The Cultural Economy of Survival: The Mi’kmaq of Cape Breton in the Mid-19th Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By the mid-19th century, the Mi’kmaq of Cape Breton Island, much like the Mi’kmaq on the Nova Scotia mainland, were nearly destitute. The outcome of over two centuries of political, economic, and cultural interaction with Europeans, this condition was exacerbated by the massive influx of Scottish settlers to the island after the end of the Napoleonic Wars – nearly 30,000 between 1815 and 1838. With their lands occupied and access to customary hunting and fishing grounds severely limited, the island’s Mi’kmaw population – estimated to be about 500 in 1847 – adopted numerous economic initiatives to stay alive: they pursued agriculture and wage labour, mobilized older skills toward different occupational niches, and maintained, at least to some extent, customary rounds of seasonal resource procurement. This essay examines this evolving pattern of occupational pluralism, and highlights how customary norms, codes, and behaviours provided part of the logic through which the island’s Mi’kmaw people made decisions about what to do, economically, to survive. Mid-19th century Cape Breton was a contested place as the forces of immigration and settlement exerted new pressures on Mi’kmaw life. This paper is about that changing context and how the island’s indigenous people sought to understand it, negotiate its pressures and possibilities, and blunt its negative effects. Resume Vers le milieu du 19e siecle, les Mi’kmaq de l’ile du cap Breton, comme les Mi’kmaq de la partie continentale de la Nouvelle-Ecosse, etaient presque prives de ressources. Resultat de plus de deux siecles d’interaction politique, economique et culturelle avec les Europeens, cette condition etait aggravee par l’invasion massive des rapatries ecossais sur l’ile a la fin des guerres de Napoleon – presque 30 000 entre 1815 et 1838. Etant donne l’occupation de leur terre et l’acces tres limite a leurs terrains habituels de la chasse et de la peche, la population Mi’kmaw de l’ile – estimee a environ 500 en 1847 – avait adopte de nombreuses initiatives economiques pour rester en vie : ils cherchaient du travail agricole et salarie, utilisaient des competences acquises vers de differents niches occupationnelles, et maintenaient, au moins jusqu’a un certain point, certaines ressources saisonnieres habituelles. Cet article examine cette conception en evolution du pluralisme occupationnel, et met en vedette les normes, les codes et les comportements habituels par lesquels les Mi’kmaw de l’ile avaient pris leurs decisions economiques pour survivre. Le cap Breton du milieu du 19e siecle etait un endroit conteste comme les forces d’immigration et de peuplement ont exerce de nouvelles pressions sur la vie des Mi’kmaw. Cet article met ce changement dans son contexte et explique la facon dont les indigenes de l’ile avaient cherche a comprendre, a negocier ses pressions et ses possibilites, et a emousser ses effets negatifs.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".