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Developing and Appreciation for the Cultural 
Significance of Childlorel 
Carole H Carpenter 

Part of the responsibility of contemporary scholars of childlore rests 
in their actively promoting a genuine appreciation for children's own 
traditions so as to counteract the continuing perception of such 
material as merely the charming, nostalgia laden ephemera of 
innocents. Childlore would seem by its very persistence in the 
modern age to merit serious investigation, for in a world of consid-
erable cultural change that which endures ought to acquire particular 
significance and its uses, meanings and function in contemporary 
society should command attention. Rather than dismissing childlore 
as culturally irrelevant, then, it is quite arguably more responsible to 
highlight this material and consider the impact of these durable 
traditions on the development and expression of individual, group 
and national identity. 

There are several reasons for assuming this responsibility, 
namely: 

1. this approach potentially affords considerable illu-
mination of the dynamics of cultural acquisition, generally 
and during childhood in particular; 

2. there is a necessity given the complexity and de-
mands of contemporary multicultural circumstances to 
gain as full an understanding as possible of the 
cultural milieu of children in order to shape and plan 
judiciously for their future; and 

3. it is desirable to combat the persisting popular 
tendency to disregard the holistic humanity of children 
as equal, fully human beings—even to the extent of 
their having meaningful culture. 

By taking on this responsibility, folklorists can more adequately 
meet their ethical obligations to their young informants while 
contributing to a richer understanding of perhaps the single most 
important yet culturally neglected minority group in North 
America—our children. 

Widespread popular belief as well as solid clinical evidence 
support the idea that childhood experiences are central to the 
development of our personalities. It might benefit our understanding 
of the acquisition and dynamic operation of culture (whether indi-
vidual, group or national) if we were to consider seriously the 

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Carpenter 

possibility of childhood cultural experiences having a similar formative 
influence on each person as a cultural being. To date, even the best discus-
sions of childlore have paid limited attention to such enduring effects of 
experiences with the cultural artifacts of childhood. Factor's Captain Cook 
Chased a Chook (1988) certainly points to, but does not elaborate upon, the 
possible influence of experiences during childhood in enabling empower-
ment and in effecting a given stance vis-a-vis culture and its manipulation. In 
One Potato, Two Potato (1976), the Knapps argue for recognizing the 
manipulation of childhood traditions as a primary means to acquiring valu-
able life skills. And some studies (e.g., Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's work on 
language and Sutton-Smith's on folk stories)2 do comment upon the signifi-
cance of folklore experiences in cognitive and linguistic development. Yet, 
even such fine discussions of the function of childlore stop short of 
documenting in detail the long-term impact of particular experiences with 
specific cultural artifacts of children's own culture. The persisting effects on 
perceived and operative identity associated with and expressed through such 
artifacts are scarcely ever recognized let alone analyzed in depth. 

Alexander Chamberlain called for an anthropological interpretation of 
children's culture as early as 1896 in The Child and Childhood in Folk-
Thought. Yet, his was a developmental focus on the lore of childhood as a 
means to understanding culture generally, allowing as this material did 
examination of the past and the future, "for children as a semiliterate society 
inherit the oral tradition of the past and use it to shape the future" (Bronner 
47). The legacy of the Gilded Age has not ultimately directed academe or the 
general public to consider children's own traditions fully as culture-the 
dynamically interrelated process and product shaping orientation on exist-
ence (worldview) both affecting and effecting identity and, hence, overall 
way of life. The finest study of which I am aware relating early childhood 
cultural experiences to subsequent identity is a historical work, Elliot West's 
Growing Up With the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier 
(1989) which, because of the author's orientation, does not highlight 
children's own traditions quite as a folklore study might. 

This paper seeks to address this evident lack in cultural scholarship and 
childlore studies. It explores the enduring influence of children's own 
expressive culture and of childhood cultural experience amongst five groups 
of modern Canadians marginalized by various circumstances so that identity 
has been a particular issue for them, specifically: 

1. residents of Saskatchewan when it moved from territo-
rial to provincial status in 1905; 

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Developing and Appreciation 

2. Newfoundlanders during the transitional period from 
WW II through to the province's entering Canadian Con-
federation (1949); 

3. Montrealers living in a bilingual environment prior to 
official bilingualism in Canada (before the late sixties); 

4. the offspring of mixed ethnic group marriages before the 
adoption of the federal multicultural policy (1971); and 

5. aboriginal Canadians who attended residential schools 
before 1960. 

The data employed in this discussion are drawn from field as well as 
archival and library research conducted over the past four years. Of special 
concern in this effort to reconstruct childhoods of times gone by and 
determine their impact on identity has been hearing the child's own voice, 
which is singularly absent from relevant "storying of childhood," to para-
phrase Rex and Wendy Stainton Rogers (1992). Therefore, appropriate adult 
informants were asked to re-member their childhood culture and to reflect 
upon its contribution to their identity. However tinged by nostalgia or warped 
by selective recall these memories might be, themes and recurrent patterns in 
them were considered as justifiably indicative of the actual historical situa-
tion. Pilot fieldwork was conducted in Saskatchewan (concerning Group 1), 
B .C. (concerning Groups 1 and 4), and Ontario (concerning 3, 4 and 5). 
There is extensive documentation of the Newfoundland situation in the 
Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive 
(MUNFLA) which was selectively consulted. As well, some data were 
incorporated from the collection of questionnaires in the Saskatchewan 
Archives (Regina) conducted in 1955 and pertaining to pioneer experiences,3 
one set of which was specifically entitled "Folklore." Last (and actually least 
given the extant publications), information was obtained from ethnographic 
accounts, journals and memoirs of childhood. 

In Group 1, the children concerned were of a broad range of ethno-
cultural heritage and mostly recent first- or second-generation immigrants to 
Canada. A substantial number did not speak English in their homes, but were 
required to do so in school and, through peer pressure, on the playground. 
Since pioneer Saskatchewan was a rural agrarian society, most of the 
children were isolated on farms except when at school or during the harvest. 
At school, they strongly perceived a dominant Anglo norm reflecting in part 
the contemporaneous British/Empire orientation strong in their classrooms, 
but 

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Carpenter 

also the desired orientation of their parents, the lingua franca of the children 
and the overall childhood cultural dynamic which elevated conformity. The 
following recollections explicate this cultural milieu: 

According to Hilbert Kreutzweiser (age 92), one morning 
in his fourth year he left the home of his birth in Englefeld, 
Saskatchewan "a wee fella who spoke German" and came 
back up the farm lane that afternoon "a real Canadian lad"-
much to his parents' delight. (Collected in Saskatoon, 
1992)4 

Frances Kanuit, looking back as an 84-year old, chuckled 
about the playground of his youth in Macoun, 
Saskatchewan, saying: "To keep all the others from 
laughing at my name, I palled up with another guy—a kid 
with an accent, too—and together we beat everyone up. 
Then I could play all the games and be just like them." 
(Collected in Kelowna, B.C., 1992) 

Informants typically saw the long-term effects of their childhood 
cultural experiences to be a general homogenization of tradition outside the 
home which, in some instances, distanced them from their families. Their 
identification was stronger beyond the region than within because of the 
immediate cultural disparities and the Anglo norm which came (however 
much willingly adopted) from outside. In later years, shared 
agricultural/economic concerns promoted local identification which fed off 
the perceived dominance from outside and produced a certain antagonism to 
Canadian (especially Central Canadian/Ontario) authority and cultural 
dominance. The subordinate situation-real and perceived—of the prairie 
region had profound and enduring socio-cultural impact.5 According to my 
informants, their own cultural experiences resonated with this subordinate 
situation resulting in their viewing the rise of socialist parties in 
Saskatchewan as a logical response to what they considered to be central 
Canadian (and overall governmental) authoritarianism. Further, in later life, 
many of them—staunch and patriotic Canadians almost without exception—
have regretted the fact that their parents and they, themselves, did not 
preserve more of their heritage traditions for subsequent generations. To a 
certain extent, then, they have welcomed the recent ethnification of Canadian 
culture as a means of recapturing that lost heritage which, as children, 
embarrassed and marked them as outsiders. 

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By considering the impact of childhood cultural experiences in pioneer 
Saskatchewan then, one can better appreciate the reasons for the cultural 
prominence of socialism in the prairie region. Also, the development of the 
seemingly conflicting intense ethnic sentiments alongside federalist identity 
are understandable as the logical consequences of the early childhood 
situation for many Saskatchewan residents. 

Let us turn now to Group 2, consisting of Newfoundlanders who were 
children during World War II and up to 1949 when the former Crown Colony 
entered Confederation with Canada. There was a considerable commonality 
amongst children throughout Newfoundland where the population was pre-
dominantly of English or Irish background. They mostly shared a common 
language-indeed, a common dialect of that language which had developed 
amongst them6—and economic conditions in that the greatest number were 
from fishing families living in small, isolated villages. There was strong 
identification with Britain across well-defined classes and throughout the 
Island, accompanied by little knowledge of or involvement with Canada. The 
experience of the outside increased greatly as a result of World War II, 
during which Newfoundland played a particularly strategic role especially as 
a result of the North Atlantic convoys. The war tended to heighten 
"Britishness" for children—an identity which was directly reflected in their 
songs, parodies, rhymes (many of which in MUNFLA closely parallel the 
topical rhymes and other material in the Opies' The Lore and Language of 
Schoolchildren, Chapter 7 in particular). 

Personal awareness of a cultural other came to many of the children 
through American servicemen stationed in Newfoundland. One informant 
(interviewed in Toronto in 1992) recounted how airmen at the Argentia base 
sought contact with local children as surrogates for their own families, and 
they used childhood traditions to do so. But, she said, their traditions were 
different, which made the local children recognize their own distinctiveness. 
Besides, some of the servicemen were black—the personification of "the 
Man in black," the "Stranger," or "Foreigner" who occupied a boogey-man/ 
frightening figure role in Newfoundland childhood cultural tradition, as 
documented by John Widdowson in If You Don't Be Good (see especially 
page 275). 

Childhood lore then served as a boundary maintenance device between 
the locals and the "Come-from-aways" (as Newfoundlanders call people from 
off their island). The schools meanwhile reinforced the inherent British-
orientation as well as separation of distinct sub-groups, given that all schools 
then were church-operated. Official childhood lore—as presented for in-
stance in school texts or other books for children—promoted a British-
oriented Newfoundlandiana, both more regional and more connected to the 

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Carpenter 

"Old Country"? than contemporaneous childhood lore elsewhere in Canada 
(for instance, in Vancouver between the 1920s and the 1960s as indicated by 
Sutherland and confirmed in my recent fieldwork). 

Over the long-term, these Newfoundland children grew up with a sense 
of separateness, of being other but of being together in their identity. Today 
the British connection remains for many of them, now amongst the older 
residents of the province, rather stronger emotionally than their attachment to 
Canada. It is present in contemporary lore such as the popular saying in St. 
John's that one can go out on Cape Spear (the most easterly point in 
Newfoundland) and come back with an Irish accent.8 Most people who were 
youngsters during World War II have maintained a certain sense of being 
foreign within Canada in good measure because of their childhood cultural 
experiences. 

The children of Group 3 existed in three distinct groupings: the 
Francophones, the Jews, and the English Canadians, the latter two together 
with other non-Francophones comprising "les Anglais," so-termed by the 
French-speaking majority in the province. Children were separated on the 
streets by language and into schools by religion (the Jews mostly attending 
Protestant owing to discriminatory circumstances prohibiting their own 
religious schools).9 In keeping with the common cultural response in 
francophone/anglophone encounters throughout most parts of Quebec, very 
little macaronic lore apparently developed here. The extant documentation of 
such traditions in Canada is remarkably limited and pertains primarily to 
adults (see Posen).10

 . 

According to my informants, there was a macaronic tradition of jests or 
jeers in the Montreal of their childhood, and this lore functioned for them 
primarily as a social boundary maintenance device, though its overt use was 
to bridge the linguistic barriers. There was very little non-institutionalized 
shared communication, though many of the children grew up able to speak 
both languages as a result of formal schooling and broad experience in the 
bilingual/bicultural city that was Montreal in those days. With limited 
communication came almost no shared childhood traditions, so that while the 
linguistic communities were not geographically divided, child groupings 
were virtually mutually exclusive. The children's own lore was antagonistic 
to the perceived other, or focussed inward because of linguistic boundaries. 
Here then was a miniature version of the situation described by Lord Durham 
in his 1840 report to the British Government on the state of the Canadian 
colony: "two nations warring within the bosom of a single state" (one might 
read street in the case of these children). 

The long-term manifestations of this childhood cultural situation are 
evident in the strong cultural protectionist sentiments in Quebec today—both 

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Developing and Appreciation 

separatist and English-Canadian. Most of the leaders of Quebec are fluently 
bilingual, but they developed throughout their youth, and today retain 
allegiance to and primary identity with, the particular culture of their 
childhood homes. Their experiences in the popular culture have prompted 
many—especially though not exclusively the francophones—to react against 
bilingualism as a negative, a move towards losing one's own culture. There is, 
as a result, a demand (supported by legislation in the instance of the dominant 
francophones) for unilingualism to protect "threatened" culture. This 
perception of threat is directly traceable to the eyes of the child beholders 
from decades past. 

According to the 1991 census data, the majority of contemporary 
Canadians are, like the members of Group 4, of mixed ethnic extraction. 
Prior to official multiculturalism (1971), those of such background mostly 
existed in some form of cultural amalgam within their homes and as nothing 
evidently distinctive culturally outside of them. Largely they blended into the 
mainstream of childhood culture, becoming invisible often by conscious 
design (witness many offspring of Japanese-Canadian/Caucasian marriages 
after the incarcerations of World War II). They accepted the strong Anglo 
norm in effect amongst children's groups (as demonstrated in Neil 
Sutherland's research in Vancouver as well as in my later research on 
multicultural playgrounds in Toronto in 1975-76 and 1986-87).11 

Over the years, such children developed no clear tie to any particular 
ethnic traditions unless one aspect of their heritage was dominant in their 
homes. They were, by virtue of their families' active nonparticipation in 
ethnic-oriented culture and consequent activities, usually excluded from the 
child-directed, child-focussed process whereby youngsters passed ethnic-
based traditions amongst themselves and over the generations. As they 
matured, Canada adopted multiculturalism and ethnicity flourished while 
mainstream traditions were down-played. Consequently, many reported 
feeling that in having no overt ethnicity they had no culture.12 Some 
embarked on a "rediscovery" of ethnicity, but most developed a profound 
sense of cultural alienation-the mosaic of cultural rhetoric did not embrace 
their identity; in fact, it denied status to their cultural reality. This situation is 
a major contributing factor to the on-going quest for identity that plagues 
modern Canada.13 

The Final Group is that on which I have done least fieldwork, but for 
which there is abundant documentation of the significance of childhood 
cultural experiences for native people who as children attended residential 
schools up into the 1960s when they were finally closed. Essentially, the oral 
traditions these native children shared helped them preserve their Indianness, 
becoming (along with their memories of home and family/community) their 

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Carpenter 

focus of identity. This childlore was consciously rejected by some children 
who purposefully tried to fit in, to some extent out of fear of punishment by 
their non-Native custodians. But most of the youngsters themselves recog-
nized the oral traditions they shared as a means of defiance and rebellion and 
actively used them as such. 

This circumstance is vividly represented in Shirley Sterling's My Name 
is Seepeetza (1992), a recent award-winning fictionalized journal of life in a 
residential school located in the interior of B.C. The young narrator, called 
Martha Stone at the school, recounts an instance in which she is given one of 
several dolls donated by the local community. Recalling dolls made for her 
by her mother, she promptly buries it and looks up to discover an older girl 
looking on: 

She said she was a grandmother, and she had stsa-wen. I 
was surprised to hear her say that word. It means dried 
fish. I thought only we knew that word from home. She 
handed me an old dried piece of pine wood and told me to 
sit on the ground to eat my stsa-wen. We sat cross-legged 
on the ground facing each other near an old log so we 
could keep warm. The tumbleweeds were rolling past and 
the wind was kind of moaning. (37-38) 

The many testimonials from contemporary adult native people bear 
witness to the long-term effect of their schooldays which was cultural 
suppression at the very least. Those I interviewed (in the Muskoka region of 
Ontario) evidenced a profound militance to preserve their heritage for 
themselves and by themselves as, it must be emphasized, they have come to 
perceive it. In large measure gone is the nostalgia for times past along with 
any substantial concern for traditional veracity to be replaced with a dedica-
tion to reject the appropriation of their voice and to be heard where once they 
were silenced. One such informant characterized the current status of her 
people's traditions through recalling a circumstance from her own childhood: 

Towards the end of the month, just before my grandparents 
could buy new batteries—they could only afford them 
once a month when their cheques came in—the sound 
from the radio would get weaker and weaker. There would 
be something you really wanted to hear, but it was fading 
away from your grasp. (1993) 

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Some (like Basil Johnston, long an ethnographer with the Royal Ontario 
Museum in Toronto) have tried to educate the non-native society and in so 
doing have supported cultural self-determination (see Indian Schooldays). In 
all, most of my informants showed many cultural commonalities with other 
suppressed/oppressed peoples. There is a rejuvenation of Indianness amongst 
youth (in a contemporary guise, often with little direct reference to the 
historical traditions and sometimes of a pan-Indian nature).14 This cultural 
revitalization involves the employment-deployment might actually be the 
better term-of native traditions as they were used during the natives' 
childhoods, that is, as weapons-both to protect and to do battle against the 
threatening cultural milieu. Excellent examples of this cultural stance or 
orientation with respect to traditions include the armed confrontations at Oka 
in 1991 between Mohawks and first, Quebec provincial police and then, 
Canadian military forces as well as powerful non-violent activity through the 
numerous native council houses established in recent years as veritable 
cultural rehabilitation centres. 

This cultural articulation derives from a form of romantic nationalism, 
similar in nature and goals to the many 19th-century movements centred 
around folk traditions. Already the socio-political products of a native 
movement bred in substantial measure through the cultural (mis)treatment of 
children are obvious in the greater evidence of the native voice in Canadian 
politics, widespread support for the natives' demand for self-government, the 
recent commencement of the dismantling of the Department of Indians 
Affairs and the realization of a native to such an understanding of childhood 
culture through themselves giving children's lore thoroughly scholarly 
attention, discouraging romantic and sentimental treatments of it and promot-
ing full appreciation of its significance especially amongst those who work 
with as well as for children. 

York University, 
North York, ON, Canada 

NOTES 

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Folklore 
Society meeting in Eugene, Oregon, October 1993. I am grateful to Linda Morley, 
Priscilla Ord and Ruth Stotter for their helpful comments and criticisms. 

2. Sutton-Smith, The Folkstories of Children (Philadelphia, 1981) and 
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Speech Play (Philadelphia, 1976). 

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Carpenter 

3. This series of questionnaires was undertaken as part of the fiftieth 
anniversary celebration of the province's entry into Confederation in 1905. At that 
time, a substantial proportion of those who experienced the transitional period as 
children were alive and able to contribute significantly to the documentation of their 
past. 

4. All the interviews cited are included within my collection on deposit in the 
Ontario Folklore-Folklife Archive of the Ontario Folklife Centre located at York 
University, North York, Ontario. 

5. As noted by the prominent Canadian historian W. L. Morton, amongst others. 
Morton directly associates this socio-historical circumstance with a marked distinc-
tiveness about the political climate, "The Bias of Prairie Politics," which supported, 
he argues, the growth of grass-roots socialism amongst other things. I discovered 
Morton's article (in Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, Vol. XLIX, Series 
III, Section Two [June 1955], 289-300 and variously reprinted) after my original 
presentation of this paper in Eugene. Queries raised at that time challenging the 
linkage I reported led me to seek corroboration of my informants' contentions, which 
Morton more than adequately provides. 

6. As extensively documented in G. M. Story, W. J. Kirwin and J.D.A. 
Widdowson, eds. Dictionary of Newfoundland English. Toronto: University of 
Toronto Press, 1990 (1982). 
 7. The reference to Great Britain most commonly used in English-speaking 
Canada at the time and well into the sixties. 
 8. Personally collected several times over three decades, most recently in 
October 1991. 
 9. As documented in Mary Ashworth, Children of the Canadian Mosaic, 
Chapter 6 "Jewish Children," 57-68. 

10. The few scholarly references to macaronic children's lore in Canada include 
an unpublished paper by Gerald Thomas concerning the French in Newfoundland's 
Port-au-Port peninsula presented at the American Folklore Society meeting in 1987; 
my own work on "Ethnic Joke-Telling Among Canadian Children," Culture and 
Tradition 7(1985): 31-41; and some brief remarks by Margaret Bennett Knight in 
"Scottish, Gaelic, English and French: Some Aspects of the Macaronic Tradition of 
the Codroy Valley, Newfoundland," Regional Language Studies. . . Newfoundland 
4(1972): 25-30. 

11. As reported in several papers to the American Folklore Society (1976 and 
1987), the American Anthropological Association (1976), and the American Culture 
Association (1984) and published in my article cited in note 10. 

12. As reported in several articles in Stella Hryniuk, ed. Twenty Years of 
Multiculturalism: Successes and Failures. (Winnipeg: St. John's College Press, 1992), 
the proceedings of a conference in which this circumstance surfaced as an 
emotionally-charged issue. See in particular Richard Ogmondson, "On the Right to be 
a Canadian," 45-55. 
 13. As argued in my paper "Folklore as a Tool of Multiculturalism" in Hryniuk 
(1992): 149-160. 

14. An excellent example is the homogenized nature of drumming, the lighting 
of supposed council fires as symbolic protest, and the omniprescence of bald eagle 
feathers as speaker's tokens. 

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Developing and Appreciation 

WORKS CITED 

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Factor, June. Captain Cook Chased a Chook: Children's Folklore in Australia. 

Ringwood: Penguin, 1988.  
Johnston, Basil. Indian School Days. Toronto: Key Porter, 1988.  
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Knapp, Mary, and Herbert Knapp. One Potato, Two Potato: The Folklore of 
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Opie, Iona, and Peter Opie. The Lore and Language of School Children. London: 
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Posen, Sheldon. "English-French Macaronic Songs in Canada-A Research Note 
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Stainton Rogers, Rex, and Wendy Stainton Rogers. Stories of Childhood: Shifting 

Agendas of Child Concern. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992.  
Sterling, Shirley. My Name is Seepeetza. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1992. 
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Sutton-Smith, Brian. The Folkstories of Children. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania 
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West, Elliot. Growing Up With the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier. 
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