On Violent Extremism

Last December I posted something I’d written On an Anniversary. Those who have read the piece or experienced the days following December 6, 1989 will recall that initially the response to the deaths in Montréal was to say that it was the act of a mad man. But shortly, as the fact that the victims had been singled out because they were women who were making a success of themselves in what has traditionally been a “man’s field” — as the fact that they had been singled out because the killer blamed women, particularly successful women, for all of the failures in his own pitiful little life — the conversation quickly shifted.  Certainly the killer was “a mad man”, but he developed his “madness” within the context of a society which still had gendered expectations, a society which still tolerated “jokes” which would be considered hate speech if cracked about an ethnic rather than a gendered segment of society.  In short, there was a realization in Canada that the fourteen women died for the unexamined sexist sins of society at large.  Sadly, I can’t help but think that now, almost a quarter century later, they seemed to have died in vain.  But that is beside the point of this post.

The killer on that December evening was a violent extremist.  Yes, he was a savage mad man. Yes, he was a barbarian.  But, his mad extremism was a mad extreme of “normal” accepted attitudes of large segments of Canadian society.  Many men (and women) then (and now) believed that a woman’s place was in the home, not working, and that women should be obedient to “their” men, that men should be the bread winners in a properly ordered society.  And so on.  And such ideas were (and are) publicly expressed at all levels of society, in print, on the radio, on television, around kitchen tables (and today on the Internet) without anyone questioning that such expression was acceptable and few finding anything disturbing about such ideas.

Montréal changed that.  Sure, the ideas are still expressed, perhaps expressed more widely and loudly today than twenty years ago.  But today, the idea that such ideas are morally wrong, detrimental to a well ordered society and simply impolite in any company, has become a strong bit of currency in public discourse in Canada.  Today, if a Member of Parliament were to utter the words “I don’t beat my wife, do you, George? Har Har” in the House of Commons, the Speaker would almost literally have that Member’s head.  When that exact disgusting moment played out in Ottawa in 1982, there was certainly shock and condemnation from around the country, but it was considered a bit of embarrassing Old Boyishness in most quarters. Since Montréal the discussion has changed and in most contexts, violence against women is not considered a joke (violence against sex workers and against indigenous women are shameful exceptions).

 

All of the above is preamble to my response to the murder of the British soldier in London a few days ago.  We are all rightly shocked and horrified.  And we all know that individuals are murdered every day in major metropolises around the world.  Sometimes they are murdered in public and in equally horrific ways.  Those murders might make international news or might not, depending on the news cycle at the moment.  But the murder of Royal Fusilier Drummer Lee Rigby was guaranteed it’s place on international newscasts because he was targeted because he was a British Soldier and was targeted because the killers considered themselves Muslim.  If two chavs had killed a schoolmate because he was a ginger, the conversation would be quite different — likely about bullying — and rightly so.

And it absolutely correct that British Muslim groups condemned the attacks with utmost dispatch.  And, I sympathize with those, Muslim or otherwise, who articulately state that “this is not Islam” . . .

 

But . . .

 

The killer in Montréal was Canadian. Certainly, he in no way represented what was good and noble about Canada (his victims did that), but he did stand for an aspect of Canadian society which I despise but which I can’t deny is part of Canada.  As long as there are sexist jokes, as long as there is sexual harassment and sexual discrimination and sexual assault and cases of missing and murdered aboriginal women that go uninvestigated, Canada has a sexism problem.  Indeed, until no one would remain silent in the face of sexism, Canada is at some level, a sexist society.

 

What does this have to do with Drummer Rigby’s murder?

 

Simply this, and I’m going to be as clear and succinct as possible:

 

 

As long as a single Muslim man, woman or child sits silent in a mosque, a marketplace, at a television or radio, at a kitchen table, in a nation’s parliament or a company’s boardroom — as long as any self-identifying Muslim sits quiet as a Muslim figure of authority utters a suggestion that violent jihad is in any way acceptable, Drummer Rigby’s murder and all other violent extremism is an aspect of Islam.

 

Please, my Muslim neighbours and friends, my brothers and sisters: do not ever again remain silent! Do not wait for the next Islamist murder to wring your hands and cry “This is not Islam!”  No. There is something you must do every day, every hour.  Do not ever again allow an imam to preach violent jihad without standing to oppose the very idea.  If you remain silent, you are in no way defending Drummer Rigby. You are turning a deaf ear to his calls for aid and accepting that his murder is Islam.

On the Occasion of Commander Hadfield’s Return to Earth

I have written elsewhere about my inspiration as a youngster watching Neil Armstrong stepping down onto the Moon, the same event that put another young Canadian boy on the road to command of the ISS.  I have written elsewhere about the writings of Carl Sagan leading me to the great Irish mystic poet Yeats.  I have written elsewhere about how obvious it seems to me that science and art are fundamentally the same thing, that both inspire and move us, the both change us and our world and, perhaps most importantly, both science and art, and all the wonder they stir in us, are accessible to all of us.  I have always known this to be true.  I have always seen supporting Science and supporting the Arts as obvious obligations of individuals and society. But I am very aware that many friends and acquaintances have never been able to see through those lenses.

Over the last five months I’ve often thought of Spider and Jeanne Robinson’s Stardance in which art comes to a space station as dance. And, of course, I’ve thought of the paintings of astronaut Alan Bean and of cosmonaut Alexey Leonov.  While Bean and Leonov’s art is exquisite and inspiring, they painted after they came home. And the Robinson’s so wonderfully imagine making art in space, but they never did it.  But, perhaps because they lacked the internet, these artists never caught the larger public’s attention.  They never joined, on a grand scale, science to ordinary people through art.

I realized tonight as Commander Hadfield’s new video of Space Oddity went viral, that this fairly  unassuming gentleman from Sarnia has done it.  He has shown ordinary people art and science meeting together  And the people get it!

Using social media and the biggest stage possible – the sky – Hadfield has had us watch him rapt for five months as he shape-shifted from rock star to zero-gravity chef to science teacher to science fiction character to military commander, and, finally, to a fifty something man with a crew-cut and moustache who actually pulls off a self-shot music video of his own acoustic cover of perhaps the most iconic Bowie song.  Whatever the flaws of adaptation or performance, Hadfield has capped his inspiring public Space Odyssey with a piece of art that captures the tension apparent in his earlier collaboration with Ed Robertson, the tension between the to most  unknowable joy of looking down on Earth from a home in the sky and the universal human joy of standing at home on the Green Hills of Earth.  No longer the story of an ominous malfunction of Major Tom’s capsule which leaves the astronaut stranded, Hadfield’s revised Space Oddity is a bitter-sweet lament for the end of his stay on the Space Station and his final return to earth. He is facing an inversion of Bowie’s original conceit of the Marooned Astronaut  –  Hadfield knows that it is to Space, not to Earth, that he will never return. With this recording Hadfield has turned a once inconceivable  Space Oddity – a Canadian kid from Sarnia becoming the tweeting rock star commander of the International Space Station opening hailing frequencies to Captain Kirk – into an Odyssey of Space very true to the spirit of the Greek epic poem.  Although at last he stands on the shores of Ithaca, he can’t help but look longingly back at the Cosmic Ocean he has sailed.

Hadfield has put himself up there and made a point of making art with us and for us from that tin can he’s sitting in.  He makes us all feel like we’re there with him, doing science, looking down on our blue home, feeling wonder at the speed and the vastness.

And we can’t help but sing along.

Thank you, Commander Hadfield.

We can hear you, Major Tom!

Safe landing!

I’ve Been Thinking About Genocide

I’ve been thinking about genocide quite a bit lately.  Most recently this thinking has been spurred by the remarks of Canada’s former Prime Minister, Paul Martin, before our Truth and Reconciliation Commission at a session in Quebec. I’m afraid my blood has gotten into a little bit of a simmer over the responses of “ordinary” Canadians in the “comments” sections of online news stories about Mr. Martin’s remarks.  I try to keep to a policy of not looking at those comments, but, even Homer nods.  Mr. Martin told the Commission that the Residential School program was, in fact, cultural genocide and that it was time that Canadians face the truth and that they needed to be educated. Online comments have certainly made Mr. Martin’s argument on the last point.  For anyone with even a passing, layperson’s acquaintance with the history of the Residential Schools and with legal matters, Mr. Martin’s comment is an unremarkable statement of the obvious.  The response his remarks have received suggests that a huge number of Canadians have vanishingly little knowledge of Residential School history and/or of legal matters.  It’s long past time for such education, although I have deep and sad doubts that the entrenched bigotry in many quarters of Canadian society against aboriginal people will be overcome easily or quickly.

Let’s look at legal matters.

On July 1, 2002, The Rome Statute came into force and the International Criminal Court was born.  Canada had signed on a number of years before the Statute came into effect.  The Court was formed to prosecute a number of heinous international crimes, one of which is Genocide. The Rome Statute defines (and States Party such as Canada also define) Genocide in Article 6 thusly:

For the purpose of this Statute, “genocide” means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a)     Killing members of the group;

(b)     Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c)     Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d)     Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e)     Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Oddly, when Canada’s Criminal Code was amended to “conform” to this international legal standard, clauses (b), (d) and (e) were quietly left out of section 318:

(2) In this section, “genocide” means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part any identifiable group, namely,

(a) killing members of the group; or

(b) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.

It must give one pause to wonder why the bits about forcible transfer of children and physical or mental harm – obviously relevant to the Residential School situation – were left out.  And one shudders to consider what might be behind the expurgation of the clause concerning prevention of births.  Are there still darker secrets in Canada’s history?

Mr. Martin’s comments about “Cultural Genocide” are obviously unremarkable. The Indian Act and the Residential Schools were (and continue to be in the case of the Act) intended to destroy principally by forced assimilation, an ethnic group.  Children were (and still are) transferred from their native group (section e).  Physical and mental harm has definitely been inflicted (section b) and certainly there have been deaths (section a). I suggest an argument could be made that the reserve system under the Indian Act inflicts conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the group through assimilation and attrition (section c).  As I mention above, I shudder to consider the possibility that section (d) has ever been contravened.

Mr. Martin’s description of the Residential Schools as “cultural genocide” is absolutely unremarkable except in the sense that most Canadians seem absolutely unaware of their own history and of the international legalities concerning the crime of genocide.  There can be no doubt that the Residential Schools were Canada’s Dirty War. If the program had been the legacy of a right wing dictatorship in Latin America, a racist government in Africa, or a Stalinist regime in the Balkans, right-thinking Canadians would be protesting outside embassies, demanding that those responsible for the atrocities be brought to justice before the ICC.  Canadians rightly admired South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of Apartheid. Those same Canadians are largely ignorant of our own TRC, and the Canadian Government has been doing everything it can to block the Commission’s work.

I’m thinking now of remarks Wab Kinew made some time ago about the Residential Schools experience and the “Get over it!” suggestion.  Kinew says he is over it, but he doesn’t forget it. The issue isn’t for aboriginal Canadians to “Get over it!”: non-aboriginal Canadians are the ones who need to learn, to remember and then we all can finally get over it.

Canadians must be educated about our country’s true history and the tragic, criminal legacy our history has burdened us with.  Often I’ve heard or read the horrifically vicious and insensitive comments “Get over it!” and “move on!”.  In fact, the point of the TRC and of Mr. Martin’s remarks, is precisely to help society reach the point from which we all may move forward: only by learning and acknowledging the truth can there be reconciliation. Only when Canadians – all Canadians – know the truth of their shared history – only then can we all get over it and move on.

Making connections through The Paston Letters

Last Wednesday I made time to partake of one of my favourite activities: I walked to my local second hand bookshop, The Bookseller, and spent an hour or so browsing unencumbered by companions or rush. As usual, the proprietor, Mr. Prins, had set aside a few hardcover Everyman’s Library Editions and an old blue hardcover Oxford World’s Classic for me to consider.  Unlike most visits, today I had time.  I left the four volumes on the counter, the seed of a number of large stacks I would build as I browsed.  Throughout my visit, Mr. Prins pottered about the store, flitting from the computer on his book-stacked desk, to the shelves and to “the back” where I imagine an infinity of yet-to-be- and never-to-be-catalogued books wait to be brought into the light.

The one volume I had come specifically seeking was H. G. Wells’ little war-time (WWII) anti-Catholic diatribe, Crux Ansata (“Why don’t we bomb Rome” it begins). I had been reading it online, but, as well as finding the digital a completely unsatisfying, indeed, unsettling manner of reading, I knew that I would someday require a real copy for the Wells collection I’ve been building since that day in about 1980 that I stumbled on a copy of Ann Veronica in that bookstore that used to be in Hub Mall on the University of Alberta Campus.  If I remember correctly, that bookstore, since shifted locations a number of times, is now The Edmonton Book Store on Whyte Avenue, in the location that one time was Bjarne’s Books, a shop and proprietor I sadly miss.  Edmonton’s loss — Victoria’s and Cyberspace’s gain.

I went straight to the Fiction section and was at first disappointed by the slimness of the Wells selection.  A few of the usual War of the Worldses and Time Machines. And, there in the middle, a slim little volume bound in dark leather. Crux Ansata! With a large smile on my face I strode back to the counter and plopped my find onto the Everyman Shelley and Langland and the little blue Paston Letters.  Now to some truly unencumbered browsing!

Oh, the treasures I found!

An early edition of the Tolkien/Gordon edition of Sir Gawain; Skeet’s two volume edition of Piers Plowman and Richard the Redeless (I already had one, but this was in better condition. The next day I traded the old one for a copy of  Bentham’s Fragment on Government); a lovely copy of the first edition of Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (in four volumes); Brown’s English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century; a 1959 copy of Vinaver’s Malory; nice old hardcovers of Quirk & Wrenn’s Old English Grammar and Campbell’s venerable volume on the same subject; The Oxford Book of Medieval Verse; nice editions of Ancrene Wisse and The Parlement of Foules . . .

And a copy of Sisam’s edition of 14th Century Verse and Prose, a volume I find oddly common in Edmonton — I have three copies now myself. But this latest copy, unusual in that it still had a (rubbed) dust jacket, had a little surprise for me which made me take a second look at the other books in my stacks. There on the flyleaf was written in small letters in ball-point “Raymond J. S. Grant”.

During my days at the University of Alberta, Dr. Grant was the senior Anglo-Saxonist in the English Department, standing in a venerable line stretching back to R. K. Gordon, a professor at the University’s foundation and, by the way, translator of number 794, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, in Everyman’s Library.

It was Dr. Grant who surprised me during an undergraduate directed reading of The Seafarer by saying “I think you might have a publication here.”  Because of Dr. Grant, I had my first scholarly publication accepted before I got my Bachelor’s degree.

I have gradually have fallen out of contact with the people of my University days. I regularly return to campus, but it’s a different world with different people now.  Not worse, not better, just different.  I had some sort of memory that Dr. Grant had retired and perhaps gone back to Scotland. As I gathered my thoughts for this piece I found on the University web page that Dr. Grant is, indeed, emeritus, as is my thesis supervisor, L. N. McKill, the man who first taught me Old English.  After I got home from the bookstore I discovered Dr. McKill’s name on the flyleaf of Brown’s English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century.  I held in my hands volumes that had educated my educators. These books had been around me in those offices three decades ago as I puzzled my way through great poetry sadly experienced by only a few.

What I find of extreme interest in second hand books is the little bits of paper one finds tucked into them.  Dr. Grant’s copy of Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose (1959) is undoubtedly a text from his student days.  Tucked into book at the first page of the Introduction are two slips of paper, one laying out the geography of dialects of Middle English with representative authors (information repeated in the facing map) and the other a cryptic, multicoloured graph of English sound changes.

These are meticulous thoughts-on-paper of a student of a different time, brief glimpses of the learning process in an age of paper, conversation and information hard-won from beautiful, tactile, fragrant objects with their own individual histories — books in a library.

Mr. Prins filled a banker’s box with my selected volumes and agreed to hold the heavy collection for me to pick up later when I’d be out with a vehicle. When I returned two stacks of brick-red hardcovers were on the counter.  “I told you I thought I had a lot of Wells back there!” Mr. Prins announced with a grin.  Indeed, he had brought from “the back” a twelve volume matched set of Wells’ novels ranging from The Time Machine to The Undying Fire.  A fine day’s discovery!

Later Wednesday evening I looked more carefully at the World’s Classics copy of The Paston Letters.  There was no name on the fly leaf.  It seemed an anonymous book with no story to tell outside of its text.  But, tucked in the back was a small blue slip of paper which indicated that this, like some others of the volumes in the box, was a review copy sent out by the publisher in the hope that professors would say nice things about it. On the back of the slip was a hand written note:

Raymond:

pp. 41-72 seem to be missing from this book as also 73 to 104. I suppose that is a whole gathering! Give him hell next time — you might get a real find from them.

Joan

Sure enough, a gathering is misplaced in the book.  But of far more interest to me is the note. Considering the number of Dr. Grant’s books that had recently come into the Bookseller, I have no doubt that “Raymond” addressed in the book is Dr. Grant. And I am equally certain that “Joan” who wrote the note is Dr. Joan Crowther, a Chaucerian I never met during our shared time at the University.  But I did meet and get to know Dr. Crowther in her retirement as each weekday morning I got her clubs out of storage for her round of golf.  I lost touch with Dr. Crowther after leaving the world of golf just a few years before she left this world.

As I stood looking at that little blue note on Wednesday night I recalled a brief exchange, one of many conversations we shared over clattering golf clubs.  These words came shortly after my reading crossed a very special threshhold:

“Dr. Crowther, do you find that the more you read the more everything seems to connect together?”

Dr. Crowther held her golf bag still and looked at me.

“Oh, yes, John!”

“Mind at the End of Its Tether” by H. G. Wells: a final testament of hope

I’ve just revisited H.G. Wells’ last book (apart from that thing on which he collaborated with Uncle Joe Stalin) Mind at the End of Its Tether, published in November 1945.  I feel I must emphasize at the outset that the title is not A Mind at the End of Its Tether — Wells is explicitly not saying in the title that his own mind is at the end of its tether (although that may have been a fact). No, this little collection of odd essays is about the coming end of “self-conscious existence” as the European intellectual elite had conceived it for centuries and also about the probable (from the late 1945 point of view) obliteration of Life itself:

. . . within a period to be estimated by weeks and months rather than by æons, there has been a fundamental change in conditions under which life, not simply human life but all self-conscious existence, has been going on since its beginning.

I think too often Mind at the End of Its Tether is condemned or dismissed (or praised) as a disjointed (Orwell’s description) wallow in pessimism by an old man disappointed or even heartbroken over the failure of his life-mission as he feels that life winding down to an end he knows to be only days or weeks away.  When I consider another little book Wells published just before Mind at the End of Its Tether, I find the suggestion that Wells had lost hope and given up to be preposterous.  The Happy Turning concludes with an idea very similar to the conclusion of Mind at the End of It’s Tether:

So we found ourselves in agreement that the human mind may be in a phase of transition to a new, fearless, clear-headed way of living in which understanding will be the supreme interest in life, and beauty a mere smile of approval.  So it is at any rate in the Dreamland to which my particular Happy Turning takes me.  There shines a world “beyond good and evil”, and there, in a universe completely conscious of itself, Being achieves its end.

Well!  That’s nothing other than an evolutionary jump!

And how does Mind at the End of Its Tether end?

. . . my own temperament makes it unavoidable for me to doubt, as I have said, that there will not be that small minority which will succeed in seeing life out to its inevitable end.

What? Bloody convoluted British piling up of negatives to confound whether or not one is making a positive statement!  If I parse correctly, Wells is saying that, in fact, he can’t help but think that there *will* be that small successful group which will reach life’s inevitable end.

But what is that end?

I would argue that life’s inevitable end in Wells’ view is an intellectual evolutionary jump to the situation described in The Happy Turning, that world “beyond good and evil”, that “clear-headed way of living.”

Let’s look at the book.

I think the chapter headings can vital to an understanding of what Wells is arguing:

The End Closes In Upon Mind
Mind is Retrospective to the End
There is No “Pattern of Things to Come”
Recent Realisations of the Nature of Life
Race Suicide by Gigantism
Precocious Maturity, A Method of Survival
The Antagonism of Age and Youth
New Light on the Record of the Rocks

Here is the pattern of Wells’ discussion. Self-conscious life is facing conditions which will end it, but thought will look back to past patterns till the end because there is no pattern in the chaos of the future. So Wells himself looks back to the past through the lens of evolutionary biology and presents some patterns he sees, including a tendency to large body size, except in the case of humans who have evolved through a process of progressive infantilization. Just as humanity has survived by evolving a permanent arrested physical development, it is necessary that Mind remain vibrantly youthful if there is to be a future for life.

Throughout the book, Wells is frustratingly vague about the threats to Life he sees and use deceptive terms to describe exactly what he thinks is in danger.  Just as there may be a tendency to read the title as A Mind at the End of its Tether, it is easy to misunderstand Wells’ talk of “our universe” ending rather than “the Universe”: at one point he writes “our ‘universe’” and at another it is “Our universe”.  Wells is decidedly not talking about a rolling up of the firmament and God wandering off to start anew.   At most he is anticipating a nuclear sterilization of the planet. At least he is talking about a restructuring of human society and intellect into something his generation of old men would no longer recognize as human.

Now, in more detail:

Chapter One is partly a description of the Mind of Wells’ time, of the intellectual approach to existence that Wells sees in the common folk (keep calm and carry on) and in the educated classes (keep calm and carry on).  Wells describes what his own attitude has been:

The habitual interest in his life is critical anticipation. Of everything he asks: “To what will this lead?” And it was natural for him to assume that there was a limit set to change, that new things and events would appear, but that the would appear consistently, preserving the natural sequence of life.  So that in the present vast confusion of our world, there was always the assumption of an ultimate restoration of rationality, an adaptation and a resumption.  It was merely a question, the fascinating question, of what forms the new rational phase would assume . . .

But Wells has come to the conclusion that there has come a complete breakdown in predictability, perhaps an anticipation of Chaos Theory, and he seems to be anticipating Toffler’s Future Shock in his description of the trauma of a world in which “everything was driving anyhow to anywhere at a steadily increasing velocity.”  And his description of his mid-twentieth century world is remarkable:

Distance had been abolished, events had become practically simultaneous throughout the planet . . .

If 1945 appeared to be at Tether’s End, what would Wells have done if confronted with the world today?

Although Wells has stated that prediction is no longer possible, he predicts that

the normal multitude, which will carry on in this every contracting NOW of our daily lives — quite unawake to what it is that is making so much of our existence distressful and evasive and intensifying our need for mutual comfort and redeeming acts of kindliness.

and

We pass into the harsh glare of hitherto incredible novelty.

Welcome to the 21st Century, Mr Wells!

What I find troubling about Chapter One is Wells’ introduction of what he calls “The Antagonist”, some sort of almost-almost personal force which is Hell-bent on destroying life.  I have trouble reconciling Wells’ seeing acceptance that the world is purposeless and virtually lacking in causality with what seems a wholly unnecessary hypothesis of an Enemy of humanity.  He is vague to the point of meaninglessness about the nature of the Antagonist.  Is the Antagonist simply entropy?  Wells’ frequent references to radioactivity — they appear in almost every chapter — makes me wonder if the Atomic Bombs dropped on Japan just a few months earlier are not the root of Wells dread.  Or is the Antagonist something about human nature, a race-suicidal imperative which nuclear fission could only exacerbate?  I don’t know, but I don’t understand why Wells felt it necessary to personify this “force” as “The Antagonist”.

The brief second Chapter is simply a condemnation of religion as a usually malicious fiction but also a necessary anodyne for the common person in the face of the futility of life:  the priests help the people keep calm and carry on until they die.

Chapter III is probably the one that causes people to judge Wells a pessimist:

After all the present writer has no compelling argument to convince the reader that he should not be cruel or mean or cowardly.  Such things are also in his own make-up in a large measure, but none the less he hates and fights against them with all his strength.  We would rather our species ended its story in dignity, kindliness and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze or poisoned rats in a sack.  But this is a matter of individual predilection for everyone to decide for himself.

In Chapter IV Wells looks at evolutionary theory as it stood in his time and then applies it to humanity and the problem he sees coming.  Wells suggests that within his lifetime there has been a huge change in the relations of the sexes in Britain, a hint that evolution continues in humans.  And then, he suggests that the sorts of forces which bring about these relationship changes “may play incalculable parts in the production of a new humanity” capable of adapting to the new world.  A hint of a sort of absent-minded eugenics as the future hope.

In Chapter V Wells suggests that the first law of Life is “the imperative to aggression” which leads to large body size.  As I understand modern evolutionary theory — and the comparative numerical and biomass success of, for example, whales and beetles — Wells is beyond wrong in this detail (as he is on the diet of basking sharks).  But Wells is correct in his main point in the chapter: species rise and fall, usually to be replaced by other species but sometimes a species rebounds from an evolutionary bottle-neck.  Again, Wells is closing on a hopeful note.

In the title of Chapter VI, “Precocious Maturity, a Method of Survival”, and in the Chapter itself, Wells makes clear the basis of his hope for the future:

time after time Nature has cut out an adult form from the record altogether, abolished it, and made some larval stage the sexually mature form.

Wells is arguing that the future must be made by the young in youth, and as he closes the next chapter, he states such explicitly:  “The young are life, and there is no hope but in them.”  Is this pessimism?  I think not!

Wells’ final Chapter brings the suggestion that a small minority of highly adaptable individuals will survive the coming “end”.  Wells recaps human evolution, pointing out the progressive infantilization which must continue into any viable future and then concludes with his convoluted affirmation of his own hope for the future.

Certainly Mind at the End of Its Tether is uneven and at times frustratingly vague.  But I cannot call it disjointed — there is a very strong coherence in Wells’ discussion. And there is nothing pessimistic in the little book!  This is the final testament of a man who has seen his world very nearly destroyed in two world wars, of a man who has seen his life long work of building peace repeatedly dashed — this is the final testament of a man in a time of vanishingly little hope who stands up and points to a young couple daring to begin a life together and announces “There are the new Lords of Creation!”

And, you know what? Those young people Wells passed the torch to are our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.  We’ve made it through the End Wells expected.  We are the New Humanity, navigating a world more complicated, chaotic and terrifying than Wells could have imagined or handled.   We navigate that world with all Humanity’s knowledge at our fingertips, in our back pockets. We chat instantly with a friend on the other side of the world, with people living off the planet, for goodness sake.  We are the Shape of Things to Come.

Let’s try to keep up the “mutual comfort and redeeming acts of kindliness”.

An #IdleNoMore Reading List (sort of)

One Shelf Full

Some time ago Lise Frigault suggested to me on Twitter that I put together an #IdleNoMore reading list.  What follows I think is decidedly not exactly what she suggested. Rather, the following is a sparsely annotated bibliography of some of the things I’ve read over the years which have shaped my thinking on Aboriginal/Newcomer relations, on Canadian Constitutional and political matters and on the necessary way forward for all of us.

First, some online documents

The Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763

The Durham Report, 1839

The Gradual Civilization Act, 1857 

The British North America Act, 1867

The Indian Act

Some Excerpts from the Bryce Report on conditions in Residential Schools, 1907

The White Paper, 1969

Citizens Plus (The Red Paper), 1970

Royal Commission Report on Aboriginal Peoples, 1996

Bill C-45, 2012

The Interim Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (pdf)

They Came for the Children narratives from the Residential School Experience (pdf)

Books on my shelf

I’m a bit of a book-hoarder. I keep my books. I don’t have much interest in e-books.  I always have a real book in my pocket. I have a lot of books.  Many of them bear directly on Canadian History and on First Nations issues.  As I grow older and read more, however, I find that everything is tied together.  This list could have been very long — I can see justification in including James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, for example, but I won’t. I’ve tried to winnow the list down severely.

User-friendly volumes

An interesting introduction is the Chronicles of Canada Series, which was published a century ago. I’m fortunate to have a nice first edition of the thirty-two volume set, but all volumes seem to be available online at various places.   The first volume, The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada is by Stephen Leacock, and is far more sensitive than one might expect of the time.  A number of other volumes are also devoted to First Nations leaders and their roles in our shared history.  The series was written for young readers: they are brief but densly packed with information. Definitely worth a look both for stong information and as a window into historical attitudes a hundred years ago.

A modern version of something similar to the Chronicles of Canada is John Ralston Saul’s fascinating collection of biographies, Extraordinary Canadians. The biographies of Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont by Joseph Boyden and that of Big Bear by Rudy Wiebe are of particular relevence to the current subject, but making ones way through the entire collection would not be a wasted effort.  The volumes are very readable.  I would wish a set were in every High School library in the country.

A Big Influence

The American Empire and the Fourth World by Anthony J. Hall is a sweeping analysis of the legal/constitutional history of European/First Nations relations.  Professor Hall’s analysis has been a big influence on my thinking.

The Northwest Rebellion

One of the most user-friendly volumes on this list has to be Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, a massive graphic-novel biography of the Métis leader and Father of Confederation.

Loyal to Death: Indians and the Northwest Rebellion by Blair Stonechild and Bill Waiser makes very clear that the First Nations never had any desire to be involved in the Metis Northwest Rebellion and indeed, desperately remained loyal to their treaties and the Crown.

Hugh Dempsey’s Crowfoot, a biography of the great Blackfoot leader, is one of so many of Dempsey’s vast output of Western Canadian history volumes directed at a popular audience.

Two fundamental works

The Fourth World by George Manuel and Michael Posluns
The Unjust Society by Harold Cardinal

Two interesting companion volumes about the Stoney Nation in Southern Alberta

These Mountains are our Sacred Places by Chief John Snow of the Stoney Nation
Bad Medicine by Judge John Reilly.

 

Contrasting takes on Canada, it’s nature, and it’s future

Lament for a Nation George Grant
The Truth About Canada Mel Hurtig
Unlikely Utopia Michael Adams
Becoming Canada Ken Dryden
A Fair Country John Ralston Saul
Navigating a New World Lloyd Axworthy
Polar Imperative Shelagh D. Grant
Unfinished Business: Aboriginal Peoples and the 1983 Constitutional Conference  Norman K. Zlotkin
How Canadians Govern Themselves Eugene A. Forsey
The Inconvenient Indian Thomas King
Hidden in Plain Sight Ed. David R. Newhouse, cora J. Voyageur, etc. is a handy tonic to the tired racist suggestion that aboriginal people are lazy do-nothings and letters to the editor of newspapers in Nanaimo.

From the other non-U.S. part of the Western Hemisphere

The Labyrinth of Solitude Octavio Paz
Open Veins of Latin America Eduardo Galeano
Do the Americas Have a Common History? ed. Lewis Hanke
Our Word is our Weapon Subcommandante Marcos

White people going native in Canada and Namibia

The Sheltering Desert Henno Martin
Maps and Dreams Hugh Brody
The Other Side of Eden Hugh Brody

Microcosm reflecting Macrocosm where the Thomson meets the Fraser

The Western Avernus by Morley Roberts
Archdeacon on Horseback by Cyril E. H. Williams & Pixie McGeachie
Where the Blood Mixes by Kevin Loring

Poetry and near-poetry

Tobacco Wars by Paul Seesequasis
Assiniboia by Tim Lilburn A disturbing poetic alternative vision of Canada.
kiyâm by Naomi McIlwraith A fascinating bilingual collection of meditative poems.
Louis: The Heretic Poems by Gregory Scofield

Contact and post-contact history, ethnology, etc.

The Conquest of Paradise Kirkpatrick Sale The classic revisionist study of Columbus’ legacy.
Time Among the Maya Ronald Wright
Stolen Continents Ronald Wright
The History of the Conquest of Mexico William H. Prescott  Prescott’s history first gave me the realization that, contrary to many conceptions, the Aztecs and the Spaniards were technologically almost an even match and that the Spanish Conquest was only successful by the skin of Spanish teeth and with the vital and massive aid of military alliances with other native nations.
The History of the Conquest of Peru William H. Prescott
The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico Miguel Leon-Portilla
The Conquest of Mexico Hugh Thomas
La Capital Jonathan Kandell An epic history of Mexico City
Time Among the Highland Maya Barbara Tedlock
Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala W. George Lovell
All of Linda Schele’s books about the Maya
The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca An amazing narrative of first contact.
The Defeat of John Hawkins Rayner Unwin A modern telling of early British contact with the New World.
The Relation of David Ingram Richard Hakluyt Another amazing narrative of first contact.
Any of Chomsky’s political pieces (he just keeps hammering at the same ideas)

Fiction

Midnight Sweatlodge by Waubgeshig Rice
Indian Horse Richard Wagamese
Green Grass, Running Water Thomas King
Three Day Road Joseph Boyden
Porcupines and China Dolls by Robert Arthur Alexie
Beautiful Losers Leonard Cohen
Elle Douglas Glover
Volkswagen Blues Jacques Poulin
Wacousta Major John Richardson

Local History Alberta and Edmonton

Walking in the Woods: A Métis Journey by Herb Belcourt
Castles to Forts: A True History of Edmonton Philip R. coutu
Fort de Prairies Brock Silversides
The Place of Bows and The Battle for Banff E. J. Hart
Stoney History Notes Chief John Chiniki
Head-Smashed-In: 5500 Years of Bison Jumping in the Alberta Plains Brian O. K. Reeves
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump Gordon Reid
Aboriginal Cultures in Alberta Five Hundred Generations  Susan Berry and Jack Brink
Medicine Wheels on the Northern Plains John H. Brumley

Some Classic pieces of European literature which are relevant

The Tempest William Shakespeare Later interpretations of Caliban have been important in discussions of colonialism.
The Aeneid Virgil perhaps Western Literature’s earliest poetic description of colonialism in action.
Candide Voltaire some fanciful descriptions of New World societies
Gargantua and Pantagruel Rabelais more fanciful descriptions of New World societies.
Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift yet more fanciful descriptions of New World societies.
Some of Montaigne’s Essays more thoughtful consideration of the New World.
Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad The Dark Heart of colonialism in Central Africa.

Still to read:

Ikonze: the Stones of Traditional Knowledge Philip Coutu and Lorraine Hoffman-Mercredi
Earth into Property Anthony J. Hall

I expect that’s enough for a start.

The Chronicles of Canada (minus the volume I’m reading)

A small note from a #Newcomer supporter of #IdleNoMore

Since the #IdleNoMore movement began, it has been common to refer to non-aboriginal Canadians as “Settlers” and non-aboriginal Canadians like me who support the movement are sometimes termed “Allies”.  I have not felt comfortable with the “Settler” term from the beginning, but not for the reasons that some might raise: “I never settled nothin’!”, etc.

Unlike the ancestors of some of my neighbours who arrived in what would become Canada in the early 17th Century and truly did clear land, plant crops, build settlements and partner with the First Nations to build a settled life, my ancestors came to the new cities of Canada, first to Quebec, Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa.  Indeed, my family apart from a disappointing experiment in Hastings County, Canada West, which ended in a lethal disagreement over a few chickens, my family have never seriously homesteaded.  We have always been urban people moving into built landscapes already “settled”.  And, today, in our Canada of immigrants and children of immigrants, our Canada to which new Canadians come from the metropolises of the world to our own Canadian metropolises, there aren’t a lot of descendants of the actual Settlers left as a proportion of our population.

So, here’s what I would propose to the #IdleNoMore movement: some non-aboriginal Canadians might appropriately be termed “Settlers”, but I and many others do not deserve the honour – mixed as the honour may be — of being linked with the voyageurs and the homesteaders.  We, and the Settlers, are all “Newcomers” but all Newcomers are not Settlers.  It’s a small point, but I think it would be great to have the #Newcomer hashtag replace #Settler as the common twitter term for non-aboriginal Canadians, whether new immigrants or those having roots in the land as deep or deeper than my own.

“The Unfinished Child” by Theresa Shea: If ever there were a book club book . . .

Sometimes when discussing books either in writing or at book clubs I am reminded of some seminars in university in which we students shared our writing with each other and then were expected to sit about critically discussing the bits of paper.  Preparation for disertation defences, no doubt. But professors were constantly and obviously annoyed and frustrated by our timidity: “There’s a typo on page 4 . . .”, etc.  While there is at least one typo in The Unfinished Child by Theresa Shea, I have left University far enough behind that I will happily ignore it and move to more substantive issues (few) and praises (many).  But I must be careful to avoid spoilers, as the narrative is quite clever and enthralling, with unexpected and expected meetings.

I’m tempted to suggest that in a nutshell The Unfinished Child is about Motherhood, but, that description is at once too wide and too narrow, and wide and narrow on a few different axes.  The novel specifically confronts motherhood of a child with Down Syndrome, but, in fact, very little time is spent depicting motherhood of such a child beyond pregnancy and birth. There are scenes of Marie and her two “normal” daughters, but the prospect of being a mother (or father) to a growing, developing child with Down’s Syndrome is left to the imagining of the characters and to our own imaginings. The Unfinished Child also touches on other relationships of family and friendship, but motherhood and parenthood in general are at the centre of the discussion — Discussion. It is this discussion that I think is the heart of The Unfinished Child‘s power.

The Unfinished Child is, to my mind, a “discussion novel” like some of my favourite novels of H.G. Wells, an author sadly remembered most for his ripping youthful science fiction novels and his turgid The Shape of Things to Come.  I firmly believe that if people today would read Wells’ late novelettes and non-fiction of disappointment and tethers’ ends the future would look brighter. And if they read discussion novels, novels which like Well’s The Passionate Friends or Ann Veronica, or, yes, Shea’s The Unfinished Child, some very deep and still ignored societal issues would go through a crowd-sourced discussion which might bring a more liveable future of well-examined lives.

Parenthood and Motherhood, along with Marriage (the title of another of Wells’ discussion novels) and Friendship are all near the heart of The Unfinished Child‘s discussion.  But the very heart of the novel is precisely the questions, problems, doubts, pain and, indeed, ignorance surrounding being mother to a child with Down Syndrome, or for that matter, a child with any disability, physical or intellectual.

The title of Shea’s book refers to the antiquated medical idea that a child with Down Syndrome is, for some reason, developmentally arrested at an unfinished state, an understanding shown to be clearly inaccurate by events — one in particular — in The Unfinished Child: Carolyn, the young girl with Down Syndrome, is obviously not arrested in her physical development.

Disclosure 1

As a parent of a now young-adult with both physical and intellectual disabilities, I feared that The Unfinished Child would be a preachy lecture on the wonders and joys of parenting a child with Down Syndrome. (Don’t antice the book!) Over the years, I’ve gotten to know quite a number of young people with Down Syndrome and their parents.  I have seen the entire spectrum of physical, intellectual, and behavioural limitations and challenges that may come with that extra bit of chromosome.  Thankfully, The Unfinished Child is an insightfully sensitive presentation of the difficult, impossible, heart breaking and sometimes rewarding challenges of what most soon-to-be parents never allow themselves to consider.  I am so grateful that Shea left the questions asked but unanswered, the problems presented, but unsolved.  The Unfinished Child is the beginning of the discussion, not a conclusion.

Back to the book. . .

The Unfinished Child moves back and forth between two converging stories, in a way somewhat reminiscent of  The Hours by Michael Cunningham. In 1947, Margaret’s water breaks at the end of her first pregnancy.  And, in 2002, Elizabeth, who we soon find out seems to be infertile, and her friend Marie, who is remarkably fecund, meet for dinner on an Edmonton winter evening. And back and forth. We see the warehousing of the disabled in the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s (and beyond?) contrasted with the fertility — and prevention of fertility — technologies of today.  The moral challenges of modern choice contrasted with the horrific disappearances of previous generations of the disabled.

The converging plot is very cleverly constructed and the moment the reader recognizes the connection between past and present (it struck me on page 128) is startling and satisfying. Somehow the convergence is perfectly foreshadowed by the author and yet completely unanticipated by the reader, and so, feels perfectly right when the juncture comes.  On the negative side, toward the end of the book there is another juncture, a meeting, which seemed to me a touch too coincidental — of all the flower shops, in all the towns, in all the world, he walks into mine. But the dissatisfaction with that coincidence quickly fades as the pieces fit so well again.

The closest The Unfinished Child comes to the preaching I dreaded — and it’s not very close — is in the words of an aged Down Syndrome specialist, Dr. Maclean, who, troubled, comments that he wonders whether the modern prevalent choice of parents to terminate Down Syndrome fetuses is not a new eugenics. My honest response to Dr. Maclean is that, of course it is a modern eugenics, but the real ethical dilemma is, despite the eugenic horrors of the 20th Century, where the correct moral course lies between always letting the genetic dice fall where they may, no matter our technological abilities, and, on the other horn, always using our technological abilities to ensure that parenthood is as easy as possible. The Unfinished Child, in the nearly identical agonizing decisions of Margaret and Marie, points out the dark attractiveness of making a problem disappear, and the truth that there is no easy choice.

It is here that the true honesty of Shea’s novel is highlighted: motherhood, parenthood, friendship, relationships of all kinds are hugely messy difficult beasts — why would we expect the prospect of parenting a child with a disability — or any child for that matter — to be a bed of roses, or, to use one of Shea’s most felicitous phrases, “a playground with enough swings for every child”?

In the end, Shea’s characters, Margaret, Elizabeth, Marie and all the others make their choices — with varying degrees of freedom. None of the choices are easy. None are right or wrong. None are made without regret. All are decisions we as a society need to be discussing. And never do the characters or the narrative become bogged down in the discussion: The Unfinished Child, although a discussion novel, never forgets to be a Novel and not just a discussion.

I realize I’ve said little about the actual story, but I truly feel that almost any revelation of plot details beyond the jacket blurb would spoil things. Suffice it to say, Margaret has a baby with Down Syndrome in 1947 and navigates the society of the time in the limited way allowed to her. Marie finds herself pregnant by surprise when almost forty years old and confronts the prospect of parenting a child with Down Syndrome at the beginning of the 21st Century.  And Elizabeth struggles with her own infertility in the face of overwhelming desire and external pressure for motherhood.  And, as the story progresses, the lives of the three women are shown to be intertwined through the tragic figure of Carolyn, Margaret’s daughter.  And, as so often in real life, there is no magical happy ending, only choices made.  And so often the choices made by each generation, despite changing technologies, remain the same.

The Unfinished Child is Theresa Shea’s first novel, but shows little evidence of a fresh(wo)man effort.  Despite a very few brief weak passages, the writing is solid and the characters believable and clearly drawn.  I was, perhaps perversely, annoyed by a pair of botanical errors of no real consequence that I would have hoped an editor should notice. On the whole, The Unfinished Child is a most worthwhile, enjoyable and challenging read. The vitally necessary discussion it must spur is a valuable added gift. I expect a large number of neighbourhood book clubs across the country will have unusually lively, thoughtful and at times sombre discussions in the coming year or two.

Disclosure 2

Theresa Shea has for some years been my neighbour, and, in our neighbourhood, “neighbour” very often quickly comes to mean “friend”, whatever the differences of experience, opinion, or language. So, I confess, the above discussion is about a friend’s first novel.

I do, however, feel comfortable if not in my impartiality, in at least a certain degree of compensatory hypercriticality in my approach.  When discussing The Unfinished Child with others as I read the book, I was often warned that I was being far more severely critical than normal, both in what I was reading and what I expected to come next. (“Don’t antice the book!”)  To conclude: if my hypercriticality had not been overcome by the genuine qualities of The Unfinished Child, I would have simply remained silent about the book.

The Unfinished Child is published by Brindle & Glass and will be available at the beginning of April, 2013.

Oh.  The typo is on page 128.

On “Louis: The Heretic Poems”, by Gregory Scofield

In Louis: The Heretic Poems Gregory Scofield has created a moving and troubling poetic biography of Louis Riel. Combining his own imaginings of Riel’s (and others’) poetic musings — in English, Cree and a little French — with found poetry from such sources as Canadian Government immigration propaganda and House of Commons debate records.  Throughout is a dense net of Biblical allusion, as small portion of which I mention below.  The result is a fascinating portrait of a brilliant man thrust through his life by sensuality and Messianic drive.  Whether a madman or a prophet, the Riel Scofield brings us is wonderfully heretical.

Scofield has divided his cycle of poems into four parts: Le Garçon covers Riel’s life up to the end of his schooling; Le Président deals with his part in the Red River Rebellion and Provisional Government, his exile and his time in the Beauport Assylum; Le Porte-Parole deals in a fascinatingly oblique way with the Northwest Rebellion; and L’Homme d’État takes us through Riel’s last days.

The cycle begins in the voice of Riel’s Chipewyan Great Grandmother Marie Joseph leBlanc reciting a geneology parallel to those that open the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but the recitation is distinctly oral in texture rather than literary, and the diction while using English vocabulary, has an odd hybrid syntax — the sounds of Marie Joseph’s Dene Suline and French come through to those who heed her repeated injunction to “Open your ears . . .”  From these opening lines, Riel is a Christ figure.

Young Louis Riel then describes the long journey through the U.S. (the Canadian Pacific Railroad was still unbuilt) to school in Montreal before his two “Contrition” poems, “#7″ asking forgiveness in the voice of a budding Messiah and “#3″ singing the emotional torrent of physical love in echoes of the Song of Solomon.  These two forces, Messiahhood and sensuality, will come to be in constant tension through Riel’s life and leadership as related in Scofield’s poems.  In” The Interview” and “Communion with David”, from Riel’s time in Beauport Assylum after the Red River Rebellion, Riel sings Old Testament style Psalms (cf. Psalms 89: 19ff. and 23:5ff.) identifying himself with King David and later, in “Dear Sir, To You I Say”, Riel stands up to Sir John A. MacDonald in Messianic terms, concluding with the ominous statement, again linking Riel to Christ through Matthew 10:34, that

I am only a poor poet
A lamb with a gun.

In contrast to the Messianic passages,  echoes of the Song of Solomon reverberate through, for example, “The Sacrament of Marie-Julie” and “The Confession of Evelina”.  In “I am a Poet”, Riel is at his most sensual, describing himself like a Métis Dionysus (with particular emphasis on his hair and moustache), but in Solomonic images rather than Classical.  And it is in “I am a poet” that the important image of the Orange first appears, here as a gift from Montreal, a city he describes as his lover. And the eating of the orange is described lovingly in parallel to poetic creation:

My mouth ran sweet. My pen
Never ceased. I am a poet.

When the Oranges reappear it is in the Red River Colony: the crate of rotten fruit who are, in fact, English Protestant settlers, Orangemen, who come to divide up Métis land amongst themselves, and who will ultimately cost Riel his life. Here, also in the context of the orange image, Riel recast’s the Lord’s Prayer as his own:

â-haw kisê-manitow
mâmaw-ôhtawîmaw
give us this day our daily oranges;
and forgive them their trespasses,
as we forgive those
who trespass against us;
and lead us not into war
but deliver us from theft.

For the land is our Kingdom,
and the power of our children,
forever and ever,
â-haw!

In contrast to the deep feeling, the deep oral history and geneology and the full blooded physicality of the poems of Riel and Dumont, of Marie Joseph, Evelina and the women of “The Sewing Circle”, the words of the Government in the found poems are cold, the shallow jargon of marketing, the formality of Sir John’s political debate polka, and the drunk, sad misogeny of “Sir John’s Reel”.  The fall of Louis Riel and the Métis Nation becomes clearly a tragedy of Biblical scale in Scofield’s hands, King David is hanged, his general in exile and his people scattered, the women weeping.

Primed by Scofield’s clear echoes of the Psalms and the Song of Solomon, I had open beside me as I read The Heretic Poems Psalm 137:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.

But the deep tragedy (heresy?) of The Heretic Poems is that the Métis (and other aboriginal nations) are exiles not in a strange land, but in their own.  I, for one, am grateful that poets such as Scofield have found the voice to sing their songs in this, their own land, that they remember, and their tongues do not cleave to the rooves of their mouths, and that their writing hands have not forgot their cunning.  And all, whether rulers in Babylon or just trying to get by, must be grateful that the Old Testament sentiment of the last two verses of Psalm 137 have not been Scooped up by the heirs of Louis and Gabriel, of Big Bear and Poundmaker.

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

Louis: The Heretic Poems by Gregory Scofield is published by Nightwood Editions in collaboration with the Gabriel Dumont Institute.

End with a song:

A highly personal and idiosyncratic response to “Where the Blood Mixes” by Kevin Loring

This afternoon I had one of the most powerful theatrical experiences of my life in a converted movie theatre at a matinee performance of Kevin Loring’s Where the Blood Mixes.  This isn’t really a review of the play, the production or the performances.  This is more of a gushing forth of the complicated background of my personal response to a powerful, challenging, painful piece of theatre.

My first encounter with Where the Blood Mixes was reading the play in early April, 2011.  I was reading it because it had won the Governor General’s Literary Award and for some years I’ve made it a point to read as many GG winners as I can lay my hands on.  In that Spring of 2011 I was also immersed in some obscure and not so obscure bits of Fraser Valley history and literature.  I was planning a road trip with my daughter down the Valley to retrace as well as possible the walking journey of British Novelist Morley Roberts in the 1880s, shortly before the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railroad.  The setting of Loring’s play – Lytton, B.C., where the Thompson and Fraser Rivers meet – was a pleasant surprise, as Lytton was also the jumping off point for one of the most surreal episodes of Roberts’ trek, an episode which I was to learn sends out historical and literary tendrils which deeply inform Loring’s play for me.

Morley Roberts arrived in Lytton after walking away from his temporary employment laying track in the Kicking Horse Pass.  His plan, which he completed, was to walk to the coast, following what would soon be the Canadian Pacific Railway and what would much later become the Trans-Canada Highway.  I’ll skip over the vast majority of Roberts’s adventure.  If you can find a copy of his The Western Avernus, it’s a fascinating travelogue of a large part of Western North America in the 1880s, well worth discovering.  For the purposes of this reflection on Where the Blood Mixes I’ll just talk about Roberts’s walk from Lytton to what is now Boston Bar.

Roberts set out in the morning along the rough path which eventually would become, in large part, Highway 1, hugging the east slope of the Fraser Canyon.  His description are of a sublimely wild and untamed wilderness.  Throughout this section of his narrative, one has the distinct impression that he is travelling in a sort of mystic solitude.  As I read it I was put in mind of parts of Basho’s Narrow Road into the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi).  Roberts seems to be stumbling along in a timeless and endless primeval forest, forgetting himself whatever reason he might have come here or any goal he may have once had in mind.

But suddenly, Roberts is on the front porch of a nicely kept hotel!  Inside he finds that the house is kept by a clergyman and his assistant with the help of what Roberts describes as “a boy”.  Roberts spends the late afternoon and evening teaching the threesome how to make bread, enjoys a dinner with the two men, and then retires to the drawing room for cigars, fine liquor and a discussion of Latin poetry.  Then, fed, watered, intellectually stimulated, and rested, Roberts bids farewell to the hotel in the woods and walks off into the gather night.  In the utter darkness Roberts finally stumbles into a stopping house at Boston Bar.  The rest of his journey has none of the strangeness of that walk south from Lytton.

In fact, the “Hotel”  was Forty Mile House, now long disappeared, one of the many stopping houses left over from the Caribou Gold Rush.  After a good deal of research, I learned that the clergyman Roberts encountered was Richard Small, the head of the Anglican Mission at Lytton and the subject of a hagiographic little biography called Archdeacon on Horseback. Forty Mile House had recently been taken over by the Mission as a resting place on the Archdeacon’s circuit of his charges over the surrounding area.  Small was also responsible for the establishment of St. George’s Residential School, an act for which he is much praised by the authors of Archdeacon on Horseback.  What a wonderful gift he brought to the poor benighted native children!  Frankly, I gag when I read Archdeacon on Horseback.  St. George’s is the dark evil in the background of Where the Blood Mixes.  As Loring writes in his afterword, when the Band finally got control of the Residential School, they immediately tore it down it was such a painful wound on their community.

Another tendril, this one literary, runs from Roberts’ strange journey through Ethel Wilson’s great Canadian novel Swamp Angel.  Wilson’s protagonist, Maggie, leaves here marriage and flees by bus to Lytton from the south, the opposite direction from Roberts.  And her journey through the area is also a little surreal.  As she travels north, Maggie notices very carefully the changes in the landscape, a landscape eerily devoid of humanity.  But suddenly she sees an old overgrown cemetery with three decaying crosses in it.  When investigating the area on our road trip, at first I thought Wilson might have been describing the recently renovated Lytton Cemetery, but her description seemed to place the three crosses farther from the town.  As my daughter and I drove south, suddenly a small cemetery flashed past us.  At the first opportunity I returned to take a few photos.  I’d been keeping careful note of our odometer reading and later was able to work out that this cemetery, the one most likely described by Maggie in Wilson’s novel, is very near to the location of Forty Mile House, where Roberts spent his nice evening with the founder of the Residential School which is the reason for the generational agony in Where the Blood Mixes.

Do all these details surrounding Forty Mile House have any meaning or, indeed, anything to do with the play? I don’t know about for anyone else, but they add a new, personal depth to the play for me. For me. This is a highly personal (and idiosyncratic) response.

Earlier, as my daughter and I were approaching Lytton from the east, I noticed two aboriginal gentlemen climbing up over the grey boulders from the direction of the Thompson River bank, and I couldn’t help but think with fondness “they could be Floyd and Mooch!”  And it is here that I will come to the production I saw this afternoon.

I found the set to be brilliant.  Not minimalist but efficient.  Everything is of the river: the grey stones such as I noticed “Floyd and Mooch” climbing over as we approached Lytton; the riverworn logs which serve as bridge and bar; the crushed oil drum and old tire, the detritus of the Shum’mas, and the bit of railroad that brought the Shum’mas to the Place in the Heart Where the Blood Mixes.  The stage is lit before the play starts with a submarine blue: from the moment one enters the theatre, it is clear that this play is about what lies beneath the surface.  The sound design is all water and wind and the sounds of nature with at least one train whistle reminding us whence comes the pain.  And, of course, the skeletal sturgeon and eagle, water and wind,  which preside over the play must be mentioned in their ominousness.

Something that really caught my eye was the subtle detail of George (Robert Benz) mopping the floor as the cast sang Ashe’ Mashe’. The stage directions simply read: “GEORGE mops up the mess of the evening throughout”.  Read, it’s a detail easy to miss.  But in performance, as the five characters sing their individual songs of – of what? Regret? Redemption? Transformation? George’s mopping tells us, whether we know N’laka’pamuxtsn or not, that they each are singing a song of mopping up the mess.

The performances were all impressive.  I found it interesting to watch Lorne Cardinal, whom I remember from his time at the University of Alberta, now the almost-elder Canadian actor he has become.  His Floyd is at the opposite end of the dramatic spectrum from his Davis on Corner Gas.  Cardinal pulls off amazing work with emotionally difficult material.  “Emotionally difficult material” is an absurd understatement: Cardinal has dedicated his performance to his parents, both survivors of the Residential Schools genocide. Years ago I met Cardinal’s late father briefly at a wedding.  It was eerily startling to watch Cardinal fils becoming on stage the damaged man is own father so easily could have become.  For a moment I saw the father on stage, the father who had been peaceful and happy on the one occasion I ever saw him, for a moment I saw that calm man tormented and twisted in the trauma of survival and memory.

Craig Lauzon as Mooch also achieves the transition from the comic to the tragic between the beginning and end of the play with painful conviction.  There was just one brief moment near the beginning where I thought Lauzon might have zoned out and just recited a line or two rather than being Mooch, but then, maybe I zoned out.  Sera-Lys McArthur as Christine (and Anna) was beautifully ethereal in the dream sequences and beautifully urban in the real world. Her solo singing was dreamy and her “spoken word artist” Christine stuck in the Lytton Hotel bar was spot on.  Michaela Washburn as June was suitably terrifying in rage and achingly tender in vulnerability.  And Robert Benz as the Shum’ma barkeep, George was perfect as the jolly friend to all these damaged characters – as long as they kept their damage out of his bar unless it was being drowned.

But it feels a little stupid to be talking about the quality of the performances: I can’t imagine acting this painful material a single time, let alone night after night. This cast not only gets through it, they make it look, if not easy — it could never be easy — absolutely real.  That in itself is a theatrical miracle.

The facts of the Residential Schools catastrophe must be made known to all Canadians, of that I am firmly convinced.  Where the Blood Mixes in a production such as the one I saw this afternoon, makes the experience of the Residential Schools catastrophe just almost tangible to a Shum’ma like me.  And that touch is terrifying and unforgettable.

See Where the Blood Mixes. And buy the play: it’s published by Talon Books. And lobby your local school board to have it placed on the English curriculum in high school.  And the Social Studies curriculum.

Where the Blood Mixes by Kevin Loring is being presented by Theatre Network at the Roxy Theatre until March 3, 2013.

Please see it, for the children who were taken, and that none will ever be taken again.