PEI students visit Gaelic hearth
SKYE,
SCOTLAND (6 April 2004)
-- STUDENTS from Prince Edward 
Island
in Canada are visiting students at Plockton High School in the Kyle of
Lochalsh and Sabhal Mòr Ostaig Further Education College in Slèite
on Skye (pictured) for the first time. Both communities are on the western
coast of Scotland in the area well known as the Highlands and Islands.
The aim of the students' visit to Skye and Lochalsh is to increase their appreciation of the Gaelic language and culture and the exchange is sure to be a memorable one. The norm in such exchanges is that students are billeted with other students in Gaelic-speaking homes where they get to experience Scottish Gaelic life first hand.
Although from Prince Edward Island's capital city, Charlottetown, which has strong historical links with Skye, Raasay and Wester Ross, the pupils of Colonel Grey High School are the first to receive Gaelic tuition within the formal education system.
Their teacher, Rob MacDonald, whose people emigrated from the north of Skye, offered a five-month course in Gaelic as a pilot project and was overwhelmed by the pupils' response.
It is now hoped that the course will be continued and developed.
Sabhal Mòr Ostaig College and the University of Prince Edward Island have also been developing reciprocal links over the recent years in Gaelic language and Island studies. Sabhal Mòr also has a reciprocal program with the University College of Cape Breton and provides exchange opportunities for Canadian students.
In March 2003 high school youth from Dalbrae Academy in Mabou also visited Plockton High School while youth from Plockton and from Portree High School on the Isle of Skye had visited Cape Breton in 2002 and 2001 respectively.
Some historical facts
In 1758, following the surrender of Louisbourg, an equally traumatic deportation of 3,000 Acadians from Prince Edward Island [then known as Île St.-Jean] as from Nova Scotia occurred. They were ordered to France by Major General Jeffrey Amherst, commander of all British forces and the first practitioner of biological warfare. About half of those deported, including whole families, lost their lives before reaching Europe. Another 1400-1500 inhabitants fled the Island.
Following the Treaty of Paris (1763), the vast majority of Nova Scotian land was transferred to individuals in land companies in Britain and the United States. In 1767 the whole of PEI was granted in one day to a few dozen "absentee proprietors".
In 1769 the British divided Nova Scotia into four new colonies: Prince Edward Island, which separated in 1769, followed by New Brunswick and, temporarily, Cape Breton in 1784.
PEI and Nova Scotia were two of the most important Gaelic-speaking areas outside Scotland and Ireland. Most of the people emigrated from the Western Isles between 1770 and 1840. In 1764 disbanded soldiers from the Highland Regiments which fought in North America during the Seven Years’ War begin taking up land in Prince Edward Island (then part of Nova Scotia), Lower Canada and New York. Chain migration began augmenting these early settlements. In 1770, three years before the arrival of the Hector in Pictou, the first large shiploads of Highland settlers were recorded in Prince Edward Island.
The central myth of the BNA Act, the British act of parliament establishing the Dominion of Canada, which persists to date, is that Canada was founded by “English” and “French”, the so-called “two nations” theory.
In fact, Canada’s non-Aboriginal population in 1867 was predominantly French, Irish and Scottish, with English being a distant fourth. At the time of Confederation [1867], Gaelic was the third most common language in Canada after the Aboriginal and French languages.
In 1871, Scots become the largest ethnic group in Nova Scotia, which had a population of some 350,000. Scots were recorded as the largest ethnic group in PEI, which entered Confederation in 1870, in the first British census of 1798 and remained so for most of the following two centuries. However the inhabitants of the colonies were described as "British" or "English", according to the nationality of the colonizer.
Education became an important front for deracination and Anglicization. Despite popular opposition, the Gaelic language was forbidden in the school systems in PEI and Nova Scotia. The experience of the Gaelic Scots and Irish, Quebecois, Acadians and other francophones, Blacks, Metis and First Nations is similar in kind, if not degree.
Source: Dr. Michael Kennedy and Tony Seed, "No Great Mischief If They Fall: a Gaelic Timeline", shunpiking/Mac-talla, May/June, 2001
For your information
Sabhal Mòr Ostaig --www.smo.uhi.ac.uk
"Soul
of Scotland?" By IAIN CRICHTON SMITH, shunpiking/Mac-talla, June,
2003
Gaelic is a language of poetic injustice and little is done where funding
is needed to stop the tongue dying. "Shall Gaelic die! What that
means is: shall we die?" A visit to Sabhal Mòr Ostaig - the
Gaelic College on the Isle of Skye in Scotland.
Many articles from the 2003 edition of Mac-talla are now online at: http://www.shunpiking.com/shun0844/shun0844.html
Copyright New Media Services Inc. © 2004. The views expressed herein are the writers' own and do not necessarily reflect those of shunpiking magazine or New Media Publications.