Voices Over the Water

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(brooding music) (people singing in Gaelic) (singing continues) - [Thomas] This is the land of ferocity.

This is the land of murder and mayhem.

- [Narrator] Who were these people, and why did so many of them leave?

- [Alexander] That sense of belonging, of roots even, is very important here in the US.

- [Thomas] But it's a particular type of Scottish heritage they're interested in.

It's usually got a Highland dimension to it.

(dramatic music) (dramatic music continues) (upbeat fiddle music) - My mother was from Scotland, and she came to New York in her 20s with no help, and a mother who was from the Highlands, from Skye, and said, "You have to get out of this country.

You have to go to New York."

The moment I was able to play a scale, I had to learn how to play a tune so her and her girlfriends could do Scottish country dancing.

- I remember that my grandmother was very proud of being Scottish, and she told me that real men drink Scotch, and that they work hard and they play hard.

- Who doesn't smile when they see a man in a kilt?

- [Narrator] We all wanna belong.

A sense of belonging gives us a foundation of community.

Pride in our ethnic roots is widespread in America.

As we show off the badges of our ancestry, immigration patterns are changing the ethnic makeup of the United States.

Family history, genealogy, and ancestry research are more popular than ever.

We will meet some of the Scottish Americans, and see how they celebrate their traditions and show their pride.

We will explore the history behind these events, the infamous, the oft unspoken, the tales that have been passed from generation to generation.

Many know the history, but for those who don't, if they had the big picture, would it change how they celebrate, sing, dance, and make merry?

(upbeat music) - I don't think there's anything wrong with people wanting to display their pride and dress up in regalia and so on, as long as you know the difference between fact and fiction.

- My birthday's the first week of April, so Tartan Week.

And I always joke and say that for my birthday I get men and kilts marching up Sixth Avenue, and I pray for a windy day.

(Sue Ann laughing) (wind howling) (water babbling) - [Narrator] Highlands, Lowlands, castles, hills, and lochs, the music, the language, the tartans, and the clans.

Who were these people, and why did so many of them leave?

Scotland itself was named after the Scoti, the Roman word for Gaelic speakers.

Gaelic refers to the old Scots language, which was once spoken by many inhabitants over much of Scotland.

These people were the Gaels.

- Scotland has about five million people in it, so were all the ancestral Scots and the would-be Scots, if they were to come home, they would swamp us.

- [Narrator] Scotland has a natural geographic divide.

In the south and east are the Lowlands and the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh.

North and West are the Highlands, with their dramatic scenery, and the many small islands that make up the Hebrides.

Together with the Orkney and Shetland Islands, it is geographically the largest part of Scotland, with less than 1/4 million residents.

- That's not very many people in the context of the United States or Canada or Australia or wherever.

But in all these countries, there are hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of people, who are descended in one way or another from people who left Scotland, and in particular from people who left the Highlands and islands.

- I am partly Scottish.

I was just brought up down South.

My mother's grandmother was from Orkney.

- The Isle of Barra.

- The Isle of Jura.

- The Isle of Skye.

- From Perthshire.

- Port Glasgow.

- Very proud to be from Scotland.

- My tartan I've got on is Stewart.

- My clan is the MacLennan clan.

- I'm a member of the Clan Buchanan.

- I'm a member of Clan Davidson.

- One of the things in the diaspora, obviously, is the clan that you belong to, your kinship.

- Clan is family, and family isn't necessarily all bloodlines.

It's an allegiance, it's an acceptance, and sometimes those acceptances can be a little difficult to swallow.

- About every clan has a chief, and all of them have been here one time or the other.

Lady Gordon's been here.

The Duke of Hamilton, he's been here two or three times.

- You don't have to be part of a clan to be interested in Scotland.

And sometimes I think there's a little overemphasis, even though I have enjoyed all my relations with Clan Donald.

- The Highland clan was a social unit designed for war.

The big clan structures came about in the 13th and 14th centuries, when in unstable times groups centered round great men for protection, and of course, great men, members of the landed elite, sought followers for the same purpose.

- [Narrator] In most of Western Europe, society hadn't been structured like this in centuries.

- The clan chief had a lot of power over his people.

He could call them out in arms.

That was part of his rent.

They had power to try them and act as courts.

- [Thomas] The original word comes from the Gaelic "clann," that's C-L-A-N-N, which means "children."

So there is a familial aspect to it.

There is a degree of consanguinity within the elite families.

That was an historical reality.

- Clans were made up of lots of different people.

They had lots of different names within them.

Sects or followers.

People that moved into the clan perhaps would take the chief's name, and people moved between clans sometimes.

- It's impossible that there's a reality of blood connection.

But in terms of the tradition, it was very important.

- Any clansman could shake his chief by the hand and call him by his first name.

Now, in any more feudal type society of the kind that was common elsewhere in Europe, that just wouldn't have been possible.

The gulf between the aristocracy and the commonality was gigantic.

- [Narrator] So the great men, the clan chieftains, gained power and prestige, and the more followers they had, the more power and prestige they gained.

- And often it was a kind of bond which was deeper than simply a rental.

It was a bond based on sons being given in return for land.

And so there was a kind of sacred dimension to it, which was more than an economic relationship.

It comes into the ancient Gaelic belief of duthchas, almost untranslatable term, which means the fact that, okay, the landowner has a right to rent and a right to people to serve him in war, but he or she has also a right of protection for the people.

It's a difficult place even today to live in, and especially if you're entirely dependent on the land and the sea.

There's a fairly regular recurrence of famine, leading to peaks in mortality.

You have very challenging climatic conditions.

Despite the endemic poverty, it did also contain a rich traditional oral and musical culture, so we can't assume that because it's poor, it's uncivilized.

- The economy of the townships was very much based on the raising of black cattle, as they were termed.

The little guys may have weighed about 300, 400 pounds, and maybe only stood something in the order of 3', 4' high.

But they were raised in their thousands.

The drovers would've either originated from the community, or they would've picked up cattle on the way to the south of Scotland to be sold to get cash so that the inhabitants of the townships could pay their rent.

- There's also emerging what must be, especially in a pre-literate society, a very important gulf indeed, and that's the linguistic gulf.

As far as we know, in the heyday of clanship, Gaelic would've been spoken by all social ranks.

(singers singing in Gaelic) - I think one of the important things about language is that it encapsulates the way people have thought about life and thought about the world and their place within it.

And we can also divide ourselves from other populations, right?

So it has to do with sovereignty.

It has to do with autonomy.

- My grandfather was a a fluent Gaelic speaker.

We weren't interested as children to learn it.

I wish now, I wish I had.

- I early on learned the importance of starting on the conversation in Gaelic, not just as song lyrics, but as a living spoken language.

(speaks in Gaelic), which means, "How are you?"

Or (speaks in Gaelic), which means, "I'm good."

(John laughs) (singers singing in Gaelic) - [Eileen] Scotland would lose so much if it was to lose its Gaelic tradition because it's bought into the lie that Gaelic was only spoken in the Hebrides and the Highlands.

It was the language of the country.

- [Thomas] From the early to mid 17th century, There's a much greater use of Scots English.

Not of English as we know it, but of the Scots dialect.

A bit like the kind of language of Robert Burns that's come down to us in his poetry.

- It became increasingly common in the 17th and 18th centuries for Highland women to go to the south to help with harvest.

A lot of women would actually go to the towns as domestic servants.

as they're going out of the Highlands for periods, they're bringing back some English language.

- At that time, people in the Highlands were looked on as savage, heathen, outlandish people.

They spoke a different language.

They wore funny dress.

They carried arms.

- And they see the Gaels, the Old Scots, as they call them, as this kind of primitive, backward people who were lazy, and they didn't like to work, and they like to steal things.

All these kind of negative stereotypes that we have now about the other, you can see the way that Anglophones regard Gaels.

(gentle music) (stream babbling) - [Narrator] We're coming to a pivotal point in Scottish history that had a bearing for many Scottish descendants.

- Jacobite politics are very complicated in general terms.

The Stewart Kings had been kings of Scotland for a very long time up until 1603, when in the person of King James VI Scotland, he inherited the English throne from Queen Elizabeth I.

This is called the Union of the Crowns.

The two kingdoms were still politically separate, but they shared a monarchy.

- [Simon] A few generations later, James II of Scotland, who was also James II of England, was suspected of being pro-French, Roman Catholic, and planning to be an absolute monarch.

His heir, Prince Charles, was Roman Catholic, which was unacceptable to many in the British establishment.

He was exiled, and fled to the court of Louis XIV in France.

He was the last Roman Catholic king of Great Britain.

In 1714, the crown passed to the Protestant George I, a distant cousin from Hanover in Germany.

Not everyone was happy with how James had been treated, however.

There were people who wanted to see him restored to the throne.

They became known as Jacobites, from the Latin for James, Jacobus.

- The Jacobite rebellions were a series of uprisings from 1688 to 1746, all of which had one main aim, and that was to restore the Stewart dynasty to the British throne.

- [James] A lot of the Highland clans were Jacobite by persuasion.

Religion played a part in that.

It's generally the case that the Highland Jacobites were Episcopalian or Catholic, and Lowland Scotland was very, very staunchly Presbyterian.

- The first thing when you consider Highland Scotland and Jacobitism is to make it absolutely clear that not all Highland Scotland was pro-Jacobite.

Some major clans, the most powerful of all, Clan Campbell, was firmly anti-Jacobite.

- The roots of the struggle were based in religion and ideology.

People supported Jacobites for lots of different reasons.

There was power and there was revenge.

A lot of people were dissatisfied with the union of the Parliament.

- [Simon] There were several failed uprisings led by charismatic figures such as Rob Roy MacGregor.

His exploits have been the subject of poems, songs, and movies.

The last Jacobite rebellion began in 1745 with the arrival in the Highlands of the man who has become known as Bonnie Prince Charlie.

- [Thomas] He entered Scotland in 1745 through the Western Highlands, with only seven companions, some money, and little else, and the promise of French support.

- [James] In the Gaelic poetry surrounding all of this, he's portrayed as something akin to a messiah, somebody who is going to save Gaeldom on the highlands and bring a new golden age.

- The Battle of Culloden is the final act in the extraordinary saga of the 1745 rebellion.

After initial victory just south of Edinburgh, the Jacobite army proceeded into England, won several more skirmishes, but eventually they started to be hunted down by three great Hanoverian armies, together with royal naval support along the coast.

And so the fateful decision was made at Derby not to proceed to London, but to go back.

The Jacobite army eventually ends up very close to the Highland capital of Inverness, and probably outnumbered by about 2:1 at Culloden Moor, just a few miles south of Inverness, in what's become one of the most famous battles in British history.

(cannons booming) (guns firing) - There was many different nationalities on the battlefield that day.

There were French regiments and Irish regiments.

It was very much a civil war, and there were Scots on both sides, and there was Highland Scots on both sides.

There were English Jacobites as well.

It's probably true to say that most of the support came from the Highlands in Scotland, because at that time they were the only place that could bring men out in arms with any seriousness.

So the main support came from the Jacobite clans.

- During the battle, the Jacobite forces began battle through canon fire.

They were met by musket fire, and then finally the Highland charge was unleashed across the field.

Within three minutes, 700 Jacobite men lost their life.

After the battle, bodies were left on the field for three days, and government soldiers were told to come on with a policy of no mercy.

- After Culloden, Bonnie Prince Charlie fled the scene, and he then hid out in various parts of the Highlands, and more particularly in the islands, for some months, and was eventually spirited way back to France.

Sing me a song Of a lass that is gone - [James] Flora MacDonald, neither she nor her husband were Jacobite, or at least they'd taken no part in the rebellion, she rallied to Prince Charles's side and helped him to escape.

At one point, he was disguised as her maidservant.

So this story has always been a key aspect of the whole Jacobite legend and the romanticizing of it that happened in the subsequent generations.

- [Narrator] Bonnie Prince Charlie was taken over the water to Skye, and then to exile.

And so in legend, he becomes the King over the Water.

- The ones who were still loyal to him would make a toast.

"A toast to the king, and you know which king we mean.

The King over the Water."

Gulp, gulp, gulp.

(singer singing in Gaelic) - Flora MacDonald's is not your typical Highland woman.

She then with her husband emigrates to North Carolina, and actually is part of the slave-owning society there.

The American Revolution comes along in 1776, and the great irony of Flora MacDonald's story is that she and her husband support the British side, which raises questions about English and Scottish identity and the Jacobite rebellion.

- I often wonder, if I had a time machine, could we actually just take Bonnie Prince Charlie, and say to him, "Mate, it's not gonna work, you know.

You're gonna cause a lot of problems, a lot of heartache.

Can we actually just stop it and get on together?"

- [Stacy] Much has been written about Culloden.

And a lot of it's been romanticized.

And many people coming back here searching for their roots and their history, their ancestors may not have been there, but it's a real connection people feel, and it connects them with their people, with their history.

(singer singing in Gaelic) - [Narrator] After their resounding victory at Culloden, the British state was about to embark on a course of action that would change the Highlands forever.

- [Thomas] The state determined to deal with this problem once and for all, and they dealt with it initially by a process of brutalizing areas which were suspected of Jacobite loyalty, putting these areas to fire and sword.

- [Deirdre] They could no longer hold court over their people and try them for offenses.

Their power to carry arms was taken away.

- [Thomas] The tartan and the kilt and the great Highland bagpipe were banned.

The tartan itself was banned right through until 1782.

- [Deirdre] Anybody thought of being a Jacobite was hunted down.

- [James] Their aim was to eliminate everything that had made the Highlanders distinctive, and to ensure that, forcibly, Highlanders would become like Lowlanders and everyone else in Britain.

(upbeat music) - [Simon] No man or boy within that part of Britain called Scotland, other than such as shall be employed as officers and soldiers in His Majesty forces, shall on any pretext whatever wear or put on the clothes commonly called Highland clothes.

That is to say the plaid, phillebeg, or little kilt, trowse, shoulder belts, or any part whatever of what peculiarly belongs to the Highland garb, and that no tartan or party-colored plaid of stuff shall be used for great coats or upper coats.

For the first offense shall be liable to be imprisoned for six months, and on the second offense to be transported to any of His Majesty's plantations beyond the seas, there to remain for the space of seven years.

- [Thomas] Once Culloden and its aftermath stabilized Highland Scotland forever, the rationale for the clan disintegrated.

- [Simon] In 1772, Samuel Johnson, the leading English literary figure, now most famous for his dictionary, set off on a trip to the Hebrides, the Western Isles of Scotland.

He traveled with his friend, Dr. James Boswell, who kept a diary of the visit for later publication.

They wanted to see a world that was already vanishing elsewhere.

They wanted to experience traditional Highland life.

They found that change was in the air.

- [Samuel] There seems now, whatever be the cause, to be through a great part of the Highlands a general discontent.

That adherence, which was lately professed by every man to the chief of his name, has now little prevalence.

And he that cannot live as he desires at home listens to the tale of fortunate islands and happy regions, where every man may have a land of his own and eat the product of his labor without a superior.

- [James] In the evening, the company danced as usual, a dance which I suppose the emigration from Skye his occasioned.

They call it America.

Each of the couples successively whirls round in a circle till all are in motion.

And the dance seems intended to show how emigration catches till a whole neighborhood is set afloat.

- [Thomas] Johnson and Boswell were shocked to find out that large numbers of people were leaving for the British colonies of North America.

- The Gaelic poetry and songs having to do with emigration of this period make that very, very clear.

America is constantly portrayed as next best thing to paradise on Earth.

But at this point in Scotland, the landowner doesn't want these people to go off overseas.

Policy is directed towards enabling and encouraging clan chiefs to stop thinking about their land as a source of fighting men.

They are now encouraged to think of their land as a source of cash.

- In the old world, their status came from the number of clansmen they had.

In the New World, it came from having a country house, better furnishings, better clothing, and the like.

- [Narrator] In 1762, a new breed of sheep was introduced into the Highlands of Scotland, the great Cheviot.

They produced more wool and more meat.

They could survive the harsh climate, and all they needed were large areas of fertile land, and just one shepherd to look after a flock of thousands.

- [James] Population of Britain is rocketing upwards, and there's a huge demand for wool.

- [Narrator] Most of the big sheep farmers were not from the Highlands.

Landowners encouraging these people to come with their sheep first had to remove the Highlanders.

- That is coercion and forcing people out against their will, but doing so within the parameters of law.

(gentle music) - They were looking to develop all sorts of assets on their estates.

On Skye, on Raasay, right across the west coast of the Highlands, and through the Hebrides, people were being removed from the more inland parts, and they were being settled on tiny little smallholdings of crofts on the coast.

Every family is given their own croft.

The crofts are very tiny, perhaps three to five acres, and often the land's not very good, so there's no way that these families can sustain themselves from farming.

- [Duncan] The inhabitants of the mountains, acquainted with industry, and united in some degree by the singularity of dress and language, stick close to their ancient, idle way of life.

Their habitations are the most miserable huts that ever were seen.

It seems absolutely necessary that some force more or less be placed in the several strath, glens, or districts where those lawless Highlanders reside.

- There's nothing particularly unique about what happened in the Highlands during the Clearances.

Whereas this change had happened over a long period in the more southern parts of Britain, in the Highlands, it had accelerated to the point where it was happening within a matter of months, or even of weeks, or even of days, in some cases.

(chicken clucking) - [Elizabeth] The Duchess of Sutherland is the worst landlord.

She's the villain of the whole piece.

This is in popular ideas about the Clearances.

- She owned a vast area of land, but she didn't have a lot of money.

She married the Marquess of Stafford, who was perhaps at that time the wealthiest man in Britain.

He was very determined that Sutherland should be turned from a backwards sort of place to something that was much more modern, much more dynamic, and that was going to produce more income for its owners, namely himself and the Countess.

- [James] The people who were to be removed were to hold their farms during the last year of their occupation rent free on condition of their settling in their new lots without delay.

Some of the people, however, reappeared, and reoccupied their former possessions.

The only course which could be pursued was to collect and burn the timber.

- [Donald] On my way thither, I passed through the scene of the campaign of burning.

The flames of the preceding week still slumbered in their ruins.

The sooty rafters of the cottages, as they were being consumed, filled the air with a heavy and most offensive odor.

Nothing could more vividly represent the horrors of grinding oppression.

(birds twittering) - Originally, there were 500 people living in this area.

When it came to the Clearances, evictions were carried out with great force.

Some went to Central Scotland to the industrial towns, some went to the coastal villages, some further afield, and some followed their minister to Nova Scotia.

But the people held on here as long as they could, and sheltered in the graveyards in what were makeshift tents.

(melancholy music) What was reported back was very much a real picture of what was happening.

People were being made homeless.

They were uprooted from their lives, and undergoing great suffering.

It must've taken great courage as well for the people to try and stand up for themselves in this situation.

They were really God-fearing people.

They felt that that the church was holy ground where they'd worshiped for so long.

They felt that, in the circumstances, God's judgment probably was upon them.

Whoever it was that made these inscriptions wanted it to be a permanent memorial of the sufferings and the struggles that have taken place amongst the people here.

- [Resident] Glencalvie people were here.

- [Simon] May 1845.

- [Resident] The wicked generation.

- The people were not simply relocated, as they were to some degree, but they were, to use the term of the time, compulsory emigrated.

(melancholy music continues) - Things took a a real turn for the worse in these localities, because people had already been crammed into smaller and smaller areas to make way for the big sheep farms, and they became dependent almost entirely for their food on potato.

And in the 1840s, there was potato blight, there was famine and hunger and disease.

There were diseases like typhus rife in Skye.

People in these places were hungry and starving.

Some people died.

Their main way of protest was simply to get out, to emigrate.

And hundreds and hundreds of homes were left derelict, and hundreds of communities, in fact, just ceased to exist.

- [Narrator] Tornamona, Inniemore, Glenleraig, Keppoch, Ascaig, Shiaba, (indistinct).

(melancholy music continues) - [Eileen] When I think of the Clearances, I think of brutal, cruel, unnecessary, and unfair ethnic cleansing, although we didn't know that's what it was called at the time.

- So many people in the diaspora are descendants of the people who've been cleared.

- And instead of letting people tend to their sheep and plant crops, it was cheaper and easier for them to clear 'em out and send 'em here or Australia or wherever, Canada.

- [Thomas] It's a lesson to us that we should not simply look at changing things either for good or for ill. What was absent during most of the Clearance period was the removal of that human factor, and its replacement by decisions made purely in terms of economy.

- We're very loving, loyal people, and wanna be loyal to our families and our chiefs.

But if we really were true to our roots, we would cut their throats.

(bright music) - [Narrator] So now you know some of the tragic stories.

How did the perception of the Highlands change from the land of murder and mayhem to a place of romance and adventure?

- [Thomas] What I call Highlandism is the mythologizing of Highland history for reasons of creating a Highland identity for Scotland, based to some extent on historical truth, but to a very significant extent on historical embellishment and heritage.

Dating from about the 1780s, 1790s, you begin to get a completely new view of the Highlander as almost the noble savage.

- It begins with James MacPherson writing the so-called Ossianic poetry that he claimed he had translated from Gaelic.

That was a hugely influential piece of writing, not just in Britain, but way beyond Britain, and in continental Europe, and indeed in North America.

(dramatic music) MacPherson is dealing with a period that's sort of vaguely in the mists of time, but his Highlands are populated by great warriors and bards and people of that sort, and they speak in a very high-flown poetic sort of way.

- A peculiar paradox is that a part of the country which had long been regarded with contempt by the rest of Scotland becomes the image in this period of the second most advanced urban and industrial society in the world.

A poor rural area in a sentimentalized form.

Its brand, its dress, its music, the kilt, the sporran, the tartan, start to be associated not with one part of the country, but with the whole country.

- Because Gaels have been on the losing side of history, the perspectives of Anglophones tends to predominate.

- There's the huge and important role of Sir Walter Scott, especially in his Waverley novels.

So the old world is changing, and because of that, nostalgia is rampant.

He creates a world that's passing away, and it's set in the Highlands.

The concept of Highland scenery as a beautiful place to visit is born.

And Scott almost puts the Highlands on the world map, because the readership for Scott was not simply limited to the UK, it was global.

- [Narrator] In 1822, King George IV visited Scotland, the first monarch to make the journey since the 1660s.

- Sir Walter Scott made sure that his visit was, what one commentator at the time called, a plaided panorama.

At the great events, all the elites of Scotland were dressed in tartan, and small groups of clansmen were created at the time to meet the monarch.

Even he was dressed in the same way, despite his rather great girth.

And of course, he became almost a figure of fun, because he wore pink tights underneath the kilt.

- [Narrator] After George IV's visit, the fashion for all things Scottish took off.

Tartan became the new pattern for soft furnishings, carpets, walls, as well as dress.

- This process of the adoption of what I call sartorial nationalism, nationalism by dress, not nationalism by political force, was in some ways an alternative to losing Scotland's distinctive identity.

My argument would be, as Scotland becomes more like England, it looks increasingly for its cultural markers to the Highlands of Scotland.

The Scots want to retain a sense of being Scots, but they want to keep the Union, because the Union is producing the material goodies.

But Highland dress, even to the present day, is based on British Army imperial uniform.

So the Highland soldier, the very incarnation of the Scottish martial tradition, is also an imperial warrior.

- Just like now, the military had a huge budget.

The clan chieftains had to put on this facade that Highlanders were inherently warlike people, that they love to fight, that they would love to show they're loyal to the king by going off and fighting in these wars.

This is what lies behind the whole facade of the Highland games, which were invented to prop up military recruitment.

- When we talk about modern Scottish heritage, I think we're mainly talking about things that have been invented.

(upbeat bagpipe music) - By tartanry, we mean the use of the tartan and tartan items to represent this kind of vague and abstract notion of Scottishness rooted in the ancient past.

The Gaels had no power over their own representation.

They had no control over how the symbols of their ethnicity were being represented.

And in fact, at the same time this was happening, they were being devalued as people, as a culture.

The time that Gaelic stops being a major dominant language, you start getting this kind of abstracted notion, this stereotype caricature of what Scottishness is supposed to be as defined by Anglophones.

- [Narrator] The national bard of Scotland, Robert Burns, was from the Lowlands, born in Ayrshire, on the 25th of January 1759.

- The values that Burns represented appealed to Anglophones in the 18th and 19th century.

And they may be wonderful, but they have nothing to do with Gaelic culture.

They're not Highland at all.

So when you start seeing Burns represented, you know that something is being taken away from Gaelic culture, and into that vacuum steps these kinda stereotypes and cliches.

But the danger is that you're being misled by somebody's fantasy, rather than getting reality checks about, well, where does this come from, and who does it belong to, and how do I really fit into this complex picture?

So that's the danger of cultural appropriation.

(bright music) - [James] America is constantly portrayed as next best thing to paradise on Earth.

- Imagine what it would've been like if you'd come to New York City in the 1750s.

It was overwhelmingly English and Dutch.

So you're from Scotland, and you've never been in a situation where you were anything but the majority.

- When Gaels came to North America, what we know from what they left us in their songs and stories was this was a very alien place.

They're coming to largely Anglophone areas, where people had preexisting prejudices against them, and they're having to make very difficult choices about, if I want to be a person of privilege and power in this establishment, I have to leave my culture and my identity and my language behind, and I have to accept these other things.

- [Narrator] Before the revolution, many Highlanders settled in North Carolina, around the Cape Fear River.

- Mill Prong was built by John Gilchrist, Sr.

He was a fairly wealthy Scotsman who had immigrated, settled in the area.

But I think most of the folks who settled in this area originally came as a result of the land clearances.

I don't think any of us speak Gaelic these days, but it's a real part of our culture that we cherish.

(lively military music) - [Narrator] At the time of the American Revolution, historical records show that the older settlers were more likely to be Patriots, and the more recent settlers from Scotland were often Loyalists.

There were Scottish regiments fighting for the British side, as well as Scottish settlers joining the Patriots' struggle for independence.

- The Scots had to swear an oath to be loyal to the king, so not very many of them could serve in the Revolutionary Army.

John Gilchrist supported the Crown, and after the war served in the legislature, and was impeached because they didn't think he should serve since he was fighting for the other side.

- These are Highlanders who hold slaves, and the slaves also are Gaelic speaking.

- It's a painful thing to look at in this day and age.

It's just hard to comprehend living a life of servitude, being owned by someone else.

It's abhorrent, but it's a part of our history that we had to acknowledge.

We certainly can't ignore it.

- My name is Ernest Royal Gilchrist.

My ancestors were once enslaved by the Scottish Highlanders in North Carolina, where I grew up, and the former Argyll Colony.

My name comes from that identity of Scottish and African.

(singer singing in Gaelic) Our people, who have come in bondage, enslaved, chained two by two, cold, at the bottom of a slave ship, and they are scared and uncertain about their futures, and often separated to different plantations, perhaps never to see each other.

Africans were forced to go to church with the descendants of Scottish Highlanders.

They spoke Gaelic because their slave masters spoke Gaelic.

My ancestors were speaking Gaelic up to 1870s.

The Reverend JC Sinclair, a Scottish minister, said in his writing that he did run into some former African slaves that spoke Gaelic as well as anyone in Scotland, and those would've been my ancestors.

- It's really important that anybody who's descended from this diaspora is entitled, is enabled to understand and claim a part of it.

(upbeat music) - The Anglo culture was New England.

The dominant culture in the South was the Celtic culture from Scotland and Wales and Ireland.

- The Celtic world has had an enormous influence on the modern world.

I'll probably get some flack about saying it, but I tend to think of us all as Celts, and you know, we are one tribe amongst the human tribe.

- [Narrator] In Ireland, the Ulster Plantation was an organized colonization by the British government in an attempt to control the province of Ulster, that was mainly Gaelic, Roman Catholic, rural, and most resistant to British control.

Many of these colonists came from the Lowlands of Scotland, and were required to be English speaking and Protestant.

Other colonists were from England, or even French Protestants.

- The first waves of immigration were from Northern Ireland.

Therefore, they were traditionally Protestant.

And they settled in the mountains.

The Highlanders came later, after the Jacobite 1745, and they came to Eastern North Carolina.

And we have sort of mixed those two cultures from the Highlands and from the Lowlands of Scotland.

- Buchanans migrated.

Many of them went to Ulster, part of the Ulster Plantation, or Ulster experiment in Northern Ireland, and then re-transplanted to the United States.

- [Narrator] Some settled in the maritime provinces of Canada.

Many then traveled down into Maryland, Pennsylvania, down the Shenandoah Valley, and into the Appalachian Mountains, and some onto areas of the South and Midwest.

- In the frontier, they used to say, "One Scot is a school, two is a church, and three is a bank."

- They brought an innate knowledge of driving cattle.

And many of the big cattle barons in North America were Scots or of Scots origin anyway.

- The people that went west were herdsmen, just like they were in Scotland.

A lot of people don't realize, in Scotland, it originally wasn't sheep, it was cattle.

They had cattle drives in Scotland.

- You had had these men driving cattle down essentially which were trails, and down to the markets.

- They branded them just like we did out West.

- Places like the Chisholm Trail, where people are driving the gathered cattle to the main markets, whether it be places like Kansas, or Fort Worth, places like that.

(auctioneer chattering) - [Narrator] In Canada, Highlanders formed the North West Trading Company to rival the English-run Hudson Bay Company.

They traded with local Native tribes as they made their way west into the Canadian Rockies.

- [James] It was very common for fur traders to have Indian women as partners, and even to have families by them.

- Many Native people can claim a Scottish lineage as well as an Indigenous one.

Traders would often abandon their Native wives and children when they returned east.

However, some traders stayed with their Native partners, and became an integral part of that community.

- Native women would attempt to marry Native men from other tribes, but because those tribes were decimated, they had to marry out into either the white or the African American societies.

Most Native people, especially in New England, are not full-blooded.

- My husband's last name is MacDiarmid, but he's also Wampanoag and Scottish.

- We all belong to communities, whether we know it or not.

A tribe is a political organization, and it is a political entity that you belong to, as well as part of a community.

- You have a group of people who are accustomed to living among clans who find themselves among people who are living among clans.

These are people who have been displaced themselves, who then go on to displaced people who are actually very similar to them in lots of ways.

(singer singing in Gaelic) - I'm a great one for believing in traditions, but I also think that traditions should be new minted.

The only idea of tradition is if it serves the now.

- Being as far removed as we are, you've got to have the Highland games and the kilts and the pipes and drums to give people something to hang onto.

- [Narrator] And in the eyes of many Americans, what's more Scottish than bagpipes?

- The origin of bagpipes is all folklore.

But they're made with African blackwood, and there's no African blackwood in Britain.

All the mounts are ivory.

We don't have any ivory in Britain.

The Irish have kind of adopted the bagpipe, and everybody thinks now that the great Highland bagpipe is an Irish instrument, and it's not.

It's a Scottish instrument that they've taken over, and that's all right, that's fine, as long as they play them well.

(laughs) - I've been playing for 56 years.

I don't claim to have mastered it, but I know I'm getting the hang of it now.

- [Narrator] Have traditions evolved since they made their way over the water from Scotland?

(upbeat bagpipe music) - In order to be a very good Highland dancer, I feel you need grace and balance and all the things you traditionally think of a dancer, but you also need an extreme amount of stamina and strength.

The origins of some of the dances go back to omens.

For instance, the sword dance.

They would lay down two swords that they were going to be at battle with, and as an omen to see how they were gonna do in battle, they would do this footwork over the sword.

And if you kick the sword, not only is it a bad omen, but you've injured yourself.

Thank goodness we do not use real swords anymore.

(everyone laughing) - [Narrator] Scottish festivals and Highland games often include athletic competition, which may have roots dating back centuries.

- Well, here at the Long Island Scottish Festival, this has always been a newcomers, you know, get-your-feet-wet kind of experience.

So cabers are not overly challenging for somebody that's new to the games.

Our cabers here are relatively short and light.

At a professional game, you'll generally get a 20' caber.

There's no standard circumference, but a general professional caber, 20', 21', 140, 160 pounds.

Size matters with a caber, definitely.

Size always matters.

- [Narrator] Some of the larger Highland games in America are often attended by thousands of people, and can last for several days.

(upbeat music) - If it does nothing more than interest the kids in finding out more about who they are and where they came from, what makes them who they are, it's gonna make them better people.

- [Narrator] This new clan comes together to forge bonds of identity.

- Many of the organizations don't allow women.

And Burns suppers, for instance, women were not allowed to even attend, much less speak.

- Some organizations are lineage based.

They still promote Scottish activities and talk about our traditions.

- [Narrator] April 6th was designated National Tartan Day in the United States in 1998 by a Senate resolution.

- We start planning about a week after the parade ends for the following year.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] And now people from Scotland come to New York to celebrate Scottish identity, heritage, and pride.

- I'm actually proud of basically, like, the centuries and centuries of, you know, the fighting for our lands.

for our people.

And we can be fierce and defiant.

I'm gonna cry now.

Yeah, I love Scotland.

- I don't think you should expect necessarily to take all that you see there terribly seriously.

And to be honest, I don't think a lot of the people who are there necessarily take it terribly seriously either.

(laughs) I think if people want to celebrate their heritage in that way, who are we to say that they shouldn't?

(upbeat music continues) (caber crashing) (upbeat music) While American country music has its own distinctiveness, obviously, it still appeals particularly strongly in places like Scotland and Ireland, because it is recognizably our music as well.

(melancholy music) - Thank God for Scottish music.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot - Every January 25th all around the world, Burns Night's being celebrated.

- [Narrator] Robert Burns' birthday is celebrated by reciting some of his better known poems and toasting his memory with a glass of whiskey over a dinner that includes that unique Scottish delicacy, haggis.

- Inside, we have sheep's hearts, lungs, kidneys, liver, and we mix that with steel-cut oats, sauteed onions, spices, and then it's all cased in this beautiful sheep's stomach.

This is Harbor View, and I'm Chef Shaun.

- [MC] Welcome to the anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns.

(upbeat music) - Once again, folks, welcome to the Argyll Restaurant for our annual Robert Burns celebration.

(upbeat music continues) (guests applauding) - We've got to be serious because we're paying homage to a man who wrote a poem to a sausage.

(everyone laughing) (rousing bagpipe music) (people singing) - His knife see rustic-labor dight, and cut ye up with ready slight, trenching your gushing entrails bright, like onie ditch.

And then, what a glorious sight, warm-reekin, (sniffs) rich!

But if ye wish her a grateful prayer, then you gie her a haggis!

(guests cheering) - To the haggis!

- To the haggis!

("Auld Lang Syne") (rousing bagpipe music) - "Auld Lang Syne" really nails it in terms of wanting to connect with home and family and loved ones, and that when you're away from them, whether you've been torn away from them, or you've been voluntarily, you've left, you know, you think about them and you want to reconnect.

And Robert Burns just nailed it with those lyrics, you know, about how important it is to not forget where you're from.

("Auld Lang Syne") (melancholy music) (wind rustling) (pensive music) - [Narrator] We are generations removed from the old world of clans and clearances.

There are Scottish Americans who have lost a direct connection with Scotland and seek to rekindle it.

- It's really important that people who are interested in learning about their ancestral heritage have some kind of reality check.

This myth making, this process of historical nostalgia and wish fulfillment and projection that is not very closely tied to the actual experience of either the immigrants themselves or the existing people who stayed behind.

- When you research your family, you also research the times that they lived in, that caused them to make the decisions that they did.

- What immigrants bring to America in terms of their different backgrounds is a lot of what has made this country the wonderful country that it is, and we shouldn't ever forget that.

- The Highlanders were not like every other white Anglo-Saxon person at the time.

And if we can feel sympathy because we understand their stories, because we accept them as ancestors, that can help us build a bridge of empathy to other people who are having the same experience now.

- [Narrator] By looking back, we learn about the present.

Knowing the difference between fact and fiction informs our desire to belong.

(dramatic music) (music ends) (brooding music) Bring to me the morning And the dawning of the day Speed up the sun and forward turn The clocks that slow our way Bring down the moon and shining stars That hold nighttime long Wake up the lark and bittern Start to sing tomorrow's song Get the ferry, set for sea As fast as can be done Let go the ropes and free our hopes Of western skies to come The rising sun to starboard As the boat leaves Oban Bay Our homeland dreams return in streams And fill the dawning day For I want to go where the great Atlantic roars From the cliffs of Kennavara To majestic Skerryvore And breathe again the air My island body craves And feel again the freedom Of the land below the waves Like barley in the wind We've been scattered far and thin From the cruelty of the Clearance (song continues) Support for this program is provided in part by The Wooly Thistle Curating hard to find knitting yarn from crofters and independent mills around the world.

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