Violence in Conception Bay
Author: Prof. Willeen Keough, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. Latest publication, ‘The Slender Thread’.
Ethnic identity is not an artifact that the emigrant stows among the baggage, like a family heirloom to be unpacked at the end of the journey – a solid, unchanging link to the old ways. Rather, ethnicity is an ongoing process of intercultural dialogue through which difference is created, redefined, and maintained. This conversation of ethnicity involves expressions of inclusion and exclusion whereby a given group essentializes its own cultural identity vis-à-vis that of an ‘other’ group or groups. So the ethnic group does not exist in isolation; it needs an ethnic other in order to position itself. Such was the forum that developed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Conception Bay, Newfoundland. The two groups that predominated were Protestants from the West of England and Catholics from the southern counties of Ireland. Both groups came to the island to pursue opportunity in the Newfoundland cod fishery, and on occasion, tensions flared between the two.
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Whatever the troubles of the immigrant Irish in the Maritime Provinces of Canada, they probably fade into relative insignificance compared to the troubles of the Acadians. These French-speaking and law-abiding homesteaders were driven out in the Great Expulsion in a government-sponsored act of ethnic cleansing for the collective ‘crime’ of refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to the British Crown.
The Irish also refused to swear this oath but they seemed to have escaped on this occasion from retribution. Apart from the rump of Acadians that still live in PEI, NS and Newfoundland, they are mainly to be found as Cajuns in western Louisiana. In this piece the Acadian and the Irish come together: