Gaelic In Scottish History and Culture

Culture is that set of mutually understood and pervading beliefs, practices, values, institutions and ways of seeing and understanding that allows a society to operate. It is that momentum which drives it in a certain direction according to its own set of principles and priorities. All the aspects of culture - belief systems, political ideologies, language, the arts, practices of birth, marriage and death, economics and consumption - inter-relate and are locked together into an interdependent web. Not a strand of the web can be moved or altered without changing the entire pattern. We might further visualise the multi-dimensional parameters of culture extending as a set of concentric circles, moving out from the nuclear family, to the extended family, to the community, to the region, to the nation, and so on.

Although people do interact with culture to reshape its parameters, culture has a great deal of inertia against change, and most people are to the greatest extent the products of their culture: we absorb the culture we are raised in, take most of its tenets as obvious and axiomatic and ‘succeed’ according to how well we work within the bounds of its institutions. Beliefs and myths are extremely hard for individuals to displace once they have been accepted within a society, regardless of their origins or basis.

Many people confuse race and culture. Although physical features may make a person stand out in a society of a different racial background, there is no reason to think that characteristics such as morality, intelligence, discipline, motivation, musicality or verbosity are the result of genetics: they are rather the result of our social conditioning.

Culture and race are independent characteristics. Having a Scottish surname indicates only that some previous ancestor was a Scot, it does not imply that every bearer of the name is Scottish - a person with the surname ‘MacDonald’ is just as capable of being English, American, French or Native American as being Scottish (real examples exist in all of these cases). Gaelic or Scottish ethnicity is not a racial inheritance: it is the result of being raised in an environment which is ethno-linguistically Gaelic or Scottish.

In anticipation of the issues to be raised regarding Scotland, there can be little room for argument that, for whatever historical circumstances or geographical accidents, the primary source of assault on Scottish culture generally, and Gaelic culture especially, has been from English culture, through myriad channels and methods of influence. The history of Scotland has been summarised as a Celtic nation gradually Anglicised.

This is not a racial conflict: Scots and English are of a common North-Western European stock. Nor is it an issue of good people vs. evil people: no society has a monopoly on ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people. Nor is it a matter of a few Scots causing their own downfall by themselves, for, although Scots have acted as agents or conduits of English Imperialism for their personal gain, they themselves would gave been incapable of cultural genocide without the force of an antagonist behind them. Nor is it the case that all English people have been agents of English Imperialism, and all Scottish people defenders of their mother culture: there are plenty of examples of English people who have consciously sided with the Scottish nation, and Scottish people who have acted as agents for the English cause for their own personal gain. This is simply the conflict that inevitably comes when two cultures with irreconcilable principles encounter each other on the same ground. Regardless of the actions of individuals, whose ethnic origins are irrelevant, what we consider are the larger scale historical dynamics of a nation: its language, culture and way of life. The origins and dynamics of social change need to be sought not only in obvious sectors such as warfare and politics, but also in other institutions and elements of the cultural matrix such as religion, education, law and economics. We must look at the influences and changes brought about by such institutions, and for each of them ask: Who instigated the change? What effects and side-effects does the change have? What people and culture benefit from the change, and who loses?

Before the time of the Roman Empire, Celtic peoples occupied a very large swathe of Europe, including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Northern Italy, Northern Spain, part of Galicia and of course Britain and Ireland. This common Celtic heritage of Europe was in fact the theme of a major European exhibition in Venice in 1991, intended to provide some historically verified ideological glue to the modern concept of European unity that the European Union is now straining for with great difficulty.

Just what do we mean by ‘Celtic’, then? It is primarily a linguistic definition: ‘Indeed this definition by language is the only useful one, for by reference to it one can speak meaningfully of Celtic archaeology or Celtic religion. But if we do not admit language as the criterion, these terms involve a circular argument. This does not mean that there was no confusion.’ Material goods and religious practice, for example, may not always align exactly with the linguistic criterion. However, especially in later times, we can see how useful a marker language truly is. Again, we must not think of Celts in racial terms, as they comprise many different racial types, but in ethno-linguistic terms.

Celtic society has always been intensely local, and although the term ‘tribal’ does not have all of the appropriate resonances, it is not far off the mark. However, we can also see long-term continuities and large-scale groupings, especially in the Gaelic context. The word Gall in Gaelic means a non-Gael, and it originated from the old name of France, ‘Gaul’. It was later applied to all manner of Germanic invaders: the Vikings, the Anglo-Normans, and the English, but it was never used for any of the insular Celts, who were usually referred to by more specific ethnic names.

The Celtic language family is a member of the larger Indo-European language family, closely related to the Romance family, but with a number of distinctive features of its own. The ancient pre-Roman peoples of Ireland and Britain must have been able to understand each other’s languages to a great extent, despite dialectic variations such as the well-known P-Q linguistic phenomenon that differentiated, for example, the Irish Gaels from the Picts and Welsh.

A great many practices and patterns of land use originated in the early Iron Age or well before, and continued until the cultural obliteration of the 18^th and19^th century. Many cultures around the Atlantic used feannagan (insultingly called ‘lazy-beds’ in English) for some 4,000 years, a technique very well suited to environmental conditions. Another ancient phenomenon common to Ireland and Scotland was the use of artificial islands built in lochs, crannogs, built from the Neolithic Age onwards and occupied in some cases up to the eighteenth century. Legends record comings and goings between Ireland and Scotland from the most ancient times, and archaeological remains confirm that trade and cultural contact were commonplace. A growing body of evidence indicates a strong continuity of settlement patterns and population all over Scotland and the Western Isles, from before the Iron Age up to the Clearances, despite occasional disturbances from Romans, Vikings and Anglo-Normans.

For some reason - some people say the expansion and depredation of Celtic marauders themselves - the Romans developed a highly disciplined and centrally organised military machine that began to deal with these provincial Celtic kingdoms one by one. Although a few desperate small alliances were attempted, they did not anticipate or even conceptualise the cold, mechanical efficiency with which the centralised Roman killing machine operated.

Julius Caesar’s political reputation had been greatly boosted by his military victories over the Celts of Gaul (modern France) whose barbarous manners, vilified in his propaganda, were a threat to Roman ‘civilisation’. Many Celtic peoples and dynasties fled to Britain and Ireland in exile, which was no doubt an excuse for Caesar’s initial expedition to Britain in 55 BC.

Except for much of Wales and parts of Cornwall, Roman control had been established as far north as the current Scottish border by 60 AD. Southern Britain was subject to Romanisation, probably including a total loss of their Celtic language.

Roman chroniclers in the third century called the people of Ireland the Scotti, possibly meaning ‘raiders’ on account of their sea-borne raiding on Imperial turf. Ireland was in fact called Scotia at this time. Marauding Scots and Picts, sometimes in conjunction, frequently harassed Roman Britain, carrying away goods and slaves, such as the famous St. Patrick. Fortunately, neither the Picts nor Irish became dependent on the Roman infrastructure, for by 410 the city-states of Roman Britain were informed that they should look after themselves, and the southern and eastern coasts were quickly engulfed in a flood of Anglo-Saxon invaders.

For centuries even before the birth of Christ, Gaels had been exploring and inhabiting the lands in the Irish Sea, including areas contained in the nation we now know as Scotland. It is important to realise that the modern national geographical boundaries of Ireland and Scotland did not exist, only a narrow channel of water which had been navigated and familiar for centuries through constant trade and contact.

According to later legend, three colonies in Argyll were established, and their continued success eventually led to independence from the parent kingdom in Ulster called Dal Riada. Gaelic culture and language spread from this power base, but especially through the influence of the Christian church. Christianity has always been expansionist in nature, and Irish Gaels were particularly zealous missionaries.

Gaels secured a lasting success in Scotland when Dal Riada under Kenneth Mac Alpine, became merged with the Pictish kingdom of Fortrui, which had already consolidated Pictish authority to a large degree. It is probable that successive threats by Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings necessitated unity earlier in Scotland, and that the spread of the Church by Gaelic missionaries expedited cultural and political union where it did not exist before. Thus we already see a momentum towards a centralised power structure in Scotland which was never permanently established in Ireland. Unlike ‘tribal’ Ireland in which invaders were dissipated and absorbed, the existence in Scotland of a hierarchical infrastructure gave incoming élite in later times a means of controlling and manipulating the entire country.

We should stop for a moment and take assessment of Gaelic culture of this time. During this period of Germanic invasions all over Europe - a period commonly known as the ‘Dark Ages’ - Gaeldom enjoyed a Golden Age. Gaelic society was already highly sophisticated when it absorbed Classical learning . This synthesis resulted in a flourishing of literature, art and philosophy. Gaelic law was recorded by scribes from about the seventh century, exceedingly detailed and complete, reflecting the complexity of Gaelic society at the time. Many Anglo-Saxon nobles came to Gaeldom to receive education, and carried back with them ideas which affected English and European literature. Gaelic missionaries established centres of learning all over Europe, and earned a reputation as scholars of great ability.

The Gaelic king Malcolm II fixed the Southern border of Scotland (which survives to this day) after the Battle of Carham in 1018, giving Gaelic its widest extent in Scotland, and extending even into Cumbria and Northumbria. (See Map A). Gaelic was the language of learning, the church and the administration of the state_7.Little wonder, then, that the Latin name Scotia was no longer used to mean Ireland, but the kingdom we now know in English as Scotland, or in Modern Gaelic as Alba. The war cry of Scottish soldiers, used in war against the Vikings in 903, against the Danes of York in 918 and against the English in 1138, was Albanaigh, Albanaigh, an indication of the symbolic strength of the Gaelic identity of the Scottish nation at this time.

Gaelic place-names and place-name elements exist all over Scotland and give testimony to the extent that Gaelic was once spoken in Scotland. Words such as loch, beinn (‘hill’, sometimes Anglicised as Ben), glen, cill (‘church’, sometimes anglicised as Kil(l), as in Kilmarnock), achadh , (‘field’, sometimes ‘ach’, as in Achindinny) are Gaelic and are very typically Scottish.

Meanwhile, the Vikings started settling in the islands and western coast in the 9^thcentury. Although the culture and language of Orkney and Shetland remained Norse, at least partly due to their geographical proximity to Scandinavia, the mixed-race Gaelic-Vikings of the Western Isles were being absorbed into Gaelic culture by the mid-twelfth century. Norway officially returned control of the Hebrides to the Scottish crown in 1266. From these powerbases in the isles and Western coast, the same area as the original embryonic Dal Riada from which Scotland itself was born, emerged a principality known in English as ‘the Lordship of the Isles’ (although in Gaelic the grander title Rí Innse Gall was used for the ruler).

This process of Gaelicisation was not just a geographical accident, but a conscious allegiance on behalf of the mixed-race Norse-Gaelic leaders of the time, again demonstrating the strength of Gaelic culture and the advantage which they saw in assimilation into Gaelic culture. Although Somerled, the leader of the Hebridean Gaels, had a Norse name, he traced his ancestry back to leaders of Dal Riada.

Except for a number of place-names and words relating to marine activity, Norse made little impact on Gaelic language and culture as a whole - this is in great contrast to the impact of Norse upon the English language, in which even the personal pronouns were replaced. In fact, the Vikings are remembered in Gaelic tradition and story as foreign marauders.

At the same time that Gaelic culture was still expanding across the Scottish kingdom, King Malcolm III married the young English princess Margaret. She introduced English biases in the royal court and foreign influences within the structure of the state.

The plain fact is that during the reign of Malcolm and Margaret what has been described as a shift to an English way of life was deliberately planned and, as far as possible, implemented. The court became English and Norman-French in speech and the loss of status which that entailed for Gaelic in Scotland was profound and permanent. This aggressive Anglicising policy was continued by the sons of Malcolm and Margaret, and intensified in response to the fierce Gaelic reaction which followed King Malcolm’s death in 1093, and which flared up intermittently until the early thirteenth century. In Moray, one of the most active centres of Gaelic resistance, there was ruthless displacement of population. In no way can this be described as accidents of history.₈

King David continued this legacy in his reign which began in 1124. (See map B ). Many foreign nobles were enlisted when he infused Scotland with feudalism, although native nobles also made their way into the structure. Some of the foreign nobles were quickly Gaelicised, as they were in Ireland. However, the establishment of towns and trading centres, burghs, populated by English and Flemish settlers by royal invitation, was much more difficult for Gaelic society to counteract, as these were usually on the more productive areas of the East coast and within easy access of the growing mercantile economy of continental Europe.

The power and wealth of the burghs was to grow, boosting their prestige and influence, and reinforcing Anglo-Norman connections with England. Gaelic was still the predominant culture in Scotland, although the Anglo-Norman-Flemish admixture, called 'Inglis', was displacing Gaelic on the eastern coast and in the south-east. But when Alexander III was crowned king at Scone in 1249, a Gaelic seanchaidh still recited his genealogy in Gaelic at his inauguration.

When Alexander III died in 1286, the line of kings emanating from Malcolm III was at an end and the kingdom in crisis. Edward I of England became entangled in the affair, and attempted to place a new king in Scotland subservient to him. Robert the Bruce assumed the mantle of kingship in Scotland. Although his father’s ethnic ancestry was Anglo-Norman, his mother was of the Gaelic aristocracy. He was raised in Carrick when it was ethnically Gaelic and his dedication to the Gaelic identity of Scotland was demonstrated frequently. In 1308 he held a parliament at Ardchattan that was entirely in Gaelic. The most celebrated Scottish political document, The Declaration of Arbroath, comes from this time (1320), and boasts proudly of the Gaelic origin legend of the Scottish nation. In 1315 when sending over his brother, Edward, to help the Irish, Bruce sent a letter stating ‘we and you, and our people, free since ancient times, share the same national ancestry, and are urged to come together more eagerly and joyfully in friendship by the same common language, and by custom…’

Both the Clan Donald (the leaders of the Lordship of the isles) and the Clan Campbell gained from the support they gave Robert the Bruce during the War of Independence. It is indeed difficult to emphasise the importance of the Lordship of the Isles. Under this leadership, the Western Isles and Highlands enjoyed a time of great peace and stability.

(See map C). Centres of learning and art flourished, and links with Ireland were re-established due to their support for traditional culture and arts.

Anglicisation continued apace in the burgh-lands and in the Scottish court, however. Our first mention of a Highland -Lowland divide, although no doubt rather exaggerated_,9 appears in the writings of John Fordun in 1380:

The manners and customs of the Scots vary with the diversity of their speech. For two languages are spoken amongst them, the Scottish and the Teutonic… the race of Scottish speech inhabits the Highlands and outlying islands… Isodore writes that the Scottish nation is that, originally, which was once in Ireland, and resembles the Irish in all things.

This is a theme that we commonly see in middle ages, that of a nation being split between its Gaelic origins and its increasingly Anglicised tendencies, bolstered by economic, religious and political ties with England. This is clearly illustrated in the case of language and the names given to language. Up until about the 15^th century, the languages were called ‘Scots’, meaning Gaelic, and ‘Inglis’. Then the momentum towards an Anglo-Saxon identity among the nobility became so strong that ‘Scots’ came to mean Anglo-Lallans and ‘Erse’ meant Gaelic. Many writers, however, continued to confess the precedent of the Gaels in Scotland and some writers mourned and scorned the adoption of English manners and language in preference to Gaelic norms:

…as our eldaris, quilkis dwelt continewally merchand with the realm of Ingland, lernit the Saxonis toung, be frequent jeoperdeis and chance of batall, sustenit mony yeris agains thaim; sa the pepill, now present in Scotland, he tint(lost)baith the langage and maneris of writing usit sum time be our elderis, and hesnow ane new maner of writingis and langage: howbeit, the Hieland hes baiththe writingis and langage they had afore, mair ingenius than ony othirpepill… we began to rute thair langage and superflew (luxurious) manerisin oure brestis; throw quhilk the virtew and temperence of our eldarisbegan to be of litil estimation amang us. Than we war gevin, efter thearrogance and pride of Inglismen…11

The polarisation between and Anglo-Scot was increasing and leading not only to an open tension between the two, but an unwillingness to acknowledge that Gaelic laid the very foundation of Scotland. This is illustrated, for example, in the famous poetic flyting between Walter Kennedy, a Gaelic poet from Carrick, and the Lallans-Scots-speaking William Dunbar in 1508.₁₂ Dunbar denigrates his foul ‘Irish’ speech and manners, and boasts of Inglis’ superiority, while Kennedy claims that Gaelic is the true mother language of all Scotland.

Many of the most powerful in both England and Scotland by this time set their ambitions at wiping out differences between peoples within Britain in order to gain more power in a united kingdom. A letter from the English Privy Council in 1559 expressed the desire that ‘this famous isle may be conjoined in heart as in continent, with uniformity of language, manners and conditions.₁₃ Many of the Scottish nobility had already long been Anglicised: by the sixteenth century even Lowland Scots had long been, in the eyes of nearly all who used it, ‘English’ and not ‘Scots’.

The Scotland which mattered politically and economically was consciously Anglo-Saxon, and would have indignantly repudiated the suggestion that it was anything else.₁₄

Revolts against the authority of James IV and intrigues with the English king gave the king reason to declare the Lordship of the Isles outlawed in 1493. Although several insurrections to reinstate the Lordship were to follow during the next fifty years, the Clan Donald and their followers were broken and destabilisation was achieved, the beginning of the period known in Gaelic as Linn nan Creach, ‘The Age of Feuds and Plundering’.

In contrast to the conservative nature of the followers of Clan Donald, some clans, most notably the Campbells, tended to be ‘progressive’ and in alignment with the central government. Such clans were employed as agents to enforce policies upon those more devoted to the old Gaelic order. The use of such agents ensured that no Gaelic unity would coalesce to threaten central authority.

Religion was a powerful means of changing society and expressing a whole spectrum of beliefs and values: politics and religion have always been closely related. The ‘progressive’ clans adopted Protestantism soon after it was recognised by the Scottish parliament in 1560 (although we have no means of knowing how clan members reacted at this time). Although Protestantism fuelled a number of significant intellectual developments in the Gàidhealtachd - most notably the first printed book in Gaelic in 1567 (the first in any Celtic language) and the incentive for wide-spread literacy - it also opened a further channel for the propagation of English cultural and linguistic norms.₁₅Little wonder that Protestant ministers were among the most zealous Hanoverian (Pro-Union, anti-Jacobite) agents during the Jacobite Risings.

When James VI of Scotland became James I of the new United Kingdom in 1603, he immediately moved to London and set about ‘unifying’ his kingdom by aggressively attacking non-English elements - the natural enemies of union would be lumped together as papists, Irish, Borderers and Highlanders.₁₆ Expeditions to conquer and occupy the Highlands were planned, although the attempt to plant lowlanders in Lewis met with failure. Addressing Parliament in 1604, King James triumphantly declared that God had ‘united these two Kingdomes…in Language, Religion and similitude of manners’ - despite the fact that Gaelic still covered about half of Scotland’s land mass and population, and that religious orders in Scotland were vastly different to those of England. (See map D).

In 1609 Ulster was ravaged and colonised by Protestant subjects, not only a loss to the Gaels of the province itself but also a breaking of a crucial link between Irish and Scottish Gaeldom. ₁₈ At the same time, a number of Highland chiefs were kidnapped and forced to agree to the Statutes of Iona, a set of laws designed to Anglicise Gaelic society and to bring it forcibly under control of central government. Among other things, it required all men of wealth to send their children to the lowlands to be educated in English, adopt and support the Protestant faith, abandon their weapons and a number of their specifically Gaelic institutions, such as poets_{. 19}

An aggressive plan of establishing Protestant schools specifically designed to root out theGaelic language and all signs of ‘Popery’ was passed into law in 1616, ₂₀and this explicitly anti-Gaelic agenda of education has been continued right into the present:

Nothing can be more effectual for reducing these countries to order, and making them usefull to the Commonwealth than teaching them their duty to God, their King and countrey and rooting out their Irish language, and this has been the case of the Society so far as they could, ffor all the Schollars are taughtin English. ₂₁

…and by reason of their barbarous language can have noe manner of Communication with others and are upon those two accounts altogethr as Incapable of being employedin husbandry, fishery, manufactories or handycrafts or of settleing inour foraigne plantations. ₂₂

Pushed into a corner and knowing the recent plight of Ireland, at least one chief, Iain Mùideartach of Clan Ranald, made some emergency plans for retaliation, asking the Pope for support in 1626. Although his document is framed in religious terms, as was so often the case on the surface, it is clear that he is describing a cultural confrontation:

…the darkness I mean of error, which the turbulent detested followers of the accursed faithless Calvin had introduced, through the violence and tyranny of the Council of Scotland, through lying pseudo-bishops and fraudulent ministers… It is certain and evident (since it is already known in the council of Scotland that we have received the true faith) that we shall be compelled to the renunciation of it or to the loss of temporal goods and life, or both, as has frequently happened, not only to Scots but also to many Irish…our country and islands … are far removed from the incursions and outrages of the English to whom we have never at all given obedience. All the Gaelic-speaking Scots and the greater part of the Irish chieftains joined to us by ties of friendship… ₃₂

Although a great many of the Statutes were ignored by many clan chiefs, who were in practical terms beyond easy access of central authorities, the effects of Anglicisation and a split of loyalties began to be felt in Gaeldom. By the middle 1600sclan chiefs were already being criticised by the poets --- spokespersons for the Gaelic community --- for being more interested in spending their clan fortunes on foreign fashions than in maintaining traditional Gaelic values and duties.

Just the magnetic pull of wealth and power on the Gaelic chieftains to join the British ascendancy --- by definition of Anglo-Centric --- was enough to cause some to change their cultural and linguistic allegiance, and thus to disown their Gaelic identity and join those who saw it as barbaric and a threat to ‘British’ unity. In 1705 the Gaelic poet Maighstir Seathan MacGilleathain exalted the role of Gaelic in the formation of Scotland and the education of Europe, but lamented:

₁₂ see James Kinsley, ed, The Poems of William Dunbar, 1979, Clarendon Press.

₂₂ Some consideration to induce the people of South Britain to Contribute to the Designe of propagating Christian Knowledge to the Highlands and Isles of North Britain and of Civilising the Barbarous Inhabitants of these parts of the Kingdome, 1708, in Withers, p57.

T he great conflict between the two cultures is symbolically embodied in the Jacobite Risings of 1715 and 1745, and in the cataclysmic end at Culloden in 1746. There were many different ingredients in these events, and as many different approaches for analysing the dynamics --- as an inter-dynastic struggle, as an internal Civil War with Scots on both sides, as a small act in a wider European religious conflict, or as an exploitive venture by an ambitious opportunist. From a broad British-European perspective, perhaps all of these and others are equally valid.

These various aspects, and the ethnic origins of the people employed on various sides of the struggle, have misled many modern historians and popular commentators into dismissing the significance of Culloden in the history of the Highlands and into projecting their own modern biases upon Highlanders of that time. ₂₅Many modern historians with arrogant hindsight dismiss the venture with pejoratives such as ‘doomed’ and ‘ill-fated’, but contemporary Gaelic accounts display no such pessimism --- the prince was portrayed as the prophesied Messiah arriving to free his people from the oppression of a hostile foreign government.

Clans were indeed often torn between the sympathy and support of clansmen for the Prince and the fear of chieftains to gamble wealth and lives fighting against the forces of the central government. Little wonder that many abstained from the conflict, or even shrewdly chose to ally against the Jacobites. But one only needs to read the large corpus of Gaelic lore, songs and tales from that time to see that Gaelic tradition itself portrays the Rising as a cultural conflict between the forces of Gaels and the English, regardless of who was utilised to act it out:

…the Rising of 1745 was the natural reaction of the Jacobite clans and their sympathisers in the Highlands against what had been since the coming of William of Orange in 1690 a calculated official genocide campaign against the religion of many and the language of all Highlanders, and that however inopportune the choice of the moment of the Rising may seem to have been, it must have appeared to many men and women as the last possible chance to throw off the Whig yoke. ₂₆

The political orientation of these songs [from 1745] is overwhelmingly Jacobite and anti-Hanoverian… Indeed it is noteworthy that even in areas where the leaders were staunchly Hanoverian, such as Argyll and the Reay country, poets like Duncan Bàn Macintyre or Rob Donn Mackay followed an ambivalent or openly Jacobite line. ₂₇

In the immediate aftermath of the defeat at Culloden in 1746, all Gaels were subjected to murder and plunder by the English forces regardless of their stance on Jacobitism. The social structure of Gaeldom was systematically dismantled. Estates were forfeited from clan chiefs known or suspected to be against the central government. Now, with a new carefully pruned élite in place in the Gàidhealtachd, it became much more common for Gaels to complain that their overlords and ‘chieftains’ lacked Gaelic or in fact anything to enable them to understand their tenantry.

The defeat of the Jacobite army at Culloden became burned into the collective memory of Gaelic speakers everywhere, irrespective of religion or political persuasion… Important as the battle was at the time in terms of human loss, it became even more important as a symbol --- the symbol of something like the end of independent Gaelic action. ₂₈

This destruction of native Gaelic institutions allowed foreign elements and anti-Gaelic forces to gain more control and dominance in the Gàidhealtachd than ever before. Discussion of religion in the Highlands is difficult, as a number of different agendas are at play at different levels at different times and places. ₂₉ At this juncture, however, the Church took on a role of unchallengable authority it could never previously have had, often acting as an agent of the Anglocentric state.

These institutions in Scotland need to be understood not just in religious terms but as political tools for social control. As contemporary parallels in the rest of Europe are not easily found, this role is not inherent in the religion of the Church itself but is specific to the English Imperial context. Although some exceptional ministers were keen Gaelic scholars and activists for their congregations, they had little power to mediate the tremendous forces against Gaeldom.

Meanwhile, having removed the final internal threat to English supremacy in Britain, having achieved significant victories abroad and profiting greatly from a burgeoning Empire, English nationalism was euphoric. It defined the Teutons (i.e., the Anglo-Saxons) as the master race, and the Celts and dark peoples as servile races. ₃₀This myth of racial inferiority was applied to the Irish and the Scottish Gaels, but what about the Scottish Lowlanders? The Scottish élite had long been self-consciously Anglo-Saxon and had been exerting pressure on Lowlanders to Anglicise their speech, manners and religion. By convincing the Lowlanders that they had been members of the ‘master race’ all along and allowing them to wash their hands of their ancient relationship with the Gaels, they could be used as pawns in a game of divide and conquer.

Although it may seem at first ironic that Lowland Scots, themselves victims of English aggression, could be so successfully used against their Highland counterparts, it is a truism of Imperialism that existing rivalries should be exploited to keep factions from joining against a common enemy, and that the work of Imperialism is best done by rival factions and internal agents rather than by the authors of Imperialism itself. It is also a truism of human nature that oppressed groups often seek a group lower on the pecking order on which to take out their frustration.

Lowland Scots were reassured that as Teutons they were not mere helots of an English Empire, nor a subject colonial people, but a branch of the dominant race which rightly belonged at the imperial high table… Teutonism fostered British integration and enthusiasm for imperialism through identification with the greater Saxon mission. ₃₁

The rise of Romanticism, the myth of the Noble Savage and the emotional Celt, gave an ideological rationale for pruning the obsolete and impractical Celt out of existence, as according to this myth, they could no longer exist in a world of inevitable Anglo-Saxon progress.

…the Celtic revival, while sympathetic to Gaelic culture, merely reinforced its disconnection from the reality of industrialisation and empire. It relegated Celtic life to a protected reservation set apart from the main highways of modernity…₃₂

Land in the Gàidhealtachd was no longer run as a subsistence-level, local economy but as a cash economy operating within an expanding English empire. Although small scale evictions and immigration occurred immediately after Culloden, large segments of the population were forcibly removed in the 1800s when land-owners discovered that sheep and deer were far more profitable than human tenants. Gaels were attached to the land of their ancestors in a most profound way, and their brutal removal is a trauma from which neither Gaeldom nor the now empty landscapes of the Highlands and Islands have yet recovered:

The language and lore of the Highlands being treated with despite has tended to crush their self-respect, and repress that 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 should fight for? ₃₃

An agitation for land rights, with strong links with similar movements in Ireland,₃₄ eventually secured some rights for those Gaels who remained in 1886, but not until after they had been pushed off the best ground and into the worst. By this time a huge haemorrhage of people, talent and self-confidence had taken place, and an inferiority complex lodged firmly in the minds of Gaels.

Although social and psychological blows resulted from the Clearances, the anti-Gaelic stance of educational institutions reinforced the dogma of the ‘inevitability and necessity’ of learning English to the exclusion of Gaelic. The1872Education Act required all children to attend school, but made no provision for Gaelic: education, English and achievement became synonymous. ₃₅The psychological conditioning of education has done more than anything else to alienate Gaels from their language and culture:

There is nothing worse than having the epithet "Heilant" hurled at one. That is one of the results of the Scottish educational system. There has always been some subtle insinuation that Highland and barbaric are synonymous… At present the only remedy seems to be to close every school in the Highlands for ten years and send Highland children to be educated in the Scandinavian countries, in Germany, France and Italy. If something of that nature were practicable, one thing is certain: there would be hell to pay if these children returned to Scotland after an absence of ten years as monoglot English speakers. As well as that they would learn to value language and nationality. They would return as very good Highlanders with a European outlook. ₃₆

The authorities now did not need to do anything explicit to exterminate Gaelic - the social institutions which supported Gaelic had been eradicated, the society associated with poverty and backwardness, and all means of advancement required assimilation into an English world. Although individuals may have participated for their personal gain within an English Empire, their energies made little contribution to Gaeldom or Scotland generally, but to the expanding English world. Lacking opportunities within a Gaelic subculture and tired of being persecuted on account of their language, it is perhaps not surprising that many stopped transmitting the language, traditions and values of the old Gaelic world, accepted the myth that their culture was inferior and conformed to English requirements.

Even when Gaels where exiled overseas, they faced the same intolerant Anglo-centric prejudices which characterised the imperial dynamic wherever it went. The Gaelic-speaking communities, which were once very sizeable in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, and other areas, have all but disappeared.

The census of 1881 in Scotland showed the effects of the many negative forces against Gaelic when 254,415 people or 6.84% of the population stated that they spoke the language. The 1901 census recorded 28,106 monoglots, but the decline postwar was rapid. The disproportionate casualties of Scottish soldiers in two World Wars emptied many islands and glens of their youth, and harsh economic structures dictated by a distant, unsympathetic government caused many communities in the Gàidhealtachd to collapse. By 1961 80,978 people or 1.66% of Scotland’s population said they spoke Gaelic.

Through the 1980s into the 1990s, Gaelic has enjoyed something of a revival, and in common with the other Celtic countries, is pushing the use of Gaelic medium education from nursery school onward, with Comann nan Sgoiltean Araich setup in 1982 to do this. At present there are over 75 such schools in Scotland, from a starting figure of four. This is complimented by the growth of Gaelic Medium Units (GMUs) in schools across Scotland. The first opened in 1988 in Inverness and there are presently over 50 such units, as well as playgroups, in several major Scottish cities.

It is interesting to note that, even into the twentieth century, Gaelic still covered most of the Highlands as delineated in the Middle Ages. (See map E ). Today, however, despite the projects mentioned, Gaelic has fallen to a dangerously low level. It is ironic that although Celtic studies have recently attracted wider interest, Celtic culture has never been so close to total extermination in its history of more than 2,000 years.

Not only are the culture and language precariously poised, but the very population is being overwhelmed by incomers who have a large impact on the ethno-linguistic makeup. Between Scotland’s feudal laws and global economics, fewer and fewer natives and more and more foreigners own and inhabit Gaeldom’s final outpost. A 1996 discussion paper by the convention of Scottish Local Authorities confesses:

Almost half the country is owned by fewer than 500 people. Estates are bought and sold in secret, without those who live and work on the land having any say. The under-use, or misuse, of land is endemic and opportunities for the indigenous population are few. No other country in Europe has such an antiquated, unfair and unaccountable system of land ownership.

Even beyond the complication of its internalised inferiority complex, some very basic issues of self-determination need to be addressed in the Gàidhealtachd. A society governed by an alien people, dependent on an outside world for its sustenance and lacking the control over its own land, is a society which has no control over the future of its culture or language.

₂₅Gillies 1991 discusses the Gaelic point of view of Jacobitism using Gaelic sources.

₃₇ ‘Exhortation to the Gael’ by Angus B MacKay (Oscar Dhu) in Bennett 1992, p 31.

Gaels were among the earliest peoples in Europe to adopt the practice of writing, the first in Europe to write their vernacular literature. Gaelic culture as a whole, however, has always been a tradition based on the spoken word. The values, the history, the music, the sense of identity and rootedness, the very sense of being a Gael, have been articulated and transmitted by living tradition bearers through the Gaelic tongue.

From the earliest times, the poet has had a central role in Celtic society, filling a key political and religious function. Celtic society’s leaders had to be validated by the bardic order, which in turn depended upon the social order for patronage. It is no wonder that the Romans attacked the druidic order to destroy the intellectual force that upheld and propagated Celtic values. Anglo-centric imperialism followed the same course, outlawing bards, destroying centres of learning and exterminating the language:

Opinions are formed in it, and consecrated by it; it constitutes, not only the vehicle of ideas, but almost the ideas themselves; and it will be in vain to change the current of thought and action in the Highlands, while [Gaelic] is allowed to remain. ₃₈

Besides upholding the traditional values of Gaelic society, the bardic order has always been a bastion of the standards of the language itself, pushing its ability to express new ideas to the limit, keeping the vocabulary rich and flexible and providing a rich store of literature to draw from. Even when all other Gaelic social institutions had been destroyed, knowledge of the champions of the oral tradition, the bards, provided conceptual role models to Gaels:

Had it not been for the bards of the past centuries, we wouldn’t have the Gaelic we have today… when you have an interest in those kind of men, you like to understand what they’ve been singing or talking about. I think the bards keep the language going, and the day they go, goes our language, goes our heritage, goes our identity.

There are a number of different genres within the Gaelic oral tradition: songs, tales, proverbs, riddles and so on. These different genres tend to express and encapsulate different kinds of experience and ideas: proverbs express the wit and wisdom of Gaelic culture; tales cover history, genealogical themes, promote role models and supply entertainment; songs provide the outlet for emotional expression of the community and the propagation of news; and so on.

A significant characteristic of the oral tradition, however, is the inter-dependency between different elements, and their relation with the language itself. Each of these elements appears in, and is dependent upon, the others. Proverbs can often be condensations of events or situations which require a long tale to explain. Songs often quote proverbs, and lines from songs become proverbs in their own right. Stories often accompany songs to explain who wrote them, when, why and how. Tales are frequently accompanied by or interspersed with song-like poems.

This is reflected in Gaelic tradition-bearers themselves, who tend to be well-versed in all genres even if specialising in a particular one. This was noted as early as the middle of the 1800s by the renowned folklore collector Iain Og Ile, John F. Campbell:

But though each prefers his own subject, the best Highland story-tellers know specimens of all kinds. Start them, and it seems as if they would never stop. ₄₀

The language itself is densely entangled within this literary web. It has been noted all across Gaeldom that good Gaelic speakers use a high percentage of proverbs and literary allusions in their normal, daily speech.

Gaelic literature has always been consciously and deliberately cultivated to maintain a distinctively Gaelic cosmology, rather than one reliant upon a Classical world-view. When the Classical literary pantheon had long eclipsed the native symbols and traditions of most of the rest of Europe, Gaelic literature still held up its pre-Christian heroes and symbols as yardsticks of praise and models of excellence. This is not, as some believe, because they were really pagans, or because they were stuck in a backward cultural time-warp: they were thoroughly familiar with Classical literature and had translated much of it into Gaelic. This is simply an unequivocal statement of the self-confidence and worth which they felt about their own native literature and cultural symbols. Thus characters from literature, such as the Fianna, represent praiseworthy qualities, and all manner of plants and animals appear as metaphors in a rich symbolic vocabulary elaborated and reinforced in song and story.

Languages belonging to distinct cultures have different means of classifying and expressing experience. The classical example is that of colour, for not every language has the same mapping from words to sections of the colour spectrum. The Gaelic word gorm, for example, is often interpreted in English as ‘blue’, 'dark grey’ or ‘green’, but it is never used for the colour of grass or water (see Dwelly’s Dictionary). There are many examples of unique cultural structures or categories reflected in the language, such as the calendar, kin systems, degrees of ownership and possession, animal taxonomies implicit in nomenclature, and so on, which cannot be directly translated into another language because of the nuances they contain.

Words are not just independent, individual units, but are bundles of associations which operate according to the internal logic of the language and its cultural experience. For example, the term gorm can also mean ‘hot’, or ‘great, illustrious’. All good poetry and literature depend on the rich interplay and juxtaposition of the many semantic fields of words within themselves and between each other in the context of the phrase and larger literary setting. Puns, which are extremely language specific, are the most obvious example of this.

Not only words but phrases and expressions also carry the historical weight of their previous usages, and skilful speakers and writers will intentionally use phrases with a previous literary existence to invoke their associations. Newspaper writers frequently borrow and cleverly modify catch-phrases, proverbial expressions or lines from songs to convey an idea quickly, and in a similar fashion Gaelic literature frequently invokes phrases well known to the audience to conjure up a complex situation or feeling.

To underscore the importance of the language in the maintenance of the culture, we can observe the ferocity with which the language was attacked as a means of destroying the culture and the degree of success of the Anglicisation campaign by teaching the English language.

₃₈ Withers, p 334- from J MacCulloch, 1824, London, The Highlands and Western Highlands of Scotland, p 184-7.

₄₀ J F Campbell, Introduction to Popular Tales of the West Highlands. See also Shaw, p 38, 52.

The characteristics of the Gaelic language itself, and its unique features such as vowel length, have contributed to the distinctiveness of Gaelic music. This is not just confined to the Gàidhealtachd itself, as many Gaelic airs, for example, were used by Lowland poets such as Robert Burns. There is evidence which suggests that the most unique characteristic of Scottish music, the ‘ScotchSnap’ originates in Gaelic speech.

In order to talk about music, we need to discuss the different ‘traditions of music’. The Western Art Music tradition which has been dominant in the European learned musical world in modern times is an unusual development, but one which has been so thoroughly indoctrinated in us that we accept it as ‘normal’. Western Art Music grew, like so many things in the Western World, from the Greek sciences, adopted by the Romans, taken up again in the Renaissance and thereafter recognised as ‘high art’ by the intellectual elite.

Western music is generally assumed to be performed for the sake of its beauty and aesthetic appeal, is recorded and transmitted in a rigid paper notation, is based on instruments and mechanically defined scales, rhythms and standards, and is performed by specially trained musicians.

This contrasts greatly with music of most of the rest of the world, often labelled ‘Primitive Music’. Primitive music is essentially a practical music, because it is used constantly by everyone in the community in all aspects of daily life, be it work, play, ritual or celebration. The words always take precedence over the tune, since the song exists to express a concrete idea, not mere aesthetics_{. 41} It is never far removed from language, and is transmitted orally to all members of the community. ₄₂

All of these features appear strongly in the Gaelic music tradition. The words of Gaelic songs are the reason the song exists, and hence the singer is appreciated by how effectively the words are articulated and the meaning expressed. The music of the song is only of secondary importance:

The old Gaelic singers sang so that a listener was able to catch the words of unfamiliar songs and follow their meaning… They accorded more importance to the subject and sentiment of the songs… than they did to the art of the musical composer as displayed in the tune… The New Style makes the singer a mere musical instrument. Clear enunciation and natural voice production, along with attention to the words, are the chief characteristics of the Old Style.₄₃

There are Gaelic songs for all sorts of work activities and social occasions (some of which have gone out of common use); reaping, sowing, milking, waulking cloth, healing, battle, mourning the dead, praising the living, and so on. These distinctions were paralleled in instrumental adaptations.

The Gaelic language has within itself a number of musical features, especially concerning vowel length, pitch and cadence. Traditional Gaelic songs are to the greatest extent governed by the natural speech patterns of the language itself: the words and the tune of the song are indivisible are indivisible, as the words govern the phrasing and the cadences:

Folk tunes cannot be noted down correctly unless one understands the language in which they are sung. The short and long vowels, the stressed syllables and the contractions form the length of the notes of the tune. I never heard my friends in Glendale hum or sing an old tune without words. To them the words and the air were inseparable. I once mentioned that I thought a neighbour had the air of a song, and the reply was, ‘How could she have the air and not the words?’ ₄₄

Even the Gaelic instrumental tradition is strongly affected by the idioms developed in the Gaelic song tradition, itself based on natural speech patterns. Thus it is no surprise that there is a long-standing belief that musicians need to be proficient in the Gaelic language to perform the music accurately and with the right blas (flavour):

…with all this perfection in the instrumentation, it even maintained a place ancillary to vocal music. It never assumed the upper hand, or pretended to be only music… the opinion on all hands was that the office of the instrument was to imitate vocal music, its success in that article being the only measure of its excellence. ₄₅

The classical musician of today believes in, practices principally with ‘music without words’. One endearing charm of our Scottish music lies in the fact that the words associated with each particular air are inseparably interwoven with them. It is a common belief that no piper who cannot speak Gaelic can ever acquire any proficiency on the instrument. ₄₆

The standard written notation developed by the Western Art Music school is incapable of accurately describing the complex subtleties of traditional Gaelic music. The simplest and oldest method of teaching and transmitting it has been through songs and oral mnemonics, such as canntaireachd. It is a great concern of Gaels steeped in the oral tradition that the language survive so that it can assure the quality of the musical standards:

So the net result over time will be that the old Gaelic flavour in the tunes will be lost. No one will know then whether he’s close to it or not… if he doesn’t have the words (to go with it)’… younger players capable of imitating the style in familiar tunes cannot generate it entirely in tunes less well known to them, much like the learning of set pieces for recitation in a foreign language.₄₇

These speech-song rhythms, and the subjects of songs, also set the pace and movement of traditional Scottish dancing:

A lot of them tunes that they played … they used to know them in Gaelic, you see. They would sing it and then play it for step-dancing… When you know the Gaelic word of it, well you had the run of it if you were to keep time for the step-dance.₄₈

It is often claimed that Gaelic music and songs help to invigorate and buttress the language, but the statements above, made by Gaels conscious of the subtle complexities of the oral tradition, give testimony to the very converse, that it is the language itself that provides the foundation and security for the genuine musical tradition. In his seminal study of Cape Breton Gaels, Charles Dunn noted:

The degree to which the people have remained truly Highland may be measured by their retention of the Gaelic language. Only by retaining the language can the people preserve their oral traditions and their music; when they lose the language they lose with it much that makes them off from the other people settled in the New World.

Today the commercial musical world is doing a brisk trade in ‘Celtic Music’. While there is a lot of good music being made under this name, it owes much more to the taste and expectations of the global consumer market than it does to the authentic Gaelic musical tradition. Although the commercial music world gains by this ‘cultural asset stripping’, this does little to enrich or develop Gaelic culture itself. Instead, audiences without prior knowledge of Gaelic tradition become confused as to what is authentic, and potential Gaelic musicians are drawn into the commercial music market and adapt traditional musical material to meet the aesthetics of the outside world.

₄₁see, for example, Maurice Bowra, Heroic Poetry, 1966, p38-9; Marius Schneider,1957, ‘Primitive Music’, New Oxford History of Music, Vol 1p2.

A very strong and local sense of identity is an important part of the Gaelic cultural experience. The oral tradition taught people the names and deeds of their ancestors and the ideals and values of their society, instilled in them a sense of pride and belonging, and made them intimately aware of the landscape around them.

Because the entire community participated in the oral tradition, they adapted it to meet their own needs and to encapsulate the knowledge specific to their environment and experience. For example, village bards wrote songs about local events and characters, and used poetic forms for memorising weather indicators and geographical information specific to their locale.

Names are extremely important in all traditional societies. A Gael is identified by his or her sloinneadh, an enumeration of ancestors (usually patrilineal descent) and by a home village. The first two questions that any native Gael would traditionally a Gaelic-speaking stranger are Có leis thu? and Có ás a tha thu? ‘Who do you belong to’ and ‘Where do you come from’, meaning not where your current residence is, but where you were born and raised. Typical phrases about locale are very interesting, as statements of origin translate in English, for example, as ‘I belong to Glen Uig’. People are conceptualised as belonging to places, not the other way round.

Gaels through the generations have given extremely dense concentration of place names to the land on which they live. Every identifiable feature, every hill, pool, field, stream, lump, clump of trees or rock, has a name and a story behind it. This has the very practical function of being able to pin-point a location with a single name so that a location can be succinctly expressed. However, it also has the effect of giving a very keen and intimate sense of place, fully accessible from the inside of Gaelic’s world view.

The huge store of names of people and places, and the stories and identities which they symbolise, were known and used by all members of the community. Christina Shaw of Harris explains that these names and their meanings were within her lifetime being lost in the process of losing the Gaelic language:

I can go over to Bays and I can establish relationships on both my father’s and mother’s side, as far as three generations. Donald wrote in a letter shortly before he died ‘Do you remember when we used to go after sheep?’ and a list followed of names of hills, lochs and streams around Ardhasaig, Miavag and Bun Abhainn Eadarra… Every one. There wasn’t the length of between here and the gate that we didn’t have a name for, which is not the case nowadays. Every ben and every mound and every hill… I could name them all. ₄₉

Gaelic literature and poetry resonate with this sense of place. Songs and stories can be highly localised, invoking place-names to evoke the relationship of land and people:

The native Gael who is instructed in this poetry carries in his imagination not so much a landscape, not a sense of geography alone, but a formal order of experience in which all these are merged. What is to a stranger an expanse of empty countryside- magnificent or drab according to prevailing notions - to the native sensibility can be a dynamic, perhaps even heroic, territory peopled with figures from history and legend. ₅₀

Needless to say, the Gaelic oral tradition hinges upon the language itself to transmit these names, stories, songs and all of the values and collective cultural experience they embody. When the language is destroyed, so is a sense of continuity, a sense of place and belonging, and the Gaelic world-view gives way to a foreign one:

The names, places and traditions described here are only a small part of what was, only a few generations ago, everyday knowledge in Strathspey… many of the [place] names are known only to those brought up by Gaelic speakers. As the language dies out, it takes with it so much of the history, music and understanding of the place… This is true not only of Strathspey - all over the mainland of the Highlands, between the wars Gaelic gave way to English_.

In her study of Scottish Gaelic culture in exile in Newfoundland and its key tradition-bearer Allan MacArthur, Margaret Bennett observes:

There may well be few books written in the 1980s about the Scots overseas which do not mention the tartan as an identifiable part of Scottish tradition… The real identity was in the fabric of the people themselves: their language, their lore, their lifestyle, all woven into the very essence of their individuality. Most important of all to Allan’s generation was the mother tongue. They realised only too well that the Gaelic language had been the vehicle for carrying their Scottish traditions from one generation to the next. With its rapid decline, the traditions it upheld would be forced to follow.₅₂

Knowledge of Gaelic is essential for a complete and balanced understanding of Scottish history. It was, after all the Gaels who forged the Scottish nation and gave Scotland its name. Throughout most of Scotland’s history, Gaels have occupied a great deal, if not the majority, of the land of Scotland, been a substantial percentage of the population, and played a key role in shaping the culture and creating its history.

Gaelic is the only language which has been spoken continuously in the area we now call Scotland from before the time of the Romans to the present day. It has left its trace in the form of place-names from Lothian to Galloway and Caithness, and in the form of personal names and surnames throughout the nation. It has influenced the customs and vernacular speech of people as far north as the Faroes.

And yet most Scots know very little about Gaelic. It is as if they have become aliens, even enemies, to their own ancestors in their own land. A knowledge of Gaelic provides access to Scotland’s history from the Gaelic point of view. It allows a person to learn what the Gaels themselves felt about their history and their culture. It allows a person to recognise and understand the Gaelic place-names that exist throughout Scotland. By being cut off from Gaelic, Scots have become more vulnerable to the Anglo-centric and anti-Celtic re-writing of Scotland’s history. The denial of the Gaelic roots of Scotland and the aggression against its oldest indigenous language and culture has contributed significantly to Scotland’s torn personality and divisive politics:

Whereas in nineteenth century Germany and France Aryanism complemented nationalism, in Scotland Teutonic racism contributed to the transformation of Highland Celtic culture from a potent ideological resource into an embarrassing millstone of backwardness. Scotland was a nation paralysed by its confused sense of ethnic identity_.53

Familiarity with primary sources is particularly important since ‘Celtic’ things have become fashionable and Scottish history is being exploited for profit. People can be easily confused about what is really Celtic, and what Gaelic culture is, and what really happened in Scottish history, if all they read are fanciful English translations, or if Hollywood’s commercial ventures are their sole source of history. Anyone who has read Gaelic literature knows that it bears no resemblance to English literature’s portrayal of the gloomy, sentimental, mist-shrouded Celt.

Scotland is currently in the midst of a deep identity crisis. After 300 or more years of propaganda, brainwashing Scots to believe that Gaels are inferior, many Scots are not willing to accept Scotland’s Celtic origins, but neither are they willing to accept an English identity. Scotland could begin to resolve its cognitive dissonance and cultural trauma were Scots willing to confront these issues and learn to appreciate their own indigenous traditions, accepting Gaelic on equal terms with Lallans and English.

This could start to heal the divisions which have torn Scotland and helped to keep it powerless. It would bring esteem to the rich cultural available within Scotland, a wealth which many people around the world would envy. It would renew the vigour of Scottish culture from within, and reinforce the sense of place and identity which has only recently been disrupted from its ancient roots in the Scottish landscape. It would change Scotland from being an ‘also-ran’on the periphery of an English cultural world to being at the centre of a Gaelic/Scottish cultural world. All of this together could help give Scotland the self-confidence necessary to seize control of its own future and reclaim its right to be a proud European nation among peers.

Gaelic culture is one of many of the world’s indigenous cultures. Understanding Gaelic culture gives us an insight into what it means to be native to a particular place and, by understanding another culture, we can better understand our own. Culture and languages are not just about looking back to our past, but also about choosing the visions and values that determine our direction for the future. The question is, simply put, will Scotland ignore the traditions and values of its own native peoples and defer to those who have conquered it in the past, or will Scotland appreciate and honour its own native culture enoughto carry it forward as the basis for future generations?

In these days of global crises, we desperately need to understand culture so that we can shape it and mould it to better suit human needs and earthly resources. Native Americans have expressed the urgent need to re-integrate human, community and environmental values in culture, especially through the binding agent of language:

The bottom line expected of education today usually focuses on job skills. However, if the generally problematic condition of much of the environment, of the job market and of society today is an indication of this approach to education, it may be time to include aspects of the holistic approaches promoted by the First Nations. Business cannot be separated from the environment. The environment cannot be separated from government. Government cannot be separated from social and economic issues. People cannot be separated from all the above. Perhaps it is time to recognise this and make efforts to reinstate a whole-life perspective in education. Teaching First Nations languages would contribute to understanding such concepts given that that such holistic or whole-life values are embedded in them…₅₄

While the experience of oppression by an empire is by no means unique to Gaels, Ireland and Scotland were often the test bed for colonial policies which were subsequently applied in British colonies. When we begin to understand some of the loss which humankind as a whole experienced in the Age of Imperialism, we have reason to treasure and nurture what remains of the diversity and richness of the world’s many native cultures.

Map D - Courtesy of A Short History of the Irish Language. Glór na nGael. 1995.

Much of the Historical section of this paper follows and is based on materials in John MacInnes 1992, Michael Lynch and the unpublished PhD theses of Mike Kennedy, Edinburgh University 1995.

I would like to thank Margaret Bennett, Wilson MacLeod, Rob Dunbar, Marie Salton, John MacInnes, Hamish Henderson and Susan Self for encouragement, comments and suggestions.

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Website Information & Links

Michael Newton's Homepage can be found at http://www.saorsamedia.com

Other links of related subject matter include;

'Colonised Land; Colonised Mind' By Alastair McIntosh
'The Scottish Highlands in Colonial & Psychodynamic Perspective' By Alastair McIntosh
Education and Anglicisation The role of the SSPCK in the education of the Highlander 1709-1825
Language Genocide in Education By Tove Skuttnab-Kangas
An Introduction to the Highland Clearances By Steve Blamires
Slavery and the Duchess of Sutherland
Who Owns Scotland?
A Century on the Census By Dr Kenneth McKinnon
Galgael

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