ORWELL, P.E.I. — Scottish Gaelic speaker and writer Iain S. MacPherson will be the featured speaker at the Sir Andrew Macphail Homestead Foundation on Saturday, Aug. 17.
MacPherson, who has strong family roots in P.E.I., is a lecturer in Gaelic language and literature at the University of the Highlands and Islands Isle of Skye-based Gaelic partner college Sabhal Mor Ostaig.
Admission to this lecture is by donation. All proceeds will go to supporting the foundation in its mission to provide pertinent programming concerning the Island’s unique forms of cultural expression and heritage.
The event begins at 6 p.m. with potato soup and fresh biscuits ($5), and a cash bar. The lecture will begin at 7 p.m.
MacPherson has spoken annually at the homestead, his fluency in Gaelic being a rare treat on the Island where once all Scottish highland settlers, including Sir Andrew Macphail’s father “The Master” ‘had the Gaelic’. MacPherson switches between the melodious Gaelic and English explaining the history, language and culture as he goes along.
MacPherson’s lecture focuses on a poem by Donald Angus Stewart which he discovered by chance. While discussing another poem of Stewart’s, the High Bank then Dakota Territory “Bard of the Plains’’, at the Macphail Homestead in 2016, a member of the audience identified herself as D.A. Stewart’s great-niece (the granddaughter of his sister) and offered to show MacPherson the handwritten original of the poem in question. In so doing, he discovered a second poem, the crux of this year’s lecture.
This P.E.I. Gaelic-speaking poet’s life represents a common trajectory of Highland emigration to British North America and subsequent out-migration (or further emigration events) to other regions on the continent, as is well documented by the Island’s strong historic ties of kinship to places like ‘the Boston States.’
Born in the Isle of Skye, Stewart was two years old when his family emigrated with him to P.E.I. in 1841 settling on a farm at High Bank (Am Bruach Àrd), King’s County, an area settled by people from Skye and Raasay, serving as a coastal extension of the Gaelic-speaking heartlands in the interior communities of Bellevue, Orwell Rear and Caledonia.
Like many second-generation P.E.I. Gaels, Stewart left the Island to work on constructing the eastern section of the transcontinental railway and then relocated to a farmstead at Bismarck, N.D., in the American ‘Far West’. In the words of one report on British emigration to the Dominion of Canada in the 1920s, Canada was seen as acting as an emigrant ‘sieve’, attracting important numbers of first-generation immigrants from the ‘Old Country’ (the imperial ‘mother-country’) but then losing equally important numbers of second-generation Canadians in their ensuing acts of out-migration to the U.S.
