JAMESVILLE – When Jim MacKillop first visited his ancestral home of Scotland, the customs officer at Glasgow Prestwick Airport asked him where he was off to, and he replied by listing off all the places in the Highlands he was set on seeing, from the village of Glencoe to the area known as Lochaber where his great-great-grandfather had lived.
In response, the inspector looked at him and said, “Up with the sheep stealers, eh?”
That broad-brushing put-down was historically the line used to disparage Highlanders, MacKillop said, and to a large extent it was that sort of misconception that drove the Jamesville resident to author his 10th book, 2023’s “Highlanders: Unlocking Identity Through History.”
MacKillop, a professor and winner of multiple awards as a theater critic, said his work of 200-plus pages published by McFarland is meant to get to the bottom of why the people of that region were traditionally looked down upon and find the truth of the matter by tracing an illuminating path through medieval history, personal anecdotes, etymology, catastrophic wars and rebellions, language repression, and the glimmer of glory days and eventual romanticization.
MacKillop said that over time, the Highlands—which boasts a smaller population than Onondaga County but over a much wider area—went from being one of the poorest sections of Scotland to a place seen by and large as one of dreamy, misty prestige where big-budget movies are shot. As time has gone on, brightly colored tartans have won fashion cred after being banned as clothing, and Scotch whisky went from being perceived as a peasant’s drink to a sign of upper-class refinement.
Some descendants of Highlanders even sought to shed and discard that part of their lineage way back when, with MacKillop’s own flesh and blood being told that speaking Gaelic “didn’t sell the cow.”
But nowadays, the birthplace of both his parents, Cape Breton Island in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, becomes “a reservoir of Scottish culture” that brings out the Celtic colors in the fall and brings in plenty of tourists for the occasion.
Born in Michigan, MacKillop, now 85, was taken on a visit to that island in the 1940s when he was six years old, a good while after his parents had emigrated from there to the United States. It was that visit, he said, that began a lifelong immersion in all things Scottish and Gaelic after he was enchanted by the scenic route now known as the Ceilidh Trail and the fiddlers who would enter houses unannounced to entertain people with their music.
From then on, MacKillop was always looking for books and tidbits of information about Scotland, his search especially helped by the growth of the internet and a boost in academic research relating to the Highlands.
In about 2012, he started concentrating the scope of his reading, dipping into his own genealogy, and shaping the basic outline for “Highlanders,” and he “got rolling even more” during the days of the COVID pandemic, when the book could become his principal focus.
With his wide-reaching paperback in all of its painstaking detail, MacKillop seeks to not only correct the historical record with respect to his heritage and uncover pieces of the past that have, as far as he’s gathered, never been taught about in school; he hopes for readers to be inspired enough to track their own genetics and see where their relatives originated—a recreational pursuit with the capacity to surprise that takes nothing more than a swab out of the mouth or a clip of the fingernail.
Jim MacKillop has taught at Michigan Technological University and was chair of the English department at Onondaga Community College, the president of the American Conference for Irish Studies, and a visiting professor at the University of Rennes. Over four decades, his writing was also seen in the Syracuse New Times.
Other books of his include the lexical semantics reader “Speaking of Words,” which he co-authored with Donna Woolfolk Cross, and “The Dictionary of Celtic Mythology.”
