Tripped up by Tartan: Settler Colonialism and the Highland Scots on Cape Breton Island

• Main Author: Kehoe, S. Karly
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Edinburgh University Press 2023
• Subjects: Breton Island; Prince Edward Island
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474494304.003.0003

In the late eighteenth and early-to-mid nineteenth centuries, the maritime colonies of northeastern British North America were a popular destination for thousands of Scottish migrants. A significant proportion were from the Scottish Highlands and Islands and many of them ended up settling on Cape Breton Island, either directly from Scotland or indirectly via Prince Edward Island and mainland Nova Scotia. It was not an easy transition. This chapter considers the complex legacy of this settlement by interrogating some of the real and imagined understandings of Scottishness there. By the 1930s, tourism had emerged as one of the province’s primary industries with powerful advocates such Angus L. MacDonald, a provincial and federal politician whose love of all things Highland blinded him to the damage that such a preoccupation would do to the future sustainability of an economically-vulnerable region. In questioning the authenticity of the ‘Scottishness’ put on display, this chapter shines an important light on those legitimate aspects of Highland culture that have survived and continue to thrive in a province that has, for so long, billed itself as the New Scotland.