The Old Man Told Us: Excerpts from Micmac History, 1500-1950

James Pritchard is a history professor at Queen’s University.

This is an excellent collection of information, stories, and narratives
by and about the Micmac people since the sixteenth century. The author
is staff ethnologist and assistant curator of history at the Nova Scotia
Museum, and the book’s great strength is that she has allowed the
Micmac to tell their own story as far as that is possible. Likening the
oral and written Micmac accounts to fragments of a broken mirror in
which only moments of particular people’s lives are briefly reflected
but never captured, she tries to restore a collective memory to the
aboriginal people of Nova Scotia whose contact with Europeans and their
descendants has been among the longest and most devastating.

Unfortunately, the book has several weaknesses, chiefly relating to
presentation and style. These are annoying because had the editor
received different advice many of them might have been overcome giving
rise to a superior text. The contents are arranged chronologically into
six sections of very uneven length, according to centuries: pre–1500,
sixteenth century, and so on. The first difficulty is that the arbitrary
decision to place some accounts in one section and not in another has
resulted in some material being terribly cut up. The fascinating account
of Micmac life written by Father Pierre Maillard during the middle of
the eighteenth century, for example, has been cut into 13 pieces and
scattered through three chapters under arbitrary date headings. Such an
organization also leaves the reader with no critical apparatus to
evaluate the many varied accounts. The editor’s brief introduction is
completely inadequate. Nevertheless, the contents of this source book,
especially the inclusion of Micmac accounts recorded over the past 400
years, are themselves sufficiently compelling to challenge readers to
overcome the difficulties.