On Storytelling and Petty Crime…

My last post was well over a week ago—a reflection piece on some of the work presented at this year’s Atlantic Canada Studies (ACS) conference.  If the numbers are to be believed it was one of the less popular posts we’ve put up here in some time.  Our ability to track traffic and viewership on our site has prompted Katherine and me into several conversations in which we try to suss out patterns in audience attention to determine what people, the nameless, faceless masses that you are, like to read on our site.  And what, conversely, you tend not to care about.  I suppose it’s probably a basic commandment of the marketing world that you use what feedback data is available to refine your product and encourage greater consumption.  But given that we are historians, and we are writing a blog about being (and becoming) historians, and that historians tell stories about the past in hopes of stumbling upon some larger truth that will help us better understand our present and future, the idea of tailoring content and themes to an audience we know so little about is disconcerting.  So ironically, as our blog has increased in visibility, the question of what to blog about has grown proportionately more complicated.  In some ways it was a lot easier writing a blog no one read!!  What better illustration of the fact that audience shapes the story?  That’s a goofy observation on one level, but when I think more broadly about the nature of storytelling and the formative role that audience plays in that process, it’s actually an animating theme to everything I do.

To go back to ACS for just a moment, storytelling presented itself in nearly every conceivable form—I talked in my last post  (Navigating Atlantic Canada by Second Nature) about Tina Loo’s Fogo Islanders and their use of film to shape stories about place, and Dave Bent’s work on the CBC’s segment “The Gillans” which told a story about rural life in mid-twentieth century Nova Scotia.  But there were also explorations of how stories were told about place and people through music and song, through language preservation, through art and literature and their communities of producers past and present.  The region, and any region really, continuously retells its own story with ever-shifting emphases and cultural perspectives.

After the conference and a few days of research in Saint John, I took the ferry back across to Digby, Nova Scotia where I was reunited with my truck.  Unwilling to return to the adolescent nonsense of my Halifax apartment, or the office refuge with the unidentified air quality problem that makes my eyes burn, I headed instead down Digby Neck to Brier Island.  As I described in High Plains Drifting, Nova Scotia has a modest network of hostels that provide clean and inexpensive accommodations, and tend to foster a more intimate experience of a place than other forms of accommodation.  You interact more with other visitors, but you also spend time doing things that local people do, in the places where they do them.  For instance you go to general stores instead of restaurants—particularly important in the case of Brier Island where there is only one of each!  You go to the library to check your email, as it’s difficult to expect WiFi to be included in your $20 a night.  And if anecdotal evidence is to be believed, generally a trip to the general store and library will foster relationships with the locals that will fundamentally alter the course of your stay.  As indeed it did for me.

I had hoped that Brier Island might provide a quiet setting for doing some reading and writing, and reflecting a bit on the research I’d just done in Saint John.  I had a couple hundred digital photos that needed sorting and I was trying to reconfigure the science chapters in my work on the fisheries.  To say that these objectives were derailed doesn’t quite adequately state the case.  But in some ways I may have made more progress on my work and my thinking about the craft than had I kept my nose more firmly rooted in my notes.

Brier Island presents a confounding case study in storytelling.  I’ve been thinking ever since I left there about how to tell the story of my visit—it’s a story too rich and colorful not to be told, but telling it presents some problems for which I lack solutions.  It’s a small island community of less than 200 people that sits exposed on virtually every side to wind and weather, and to this day can only be reached by ferry.  The tides are enormous, with the Bay of Fundy opening to one side and St. Mary’s Bay upon the other.  Its edges are surrounded by dangerous rocky shoals and ledges.  For centuries these traits have ensured that Brier Island remained small, isolated and exposed but have also granted a tremendous richness and diversity of marine resources, extraction and use of which are central to island life and identity.  Because modern development has been limited, it has also become a haven for bird watchers.

The idea was to admire the lighthouse, but I quite enjoyed the bullet holes in the sign!

There is no police force on Brier Island.  This gives the place a kind of benign lawlessness that is difficult to relate to or fully explain.  From one perspective the residents boldly and blatantly violate the law with impunity, knowing full well there is no mechanism to prevent it.  While at the same time they exhibit a regard for one another and a spirit of communal protection that simply does not exist other places.  The upshot is that the locals embraced me within minutes of my arrival, but much of the experience they welcomed me into was, from the outsider’s perspective, not altogether lawful—not violent, menacing, insidious, or, in most cases, especially dangerous, just not entirely within the letter of the law as it operates in other places.  As such, I’m left largely unwilling to tell the tale, in this forum or really any other public venue, lest my companions become co-conspirators and my reflections become confessions!  Instead I defer to the several interesting efforts of the islanders to tell the tale of their place for themselves (some of them contained in the photos herein attached), and wonder if the dynamic in play here actually empowers the islanders, much as Loo found in the islanders of Newfoundland, to maintain a more profound grasp on their own story.

Of course these dynamics interest me on a variety of levels.  My own research looks at coastal, and very often island, communities of New England and the Maritimes in an effort to understand resource management in the fisheries.  To do that requires understanding to some degree how island populations actually relate to laws in circumstances where the means of enforcing them are scant, or even non-existent.  Naturally what I’ve found is that the management regimes that existed on paper and those that shaped up in practice often looked dramatically different—and the same regimes could be manifested quite differently in two places even if within the same jurisdiction.  My experiences at Brier Island provided a sort of dramatization of this very process.  I love it when my research and my life come toe to toe and fumble about for the tools to make sense of each other!

One of the more tiresome platitudes that blows through our profession is that history is told by the winners, by the powerful.  It has also been variously stated that when we tell the story of something we exert a form of control over it, we tame it, colonize it even.  Catch phrases aside, there are important power implications in storytelling of any kind, anywhere on the spectrum between campfire and academic conference.  The geographical and societal isolation of communities like Brier Island turn these power dynamics on their head a bit.  The viability of a story depends on the audience’s availability to hear it and ability to relate to and understand it.  But the realities of life on this little rock are quite a ways beyond what many of us can relate to through our own experiences.  The rules for who can disseminate the story of this place and how are as non-existent as so many of the other trappings of modern society.  And thus as we do with our blog, the islanders continually assess their audience and mold their story to it, entirely on their own terms.

I suppose the rugged beauty of an island will tend to inspire introspection.  They tend also to inspire a robust and colorful tradition of lore and storytelling.  Brier Island, Nova Scotia is no different.  If you visit you will likely hear some great stories.  You will likely not receive any parking tickets.

— Stillwater Historians