Just as the trappings of consumer culture were easy to spot on a drive through Salt Harbour, it was also common to see artifacts and symbols of the “Traditionalism” movement. Plains-style tee-pees and a firepit for the “sacred fire” formed ceremonial grounds behind the community health center. The domed, bent wood frames of sweat lodges stood in the back yards of self-identified traditionalists, and medicine wheels were displayed on stores and office buildings. Out at the Sundance grounds, buffalo skulls and eagle feathers marked ceremonial firepits, and the cloth ends of tobacco-filled prayer bundles flapped in the breeze. Ceremonial practices like the sweat lodge, sacred fire, Shaking Tent, pipe ceremony, Sundance and sweet grass purification took place at different times throughout the year and were well-attended by Salt Harbour band members, as well as other Native and non-Native peoples, some of whom traveled great distances to attend. In this chapter, I suggest that the growing interest and participation in Traditionalism by the people of Salt Harbour over the past several decades reflected community members’ (sometimes disparate) desires to cultivate spiritual and cultural relationships with their environment, and with each other, during a period when their historical practices of living on the land (e.g., fishing) had been made more difficult by state restrictions
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and voluntarily changing practices. Traditionalism, as it was called by Salt Harbour community members, offered participants practices, ceremonies, symbols, knowledge and teachings grounded in narratives about shared (or the perception of shared) pan-Indian experiences, like forced separations of people, natural resources and cultural practices, essentially downplaying (even sidestepping) local, historically-rooted, practice-based practices of fishing and hunting in the formulation of culture and identity.
This approach to figuring Mi’kmaq culture and identity took on particular importance in the period of cultural, social and economic upheaval following the Marshall decision, as the links between fishing and cultural practices and attitudes considered to be Mi’kmaq were growing ever-more tenuous – but as Mi’kmaq people’s presence on their territory was as strong as ever. During my time in Salt Harbour, various community members engaged discursively with the Traditionalism movement to position themselves and others in relation to Mi’kmaq (or
“Native”)56 culture and identity, as they conceptualized it. While some embraced Traditionalism as a resource for organizing collective Mi’kmaq subjectivities and practices, others contested it as a fad obscuring local-historical Mi’kmaq cultural practices. In this chapter, I portray
Traditionalism as an alternative cultural world where Mi’kmaq peoples were figuring identities, practices and spiritualities that did not rest exclusively on subsistence relationships with the environment, but rather rested on equally intense relationships with the environment based on pan-Indian spirituality and teachings. I also examine how competing discourses about
Traditionalism, “traditional ecological knowledge” and science intersected as community members worked to achieve validation and stability of particular cultural meanings, practices and knowledges in the post-Marshall period.
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Traditionalism, in its contemporary form, gained popularity during the height of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s, when it was touted as a way for aboriginal peoples across the United States and Canada to re-connect with cultural practices and identities after centuries of being separated from their lands and cultural traditions by violent and coercive colonial programs and policies (Prins 1996). The teachings that form the basis for contemporary Traditionalism are largely drawn from the Lakota, Sioux and Cree tribes. For the Mi’kmaq and other Native peoples for whom subsistence fishing and hunting practices had declined or even ceased, Traditionalism provided a way for them to take up and create meanings, knowledge and practices that they could use to construct cultural identities related to their own material relationships with their environments without necessitating the inclusion of specific local- historical practices, like food fishing, trapping or seasonal migration. In particular, in Salt Harbour, Traditionalism was attractive to younger people and others who were not directly engaged in food fishing or hunting. They drew on the resources Traditionalism offered to produce and position themselves within a figured world of Mi’kmaq culture (or Native culture, more broadly); Traditionalism provided them with a narrative and other resources for making sense of the embodied experiences they did have with the local environment. For example, self- described Traditionalist Joe Hall explained to me that “the traditional way of life” is about “belonging to the earth.” For Joe, belonging to the earth involved participating in ceremonies like the Sundance and sweatlodge, which facilitated intense, tangible connections to the earth. In the Sundance, participants dance continuously around a ceremonial tree for four days, their bare feet connected to the earth and their bodies connected to the tree by thin pieces of twine looped around the tree at one end and anchored into dancers’ flesh by needles or small wooden piercings on the other end. Ceremonies like this reminded participants, like Joe, that “our blood runs through the earth.”
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I suggest that the Traditionalism movement in Salt Harbour was providing resources for the construction of an alternative figured world of Mi’kmaq culture that was still intimately connected to the environment. The stories shared with me, and the events in which I
participated revealed the sincerity and authenticity of Traditionalism to those who practiced it, as well as its power to shape human-environment relationships. I want to be clear that the popularity of Traditionalism in Salt Harbour did not mean that Mi’kmaq links or claims to their traditional territories or the environment were weakening. Rather, the ways that Mi’kmaq people were interacting with the resources on their territories were changing, and
Traditionalism provided a context for them to produce new collective meanings, knowledges and practices about their embodied experiences with the world around them.