Paper short abstract:

Drawing on personal fieldwork, archival field recordings and printed sources, this paper highlights the complex relationships and often blurred boundaries between cultural and natural worlds in the diasporic imagination of Scottish Gaels in Canada, ultimately challenging what it means to be human.

Paper long abstract:

Dùthchas is the dynamic system of emplaced knowledge maintained by Scottish Gaelic-speakers at the intersections of time and space, nature and culture, the individual and the community. Enacted at moments of transition and change, dùthchas can serve as a conceptual embodiment of one's place in the world in emergent contexts, where "speakers apply their understanding of its pragmatics, an understanding that presupposes older contexts of use and potentially entails the creation of new contexts" (McQuillan 2004: 182). Drawing on personal fieldwork, archival field recordings and correspondence as well as historical newspapers, this paper explores a dynamic understanding of the natural world creatively enacted in the diasporic imagination of Scottish Gaelic-speakers in Atlantic Canada. From emergent folk taxonomies innovatively drawing on ancestral knowledge to identify previously unknown species of animals encountered in the Canadian forests to mimetic representations of the calls of birds who sing in and understand Gaelic, this paper highlights the complex relationships and often blurred boundaries between cultural and natural worlds, ultimately challenging what it means to be human. Special attention is given to sung dialogues that simultaneously give anthropomorphic voice in a minoritized and marginalized endangered language to black bears, frogs and chickadees and provide a zoomorphic masking of the bard that serves as an empathetic and cathartic release between singer, audience, and animal, emerging from under the shadows of our all-too-often masked humanity.