In 2016, I was traveling North in Scotland toward the Orkney Islands to mark the Summer Solstice at the Ring of Brodgar (Scotland’s version of Stonehenge). Looking for a place to spend the night before getting on the ferry in the morning, I came upon a fine B&B run by an older couple in the small town of Helmsdale. I was the only guest. I knew nothing about the town. I noticed a Cross of St. Andrew Scottish flag flying from a verdant hill overlooking the town and asked the gentleman of the B&B about it. All he would say was that it was a fine place for a flag and a great place to go for a hike and then have

a pint afterwards at the pub. Nothing more. I went on the hike. And from there I saw in the distance a large tower or statue in the far distance on a bare mountaintop.

Afterwards, I did stop at the pub and asked some local patrons about both peak displays. Not knowing who I was, no one would talk about it. I later learned that the statue in the distance was of the 1st Duke of Sutherland, known as the “Mannie.” I later learned that there have been repeated attempts by locals to vandalize, desecrate, destroy, or even blow up the statue. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-15924649 As I walked around town, I came upon another statue known as The Emigrants. A profound and moving tribute it is engraved as follows:

The Emigrants commemorates the people of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland who, in the face of great adversity, sought freedom, hope and justice beyond these shores. They and their descendants went forth and explored continents, built great countries and cities and gave their enterprise and culture to the world. This is their legacy. Their voices will echo forever thro the empty straths and glens of their homeland.

A picture was beginning to emerge.

Today, reading Simon Winchester’s “LAND. How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World,” the story for me comes full circle and takes me back to 2016. The landholders of Sutherland in the early 1800s, the Duke and Countess, forced the Highlanders off their land and pushed them into Helmsdale to change their lives into a fishing people when they had been farmers in the wide expanses of Northeast Scotland. Why? Because raising sheep on the land was more profitable than having small farmers living out an ancient way of life and paying rent.^* Many gave up hope and some fled to Canada where the Earl of Selkirk was given a large tract of land and was inviting dispossessed Scots to use their skills to make something out of the wilderness. They did so and this gave rise to the city of Winnipeg today. But who possessed the land before Selkirk? The Métis, an Indian-French people who had developed their own culture across Canada.

I have both Scottish and Métis heritage. The Scots of my family came from the central Highlands to Canada in the 1800s when the economic changes for the average people became too difficult to bear. The Métis were the result of French trappers intermarrying with local native populations in North America; mine were from Quebec and moved West. The common people of both were done great injustices in the name of progress and economic development (enriching who, exactly?). In accord with history, they were also pitted against one another. As is often the case with injustices, however, their children and their children’s children do not seem to forget. And sometimes, even if they do forget, they stumble upon the history of it and know not at what they are looking. Yet it reminds us: Injustice is a choice.

And injustice comes full circle.

* Today, arguably in response, Scottish land law does permit a community right to buy landholdings that come up for sale. But they must meet the requirements for a community interest and the land must go up for sale. https://www.gov.scot/policies/land-reform/community-right-to-buy/