Micmac Leadership and the Annual Festival of St
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Ceremony, Social Revitalization and Change: Micmac Leadership and the Annual Festival of St. Anne JANET ELIZABETH CHUTE Dalhousie University Introduction Micmac commemoration of the festival of St. Anne, an annual religious event followed by feasting and games occurring around July 26th, St. Anne's Day, has as much to do with traditional Micmac conceptions of "power" as it has to do with Roman Catholicism.1 Micmac themselves describe St. Anne's, or setonewimg (Deblois and Metallic 1984:313), as a time when the spiritual and social realms draw close together, and when the Micmac political system demonstrates a distinctly ranked order. Rarely does July 26th ever occur in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, for instance, without the Grand Chief of the Micmac nation, the Grand Captain and several subordinate Captains being in attendance. Throughout the last 200 years, St. Anne's has provided a forum in which Micmac leadership could discuss and promote exclusively Micmac goals and aspirations. While the fairly rigid hierarchy characteristic of Micmac lead ership probably arose in response to European political and military ini tiatives during the French colonial period, its primary function, to embody and uphold cherished Micmac values, has apparently remained unchanged throughout the historic era (Chute 1990). The festival later became the preferred time for choosing chiefs and councillors, settling internal disputes, distributing revenues from band lands and other resources, baptizing infants and performing marriages. That the event, although presently observed by only a few Micmac communities, has been drawing larger crowds year by year, testifies to its deeply-rooted resilience as a Micmac cultural institution which bears close investigation. 2This paper has been prepared with the generous assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under the auspices of post doctoral grants 456-89-0192 and 457-90-0153. 45 46 JANET ELIZABETH CHUTE Problems with Asstmtlationtst Perspectives on St. Anne's In the light of renewed Micmac interest in the event, it may seem surpris ing that less than 50 years ago St. Anne's festivities were believed to be dying out. In a diachronic study of Micmac society conducted in the early 1950s, Wilson D. Wallis and Ruth Sawtell Wallis (1955:283) contended that St. Anne's, which they designated as the Micmac national holiday, might be viewed as a barometer of social change, since in many respects it reflected trends through time within the Micmac cultural community, in microcosm. Lack of positive reinforcement for the St. Anne's celebration, they main tained, paralleled a decline in Micmac culture generally. As a student of Frank G. Speck, whose interest in reconstructing the cultural integrity of northern Native value systems has become legendary, Wilson D. Wallis sought to recreate a baseline ethnography for the Micmac area by drawing on what he saw as cultural survivals from an earlier era. In his estimation, St. Anne's constituted a syncretism between the Roman Catholic Feast of St. Anne and the Micmac summer council meeting, which had been convened annually at least as early as the 16th and 17th centuries for the purpose of discussing alliances and war (Jesuit Relations (3):87- 95). Both Wilson D. and Ruth Sawtell Wallis contended, however, that by the early 20th century whatever still remained of the earlier council proved totally devoid of any political content. Unfortunately Wallis and Wallis's approach tended to be unidirectional, with a strain of inevitability charac teristic of many assimilationist studies. The ancient aboriginal culture was seen as inexorably giving way in the face of modern westernized values. Detailed Assimilationist Approaches to St. Anne's In 1911 Wilson D. Wallis had gained most of his information on St. Anne's from two elderly men, John Newell of Pictou, Nova Scotia, and Peter Gin- nish of Burnt Church, New Brunswick. The care Wallis evidenced in re producing these oral traditions in narrative format, almost exactly as the Native respondents had related them, invests his material with a value ex ceeding the theoretical framework in which it is cast. John Newell's account depicted two chiefs' engaging in ritualized speech-making, the aim of which seemed to be to ensure a state of balanced political reciprocity between the two leaders, as well as between these chiefs and their respective groups. Re peatedly the speakers appealed to their audience to affirm their statements, and only resumed their orations when they had obtained the assembly's sanction. Once the correct tone had been struck in this sequence of de livery, response and counter response, both leaders and assembly relaxed, feasted and engaged in social activities. Since Newell's account lacked ref erences to Roman Catholicism, Wallis and Wallis (1955:188) assumed the ceremony to be ancient or, at least, to have "greatly antedated . [Newell's] own life." FESTIVAL OF ST. ANNE 47 In contrast to Newell, Peter Ginnish told of a specifically Christian religious ritual. The place, and even the names of groups participating in the event were specified. Since Wallis's mentor, Speck, had insisted that Native ceremonial forms be as little contaminated as possible by Christian influences before they were worthy of ethnographic note (Smith 1976:116), it is fortunate that Wallis's work did not suffer from Speck's bias. According to Ginnish, 15 canoes from Richibucto journeyed to the mis sion community at Burnt Church, New Brunswick. Before landing, the Richibucto flotilla assembled in orderly fashion offshore while the Richbucto chief's assistant sang a neskawet, or welcome song, which was responded to in kind by the Burnt Church chief's assistant. The Roman Catholic element was present in the procession to the church, and the service which followed. Yet, according to Ginnish, the highlight of the event was a feast of ox, and games — when the fun commenced (Wallis and Wallis 1955:189). While Wallis claimed that many features associated with the summer meeting survived into the 20th century, he nevertheless admitted that for mation of his views on the subject had been hampered by difficulties he encountered in obtaining information. In 1911 and 1912 the Micmac dis trusted most whites and white institutions as being potentially destruc tive to Micmac culture. Even more problematic, elderly Micmac proved highly suspicious of any strangers — Native or non-Native — who attended St. Anne's unless visitors could furnish good reasons for being present. Wal lis (1955:23-24) attributed this reticence in part to the influence of Roman Catholic missionaries, who, he argued, had promoted Micmac psychological isolation by treating the Micmac as a people separate from the whites, and encouraging literacy through the reading of ideograms rather than Roman script. Thirty years later, however, Wallis and Wallis found the St. Anne's celebration radically changed. By 1950 the individualism characteristic of post-World War II Canadian society had won out against the traditional reticence of even the most conservative Micmac. Returning soldiers evi denced new attitudes and outlooks; young men and women arrived back from living in Maine with new conceptions of space and freedom which only access to cars could bring. Most modifications were in the sphere of material culture. Micmac youth ridiculed the beaded frock coats and brilliant sashes formerly worn by men at St. Anne's. Women's clothes proved both fashionable and new. Gone was the high peaked beaded woman's cap, along with the orna mented ceremonial skirts and beaded tabbed bodices. The only overt bid towards Indianness lay in the occasional donning of a Plains style feather war bonnet representative of pan-Indian leanings rather than any desire to ex press exclusively Micmac cultural traditions. !> JANET ELIZABETH CHUTE Other changes were less overt. The centrality of Native leadership in the New Brunswick festival proceedings observed in 1911 had diminished in relation to the clergy's authority. The number of non-Native visitors had grown as well, so much so that at the mission at St. Anne de Restigouche, Micmac charged that the goals of the Capuchin missionaries focused less on religious matters than on making the festival "attractive to the French and profitable to the church" (Wallis and Wallis 1955:288). Almost identical conclusions were drawn ten years later by Karl Bock after observing the St. Anne's ceremonies at Restigouche. To Bock, the event lacked "Indian context and resemble[d]...the celebration of the patron saint's day in many small Roman Catholic communities" (Bock 1962:102). Similar trends were observed in Nova Scotia by another anthropologist, Sheila Steen (1951). The ceremony at Shubenacadie in 1950 had been short ened by clerical fiat to only two days, the 26th and 27th of July. Among the most orderly of the participants were young women from the Shubenacadie residential school dressed in their school uniforms. Priestly constraints were even more in evidence on Chapel Island, Cape Breton, where Native danc ing allegedly had been banned by priest's orders in 1942 (Steen 1951; Wal lis and Wallis 1955:288). While certain Micmac communities exercised a greater degree of control than others over the organization of events vis-a vis the clergy, nevertheless in all cases the festivities' content proved highly westernized. As far as Bock, Steen and Wallis and Wallis could see, it would only be a matter of time before the last of the distinctly Micmac features of St. Anne's had disappeared forever. Drawing New Value from Early Assimilationist Studies A valuable contribution of Wallis and Wallis's, Steen's and Bock's assimila tionist perspectives on St. Anne's lies in their recognition of the ceremony as a circumscribed ritual arena in which to examine social change. Micmac communities during the 1950s and 1960s certainly seemed to be headed for eventual assimilation within the Canadian mainstream.