Back to the Future

Cape Breton Island’s old-timey Highland Village Museum just got an upgrade fit for the 21st century

- Isabel B. Slone

DURING THE HIGHLAND CLEARANCES of the 18th and 19th centuries, landowners forced roughly 70,000 Scots from their homes to make space for more profitable (sheep-farming) tenants. Many evicted residents crossed the Atlantic and resettled on modern-day Cape Breton Island, displacing the Mi'kmaq from their own ancestral home, known to them as Unama'ki. The Highland Village Museum, located in quaint Iona, has told the story of these back-to-back displacements since 1962. The museum's re-enactors, clad in billowing tunics and scratchy-looking aprons, spin wool, tend hearth and break out into songs about the region's early Gaelic settlers for more than 26,000 school kids and holidaying history buffs every year.