Paper Short Abstract:

By refocusing my fieldwork on Gaelic aural/oral traditions in Cape Breton Island through the simple forms and multisensory poetics of folk names and mimologisms related to emic multigenerational observations of such interspecies’ entanglements between the feathered and featherless, I will empathetically reconsider the multilayered and intersectional complexities of everyday discourse on being in a place with others and coming to know ourselves through such entanglements with more-than-human others.

Paper Abstract:

Roger Tory Peterson, author of my first dogeared and rebound field guide to North American birds, observed that over half of the bird species in Atlantic Canada are found on both sides of the Atlantic. This paper offers a mid-life auto-ethnographic multispecies reflection on the induction of a young folklorist in learning an endangered minority language and cultural expression in a diasporic context. This revisitation offers a reassessment of the resulting intersubjectivities at play between a teenage bagpiper “from Away” and mother-tongue speakers of Scottish Gaelic in Cape Breton Island. Frequent asides on the names for plants and animals amid focused ethnographic exchanges on the local aesthetics of music and song were, in hindsight, deeply informed by a shared curiosity for the connections between natural and social worlds that reveal complex more-than-human ontologies of migration and dis/emplacements. By reflexively foregrounding these observations through my first experiences in systematic fieldwork, I will consider the impacts that my earliest observation of non-human others tagging and radio-tracking gregarious Canada Jays for the Audubon Society had upon my later training and practice as a folklorist. By refocusing my fieldwork on Gaelic aural/oral traditions in Cape Breton Island through the simple forms and multisensory poetics of folk names and mimologisms related to emic multigenerational observations of such interspecies’ entanglements between the feathered and featherless, I will empathetically reconsider the multilayered and intersectional complexities of everyday discourse on being in a place with others and coming to know ourselves through such entanglements with more-than-human others.