Chris Greencorn
On 3 March, Conservative Get together of Canada chief Pierre Poilievre delivered the keynote Margaret Thatcher Lecture for the Centre for Coverage Research in London, an influential British conservative assume tank co-founded by Thatcher with the mission of protecting her concepts and insurance policies related in in the present day’s political panorama. Poilievre’s deal with to this room filled with Tory movers and shakers thus was unsurprisingly a paean to free market capitalism, drawing on Adam Smith, Thomas Macaulay, Winston Churchill, and the Iron Girl herself.
About three-quarters of the way in which by way of his speech, Poilievre waxed concerning the ties that proceed to bind the previous dominion with its imperial metropole. “Canada and the UK share language, tradition, parliamentary authorities, and most vital of all, folklore,” he claimed, “together with the probably fictional legend of Robin Hood. And, by the way in which, I don’t imply the medieval Marxist of Twentieth-century retellings. Robin fought, as can we, for historic liberties of the widespread individuals: to hunt, harvest, and maintain what was theirs.”
I encourage your pardon?
I admit, this was not on my bingo card. My doctoral analysis focuses on the work of Helen Creighton, the Nova Scotian folklorist largely chargeable for popularizing the thought of that province as a singular protect of British folkloric materials. Constructing on historian Ian McKay’s influential The Quest of the Folks: Antimodernism and Cultural Choice in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (1994), which analyzed this constructed picture with a class-based lens strongly formed by New Left cultural research, and the work of folklorists like Diane Tye, who’ve tackled Creighton’s legacy from a feminist perspective throughout the self-discipline that has successfully inherited her mantle, I ask how race outlined what was authentically Nova Scotian and established a hierarchy wherein the folklore of some teams was deemed extra genuine than others.[1]
Poilievre was not being fully glib when he used the legend of Robin Hood for example of folklore shared between Canada and the UK. Few Robin Hood tales have been collected right here, however in Helen Creighton’s first publication, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (1933), she printed two Robin Hood ballads, “Daring Pedlar and Robin Hood” and “Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham,” which she had collected from Ben Henneberry of Satan’s Island in Halifax Harbour. In her notes to those songs, Creighton linked them to a number of of the English and Scottish “in style ballads” canonized by Harvard professor Francis James Baby within the mid-19th century.[2]
Creighton’s profession in folklore gathering coincided with a interval wherein the discourse round English Canadians’ place on this planet would shift dramatically, from imperialism to nationalism and from “founding races” to “multiculturalism inside a bilingual framework”—“the opposite Quiet Revolution,” to make use of José Igartua’s flip of phrase.[3] All through this sea-change, Creighton privileged Baby ballads just like the “Daring Pedlar and Robin Hood” and “Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham” as proof of the elemental Britishness of Nova Scotia. In her fieldwork and in her publications, materials like this got here initially. Whereas the nation grappled with the truth of its racial and ethnic range and reconfigured its political narratives to accommodate, folklore supplied figures like Creighton a way by which to reinstate the dominant place of British settlers in Canadian tradition.[4]
Within the course of, Creighton implicitly and explicitly marginalized different teams, doing so alongside racial traces. Her assortment, research, and publication of fabric from African Nova Scotians and Mi’kmaq was minimal, and what consideration she did give them was characterised by a pervasive condescension and a repertoire of in style and racist stereotypes, versus any magnanimity or prescience concerning the worth of multicultural range.[5] This was not unusual for the time—actually, it stays widespread—however Creighton’s prejudices formed the fabric she collected, the way it was built-in into her printed works, and due to this fact how we proceed to think about and perceive cultural traditions within the area. The Canadian mosaic has all the time been a “racial mosaic,” and the racialized politics of authenticity that suffuses Creighton’s archive warrants particular and sustained consideration.[6]
Poilievre’s argument for a shared heritage of folklore does one thing related. His Robin Hood anecdote was not simply an opportunity to get a jab in at Marxist bogeymen or to align his trigger with that of the folks hero. Sandwiched between the reactionary cry that new jobs should go to “our individuals,” to not momentary international employees, and simply earlier than championing the CANZUK alliance—i.e., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, primarily a commerce, safety, and motion settlement between Britain and the previous white Dominions that may revive one thing of the empire upon which the solar by no means set—Poilievre deploys folklore as a type of “restorative nostalgia” which, in Svetlana Boym’s definition, “makes an attempt a transhistorical reconstruction of the misplaced house,” the nostos of nostalgia.[7]
On this gentle, Poilievre’s invocation of Robin Hood just isn’t quaint, however harmful. Musicologist Ross Cole writes in The Folks: Music, Modernity, and the Political Creativeness (2021) that “the folks have bestowed upon us a double-edged sword,” by which he implies that they, the cultural core of the imagined group, encourage each utopian and dystopian visions of the longer term. The identical idea round which left-wing people singers rallied additionally mutated and metastasized into the Volksgemeinschaft of the Third Reich. The thought of restoring genuine connections between individuals and place is an especially potent one.[8]
It additionally evokes the modern far proper in Canada. Contemplate Diagolon, the intense white nationalist tendency led by Jeremy MacKenzie, and their “nationwide anthem,” a rewrite of the shanty “Rolling Right down to Previous Maui,” made in style in Canada by people singer Stan Rogers.[9] One of many verses goes as follows:
In our personal cities we’re foreigners now
Our names are spat and cursed
The headlines smack of one other assault
Not the final and never the worst
Oh, my fathers, they appear down on me
I’m wondering what they really feel
To see their noble sons pushed down
Beneath a coward’s heel
A refrain of males then sing with full chest:
Oh, by God, we’ll have our house once more
By God, we’ll have our house
By blood or sweat, we’ll get there but
By God, we’ll have our house
The video accompanying the anthem options footage of a warfare memorial in Pictou, Nova Scotia, contrasting the present maple leaf flag with the black-and-white slash flag of Diagolon and an identical, monochromatic crimson ensign flying over rural fields. A last shot lingers on the memorial’s iron railing, to which the phrases “lest we neglect” are hooked up. One might hardly ask for a clearer instance, or a extra foreboding one, of the joint efficiency of restorative nostalgia and the folks.[10]
Cole observes from the UK that “we’re at the moment dwelling by way of an period of resurgent right-wing populism wherein repeated references are made to tribal belonging saturated with blood-and-soil rhetoric.”[11] That is unambiguously the case in Canada as effectively, apparent in musical examples just like the one above but additionally within the explosion of white nationalist “lively golf equipment” (the biggest community of which is Second Sons, additionally led by MacKenzie) and continued scandals involving white supremacist extremism within the army.
If the swirl of crimson ensigns and inflammatory clickbait kicked up in response to his social media posts are any indication, Poilievre’s feedback about an historic inheritance of British folklore are a canine whistle to the far proper. To be clear, most far-right commentators on websites like X scorn Poilievre. One account which seems to completely publish racist hate speech replied to a clip of his folklore remarks, “How disappointing is that this? @PierrePoilievre, none of this makes any sense till you start mass remigration. Hundreds of thousands should go.” (“Remigration,” i.e., ethnic cleaning by deportation, is a present watchword for extremist white nationalism).[12] Poilievre, alternatively, maintains a level of believable deniability by denouncing alignment with the far proper as examples come to gentle. However regardless that they disagree with Poilievre about what motion is required, these extremists do agree with the elemental premise: that of a primordial British people on the coronary heart of Canadian society.
Poilievre’s allegory to Robin Hood was not, in any case, a quaint diversion from issues of actual political substance. His speech units a harmful precedent for shifting public discourse towards the paranormal, exclusionary group of “the folks,” and that it’s a menace in opposition to which we must always all be vigilant.
[1] Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folks: Antimodernism and Cultural Choice in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McGill-Queen’s College Press, 1994); Diane Tye, “‘A Very Lone Employee’: Lady-Centred Ideas on Helen Creighton’s Profession as a Folklorist,” Canadian Folklore 15, no. 2 (1993): 107–17, and “Katherine Gallagher and the World of Ladies’s Folksong,” Atlantis 20, no. 1 (1995): 101–12. On “authenticity” as a elementary organizing idea within the historical past of folklore research: Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Research (College of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
[2] Helen Creighton, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (J. M. Dent and Sons, 1933), 12–16. On Baby’s “in style ballads,” see David Harker, “Francis James Baby and the ‘Ballad Consensus,’” Folks Music Journal 4, no. 2 (1981): 146–64. Harker’s work is controversial amongst people music students, however this text highlights effectively the mental scaffolding of Baby’s definition of ballad.
[3] José E. Igartua, The Different Quiet Revolution: Nationwide Identities in English Canada, 1945–71 (UBC Press, 2006).
[4] On this level, I crib from a number of students: on the dominant place, John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Evaluation of Social Class and Energy in Canada (College of Toronto Press, 1965); on the reinstatement, Eva Mackey, The Home of Distinction: Cultural Politics and Canadian Nationwide Id in Canada (Routledge, 1999); Richard J. F. Day, Multiculturalism and the Historical past of Canadian Variety (College of Toronto Press, 2000); and Eve Haque, Multiculturalism inside a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race, and Belonging in Canada (College of Toronto Press, 2012).
[5] My article, “‘I doubt in the event that they had been uncommon’: Race and Place in Helen Creighton’s 1967 African Nova Scotian Recording Mission,” MUSICultures 51 (2024): 193–225, explores one discrete occasion of how this manifested for Black communities in Nova Scotia. My dissertation analysis explores Creighton’s gathering in Mi’kmaw communities additional and in comparative perspective.
[6] Daniel Meister, The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-Historical past of Canadian Multiculturalism (McGill-Queen’s College Press, 2021).
[7] Svetlana Boym, The Way forward for Nostalgia (Primary Books, 2011): xviii.
[8] Ross Cole, The Folks: Music, Modernity, and the Political Creativeness (College of California Press, 2021), “Coda”; citation on p. 177.
[9] Stan Rogers, “Rolling Right down to Previous Maui,” Between the Breaks… Dwell! (Fogarty’s Cove Music, 1979).
[10] A video of the “anthem” is out there on the time of writing: Merc 306 (consumer), “diagolon nationwide anthem, we can have our house once more!.” YouTube, posted August 26, 2021. The authorship of the track is obscure; recorded variations on-line are attributed to the group Pine Tree Riots or “The Mannerbund.” The track can also be used outdoors of Canada: for instance, the US Division of Homeland Safety referenced it an ICE recruitment publish on X in January.
[11] Cole, The Folks, 161.
[12] I’m not utterly satisfied that the account in query isn’t a bot, however that solely amplifies the problem. Proof in favour of a human operator contains frequent references to C. P. Champion’s The Unusual Demise of British Canada: The Liberals and Canadian Nationalism, 1964–1968 (McGill-Queen’s College Press, 2010), full with scanned, highlighted photographs of passages from this monograph.
Chris Greencorn is a PhD candidate in Historical past at Queen’s College in Kingston, Ontario, and holds an MA in Ethnomusicology from the College of Toronto.
Associated
