I climbed the flights of stone steps up to Donald's flat unable to tell how many years it had taken for peoples' feet to wear the edges smooth. How long for the sunken spots to appear where repeated human weight had worn away the stone, one hundred years, two hundred years, four hundred? His flat in Old Edinburgh lies above an antiquarian bookshop that sits next to one of Edinburgh's stripper bars. The bustling international district's narrow medieval streets nestle snugly beneath the imposing form of Edinburgh Castle. When I reached his door, he was waiting. The door opened inward.
Strewn over his living room-kitchen was both correspondence and 17th century costumes. Bagpipes hung on display over a tartan on the wall. A stone relief of two Celtic sea horses whose legs and tails entwine around the symbol of Alba, Scottish independence, hung over his cast iron stove.
For the next four days I spent most of my time sitting next to that stove and to Donald, listening to his tales. Gaelic is his native language, and I half hoped he would entertain me with lore and heroic myth of ancient Scotland. The truth is more contemporary. It is with his truth, his life, the reality of a proud Gael in Scotland now, that he filled my ears.
Donald first learned Highland dancing on the Isle of Uist where he and his family belong, and went on to study highland dance from several other regions. He became a member of the Royal Ballet company at twenty and performed with them throughout Europe and the US. He also learned to play the bagpipes and many traditional tunes. Later he earned a doctorate in music from Harvard University. In the 1960's he and some other highlanders started a performance group, Lundalgen that has played fairs and concerts ever since. Everything the group does is traditional, specific to the 1700's, and historically accurate. Donald habitually has consulted with as many as three academic experts on the archaic meaning of a single Gaelic term in one of their songs so that the performers can understand what it means.
Donald makes many of the group's costumes himself. He has traveled as far as Mesopotamia to get cloth, because that is the only place where the traditional methods of weaving remain in use, and that cloth he sews into shirts according to patterns he has re-constructed by studying period costuming. When I noticed the jacket hanging on his door I couldn't help but examine it closely, feel it, turn the seams over and watch the stitch pattern, hold the cloth between my fingers and rub its feeling into my hands.

Paul MacPhearson came over one evening, a young man oftwenty two wearing a kilt that Donald had made for him. A sword fighter, Paul belongs to the Isle of Skye, but Donald is his first traditional teacher. As the night proceeded Donald took down his bagpipes and there in his kitchen transported us to realms of the past and into the other worlds.
It may be that I am unschooled but at all of the previous times I have heard bagpipes in my life I have felt repulsed, thought intriguedas well. Repulsed by the military flavor, the context of Imperial display, or the triteness of the history portrayed. And intrigued by a potential I had never heard developed, until that night. For Donald the instrument was a means of transformation, a poetic and spiritual discipline. His pipes reach back to and come forward with the soul.
Paul had noticed the announcement for a battle reenactment put on by the Scottish National Historic Society at the Stewart Palace. The following day we all made way for Linlithgow, Paul with swords and gear. As I watched the reenactment I re-experienced the feeling I have had so many times at Highland Games, and bagpipe performances, and at hearing Scottish songs over my radio. The feeling is that there is something wrong. Inspired by popular movies more than by history or knowledge of Highland life, the work leaves me empty. The theater company we watched that day couldn't sing or dance or play music. They shouted a few lines at each other and then played at fighting.
It's this feeling of inauthenticity, this lack of depth, this cutesy falseness that repels me from what I have always been told is Scottish culture. Now I was finally in the presence of someone I could trust to show me its deeper significance.

When we got back to his flat, Donald began talking. "You probably don't know much about how Scotland is ruled," he said. "Scotland has its own banking system and prints its own money. We have our own schools and universities that operate completely differently from England's. We have our own courts and judges. We have our own police and public lands administration. We are an independent nation. And we are under the occupation of England. The key institution we are not allowed is a parliament. We cannot make our own laws.
"Scottish people vote almost unanimously for either the Labor Party or, increasingly, the Scottish National Party, whose primary demand is Scottish independence under an agreement with the European Community. The only Tory votes in Scotland come from communities of English people that live concentrated in certain districts and they comprise less than 10% of the vote. Yet the Tories have ruled us for the last fourteen years and have instituted policies that further undermine our culture and promote English control over all aspects of our lives.
"Although we have independent governmental institutions, at the head of every agency and especially in positions that control employment, sits an Englishman. They have promoted policies like what they call the 'introduction of cosmopolitan values' at Edinburgh University, which means that only twenty percent of the students there are Scottish while seventy percent are English. They wouldn't even let me in there. That's why I had to go to Harvard.

"About four years ago a man from the building department came in here and told me I had to remodel my apartment. I had to move the water heater and redo the plumbing and change the storage areas all because they don't design housing like mine in England. It's a totally different climate. They came up here with these English building codes and so I had to take out a loan to renovate this flat. I had paid the flat off in full when I bought it fifteen years ago because I knew I wouldn't be able to count on making payments. So I had owned it outright and then in comes this housing official and so I have been forced to take out loans and I am behind in payments. I may lose my home.
"Most of my neighbors had to move out when the remodeling was first required. They were all Scottish people who couldn't get loans from the banks. I could only get one only because a few friends were able to help me. The homes they had to abandon were all taken by people from England. All up and down this street it happened and now its mostly an English neighborhood. This has all happened in the last five years.
"It's really ethnic cleansing. The English promote their culture and their people to move here. They administer the government money and employment options. They develop a charicature of our culture and sell it both here to tourists and internationally as Scottish culture. They have depressed our wages by closing down our traditional industries like mining and shipbuilding while promoting tourism and developing our oil. The profits from our oil they use to finance their armies (there are more English military bases in Scotland then there are in England) their prisons (England has the highest rate of imprisonment in Europe. If Scotland is considered separately it has a much higher rate than Englands) and social policies geared to benefit English incomers.
"The English people here will even say it. 'The land is cheap here and relatively uninhabited,' they'll say. 'The life style is slower and services from locals are cheaper." (The average Scot I spoke with, aged 20-35 earns from 3 to 5 pounds per hour. That is about five to eight dollars. Unemployment is very high. Significant numbers of people in the prime of their lives leave Scotland because there is no meaningful employment.)
At about ten o'clock every morning Donald would start to get nervous about the mail. Sometime before eleven o'clock the sound of envelopes hitting the floor brought him rushing to see if the payment from the concert he had given five months ago, the 100 pounds due, had finally come-- three invoices, four or five long distance calls and five months later. "They always pay me on a show by show basis. They are always late. The contract specifies I'll be paid on the night of the performance. I do all the form signing and I send in the right invoices and here I sit waiting for a payment due five months ago."
I was with Donald for three days before I learned that he only had three pounds in his pocket and an overdraft at the bank.
"I can't get a residency or a grant or a foundation to support me. It's always job by job, which multiplies my book work, and calling costs and hassle. Most of the time they want me to perform for free, for my reputation, they say.
"I don't need it. I have been doing this for twenty five years and everyone in a position to help already knows who I am. What's happening is very clear and simple. All the arts administrators in England and Scotland have to have a degree in administration from a college in Southern England. These people have responsibility for hiring and granting all the artists in Scotland. They get millions of pounds of funding for dance, music, theater, historical reenactments, museum and theater site acquisition and building, production of festivals and concerts, all under the financial control of these various agencies and their appointed chief administrators. Amid all these administrators there is not one Scottish person. There is not one Gaelic speaker. There is no one who is of the highland culture they are charged with preserving."
A small weekly newsletter arrived in that day's mail which had an article celebrating the renewal of Skellig dancing. The author was buoyant about how this form was being brought back to Scotland. A dance company from the Scottish enclaves of Nova Scotia Canada is being commissioned to residence in Scotland and teach the form. Since the form has died out in the Highlands, the author proclaimed, it is lucky we have such dedicated revivalists willing to search even across the ocean to find this company and pay them to residence here.
I was sitting next to a man who knows these dance forms and many others. A Scottsman, a Gael who cannot get work in Scotland because of the policies of the ruling British government and here we sat reading this article.
"In Nova Scotia they dance on wooden floors," Donald said, "The form developed into using metal tipped shoes so that the dance has become a percussive instrument as much as a form of movement. Of course, Highlanders dance on sod or rock. It is a completely different kind of dance.
"I applied for that residency. I have more qualifications than anyone in that company, or in the bureaucracy that brought them here. I was not even interviewed for the assignment. I have applied for every relevant job posted in the newspaper or announced through other channels that has come up over the last few years. Over sixty applications in the last nine months. I have never even been called for an interview.
"Sometimes people call to ask that I send a video tape or recording or more details about who I would interview to accomplish my research. If I send these they are invariably used as source material for the production companies that get the funding. I can show you performer after performer, teachers and whole troops where all they know about highland dancing they got from watching videos I have sent to people like those 'dedicated administrators'.
"They are almost all English, with only a few Americans. At least the Americans don't know any better. When their groups perform they are unable to accurately answer questions, they don't know a range of steps or how to arrange an entire traditional event. Very often they don't know the difference between what they do and traditional practices. All they know is what they have learned from a few videos and gained from an English education and watching movies.
"I decided to try and write my own job description and to get the elected councilors to open a new department which I could administer directly under their locally elected control. I did some work in the Tayside region a few years ago. Some of the councilors were elected as Scottish National Party candidates. They were very pleased with what I did. One of them told me he wanted to put me in charge of their cultural programs but they were a minority on the council and couldn't get it through. Just a few months ago they won several more seats and now the Scottish National Party has a majority on the council and the chair is a man who knows and supports my work.
"I wrote to them asking that they create this separate organization under their control to begin this program of teaching and promoting Highland culture. I'm waiting now two weeks for their response."

The last time I saw Donald he was cursing. "I've never done this before," he said. "I threw a dictionary at the door and cracked the door frame. I got a letter from the arts administrator of Tayside this morning. The council member sent my letter over to him, an Englishman, who sent back saying the position I am asking for is outside the jurisdiction of the councilors. I sent to those councilors because it is only those elected counselors who have any commitment to Gaelic culture. That's why I applied to them. I asked them to create an independent organization whose staff they could oversee. This was my idea about how to get around the English control of Scotish culture. It was my last chance idea about how to get a job in the traditional art of Scotland. So then this English administrator says that he is the one who should approve my application, and unfortunately all of the money has been allocated.
"I told them where they could get the money right in my application. There is 60,000 pounds of unclaimed money they could apply for from the preservation commission. I am only asking for 12,000 pounds to run an entire company and training center. I'll have to call the council member I know tonight and find out why he didn't treat this differently. Maybe he didn't even see it.
"I have sent out over sixty applications and this was the last one to respond. I have been talking with people in Tayside about moving there and I've spoken with several students and teachers who would participate in this program. And now I get a letter back from the same arts administrator I applied to five years ago and who I know won't put me on. The quality of my work would show him up for the impostor he is. He could not stand the test of that comparison. Nor with any other truly Gaelic performer. So he has to keep us out. He maintains the compromised level of standards on which the English and Canadian performers can seem to have anything to offer about Highland culture.
"I was going to a concert with a man like him in Edinburgh a few years ago. We were walking down the street and he pointed to a juggler whose upturned hat lay at his feet while he performed tricks for tourists. That administrator pointed to this juggler and said, 'Why don't you do that Donald? I'm sure lots of people would give you money. Just go out and put yourself in front of them.' He said that to me! I have a doctorate degree in music from Harvard and know more about Highland culture than he and all the people like him do, and he has a 30,000 pound a year job giving money to arts groups like the Contemporary Dance Ensemble, which gets 8,000 pounds per year per audience member. The problem is they can't get much of an audience. They have nothing interesting or authentic to offer. They do abstract movement pieces to synthesized music. They don't like live music! They wear only black clothing and perform in abstract space. They pretend they came from no where because they are ashamed of who they are. And there is no way they can be honest about it. Their falseness is funded although no one goes to see it but a few London society exiles on vacation in my country. The administrators call this "Cosmopolitan". And their sponsor tells me I should put my hat out by my feet while I perform for tourists' pennies on the street.
"I've never been like this before. I am completely incensed. I don't think I'll perform anymore. I don't think I can do it. I arrange event after event, each time facing the same coldness from the organizers and waiting months for my measly checks that barely cover my transport, housing and food for the time I spend at the event. And people record me and use the tapes to create their own imitations and get money and rehearsal space from the government to do it.
"I just can't keep doing this.
"I don't know what I can do. I've tried applying for all the jobs in all the fields I'm qualified for. I never even get interviewed. I'm going to have to give up my house. The bank manager said he didn't want to see me again the last time I went in there. I said, 'Look, I gave the last hundred pound check I got to you. Do you think I am keeping anything from you? I just brought the whole check right here and deposited it.' Now I have got four notices from the electric company and they say they are going to install a meter. I'll have to put coins in to turn on my lights. I just don't know what else to do.
"I thought I might kill myself."

I promised to inform all the people I can about this situation and try to interest some newspaper writers that I know. He said this could help very much. He said there is a group called the Scottish Heritage Foundation that receives hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from American contributions and it all goes to English people and organizations. Of course, no one in the States knows that. Few people even know that ethnic cleansing is an issue in Scotland. Scottish culture may be dying right now. Scottish people are being cleared from their family homes. Scottish culture is being undermined by fake groups who exist through alluding to traditional forms but who actually know nothing.
As I looked out Donald's window over the kitchen sink, I could see the flat tar-patch rooftops, maybe ten or so deep, and then a black rock face stretching up 300 feet, sharp edged rock of rich blackness. Atop this rock is a mighty wall made of the same stone and above that stands the famous Edinburgh Castle. Its ancient and military appearance reaches upward. On top of the highest tower in Scotland's most prominent Castle sits a flag pole, and on that pole flies the British Union Jack.
Tourists who see it do not even know it is felt as an invasion by Gaelic people. A large percentage of these tourists consider themselves Scottish and come here hoping to discover what that means. They walk by this flag, and think they are in contact with their roots. I am trying to communicate to them. But the ways of the pipes and dances which are made to speak of this have been lost in my line.

Neil McLean