#collected memory

Canadian historians have adopted a similar approach, some of who have written about aboriginal people. Shelagh Grant, for instance, in her examination of an Inuit man from Baffin Island charged with a 1921 murder, uses the resulting court case to illustrate the social and legal relationships within Inuit society and their relationship with outsiders, including the Canadian government.

These studies, however, are only possible because the cases produced an extensive documentation. The same is not true for The King vs. Sylliboy. There are no court transcripts and there is little press commentary. Moreover, since the magistrate’s decision was only appealed to the County Court, the case did not produce much additional commentary. Since Sylliboy was charged with a summary offence, his prosecution also did not initiate much investigation or testimony and the magistrate court records only include testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses. The appeal notes are also brief and do not include either an oral summary of the lawyer’s arguments or a printed copy of their factums. Besides a typed copy of the decision, the appeal file contains a series of historical documents, which the defence lawyers entered as evidence. These include a treaty signed with the Abenaki in 1727, the 1752 treaty, the Royal Proclamation of 1763, excerpts from Thomas Akin’s 1869 history of Halifax City, and minutes from various meetings of the Nova Scotia Council, the eighteenth-century Crown-appointed body that ruled the colony. Although useful for situating the lawyers’ use of historical evidence, this documentation does not explain what occurred in Judge Patterson’s courtroom. The appeal packet, however, does contain one additional piece of evidence: Judge Patterson’s summary of six Mi’kmaw men’s testimony about their understanding of the 1752 Treaty. These five pages of testimony offer a unique insight into the men’s lives and into their collected memory about the treaty."

The whole point of the landfall myth was that discovery was a precedent: North America was meant to be British; conquest was merely incidental. At least in public, the history of discovery was a substitute for other histories, a useful diversion from the issues of ethnic dominance, coercion, and dependency that we cram clumsily into the concept of conquest.

In contrast, my interest is in the inter-generational remembering of a collected memory. I focus on how a small group of men remembered what they had been told about an event in their people’s history. My subjects are five of the six men who testified in Sylliboy’s appeal. As Jeffrey Olick points out, a collected memory approach has distinct advantages. First, it potentially avoids the reification of a particular set of memories as is true of commemorative studies, which focus on a subset within a group and usually on individuals with access ‘to the means of cultural production, or whose opinions are more highly valued.’ Although Bodnar’s distinction between official and vernacular memory is one way to avoid this problem, the emphasis on charting societal norms renders detailed understandings of individual memories unworkable or if the focus does switch to the individual, does not obviate reification. Second, a collected memory approach does not necessarily assume the existence of a collective memory and allows for differences in how memories are remembered. Finally, focusing on individuals allows the use of psychology and neuroscience."