"Because memory and its transmission play an important role in this study, some preliminary remarks about these two issues are necessary. Studies that employ memory as an analytical tool have assumed various forms. One approach is to examine collective memories. ‘Collective memories’ concern how a society or a community remembers the past or a past event. Those who study collective memory might anaylse how and why such memories are formed, sometimes tracing their development over generations, at other times focusing on specific events or historical periods to elucidate broader cultural trends. In Canada, the most common approach has been the study of commemoration. This entails deciphering a commemorative event or a historical figure to chart how various generations have remembered history, people, and events. The resulting analyses are useful for understanding how memory became subject to manipulation as well as for evaluating changing norms, including attitudes about aboriginal people. Coates and Morgan, Knowles, Nelles, and Pope, for instance, all explore how aboriginal peoples were perceived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and show how succeeding generations obscured or rationalized the appropriation of aboriginal lands and justified assimilationist policies. As Pope explains about the commemoration of Cabot’s landfall:
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."
- William C. Wicken, The Colonization of Mi’kmaw Memory and History, 1794–1928: The King v. Gabriel Sylliboy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. p. 25
