Micmac by Choice: Elsie Sark-An Island Legend

J.R. Miller is a professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan
and author of Skyscrapers Hide in the Heavens: A History of Indian-White
Relations in Canada.

Elsie Sark chose to become a Micmac and live on a reserve on Lennox
Island, PEI. Born and raised in southern England, Sark fell in love with
a Canadian soldier during World War I. With her husband—a teacher and
son of the Lennox Island band chief—she returned to his home at
war’s end to begin a long and eventful association with the Micmac.
Elsie combined her knowledge of nursing and her firm attachment to the
Catholic faith (which she had adopted after meeting her fiancé) with
her own determination to become an important fixture in reserve life.
From the 1920s until her death in 1973, she was at the centre of
community activities.

Sark’s choice involved her in the intense and sometimes turbulent
life of a distinctive people. While raising a large and devoted family,
she found time to help with major church activities, to back her
husband’s side of the Sark family in the internecine political
struggles into which the election of a chief frequently degenerated, and
to offer advice to anyone who would listen. Apparently her assertiveness
offended traditional Micmac notions of proper female behavior, and she
was as resented by her Micmac neighbors as she was admired by non-Native
friends. Although Sark was sometimes described by unfriendly Micmac
women as “just a squaw like any other,” she clearly never fitted in
among the people she had chosen through marriage.

McKenna, a former professor of Education at Mount Saint Vincent
University, has fashioned an intriguing, though not completely
satisfying biography of Sark. The reader constantly wonders about the
precise nature of Sark’s relationship to the Micmac, which McKenna
never explains fully. She suggests that enmity toward Sark was the
result of Lennox Island factionalism and of envy at the relative
affluence she and her husband enjoyed. Unfortunately, the research on
which the study is based, though extensive, did not include much
interviewing of Micmac sources and the Natives who were interviewed were
almost all members of Sark’s family on the Island. Interviews with
Micmac critics would have been a welcome accompaniment to the many
interviews with non-native admirers.

If Micmac by Choice leaves the reader unsafisfied, it is partly because
the book arouses interest in its subject—a complex woman who
experienced a most unusual life.