Thomas Parkhill
St. Thomas University, Fredericton, N.B.
Jennifer Reid, University of Maine, Farmington, ME
"Power and the Sacred: An Exploration of Mi'kmaq-White Interaction in 19th Century
Maritime Canada"
Jennifer Reid, University of Maine at Farmington
For at least two centuries the interaction of the descendants of English colonials and of
aboriginal peoples in Maritime Canada has been characterized by a clash of virtually
irreconcilable cultural perceptions of power. This paper is an exploration of these divergent
notions of power in the 19th century.
To speak of power in culture can be regarded as a way of speaking of the sacred. Power, in its
most embracing sense, is the capacity to construct one's own meanings of the world, and
historians of religion tell us that the human creates or ascribes definition to the world on the
basis of a relationship with what one regards as sacred. It is consequently from our
relationship with what is sacred that we derive power. Given the association between ideas of
power and those of the sacrality of language for Mi'kmaq peoples, this paper will focus on the
concept of language and the related arena of verbal exchange in order to suggest that a
Mi'kmaq understanding of power exists that contains the possibility of bridging the distance
between both individuals and communities. This will provide a comparative framework
within which to regard antithetical colonial perceptions of power that have historically
permitted whites to violently alienate themselves from the Mi'kmaq communities of Maritime
Canada.
"Charles Godfrey Leland's Aryan Indians"
Thomas Parkhill, St. Thomas University
For several summers in the early 1880s Charles Godfrey Leland visited the Passamaquoddy
people while he was taking his holidays on Campobello Island. This experience and his
correspondence with Silas T. Rand, Lewy Mitchell, and Edward Jack resulted in the 1884
publication of Algonquin Legends of New England, a text that has enjoyed a long career and is
still in print.
Elsewhere I have argued that Leland compiled the first story of Algonquin Legends -- "Of
Glooscap's Birth, and of his Brother Malsum, the Wolf" -- from four sources, relying most
heavily on the version that came, unattributed, from a tourist guidebook. Further, Leland
edited his sources with a heavy hand, adding details he felt were authentic. These findings beg
the question, why did Leland construct this story?
Part of the answer can be gleaned from Algonquin Legends itself. There, and in related
writings, Leland argues that the story corpus he discovered derives from Norse legends. In the
first part of this paper I show that some of the very characteristics Leland used to demonstrate
the Icelandic heritage of his stories are the ones he most likely added to "Of Glooscap's Birth".
Leland's theory about the Norse roots of Native American stories has been all but discarded.
Even if that were not the case, I am prompted to ask another question -- why did Leland want
this connection between Norse and Native American story traditions so badly that he
massaged so energetically the Passamaquoddy, Micmac, Maliseet and Penobscot stories he
gathered? I shall attempt to respond to this question by examining the textual conversation
Leland carries on with Henry R. Schoolcraft on one hand, and Henry David Thoreau on the
other. By attending to the voices of this conversation now over one hundred years old, I show that some of the ways of thinking Leland follows when he studied Native Americans
in the late nineteenth century still influence us today