Islands Matter Seminar - Migrants on the Margins Matter: three Scottish Gaelic song-poems from and about 19th-century Prince Edward Island.

Starting some time after the Earl of Selkirk’s 1803 settlement of Skye, Raasay and Wester Ross Gaels in PEI, we encounter Calum Bàn Buchanan’s masterpiece of orality: “Òran Imrich”/“Emigration Song”. Trailing his listener-reader over the North Atlantic from the Isle of Skye, we shift from a litany and evocation of intimately-known Hebridean place to a robust poetic defence of life in the New World, no longer “beholden to MacDonald” (the MacDonald Lords of Sleat & Duntulm).

Next we encounter a contra castigation of PEI in the work of a quasi-anonymous Raasay settler-poet who nostalgically elegises his Inner Hebridean past while excoriating his new island present c. 1840s. And finally we land at the end of the century, and out in the very centre of the continent, with D A Stewart’s North Dakota-composed pro-contra song-poem which sees PEI as the place of prelapsarian innocence (with a knowing nod to the Isle of Skye of his birth) and the Dakota Territory, USA, as the site of his present socio-religious malaise. Each of our works (presented in Gaelic and with translations) highlight poignantly the navigating of settlement and removal of migrants on the margins: voices that mattered then and matter still.

My research expertise concerns the corpus of Scottish Gaelic diasporic song-poems of migration: iterations of displacement, dislocation and the ensuing poetic events which capture the same. This work of literary criticism has been carried out largely under the aegis of a project which has now led to my PhD by Published Works at Ulster University, ‘Displaced Poets: Migrant Writing from the Margins of Movement and Memory in a Diasporic and Transgressive Scottish Gaelic Context’. However, my expertise also encompasses modern Scottish Gaelic prose and the practice of literary translation.

As a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy UK, my teaching experience spans more than twenty years in both Scotland and Northern Ireland. I was a lecturer for nine years at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, from 1997 to 2006, as both a module leader on various degree offerings in the BA (Hons) Gaelic and Related Studies scheme, and as a Programme Leader of An Cùrsa Comais. From 2006 to 2016, I was an RCUK Academic Fellow and then full-time lecturer at Ulster University in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, which then became the School of Irish. During this time I taught on and co-ordinated various modules in both Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic language, literature, research skills, language planning, media studies and culture and heritage studies. From 2017 to the present, I have been lecturing at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on a range of modules in Gaelic language and literature and Gaelic and rural development, as well as a postgraduate module in The Gaelic Legacy and most recently as Course Leader of the PDA Gaelic Translation course being offered through Sabhal Mòr Ostaig.

The talk is brought to you in collaboration with the Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island.

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