Cutlery and culture
Highland Village Museum helping people learn Gaelic online
IONA — Learning a few Gaelic words and phrases can be as simple as doing the dishes.
With the Highland Village Museum closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, staff at the outdoor living history site have been sharing videos on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as a fun and simple way to introduce people to a language so vastly different from English that it can be downright intimidating.
And with many people stuck in their homes — and May marking the 24th anniversary of Nova Scotia Gaelic Month — it’s a great time to give it a shot.
In one video, Amber Buchanan shows various dishes at her home while saying the Gaelic words for fork, spoon, glass, cup and plate — big and small — as well as a glass of water, cup of tea, dirty dishes and clean dishes.
ANCESTRAL LANGUAGE
“The idea is to keep people engaged and connected in a time when we can’t physically be together, to give an offering to the community and also to provide a little bit of a distraction from the distress of the times. And I think some people are finding that they have more time on their hands,” said Buchanan, one of the Highland Village Museum’s “na cleasaichean,” or performers, and a Gaelic teacher in the community.
“There’s so many people who have wanted to learn Gaelic over the years, who wanted to reclaim their ancestral language, but it’s very hard in modern life to have the time and the space to dedicate to learning a new language — it takes so much time and energy.”
Buchanan shows her true colours in another video.
Using the Buchanan family tartan she’s currently weaving on the loom at her Iona home, she teaches the names of each of the colours: blue, green, black, yellow, white and purple.
‘KEEP YOUR FACE INSIDE!’
Hannah Krebs, also a performer at the museum, took a video of a short walk where she shared words like road, footprints and snowball, as well as one in which she dyed Easter eggs using some onion skins, turmeric, tea leaves and blueberries.
There’s even a video where the museum shares the Gaelic equivalent of “Stay the blazes home!” — “Cum do bhus a-staigh!” which translates into “Keep your face inside!.”
“Basically what they are is short little snippets of Gaelic,” said Buchanan, who is also fluent in Spanish. “No one is going to learn how to speak Gaelic through watching some videos, but it’s something. It’s like a little start, and if in your home you can learn a couple of words and phrases, then you might have the confidence to head out to a community class after that.
“It’s like to iseach-tòiseachaidh, as we say in Gaelic — the start of the start, or the beginning of the beginning. It’s a blasad; in Gaelic we say blasad, which means ‘just a little taste.’”
THE MAC IS BACK
The videos are just one way the museum is reaching out to the community during the lockdown.
Co-ordinator of cultural experiences Shay MacMullin was planning to read from the old Gaelic-language newspaper Mac-Talla on Facebook Live this week and there’s been a weekly popup Gàidhealtachd — Gaelic conversation — each Friday at noon on Zoom, with the link shared on the museum’s Facebook page.
Museum director Rodney Chaisson said they’ve thought about creating more social-media content in recent years but increased cruise ship traffic had them focusing on the visitor experience at the 40-acre site, which includes 11 historic buildings and a working farm where costumed animators demonstrate blacksmithing, spinning weaving, wooldying and other hand-crafts that depict life for Gaelic settlers in Nova Scotia.
COMMUNITY PRIDE
“With COVID, it kind of stopped us where for at least the next few months we’re not going to have that public, person-to-person interaction, so staff quickly adapted,” he said. “We’ve got a great group of Gaelic innovation staff and they took their skills and what we’re really all about here is pride in the Gaelic story and Gaelic identity. Now what we’re doing is ensuring we can still capture that through our social media, share that pride with our community and help them engage with people are sitting home. Gaelic is a very communal experience, whether it’s just at a house ceilidh, or sharing stories, or visiting with a neighbour. We can’t do that right now, so our staff are enabling some of that community to still happen, only in a virtual setting.”
Outside of her work with the museum, Buchanan is also hosting Gaelic yoga classes Wednesday mornings at 9 a.m. on Zoom. Anyone can join by finding the link on the
Nova Scotia Gaels Jam Facebook page.
“If you go back far enough there’s connections between Gaelic and Sanskrit, so it’s not that far-fetched a connection,” said Buchanan, who lived in India while she trained to become a yoga teacher.
While she hasn’t had too much trouble translating the names of the poses into Gaelic because many are named after animals, figuring out other words has been a bit more challenging.
“I’m trying to find an appropriate word for posture or pose. There’s the Gaelic word for statue but we don’t become a statue in these postures — you don’t want to be like a rock,” she said. “There are also words I actually never really drilled into my head and don’t use very often, like elbow. I don’t usually say the word elbow in Gaelic, it’s one of these things you don’t talk about a lot.”