RESOLUCIÓN N.° 532/AGC/

As I discuss throughout this thesis, Chéticamp rug hooking is largely a tradition based on economics. The style of rug hooking practiced by women in Chéticamp was consciously created to appeal to the tastes of wealthy outsiders. Academics have explored the role economics and labour have played in the cultural history of Cape Breton in terms of both exploitation (McKinnon 1989) and resistance (Feintuch 2004; MacSween 2004). Ian McKinnon’s work on the progression of Cape Breton fiddle albums examines the earliest recordings made in the 1920s by large American record companies like Decca and Columbia that were marketed as part of the “ethnic” music market. During this time fiddlers were largely motivated by the increase in status that recording an album would offer. There was not much money to be made from these recordings, something that was only multiplied by the fact that the record companies often withheld royalties from the fiddlers. McKinnon notes that during the 1970s, fiddlers began to move towards independently recorded albums. This allowed fiddlers to manage their own finances, to distribute their own records, and have ultimate control over their representation. In a

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broader sense, McKinnon is discussing the idea of outsiders affecting a local tradition within Cape Breton and seemingly taking advantage of tradition bearers. This is

something also seen in the Chéticamp rug hooking tradition. The economic aspect of the tradition was imposed by outsiders who set themselves up as “middlemen” – as brokers between the wealthy purchasers and the Chéticamp hookers.

Burt Feintuch builds on the work done by McKinnon by writing about the economic and social context of Cape Breton fiddle music. He explains that as the island’s fisheries and mining industries declined, Cape Breton became an economically marginalized place (Feintuch 2004). Due to this economic situation, the local fiddling style has taken on an important role in tourism, with tourism replacing other once- thriving industries. The fiddle has taken on multiple symbolic identities as an immigrant tradition reaching back to the 18th century. Feintuch argues that the music provides a sense of cultural vitality in the face of poor economic conditions. In many ways, rug hooking has always played an important economic role in the life of Chéticamp. Women were able to keep food on their family’s table during bad fishing seasons because of rug hooking (Poirier interview 1988; Muise interview 2015). The cottage industry began at around the same time as the mining and fisheries began to decline, and at the same time as tourism began to increase in the area. In many ways, this selling of culture that Feintuch talks about can be extended to rug hooking in Chéticamp.

Marie MacSween’s work (2004) focuses on the narratives of four women in Glace Bay whose husbands had lost their jobs in the coal mine in the late 1990s to early 2000s. She discusses the many ways in which the women bore the brunt of the burden when their husbands lost their jobs. MacSween found two different types of resistance

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among the women she spoke to. Some women practiced quiet resistance by going back to school and taking on multiple jobs to keep the family from having financial

difficulties, while others took a more public form of resistance taking on the mining companies, demanding better compensation and severance packages for miners (2004, 85).

Richard MacKinnon’s research on labour and protest song asserts that on “Cape Breton island, where coal mining and steel-making were once an essential part of the region’s culture and economy, protest song and verse are found in abundance” (2008, 33). His work shows that a vibrant occupational folksong tradition was alive in the first half of the 20th century. By examining archival material, newspapers and magazines, he is able to trace the hardships endured by the workers as they struggled towards solidarity and unionization. MacKinnon puts forth a possible reason for the lack of popularity of labour songs. He writes that, “the songs composed during labour struggles, strikes, or particularly difficult times may lose their meaning for the people when the events surrounding their composition are long forgotten” (2008, 43). MacKinnon has also published studies on the material culture of industrial Cape Breton, something that has been largely ignored by folklorists. His work on company housing, log architecture and cooperative housing are all topics that have been under limited examination by other scholars.

1.9 Conclusion

This thesis is an ethnographic and archival study of Chéticamp hooked rugs. It utilizes structuralism to analyze the design of these artistic pieces of material culture. I

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also use structuralism to discuss the social contexts which create this art, specifically relating to issues such as social structure, economics, gender and Acadianness. I examine Chéticamp’s hooked rugs chronologically and how design was used and changed

depending on consumption and context. This chapter began by introducing the subject of this thesis and placed my study in both larger theoretical and methodological contexts. I continued by presenting a review of the ways in which folklorists have studied and written about material culture, art and craft, as well as hooked rugs. Following this, I examined how studies of Cape Breton folklore and heritage has been studied in scholarly literature with an eye to demonstrating why this thesis fills an important gap in the literature. In the following chapter, I focus on early rug making traditions in Chéticamp before the cottage industry was set up in the late 1920s. I also present a structural analysis of different rug types and discuss the creation and application of my motif-index for hooked rugs.

51 Chapter Two: Early Rug-Making Traditions in Chéticamp

History tells us that when Adam was accused of having stolen the apple from the tree he immediately ‘passed the buck’ and blamed it on

Eve, and that she, to retaliate, swiped his best Sunday suit, cut it up into small strips, and worked

it into a Hooked Rug. (Cecil Garrett,1927) 6

2.1 Yarn

The package comes less than a week after I order it. I am excited but hesitant. It is smaller and softer than I was expecting. I am about to put several years of active

listening in the field to the test. Every rug hooker I know is several provinces away, the only helpers I can count on are my three cats who are currently waiting for me to empty the package, so they can crawl inside. I reach into the package and remove a large piece of burlap which will be soon stamped with a design of my choosing and hooked into a small rug. The cats crawl into the discarded package and I hunt around my sewing box for the yarn and fabrics strips I have been saving for this project – varying shades of blue and green: black wool yarn, and fluffy white cotton. It occurs to me that I have no idea how to hook fluffy cotton, only fabric strips, or threads of wool. Even then, it’s not so much that I “know” how to hook them in a practical way, but more that I understand it, in theory. But the leap from theory to practice is a big one. I am about to hook my first rug.

6 _{Cecil Garrett, the son of John Garrett, was the successor to his father’s company, The John}

Garrett Company. Also referred to as the Garrett Bluenose Company, it was the first Canadian company to sell commercially designed hooked rug patterns.

52 The burlap is stretched across my cheery yellow frame, ready for me to begin. I start by holding a strip of baby blue cloth under the burlap and using my hook, bring a small loop of the cloth through a hole in the burlap. My first loop. I am very proud of this first, perfect loop. The next few loops come up easily, then I tug a bit too hard and

accidentally unravel the whole line of carefully hooked loops. I begin again. Over and over, again and again, I unravel lines of loops or pull my hook too aggressively through the burlap, making the hole too big to properly hold a loop. Constantly fixing mistakes, I am happy no one is around to see this.