Moving Mountains: Community and Resistance in the Isle of Harris, Scotland, and Cape Breton, Canada

© 2003 Editorial Board of Antipode. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,Malden, MA 02148, USA

Moving Mountains: Community andResistance in the Isle of Harris,

Scotland, and Cape Breton, Canada

A Fiona D Mackenzie and Simon DalbyDepartment of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University,

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; [email protected], [email protected]

Drawing on poststructuralist political ecology, the narratives of two struggles about siting asuperquarry are examined to elucidate the complex articulations of community, nature, resistanceand identity in play in public debates. Focusing on the discursive formulations of the quarry in theexpert language, as well as in the arguments of both local proponents and opponents of the quarries,shows the importance of ontological categories in “environmental” siting disputes. In Harris, thesethemes rearticulate the histories of dispossession, crofting and religion, as well as complex layersof geographical identity in the various claims to community. In Cape Breton, the rethinking ofaboriginal Mi’kmaq identity was stimulated by revived interest in the religious traditions linked tothe sacred site near the proposed quarry. In light of these findings, the complexity and activerearticulation of local “community” as political resistance are emphasised and the difficulties ofthinking about sustainability highlighted.

IntroductionIn the autumn of 1996, Sulian Stone Eagle Herney—Mi’kmaq elderfrom Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, director of the Sacred Mountain Society(SMS), and founder of the First Nations Environmental Network—was invited to talk to an audience at the Stone Angel Café in down-town Ottawa. He spoke of the inseparable relationship between FirstNations people and nature/land on which claims to sovereignty werebased. He had become an environmentalist, he explained, becausewithout land there would be nothing to be a First Nationist about. He traced his growing intervention in environmental politics to thestruggle against a corporate proposal to quarry Kluskap’s Mountain,the site of a cave sacred to Kluskap, a figure of central spiritualimportance to Mi’kmaq people, to produce aggregate for road-building in the US.

Earlier, Herney had been invited to appear before the public inquiryinto a superquarry at Lingerbay, southeast Harris, Scotland, in 1994.In this case, the proposal came from an English multinational wishingto quarry anorthosite from Roineabhal for roads in southeast England.Herney’s appearance on the Isle of Harris suggests both a common

purpose amidst diversity of postcolonial experience at a global leveland a certain measure of irony, given the participation of those forcedfrom the land in the Outer Hebrides during the Clearances of the eight-eenth and nineteenth centuries in the colonisation of Nova Scotia(Dalby and Mackenzie 1997; Hunter 1994). On Harris, recognising a past in which Scots were implicated in the process of colonisation of his people, Herney spoke on that occasion of the rekindling of“traditional values and codes of conduct … that reawakened the trueMi’kmaq spirit and spiritual connection to Mother Earth and theCreator”. “Our philosophy and spirituality”, he continued, “has alwaysbeen one where man [sic] was not dominant over the creation of otherlife forms, which we shared this territory with. It was always our beliefand still is our belief that the Creator had placed the Mi’kmaq peopleas caretakers of Mother Earth” (Herney 1994:19). Geographicallocation was immaterial: “Your mountain, your shorelines, your riversand your air are just as much mine and my grandchildren’s as ours isyours” (Herney 1994:19).

This paper traces the nature of local resistance to these proposals toturn two mountains, Kluskap’s Mountain and Roineabhal, into gravelfor consumption elsewhere. We draw on the narratives from these twocase studies to extend recent debates within the emerging field ofpoststructural/postcolonial political ecology concerning resistance(for example, Castree and Braun 1998; Escobar 1995, 1996; Espeland1998; Guha 1989; Howitt, Connell and Hirsch 1996; Mackenzie 1998a;Neumann 1998; Peet and Watts 1996; Schroeder 1999). This research,inspired in part by postcolonial and feminist theorisation of differenceand identity and discourse theory, explores resistance in terms ofpolitical economy, the articulation of the relationship between powerand knowledge through discourse and the construction of nature insocial struggle. Most of the political ecology literature has focused onresistance in the global South, but it is important to emphasise thatsimilar struggles take place in peripheral locations in Northern states.

In both our case studies, resistance is locally based. Although suchresistance must clearly be located within the broader political contextof which it is part, it has been neither initiated nor directed by non-local organisations. As, we argue, resistance in each case must beconceptualised within the context of processes of cultural recovery,this matter is of central significance. People in both places have,historically and in the present, experienced dispossession and the lossof local autonomy that accompanies disempowerment (Devine 1994;Hunter 1976; Royle 1993; Shucksmith, Chapman and Clark 1996).Both have also experienced the threat to social fabric that comes fromlimited opportunities for (particularly skilled) employment and fromhigh rates of out-migration. As we show in this paper, both draw onhistorically resilient senses of collective identity to resist corporate

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intrusion. In this context, notions of community and identity—of thepast and the present—are recreated or reinvented as part of politicalstruggle, and the boundaries between groups of people are reworkedto serve particular interests. Groups emerge that may well not haveexisted prior to the current conflict. Social boundaries become morefluid and negotiable in the attempt to legitimate new political positions.

In both of our case studies, opposition to the quarry was groundedin the reconstruction of a history in which the integral relationshipbetween people and land/nature was central. There was a rejection ofthe dualism that posits the individual against the collective and societyagainst nature. Individual identity was shown to be negotiated as partof “networks of shared responsibilities” (Gibson 1999:56), notions ofterritoriality—and, specifically, rights to land—being inseparable fromsuch configurations. In both places, rights to land—to property—wereconceived of in terms representing “fundamentally different epistemicdomains to the commodifying logic of the capitalist state” (Gibson1999:56). As Chris Gibson (1999:56) points out, “This paradigm of‘owning’ differs dramatically from the individualistic premises of non-indigenous ‘private property’”, basically because of its insistence oncollective rights to—and responsibilities for—land and its rejection ofabsolute rights to land under allodial systems. In parallel, and as furtherevidence of non-capitalist modes of knowledge construction, people inboth places refused to subscribe to the separation between peopleand nature. One demonstration of this was a rejection of framing the issue of the superquarries in terms of jobs/environment, within thecontours of which protagonists sought to confine debate. As we willshow, the most eloquent fusion of people and place is found in theexplicit binding of the “spiritual” and the “natural” in Mi’kmaq testimony.

Yet, despite such common threads that are woven into the discursivepractices of groups in both Harris and Cape Breton, evidence fromdocumentary sources and personal narratives collected on both sidesof the Atlantic between 1997 and 2000 demonstrates that the strugglegenerated by the proposals to extract rock meant the renegotiation ofcommunity boundaries in ways that differ profoundly between the twocases. In the case of Harris, fractures in the community deepened inthe aftermath of the public inquiry, although this did not occur alongthe lines of the binary “islander”/“incomer” or “white settler” deployedby the corporation in its bid to split the opposition by mapping thisbinary onto that of jobs/environment. In contrast, in Cape Breton,while the proposal for a quarry split members of the St Ann’s Baycommunity (in large measure people of Scots descent), the deeplyfissured Mi’kmaq community on Cape Breton united in opposition tothe destruction of Kluskap’s Cave.

The grounds for Mi’kmaq unity of purpose lie, we argue, in the con-vergence of a discourse of cultural distinctiveness—in which spiritual

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identity was central, intricately bound up with the construction ofnature, of Kluskap’s Mountain—with one of territoriality. The par-ticular issue of the quarry was subsumed within larger discourses ofself-determination and sovereignty vis-à-vis the Canadian state(Battiste 2000). This convergence was central to an expression ofidentity. As Alf Hornborg (1994:255) points out, opposition to thequarry provided the means through which Mi’kmaq could assertcultural difference and claim spiritual values antithetical to those ofmainstream Canadian society. Despite disagreements over tactics,resistance to the quarry proposal played an important part in thereassertion of Mi’kmaq identity and in ongoing struggles against thelegacy of conquest, dispossession and attempted cultural assimilation—struggles that increasingly resonated across Canada. The local strugglein Unama’ki (the Mi’kmaq name for Cape Breton) was connectedwith broader geographical struggles and with reimagining politicalfutures (see Burawoy 2000). In the discussion that follows, we arguethat it is this distinction between the islanders of Harris and Mi’kmaqof Cape Breton, where for the latter the mountain becomes part andparcel of the construction of national identity, that explains both whyand how a proposal to quarry rock led to recognition of commonpurpose among Mi’kmaq but deepening divisions on Harris.

In the next section of the paper, we situate this analysis within theparticular contexts within which local resistance took place, focusingon the strategies deployed by the protagonists of the two quarries. Inthe following two sections, we analyse the discourses of resistance thatemerged in Cape Breton, focusing on First Nations politics and, inHarris, on the actions of the Quarry Benefit Group (QBG), whichbecame a key voice within the community during the process of thepublic inquiry into the proposed quarry. In the conclusion, we drawout the implications of the research for recent debates about the natureof resistance in struggles over resources as these debates engage withideas drawn from poststructural, postcolonial and feminist theorising.

Corporate Metaphors of Modernity “Turning a mountain into gravel”, writes Hornborg (1994:251), “isfacilitated by first breaking it down conceptually”. In both case studies,state-endorsed forums provided the public arenas within which thecontours of the debates about the quarries were defined and theconceptual parameters set: in Cape Breton, through the establishmentin March 1991 of a joint federal-provincial Environmental AssessmentReview (EAR) panel; in Harris, through a public inquiry which began inOctober 1994 and ran until June 1995. In this section of the paper, wefocus attention on the public discourses of the two companies involved,Kelly Rock Limited (KRL) in Cape Breton and Redland AggregateLimited (RAL) on the Isle of Harris. For each, we demonstrate how

the corporate proponents of the quarries claimed legitimacy fortheir positions on the basis of the “universal” norms produced by “pure science”. Principles of objectivity and political neutrality“empowered” the “universality” of the explicitly modernist discourse(see Gismondi and Richardson 1994:245), becoming the means throughwhich particular political positions were simultaneously furthered andmasked.

A modernist discourse of progress (Scott 1998), frequently sub-sumed under the banner “sustainable development”, became a“political technology” (to follow Michel Foucault 1978, 1979. For adiscussion, see Dreyfus and Rabinov 1983: 195–196), advancingparticular political positions by removing what was a deeply politicalissue from the arena of political struggle, reframing it in terms ofscientific neutrality. An integral component of this technology was thepromise of jobs, casting the debate in terms of jobs versus theenvironment, engaging in what Laurie Adkin (1992:146) aptly names“jobs blackmail”, attempting to splinter the opposition. In Harris, thesubsequent attempt to map this binary onto that of islander/incomer—or, in the pejorative language of RAL, “white settler”—wasparticularly divisive. In the case of the St Ann’s Bay area of CapeBreton, while a parallel split appeared between the “come from aways”and those—often of Scots descent—who could claim longer residency,this fracture articulated with an increasingly powerful oppositionalvoice from the Mi’kmaq First Nation, claiming rights to Unama’ki.

In Cape Breton, in 1989, KRL, under the directorship of localbusinessman Dave McKenna, made known its intentions to open asuperquarry on what it called Kelly’s Mountain, located between StAnn’s Bay and the inlet to the Bras d’Or to the east. The companyproposed to use a “glory hole” method for extracting 5.4 million tonsof granite a year for the next 20 to 40 years to provide aggregate forroads in the eastern US. It claimed that it could do so with minimalvisible disturbance, despite the blasting, once a month, of half a milliontonnes, the operation of crushers working continuously and the con-struction and operation of a shipping wharf near St. Ann’s Bay. Thelast would be large enough to accommodate ships of 60,000 tonnesand would have located next to it large stockpiles of gravel. Additionalland would be needed for the fleet of trucks, conveyor belts andadministration buildings (Consedine 1990; Nolan, Davis and Asso-ciates 1989a). Although this was a very large proposal, Cape Bretonhas a long history of large-scale resource extraction, some quarryingand coal mining and a steel industry (Royle 1993). Kelly’s Mountainitself has been relatively undisturbed, although only limited patches ofold growth forest remain; it provides the visual backdrop for part ofthe tourist route, the Cabot Trail, which runs through the Cape BretonHighlands National Park further north.


Initial surveys conducted for KRL in 1989 by its consultants, Nolan,Davis and Associates, suggested that there were approximately 2 billiontonnes of granite close to the shore of St. Ann’s Bay that would allowfor direct shipment from the shoreline to eastern US markets (Nolan,Davis and Associates 1989a, 1989b). Crucial to the rise of oppositionto the KRL proposal in the St. Ann’s area was the initial sense by localpeople at the public meetings held by KRL that the proponents of thequarry were not telling the whole story about the planned project.People were immediately suspicious of the technical language of theinitial environmental impact assessment (EIA) work. They were alsoconcerned that the provincial government was effectively pushing theproject ahead without requiring KRL to be comprehensive in theirimpact evaluation. Especially telling in raising suspicions was theapparent confusion in the initial public meetings over the fact that thequarry would involve a 40-acre site, but KRL had apparently receivedagreement from the provincial government to have exclusive access to4000 acres of Crown land. Given the apparent difficulty many smalllandowners have getting access to Crown land for use as grazing or fortimber, KRL’s ability to gain access to 4000 acres without apparentpublic consultation raised suspicions that much more was plannedthan one glory hole mine (Dubinsky 1991).

The EIA became publicly available in November 1989 (Nolan,Davis and Associates 1989c). The Mi’kmaq dimension was note-worthy in that the initial technical references to matters of Mi’kmaqconcern were in terms of an archaeological evaluation of artifacts or ceremonial material found in the cave and documentation of some petroglyphs. In the language of the EIA, all this became “VEC[Valued Ecosystem Component]-11 Lifestyle—Mic mac site.” In sum-mary, “The Micmac site at the north end of Kelly’s Mountain, aroundwhich significant folklore has been developed, was identified as a keycomponent. Although no physical evidence was found within the caves,it was still felt that they do represent a significant cultural heritage tothe Micmac nation and, therefore, should not be damaged” (Nolan,Davis and Associates 1989c:130). The cave was not evaluated in termsof contemporary spiritual value or culture, although the archival sur-vey of literature, searched to find myths related to the cave, waspassed onto Mi’kmaq representatives, some of whom accompaniedthe company’s researchers to the cave. Nonetheless, because the cavewas two miles from the site of the proposed quarry and consequentlywould not be physically disturbed, it was not, in this technical evalu-ation, considered a possible obstacle to proceeding with the quarry.

Local opponents to KRL in the St Ann’s area coalesced into theSave Kelly Mountain Society (SKMS). Their priority became gettingthe federal government involved in a review process that would allowa full-scale public evaluation of the project. They expected that technical

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evidence would expose the inadequacies of the EIA and what were, to the activists, apparent evasions of the provincial environmentalprocess. Getting the science right, getting an impartial hearing, would,the SKMS was confident, ensure that the quarry would never goahead. Given the scale of the proposal and the fact that oceans are amatter of federal jurisdiction in Canada, federal agencies—includingthe Coast Guard—became involved and a complex process of projectevaluation was triggered. This led to a joint federal and provincialreview of the proposal under the terms of the Nova Scotia Environ-mental Assessment Act and the Federal Environmental Assessmentand Review Process (EARP) being announced in December 1990.The mandate of the duly constituted Environmental Assessment Panelwas to review the proposal and advise the ministers of environment ofCanada and Nova Scotia as to the possible effects on the environment.

Considerable political energy was expended by the quarry oppon-ents to ensure the comprehensiveness of the terms of reference for theassessment. The Union of Nova Scotia Indians (1991) responded tothe opportunity to have public input into the guidelines by suggestingnumerous changes to incorporate Mi’kmaq issues, including both thespiritual concerns regarding Kluskap’s Cave and the recognition ofoutstanding Mi’kmaq treaty rights to the resources of the mountainand surrounding waters. The Mi’kmaq were especially concerned aboutthe migration patterns of fish that spawn in the Bras d’Or through St Ann’s Bay. In December 1991, John Joe Sark, a Mi’kmaq kep’tin ofthe Grand Council from Prince Edward Island, was added to thereview panel to ensure that Mi’kmaq concerns were addressed. Later,another Mi’kmaq specialist was hired as a technical advisor. For theMi’kmaq activists, the delays and the recognition of the Mi’kmaqconcerns in the hearing process were a victory. The tradition of dis-missing their concerns—or, more often, simply ignoring their treatyrights, despite constitutional and repeated court affirmations ofthese—had been broken. In the event, KRL did not finish its technicalevaluation in 1994 and the rest of the review process did not take place.

On the Isle of Harris, RAL’s proposal followed a long history ofquarrying for anorthosite (Mackenzie 1998b:510–511). But, as oppon-ents pointed out, the proposal submitted in March 1991 to Comhairlenan Eilean Siar (the Western Isles Council) bore no relationship in scale or scope to previous applications for planning permission.Output was to average ten million tonnes a year for the next 60 years,effectively gutting the mountain and leaving a hole which wouldextend from 180m below sea level to 370m above and be 2km long and 1km wide (Link Quarry Group 1996:3; RAL 1995:22–26). Theplan was to build a port at Lingerbay to accommodate ships of 60,000tonnes. In the public inquiry into the superquarry on Roineabhal, RALfielded an array of “expert” witnesses, ranging from their own professional


employees (a planner, a geologist, an ecologist), to a Norwegian seacaptain and consultants in the fields of economics, geology, hydrology,environmental impact assessment and landscape architecture. It wastheir testimony, RAL’s solicitors insisted, that carried weight in a plan-ning process. Arguments of “third parties” with “no statutory right” toparticipate in such hearings—arguments based on emotionalism, per-sonal interest or spirituality—could not provide the grounds for “anymaterial finding”, it was asserted (RAL 1995:4, 90). Only professionalpersonnel employed “for their experience and objectivity” could provide“independence” in judgement (RAL 1995:4, 91).

As RAL justified its position through a particular interpretation oftwo pieces of legislation, the Mineral Planning Guidance 6: Guidelinesfor Aggregates Provision on England and Wales (Department of theEnvironment 1994) and the National Planning Policy Guideline: Landfor Mineral Working (NPPG4—published by the Scottish Office 1994),and accorded priority to the former (Mackenzie 1998b), sustainabledevelopment became the political technology through which the case for the quarry was constructed. It proceeded by belittling boththe landscape and society and then promoting the quarry as the onlyroute that would end the “crisis” in which the island found itself.

First, with respect to the environment, damage from the quarry wasminimised and the landscape itself rendered ecologically insignificant.Any local costs were offset by “national” benefit—self-sufficiency inmeeting a demand for aggregate and the conservation of landscapesin England and Wales close to densely populated areas. As McCrone(1992) has demonstrated elsewhere, the interests of England andWales were elided with those of the “nation”, the UK. At the close ofthe inquiry, RAL’s solicitors embellished this argument. For example,they ridiculed the evidence presented by fishermen that pollutedballast water would enter the pristine waters of the Minch (RAL1995:163), and they dismissed as insignificant claims concerning theinternational as well as national significance of eagles and goldenplover and bryophyte species and assemblages (RAL 1995:202). Earlyin the inquiry, the case made by RAL’s witness for landscape designand environmental planning, Moira Hankinson, was crucial in con-structing a picture of minimal environmental cost. Using computer-generated “zones of visual influence” (while acknowledging problemsin using this technique), Hankinson proceeded to quantify the mountain.She used the writings of travellers, novelists and poets from the sixteenthcentury onwards, but omitted work by Gaelic writers and several inter-nationally acclaimed contemporary Scots poets. The highly problematicuse of the work of some writers led her to conclude that the landscapewas scenically insignificant (Mackenzie 1998b).

Second, the case for the massive venture rested on the negativeportrayal of the society and economy of the island. RAL’s solicitors

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referred to “the very depressed state of society in Harris with its dearthof employment and economic activity” (RAL 1995:18). A superquarrywould reverse “the spiral of emigration” and “decades of economicdespair” (RAL 1995:120, 93). If Scotland was not to become “a museumof natural history or folk culture”, and Harris was not to experience“terminal decline” and “economic oblivion”, the solicitors insisted,the superquarry must go ahead (RAL 1995:52, 120, 52). Progressdepended in particular on the provision of jobs for men, as it was they,rather than women, who were seen as anchoring the economy. Onlyunder cross-examination did Peter Wood, RAL’s economic advisor,admit that the “greatest benefits [would] fall outwith Harris” (QBG1995:1). “Local” and “national” became discursive ploys to legitimatethe case for a venture of corporate capital.

In both Cape Breton and the Isle of Harris, corporate interest wasfurthered through recourse to the universality of data derived from“science”—whether this concerned the people, the land or the sea.“Experts” were imported to cast the case for the quarries in languagethat pretended precision, imputing “objectivity” to an exercise thatwas profoundly political. In the case of Harris, mystification of suchconcepts as “local” and “national” was part and parcel of politicalpositioning. And in both places, nature was portrayed as somethingthat could be measured and managed. Sustainable developmentbecame the discursive means through which the “two old enemies—economic growth and preservation of the environment” were reconciledwithout, as Escobar (1995:49) explains, compromising the interests ofcapital. In this discourse, as Escobar (1996:49, 52) indicates, “Natureis reinvented as environment so that capital, not nature and culture,may be sustained”, opening up “a new field of social intervention and control”. Capital advances in tandem with the reinvention ofnature, a discourse of modernity—of which sustainable developmentis merely a recent guise—providing the means through which this isoperationalised.

Roineabhal and Kluskap’s Mountain: Sacred Sites/ScriptsIf the attempt to extend corporate interest over a material resource ismediated through expert discourses of modernity—progress, devel-opment, science—then resistance and processes of cultural recoverymust involve not only reclaiming the land itself but also renegotiatingthe meanings attached to the land. In the discussion that follows, wefocus on the ways in which people in Unama’ki and on the Isle ofHarris have sought to re-establish claims to land to which they considerthey have collective rights through discourses of resistance groundedin epistemologies quite at variance with the modernist project. As weshow, resistance to corporate exploitation is informed by a recalling


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of rights to land that defy “the logic of exchange value” (Castree andBraun 1998:16) and the “disembedding” of local identity (Giddens1991:18) and its replacement by what Hornborg (1994:258) refers toas membership in “supralocal sectors of meaning production”.

Establishing the spiritual significance of each site was a key strategyin asserting claims to the land in question and in establishing theintegral relationship between people and place. In the case of theMi’kmaq, it was central to their recovery of a sense of national identity.In the words of one elder interviewed in 1998:

Kluscap Mountain was different because it was important culturally.Other places of conflict were important for environmental reasons.But Kluscap Mountain was more significant because it threatenedour culture.

Another elder suggested that

The conflict was important since it was the first victory outside areserve. This set a precedent for other conflicts that arose later.

A third said,

This issue was top priority. It was a major point in our community,although the others were important too. Because of the spiritualsignificance this issue was more important. More people are open-minded today about traditional ways as a result of the conflict. Wehave to go back to the past to know where we can go in the future.

Perhaps the most revealing single episode in the controversy interms of the multiple identities in play in the assertion of Mi’kmaqrights, religion, recognition and culture came in 1994, some weeksafter the announcement by KRL that they were again delaying plansfor the quarry due to the “soft markets” in the US. On 20 May, theMi’kmaq drum group Sons of Membertou held a ceremony on the top of Kluscap’s Mountain marking, among other things, the fiftiethanniversary of the battle of Monte Cassino in Italy, in which Mi’kmaqwarriors had served in the allied forces fighting Nazi Germany, and themid-1940s Nova Scotia government policy of “centralization” underwhich Mi’kmaq were forced to move to live on a few central reserves.This ceremony was put in the context of the long history of treaty-making and the rights of religious sovereignty initially codified in theMi’kmaq Concordat with the Vatican, signed in 1610 (see Henderson1997). The site of Kluskap’s Mountain was selected to emphasise thetradition of the “Covenant Chain, which ensures [Mi’kmaq] freedomof worship”, which, in the words of the “Proclamation of SpiritualEquality” prepared for the occasion and signed by the drummers, “is

being threatened by those who fail to understand our Spirituality.They fail to see that Klu’s Kap Mountain is not only the very centre ofour Spirituality but the very heart of our Mi’Kmaq Nation”.

The ceremony also involved the proclamation of a Native park andthe beginning of the construction of Kluskap Kairn to memorialisethose who had fallen in the 400 years of “protracted holocaust” sincewhite settlement began. As the pamphlet explaining the reasons forthe construction of Kluskap Kairn suggested, the People of the Dawnassembled on the mountain to reclaim it on “the Day of Forgiving”and ensure that no more wounds would be inflicted on it. The pamphletnoted the 1940s centralisation policy in Cape Breton, which includedthe removal of Mi’kmaq families from Whycocomagh and Malagawatch,and suggested that the policy “copied a page from the old highlandclearance manuals … when they burned out farms and villages andforcibly moved entire families from their homes”. The violence of theassimilative strategies of the residential schools, which banned the useof the Mi’kmaq language, was also noted, as was the fact that thismodel of reserves was used to establish the apartheid system in SouthAfrica. Although the pamphlet pointed out that apartheid had beenvoted out of existence earlier in 1994 while these policies remained inplace in Canada, an optimistic tone of “forgiving” was nonethelessclear. Mentioning the approval of a new Mi’kmaq language course bythe Cape Breton School board that month, the text asserted that “Theholocaust is over. The language is returning. The healing has begun”.

The rationale for the ceremony and the memorial cairn are linkedto the writings of two Mi’kmaq poets and “a request from themountain itself which was calling out for help … had been speakingthrough the wind to the writers of songs telling the People to end theassault by Kelly Rock Limited which is about to strike at the very heartof the mountain. The proposed quarry site is less than fifty bow lengthsfrom the cave at Cap Dauphin”. “The Mountain Cries” by Shirley KijuKawi and “Muklaqiti” (Place for Brent Goose) by Pauline Bernard aretwo poems evoking the call for help from the mountain. The spiritualbasis of such claims is obvious, as is the importance of integratingspirituality, culture and identity into a series of relations between thenatural and human. Mi’kmaq thinking frequently emphasises theimportant point that the ontological divide between human andenvironment is untenable in its culture; here, the point is given addedspiritual force by the explicit link between the mountain and thesongwriters.

This discussion of the Day of Forgiving ceremony raises questionsof the criteria for political judgement and the role of spirituality inenvironmental controversies. Above all, it directly challenges thepractices of breaking a mountain down into discussions of granite andtons of aggregate and making political decisions within such discursive


parameters. It emphasises that what was once, in the language of theEIA, a cave of “Micmac myths” is now, in the language of the Mi’kmaqdrummers, the symbol of a contemporary assertion of identity, cultureand spirituality. The inescapable political questions of who decideswithin what discursive regime are explicitly linked here to the matterof prior ontological specification; discourse is implicated in the con-struction of the identity that should protect the mountain.

Although the explicit link between contemporary warrior identitiesand the mountain was not made on this occasion (the SMS was not theorganiser of the event), the connection between World War II soldiersand the contemporary warrior component of the SMS in the early1990s was implied. Memories of the fallen in the holocaust suggesthistorical analogies with what Mi’kmaq soldiers were fighting againstin 1944. The connection to Nova Scotia is clear, as the Mi’kmaq gatheredto “keep sacred the memory of the warriors who fell at Monte Cassinoas their homes were being burned in Whycocomagh and Malagawatch”.Local and global, historical and contemporary, spiritual and practicalwere rewoven together here in a rearticulation of Mi’kmaq identitystimulated by the threat to the sacred mountain that is both a symbolof their link to this place and, now, a memorial to the violence ofconquest and dispossession. These constructions of this place are veryobviously epistemologically at odds with the logic of capitalism.

This conceptualisation of the integral relationship between peopleand nature was echoed in local evidence given at the public inquiryinto the proposed quarry at Lingerbay on Harris. The words of theFinal Submission of the Quarry Benefit Group (QBG), formed byresidents of Harris both to keep the community informed about thequarry and—in the event that it went ahead—to ensure maximum localbenefits, are enlightening here:

There is far more to the removal of a mountain and the relocating of a village than cold economics, National and Local GovernmentPolicies, environmental and visual impact … The enjoyment of thenatural environment is an integral part of the island way of life. Nospecial journey has to be made, or days set aside to satisfy man’s [sic]natural desire to take pleasure from the peace and beauty of creation—we live as part of it.… It is not a “holy mountain”, but is certainlyworthy of reverence for its place in Creation. (QBG 1995:4)

Individuals appearing before the public inquiry referred to the “sanctity”of the islands, in particular Harris (Fulton 1994). Recognising that, on Harris, “humans have historically lived in harmony with theirenvironment, because land and sea have to be wooed to yield a living”,another long-time resident spoke of the “all-embracing light, air, spaceand sound which makes the area more and more precious in a world

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where these goods are more and more scarce and fragmented.… [Theislands afford] opportunities of aesthetic and spiritual refreshment(Johnson 1994, 2.6:6–8, 8–9). One of the oldest residents of Lingerbay,Marianne MacDonald, spoke of the quarry in terms of Breitheanas,God’s ultimate judgement on a people (QBG 1994:10). Other localpeople cited biblical references in support of their stand against thequarry (see Maltz 1994–95:806–807). There was particular concernabout the extent to which observance of the Sabbath, an historicallyresilient symbol of cultural distinctiveness and a key marker of socialcohesion on the island, could be protected even with the SundayAgreement negotiated between Comhairle nan Eilean Siar and RAL(Maltz 1994–95:807–809).

But it was Donald MacLeod, Professor of Theology at the FreeChurch College in Edinburgh, and Alastair McIntosh, a Quaker fromthe Isle of Lewis who had invited Herney to the inquiry, who ex-pounded on the theological case against the quarry in detail. Drawinglargely on the early chapters of Genesis, MacLeod spoke of “man’s[sic]” responsibility to the environment as “guardian”, “protector”and “servant”. “In the Judaeo-Christian tradition”, he added,

there is an intimate link between man [sic] and the soil. He is takenfrom the ground; his food is derived from it; he is commanded to tilland to keep it; and he returns to it. This implies a psychological aswell as a theological bond. Although such facts should not be used toendorse naked territorialism they do raise the consideration thatrape of the environment is rape of the community itself. (MacLeod1995:16)

“Torn between their love for the land and their need for jobs”, the people of Harris “face a cruel dilemma”, he continued (1995:17):“Capitalism offers to help them in characteristic fashion: it will relieveunemployment provided the people surrender guardianship of theland (thus violating their own deepest instincts)”.

For McIntosh, the theological key was found in “the concept ofreverence”—a concern for “integrity” and an antithetical position to“the graceless spirit of mere utility” (McIntosh 1994:9–10). For him,proceeding with the quarry would “inexcusably violate the integrity ofCreation” (McIntosh 1994:9–10). More recently, as the superquarryhas once again become the subject of the national press, he has arguedthe case through the metaphor of the Sabbath. “A Sabbath of the Land”,he writes, implies thinking about “conservation” not as some sort ofredundant set-aside, but as part of the enriching and providentiallyproductive deeper meaning of “Sabbath”—where time and space areset apart “in which to draw more present to the presence of God”(McIntosh 2000:4).

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Roineabhal is not a sacred site in the sense of Kluskap’s Mountain.Nevertheless, it is clear that it is part of a landscape of spiritual signifi-cance to many who live on Harris, a position congruent with a longhistory of Gaelic culture in the Highlands and Islands (Hunter 1995;Meek 1974–76). The QBG (1995:8) recognised this in their referenceto the poems and medical knowledge of Iain Gobha na Hearadh andthe writings of his editor, George Henderson, both of whom wereignored by RAL’s landscape architect, Hankinson. Like the numerouspoems of such writers as Hugh MacDiarmid, cited by McIntosh at theinquiry, these reveal the reverence accorded nature and, particularly,mountains and the integrity of people and place. There was, as McIntosh(1994:12–13) makes clear, a link between the sacred and the secular.

This argument contrasts with that of Alesia Maltz (1994–95:830–831),who argues that “the concept of sacred sites is an anathema to Pres-byterians of Harris, smacking as it does of paganism and Catholicism”.It would be closer to the mark, we would argue, to suggest thatparticular places, including mountains, in Harris and elsewhere in theHighlands and Islands may not be singled out as having religious sig-nificance, but that there is abundant evidence of a spiritual relation-ship to place/nature quite congruent with the position expressed byHerney. In other words, a bond exists that goes beyond doctrine anddogma, a bond captured in the writings of Scots poet Kenneth White(1992:173, 174) through the poetics of place: “[I]t’s in it—in those rockpiles—that the poetics lie.… Poetry, geography—and a higher unity:geopoetics”.

Codes of CommunityThe parallels between the discourses of spirituality and the refusal toreduce the question of the superquarry to one of economics on bothsides of the Atlantic are clear. But, as we show in this section of thepaper, in the case of First Nations in Cape Breton—unlike the case onHarris—the struggle that centred on the quarry led to a unity of pur-pose linked to a much wider struggle. As the poststructuralist politicalliterature emphasises, such conflicts as those about the quarries arealways about more than technical definitions and contrasting percep-tions of the likely impacts of “developments”. The terms within whichthe controversies on Harris and Cape Breton were discussed were alsovery much what the controversy was about—not just language, not justthe technical parameters of aggregate tonnages, lobster trap locationsand sight lines. Rather, the poetics matter, and the identities thatinvoke such discourse in making claims to appropriate behaviour areconstitutive—and a constituted part—of this politics. Who speaks, whocan speak and how are irredeemably political.

On Harris, the parameters of struggle within the community becamemore apparent as the public inquiry progressed and in its aftermath.


Divisions that had been made visible by two referenda on the quarryissue—one carried out in 1993 before the inquiry was underway, theother in 1995—demonstrated the extent of this divide. In the first ref-erendum, 62.1% of those voting (60.9% of the electorate) supportedthe initiative. The voting pattern was reversed in 1995, with 67.7%against (82.7% of those eligible voting).

The QBG was instrumental in providing residents of Harris with theinformation that led to this shift. Replacing the Lingerbay QuarryBenefit Group (LQWG) in 1992 subsequent to Comhairle nan EileanSiar’s decision to grant planning permission for the quarry (a positionreversed just before the close of the inquiry), the QBG had as itsgrowing concern the perceived threat to “Hebridean culture andheritage”, whose uniqueness was symbolised through the livelihood ofcrofting, its centrality to the Gaidhealtacht (Gaelic Scotland) and itsstrict observance of the Sabbath. These symbols became markers ofcommunity, constitutive of the community that was in the process ofbeing reimagined in the face of RAL’s rejection of the particularitiesof place. Through them, the QBG resisted being drawn into themodernist debate of jobs versus environment.

In part, resistance was based on a refusal to subscribe to the divisionbetween society and nature implicit in that binary, as has been demon-strated in the earlier discussion of the “spiritual” and the “natural”.The environment was not something “out there” to be preserved orconserved; “nature” was something worked with in the day-to-daystruggle to gain a livelihood. In part, evidence of resistance drawnfrom a different epistemic domain than that of modernity comes fromthe paradigm of owning on which crofting is based. Predating theClearances and the establishment of crofts subsequent to the Battle of Culloden (1746), and central to the widespread resistance thatfollowed (see Devine 1994; Hunter 1976), the notion of duthchascontinues to define islanders’ relationship to the land. Duthchas refersto the hereditary right to land, “the expressed collective belief in theinalienability of land … in the sense of land as their land, an inheritedoccupance, a physical setting in which Highlanders were indissolublytied through continuity of social and material practices” (Withers1988:389). Crofters speak of belonging to the land. “That’s the onlyconnection that is made in relation to people and land … not just land,but the whole concept of belonging to the land, everything that goeswith the land we live on here. These are inherited rights that nobodycan argue with”, stated one (male) crofter in 1997.

Tom Devine (1994:11) notes that this notion was integral to thesocial cohesion on which clanship was based. It had been massivelyviolated from the early eighteenth century onwards, accelerating afterCulloden, as the landed class replaced the system of run-rig1 with landenclosure, displacing people from the land in the establishment of

capitalist relations of production through large-scale sheep farming(Hunter 1976; Withers 1988). On Harris, this entailed the forced move-ment of people from the fertile machair2 of the west and outlying islandssuch as Pabbay to the rocks of the east and Scalpay and, overseas, toCape Breton (Geddes 1955). Congruent with earlier struggle on Harris(see, for example, Robertson 1997), duthchas remains the central“legitimizing notion” (Withers 1988:331) in the struggle for land, andthe language of the Clearances—and Culloden—was frequentlyinvoked at the time of the RAL inquiry (Mackenzie 1998b).

Crofting—and those other boundary markers of “community”recalled during the public inquiry, the Gaidhealtacht and observanceof the Sabbath—are most obviously boundary markers for those resid-ents with generational depth on the island. But the critical point forthe argument here is that these markers are not fixed. Crofting is an activity in which some “incomers” engage. None of these symbolsdefines impermeable boundaries between “islander” and “incomer”,however historically resilient in terms of community identity they maybe. But they do provide the discursive fodder for the negotiation ofpolitical positions, as is evident in the struggle to define a sustainablefuture in the context of the proposal for a superquarry at Lingerbay.

RAL made much of this “division” during the public inquiry, attempt-ing to garner political mileage in its bid to pre-empt alternative visionsof sustainable development by mapping that powerful jobs/environ-ment binary onto that of “islander” or “local”/“incomer”. As CharlesJedrej and Mark Nuttall (1996:20) demonstrate, there is “a powerfulmetaphorical dimension of meaning” to the latter dualism. Categoriesthat are recognised as “elusive”, “contested” and subject to negoti-ation according to social context in other situations become “static”,“absolute” and “natural” in a conflict over a resource (Jedrej andNuttall 1996:53). Referring specifically to the proposed superquarry,these authors (1996:92) note how the binary between locals andoutsiders, and the investment of the notion of locals with “realinterests”, introduces “a powerful material basis” to “sustain the dis-tinction between a community of locals and a collection of outsiders”.Where jobs are scarce and such high levels of out-migration exist thatcommunity structure is under threat, such simplification of acomplexity of social relationships may have substantial local purchase.

This is apparent in the success of the Coastal Quarry LocalSupporters Network (CQLSN) in garnering local support. Establishedin March 1996—nine months after the end of the public inquiry—andin the wake of a succession of visits to the island by John Leivers, anRAL director, the CQLSN has as its remit the correction of “misin-formation” disclosed at the inquiry, informing residents of Harris of“the real facts” of the case. The organisation has maintained a closerelationship with RAL, both in terms of accepting support for funding

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such activities as a mail-out campaign in 1997—assistance initiallydenied by the chair of the CQLSN—and with respect to the draftingof a constitution (Mackenzie 1998:527–528). The relationship has beenmaintained since the takeover of RAL by a French multinational,Lafarge, in 1998, and during the time of uncertainty that has followedLafarge Redland’s court challenge to Minister of the EnvironmentSam Galbraith’s decision to veto the proposal in November 2000.

Letters published by the chair and secretary of the CQLSN in The Stornoway Gazette and intermittent press releases demonstratethe degree to which the CQLSN subscribes to the modernist discourseof RAL. From its early pronouncements, it is evident that the binaryjobs/environment was and remains paramount and underpins adiscourse of sustainable development. The spectre of a deserted St Kilda, that icon of Scottish Natural Heritage, was identified as theonly other option if the jobs from the quarry were not forthcoming (J Mackenzie 1998:4). Environmental fears such as the one aboutballast water were dismissed in language reminiscent of that previouslydeployed by RAL and similarly belittled through the use of quantit-ative indicators. And although it is evident that there is some recastingof the boundaries of “local” and “incomer”, those with “long-termresidence” as well as those “Harris people by birth” being accepted aslegitimate voices in defining the future of the island (J Mackenzie1999:8), the argument continues to pit one constructed group withinHarris against another. There remains a massive simplification ofsocial relations: only those with a long-term interest in the island areconcerned about jobs; others—those with holiday homes, retirementincome, or reliance on well-paid jobs—can afford to be concernedabout the environment (Mackenzie 2002). Community is inventedhere, not in terms of “an alternative framework of sense” (Melucci1988:248), but as part of “a practice of representation” (Braun 2000:26),integral to the process of rendering nature visible to corporate capital.

In Cape Breton, among the non-Mi’kmaq population, a similar dy-namic worked to divide quarry proponents in St Ann’s and English-town. The advocates of the quarry, seeking local employment, werequick to dismiss the legitimacy of the come from aways, frequentlyskilled professionals who would not have any interest in employmentin the quarry. In Englishtown, local politicians and businesspeopleclaimed that a majority of the local population was in favour of thedevelopment, given the promise of employment for one hundredpeople. But, as in Harris, the question of who constituted the communitywas far from simple. Nonetheless, the assumption that community wasthe basis for political action—that what the community wanted matteredas the criteria for judgement—ran through the whole discussion.

Given their language, culture and history of dispossession, it wasnot hard for the Mi’kmaq to see themselves as a distinct community.


And, while there was a broad consensus that Kluskap’s Mountainought to be protected and that the quarry ought not to be established,there were some pointed disagreements about the legitimacy of thetactics adopted by the warriors in apparently threatening violence,blockades and even armed opposition to the development. While thisneeds to be understood in the larger Canadian context of the armedstandoff between Mohawk warriors and the Canadian military at Okain Quebec in 1990, the issue of appropriate tactics relates also to thequestion of who among the Mi’kmaq authorised such action. Herneyclaimed the source of authority for his actions from the traditionalchiefs of the Mi’kmaq people, rather than from any contemporaryelected body. Other participants sometimes suggested that theappropriate authorities were the elected band councils, part of themodern arrangements for administering reserves.

The point here is that opposition to the establishment of the quarryon religious grounds, based on Mi’kmaq traditions and practices nearly(though not entirely) obliterated by generations of dispossession andcultural assimilation, implicitly challenged modern political authorityfor the Mi’kmaq people, who had accepted the band-governancestructures, Christian beliefs and the English language while dismissingthe ways of the past. The reassertion of rights and identities aroundKluskap’s Mountain has led to attempts to resuscitate other Mi’kmaqpractices, festivals and the language itself and, in the process, changedthe understanding of Mi’kmaq identity and what it means to be partof the native community. The Eskasoni Fish and Wildlife Commission,for example, has been actively working on alternative managementplans for the resources in the Bras d’Or (Hipwell 2001). While thecontroversy over the quarry alone is not responsible for the upsurge ofinterest in redressing past grievances, it did galvanise at least some ofthe Mi’kmaq people on Unama’ki and has played an important part in reconstituting Mi’kmaq identity and giving the activists a sense ofconfidence in confronting both the Canadian state and provincialadministration on other issues. This “ethnicization” of Mi’kmaqenvironmentalism marks a turning point in the evolution of Mi’kmaqidentity and their campaigns about other environmental problems onUnama’ki (Hornborg 1998).

Conclusion: Theorising ResistanceOn both the Isle of Harris and Cape Breton, it seems to be the casethat, in the struggles over the proposed coastal quarries, the politicalhas once again escaped the constraining formal structures of politics,to borrow David Slater’s (1997) reformulation of Chantal Mouffe’sideas. The larger social sphere of contestation and struggle has notbeen constrained within the formal boundaries of politics and, in thesecases, the attempt to limit the discussions within the accepted technical

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processes of official administration. In both places, environmentalconflict has been caught up in processes of reimagining community andthe reworking of its boundaries to serve particular political interests.In both places, the struggles bear the marks of particular insertionsinto empire—ironically entwined, as those cleared from Harris becamepart of the process of colonisation in Cape Breton.

In common with processes of cultural recovery elsewhere, resistancehas centred on reclaiming rights to land and on reframing politicaldebate through the contours of symbols deeply embedded in the past.The notions of duthchas in Harris and of Unama’ki in Cape Breton areemblematic of the vocabulary on which an alternative politics, groundedin noncapitalist epistemologies, is envisioned. The past—selectivelyrecalled, as it can only be (for example, Hall 1996; Nora 1989; Samuel1994; Withers 1996)—becomes the vehicle for re-creating the present.As we have shown, such symbolic resources are powerful in terms ofmobilising people locally against what is very clearly capitalist exploitation.

Implicated as such symbols are in a search for authenticity—for anidentity anchored in an epistemology antithetical to that which isbeing resisted—they carry within them, as Said (1993:228–229) demon-strates, the possibilities for an essentialist politics that accepts ratherthan challenges those divisions—of race, gender, religion, degrees of localness—created by imperialism itself. The way beyond suchessentialising—and towards what Donna Haraway (1990:197) refersto as a “politics of affinity”, Jane Flax (1992:460) as a politics of “dis-cursive communities” and Jennifer Barron (2000:103) as a “politics ofarticulation”—Said (1993:229–230) points out, means recognisingthat identity is neither singular nor stable. In other words, the categoryof “local” or “First Nationist” is not exhaustive. It involves a searchfor a politics not dependent on a fixed identity, for one in which it isrecognised that identity is contingent (Butler 1992), that a particularsubject position is constituted through the articulation with othersubject positions (Barron 2000:107).

In significant respects, resistance in both Harris and Unama’kiengaged with such politics of articulation. The QBG drew on idiomsof a collective past that were sufficiently broad to be socially inclusive.Practices of crofting, observance of the Sabbath and even Gaelic—symbolic resources central to the QBG’s case—are not restricted tothose with generational depth on the island. As Anthony Cohen(1985) observed with respect to Whalsay, Orkney, such idioms as thatof crofting carry no essentialist meaning of community but are part ofa “symbolic repertoire” through which people made meaning, a facadeof homogeneity invented to resist external threat. Such publicpresentation of homogeneity masks such axes of social differentiationas those of localness, gender, age, wealth, social position or religion onthe island. Yet clearly, given the degree to which people on Harris

were divided around the question of the quarry, these symbolic resourceswere insufficient to unite the community. What had previously been alatent difference of localness whose porous boundaries shifted accord-ing to political expediency became, through the modernist discoursesof RAL and, later, the CQLSN, far more rigid and visible markers inthe bid to capture the moral high ground of defining a sustainablefuture. When mapped onto the jobs/environment binary, the “meta-phorical force” implicit in the “obviousness” (Jedrej and Nuttall 1996:12)of the categories “islander” and “incomer” became evident and—howeverinaccurate in terms of political positions on the ground—substantialcleavage within the community occurred (Mackenzie 1998b).

When this is compared to the struggle in Unama’ki, the strikingdifference that emerges is that in Cape Breton, resistance was muchmore firmly linked to struggles within the broader Canadian context,particularly those inherent in reimagining political futures (Battiste2000). Despite the potential of the discourses on which it drew tolegitimate such connections, the QBG did not explicitly connect issuesof local significance either with other struggles that were emerging atthis time with respect to community and rights to land in Scotland (for example, see MacAskill 1999) or with reimagining a future withinScotland. The potential of making these connections—so necessary tothe creation of new political spaces, as Magnusson (1996) argues—hasbecome much more feasible, of course, in the intervening years, as thelanguage of social justice, and to some extent environmental justice,holds centre stage with the new parliament.

In contrast, in Cape Breton, the quarry provided a focal point ofagreement for the Mi’kmaq community, which was badly divided on many other matters. It did so, we suggest, because of the way inwhich First Nationists linked the question of the quarry to the issue ofsovereignty—of the recognition of rights to a particular territory. In other words, the Mi’kmaq struggle in Cape Breton was connectedto other territorial claims within Canada (Sparke 1998) and to reimag-ining the future fabric of the political landscape of Canada.

Claims to spiritual values at variance with those of non-First Nation Canadian society were an integral part of the case for self-determination. At first glance, they may appear to run the risk ofbeing an integral element of an essentialist politics or, in Barron’s(2000) words, a politics of representation, dependent on fixed ideas ofcultural difference. As Barron (2000:96) demonstrates, by buying intothe “legitimacy=authenticity=traditionalism equation” and accept-ing the “Native/earth equivalence”, these claims rely on establishedidentities that limit political options, not least by foreclosing possi-bilities of political alliance.

The case for suggesting that this was not so—that Mi’kmaq struggletended towards articulatory politics, and that this is what contributed

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to its success—is evident at two levels. First, to return to Herney’sstory, it was recognised that the struggle for land was intricately linkedto the struggle for the environment. Mi’kmaq activists made the strategicdecision to engage in coalition politics, joining forces on many occas-ions with the SKMS. While not assuming homogeneity of concernswith non-First Nations people in the SKMS, they entered a strategicalliance with SKMS around particular and common goals and con-cerns, as Barron (2000:104) suggests was the case for the LabradorInnu when confronted with a parallel situation. Similarly to the Innu,the Mi’kmaq politics of affinity was contingent on their decision toarticulate their claim to land and sovereignty to the concerns of environ-mentalists. By adopting a position where difference was accepted as multiple, they avoided what Barron (2000:110) refers to as “theessentialized Otherness of more representational politics”. In sodoing, they were able to connect their particular struggle against thequarry, not only to the multiple struggles of First Nations people vis-à-vis the Canadian state that have proliferated following theDelgamuuqw decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1997, butalso to those in Canadian society who are motivated by principles ofenvironmental justice. The Mi’kmaq connected a specific local struggleto a re-imagining of the Canadian state.

Second, evidence provided by Herney about his own painfulstruggle to come to terms with his background supports the claim thatwhat was emerging was indeed a politics that was not reliant on fixednotions of identity. Ardent First Nationist that he was, he nonethelesscame eventually to realise the personal cost of a politics of resentmentdirected at non-Mi’kmaq people. Subsequently, he discovered thatone of his great-great-grandmothers was in fact not Mi’kmaq, but hadbeen a Scots settler. He confronted his relatives, who had kept thisfact from him through his period of intense activism. Asked pointedlyabout the reasons for their silence about his ancestry, they responded,“But would you have listened and believed us if we had told you?”Herney’s very courageous and immensely poignant public concessionin the Stone Angel Café that he would not have listened summariseselegantly both the dangers of essentialist thinking and the need toconstantly put in doubt the most valued political identities on whichstruggles are based. It reinforces the crucial point in this paper: thatidentities are contingent resources in political struggle, but at the sametime unavoidably necessary strategies of resistance to the encroach-ment of capitalist resource extraction in many peripheral places.

AcknowledgmentsThe authors would like to acknowledge the funding from the SocialScience and Humanities Research Council of Canada that made theresearch on which this paper is based possible. We would particularly


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like to thank Madeleine Dion Stout, Stephen Augustine and KenFrances, who worked with us in Ottawa in framing and guiding theresearch carried out in Cape Breton, and Kari McLeod and BillHipwell, who did much of the field research there. We also wish toexpress our appreciation of the insightful and detailed comments of Chris Gibson and two anonymous reviewers on an earliermanuscript.

Endnotes1 The run-rig system of agriculture was one in which social relations were intricatelyintertwined with agricultural practice. Located in the inbye land, rigs were long, narrow,raised strips of land, built up with soil from intervening hollows and by other mattersuch as kelp. Use rights were organised such that each tenant had equitable access toland of different agricultural value. The land was worked collectively. See R J Brien,1989, The Shaping of Scotland (Aberdeen, University of Aberdeen Press).2 Machair refers to the gently sloping strip of land along parts of the west coast of theHighlands and Islands of Scotland formed by “wind-blown calcareous shell-sand … [It] incorporates a mosaic of species-rich grassland, fens and lochs, with dunes towardsthe sea and blackland (a mixture of peat and sand) further inland … The grassland hastraditionally been maintained by low intensity agriculture”. (Joint Nature ConservancyCommittee, 1995, Council Directive on the Conservation of natural habitats and wildfauna and flora (92/43/EEC). Prepared by the JNCC on behalf of English Nature,Countryside Council for Wales and Scottish Natural Heritage.)

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Moving Mountains: Community and Resistance in the Isle of Harris, Scotland, and Cape Breton, Canada