PART THREE: IDENTITIES CONCLUSIONS Paraphrasing Young, we can state that it is not enough to ask whether the Highland landscape remembers the Clearances, nor even how it might remember them. We should also ask to what ends does it remember—or rather to what ends do we remember through it (1993: 15). Young asserts that “memorials provide the sites where groups of people gather to create a common past for themselves, places where they tell the constitutive narratives, their ‘shared’ stories of the past” (6). One could cite many of examples of this process in Sutherland. For instance, every year the Clan Gunn gathers at the old church in Kildonan where their chiefs were once buried to hold a service of commemoration, by doing so clan members, otherwise dispersed, reaffirm their mutual connection to each other and to their ancestral homeland. Another intriguing example came to light when an informant showed me an old photograph of a public meeting held in 1914 at Caën, one of the cleared settlements in the Strath of Kildonan, marking the centenary of the evictions. I wondered whether the event might be repeated in 2014. ‘Guided heritage walks’ conducted during folk festivals and the like provide another occasion for the sharing of such landscape narratives: Ann Mackay’s walk around Rosal during the 1997 Highland Archaeology Week is a good example. “Without a shared memory identity fades and unity dissolves” (Havel quoted in Koonz 1994: 269).
Caen, August 5, 1914
If the Highland Clearances can be regarded as ‘mythic’ in structure, we may go further and suggest that they actually function as an ‘origin myth’ for contemporary Highland identity. They represent one of the key defining episodes of Highland history: “in terms of national consciousness,” Mackay writes (1993: 51), “the [Clearance] period is fundamental to our nation’s sense of identity.” Mackay also reminds us that “our nation” is not only the Gaidhealtachd, the ‘Gaelic’ Highlands, but the whole of Scotland, where ‘Highland culture’ comes to define, for many, ‘Scottish culture’. But what is it to ‘identify’ with place? In his paper on Apache narrative (1988), Basso describes how stories told ‘in’ place do not only create a sense of identity, but also shape that identity in practice. Apache landscape-narratives are moral tales and are instructive and corrective in nature. It is through the telling of these tales that the individual is socialised in specifically Apache terms. “Wisdom sits in places,” Basso writes (1996); such wisdom lies waiting in the landscape ready to ‘strike’ errant individuals, bringing to mind the ‘truth’ they have neglected or forgotten, setting them back on the right course. The landscape also acts to substantiate the constitutive stories that define a people. Bruner and Gorfain describe how the ambiguous and shifting meaning of the Israeli Masada myth seems to become unambiguous and fixed in the encounter with the massive mountain fortress where the events occurred. “To attach such a mutable story to such an immutable site,” they write, “ makes use of a device to fix meaning, to lend stability to authority and interpretation” (1988: 72). Similarly, Salmond reports that Maori children would be taught of their ancestors in the places where they had dwelt. The place and its name become “a guarantee for the truth-value of the account,” and allow the child to confidently assert, “I know it is true because I have seen that very rock” (1992: 84). Tilley sums it up when he writes,
	People routinely draw on their stocks of knowledge of the landscape and the locales in which they act to give meaning, assurance and significance to their lives. The place acts dialectically so as to create the people who are of that place. These qualities of locales and landscapes give rise to a feeling of belonging and rootedness and a familiarity, which is not born just out of knowledge, but of concern that provides ontological security” (1994: 27).
“To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from” (McCullers in Basso 1996: 83). “The sureness of ‘I was’ is a necessary component of the sureness of ‘I am’” (Lowenthal 1995: 41). It appears then that our narratives of past times and past places are crucial to our orientation in current times and current places. But lest this begin to seem a self-evident truth, we should remember that it is not the only imaginable view. We may find it easy to agree with the columnist in The Scots Magazine when he rejects Cowan’s assertion that the “debilitating” remains of the Clearances should be removed. Cowan’s remark seems insensitive to such symbolic landscapes, so fundamental—as we have seen—to certain varieties of Scottish identity, but perhaps his comment was not so flippant. Replying to a question about the significance of the loss of such symbolic landscapes, one of my respondents wrote, “If you wish to destroy a nation, first destroy its history.” But how healthy is a present which often seems preoccupied with its past? As one commentator put it, “The clearances have done even greater damage to the Highlands as a memory than they did as a historical fact” (Shaw Grant quoted in Gibson 1996b: 40). Indeed, as the arson attack on the shooting lodge bears witness, there can be no doubt that the popular image of the Clearances—painted by the schoolchildren on the walls of the museum, reproduced in the wax-work displays of the tourist attraction, written into histories and novels—breeds an unhealthy antagonism. Is this what it is to belong? There is another view of past times and past places which sees history as “the most dangerous product the chemistry of the intellect has concocted…”
	It produces dreams and drunkenness. It fills people with false memories, exaggerates their reactions, exacerbates old grievances, and encourages either a delirium of grandeur or a delusion of persecution. It makes whole nations bitter, arrogant, insufferable, and vainglorious (Valéry quoted in Lowenthal 1995: 365).
The notions of identity, rootedness and belonging are, after all, relative terms, exclusive as well as inclusive. They are means through which people set themselves apart from those who do not share a common identity, who have other roots, who do not belong. If we also assert that these notions are fundamental to our ability to live in and make sense of the present, we surely define for ourselves a bleak prospect.
	We confront one another armoured in identities whose likenesses we ignore or disown and whose differences we distort or invent to emphasize our own superior worth. Lauding our own legacies and excluding or discrediting those of others, we commit ourselves to endemic rivalry and conflict” (Lowenthal 1994: 41).
This is true—perhaps truer—of minorities as well as majorities. Samuel and Thompson describe such constructs as “strategies for survival” (1990: 19), and suggest that “it is often persecution and common grievance which define belonging” (ibid.). Increasingly it seems to ‘go without saying’ that our various heritages, and the places of memory which embody and narrate them, should be protected from decay and presented for popular consumption. But perhaps we should question the inevitability of this conclusion. Are we right to place such enormous value on these controversial relics of the past? Would it not be better to reject a heritage which also distinguishes, separates and discriminates? Perhaps Cowan had a point when he suggested the Highlands would be better off without its monuments to the Clearances. Not because the Clearances should be somehow denied, their memory suppressed—as if they had never happened—but in a more radical sense, in that they might become irrelevant in an idea of the future where the assertion of distinct identity becomes unnecessary. It is ironic, if not particularly surprising, that in the current age of perceived homogenisation, there is a growing desire for cultures (especially minority cultures) to assert such distinction. Gibson writes that Highland culture and language is experiencing a “remarkable revival” (1996a: 2). This is felt not only in the Highlands—in the growing number of heritage centres and museums, the resurgence of folk festivals, the revival of the Gaelic language—but throughout the diaspora, aided by mass media and modern communication systems.
	“In Scotland here, the revival in Gaelic and the huge expansion of what was a rooted tradition in music, song, dance, and so on; the bringing back of step dancing from Cape Breton to here, strengthening the Canadian-Scottish links. The information highways that there are now that make it possible for people to know these things, they’re all making it all much more likely that people are asking about their roots…” (Gibson pers. comm.).
To what ends have we remembered? There is, of course, no end, there is only process. What we remember, how we remember, why we remember, these are all governed by an ever-evolving present. “Memory,” as Young says, “is never shaped in a vacuum,” its motives “are never pure” (1993: 2). Though it may often seem so, this is not some vague, self-regulating process, but the result of a myriad discrete decisions, consciously made. For example, in preserving the monuments of the Highland Clearances, conservation bodies actively shape the memory of the events they recall. Preserving the ruins of cleared settlements is as much an act of intervention as any bid to remove them. One attempts to force forgetfulness, the other remembrance. Riegl appeals to a sense of the natural decay of memory. Like memory, the monument is seen as having a finite life span and no attempt must be made either to hasten its demise or prolong its survival:
	Every artifact is…perceived as a natural entity whose development should not be disturbed, but should be allowed to live itself out with no more interference than necessary to prevent its premature demise…What must be strictly avoided is interference with the actions of nature’s laws, be it the suppression of nature by man or the premature destruction of human creations by nature… preservation should not aim at stasis but ought to permit monuments to submit to incessant and steady decay (1982: 32).
We should perhaps not be so afraid to forget. The memories and monuments of the Highland Clearances are important, but their importance may be overstated so that they become something of a ‘cultural preoccupation’. The dominant narrative of the Clearances—just one configuration of the myth—ultimately serves not to bind but to separate. It does so because, like all narratives, it recalls selectively. It does not remember, for instance, that the process of rural dispossession has been a calamity that has faced many peoples at many times; nor does it remember that those dispossessed may later become the dispossessors. Thus, when considering the Highland Clearances, we should be careful to remember not the uniqueness of those appalling events, but rather their affinity with analogous situations, for example, with the violences of rural transformation in Tudor England. And neither should we forget that many of those who were exiled from the Highlands during the Clearances were also among those who, in the name of civilisation, modernisation and capital, were not averse to exiling other peoples from their ancestral lands in the colonies, sometimes in circumstances of the utmost brutality (see, for example, Richards 1985: 269-70). This neither absolves the guilty, nor condemns the innocent, but simply questions the usefulness of identities founded on such absolute terms. The vivid simplicities are not enough. In this respect the landscape-narratives still have a vitally important role to play. For, despite all, they remain sites of contention. They are foci of debate, defiantly resisting monologic interpretation, exposing the paradoxes and ambiguities of the narrative, revealing its constructed nature and the dissonance of remembrance. Such place-stories may undermine our confident assertions about who we are—culturally, nationally, individually—forcing reflexivity and, above all, encouraging tolerance.
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