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Islands are places that foster a unique sense of place-attachment and community identity among their populations. Scholarship focusing on the distinctive values, attitudes and perspectives of ‘island people’ from around the world reveals the layers of meaning that are attached to island life. Lowenthal writes: ‘Islands are fantasized as antitheses of the all-engrossing gargantuan mainstream-small, quiet, untroubled, remote from the busy, crowded, turbulent everyday scene. In reality, most of them are nothing like that. ...’1 Islands, for many people, are ‘imagined places’ in our increasingly globalised world; the perceptions of island culture and reality often differ. Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, in eastern North America, a locale with a rich history of class struggle surrounding its former coal and steel industries, provides an excellent case study for the ways that local history, collective memory and cultural expression might combine to combat the ‘untroubled fantasy’ that Lowenthal describes. History and methodology Coal mining has been an essential part of Cape Breton Island’s landscape since the early-eighteenth century. A steel mill was constructed in Sydney, the island’s largest city, in 1899; this steel plant provided employment for many of the island’s inhabitants throughout the twentieth century. Grid-patterned streets, dotted with company-owned homes, formed around the industrial workplaces in many Cape Breton communities. It was in these communities, from the people employed in the coal mines and steel mill, that distinctive traditions of work and leisure began to emerge. The 1920s witnessed several conflicts erupt between industrial workers and the coal and steel companies in Cape Breton. The coal miners were able to force the company to recognise trade unionism after a bitter strike in 1925, while the steelworkers were unable to achieve such recognition of their union until the Nova Scotia Trade Union Act in 1937. Although ethnic and religious divisions existed, by the 1920s a close-knit working-class consciousness had taken root in Cape Breton’s Richard MacKinnon and Lachlan MacKinnon 40 London Journal of Canadian Studies, Volume 30 (2015) industrial communities. Music and song played a significant role in this process. Many protest songs and poems of local composition were sung and recited throughout the industrial communities; some were published in the Maritime Labour Herald throughout the 1920s.2 These compositions focus on local events, personalities and places, tragedies such as mine accidents, the industrial conflicts of the 1920s, and the attitudes of workers toward management. These songs are often tinged with satire and witty analysis of workingclass life. Some have entered oral tradition and others did not; however, they provide us with a snapshot of the attitudes and values of the Cape Breton workers during the early twentieth century.3 Cape Breton’s industrial communities have developed distinctive local identities. The struggle for survival and the intensely-fought labour conflicts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have inextricably shaped identity formation in these communities. Although the coal mines and steel plant were shut down in the early-2000s, some aspects of these working-class identities remain visible. MacKinnon recently invited young Cape Breton songwriters, many of whom had relatives who had worked in the coal mines or steel mill, to take part in the ‘Protest Song Project’ at Cape Breton University. This project includes a form of conscious cultural intervention; MacKinnon introduced Cape Breton songs from the 1920s to contemporary musicians. He worked collaboratively with local singer/songwriter Victor Tomiczek to select eighteen song texts from the 150-song corpus originally identified and asked local musicians to compose music for the lyrics. They brought the musicians to Cape Breton University’s Rotary Music Performance Room to record their songs and released them on a CD with an accompanying web site providing more historical context.4 Some of these Cape Breton musicians, many of whom tour nationally and internationally, now play these songs regularly in their own sets, bringing new audiences to these older songs of protest. The musicians learned much about Cape Breton’s labour past through writing Figure 1. Map of Cape Breton Island

Travelling in Time to Cape Breton Island in the 1920s: Protest Songs, Murals and Island Identity