Week 4:Nobody can ride your back if your back's not bent
Whiners. Malcontents. Brain-dead. Hillbillies. Hypocrites. Stuck in the past. Bitter. Stupid. Ridiculous. Nonsensical. Squabblers. Daft. Insular. Paranoid. Petty. Foolish. Complainers. Grumpy buggers. Irrelevant.
I've heard all these words used to describe my people in the past few months. In public places. In comments on local, provincial, national news stories.
Colonization is an insidious process. Outright insults and assumptions of inferiority creep inside your head until you yourself believe that your culture is inferior.
My people are not the Scots, not the Highlanders, not the Celts. We are the Gaels.
It began... well, how it began is for historians to guess at. In 1380 John of Fordun wrote: "The highlanders and people of the islands, on the other hand, are a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine, ease-loving, clever and quick to learn, comely in person, but unsightly in dress, hostile to the English people and language, and, owing to the diversity of speech, even to their own nation, and exceedingly cruel." In 1586 William Camden described my people as wild and barbarous (or possibly vampires): "They drank the bloud out of wounds of the slain: they establish themselves, by drinking one anothers bloud..." In 1609 the government required my people to send their eldest children to far away English-speaking schools, if they were to inherit their fathers' cattle. This was to combat "ignorance and incivilitie". There have been government dictates preventing my people from offering hospitality in their homes, from sheltering our musicians and poets, from wearing our own clothing, from carrying weapons and from speaking our language in schools. There have been government-sponsored efforts to plant English-speaking colonists on our lands.
These things undermine confidence.
In 1884 the Commission of Inquiry into the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland found that "The language and lore of the Highlanders being treated with despite has tended to crush their self-respect and repress their self-reliance without which no people can advance. When a man was convinced that his language was a barbarism, his lore as filthy rags, and that the only good thing about him -his land- was, because of his general worthlessness, to go to a man of another race and another tongue, what remained that he fight for?"
And eventually our chiefs became "civilised", and they forgot that the people belong to the land, and we were spun away to colonize other lands. To remake ourselves in the image of our oppressors.
A hundred years ago there were 50,000 Gaelic speakers in my province alone. Now there's scarcely more than 50,000 in the whole world.
If you can teach the people that English is superior, eventually they'll clamour to learn it. To leave behind the stupid insular brain-dead hillbillies.
See how it works?
It began again last October, when the board of our tiny Gaelic educational institution announced that it has received a Royal designation from the Queen.
I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. The Crown and honour don't go together, for us. There is no honour in becoming the English. Being English is all very well for the English, but I've had to struggle to learn my own language. What does the Crown care about that? I wasn't the only one who felt this way. Letters to the editor were sent, petitions were circulated, meetings were called. The people made it clear that they opposed this renaming.
The name change was quietly dropped.
My people fought. Our language is beautiful, our lore is rich and deep.
The only irony is that I am writing this in English.
'S e cànan mo chridhe a tha seo, cànan cho binn ri smeòrach a'seinn air barr nan geug.
(This here is the language of my heart, a language as melodious as a thrush singing on the tip of a branch.)
I've heard all these words used to describe my people in the past few months. In public places. In comments on local, provincial, national news stories.
Colonization is an insidious process. Outright insults and assumptions of inferiority creep inside your head until you yourself believe that your culture is inferior.
My people are not the Scots, not the Highlanders, not the Celts. We are the Gaels.
It began... well, how it began is for historians to guess at. In 1380 John of Fordun wrote: "The highlanders and people of the islands, on the other hand, are a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine, ease-loving, clever and quick to learn, comely in person, but unsightly in dress, hostile to the English people and language, and, owing to the diversity of speech, even to their own nation, and exceedingly cruel." In 1586 William Camden described my people as wild and barbarous (or possibly vampires): "They drank the bloud out of wounds of the slain: they establish themselves, by drinking one anothers bloud..." In 1609 the government required my people to send their eldest children to far away English-speaking schools, if they were to inherit their fathers' cattle. This was to combat "ignorance and incivilitie". There have been government dictates preventing my people from offering hospitality in their homes, from sheltering our musicians and poets, from wearing our own clothing, from carrying weapons and from speaking our language in schools. There have been government-sponsored efforts to plant English-speaking colonists on our lands.
These things undermine confidence.
In 1884 the Commission of Inquiry into the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland found that "The language and lore of the Highlanders being treated with despite has tended to crush their self-respect and repress their self-reliance without which no people can advance. When a man was convinced that his language was a barbarism, his lore as filthy rags, and that the only good thing about him -his land- was, because of his general worthlessness, to go to a man of another race and another tongue, what remained that he fight for?"
And eventually our chiefs became "civilised", and they forgot that the people belong to the land, and we were spun away to colonize other lands. To remake ourselves in the image of our oppressors.
A hundred years ago there were 50,000 Gaelic speakers in my province alone. Now there's scarcely more than 50,000 in the whole world.
If you can teach the people that English is superior, eventually they'll clamour to learn it. To leave behind the stupid insular brain-dead hillbillies.
See how it works?
It began again last October, when the board of our tiny Gaelic educational institution announced that it has received a Royal designation from the Queen.
I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. The Crown and honour don't go together, for us. There is no honour in becoming the English. Being English is all very well for the English, but I've had to struggle to learn my own language. What does the Crown care about that? I wasn't the only one who felt this way. Letters to the editor were sent, petitions were circulated, meetings were called. The people made it clear that they opposed this renaming.
The name change was quietly dropped.
My people fought. Our language is beautiful, our lore is rich and deep.
The only irony is that I am writing this in English.
'S e cànan mo chridhe a tha seo, cànan cho binn ri smeòrach a'seinn air barr nan geug.
(This here is the language of my heart, a language as melodious as a thrush singing on the tip of a branch.)