Language and Land: Mi’kmaq and Gaelic in Cape Breton

Abstract

I spent most summers in Cape Breton, NS, where I would visit my family’s house on the Cabot Trail in Wreck Cove. Each summer, I would hear stories about my relatives, who were lobster canners, church ministers, and carpenters, who had settled in Wreck Cove after leaving their homes in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland in the mid-1800s. My maternal great-grandparents (and great-great grandparents) were native Scottish Gaelic speakers, and there are estimates that 50,000 Gaelic speakers lived on Cape Breton Island in the middle of the nineteenth century. Gaelic originated in Scotland, and it is one of approximately 4,000 Indigenous languages that currently exist.

The region where my family settled is called Unama’kik in Mi’kmaq, and the people there have spoken Mi’kmaq, an Indigenous language, for thousands of years.