Selling Tradition

Picture this: a group of federal civil servants who work at Cape Breton Highlands National Park in the early 1950s receive a memo from their minister, acting at the request of the Nova Scotia premier, Angus L. Macdonald. These stolid Canadians are to go out and plant imported Scottish heather
all over the hills of the park, and they are to do so wearing kilts and blue Highland bonnets. Given typical staff sensitivities to uniform design, one can only imagine how park workers might react to this edict.

Ian McKay and Robin Bates’s In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia is a book about reconstruction. Not just the reconstruction of buildings such as Champlain’s Habitation at Port Royal. It is also about the reconstruction of history to transform it into a marketable commodity. The authors have chosen as their field of study Nova Scotia and its evolution toward the Province of History, as the title cleverly implies. In the book’s examination of this decades-long branding exercise, authenticity succumbs to myth making and historical truth succumbs to romanticism. By focusing on what they call “tourism/history,” McKay and Bates raise important questions about the role of history, historians and historical process in the heritage business.

The authors argue that the development of tourism/history in Nova Scotia has been for economic, political and cultural gain. They take care to underscore on several occasions that the motivation goes beyond economic benefit, although clearly the commercial aspect predominates. In their judgement, tourism/history collapses the boundaries between fact and fantasy, creating a safe, remote and romantic past. The book calls for greater respect for the rigorous application of historical evidence and for opening up the bland discourse of tourism/history to encourage real dialogue. It probes beneath the inoffensive surface of tourism/history to reveal it as a form of knowledge antithetical to historical processes and contemporary relevance. The authors criticize the tourism/history approach for its failure to capture the contentious and complex nature of the past and for its disconnection between past and present. But they also acknowledge that it can be “beguiling and beckoning.”

The book is framed by a selection of key players living in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, chosen for their influence on the creation of a romanticized view of the past. The prologue introduces the people of “Canada’s Ocean Playground” through an elaborate dissection of a composite photograph entitled “Native Types” that was published in 1936 by Nova Scotia’s Department of Highways, then responsible for tourism. Identified as “five distinct white races,” the so-called native types included English, Scotch, French Acadian, Irish and Hanoverian. McKay and Bates offer several possible interpretations of this representation of Nova Scotia’s past before revealing their identities and reflecting on the meaning of their position in the cultural hierarchy. They also note the absence of groups such as the Mi’kmaq, Afro–Nova Scotians and some European immigrants. This engaging analysis encapsulates the main ideas that are explored and teased out in the rest of the book.

McKay and Bates set the stage by presenting a brief synopsis of the complicated historical events that occurred in the province from 1604 to 1867 as well as an overview of the early historiography that shaped the perception of these events. They examine the influence of authors such as Thomas Chandler Haliburton and Francis Parkman, as well as the more scholarly works of J.B. Brebner and D.C. Harvey on the construction of Nova Scotia’s public history.

They then turn to the first important example of tourism/history in Nova Scotia, the Evangeline Phenomenon that gathered steam through Longfellow’s famous poem that recast the events of the Acadian deportation. After settling in the Annapolis Valley for more than a century, Acadian farmers and their families were deported in 1755 from Grand-Pré on the order of British military leaders who distrusted their allegiance during the French-English rivalry for North America. McKay and Bates note that the American author never visited the site and wrote a century after the events in question. They argue that Longfellow depicted a fictional young girl called Evangeline and evoked a non-existent Golden Age in phantom primeval forests where naive and honest Acadians lived an idyllic existence until evil Europeans forced them to migrate from Nova Scotia. Nonetheless, this poem came to depict reality and truth for generations of readers and visitors. The authors tie the Evangeline Phenomenon to the development of tourism and specifically to the growth of the Dominion Atlantic Railway. Their chronicling of the railway’s promotion of Evangeline Land is a wry exposé of early branding and marketing of a heritage commodity. The authors define commodity as the experience of a generic pastness, a generalized tender nostalgia. The challenge for the Dominion Atlantic Railway was to meet its customers’ expectations for a rustic landscape inhabited by Acadians and for visible evidence of past events at Grand-Pré. In the tourism/history framework, where fact and fantasy intermingle, reconstructions to improve the visitors’ experience are acceptable. Despite their questionable authenticity, the 1920s memorial chapel and the statue of the fictional heroine Evangeline met the railway’s need for a touristic focal point.

Full chapters are devoted to what the authors call the “triumvirate” of history trendsetters: Will Bird, Thomas Raddall and Angus L. Macdonald. From the 1930s to the 1950s, these three men were instrumental in reconstructing Nova Scotia’s past. Drawing on a broad array of primary and secondary sources, McKay and Bates sketch out in sometimes exhausting detail the manner in which each one contributed to creating the Province of History.

In a chapter appropriately entitled “All the World Was Safe and Happy,” the authors describe the writings of Will Bird (1891–1984), a provincial civil servant from 1933 to 1965 who wrote 19 books in his spare time. They demonstrate how Bird painted convincing portraits of Nova Scotia’s past by erasing the boundary between fact and fiction and by interspersing specific historical details into what were romantic novels. Bird’s best-selling This Is Nova Scotia describes a tourist/narrator’s encounters with commemorative plaques (which Bird as civil servant had written) and an idealized inn at Bridgetown complete with engravings of apostles, angels, children and animals. Bird’s simple writing style appealed to a wide audience who came to believe that this romanticized past—which the authors call “Birdland”—had really existed in a more innocent time and place. McKay and Bates are not convinced. They describe Bird as a manipulative “state functionary with an exquisitely sensitive marketing nose” who had manufactured a picturesque portrait of Nova Scotia in order to attract tourism. They particularly decry the impact of Bird’s appealing and simplistic historical vignettes because such portraits dissociate the tourist from the contemporary implications of the past on issues such as military conflict, revolution or slavery.

Thomas Raddall (1903–1994), novelist and historian, was an influential cultural figure in Nova Scotia. A prolific writer of 22 books on historical themes, again with uncertain boundaries between fact and fiction, Raddall also shaped the interpretation of Nova Scotian history. He created what the authors comically call “Raddallia,” a space of crude determinism where historical significance is reserved for events and places associated with the British and Canadian elites in whom social evolution has vested power and prestige. Rejecting Longfellow’s Acadia as “maudlin and untrue literature,” Raddall sided with the British and blamed the Acadians themselves for their deportation. He strongly supported heritage preservation activities, although he resented the disproportionate number of tourists going to the Annapolis Valley as a result of the Evangeline Phenomenon. He worked actively to expand tourism to the South Shore and proposed another reconstruction—Liverpool’s Fort Morris—as a means of attracting tourists.

The third and most powerful person in the triumvirate was an ardent Scot, Angus L. Macdonald, who served as premier of Nova Scotia from 1933 to 1940, then from 1945 to 1954. While Bird and Raddall set the official narrative for Nova Scotia in the early 20th century, it is to Macdonald whom we owe the systematic branding of Nova Scotia as a Scottish province. The authors contend that before the 1930s the Scottish influence was overlooked in tourism/history products. They document Macdonald’s role in the state promotion of a “tartanized quasi-Scottish image.” The creation of the Scots myth included rekindling the story of the arrival of the Scots-bearing ship Hector, stationing a piper in Scottish regalia at the provincial border to greet visitors in Gaelic with “a hundred thousand welcomes,” renaming the rugged landscape of Cape Breton the Highlands and building the Keltic Lodge complete with golf and Highland cattle. The Scottish myth persists to this day, described by the authors as a “vapid tartanism driven solely by profit.” They contend that it reasserted Britishness in the tourism/history of Nova Scotia and underscored the dominance of the Scots in what they call the general politics of whiteness.

The triumvirate joined forces through the newly created Historic Sites Advisory Council, most active between 1948 and 1964. Macdonald established it in 1948, appointing Bird as its first chair. The authors show Macdonald’s direct influence by including a detailed list of historical places that the premier gave to Bird for council consideration. Macdonald’s list gives priority to stately homes of important people and first occurrences of events. The heritage of several minority groups is ignored. The authors cite two examples of dubious provenance—a non-authentic Norse runic stone found in Yarmouth and a non-proven landing of Cabot in Cape Breton—as evidence that tourism/history could develop its own truths. The fact that the council and government endorsed the Cabot landing is used by the authors to demonstrate how heritage officialdom can anoint winners and reject losers in the quest for recognition of historical significance. They hammer home the point that layers of historiography affected how the council perceived and valued the events, people and sites of the past.

In the Province of History brings into focus issues of fundamental importance for heritage professionals. The first relates to the role that heritage designation plays in disconnecting the past from the present. Heritage designation has often had the unintended consequence of freezing historic places or events in an historical frame, thereby preventing any legitimate evolution or added layers of value. As the authors point out, Bird’s imagined Nova Scotia is “impervious to alteration.” This same issue has emerged in international work, particularly at UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee where discussion about the appropriateness of new developments in designated World Heritage Cities occupies an inordinate amount of the agenda.

The book also raises the issue of conscious or unconscious bias in selection criteria that are often used to identify historic significance. This phenomenon is not limited to Nova Scotia or to Canada. The weakness of all heritage designation processes lies in the creation of a hierarchy of values. Dotted throughout the text are examples of criteria that inevitably influence the determination of winners and losers in the heritage game. Macdonald’s Historic Sites Advisory Council favoured the great man syndrome and the “first” syndrome, which gave value to the first example of anything. It also used criteria that were less about significance and more about marketability, such as accessibility for tourists, support from local historical societies, uniqueness and attractiveness (properties must not look too old!). In this context, the council favoured stately homes and gave historic cemeteries short shrift because they could not be turned into profitable attractions. During the period under discussion, the authors contend that the politics of commemoration meant that the losers were persons, places and events associated with aboriginal people, Afro-Canadians, the labour movement and other non-elites. From the perspective of a heritage professional who worked in the last quarter of the 20th century, In the Province of History helps to explain the inventory of heritage properties and commemorative plaques that were passed down to government agencies in the 1970s.

Given the tantalizing glimpses that this book offers into the pernicious impact of tourism/history on heritage conservation and presentation, one can only regret that the authors did not explore these ideas further. One can extrapolate that the needs of tourism/history are in part responsible for the flurry of reconstructed historic sites—often military sites—that were built in Canada in the first half of the 20th century with little regard for authenticity. McKay and Bates point to one example—Champlain’s reconstructed Habitation at Port Royal—which is neither on its original site nor accurate in its details. With its simplification of events, tourism/history may also be responsible for a legacy of dull, one-dimensional heritage programming that makes it difficult to believe that anything dramatic and relevant ever happened here. Does not such a treatment, ponder the authors, resemble inoffensive theme parks à la Disney? To be fair, recent heritage practitioners have identified this weakness and are taking measures to present history in all its diversity and contradiction—within the constraints of professional advice that identifies the average level of visitor comprehension at grade eight. In this context, it would have been interesting to read the authors’ assessment of the current programming at Grand-Pré National Historic Site, where Parks Canada has attempted to enlarge the historical dialogue beyond Evangeline Land.

McKay and Bates introduce us to an astonishing array of persons, places and events from Nova Scotia’s past. Nicely written and carefully researched, In the Province of History brings to life the distortions that tourism/history can inflict on our understanding of historical events and sites. It demonstrates how the convergence of romantic literature, business interests and state intervention can create a safely remote and romantic past. The authors make a convincing case for the influence of Longfellow, Bird, Raddall and Macdonald on the understanding and marketing of the past.

This is a serious book about the process of history. It advocates for solid academic research as an antidote to popular and state-approved history that is market driven and shaped by cultural elites. Its message extends beyond Nova Scotia to historic sites across Canada and to popular programs such as the CBC’s Canada: A People’s History. After perusing this book, readers will surely approach such places and programs with caution as they reflect on the bias and selectivity that underpin them. One can only hope that the book stimulates a debate on the nature of our perception of the past. After reading this book, a visit to Nova Scotia will never be the same.