetrating glimpse at the dominant Euro-Canadian attitudes toward Indigenous women that served to rationalize the relocation of Indigenous people outside Sydney’s city limits. The King’s Road Exchequer Court hearing in 1915 that determined the fate of the King’s Road Reserve gave no voice at all to the Mi’kmaw women whose families were threatened with relocation. Instead the court heard twenty-six supporters of relocation who, between them, stereotyped the women as slovenly alcoholics who could only be a bad influence on a white Christian community. That many of them worked as domestics cleaning the homes and businesses of Euro-Canadians in Sydney could be conveniently ignored. Only three Mi’kmaw witnesses and five allies got to speak to the hearing, and they refuted the racist, stereotyped, gendered views of the Mi’kmaw women presented by the vast majority of witnesses. The central Canadian judge brought in for the hearing accepted the views of the racists and ruled that the reserve had to be relocated outside Sydney’s city limits.

Such relocations occurred across Canada and racist stereotypes of Indigenous women and men were constantly used to rationalize profit-driven Euro-Canadian efforts to steal Indigenous lands. Those were under threat from the moment when settlement replaced the fur trade as the goal of an expanding Euro-Canadian presence on the lands that compose today’s Canada. The European view was that Indigenous people merely roamed the lands that they had inhabited for millennia but could not claim title to them because they supposedly did not use that land for “civilized” purposes. Therefore, seizures of their land were considered lawful, though practical considerations often led to guarantees, largely broken in practice, of providing “reserves” of land for Indigenous people.5

Well before Confederation, seizures of Indigenous land were common. European settlers did not seek Indigenous approval for lands where they settled. Local European-settler governments sometimes negotiated treaties that reserved certain lands for Indigenous people. But the government of the United Province of Canada (Quebec and Ontario from 1840 to 1867), for example, admitted an unwillingness to prevent settlers from encroaching upon lands reserved for Indigenous peoples.6 In British Columbia, where treaties before Confederation were restricted to Vancouver Island, an onrush of Europeans seeking gold in the interior ignored the Indigenous presence on the lands, using force to get their way. Once the gold rush was over, settlers seeking to ranch or farm kept up the pressure on Indigenous peoples, eager to hold on to their traditional lands.7 In the Atlantic colonies, Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) were removed from their territories, which included seasonal settlements, to make the best use of local resources and confined to a sedentary lifestyle on tiny, unproductive reserves in the 1840s and 1850s.8

Confederation changed little. Though treaties were negotiated across the Prairies, they were rarely enforced when Indigenous rights were at stake. For example, the Papaschase First Nation peoples, in what is now southwest Edmonton, were defrauded of their reserve land in 1888 and are still fighting for restitution.9 Their fate was similar to that of Prairie First Nations generally, who had to fight the genocidal intentions of the federal government.10

In 1905, the federal government amended the Indian Act, the racist legislation that governed the lives of First Nations without their input, to give all towns with a population over eight thousand the right to force a relocation of reserves that were within their geographical limits or nearby. A 1911 amendment to the Indian Act reinforced the perspective of reserves as simply impediments to economic development by granting municipalities and companies alike the right to expropriate portions of reserves for roads, railways, or other public purposes. Such federal legislation eased the task of Sydney’s Euro-Canadian population in their effort to force the relocation of the King’s Road Reserve. Such forced relocations continued for decades in Canada. In 1911, the struggle of the Songhees people of Victoria, who had lived within the boundaries of what became that city for four thousand years, to retain the reserve that they had once negotiated ended tragically with their forced removal east of Esquimalt Harbour.11 Similarly in 1913, Vancouver forced the removal of an ancient Squamish village in the False Creek area, which had received reserve status in 1877. Community members moved to other Squamish Nation reserves in the area and received no compensation until a prolonged struggle led to a land-claims settlement in 2000. Other displacements followed.12 Such immoral removals across Canada continued even after World War II, with its stinging message about the genocidal impacts of racism. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples throughout Canada in areas where highly profitable hydroelectricity projects were planned were moved with no thought to the impact on their traditional economic and cultural pursuits.13

Throughout all of these denials of the rights of often ancient communities to continue to exist and any other concession toward the rights of self-determination of peoples, Euro-Canadians insisted that the economic growth and profit motive extolled by the Western capitalist world gave them the right to roll over “unprogressive” Indigenous people. The latter were characterized as backward and lazy, their women trashed as dissolute and slovenly. The removal of the Indigenous community from Sydney, within this larger history, can be seen as one more tune from a Western imperialist songbook. And the resistance of Indigenous peoples and their allies to such inhuman treatment, which we witnessed in Sydney, also bore a similar shape across Canada.

Many of those responsible for acting as agents of colonialism and land theft against Indigenous Canadians were themselves victims or descendants of victims of land theft in Europe before coming to the Americas.

This was precisely the case for many of the Scots-descended migrants to Cape Breton. The Highland clearances involved decisions by landlords, who once were content with feudal-origin dues, to treat the land that they owned and the people on that land as simply factors of capitalist production. The grazing of sheep and the maximizing of the productivity of the land argued for throwing most tenants off the land, which forced many to emigrate from Scotland in order to survive. When economic circumstances in their new Cape Breton homes proved dire, they moved again in search of new opportunities, particularly if they were young, single adults. Those who left the island were often later arrivals who were only able to acquire poor land. In a society of individualist accumulation of wealth, their lot, relegated to soil of questionable value, made moving on seem the most rational choice, particularly when blight threatened them with starvation if they stayed. There were no built-in guarantees within Cape Breton society or within other capitalist frameworks that would allow them to bridge times of some crop production with times of limited or no crops.

Beginning in the 1840s, chain migrations from Cape Breton, Atlantic Canada, and Quebec to the “Boston states,” then later to Central and Western Canada, emerged. The push of poor economic conditions in market economies and the pull of land or jobs that seemed to offer households better possibilities created unplanned exoduses in which those who left first used their communications with family and friends left behind to persuade many more to follow. Meanwhile, parallel economic circumstances were bringing immigrants into British North American colonies, including Quebec and the Atlantic colonies, even as many others left these colonies mainly for the United States. The classic case was the Irish famine of 1845 and 1846, which resulted in a million deaths and two million emigrants in a population of nine million. Their deaths were the result of deliberate British policy rather than local crop failures as such. While the potato crop upon which the native Irish depended had failed miserably both years because of blight, the English and Scots settlers who had taken over the best land of Ireland over time produced enough food in 1845 and 1846 to easily feed everyone in Ireland. But the British government dismissed any idea of requiring or even encouraging the wealthy Irish farmers to provide the food needs of the Indigenous majority of the island rather than fulfilling demands from paying purchasers outside Ireland.

In 1845, a conservative British government provided relief to the Irish farmers who were dependent upon potato crops. But in 1846, when there was another crop failure due to blight, a new, liberal government rejected direct relief. Its free-enterprise ideology dictated that such social help created individual dependence upon the state rather than reinforcing the perspective that only the compulsion exercised by market forces would encourage the propertyless to seek out employers. The only help made available was to those who moved into workhouses where food was provided in return for work, though the accommodations were brutal and families were split up so that children could become servants to well-off families. With millions starving but only 130,000 spots available in Irish workhouses, many taken by people too weakened by the famine to survive the forced manual work of the workhouse, widespread death and immigration were inevitable. The application of market ideology proved murderous and arguably genocidal against the indigenous Irish.14

The tragic fate of the indigenous Irish, forced to live on lands where only potatoes would grow, and of the Scottish emigrants, forced off their traditional lands so that lords could earn fortunes from sheep, may make the fate of the Cape Breton emigrants and their many counterparts throughout British North America, forced to move on to survive, seem tame. Long-term tenancy as opposed to land ownership was less common in the colonies than in Britain, where land ownership was concentrated among four thousand aristocrats. But the quality and quantity of land that European immigrants might obtain varied and the state offered no guarantees of help to those who endured short-term or long-term problems with putting food on the table. Those unable to purchase land or make a go of purchased land joined a proletariat of those who could only survive by selling their labour. That was the case on the Canadian prairie lands after the Canadian government purchased them from their legally invented owners, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), in 1869, leaving that company and the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) with much of the choicest land for free. Though the subsequent homestead laws gave ownership of plots of 160 acres to settlers who could convert a certain portion of the land to farmland, failure to meet that minimum requirement was widespread: in Alberta, from 1905 to 1930, only 54 percent of homesteaders managed to secure titles to their lands, while in Saskatchewan from 1911 to 1931, a mere 43 percent were able to meet the requirements. Most farmers who failed to “prove up” had little option but to become urban and industrial workers, sometimes, like their Atlantic counterparts, moving far from their homes within their region or moving to the United States or another part of Canada. Even many who did prove up found that their homesteads would not yield a living. They needed to buy land that had been set aside for the CPR and HBC, and the credit payments for loans to make such purchases at the inflated values set by the companies drove many farmers off the land or needing to combine farming with off-farm work.15

While their lot may be viewed as far worse than that of the Cape Breton migrants, Irish and Scottish forced emigrants cannot be seen as the worst victims of a capitalist land system that, in its different forms, made it impossible for many farmers to survive without moving on. As our discussion of the fate of the Mi’kmaq of Cape Breton and other Indigenous people in the lands of today’s Canada indicated starkly, the nonwhite conquered peoples of the European colonial world were victimized more brutally. Sticking to the British imperial world, for example, we see something akin, but ultimately far worse, in the fate of people throughout India who were subjected to British control of their land. The British East India Company, which had been given a monopoly over much of British-controlled India, forced farmers to abandon millennial agricultural practices that relied on a variety of crops and economic arrangements over wide areas for sharing when a particular area suffered crop failures. The company replaced such diversity and reciprocity with monoculture in each area meant to yield big crops for international markets. The results were horrendous. When the rice crop failed in a large area of Bengal in 1770, the company, taking the position that the British government would take in Ireland in 1846, forbade the export of foodstuffs from unaffected areas of Bengal to the famine areas. They did not want to create any expectation among their forced servants that they would be fed whether or not they produced a crop during a given year. The result was ten million deaths among an estimated thirty million Bengalis.16 There were so many deaths that the company pleaded to Britain for financial aid (for the company, not the famine victims) because its profits took a hit from so great a loss of workers. Britain responded by giving the company a monopoly of the American tea market, which in turn led to the Boston Tea Party in 1773, which helped launch the American Revolution.17

The starving Bengalis were given no possibility of immigrating elsewhere, either within India or to the Americas. That was a choice only given to white people such as the Irish and Scots. Similar circumstances led to ten million deaths of Tamils in South India from 1781 to 1783 and another ten million deaths in North India in 1783–84 and many millions more deaths in later famines.18 So while the fate of the desperate Cape Bretoners of the 1840s who felt forced to migrate seems mild compared to the fate of the Irish famine emigrants of the same decade, even the latter, with its possibility of migration, represents a degree of privilege relative to what nonwhite peoples whose lands had been invaded by Europeans were forced to accept. That doesn’t denigrate the hardships experienced by Cape Bretoners whose circumstances forced many to emigrate and encourage others to follow. Rather, it places their lived experiences within a larger history of capitalist development in which the state and capitalists alike placed profits ahead of people’s rights to land tenure or stable incomes in their home communities.

The ability to migrate until they could find a degree of prosperity that motivated the Scots who came to Cape Breton but often did not stay did not exist for Indigenous peoples such as the Mi’kmaq. Both their efforts to maintain their communities and their need to respond to the racism of the colonialists forced them to seek collective solutions and to offer resistance to colonialist plans that ignored their territorial homelands and their traditions. Such resistance was also fundamental in the lives of Black Cape Bretoners, as Claudine Bonner notes in her chapter, “Bridging Religion and Black Nationalism: The Founding of St. Philips African Orthodox Church and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Hall in Whitney Pier, 1900–1930.” The Black community in the Pier included long-time Nova Scotians as well as more recent American and Caribbean immigrants. Dominion Steel and Coal Company (DOSCO) hired many Blacks but always relegated them to the dirtiest jobs in the steel plant. The discrimination that Blacks faced resulted in a variety of forms of resistance. Black nurses, prohibited from recognized nursing programs, created their own. The creation of a local chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was key within that resistance, an affirmation of Black nationalism that linked Cape Breton Blacks with the struggles of Black people everywhere to achieve liberation.

Both the discrimination that Cape Breton Blacks faced and the resistance of the African-descended population to attacks on them as individuals and as a community echoed the experiences of Blacks across Canada throughout our national history from the colonial period to the present. While the geography of Canada did not support the plantation agriculture that made slavery widespread in some of the British colonies that formed the United States, slavery was legal in both New France and British North America until the British Parliament abolished the practice in legislation that took effect in 1834. There were also free Blacks in Canada, such as the approximately three thousand former Anglo-American slaves who fled their masters to serve the British cause during the American Revolution and were resettled in Nova Scotia after Britain accepted its defeat in that colonial uprising.

But the discriminatory treatment that they received from both the British government and the white Loyalists who cared little that they had risked their lives for Britain caused about twelve hundred of the Black Loyalists to migrate to Sierra Leone. Their embrace of a return to Africa followed the same logic as the UNIA movement more than a century later: Blacks could expect nothing but abuse from the Europeans of North American who had once enslaved them and could only regain their full humanity by returning to Africa.19 But the European scramble for colonies in Africa in the latter half of the nineteenth century resulted in the imposition of quasi-slavery on most of that continent and the deaths of millions of Africans whom the colonials overworked and underfed.20 So while the UNIA’s philosophy of a return to Africa might appeal to many North American Blacks conceptually, the realities of European imperialism in Africa made such a return implausible for most.

Between the end of slavery in British North America in 1834 and the end of slavery in the United States after the Union defeat of the Confederacy in 1865, an Underground Railroad operated by free Blacks, escaped slaves, and white abolitionists brought thousands of American escaped slaves to British North America. But everywhere they encountered abusive treatment, and many returned to the United States once slavery there had ended, choosing to reunite with their families in their former homes rather than bring them to British North America. In British Columbia, for example, many Blacks attempting to escape restrictive legislation in California settled on Vancouver Island as farmers, ranchers, merchants, bakers, and barbers. But an overwhelming majority, finding their white neighbours unbearably racist, chose to return to their former country in the hopes that the post–Civil War era would be marked by greater equality among the races.21

After Canada became a country, racist politicians discouraged Black immigration. About thirteen hundred African American homesteaders from Oklahoma, facing the lawlessness of their white neighbours, moved to Alberta and Saskatchewan between 1910 and 1912 in an effort to establish homesteads and Black communities. Though they proved to be successful farmers, the white supremacist leaders of Canada ordered border officials not to allow more Blacks to enter the country and sent immigration agents to the US to counsel Blacks against thinking that they could escape racism by attempting to enter Canada. Canadian governments wanted an all-white country where Indigenous people were pushed to the margins and only white people could become immigrants.22 In the years that followed, Black and other nonwhite minorities faced persistent discrimination, evident in urban “renewal” programs that resulted in the levelling of Africville in Halifax and parts of Chinatowns in a number of cities.23 Such forced relocations had parallels with the ongoing removals of Indigenous communities from cities.

Restrictions against Black immigration were only relaxed in the 1960s when a combination of labour shortages in Canada and the reluctance of Europeans to emigrate as their economies prospered made a whites-only immigration policy uneconomical for Canada. Nonwhite immigrants faced a variety of obstacles, and Black organizations in particular played a large role in campaigns for human rights commissions. Over time, Black minorities in Canadian cities would form a network of organizations to fight formal and informal discriminatory practices.24

Apart from Indigenous, Black, and other racialized groups that faced discrimination in Cape Breton and elsewhere in Canada, several chapters in this collection deal with discrimination against white Europeans in Cape Breton whose cultural backgrounds were shaped in languages other than English. Ronald Labelle’s chapter, “An Invisible Minority: Acadians in Industrial Cape Breton,” traces the anglicization of the Acadian minority on the island. Most postconquest Acadian arrivals in Cape Breton felt compelled to assimilate to English. By the early 1900s, however, as coal mines attracted Acadian migration to the island along with some migration from French-speaking countries, Acadian organizations hoping to defend Acadian culture founded French-language schools. Rural towns with significant concentrations of French speakers such as Chéticamp resisted assimilation relatively successfully, whereas by 1950, in Reserve Mines, for example, at least 75 percent of Acadians had given up French for English. Acadian rights organizations used the courts to force Sydney to establish a French-language school and to pressure the University College of Cape Breton and the Canadian Coast Guard College to offer instruction in French. While such changes decelerated the loss of French as a first language, the descendants of the original Acadian settlers remained anglicized.

The Cape Breton experience of French speakers paralleled the experience of French speakers across Canada, specifically outside Quebec and in northern New Brunswick, where French-speaking majorities were in a stronger position to protect their language. Before the late 1960s, for example, in British Columbia, public schools offered instruction only in English. French-speaking parents who wanted their children educated in French had to be able to afford private school fees. The first crack in the BC wall of resistance to French-language instruction came in 1968, after lobbying by the Fédération canadienne-française de la Colombie-Britannique led to the Coquitlam school board receiving provincial approval to offer, on an experimental basis, a kindergarten program in French to be followed by instruction in French for grades 1 to 3.25 Such accommodation to linguistic minorities, as in Cape Breton, came too late for the majority of those whose mother tongue was French. The 1971 census indicated that 77 percent of British Columbians aged thirty-five to forty-four whose parents were French speakers had been anglicized by that year—that is, their home language had become English.26

French-language instruction in public schools was offered only in the earliest school grades in Alberta and Saskatchewan before the 1970s, and as in British Columbia and Cape Breton, few employers made any accommodations for French speakers.27 In both provinces, while anglicization was disturbingly high in all age groups, it had galloped over time. While 42 percent of Albertans with French as their mother tongue over the age of sixty-five had made English their home language by 1971, 64 percent in the thirty-five to forty-four age bracket had followed that route.28 Rates of anglicization were somewhat smaller in provinces east of Saskatchewan but were concerningly high everywhere outside Quebec and New Brunswick. The passage of the Official Languages Act by the federal government in 1969 and federal and provincial programs meant to counter anglicization and persuade Quebec that it was part of a bilingual nation-state was supposed to reverse the erosion of the French language outside Quebec and the Acadian region of New Brunswick. As in Cape Breton, organizations of francophones that fought for greater language equality and organized activities for their communities meant to preserve French as a mother tongue developed higher profiles.

But they largely failed to achieve their overall objective. La Fédération des Francophones hors Quebec reported in 1978 that the Official Languages Act and provincial policies encouraging bilingualism were mainly focused on giving English speakers working in the public sector some degree of fluency in French. They did nothing to help French-speaking minorities maintain their culture and language.29 Statistician Charles Castonguay reported in 1993 that “since 1971, individual Anglicization appears to have continued at the same level among Canadian francophones. On the other hand, it is clear that they are experiencing a collective assimilation that is unprecedented: today French may well be transmitted more regularly as a legacy; but there are too few heirs.”30 The 2016 census provided little evidence that the disappearance of heirs to the French language was turning around. While 91 percent of Quebecers with French as their mother tongue spoke that language at home, the figure outside Quebec was 34 percent.31

In short, the fate of French is the same in Cape Breton as in most parts of Canada. While Canadians often attempt to portray their country as a mosaic rather than the melting pot of the United States, in which home cultures and languages are lost and mix together to create one national culture, the fate of the French language outside Quebec and northern New Brunswick challenges that comparison. The fates of other languages than English and French provide a further challenge to that characterization of Canadian “multiculturalism.” That is evident in Heather Sparling’s contribution to this collection, “Twenty-First-Century Uses for Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia Gaelic Song Collections: From Language Preservation to Revitalization and the Articulation of Cultural Values.” Sparling complicates Ian McKay’s analysis of folk culture as an effort to idealize a nation’s identity rather than document its authentic character. Antimodernism and romanticism are employed to challenge science, industrialism, and cosmopolitanism. Sparling contrasts the collection by many individuals of different backgrounds of Gaelic songs with the historical discrimination in Cape Breton against the Gaelic language and the negative characterizations of Gaels that discouraged Gaelic speakers from transmitting their language to their children. That has been the fate of many languages across Canada, from Indigenous to European, Asian, and African dialects.

While folk cultures are now celebrated across Canada in museums, designated historic sites, scholarly and popular research, and publications, the languages that have kept them distinct are threatened intergenerationally. “Overall, 72.0% of people with a non-official mother tongue speak a language other than their mother tongue at home,” reported the 2016 census.32 While most of those people also sometimes use their original language at home, 18 percent reported that they never do. But the loss of mother tongues altogether was far higher among some groups, who, like the Gaels, have a long history in Canada. Only 11.5 percent of Canadians who report Ukrainian descent, for example, claim to be able to speak the language. Among those whose mother tongue is Ukrainian, just 32 percent report a good understanding of the language, though another 20 percent claim a partial understanding.33 Like the Gaels of Cape Breton, Ukrainian heritage is celebrated in many ways. The ambitious Ukrainian Village reconstruction east of Edmonton is a primary example. So are the programs in Ukrainian studies at the Universities of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Toronto. But like the Cape Breton Gaels, Ukrainian immigrants to Canada, who began arriving in the 1890s, found that their language and culture were denigrated by Anglo-Canadians and that achieving success in Canada meant not just becoming fluent in English but also abandoning their own scorned language.34

The 2016 census shows that the retention of the Dutch language has been even less encouraging than the retention of Ukrainian. Only 17 percent of those claiming Dutch as their maternal language speak it well, while another 7 percent claim a partial understanding of the language. That puts into perspective the experience of Ella Barron, whose Canadian experience is the subject of Ken Donovan’s chapter, “‘Everybody Was Crying’: Ella Barron, Dutch War Bride in Amsterdam and Ingonish, Cape Breton, 1923–2020.” Born into poverty in Holland, Ella’s marriage to a Canadian serviceman led to her becoming a war bride and stepmother to his three children in Cape Breton. Donovan notes that she faced discrimination as a Dutch-speaking Protestant in a Catholic community. While Ella retained some affinity for her homeland, and no doubt so did many other immigrants from Holland, the hostility of English-speaking Canadians to immigrants speaking their mother tongue clearly had an impact on decisions made by Dutch immigrants about whether or not to pass on their language to their children in Canada.

The complexities of defining a local culture are often evidenced in the efforts of the tourism industry to frame particular cultural stories that will be attractive to potential visitors. Anne-Louise Muise Semple and Del Muise provide an encouraging story of change over time for Cape Breton in this area. In “From Artifact to Living Cultures: Cape Breton’s Tourism History and the Emergence of the Celtic Colours International Festival,” they examine the changing strategy of Cape Breton’s tourist sector, which shifted from heritage and nature to an emphasis on experiential tourism. While the focus is rather pointedly on the Gaelic and rural culture of the island with other ethnic groups and the island’s urban history unrepresented in Celtic Colours, the festival does focus on a “showcasing of living cultures” that in turn provides tangible economic aid to those who want to preserve those cultures.

It’s a laudable branding exercise despite all that it leaves out. Its emphasis on a particular rural culture is more authentic than some other examples in Canada of celebrations of rural life that nonetheless have in common the exclusion of urban and industrial pasts and presents. For example, white-collar Calgary, drowning in oil money, continues a long, inauthentic tradition of making the Calgary Stampede, a rural-themed event, its annual fair. The Calgary Stampede had been planned as an annual event in 1912 by an American promoter just as the ranching economy that had contributed to the city’s earlier growth was receding. Its continuation for over a century demonstrates the importance to many cities of branding and commodification with no connection to the current realities of the city.35 Edmonton does one better. Its annual Klondike Exhibition perpetuates the notion that Edmonton played a major role as a supplier to gold seekers during the Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s. In fact, though its merchants hoped that their then modest prairie town would get traction from adventurers going north, other routes northward proved more popular. The gold rush had minimal impact on the development of Edmonton as a city. Only two thousand of the one hundred thousand aspiring gold seekers attempted the Edmonton route, with only a few actually reaching their destination and none reported to have found any gold.36 Cape Breton’s rural culture is clearly a “living culture,” and it is rather the urban cultures based on coal and steel that Cape Breton festivals only provide glimpses toward with performances of the Men of the Deeps. But it is in the nature of tourism to tell only part of the story, and Cape Breton deserves credit for telling a story that reflects a revival of Gaelic life that once was suppressed on the island.

The pressures on people to speak a particular language, to fit into the dominant cultural forms that influence the spaces we call Cape Breton and Canada, and to share the same entertainments were not, in any case, always experienced as oppression. Sporting activities often served an integrative role, as John G. Reid demonstrates in his chapter, “‘The Grand Old Game’: The Complex History of Cricket in Cape Breton to 1914.” Though cricket was clearly a settler sport, it produced a degree of settler integration across social classes. Organized sports’ complex role in reducing social class tensions and racial tensions has been documented by sports historians along with its contrary role of affirming social divisions. In St. John’s, teams from different vocations played baseball, the most popular sport in Canada in the late nineteenth century, against one another, and Roman Catholic teams competed with Protestant teams. But Blacks in Halifax and most everywhere else had to form their own baseball leagues before World War II because whites refused to include them in their leagues. Boxing, by contrast, was partially open to Blacks, and several Canadian champions also became important boxers in the United States. Though Indigenous people were also segregated from participating in sports organized by organizations of whites, runner Tom Longboat won the Boston Marathon in 1907.37

The racism that was prevalent in most areas of Cape Breton life, as revealed in this book’s chapters, served the interests of the capitalist system that prevailed on the island and throughout Canada. The chapters in this collection that focus on the economy and class divisions of the island speak perhaps most clearly to the reality that however unique the experiences of people in Cape Breton may appear on the surface, they are grounded in global social relations created by a particular economic structure whose reach is multinational. Don Nerbas’s chapter, “Empire, Colonial Enterprise, and Speculation: Cape Breton’s Coal Boom of the 1860s” is particularly pointed in its emphasis on the extent to which the opportunities or lack thereof available to people in Cape Breton have been shaped by forces beyond their control despite the facade of democratic institutions in their midst. Nerbas underlines the role of the British Empire in developing the coal industry on the island versus a more traditional focus on growing dependence on American capital and markets and a liberal economic order. London capital financed Cape Breton’s coal boom in the 1860s, which collapsed during the global economic recession of the 1870s, an international event over which Cape Bretoners had no influence. That imperialist financial presence continued with the creation of the British Empire Steel Corporation, “which delivered to the Sydney coalfield another round of financial ruination.”

As the editors suggest in this book’s introduction, Cape Breton ended up gradually with no coal mining industry at all. Like the island’s steel plant, the coal industry depended on foreign capital and foreign markets, and the profits also went abroad, leaving little room for the creation of alternative, more home-based industries through the investment of those profits locally. By the time the Nova Scotia provincial government took coal and steel under the government umbrella, it was too late for either of them to become economic.

Much of the history of capitalist development in Canada parallels the Cape Breton experience. An overdependence on the extraction of resources and their financing by foreigners or at least people outside the regions where the resources are located marks much of Canada’s industrial history. External financing, external markets, and class struggles over the division of income from the resource also mark the history of the coal industry in Western Canada, particularly in the Crowsnest Pass.38 In Quebec, entire communities depended on the fate of the asbestos industry, which gradually disappeared as the companies’ efforts to hide the reality that the product was highly toxic became less tenable in the face of media revelations.39

The employment that was created by resource industries dependent on foreign markets frequently proved to be short term and, ultimately, resulted in a disastrous decline for many communities across Canada. At Pine Point in the Northwest Territories, a Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (COMINCO) lead and zinc mine that was opened in 1964 created a working-class community with good wages. But that good news story cost Canadian taxpayers about $100 million to build infrastructure that COMINCO wasn’t prepared to spend its own money on. The big losers were Indigenous people in the area, whose trapping grounds shrank because of the building of the mine and the highway that connected it to southern points as well as the increased population in the area that the workers and managers in the mine represented. They lamented, “Our traditional grounds are slowly being overtaken by these employees. There is virtually no benefit to be spoken of from the mine.”40 Any benefits to the employees and to Canadian taxpayers vanished in 1988 when the mine closed, leaving the disturbances to nature that it had earlier caused to linger perhaps permanently.

Even when Indigenous people were hired by a mining firm, the end of the story looked much the same. Noranda Mines began mining uranium in the area of the Anishinabek of the Serpent River First Nation in 1953. Although the First Nation had a reserve that dated back to the Robinson-Huron Treaty of 1850, Noranda bypassed the need for their permission to open a plant on reserve property to process the sulphuric acid that is a waste product of mining uranium. Instead, Noranda leased the land from a lumber mill to which the Serpent River people had provided a lease for part of the reserve’s property. The Anishinabek protested, and Noranda bought their acquiescence by providing employment to many reserve residents. When the plant closed within a decade of opening, Noranda left wastes in the soil and waters nearby. The combination of the pollution from the sulphuric acid plant and the mine resulted in a huge drop in the quantity of both local fish and game. Swimming became dangerous, removing an important recreational activity.41

While the fate of settlers in coal mining areas of Cape Breton might have resembled that of the asbestos miners of Quebec more than Indigenous people in Ontario and the Northwest Territories, all of them found themselves abandoned by resource extraction companies that made their profits and moved on. Even when community activism seemed to have resulted in some concessions being made to the Mi’kmaq of Cape Breton during the more liberal era of the post–World War II period, those were largely forsaken during the neoliberal period that began in the late 1970s and has arguably persisted to the present. Neoliberalism largely rejects the modifications to marketplace economics of the earlier era in favour of a tight state-corporate partnership that highlights the earning of profits over all other goals on the spurious grounds that economic growth is required for the creation of happy societies and that only a mollycoddling of investors and deregulation by governments can produce such growth. And so William Langford traces the history of oyster farming in “The Great Spawn: Aquaculture and Development on the Bras d’Or Lake.”

The Mi’kmaq of Eskasoni were confronted with precarious employment from the 1920s onward. They viewed oyster farming as a means of self-determination. But the few jobs it produced were seasonal. Efforts to persuade the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) to develop the industry further faltered in the 1980s as DEVCO pulled out of development activities in favour of tax incentives and small-business loans. So oyster farming remained a marginal sector.

The neoliberal logic, which provided setbacks to Indigenous efforts to achieve self-determination, created a nationwide series of efforts by Indigenous people to demand their right to control their own lands and be exempted from the developing paradigm that removed state interventions that at least somewhat balanced monopolistic marketplace power. While they had some limited successes despite the violent reactions of state authorities, mostly their fate was similar to that of settler groups that were outside the “one percent” with all the economic and social power.42 Lachlan MacKinnon’s chapter, “Industrial Crisis and the Cape Breton Coal Miners at the End of the Long Twentieth Century, 1981–86,” demonstrates that the strategy employed by the trade unions during the period of the “historic compromise” between capital and labour during the early postwar period proved useless in defending workers’ rights during the period of neoliberalism. The historic compromise in 1945 involved a three-way bargain. Capital would accept trade unions as representatives of workers in particular sectors dominated by big companies in return for labour peace: the trade unions would have to sign and then police collective agreements, suppressing any wildcat strikes that might arise, and accept owners’ and investors’ total rights to make corporate policy, including all policies that affected life on the shop floor not specifically covered in collective agreements. The trade unions would limit their defence of workers’ rights by only negotiating about wages and benefits while accepting management’s total right to manage the work process. The state would enforce collective agreements and would provide a degree of social protection for individual workers through social programs.

While many workers achieved benefits from this compromise, the trade union leadership was perhaps the most invested group within society in making the compromise permanent. For governments and industry, much of the compromise seemed to be a temporary truce necessary to deal with worker alienation from the capitalist system after sixteen years occupied by the Great Depression, World War I, and the fear of a recurrence of the postwar recession. Many elements within industry never accepted the compromise, and their forces grew in the 1960s when younger workers who had not experienced the Depression or war behaved far more incautiously than their parents in fighting corporate control over their work lives. Wildcats caused by unjust punishments of particular workers or a general disgust with speed-ups, unsafe working conditions, and negotiated wage increases that seemed insufficient in the light of corporate profits became common. Many employers regretted fiscal and social policies that focused on near-full employment because such policies made workers believe that they could find other jobs if they were fired or live without work if necessary. Relocating jobs to Third World countries where unions were illegal or had no teeth, the corporate leadership was able to persuade the leading political parties in the First World to reduce social benefits and implement monetary and fiscal policies that led to increased unemployment. The bankers referred to the “NAIRU,” the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment, or in plain English, the rate of unemployment that would scare the bejesus out of workers and make strikes unlikely; tied to decreased social wages, especially from unemployment insurance, which was made far harder to qualify for, the NAIRU would discipline workers in ways that had been more common in the period before the historic compromise.43

Workers did, if with less frequency, rebel against the neoliberal order that was replacing the more liberal postwar order. MacKinnon’s chapter addresses this point as well. Faced with wage and benefits reductions in the early 1980s as neoliberalism made its still early appearance in Canada, the miners employed by DEVCO were split on how to react. Older miners were mostly content to grin and bear the Nova Scotia government’s efforts to reduce payouts to working miners. But younger miners remained resistant to management depredations and led a strike from July to October 1981. Women in the coal communities “sought solidarity across Canada, drawing comparisons between their efforts and those of the wives of striking Inco workers in Sudbury during their 1978 strike.” But the international office of the United Mine Workers of America, the union of the Cape Breton miners, had the trade union mindset of the historic compromise period. Unable to cope with the breakdown of arrangements in which the master was willing to toss crumbs to the workers to gain their acquiescence to a system of great inequalities of wealth and power, they did not support the young strikers. Their strike fund became “moribund” while the company fought them tenaciously, secure in the knowledge that the financial masters within the union were on the side of the corporations, not their members.

There were similar circumstances outside Cape Breton. Perhaps the most reported strike during the 1980s was that of the packinghouse workers at Gainers in Alberta. Their boss, Peter Pocklington, was best known for his ownership of the Edmonton Oilers hockey team and his interventions in national progressive conservative politics. Gainers’ workers took a huge rollback in wages in 1984 to preserve their jobs after being promised by Pocklington that they would be rewarded with a share of his profits when company sales turned around. They had turned around by 1986 when their contract terminated, but Pocklington demanded that the workers take further cuts to their wages and benefits, including their retirement pension. This time the local union, supported by virtually all the members, said no, and a seven-month labour conflict ensued. Over ten thousand people attended a rally at the provincial legislature in support of the Gainers workers, and for months, workers from other unions as well as other supporters joined the workers on their picket line. Efforts by workers to stop scabs from entering the plant led to violent confrontations with the Edmonton police, who worked on behalf of Pocklington’s interests. The local union then led a successful national campaign to boycott Gainers products; it also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the strikers. But as in Cape Breton, the national leadership of the union, in this case, the United Food and Commercial Workers, was not in support of the local union. Its instincts remained to attempt to regain the good relations that existed between the companies and the meatpacking workers from 1945 to 1984.44

The presence of cautious sellouts at the top of some Canadian unions during the neoliberal era is not much of a surprise when one examines the period of the historic compromise. In the effort to fulfill their contradictory roles of representatives of the workers whom they had organized, on the one hand, and administrators of the largely proemployer rules that the employers and the state expected them to enforce, on the other, union leaders walked a fine line. They often resented the efforts of radicals to put workers’ interests ahead of the union leaders’ enforcement duties, which postwar labour legislation enshrined as the cost for treating unions as legal entities with legally enforceable collective agreements. David Frank’s chapter, “C. B. Wade, Research Director and Labour Historian, 1944–50,” introduces one of these labour radicals. In his role as research director of District 26 of the United Mine Workers of America, Wade mounted campaigns for labour solidarities during the 1947 coal strikes on the island. His research labelled capitalism as the cause of regional disparities. His firing as a suspected Communist in 1950 reflected the determination of more establishment labour figures to cooperate with capitalists rather than always take the side of workers in labour-capital conflicts.

Wade’s background was entirely outside Cape Breton before he was hired by the UMW in 1944. Born and raised in Britain, his years in Canada before 1944 were spent as a chartered accountant and then an instructor at Queen’s University. But his hiring and firing reflected contestation within a Cape Breton union that had its counterparts elsewhere in the country. Neither his hiring nor his firing can be seen as unique Cape Breton stories. Hired by District 26 when radicals were influential within the union in 1944, Wade’s welcome could have occurred in many other parts of Canada because the Communists and their allies played key roles during wartime in organizing workers and preparing for combat on behalf of workers’ aspirations in the postwar period.45

Similarly, Wade’s firing in 1950 could have occurred anywhere else in Canada because by that point, the Cold War was a global phenomenon and certainly had a hold across the country. And so, for example, support for the Canadian Seamen’s Union (CSU) during the 1930s and 1940s when it organized the seamen and extracted concessions from shipping companies on their behalf was widespread in the trade union movement before the Cold War. The CSU fought a valiant though ultimately unsuccessful battle to maintain Canada’s world-class merchant fleet after the war. Neither the shippers nor the Canadian government appreciated CSU activism. The two collaborated with a company union called the Seafarers International Union (SIU) to break the CSU. The federal government allowed Hal Banks, a mobster with American convictions that made him ineligible to enter Canada, to not only enter the country but lead the SIU. That alleged union soon showed itself to be a thug puppet of the shipping companies. Only in 1964, when there was no chance that the CSU could be re-established, did the federal government take action against the leaders of the SIU. In 1950, the year Wade lost his employment with District 26, the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada (TLC), one of two competing national union centrals, stripped the CSU of its union status and disaffiliated the union. Both the TLC and the rival Congress of Canadian Labour dismissed unions led by Communists elected by their union members and carried out raids to weaken those unions. That undemocratic practice continued when the two rival organizations formed the Canadian Labour Congress in 1956.46

The strength of the chapters in this book is that they address Cape Breton issues and events with critical eyes that resist any temptation to engage in folk history and romanticization of the lives of its peoples or in the smothering of class, race, and gender differences, among others, in the name of a common Cape Breton sense of belonging. Some chapters hint at the place of the stories they are telling in contexts that go beyond the bounds of the island while others are tightly focused on local details. While this afterword tries to place all of these Cape Breton stories in national and sometimes international paradigms, it is important not to deny the importance of people’s lived experiences, resistance to injustices, and successes and failures in efforts to improve their lives. As the author of a history of social policy throughout history and across the globe, I know the dangers of homogenizing human experience in particular eras and underestimating the abilities of people in particular places to win victories, temporary or long-standing, over powerful forces.47 But the beauty of the chapters in this collection is that they tell local, generally bottom-up stories in unvarnished ways that make clear both the limitations under which particular groups of Cape Bretoners operated and the extent to which they fought such limitations, along with assessments of the results. That makes it rather easy to place these stories in larger national and international contexts.