Tracking Doctor Lonecloud: Showman to Legend Keeper

by Ruth Holmes Whitehead

Tracking Dr. Showman to Legend Keeper , by Ruth Whitehead, Nova Scotia Museum ethnologist, is a book that includes the memoir of Jerry Lonecloud, a Mi'kmaw hunter, healer, and showman. Co-published by Goose Lane Editions and the Nova Scotia Museum, the book offers to readers, for the first time, the earliest known Mi'kmaw memoir. Jerry Lonecloud was born Germain Laksi, on 4 July 1852 in Belfast, Maine, to Mi'kmaw parents from Nova Scotia. As a youth, he lived in Vermont. Orphaned at the age of fourteen, he set out on a two-year adventure to bring his two brothers and one sister back to Nova Scotia. Trained in the use of herbal medicine by his parents, Laski fell easily into the role of Doctor Lonecloud in the American medicine shows of the 1880s, including Healey and Bigelow's Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and his own company, the Kiowa Medicine Show, for which he made the medicines. During the rest of his remarkable life, he sold tonics in South America, prospected for gold, and guided sportsmen into the woods of Maritime Canada as they searched for moose and caribou. Hunter, healer, and showman, Lonecloud valued, studied, preserved, and passed on many of the traditional ways, stories, and natural medicines of his people. "During Doctor Lonecloud's travels, he gained a great amount of personal knowledge of different cultures, and in return he shared his vast knowledge of the Mi'kmaw people," notes Donald Julien, executive Director of the Confederacy of Mainland Mi'kmaq, in the book's preface. A researcher himself, Julien has found Lonecloud's name on hundreds of government documents in the provincial and national archives. "The story of his many trips from childhood, to when he left this world to join our ancestors, is very intriguing," said Julien. After Lonecloud met Harry Piers, curator of the Provincial Museum of Nova Scotia, in 1910, the two developed a friendship that continued until Lonecloud's death in 1930. Lonecloud's great knowledge of natural and social history is reflected in the specimens and artifacts he brought to the museum, and in Piers's meticulous notes on the information Lonecloud provided about the items. Near the end of his life, Lonecloud told journalist Clara Dennis his own story and a wealth of Mi'kmaw tales, oral histories, jokes and social customs, many previously undocumented. Unpublished until now, this treasure of information, recorded between 1923 and 1929, forms the basis of this book.

184 pages, Paperback

First published September 19, 2002

About the author

Ruth Holmes Whitehead is a renowned historian and ethnologist. She has worked with the Nova Scotia Museum for over 40 years, first as assistant curator in history and now as research associate.

The author of several books, including Six Mi’kmaq Stories, The Old Man Told Us, and Black Loyalists, Ruth lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was awarded the prestigious Order of Nova Scotia in 2014 in recognition for her contributions to documenting the province's cultural history.