The Quest of the Folkwas published in 1994, reprinted in 2006, and now makes its appearance in the Carleton Library Series. For me, theQuestis rather like the good ships doted upon by Simeon Perkins in his renowned eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Nova Scotia diaries.¹ Like Perkins, keenly awaiting news from thePollyand theBetseyas they went about their run-of-the-mill coasting exercises, interspersed with the odd bit of privateering and hurricane-dodging, I often scan my e-mail for word of theQuest’slatest adventures. Quite frequently I get letters - sometimes from the book’s admirers pursuing topics...

In the Public Archives of Nova Scotia there is a postcard depicting a scene from Mill Cove, Lunenburg County, one of many fishing settlements ringing St. Margaret’s Bay on Nova Scotia’s Atlantic coast. The photograph is of a small cabin with weather-beaten boards, encircled by a rough-hewn rock wall and sod for insulation: a rickety ladder leads to a loosely shingled roof, deeply stained by the soot from the stove chimney. In front of the house stand seven people, presumably its occupants: on the left, two men, one an old man with a full white beard, the other a man...

Dark figures gathered round the sputtering embers of a camp fire. It was late spring, 1928. A picnic was in progress on the shores of the Atlantic, near the town of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. One of the figures was Helen Creighton, a young local journalist.

“As the evening shadows lengthened we strolled along the beautiful sandy beach, leaving a small bonfire to burn itself out,” Creighton later recalled in her memoirs. “On our return we found a villager, Mike Matthews, standing beside it, and in that easy way one does in the country, we began to talk. The stillness of...

No single figure is more identified with the emergence of the idea of the Nova Scotia Folk than Helen Creighton. From the late 1920s to the early 1970s she stood for the idea of the Folk in the province. No other provincial writer commands greater public esteem.¹ Her books are widely read in the school system, and performing artists have used songs from her collection. No balanced history of Nova Scotian cultural life in the twentieth century would question the significance of her contribution.

As we have seen, when Creighton went to Devil’s Island as a journalist in 1929, she...

Helen Creighton successfully made a particular antimodernist reading of Nova Scotia into something that seemed a simple matter of common sense. She took an entropic conservative ideology and made it into something that both Nova Scotian and Canadian nationalists could see as speaking to their own sense of identity. But this elevation of folklore to such a position of cultural prominence in twentieth-century Nova Scotia only captures part of the Quest of the Folk in Nova Scotia. In many respects, the handicrafts tradition was a more visible and obvious indication of pre-modern Innocence than the emergence of folklore. The casual...

Both folklore and handicrafts naturalized a certain reading of some Nova Scotians as Folk. Both of them were essentialist, even if their metaphors and strategies – selective preservation in one case, technical training in the other – were dissimilar. Helen Creighton and Mary Black, working in different ways in different fields, converged in naturalizing a sense of the Folk. Both of them lent credence to the notion of an organic community united around certain key values and traditions. But how much importance should be attached to the ways in which they imagined Nova Scotia? Was it the case that they were merely...

“Nova Scotia,” Kildare Dobbs wrote in a publication for tourists in 1986, “is a province that becomes more itself in every decade.” None of his readers could doubt that this peculiar procedure of becoming “more itself” meant becoming the promised land of the Folk, handicrafts, and the simple life. Grizzled captains chat to small boys on sunlit wharves, lazy rivers meander through lush fields on their way to the sparkling sea, stately mansions glory in their Victorian gingerbread: by becoming “more itself,” Dobbs’s Nova Scotia has cleansed itself of the twentieth century. Handicrafts are everywhere. “Visitors and tourists in any...