Growing up in Cape Breton, an island that is part of the province of Nova Scotia on Canada's Atlantic coast, it felt like history was always around me. I come from a little village in Inverness County called Margaree Forks. It is distinctively rural, was originally inhabited by the Mi’kmaq and had a mix of settling groups: Acadian, Loyalist, Scottish (predominantly Highland) and Irish. Many residents today can still trace their families back to the original settlers; they have their own stories and traditions, and many have a genuine interest in who ‘their people’ were. On this western or sunset side of the island, a strong Scottish Highland identity tends to dominate and often gets projected over the other groups. That Cape Breton is home to many ethnicities is thanks also to the rise of heavy industry in the early twentieth century, when a variety of people arrived to work in coal and steel and set up as merchants. I remember, as an undergraduate student in the 1990s, reading Anne Marie MacDonald's award-winning novel, Fall on Your Knees, and being shocked to discover that Cape Breton had a Lebanese community. It was not something that anyone locally ever mentioned nor anything we were taught about in school. It was a similar situation with the island's African Caribbean community, though I do recall one confusing incident in junior high when a class project on family tartans was announced. Those of us with no Scottish ancestry protested, including a young woman who highlighted her African Caribbean heritage as an example, but an annoyed teacher ignored our arguments and told us to find one we liked and use that. This is a small example, but it reveals how a Scottish Highland identity could dominate.

To the Mi’kmaq, the region's Indigenous people, Cape Breton Island is known as Unama’kik, which loosely means ‘Land of Fog’, and if you arrive on the island by road via the Canso Causeway, two signs will greet you: the English ‘Welcome to Cape Breton’ followed by the Mi’kmaw ‘Pjila’si Unama’kik’. The Mi’kmaw welcome was only added in the summer of 2021 as a step towards reconciliation and an acknowledgement of their historic presence. According to the Mi’kmaw elder and scholar, Daniel Paul, the Mi’kmaq occupied much of what we now know as the Canadian Maritimes for somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 years.