creative forces

 Blog # 145...September, 2023

My friend Marilyn took this photo for me on a recent trip to Paris. As well as recognizing my birthday, it also marks the founding of the 3rd French Republic in 1870 - stretching for 70 years from Napoleon to WWll.  

Birthdays make me think of transitions, the inevitable ones involved with aging - diminished hearing, sight or mobility but others like changing gender...or minds. All demand adjustments to how we think and act. 

It's uncomfortable to change, and many of us are struggling with adapting our attitudes towards our Indigenous fellow citizens. We deserve some background and history to be able to decide how to form our thoughts.

I was lucky to have a short trip to Manitoulin Island in July...staying at a lovely hotel /conference centre, a short lakeside walk from the main street of Little Current. Built in an Indigenous style and staffed by Indigenous folks, it's a great place to launch a visit, and feast on the local Georgian Bay whitefish. We also had a tour of the Island with a settler and time spent on unceded territory with an Indigenous elder.

For people not able to do that, there are a couple of books I read afterwards that gave me food for thought.  Michelle Good, who wrote the beautiful and anguished Five Little Indians, has given us Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada. It made me angry which I'm sure she intended.

And The Valley of the Birdtail is an unusual hybrid (maybe that should be trybrid) part history, part journalism, part novel...most of all a good story. It's set in a valley in central Manitoba - one side has the village of Rossburn, the other, the reserve of Waywayseecappo. The two lawyers who wrote it - one Indigenous from Manitoba, the other not - introduce a family from each place, real people living their present day lives set against the backdrop of the settlement of the valley.  A central figure in the early 1900's is Clifford Sifton, the federal minister responsible for importing hundreds of farmers from Ukraine giving them land that wasn't theirs(ours)to give!

It's an unusual form but works well to give us a look at two close communities, historically separate and tentatively testing ways to come together. A call out to Janice for suggesting I read it.

August was Emancipation month, certainly a time to recognize some progress on the road to equality, maybe also freeing up some of our thinking, looking for new ways to process the world and to care for the earth.  There's a cruel irony in the fires devastating Maui and our own British Columbia and North West Territories  - much of the land occupied by Indigenous people who have respected and done their best to preserve it... not the only case of the people doing the most to pollute suffering least.

So, we lurch into September, trying to do the best we can to keep our own small world in order, helping out when we can and comforted by the kindness and generosity of people in a position to do more.

And wait, don't go yet - another fine Canadian film:  North of Normal -  Carly Stone adapts Cea Sunrise Person's story of her unconventional life growing up in the north of Canada.

See you back here in October, as the leaves begin to fall.