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(Note: the following essay is based on research that is shown in detail in the book, We're Indians Sure Enough: The Legacy of the Scottish Highlanders in the United States.)
Anglo-America, for a number of reasons, has been rediscovering and reinventing its ethnic roots in recent years and Celtic heritage seems to be particularly popular. Modern interpretations of folk music and dance seem to have a particularly strong following. While the Irish have managed to make the most of this trend, the Scots are also featuring in popular forms of Celtic ethnicity in America.
This Scottish-American connection has a popular appeal from both ends. It provides, for many Americans, regardless of how assimilated into the dominant culture they may be, a connection to European ancestors and a heritage that is glorified in popular media (be it modern films such as Braveheart or romantic novels such as Waverley or Rob Roy) as heroic and ancient. The connection provides, for Scots, a means of vicariously enjoying the success of their relations in a rich and powerful nation of industry and commerce after they left their marginalized and disempowered nation behind. It is thus not surprising that historical truth has often fallen victim to this mutual attraction.
In order to understand the legacy of the Scottish Highlanders in America and what, if any, trace they have left, one must first understand Gaelic culture in Scotland. In my book A Handbook of the Scottish Gaelic World (henceforth referred to as HSGW) I provided a general overview of the traditional culture of the medieval and early modern Scottish Highlands, and I will refer to it in the following discussion.
It has been well documented by scholars in recent decades that Scotland was one of few nations in Europe not to have benefited widely from the nation-building movements of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scottish institutions were left underdeveloped, especially where serious scholarship on Scottish subjects was concerned (HSGW pp. 28, 69-72, 283-4). The lack of support and patronage made Scotland susceptible to myth-making and romanticism, and this is obvious in the popular mythology about emigration.
The history of Scotland is no less complicated than other nations in Europe, or the rest of the world. Early Scotland was a Celtic kingdom, compromised of Gaelic, Pictish, and Brythonic peoples, unified by Gaelic nation-builders and ruled by a dynasty of Gaelic kings. The adoption of feudal institutions and the introduction of Anglo-Normans, however, especially during the twelfth century, began a process which was to polarize Scotland into Lowland and Highland culture regions. In time, the Lowlands were drawn inexorably by the gravity of England and became estranged from the Highlanders who in turn increasingly saw their society under threat and developed a siege mentality (HSGW Chapter Two).
What is, or was, a Highlander? To borrow a catch-phrase from my friend Kenneth McKenna of Glengarry, Ontario, "a Highlander is not just an Englishman in a kilt." Until very recently, the people of the Highlands (and part of what is now considered the Lowlands) were distinctive because they had their own worldview, belief system, value system, social system, literature, and, mostly importantly, language. These can all be understood as derived largely from earlier Celtic antecedents, and are generally in contrast, especially by the eighteenth century, with what had developed in Lowland Scotland.
As Lowland Scotland was attempting to join the European rush to exploit the 'New World' in the seventeenth century, one can find many Lowland Scots immigrating to North America on often ill-fated commercial schemes. Only a small number of Highlanders were part of these ventures, often sent forcibly as prisoners of war.
Also present in large numbers in America, especially in the southern regions, were the Protestant planters who left Northern Ireland, now commonly called 'Scots-Irish'. Every aspect of this important group has caused a great deal of confusion about Scottish-American history. The term 'Scots-Irish' first appears in the early sixteenth century to describe soldiers of Scottish Gaelic origin or descent who were engaged in Northern Ireland. However, this group of Gaelic mercenaries is very different from the soldier-colonists sent from 1609 onwards by the British Crown to conquer Ulster by force and displace its native Gaelic inhabitants. These colonists were from many different places, especially Northern England, the Scottish Borders, Lowland Scotland, and France, and some Gaelic-speaking Highlanders were also in their number.
There were some among the 'Scots-Irish' who could be argued to have Celtic traits or to have been speakers of Celtic languages, but it would a complete misrepresentation to call the Scots-Irish as a whole 'Celtic'. They were sent specifically as loyal Protestant subjects of the British Crown.
The term 'Scots-Irish' was not applied to them until the end of the seventeenth century, and the term did not gain widespread use until the nineteenth century, when they wanted to differentiate themselves from the masses of Catholic Irish who came to America during the Great Famine. Many scholars and writers have, on account of the misnomer 'Scots-Irish' and marginal Scottish connections, thrown them in with other Scots, but this is to overplay their Scottishness and to underestimate their distinctive characteristics.
Although the popular imagination in recent years has made a false link between the Highlanders and the American South - because of stereotypes about backward peoples - Highlanders could be found everywhere in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States. If anything, their legacy was much diminished by the intolerance of the homogenous Anglo-Saxon South.
The Highlanders have long been considered ignorant and backward barbarians by the English-speaking world, and these attitudes can be found in both scholarly and popular writing into the twentieth century. Anyone who looks at the Scottish Gaels through the eyes of the English-speaking world is likely to pick up these ethno-centric biases and for this reason it is crucial for serious modern scholars to become aware of these prejudices and to acquire familiarity with Gaelic perspectives and primary source materials.
Fortunately, it is no longer considered acceptable to take anti-Native American prejudices seriously in preference to anthropological texts on Native American society. It is clear that one must learn about Native American society first-hand and to take its language, worldview, social norms, and literature seriously in order to understand it on its own terms. Why then should Scottish Highland society be neglected in a way no longer acceptable to other native peoples? It is sad and strange, for example, to still read of Highlanders being called the "wild Scots", and differentiated from the Lowlanders because "Lowland Scotland had cities and culture". Any contemporary Highlander would have answered that Gaelic society had centuries of a learned tradition which included poetry, prose, history, genealogy, medicine and music, not to mention other specializations (HSGW Chapter Three). Why does this not qualify as culture?
It is tempting from the outside to see both Highlanders and Native Americans as primitive peoples having a similar oral culture, clan system, superstitions, and customs. There are, of course, many common motifs and metaphors that can be found in the societies and belief systems of people throughout the world. Unless we attempt to understand how these work from the inside, however, we are liable to gloss over the differences between indigenous peoples and the ways in which they see themselves and their neighbors.
Things are rather more complex in the case of the Highlanders in the United States, as they arrived essentially as colonists of a powerful empire whose might they could choose to wield for their own benefit. It is a testimony to the integrity and compassion of those who chose to ally themselves with native peoples that this did not always happen. However, we must see that Highlanders were individuals with a long history of forced cultural assimilation who were not racially predetermined to live like indigenous peoples. They had rather strong incentives to adapt to Anglo-centric norms, to advance the cause of empire and commerce, and to continue the marginalization of indigenous peoples, and few reasons to prolong their own disadvantages as rebels against an Empire that had nearly wiped them out.
It is thus disappointing to see that many people overgeneralize the similarities between Native American society and Highland society without discussing the complexities of their interactions, or the forces that were acting against their synergistic cooperation. We must also realize that what may seem like similarities to us might have been insignificant to the people themselves.
The pervasive Gaelic oral tradition is often mentioned, although the fact that the Gaels also had over a thousand years of a written literature is not mentioned. Much worse than this, however, is the implication that the popular English-language writings of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns are somehow directly related to Celtic tradition or to the Highlanders themselves. While these two men enjoyed a huge success during their lifetimes and have continued to exert a powerful force on the popular imagination to the present day, they were Lowlanders (not Highlanders) writing for an English market who already had strong stereotypes about what they expected (or wanted) the Highlanders to be. Their works are not representative of Highland culture, but have instead misinformed the public about Gaelic society in the same way that Cooper and Longfellow romanticized and misrepresented Native American society. Yet, long after these American fiction writers have been recognized as unreliable sources about Native America, Scott and Burns continue to detract from true Highland literature.
Music has been the most attractive aspect of Celtic heritage recently and it is little surprise that people are looking for connections between American folk music (especially country-western) and Celtic musics. Many have heard this siren call, for there are frequent claims that there is a similarity between western songs and the classic ballad, such as 'Barbara Allan' or 'Lord Ronald'. What is often not realized is that although the classic ballad was highly popular throughout Europe, one of the only places where it did not catch on was the Gaelic-speaking world (HSGW p. 263). Although there are a handful of late examples of ballads adopted into the Highland repertoire, Gaelic song and narrative appears to have been so robust and well developed that the ballad was not seen as an attractive option at the period of its height in Europe. This is an example of how much Lowland and Highland Scotland can differ, for Lowland Scotland shared England's love of the classic ballad.
There are similar confusions between the classic ballad and Jacobite song. While the revival of the folksong in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was focused on the North, Gaelic Scotland's Jacobite songs were very different from those of Lowland Scotland, even though English-language authors sometimes claimed to use translations of Gaelic Jacobite songs as starting points for their own flowery derivatives.
Both scholars and popular writers who discuss the Scottish Highlanders in North America will have to take account of:
1. Critical Thinking: Stop repeating tired cliches and worn-out myths about the Highlanders and the Scots in general and question where these ideas come from, what they really mean, why they exist and have proved popular, what agenda they advance and what complexities they hide. Don't assume that superficial similarities between two things implies that there is a direct connection between them. The similarity might be due to similar circumstances, a similarity shared by many different ethnicities, or merely coincidental.
2. Nuanced Ethnicity: Make clear distinctions between the different kinds of 'Scottish' immigrants: Scots-Irish, Borderers, Lowlanders, Highlanders, Northern Islanders, and so on, and their cultural complexions. These categories should also be broken down into their distinctive subcultures when appropriate.
3. Inside Perspectives: Stop looking at the Gaels through the documents left by outsiders, largely English-speakers who did not like or understand them, and instead attempt to understand Highland society through its own language, culture, and literature.
4. Orientalism: Stop assuming that the Gaels are irrational and backwards primitives who were running away from the wheels of Progress (as defined by the English-speaking world), and instead accept that they had a legitimate point of view that should be understood in their own terms; to stop assuming that Gaels are inherently similar to other 'primitive' people. The term 'Celtic' should be avoided unless clearly defined and used carefully and meaningfully.
5. Romanticism and Popular Literature: To distinguish between actual cultural traits that endure in immigrant communities and the influence of popular literature, such as Sir Walter Scott, in creating symbolic ethnicity.
6. Racialism: Stop assuming that Scottishness is defined by some racial essence that is automatically transferred from one generation to the next, but instead consider the defining cultural factors that were retained, adapted, or submerged in immigrant communities.
7. Individual participation vs Cultural Influence: Stop assuming that the participation of people of Scottish origin or ancestry is an automatic indication of Scottish cultural influence, when individuals (especially from Scotland with a long history of assimilation to Anglo-centric norms) had the choice to adopt and advance the agenda and values of the dominant culture.
8. Assimilation: Consider how Scots reacted to the Anglo-centric ethnic forces in America and made choices about strengthening or abandoning their own distinctive linguistic and cultural identities, and what kind of relationships they had with other ethnicities.