creative forces

 Blog # 153...May 2024

Hooray hooray, it's finally May and, as promised in #152, I've been to British Columbia and have a few tales to tell about it.

But first, to digress, something about women in history. We've all heard of Cleopatra, Eleanors both Roosevelt and Aquitaine, and our own country's politicians - Flora McDonald  Iona Campagnolo, Alexa Mcdonough, and now the wonderful Jane Philpott, with a great new book about how to fix our healthcare system. But wait a minute, how about the women backstage,  the ones we've never heard about who shaped our world too?  

A new play Women of the Fur Trade takes us back a few hundred years and gives us a peek at the time when settlers were arriving and the place of the women who were already here...those of the First Nations. Born in Winnipeg at the Vault Project, nurtured by the  National Arts Centre in Ottawa and produced last summer at the Stratford Festival, the play introduces us to three women who tell stories - some sad, some hilarious of their daily lives. Although it's set around the mid 1800's their concerns of love, loss, joy and sorrow could be today. And Lois Riel makes a dazzling appearance too.

Now about BC...there's such an indigenous presence there, and just after we arrived in Victoria, we came upon a crowd outside the BC legislative Assembly -  the Haida People in full regalia were celebrating the first reading of the bill recognizing their Aboriginal title throughout Haida Gwaii. Here's a link to more about this and a pic (that I can't seem to load after many tries!)  https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2024IRR0020-000610 

Moving right along, as we did, to Campbell River - about half way up Island, as they say here. It's fishing, logging and mining territory and the town has a great small museum reflecting these important influences on life in the town...the most interesting thing for me was a life sized recreation of a floating house. These were complete dwellings built on wooden rafts, sometimes as many as a dozen, forming communities of workers and their families who could be floated from site to site to follow the work.

We were also aware of the art of survival, people appearing with tents at night after the local patrol had passed, gone in the morning. The climate is much more friendly to living rough and also to being old, so although I was at my usual level of discomfort with the homelessness, I certainly felt at home with the age cohort.

Sorry there are no pics, lots of images in my head but my energy to load them is flagging so I'm going to post this and see you in June.