Growing up in the shabbiest part of the North End of Winnipeg in an immigrant home, I was both inspired and confounded by the story of my great-grandfather Eliezer Gruber having been the first founder of a Jewish agricultural colony in Manitoba and a celebrated Winnipeg rabbi. Several times we visited the stunning mausoleum erected to him in Shaarey Zedek cemetery, the largest Jewish cemetery in the city. Meanwhile we were living in a slummy house converted into three small apartments that would be expropriated and torn down by the city in the late 1960s to make room for a public housing development that was never actually built.

What made no sense to me was how it was that my great-grandfather was such a big macher (bigshot) in Manitoba at the turn of the 20th century, and yet my baba (grandmother) and all her children remained in a mud hut in a shtetl (Jewish village) in Polish-occupied Ukraine until they immigrated to Canada in the 1930s. Cholojow was situated 62 kilometres northeast of Lviv and had a population of 4,151 in 1921, of whom 793 lived in the Jewish ghetto. The story of the family’s emigration from there had Biblical overtones. About 1932, the couple who owned Ideal Electric in Winnipeg prepaid the travel costs for my dad’s two sisters, both in their early twenties, to work in the shop. My baba’s younger sister was the woman of the couple. The deal was that they would work to pay off that travel, assembling lamps, and then start accumulating earnings to bring the rest of the family to Winnipeg. But after a few years the owners decided to make aliyah to Palestine, failing to leave the girls the money they had earned to bring more family members to the city. The new owners, also relatives, said they had not received the saved wages of the young women and they would have to start all over in their effort to bring family out of central Europe. Only in late 1937, when my dad was 15, did he, one of his brothers and baba come to Canada. The interruption in funds to bring family made it impossible to bring the oldest brother, for whom I’m named in Yiddish, along with his wife and child to Winnipeg. They all died in the Holocaust.

My dad, with zero formal education and not a word of English, went to work as a sewer in a shmata (garment) factory. When the Second World War came, he joined the army. His post-war veterans bonus went to providing dowries for his sisters and a house for baba with two one-bedroom apartments to provide her an income. We lived in one of those apartments until I was 9 and my mom was pregnant with the fifth of her six children. At that point my parents bought a dumpy house of their own with a second floor they could rent out to pay a mortgage. My dad often worked three jobs, the main one being a labourer at the CPR.

My knowledge of my great-grandfather Eliezer, apart from the words on his shrine and a few hints from my dad, was restricted to two letters that my dad had inherited. One was from Eliezer to his wife in Cholojow, the shtetl where she remained, in 1880. He warned her that there was no future for Jews in central Europe. “Men vet alle zebrennen,” he wrote in Yiddish letters. “You are all going to burn.”  They had married in 1857, when he was 15, but he spent as much time afterwards in Britain, where he learned to speak English, as in Cholojow. He returned home often enough to keep her constantly pregnant, with 10 live children completing the family in the late 1880s. My baba, likely born in 1884, was the ninth child. After Eliezer moved to New York City in 1892 and then Winnipeg by 1898, he apparently continued to write to my great-grandmother, urging her to come to North America along with her children at his expense. The letter from her to Eliezer in the early 1900s proclaimed that the “very soil of Canada is unkosher.” When I read that, at age 15, I said to my dad: “She’s a religious nutcase.” Later I would understand that her statement was only superficially about religion.

Two of the 10 Cholojow children did come to Canada. But I was 30 when I learned why his wife stayed put. Two old crones had twice shooed away my older brother and me from playing near the shrine. “Who were those women?” I asked dad. He laughed: “They’re your relatives.” But I had gone to many extended-family events and never seen them there. “They’re from his other family,” said dad. “The old goat was a bigamist. He had 10 kids with his first wife and seven with the second.” Lehr, who didn’t uncover the bigamy, speaks of only six kids. There was a history lesson in my dad’s revelation. Great-grand-baba did not mean God had fouled the land of Canada; she meant that her two-timing husband had done that.

He went on to make a success of himself. Lehr notes that he was regarded as a wise rabbi by his congregants, even though an article in the Morning Telegram on February 26, 1901, questioned whether he was a rabbi at all and strongly suggested that he was at bottom a conman. Having failed to sell all the land in Gruber to Canadians, Eliezer Gruber visited American Jewish communities and offered to sell town lots for $100 to $200, with one-third to be paid upfront, the rest in instalments. After he sold a lot to a Jewish man in Dubuque, Iowa, the man made a complaint to the authorities, and Gruber was arrested in Des Moines and charged with fraud. A Des Moines rabbi who initially tried to get him released told the Telegram that Gruber was lying when he claimed that he was in the city to preach to the Jewish congregation, not to sell land. Gruber told the newspaper that the complainant was influenced by “lies in Jewish papers published in New York. They don’t like me down there. They are persecuting me…. They can’t stand to see we are building up my colony.” But the Des Moines rabbi told the Telegram, “I don’t believe he is a rabbi at all.” Lehr also notes that there is no evidence of Gruber ever having been ordained and suggests his colonization schemes were motivated by commercial gain, not religion. He required his colonists, who, like him, received free farmland, to purchase land on his unfarmed land to build their houses there rather than on their free land.

When Gruber died in 1919 in Winnipeg at the age of 76 or 77, he was apparently well off. He willed his wealth to his 17 children equally. But family lore is that the nine children in Winnipeg (two from the first family and the seven from the second) collaborated to claim that none of the remaining Cholojow children were still alive. The Winnipeg authorities may have believed that, because during the First World War Jewish wartime conscripts in the Austro-Hungarian army died in large numbers, first during the fighting and then from a plague that followed. My baba certainly survived, but her husband came back to Cholojow from the war, as my dad said, “Not quite right.” He died in 1925, age 36, when my dad was 3. They survived on my baba’s work acquiring chickens from local farmers and then going by horse and buggy to Lemburg (Lviv) to sell them to the Jewish community, who comprised a third of the big city’s population. But they lived poorly, because baba gave half of what she earned to the Talmudic students who, in dad’s view, were social parasites.

Their lack of inheritance may have been a blessing in disguise. Baba’s younger sister was one of the two inheritors from the first family and her money went into the establishment of Ideal Electric. The existence of that firm and her willingness to bring my two aunts to work in the company, if only for peanuts, ended up saving my dad’s family, who might have been less keen to leave Cholojow had they had an inheritance and not been close to starving. So, while great-granddad was likely a conman, his money ultimately explains why my dad’s family did not stay behind and become Holocaust victims. Of course, the land which provided some of that conman income was stolen Indigenous land in a dispossession Canadians still largely deny. So, I’ll thank Indigenous elders along with conman Rabbi Eliezer Gruber for the fact that I ever got to be born at all.

Alvin Finkel is professor emeritus at Athabasca University, co-founder of the Alberta Labour History Institute, and author of Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality (Lorimer, 2024).

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The post Great-Grandfather, Your Jewish Settler Story is so Unheroic appeared first on Alberta Views.

Smith’s remarks epitomize a troubling trend in the province she hails from: an attempt to ignore Indigenous perspectives on Canadian history. Never mind whether any Indigenous people would characterize their homelands the way Alberta’s premier does—as “unforgiving frontiers” needing to be tamed—Smith’s vision of Canadian history doesn’t include space for them to have any perspectives at all. Never mind what failed Treaty promises, residential schools and decades of successive iterations of the Indian Act did to undermine Indigenous governments, lands, families and societies. First Nations are simply subsumed by Smith as willing participants in building a capitalist democratic nation state. It is a triumphalist vision. It’s also emphatically bad history.

Smith’s party has a track record of making Canadian history a contentious issue. Her predecessor, Jason Kenney, announced a rewrite of the entire K–6 curriculum in summer 2020, stating that his government particularly hoped to remove the “ideology” they contended was in the unreleased NDP draft curriculum, and reinsert the “history.” Our heroes—like John A. Macdonald, like our war dead on Vimy Ridge and Juno Beach—have been crushed under a mass of liberal biases, opined Kenney. What was unfurled in the spring of 2021 was a social studies curriculum so hurriedly prepped that many people saw it as an attack on the public education system itself.

Content heavy, even in the youngest grades, the UCP’s draft social studies curriculum promised to require that students memorize a heap more and think a whole lot less. The Grade 2 draft curriculum read like an outline of two semesters’ worth of a university-level western civilization course (minus, of course, the critical analysis), with topics such as the essential wisdom of Plato and Socrates, the major tenets of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and the leading theories behind the fall of the Roman Empire all to be covered in the portion of the day that 7-year-olds devote to social studies (as at least one teacher satirized, perhaps between morning snack and recess). So many members of the public were appalled by the assertion in the Grade 2 materials that “most” Albertans are Christians, and “newcomers” bring other religious traditions and may “struggle to find acceptance,” that the Ministry of Education hurriedly yanked the line from the drafts on its public consultation websites.

That forms of violence were perpetrated on Indigenous people during the settlement of the Canadian West is acknowledged openly now.

Situating Indigenous cultures squarely in a hazy, mysterious past, reassuring us that they made some positive “contributions” to modern (white, Christian) Canadian society, the social studies draft makes a brief detour to New France in Grade 3 before landing, in Grade 4, in the western “untamed wilderness” evoked by Danielle Smith. Here, after a cursory mention of how Plains Indigenous people used “all” the parts of the buffalo, we are treated to a throwback to the Eurocentric way of interpreting the settlement of the Canadian West, where, in essence, Treaties and the North-West Mounted Police peaceably cleared the way for white settlers, their ranching, their farming and their civilization. Roundly criticized for their advisers’ assertions that residential school history was “too sad” for K–6 and should wait until junior high, the UCP curriculum team deigned to mention it in Grade 5.

Maybe it still comforts some, but this is not how Canadian history is taught in graduate schools nor in undergraduate classrooms. It is not how it is explored in academic books or analyzed in our country’s courts and tribunals. We have moved past the smug assumption that the Canadian West was the “mild” frontier (compared to the US and its Wild West, with its violent Indian wars). That forms of violence were perpetrated on Indigenous people during the settlement of the Canadian West, whether on reserves, through the pass and permit systems, in residential schools, in the child welfare and the criminal justice and the healthcare systems—that they were excluded from participating fully in Canadian life, and not treated as equal partners or even as neighbours in some project of developing Canada, as Smith’s casual revisionism would have it—these things are acknowledged and taught openly now. And we’ve started to become the better for it.

The UCP would have Indigenous perspectives and the more difficult aspects of Canadian history scrubbed from the K–6 curriculum. But they were unprepared for the protest from teachers, school boards, parents and the public at large that followed the release of the draft curriculum. Backlash came from people concerned about the whitewashing of history, about the normalizing of white, Christian viewpoints in the social studies curriculum, but also from experts in how children learn, seemingly none of whom were consulted by the UCP.

As a parent of a fourth grader at the time of the draft curriculum’s release, I kept visualizing the effortless way I had watched my son’s (white) kindergarten teacher introduce the Blackfoot name of the ubiquitous Alberta wild rose bushes, kiníí, on a ridge near our home in the foothills a few years before, and also their rosehips (“itchy bum berry”). Like my son’s kindergarten teacher, maybe first let’s look around the neighbourhood and only then tackle the UCP’s “short version of Western civilization from Mesopotamia to the present”—although I hope my children aren’t required to. With the uproar surrounding particularly the disastrous social studies draft, most of the UCP curriculum was shelved for “revisions.”

As a parent but also a professional historian, I’m concerned about the UCP’s attempts to rewrite the social studies curriculum in the past two and a half years, and the threat this still poses should the NDP not form the next provincial government. The existing curriculum, while ready for the update the NDP was preparing, at least emphasized how to ask good questions. The UCP sought to replace that with nothing but prepackaged answers, in the guise of endless dates and names and facts.

As a professional historian, I’m prompted to ask, “Whose version of history is being presented here?” and “For what purpose?” Danielle Smith putting her blithe Eurocentrism on display during a stroll in Ottawa—the talk that began with fanciful notions about Canada being founded in a shared quest for turning untamed wildernesses into prosperity and ended with a pro-oil-sands screed against carbon taxes—makes it abundantly clear what ignoring Indigenous perspectives on Canadian history enables us to likewise brush under the rug. To name just a few: Indigenous dispossession. Indigenous sovereignty. Indigenous rights to be consulted about the lands and resources that have disproportionately enriched white Albertans. The prosperity that Smith refers to is under threat, she argues, by a federal government that unjustly taxes Albertans. And it is on that “victimization” that the UCP would like the Albertan public and Canadians at large to remain foused.

Earlier in the same week as Smith’s remarks in front of the Parliament buildings, former professor Frances Widdowson took a flamboyant stand for removing Indigenous perspectives from the highest levels of education in Alberta. Widdowson—a political scientist, not a historian—has insisted, especially since her termination from Mount Royal University in Calgary at the end of 2021, that she is fighting “fascism” in the postsecondary system. Widdowson believes a poorly defined boogeyman called “postmodernism” has ruined the university and is stripping professors of their academic freedom. Those who labour in the academic vineyards, according to her, have been forced to replace the spirit of open inquiry and any notion of free speech with a doctrine of “wokeism”—which, for those unfamiliar with the term, is meant to conjure up spectres of identity politics and victim Olympics.

Widdowson has claimed that she herself is victimized, hindered by woke policies such as the University of Lethbridge’s Indigenization initiative from expressing her opinions that residential schools and the assimilation policy writ large in Canada were not genocide. Her plans to deliver a public lecture at the U of L on February 1, 2023, were thwarted by hundreds of protesters. Widdowson was forced to give that talk (“How ‘Woke-ism’ Threatens Academic Freedom”) on Zoom, but she did deliver a two-part, in-person lecture as planned to a U of L philosophy professor’s classroom that same week. Titling her lecture “Should universities ‘foster respect’ for Indigenous ‘ways of knowing’?,” Widdowson—predictably—answered “no.”

Widdowson begins her lecture with a sweeping proclamation that she is opposed to the relativism that has permeated historical thinking since the 1960s (a.k.a. what she calls “postmodernism”). No, instead, universities should be citadels of Enlightenment principles, zealous guardians of the Enlightenment’s pursuit of Universal Truth. Much of Widdowson’s belief that Indigenous ways of knowing should not be respected by academic institutions centres on her preoccupation with the “preliterate” nature of pre-Contact Indigenous societies. Indigenous ways of knowing (at least in Widdowson’s view) are heavily based on the pronouncements of “knowledge keepers,” who may in turn be basing their knowledge on “revelations,” which cannot be scientifically tested, and are heavily dependent as well on “oral histories,” which Widdowson summarizes are “often inaccurate” since Indigenous people didn’t have any “writing to pin down those observations.”

It is worth noting here that in Widdowson’s body of work, the “preliterate” nature of pre-Contact Indigenous peoples is key to the “cultural gap” or “developmental gap” that she claims still exists between European civilizations and Indigenous societies. As she wrote in her 2008 book (coauthored with her husband, Albert Howard), Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, “never has the cultural gap between two sets of peoples at the time of contact been wider… [Indigenous peoples] were in an earlier stage of cultural development in comparison to Europeans, who were making the transition from feudalism to capitalism.” Developing a system of writing, in Widdowson’s view, was a necessary precursor not only to economic development but also to a culture’s achievement of logic, science, philosophy and history, for only writing can be properly analyzed. And “postmodernists” have tried to “disguise this gap in development” between Indigenous people and Europeans by recasting “aboriginal recollections as ‘oral literature.’ ”

Widdowson’s facile brushing aside (as “relativism” and “postmodernism”) of all the contributions made since the 1960s by scholars of women’s history, Black history, Chicano history, Indigenous history, LGBTQ history and social movements at large deserves scrutiny. It is doubly weird that Widdowson, who has described herself as a “historical materialist” (i.e., a Marxist) downplays to such degree any utility in oral histories, given that labour historians were among the first in the academy to use them to uncover details about working people’s lives and pursuits of equity—since, historically, working-class people scarcely had the time to write things down, if they were even literate enough to do so. Was the (white) working class also suffering from a “development gap,” one wonders?

Widdowson’s consecration of the written word ignores the fact that written sources require as much “interrogation” as she believes oral histories do. Anyone who has taken an undergraduate-level history course in the past half-century could help Widdowson with how to interrogate a (written) primary source, how to ask questions like: Who authored this What was their perspective What were their motivations Their biases Whose perspectives are being left out here And why might that be so As someone who deals with government records about Indigenous people all the time, I would argue that understanding the biases of government officials is exceedingly important to interpreting the document trail they left behind.

The most telling part of Widdowson’s lecture (which she encouraged to be recorded and shared) was when she stated that U of L’s Indigenous policies and especially its initiative of “fostering respect” for Indigenous ways of knowing has had “serious consequences” for her own career. Widdowson claims her academic freedom was trampled. I think what really happened was that she was criticized for her poor ability to think historically. What largely brought the protesters to the atrium at U of L, again, were Widdowson’s views on residential schools, which are neatly encapsulated in a paper she delivered to the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in 2017. This paper, titled “The Political Economy of Truth and Reconciliation: Neotribal Rentierism and the Creation of the Victim/Perpetrator Dichotomy,” draws on zero historical sources in order to make broad assertions about the residential school experience in Canada: no archival documents, no oral histories. Her arguments in this paper cannot be “tested” in the manner in which she lectured Lethbridge philosophy students that real forms of knowledge must be tested. Meanwhile she details why Indigenous ways of knowing fall so short of Western scientific methods and modes of inquiry.

Widdowson asserts that residential schools, for all their faults, provided a preliterate society the opportunity to acquire the “knowledge, skills, values and disciplines needed to participate in a modern society.” She also suggests that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission incentivized Indigenous Elders to stretch the truth about physical and sexual abuses in order to gain larger payouts. Many of the testimonies of residential school survivors, writes Widdowson, have “an air of improbability about them.” She muses, “it is hard to believe that so many intensely religious people would have collectively taken part in brazen actions regarded as mortal sins.” Whether Widdowson personally believes or not that “intensely religious people” had it in them to commit mortal sins doesn’t feel like a tested, learned, academically sound theory at all. It just sounds like her opinion.

One should draw on a plethora of actual historical evidence—archival sources, oral histories and other forms of data—before drawing a conclusion.

Historical academic standards generally suggest that one should draw on a plethora of actual evidence—including archival sources, oral histories and other forms of data—before drawing a conclusion. Widdowson’s views on residential schools do not hold up to these standards. Likewise, her opinion on the “development gap” that she asserts holds Indigenous cultures back is difficult to square with any actual scholarly study of Indigenous peoples. I think, just to draw one example from recent projects I’ve worked on, of the Indigenous leaders who negotiated the treaties on the Canadian prairies. They were described (by government officials) as men who spoke several Indigenous languages, had long histories of interacting with British officials and fur trade economies, and often understood English to boot. They bargained hard for concessions that the federal government was loath to promise them, such as agricultural implements, work animals and instruction in how to farm. They protested when the government failed to fulfil these treaty promises, and they protested government policies that deliberately kept them from scaling their farming operations or selling their crops. Government repression is in full view in these historical sources, like the section of the Indian Act that until 1951 forbade Indigenous people and band governments from retaining lawyers. But the supposed “gap in development” that Widdowson insists has held Indigenous people back from equally participating in Canadian society It is not apparent.

To the Lethbridge students, Widdowson decried the inclusion of “knowledge keepers” within the academy. Letting Elders within the ivory tower, Widdowson reasoned, threatens to “lower standards” for the entire university because the directive from on high to respect Indigenous ways of knowing precludes any scrutiny of their traditional teachings. In her several books, Widdowson has argued that First Nations, given the developmental gap, were not ready to participate in industrial capitalism, and (as she writes in Disrobing) universities or other institutions adopting “low standards hides the fact that most native people have not developed the skills, knowledge or values to survive in the modern world.” As she continues in the 2017 paper, “aboriginal cultural development will require intensive educational methods. Real education for aboriginal people will mean actual attempts to improve literacy and scientific education in communities where books are rare, animistic beliefs still hold traction, and ill-informed ‘wisdom-keepers’ are deferred to. How this developmental gap can be bridged will not be easy.”

One wonders, though: If Widdowson is so secure in the Western scientific method and the ongoing gifts that the “Enlightenment” holds for modern academia, why is she so worried about Indigenous Elders being invited inside academic institutions What threat do their perspectives pose to such an overwhelmingly superior, and dominant, culture?

I think, much like for Danielle Smith and the UCP’s K–6 curriculum writers, that the real issue is that they don’t want Indigenous perspectives included in Canadian history at all. For anyone curious about the wordy second half of Widdowson’s 2017 paper title—“Neotribal Rentierism and the Creation of the Victim/Perpetrator Dichotomy”—she defines “neotribal rentierism” as processes that “are oriented towards extracting ‘rent’ so as to incorporate aboriginal groups into late capitalism.” In other words, not being equipped (developmentally) to participate in capitalist endeavours on their own terms, in Widdowson’s view, Indigenous people instead demand compensation, “a form of circulation that is becoming increasingly common in addressing the conflicts between aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state.”

And there we come to the crux of the matter, full circle to the underlying issue with Premier Smith’s smooth omission of Indigenous points of view about the great national project she describes, the one where Indigenous and settler Canadians supposedly united in order to transform “untamed wilderness” into prosperity. Prosperity for whom For if Indigenous perspectives on Canadian history aren’t sidelined, if Indigenous viewpoints are allowed space, and if—most dangerously of all!—they hold any validity for the public, perhaps, then, the rent comes due.

Smith subsumes First Nations as willing participantsin building a capitalist, democratic nation state. It’s emphatically bad history.

Widdowson was turned back from giving a public lecture in Lethbridge by the drumming and shouting of hundreds. The UCP social studies curriculum was shelved, for now. And Premier Smith now faces backlash for her revisionist stab at historical storytelling. It is worth mentioning too that in the very same week as the Widdowson / U of L drama and Smith’s controversial remarks, the Law Society of Alberta was forced to deal with a measure that sought to remove Indigenous cultural competency training as a mandatory course. Its members did vote down that measure, resoundingly, to the tune of three to one, and the training remains. A great many Albertans apparently don’t buy into the notion that the pursuit of history involves the slow uncovering of a universal truth—with only one valid viewpoint—the inexorable march of progress, the metaphorical hallways in which we can showcase our hagiography of heroes. Inconveniently for Premier Smith, Widdowson and the architects of the UCP’s K–6 social studies draft curriculum, scholarly assessments of historical events in Canada do not tend to support an overarching narrative of white victimhood.

It would seem that a majority of Albertans see through these narcissistic (one might even say “colonial”) traits: of doing exactly what one is accusing someone else of doing—crafting a totalitarian, doctrinal view of history, and dumbing history down to boot—of blaming the victim (preliterate societies were inferior, after all, and if residential schools were insensitive, they were only trying to help bridge that developmental gap), and of accusing the victim of being the aggressor (“they” took away my academic freedom, the narrative of history that made me feel good, my heroes, and now they are fleecing Canadians with their demands for compensation!).

In my work, which deals largely with Indigenous legal claims, when I have brought scraps of documentary evidence that illuminate conditions on reserves in the late 19th and early 20th centuries out of the archives and back to communities, people have often cried. The letter from the farm instructor to the Indian commissioner, describing how he narrowly avoided a fist fight with the Indigenous farmers to whom he had denied a permit to sell their products (1920s, Saskatchewan). The journal of the Oblate priest who baptized the dying baby, fed only with fish broth while government officials “scaled back” the rations (1880s, Alberta). The perfunctory, one-paragraph letter to the parents in the north, telling them their toddler had died in a distant southern sanatorium (1950s, Manitoba).

People react emotionally to these scraps of evidence, I presume, not because they didn’t know what happened. It was, indeed, their own lived experience, or that of their parents and their grandparents. I think they’ve cried because the voices of those who denied it ever happened have been so very, very loud.

The truths about Canadian history are by no means finished being told, and (in the manner of Widdowson’s “open inquiry”) perhaps this is a project that never ends. The outpouring of grief that can accompany telling historical truths isn’t finished either. The Canada I dream of my children becoming adults in—the reconciled Canada—will be hard won, not with glib assertions like Premier Smith’s about mystical partnerships and neighbourliness but with education, with time, with truths and with tears. Children in our K–6 schools and young adults in our universities are more than capable of being exposed to different perspectives, difficult past events and ongoing injustices. As the TRC’s final report insisted, changing the undeniable inequities in Canadian society will only happen if first there is listening. The majority of Albertans consistently show that we are ready to do just that. A minority keeps trying to take away our opportunities to do so.

Gretchen Albers is a historian who works principally with Indigenous communities in the prairies on land claims and treaty rights issues being heard by Canadian tribunals and courts.

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The post Whitewashing History appeared first on Alberta Views.

First, the republicans of Oliver Cromwell took control. Then the monarchy was restored. Then there was another revolution. After 40 years of civil war and religious upheaval, Mary II, the granddaughter of Charles I, assumed the throne, ruling alongside her husband and cousin, William III. But the era of absolute monarchy was over. In 1689 England adopted a Bill of Rights which severely curtailed the power of the Crown and entrenched the powers and privileges of the elected parliament.

It’s a shame we don’t learn more about this history in school or via popular culture. The more “romantic” French  Revolution gets all the attention in the curriculum and the public imagination. Still, the power of parliament was enshrined in 1689—a proud tradition that Canada inherited in 1867.

It’s a shame we don’t learn this history in school. The more “romantic” French Revolution gets all the attention.

So I’ve been intrigued, amused and a little frustrated by a tendency among Albertans and other Canadians to demand, when it’s convenient to them, that the Crown intervene in our politics; that the Queen or her designates ride to our rescue when we don’t like what our elected officials are doing.

In 2016 George Clark tried to launch his “kudatah” against Rachel Notley’s NDP government, petitioning Queen Elizabeth II to throw Notley out. At the time, it seemed laughable, a clownish attempt at revolution, launched from the parking lot of a Walmart at Calgary’s Westbrook Mall.

These days, though, it’s more often those who oppose Jason Kenney who insist that the Crown should solve our problems.

Last July I posted on Twitter a picture of myself with Alberta lieutenant governor Salma Lakhani. The responses were both comical and alarming. “Can you ask her to get us a new provincial government Seriously, at what point does that become a thing Asking for several thousand friends,” posted a commenter with the handle The Notorious PFG. I’m pretty sure he was joking. But other replies to Lakhani’s tweets were insistent and angry, with people blaming the lieutenant governor for Alberta’s political situation. “Are you having daily long talks with Premier Kenney about how he has lost the moral authority to govern and needs to resign and dissolve his government for the good of the people If not, why not How many more people will have to die before you say ‘Enough’?” someone asked on September 25. “You need to force an election. If you don’t, you can’t in all good conscience ever refer to yourself as an Albertan. You’ll go down in history as someone who could have done the right thing and saved lives but instead chose to do the wrong thing,” wrote another. On October 1: “Please dissolve the legislature. The people have no confidence in this government to lead, and we need a new one.”

“Sorry, I don’t believe you are doing what is necessary to protect Albertans,” someone posted a week later. “You have the opportunity, indeed the obligation, to sit down with the premier and tell him his policies are failing the people of this province, to be better. And yet you fail to do this. Complicit.”

But even some politicians don’t seem to understand the rules and roles of a constitutional monarchy—as we saw when federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh asked Governor General Mary Simon to refuse to grant Justin Trudeau the right to call an early election.

We’ve become a society of “Karens,” demanding to speak to the manager, imagining the Queen or her federal or provincial surrogates can somehow absolve us from the consequences of elections. (Is it because all three are female Are we somehow expecting our mother or super-nanny to come to save us?)

It’s true that in 1937 Alberta lieutenant governor John C. Bowen refused to grant royal assent to three bills passed by the Aberhart government, including legislation to censor the press and to interfere with federal control of banks. Those bills were blatantly unconstitutional. Bowen’s extraordinary, unprecedented action was the exception to prove the rule.

No matter how frustrated we get with any elected government, we shouldn’t want the Crown to usurp them—any more than we should want the Senate to exceed its constitutional authority and start killing bills willy-nilly. Nor the federal government to override provincial jurisdiction, even in a public-health crisis. The constitution is there for a reason. It protects our rights and the integrity of our political institutions. We can’t simply wish it away, no matter how frightened or frustrated or furious we feel.

If we don’t like the governments we elect, the answer isn’t to lose our heads and demand that some external constitutional actor save us. It’s to take responsibility for our choices—and our actions. No fairy godmother, no shining knight is coming to our rescue. Our democracy is in our hands, and ours alone. Right where it belongs.

The post We Are Our Own Masters appeared first on Alberta Views.

The bullet, however, split the branch where the partridges roosted, and as its two halves snapped together, all the birds were caught by the feet! As Johnny went to collect them, he slipped and fell into the nearby river. Struggling his way back up the muddy bank, Johnny noticed his pants, which had filled with water, were now teeming with fish. Johnny was saved! “You never know when your luck’ll change!” he said.

This scene is from Johnny Chinook: Tall Tales and True from the Canadian West, a 1945 collection of folktales, popular history and travel writing by Robert E. Gard. The character of Johnny Chinook, Gard’s own invention, appears periodically in the book, linking its various vignettes. Johnny Chinook is “a muse, or spirit, [a] supernatural being,” Gard writes, “who represents all the good storytellers in Alberta.” Written by an American who only lived in Alberta a few years, Johnny Chinook was nonetheless a foundational and influential expression of official, state-funded Albertan culture.

Much like Johnny’s, Alberta’s luck was changing in the mid-1940s. After a decade of Depression, wartime spending had pushed the economy into the black, and an oil strike in Leduc was about to ignite a boom that would last largely uninterrupted for four decades. More than anything, however, Gard’s book reflected Alberta’s recent Depression-era experience as well as its colonial past. Through its commitment to ordinary people’s stories, Johnny Chinook displays a working-class sensibility, and its humorous, sometimes satiric tone demythologizes the so-called frontier.

Robert Gard was born to a middle-class family in the farming town of Iola, Kansas in 1910. As a young man during the Depression—“a sad time and a bad time” as he wrote in his 1956 book Grassroots Theatre—Gard took to the road with thousands of other itinerant men. He eventually attended the University of Kansas, where he studied drama (against his lawyer father’s wishes), and, with the help of the New Deal-era College Student Employment Program, found his first job as a helper at the university’s theatre. On a scholarship he then shipped off to the prestigious Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, to study under A.M. Drummond, a specialist in folk drama. Under Drummond’s direction Gard helped produce and perform plays for popular audiences across upstate New York.

As Gard writes, in Ithaca he put on “country theatre experiments” with the aim of “developing fine original plays authored by the people of the area.” Gard travelled to towns and villages, conducted interviews with residents and incorporated their stories into a play he wrote in collaboration with them. The show was then performed in the town, with roles often filled by the residents themselves. Gard would use similar methods of community engagement to write Johnny Chinook.

Folk culture was an especially influential force in the early decades of the twentieth century, and it continues to appeal today. Fuelled partly by a disenchantment with modern society, folk culture is an attempt to find authenticity in the traditional arts and culture of rustic and rural peoples, those supposedly least touched by modernity and in most direct contact with nature and the land. Urban, middle-class cultural producers selected, collected and purveyed folk cultures to a wider audience, shaping to a large degree what was seen as legitimate.

Unsurprisingly, folk culture is a strong influence on Gard’s Johnny Chinook. The foreword, penned by Donald Cameron, president of the University of Alberta Department of Extension (where Gard worked), indulges in a painstaking description of Alberta’s geography and weather before proffering those as a foundation for an Albertan identity: “The people have become acutely aware of the Alberta sunshine, the hail, the rain and the warm chinook wind with its mysterious arch in the west. Such things have had much to do with the creation of a distinct western spirit, an optimism that is at once hopeful and fearful, a sense of humour.”

For as compelling as folk culture can be, in his book The Quest of the Folk, Canadian historian Ian McKay points out that folk culture was popular in elite institutions partly because it defined “the people” in a way that overwrote class conflict in contemporary capitalist society. The land could be the source of a shared provincial or national identity, encompassing everyone who lived there, whether worker or boss, renter or landlord, papering over more meaningful tensions over ownership, control and distribution of wealth. In colonial societies such as Canada, folk culture tended to erase, belittle or romanticize Indigenous peoples, the actual first inhabitants of the land.

Johnny Chinook represents all the good storytellers in Alberta.

Gard came to Alberta in 1942 to teach at the Banff Extension School, the predecessor of the Banff Centre for the Arts. There he taught playwriting to summer students, and in 1943 he settled in Edmonton at the University of Alberta, where he became head of the Alberta Folklore and Local History project, establishing the short-lived Alberta Folklore Quarterly. This and later work was funded by numerous grants Gard received through the Rockefeller Foundation.

Gard quickly became a prominent public intellectual, “the Mark Twain of Alberta” as he was labelled by the press. He lectured across the province, at the same time collecting material for his folklore initiative, “asking people desperately about their yarns, materials about themselves and their places.” This material would be the basis for Johnny Chinook. Gard even read some of these stories on air at CKUA radio in Edmonton on a popular show.

Gard was a key member of the earliest cultural institutions in Alberta. The Banff School was one program of the University of Alberta’s Department of Extension, which offered informal adult education across the province. Established with a grant from the Carnegie Foundation in 1933, U of A’s was the country’s largest such program, reaching some 380,000 Albertans in the 1930s. Teachers travelled to far- flung towns and villages to offer free lectures in community halls, church basements and barns. As academics PearlAnn Reichwein and Karen Wall write in their book Uplift, public arts education in Alberta promised students “a higher quality of life, moral uplift and shared citizenship.” It was during these years also that the CBC and NFB were established, with mandates to educate, inform and entertain the public.

It wasn’t a coincidence, however, that such programs, funded both by governments and by wealthy philanthropists, were launched in midst of the Great Depression when popular support for capitalism was being deeply shaken. Political parties such as the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and the Communist Party of Canada provided free education to their members on topics including arts and culture. Amid the intense class conflict of the era, state- and philanthropist-funded public education programs sought, as Reichwein and Wall emphasize, to promote “social harmony” by “align[ing] popular taste and knowledge with elite, conservative values.”

Whatever the higher goals of these institutions, art does not always lend itself to such instrumentalization, and Gard himself was primarily interested in the development of local culture. “I have wanted the arts,” he wrote, “to come into their own as a vital force in community life.” Because Johnny Chinook is interested in the stories of ordinary Albertans, the book ends up criticizing capitalism and colonialism.

Gard’s books display a fondness for the working class and outlaws—who are often the same people. In Fort Macleod, Gard hears the story of Jeff Davis, an ox-cart teamster who, after the arrival of the southern branch of the railway, is ordered by his employer to deliver the oxen to the slaughterhouse. Davis is so attached to the animals, however, he can’t bear to do it. Gard writes: “You can imagine how Jeff felt. He sat on his wagon seat and thought the matter out. The oxen symbolized his whole life, the plodding, the twelve-miles-a-day treks across the prairie, the camp at night[…] It seemed to Jeff that his life had ended.” Taking it upon himself to save the oxen, Davis hides them in a distant pasture, claiming that they had wandered off and gotten lost. Still attached to the beasts, however, Davis visits them every night under cover of darkness until one evening he’s discovered and the oxen are repossessed.

In Lethbridge Gard hears the tale of Dave Cochrane, a well-known character who squatted on various properties, resisting all attempts to dislodge him. In the meantime Cochrane lived frugally. In one anecdote he steals a stove from a detachment of the nearby North-West Mounted Police. Cochrane ingeniously makes off with one piece of the stove at a time, while hauling away other junk, then reassembles the pieces at home. “Not long after this,” as Gard retells it, “[a] police officer paid a visit to Dave’s cabin, and saw the fine-looking stove. ‘Where did you get that new stove, Dave?’ asked the Mountie. ‘Why,’ said Dave, ‘it was amongst the junk you told me to haul away from behind the Barracks!’ ”

Later in the book the author travels to Waterhole, Alberta (now a community in Fairview, in Peace Country) to interview John Sweeney, a retired agricultural labourer and amateur poet known as the “Bard of the North.” “One thing that does make me good and mad,” Sweeney says, “are these fellows who set out to make a lot of profit out of the man who doesn’t have anything anyway. I speak my mind about this whenever I get a chance, and as a result some people call me a communist.” Gard reprints Sweeney’s verse at length:

In Heaven I never want a seat,

If I have got to shovel wheat.

To tell the truth upon my soul

In Hell I’d rather shovel coal,

To keep old Limbo good and hot

And burn the whole infernal lot.

That owns a damn old threshing rig

And tries to make their profit big.

Sweeney adopts the traditional social hierarchy on earth, in this satiric version of the afterlife, with bosses on top and workers below, only to invert it when the worker stokes the furnace so hot that he exacts revenge on his exploiters above.

Along with its appreciation of working-class heroes, Johnny Chinook displays a populist disdain of the professional classes, including lawyers and doctors. Gard retells a story of a Dr. McMurder and Dr. Slaughter who perform unnecessary surgery on their patients just so they can charge them more. “I wonder if I’ve given him an overdose of chloroform,” says Dr. Slaughter. Then, “with his ears against the patient’s chest, Dr. Slaughter laughed heartily,” before rushing off to spend his windfall on a lucrative bit of real estate, his patient still unconscious.

The oil industry receives a relatively brief treatment by Gard. He was writing in the years before the discovery of major reserves at Leduc in 1947. But of the earlier strike in Turner Valley, Gard writes, “Calgary’s staidest citizens engaged in an orgy of speculation which reached such fantastic heights that some brokers used waste baskets as temporary containers of money eagerly offered by purchasers of oil stock—most of it entirely worthless.” Having lived through the carnage of the Great Depression, Gard was understandably critical of this kind of rampant speculation.

To my mind, the funniest section of the book is about “remittance men,” what we might call today “trust fund kids.” These younger sons of well-to-do British families arrive in Alberta intent on setting up a ranch or a farm, but mired in incompetence and bad habits, they don’t get very far. Gard retells the story of an unnamed Britisher who spent all his allowance in the bar at High River. When surprised by an unannounced visit from his family, the young man gave his father a tour of a friend’s ranch, pretending it was his own. Satisfied with his son’s progress, the father left his son an extra 1,000 pounds—which he spent on drinks for his friend.

Alberta’s “country western” identity proves adaptable to the uses of swaggering corporate executives and working-class people alike.

Johnny Chinook includes many stories about Indigenous people, some of them containing offensive tropes common to the era. While no one should treat Johnny Chinook as an authority on Indigenous culture in Alberta, the book does in its way attempt to include Indigenous perspectives. Gard retells a lengthy story offered to him by Chief Mike Mountain Horse of the Blood Tribe, whom he met in Lethbridge. One story is the epic of Charcoal, a member of the Blood who became a fugitive from the RCMP after killing his wife’s lover and who was executed by hanging in 1897.

In Rocky Mountain House Gard writes about the nearby O’Chiese First Nation, which refused to sign Treaty 6 until 1950, five years after the publication of Johnny Chinook. Gard adopts the O’Chiese’s point of view in reporting the issue: “In refusing the offer the Indians argued that this was their country and had been theirs long before the white men arrived[…] They said that the white man was the intruder and should leave them in peace on the land that had been theirs since the world began.”

The same year Johnny Chinook was published, 1945, Gard left U of A for a position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he spent the rest of a storied career. He wrote dozens of plays, essays and books, becoming a dynamic administrator in community arts and working in educational initiatives at state, national and international levels. Gard passed away in 1992 at the age of 82. In 2003 a foundation promoting Wisconsin community arts was created in his name and continues today.

Despite his brief tenure in Alberta, Gard did leave a legacy. While at the Banff School, he taught drama to Elsie Park Gowan, who would pen many stage plays and CBC radio plays in the 1950s and 1960s. The work of influential Albertan poet, novelist and academic Robert Kroetsch, especially his 1967 book set in the Great Depression, The Words of My Roaring, seem particularly indebted to Johnny Chinook’s tall-tale style.

Johnny Chinook was a key contribution to official Albertan culture, shaped by folk notions as they were imagined for Alberta. As the postwar welfare state developed at both the provincial and federal levels, financial and institutional support for Albertan cultural production grew, as recommended by the 1951 Massey Commission. Johnny Chinook was republished by Mel Hurtig in 1967, Canada’s centennial year, a nod to its importance in official Canadian culture as well. That edition was illustrated by Walter Phillips, another icon of Alberta culture.

Over the ensuing decades, cosmopolitan values such as multiculturalism and diversity have mixed with Alberta’s folksy, western image, sometimes ingeniously, sometimes uneasily. Clearly Alberta’s “country western” identity is still powerfully resonant, proving remarkably adaptable to the uses of both swaggering corporate executives and working-class people. To my mind, however, Johnny Chinook’s sympathies are with the latter.

The post Johnny Chinook appeared first on Alberta Views.

Ronald Ross Annett was the author of a long-running series of family-friendly short fiction in the iconic American magazine The Saturday Evening Post. His 72 stories, appearing between 1938 and 1960, feature six-year-old Babe and her family: father Big Joe, drunken Uncle Pete, tutor Miss Hans and older brother Little Joe. The stories are set in the fictional prairie town of Benson, Alberta—inspired by Annett’s life in the farming village of Consort, Alberta, where he lived for 30 years. With his fiction appearing regularly in a magazine that enjoyed a weekly circulation of six million at its height, Annett may have been the most widely read Canadian writer of his time, and most certainly was the most widely read Albertan.

Why, then, has Annett’s work fallen into obscurity His stories were strongly shaped by a Depression-era populism, which aligned the common “people”—generally Babe’s family—against the “elite”: the police, debt collectors, the wealthy, even a fussy reverend. This populist vision thrived during the scarcity and class conflict of the 1930s. In the post-Second World War period, however, Annett’s populism fit awkwardly into a nation growing in affluence and developing a social democratic consensus, which accepted the legitimacy of elite management of the economy, government and even culture, through cultural institutions such as the CBC, the Canada Council for the Arts and the expanding public universities. Today, we are living through our own economic and political turmoil, with the legitimacy of the social democratic nation severely eroded by decades of neoliberal disinvestment, and with distrust in institutions and elites growing. In our time of renewed populism, Ross Annett’s Babe stories are worth revisiting, not just for history’s sake, but also for their unique charms and comforts.

Annett was born in 1895 in Watford, a farming village in southwestern Ontario, halfway between London and Sarnia. According to a 1941 autobiographical note included in The Saturday Evening Post, Annett lived in New York as a young boy, but then was sent back to Watford to live with his grandparents, where he spent the rest of his boyhood. (His mother’s grave is in Saratoga County, New York, and so perhaps she never returned to Canada.) A 1978 biography lists Annett’s favorite writers as Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott and—the most obvious influence on Annett—the late-19th-century popular adventure author G.A. Henty. After graduating high school, he took a job at the London Advertiser and sold his first story, a piece about hunting, to the Canadian outdoors magazine Rod & Gun. At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Annett attempted to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force but was rejected for being too short. Then he moved west, to Wetaskiwin, where a brother lived, and there he met his future wife, Lenora (known as Leyanne). Annett hustled jobs around central Alberta, including as a farm labourer and biscuit salesman, but found out he could make as much money teaching. After brief assignments in Thorsby and New Norway, in 1915 he successfully enrolled in the armed forces, joining the Western Universities’ Battalion. He fought and was wounded in the hip at Vimy Ridge, which incident, according to The Saturday Evening Post, left Annett with a limp.

The acceptance letter came with a request for more stories—and a cheque for $500. That was nearly half a year’s salary in Annett’s school district.

After the war Annett returned to teaching in towns across Alberta and dedicated more time to writing for “the pulps”: westerns, war adventure and detective stories. He married Leyanne in 1922, and a year later the couple found themselves in Consort, where Annett was teaching at the school. However, in 1924, still hoping to become a professional writer, Annett packed up his young family and headed to the US, first to Great Falls, Montana, then Salt Lake City, then finally New York City. “To make money, you have to go where the money is,” Annett wrote about this experience in Maclean’s in 1926. The young family rented in New Jersey while Annett worked an office job in Manhattan. By 1929 he had a poorly paying magazine writing contract for an overwhelming 20,000 words a month for Street & Smith Publications, which owned several pulp outfits. With the Depression now beginning to bite, in 1930 the couple returned to Alberta, settling again in Consort, where Annett was offered the principalship of the school. The farming village in eastern Alberta became the Annetts’ long-time home and furnished Annett with the material for his unlikely writing success to come.

While working as a teacher and raising his family, Annett still wrote and sent out stories, with declining success as the Depression wore on and publishing venues closed. According to a 1956 column in the Calgary Herald Annett liked to write late at night. He’d drink a pot of strong coffee at 10 p.m., stop for a pipe of tobacco at midnight, then keep writing until 3:00 a.m.. The Christmas break of 1937 allowed Annett some breathing room, an opportunity to put extra care into a story called “It’s Gotta Rain Sometime,” about a widower father on a dustbowl farm. He sent it to the prestigious and well-paying The Saturday Evening Post on January 31, 1938. “I never even told my wife,” he said. “Just false hopes.” On February 17 the acceptance letter came, with a request for more stories—and a cheque for $500. That was nearly half a year’s salary in his school district. “I’ll never forget getting my first $500 cheque,” he said in a 1971 interview. “Word got around, and the postmaster asked, ‘Gee, Ross, that’s for how many volumes?’ ”

Annett would publish another story in the Post that year, “The Tooteress,” in which he introduces the character of Miss Hans, and both stories were smash hits. In a poll of Post editors “It’s Gotta Rain Sometime” was chosen story of the year, and “The Tooteress” received top spot in a poll of Post readers.

In 1941 Annett quit his day job to write full-time for the Post, publishing four or five Babe stories a year for the next 22 years. Established with the Post, Annett wrote little else during his career, although I found three of his short stories published in Maclean’s magazine in the early 1940s. In 1953 Annett moved to Edmonton to be near his adult children, and while he lived in the provincial capital until his death in 1988, Annett, his wife and two of his children (that I know of) are buried in the Lakeview cemetery in Consort, indicating the deep connection they felt to that place.

Annett’s characters are simple but charming. “Children and even animals took to Big Joe fearlessly,” Annett writes of the wheat-farming and cattle-raising father, despite his “ragged black mustache and generally uncouth appearance.” Big Joe, too, is loyal to the memory of his dead wife when it comes to taking care of the family. The equally lovable Uncle Pete is an “old soak” who only desires two things: his next drink, and the best for Babe. “Sometimes his bleary eyes rested upon Babe with a faint awareness, as though he were thinking: In an otherwise drab world, ain’t she somethin’.” Babe herself is an angelic creature whose “yellow hair was bright as summer sunlight,” who likes everyone and is adored by them in turn. Eight-year-old Little Joe, “black of hair and eyes and mood,” likes hunting gophers but hates school. The severe tutor and housekeeper Miss Hans extracts Uncle Pete and Big Joe from their run-ins with the law: “Are you smart or are you smart,” Big Joe will typically say to her.

The plots almost always revolve around money. Big Joe needs gas for the tractor, Little Joe wants a .22 rifle, Babe wishes for a new Sunday dress—but where will they find the money Sometimes Big Joe and the family rebuff an evildoer’s deceitful design, like the rich rancher Bill Hausmann, who falsely claims they rustled his cow. The earliest stories relate the impoverishment and precarity of the Depression, as Babe and Joe don’t even have enough clothes: “Their bare hands were blue with cold, for it was a raw March day and they had no mittens. They had no stockings either. Bare legs and feet showed here and there through rents in overalls and shoes.” Whether Annett’s family experienced this level of poverty, I don’t know, but certainly for Annett money was a constant concern. In a 1941 editorial note to the Post Annett says, “Sometimes I think I write because I need the money.”

Annett writes adeptly in different genres over the run of the series, producing comedy, mystery and western stories, consistently delighting with a twist ending. His limited means (stock characters, happy endings) spur admirable creativity, much as a skilled cook, constrained by frugality, uses the same ingredients to produce new recipes each time, with an added spice here and there.

Nothing bad ever really happens to Babe or her family. In a clever metatextual commentary, Annett shows he’s well aware that his duty is to provide feel-good tales. In the 1939 story “Uncle Pete Laid a Negg,” Big Joe is telling Babe a tragic bedtime story—about a blind girl named Mabel and her dead cow—but soon realizes he needs to change tack:

“‘O-o!’ moaned Babe. A hot tear fell on Big Joe’s hand and played hob with the stern realism of the creative artist. Having decided upon a happy ending, Big Joe made a thorough job of it… Babe sighed happily. Big Joe wished the Lord would banish grown-ups’ troubles as quickly as he himself could wipe away Babe’s.”

In the 22-year run of Babe, the children do not grow up and the adults don’t age. “The Post actually ran a poll with their readers,” said Annett in 1978, “and thousands wrote in saying ‘Never let Babe grow up.’” With its creator thus committed to keeping things as they are, as the years wear on Babe’s world is out of step with the emissaries of the contemporary world that arrive, and this becomes the source of narrative conflict. In the final instalment of the series, “Big Joe’s Dilemma,” published in 1960, the modern style of the young woman selling encyclopedias—“who is so sleek and self-possessed”—both intrigues and threatens Big Joe, “who feels more than usually big and awkward.”

Yet if read the right way Annett’s stories register the passing of time in his own life. A story in the Calgary Herald on May 8, 1944, reports that Ross Annett’s son, Robert J. Annett, a sub-lieutenant in the Canadian Navy, was missing in action after the sinking of HMCS Athabaskan. The ship was torpedoed on April 29 while engaging German vessels near Île-de-Batz, off the northwest coast of France, killing 128 Canadian sailors, Robert Annett among them. Robert (Bob) Annett’s service portrait can be found online, showing a shyly smiling, good-looking young man of 19. The next story his father published in the Post, just one month later, in June 1944, hinges on the return of a young man named Wally Stevens, who is sorely missed by his elderly father. Wally makes a triumphal entrance in a climactic courtroom scene:

“Hi, pa!” cried Wally. He left the stand and bounded across to his father, hugged the old man to him.

“Wally!” cried Mr. Stevens. “Where you been, Wally?”

“I’ve been bombin’ Germany, pa.”

“I knew it!” declared Mr. Stevens, looking about him proudly, and everybody cheered.

This happy ending, as pat and formulaic as it is, is in fact what tens of thousands of Canadian families like the Annetts would have preferred to the news they did receive.

Annett had four sons with his wife Leyanne, and one daughter, Carol Lynn. She was born in August 1937, five months before Annett sent his first story to the Post featuring the angelic Babe. Sadly, according to findagrave.com, Carol Lynn died in April 1940 at the age of two. Annett never mentioned a daughter as inspiration for the Babe character, but a story titled “Especially Babe,” published in the Post in December of that year, just a few months after Carol Lynn’s passing, is Annett’s most lyrical, perhaps the best of all his stories. “There was a snoring wind that you had to lean into,” he writes in the opening paragraph, “It whipped at Babe’s dress and stream-lined her yellow hair and snatched the words from her lips when she tried to speak.” In this story, Big Joe is plunged into renewed grief about his long-dead wife, described with elegant simplicity: “For awhile it was hard to see anything was worth while.” Annett himself seemed to consider “Especially Babe” his best story, or at least the most representative of his work, since he named his one and only book after it. And the dedication page reads “To Babe.”

Magazine publication meant Annett’s work would be ephemeral. Especially Babe can still be found used online and in most Alberta libraries, and while it’s still a delightful read, the stories lose some of their charm by not appearing in their original format accompanied by the striking visuals of the Post’s illustrator, Amos Sewell.

Annett never completed a novel, which might have given him a firmer presence in the literary canon, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. An editorial note in the Post in September 1939, just a year after his first Babe story, announced that Annett was working on a novel, as did another interview with Annett in the Calgary Herald in 1971. In 1978, however, he said that by the time he retired the Babe series and had more time, he had “lost his pep.”

The biases of Canadian cultural institutions also militated against including Annett in the canon. Canadian culture was built by explicitly differentiating itself from the American. But Annett’s major work appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, an iconic publication of its era, the famed outlet of Norman Rockwell’s illustrations, and a magazine that claimed on its cover (rather dubiously) to have been founded by an American founding father, Benjamin Franklin. In George Melnyk’s The Literary History of Alberta, Annett’s work is described as “Americanized.” But in Annett’s day, especially during the Depression, there were few publishing opportunities in Canada. “I always resented having to sell in the US,” wrote Annett, “but I had to make a living.”

In his introduction to Annett, Wiebe claims Annett as “the first of the popular prairie humourists,” and we can understand Annett better by comparing him to Canada’s recognized master in the genre, W.O. Mitchell. A 1942 editorial note in Maclean’s, which had recently published stories by both Mitchell and Annett, mistakenly asserted that both men lived in Castor, Alberta, and that they knew each other. Only Mitchell lived in Castor, but the mistake is understandable given the similarities of their humorous prairie tales.

Given that they work in a similar genre and are from the same region, the differences between the two men’s writing are perhaps more revealing. Mitchell, born in 1916, was nearly a generation younger than Annett. Mitchell’s tales are doubtlessly more modernist and more psychologically complex than Annett’s. Coming to prominence in the postwar era, Mitchell’s work embodied the dominant ideology of the emerging affluent nation, with its existentialism and humanist liberalism, philosophies that highlight individual experience. For the growing middle classes in the postwar period, with the worst problems of capitalism apparently solved, life’s concerns took an increasingly individualistic hue.

Annett’s work, on the other hand, was honed in the Depression, a time of scarcity and intense class conflict. It was strongly populist, with an underlying ideology that distrusted the elite, the rich and the powerful. This point of view did not age well in the postwar decades of affluence, when the growing middle class aspired to be or actually were elites themselves. Annett’s simple characterizations often emphasized type—what class or group a character was—over their individual psychological profile. This can be insufficiently nuanced, and at times it was. But sometimes simplicity is morally clarifying.

Mitchell himself became one of these elite. He had a bachelors degree and a masters and held positions in key Canadian cultural institutions during his career, including as literary editor of Maclean’s, founder of the Banff Centre for the Arts creative writing program and writer-in-residence at several Canadian universities. None of these professional-class positions were available to Annett, a working writer. It seems Annett sometimes claimed (at least according to columnist Ken Liddell of the Calgary Herald) to have attended Queen’s University, although this fact doesn’t appear in any official biographical note.

Late in life, Annett perhaps regretted that he didn’t have Mitchell’s success. The 1978 biographical note for Especially Babe mentions that “it was his dream to live in a house in the foothills south of Calgary, close to trout fishing, but that dream never materialized.” Fair enough; that sounds like a pretty nice dream—but it’s also the rather well-known biography of W.O. Mitchell, who lived in a house in High River, now known as the W.O. Mitchell house, and whom the Edmonton Journal described as “a foothills fisherman” in 1948 on the heels of the success of Who Has Seen the Wind.

But if Annett had some regrets, I can’t help but admire someone who raised a family on his writing alone and who garnered millions of readers in his time.

Aaron Giovannone’s most recent poetry collection is The Nonnets (Book*hug, 2018). He lives in Calgary and in the Okanagan.

The post Ross Annett appeared first on Alberta Views.

Born in 1772 in Manchester, New Hampshire, at 20 he’d made his way to Montreal, where he joined the North West Company. He was a Nor’wester for four years before he jumped ship—or canoe—and went to work for the HBC. He signed a three-year contract as a “steersman” at a salary of £20 a year. Lewis paddled and portaged his way west for three years, until he arrived here, at the tail end of the 18th century, to help Peter Fidler found Greenwich House, a trading post near Lac La Biche.

One other thing about Joseph Lewis He was black.

Oh, I know. When you picture voyageurs, you probably don’t imagine them as Afro-Canadian. And I don’t blame you. After all, our textbooks, our miniseries, our novels, our heritage parks, don’t tell the stories of black fur traders in the Canadian West. But they were here nonetheless. They’ve just been erased from our cultural narratives.

I think it’s worth asking why—especially in this age of Wexit, when Trump Lite wannabes and would-be separatists are trying to rewrite Alberta’s past, the better to advocate for their wizened vision of our future.

We have forgotten, or neglected to learn, so much of the real history of this place: of the Indigenous peoples who were here first; of the early fur trade; of the Metis Nation that was born of the blending of European and First Nations cultures. We’ve forgotten that the NWC and the HBC attracted adventurers from all over, young men of energy and ambition, who could seek fortune and fame here, even if they came from working-class backgrounds back home, wherever home was.

We’ve forgotten, or never knew, that those early western fur posts were multicultural, multilingual places, where English, French, Michif, Gaelic, Orcadian, German, Norwegian and other tongues mixed and mingled, spoken alongside many Indigenous languages from Cree to Blackfoot to Iroquois.

Our diversity has always been our strength, even when we didn’t realize, much less celebrate, it.

This territory was never a homogeneous, ethnically “pure” place—that’s the nativist nonsense of malignant fantasy. Our diversity has always been our strength, even when we didn’t realize, much less celebrate, it.

Records being scarce, we don’t know whether Lewis was an escaped slave or a free man looking for a better life. But why should we be surprised that he headed for the western frontier, where he might hope to be judged by his abilities, not his race?

I first learned Lewis’s story two years ago when writing a column for the Edmonton Journal. I’d been inspired, or rather goaded, by a debate I’d had with a history professor. Fort Edmonton Park, I’d suggested, could do a better job of teaching about diversity. She’d insisted that would be ridiculous because, as she put it, “There were no black people at Fort Edmonton.”

I had no idea if she was right, but her attitude annoyed me so much I determined to find out. With the help of poet and professor Bertrand Bickersteth, who was researching Alberta’s lost black history, I determined that Lewis had indeed been at Fort Edmonton—or Edmonton House, as it was then known.

In the summer of 1810 he joined Joseph Howse’s expedition across the Rockies to the Columbia River. (By then, his pay had risen to £30 a year.) He was a free man, though slavery in the British Empire wouldn’t be abolished for another 30 years.

History records that a few other black men come to Rupert’s Land. Stephen Bonga, a fur trader and interpreter who took part in the Bow River expedition in 1822, was the grandson of Michigan slaves. Glasgow Crawford, another black HBC employee, spoke English, French and Iroquois, and worked as a cook and “middleman” at Fort Chipewyan from 1818 to 1821.

But Lewis may have left the most lasting Canadian legacy. He married a local Indigenous woman, whose name we no longer know. They had two daughters and a son, who later moved to join Red River colony to become a part of the Metis Nation.

This column is called “On Second Thought”—an allusion to the fact I’m now a Senator, sitting in what’s sometimes called the Chamber of Sober Second Thought. But second thought is useful outside of the Senate too. With Black History Month here again, retelling Lewis’s story seems politically urgent.

Don’t be fooled by what you read on protest placards and in the dark corners of Twitter. Albertans aren’t defined by skin colour or ethnic identity. What makes us Albertan is our shared belief that this is a place of opportunity, freedom and fresh beginnings, a place where courage, skill and hard work are valued, and where people are encouraged, indeed invited, to start life over again. We need to learn about Albertans like Joseph Lewis, not just to understand our history but to navigate our future. Especially as we steer into troubled waters ahead.

Paula Simons is an independent Senator, a former columnist for the Edmonton Journal and a long-time Albertan.

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The post The Story of Joseph Lewis appeared first on Alberta Views.

At the province’s Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village and again in the legislature, Bilous—himself of Ukrainian ancestry—spoke in the boilerplate rhetoric familiar to all ethnic audiences who are beneficiaries of government solicitude: “Generations of Ukrainians overcame many challenges for a new start in Alberta. They helped build this incredible province”; and “From agriculture and industry, to politics, academia and culture, they and their descendants helped build this province.” Which is exactly how we Ukrainian-Canadians speak of ourselves. From the website of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress–Alberta Provincial Council: “The Ukrainian story in Canada is a testament to the opportunities and possibilities that our great country represents.”

According to the 2006 census of Canada, some 332,180 Albertans claim Ukrainian origin. Ever since we climbed up from bohunk status to become poster kids of multiculturalism in the 1970s, we have scarcely changed our tune.

Most of our forebears landed east of Edmonton starting in 1892 on our proverbial quarter-sections. Descendants have never stopped extolling their wisdom in choosing to settle on “free lands” in an apparent “wilderness” on which railway track had been fortuitously laid for our benefit. Years of the familiar litany of perseverance, fortitude and sacrifice followed, and, hey, presto! Today’s rolling fields of wheat and canola—on farms so big they look like the collective farms, or kolkhozes, of Soviet yesteryear—and, in the cities, other fruits of great-great-grandbaba’s resilience: our Ph.D.s and QCs, our SUVs and timeshares, our cabinet ministers and comedians on CBC TV.

We visit the ancestral graves in rural churchyards: headstones written in Cyrillic we no longer know how to read. We vote for politicians with Ukrainian last names who send us Easter and Christmas greetings in our community newspapers in Cyrillic which they can’t read either. We send our kids to Ukrainian dance school—great costumes—because we are so damn colourful, and remember to send money to orphans in Ukraine (there are a lot of them). We used to eat pyrohy but now we eat perogies along with everybody else, and wear Remembrance Day poppies because, you know, like, we’re proud Canadians.

Descendants have never stopped extolling their forebears’ wisdom in choosing to settle on “free lands” in an apparent “wilderness.”

Construction of our history in this province since the 1890s is replicated everywhere in summary accounts that begin with Ivan Pylypow and Wasyl Eleniak, early “catalysts” of Galician immigration, and proceed through the life stories of settlers who persevered and prevailed. Land-lessness of the immigrants and “free land” on offer to them are emphasized. Their ultimate success in a Ukrainian bloc in east-central Alberta—stretching almost 130 km from Bruderheim in the west to Vermilion in the east and more than 80 km from Mundare, Vegreville and Innisfree in the south to Radway, Smoky Lake and Vilna in the north, forming “the largest mass of rural Ukrainian-Canadians on the Prairies”—is understood to be a foregone conclusion.

This popular image tells only part of the Ukrainian heritage story.

It’s as though the only narrative worth commemorating is the one down on the homestead and small towns in the bloc settlement whence flowed our entire heritage, where there was no misery, no alcoholism, no racism, no abuse and assault of women and children …and no social and political activists to combat them. And no one lived in cities.

It never occurred to me, for instance, to do the research for my 1977 book All of Baba’s Children in Edmonton. I went to Two Hills, population 1,200, in 1975. I had grown up entirely in Edmonton, yet, in the introduction to the 1987 edition of the book, I wrote that I had been “willing, even eager, to engage in the construction of neo-Galician prairie identity.”

Take the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village—the largest open-air museum in Alberta, composed of 50 heritage buildings, a lake, monuments, a community centre and conservation and curatorial buildings. It showcases the 1892–1930 period of Ukrainian bloc settlement. A promotional video on its website shows us a horse-drawn wagon, onion-domed churches, a grain elevator, a barn, a young woman in a babushka weeding her garden. The amiable narrator in a woolen flat cap tells us that everything on view is “authentic,” and a visit here is “a way for Albertans to learn about their past.” Given that not everybody has a family farm they can visit, the village is the next best thing, where they can absorb their heritage in a “fun” way, “without barriers.”

This is the very visible, very active and very successful face we present to visitors as where we came from, and the Village has a special responsibility for the story it constructs. In fact, as public historian Karen Gabert has argued, “The Ukrainian houses, barns and churches at the Ukrainian Village have become shorthand symbols of Ukrainian identity,” a process equally of construction as of preservation, given the authority of museum professionals.

And so at a safe distance we gather artifacts, material evidence of the journey from luckless homeland to ultimate success as householders and proprietors of land in the new country. In August 2012 the ancestral house of former Alberta premier Ed Stelmach, built by his grandparents in 1915, was moved from its moorings on the original quarter-section near Andrew to the Heritage Village. Together with other agricultural mementoes, such as a pigsty, granaries, market square and roadside shrine, the Stelmach house invites visitors to marvel at how far settlers have come: “From untouched bush, settlers carved out farms, and soon turned their attention to building their communities.”

The implication is that, prior to the prodigious investment of our labour, the land had been useless, unproductive and uninhabited. Asserting since the 1970s the deep belonging we felt to our place on the prairie that was neither English nor French, we had stepped up as exemplars of and participants in multiculturalism, having earned our right to the status of a “founding people” here thanks to our sweat, toil and tears on the land. Scholars such as Frances Swyripa and Lindy Ledohowski point out that the home we were claiming was also the homeland of displaced Indigenous peoples.

At our Heritage Days, our pysanky festivals, what do we learn of Ukrainian-Canadian socialists and communists What about our relatives in the cities?

As far as I know, there is no public acknowledgement at Ukrainian-Canadian memorial sites that the free land offered by the Canadian government to landless Galicians had been traditional Indigenous territory. Nor any account given or acknowledged that the Canadian plains had been cleared for railway and settlement by systematic starvation of the Indigenous population until they submitted to confinement on reserves.

Three generations later, Ukrainian-Canadians struggle to remember the stories great-grandbaba told them of the “Indiany” down the section road who hired on at harvest time—stories told once and never again. Elder Danny Musqua remembers: “They wanted us to work with them, because we helped each other. The Indian worked hard back then. Ask any white man who farmed. The old farmers, they can tell you about the Indian that worked hard.” Then why aren’t they invited to our harvest festivals?

At our Heritage Days, our pioneer villages, our pysanky festivals, what do Albertans learn of the remarkable success of Ukrainian-Canadian socialists and communists in organizing immigrants, not on farms, but wherever they could find work What about our relatives in the cities—such as my own maternal grandparents—who worked on the killing floor of the packing plants, in railway extra gangs, sold eggs, cleaned houses, never went to church Who went to the Labour Farmer Temples (By the mid-1930s, 95 temples were tied to the pro-Soviet Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association, mainly in Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario.) Who subscribed to Ukrainian-language socialist newspapers Who rallied for Dr. Norman Bethune and sent husbands and brothers to the Spanish Civil War to defend the Spanish Republic from a fascist coup d’état Who crowded the Labour Temples to see a new play from Soviet Ukrainian playwrights, in which capitalists and landlords got the heave-ho?

Not to idealize this milieu: To the bewilderment and consternation of ordinary members, much socialist leadership steadfastly justified or denied and obfuscated events of Soviet terror in Ukraine, such as the mass starvation during the Holodomor and the persecution and murder of Ukrainian artists and intellectuals. No one was spared, not even one of the most popular of those playwrights, Myroslav Irchan, whose plays were performed across Canada in the Labour Temples.

The unsuspecting Albertans at our heritage festivals will be told none of this.

Our Heritage Village has absolutely no reference to these chapters in Ukrainian-Canadian experience. In fact, in an act of what Karen Gabert calls “historical whitewashing,” the words “Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association” were removed from a rural building on site and the communist history of the building dropped from its interpretation. Ukrainian-Canadians were CCFers and socialists and communists, pacifists, suffragists, anti-racists, health workers, union organizers, teachers, orchestra conductors, as passionate about their Galician heritage and their place in Canada as any other Ukrainian immigrants and families.

But none of this is to be found at our neo-Galician memory sites, where visitors are brought into the Ukrainian-Canadian narrative as a story that is now about all of us who are descended from settlers and share a legacy. Ed Stelmach once told CBC radio that his grandparents’ home at Heritage Village will be a “lasting legacy… not only [from pioneers] of Ukrainian descent, but Polish and German—those that came to break the sod here.” Visitors to the Harvest Food Festival learned from David Makowsky, its head of communications, that “we want people to get a sense of natural history, cultural history and just the human history of early Alberta.” (Visitor Randy Grant’s immediate answer to what brought him out was one word: “Perogies.”)

Responding to the Ukrainian-Canadian Heritage Day declaration, Ricardo Miranda, Alberta’s minister of culture and tourism, spoke movingly in the Legislature as a refugee inspired by the Ukrainian settlers: “I too started my journey elsewhere. …My family left our country, our home, in search of a better life, in search of a safe place to be, and we found it here, just like our Ukrainian pioneers did.”

The Ukrainian-Canadian has become the default “prairie ethnic,” or, as Gabert writes, “…visitors of all ethnicities are encouraged to see the universal relevance of the pioneer story and thereby place themselves within a broader Albertan and Canadian collective.” But not all Albertans can read themselves in.

Frances Swyripa, a retired history professor who has written about ethno-religious identity and the Canadian prairies, observes the emphasis settler groups put in their myth-making on settlement and cultivation of the land by their immigrant forebears. In this way, they are “elevating to iconic status both the settler generation and the land they tamed and brought into production.” This was a self-conscious process of asserting the group’s rights to their heritage on the land “by preserving their stamp on their surroundings and redoing the map in their memory.” By 1931, 57 per cent of Ukrainian-Canadians were Canadian-born, so this is the work of the generations who have long left the homestead quarter behind but make the pilgrimage to the Heritage Village, to harvest festivals and pysanka festivals to reconnect to roots in land and land title.

Ukrainian-Canadian Labor Temple, Coleman. (Glenbow Archives)

The enthusiastic celebration of 125 years of Ukrainian-Canadian settlement in Canada belies how complex settler identity really is. A family of landless Galicians in bare feet, disembarked on an Edmonton station platform, could also be unwitting occupiers of Indigenous land. Nevertheless, their grandchildren would also call this land mother and give thanks for it through their own labour in the face of economic despair and dispossession. Their descendants might grapple with what public intellectual Lindy Ledohowski calls “white settler guilt.” Or, conversely, they may want to honour their forebears’ courage and imagination on the land. The word “settler” derives from Middle English settlen, to come to rest. To have a home, as it were. The much-maligned settler Albertan has the same fierce attachment to the land ceded by the First Nations as had its Indigenous peoples.
It’s complicated.

Lumpenproletarian grandparents (with names such as Mykola, Paraska) might rear a generation of schoolteachers (named Mary, Walter) who rear IT graduates Tiffany and Cody. Symbols long disassociated from their first embodied meaning survive as ethnic kitsch (Vegreville’s giant pysanka), and artifacts whose purpose has been superseded are nevertheless lovingly preserved in even the most modest rural museum (a cream can).

Some forebears skipped the homestead altogether and worked as ditchdiggers in Edmonton, inspired on their picket lines by Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) from Butte, Montana; worked as laundresses for the English families who handed down much-appreciated winter coats. Lit out for the coalfields of Pennsylvania and returned to Edmonton, broken.

The alternative stories are legion, and I am learning some of them as I prowl through my own family’s archive, which includes that ditchdigger, that laundress and even a great-uncle who was deported from Canada as a labour agitator in Lethbridge, and vanished.

Each ethnic minority community faces the challenge of historical cleansing of its constructed heritage. The alternative stories offer us a welcome opportunity to turn our attention to our narrative not in nostalgia but in critique and reimagination.

Edmontonian Myrna Kostash’s latest book, The Seven Oaks Reader, took her to the Edinburgh International Book Fair 2016.

The post Baba’s Other Children appeared first on Alberta Views.

Hugh’s mother was an English war bride from Folkestone on the English Channel. In 1916 Lily Louise Sharp married Canadian soldier Otto Lionel Dempsey and became a farmer’s wife. The Dempseys farmed in central Alberta at Edgerton near Wainwright, where Hugh, the youngest of four sons, was born on November 7, 1929. The Depression and drought of the early 1930s forced the family off the land. They moved to Edmonton when Hugh was five. He remembers going barefoot in summer and wearing moccasins in winter with rubbers pulled over them and sealer rings to keep them from falling off. The Dempseys were poor in Edmonton, but the positive was that they now had electricity, running water and close neighbours.

Hugh enjoyed elementary school, particularly art. In his autobiography, Always an Adventure (2011), Hugh portrayed his mother as the major influence in his childhood. She “taught me to be independent and encouraged me to be creative.” He loved reading, particularly the British children’s magazines his maternal grandmother would forward each Christmas. His first summer job, at age 8, was as a milk wagon delivery boy. His pay was five cents a day and, if he was lucky, a bottle of milk. He shovelled snow, collected bottles. Later, he gardened and worked as a handyman.

Hugh left high school in 1947 after completing Grade 11. Fortunately, after a few false starts, he obtained a job as a copy boy with the Edmonton Bulletin. Within days he realized he wanted to be a writer. He rose to junior, then senior reporter, and at the tender age of 21 became provincial editor.

As a reporter, Hugh attended an Indian Association of Alberta (IAA) convention in 1950. Meeting Pauline Gladstone, the daughter of IAA president and Blood tribe member James Gladstone, changed his life. He and Pauline began dating and felt at home together wherever they went. Hugh’s mother became a lifelong friend to Pauline, and Pauline’s father came to regard Hugh as a son.

When the Bulletin folded in 1951, Hugh became a publicity writer with the Alberta government. He and Pauline married in 1953. In Hugh’s biography of James Gladstone, The Gentle Persuader, he wrote, “I had become part of a close-knit extended family of brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and people whose exact relationship was uncertain. That is a wonderful thing about Indian families—blood lines are less important than a mutual acceptance of someone as ‘family.’”

Through Pauline and her family, Hugh gained an entry into the First Nations world, one completely unknown to most non-Aboriginal Albertans. At first there were many misunderstandings. In Hugh’s own words he “didn’t know his way around.” He learned, for instance, that at a pow-wow there are protocols. “The owl dance was for couples and three rules were that the women asked the men to dance, the men could not refuse, and wives could not dance with their husbands.” On his visits to southern Alberta reserves, he learned that traditional families laid out their houses in the same fashion as a teepee. “This meant that the fire, i.e., stove, was in the middle, the owner of the lodge was at the back, and his altar was in front of him. Female members sat on the south side of the room, and men on the north. …It was important never to go between a man and his altar, or between the altar and the stove.” In the Gladstone home Hugh also learned that “a son-in-law was not supposed to speak directly to his mother-in-law” and should “avoid even staying in the same room with her if this was possible.” Pauline’s mom lived in two worlds on this issue. She didn’t avoid Hugh, but “neither was she openly talkative and chatty.”

When Hugh married Pauline, he learned first-hand how the Canadian government would divide many First Nations families. Their wedding led them into the complications of the Indian Act. “When my wife married me,” Hugh said in a 1961 interview, “she legally became no longer an Indian. At the same time, her brother married a white girl, and the girl legally became an Indian. This gives us a situation where my wife, who was raised on the Blood Reserve and speaks the language fluently, is not an Indian, but her sister-in-law, who was raised in a white community and does not speak the language, is legally an Indian.” Parliament only altered this bizarre provision of the Indian Act in 1985.

Through his wife’s family, Dempsey gained entry into the First Nations world, one completely unknown to most non-Aboriginals.

Hugh became involved in the IAA, attending annual conferences and helping write resolutions. Calgary schoolteacher John Laurie, a great admirer of the First Nations, became a friend of Hugh’s. After Laurie’s death in 1959, Hugh took his place as honorary secretary of the IAA for six years. Pauline fully supported him in his work, and James Gladstone remained an invaluable ally. Hugh became a bridge between worlds, communicating invaluable knowledge of the Aboriginal world to non-Aboriginal Albertans.

Hugh joined Calgary’s Glenbow Foundation in 1956. He served as archivist from 1956 to 1967, and then as curator/director from 1967 to 1991. He kept a diary and began to gather notes on historical events and interesting Albertans. Hugh began writing about the Blackfoot (Siksika) and Blood (Kainai) nations, assisted by his father-in-law’s skill as an interpreter. “In speaking to me, he gave me everything that was said, including the conversations. That was one thing I noticed about Blackfoot storytelling. Even though an incident might have occurred two or three generations earlier, the informant would speak as though he had been there, complete with conversations.” The old people, speaking in Blackfoot with his father-in-law, told of buffalo hunts, battles, the supernatural and the accomplishments of great chiefs.

In the late 1950s Hugh began an in-depth biography of Crowfoot, the most important spokesperson for the Blackfoot Confederacy at Treaty Seven. Hugh completed the book in 1958, but was told by the publishers he approached that there was no market for Canadian history. Macmillan of Canada offered to bring the book out if cut by two-thirds and rewritten as a children’s book. When finally published in 1972 by University of Oklahoma Press (with a Canadian edition from Hurtig Publishers of Edmonton), Crowfoot did very well in both sales and reviews, and Hugh was well on his way to a successful career as a writer. After Crowfoot he published a new book almost every year for the next 20 years. The next of his books to appear were The Best of Bob Edwards (1975) and The Wit and Wisdom of Bob Edwards (1976), collections of Edwards’s humorous writings from his satirical newspaper The Calgary Eye Opener.

After the Edwards books, Hugh returned to First Nations subjects. In Charcoal’s World (1978), he focused on a Kainai holy man who shot and killed his wife’s lover in 1896. Charcoal had found the duo in the act of adultery. As Hugh wrote: “The white men who ruled their lives said it was wrong to do these things. The police had the guns; they had the rope; they had power. Even to kill a fornicator who broke the unwritten rules of the tribe was now wrong. The Indian laws meant nothing; only the white man’s laws counted. When he had violated these, Charcoal knew he would soon die.” To prepare for his entry as an honoured warrior into the spirit world, he resolved to kill an important person whose spirit would announce his coming. For months he eluded police patrols, thwarting attempts to entrap him. He killed one of his attackers, a Mountie, just a few days before his capture in mid-November. He was tried and hanged in March 1897. The whole incident, Dempsey argues, reveals the dilemma of a clash between two cultures, “neither completely understanding what was motivating the other.”

After Charcoal’s World, Hugh began a biography of Red Crow, head chief of the Bloods, another of the most important Plains First Nations chiefs in the late nineteenth century. Red Crow: Warrior Chief came out in 1980, and in its preface Hugh thanked his late father-in-law “who was my interpreter… and added his own knowledge of the chief.” Senator James Gladstone had died in 1971.

Next, in 1984, came Big Bear: The End of Freedom. Based again on written and oral testimony, the Big Bear biography remains the authoritative source about this important Plains Cree leader. Hugh’s biography of his father-in-law was published in 1986. In search of solitude for the arduous task of writing The Gentle Persuader, he prepared much of the Gladstone biography in the seclusion of a foothills cabin.

The first time I heard Hugh Dempsey speak was at the University of Toronto in June 1974. Just a few weeks earlier, I had accepted a position at the University of Calgary. That fall I would be paid to teach what had always been my passion—Canadian history.

The panel Hugh was part of was at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association. I even remember where: Sidney Smith Hall. Crowfoot had come out two years earlier and Hugh’s contribution to the panel was based on that book. What he said was a revelation to me. He spoke about the Plains First Nations from the “inside,” in flesh and blood terms. As a graduate student I had been studying North American history for five years, including First Nations history, but I never heard the topic come so alive.

He spoke about the Plains First Nations from the “inside,” in flesh and blood terms. I’d never heard the topic come so alive.

Years later I asked Hugh about that panel. He checked his diaries and found this entry: “Friday June 7 [1974] Toronto: This morning I was part of a three-man panel discussing the writing of Indian histories, at the meeting of the Canadian Historical Association. It went off very well. This evening I started a week’s holiday, during which time I want to do some research on Charcoal.”

Shortly after I came west to take up my teaching position, I got in touch with Hugh at the Glenbow. A friendship began that has now lasted more than four decades. Our strongest bond may be a common interest in the lives of people. We are both historians and biographers. My first book was Long Lance: The True Story of an Impostor, about a man who claimed to be a Blackfoot in the early 20th century. Hugh taught me a great deal about Blackfoot history and culture for that book. My expertise then and now is primarily in the First Nations in Central Canada, but I was eager to learn about the First Nations in the West. Hugh put me in touch with important individuals who had known Long Lance well in his Alberta years, in particular George Gooderham, a former Indian Agent on the Blackfoot (Siksika) reserve, and Mike Eagle Speaker of the Blood (Kainai) First Nation.

In those days I wrote my drafts without indicating right away the footnote references. Diplomatically Hugh pointed out how short-sighted this was. It made trying to find them later impossibly difficult. He was right, and I changed my technique! Hugh also has the 95 per cent rule. That is, when you have almost all the material collected for your project, don’t hold off writing, just begin—more good advice.

To my classes he gave lectures on Crowfoot, Red Crow and Big Bear. These talks were delivered with the aid of a scrap of paper, usually an old envelope with some penciled notes on it. In the fall of 1980, after six years of being a professor, I audited his interdisciplinary studies course on Aboriginal Canada at the University of Calgary.

One of my treasured objects is a copy of Red Crow that Hugh gave me. It is inscribed “With kind regards to Don Smith, who shares my interest in native peoples.”

In 1991 Hugh took early retirement from the Glenbow, becoming chief curator emeritus. The reading room at the Library and Archives has been named after him. Many other honours have come to him over the years. One of the greatest was to be inducted as an honorary chief of the Bloods. At this ceremony he received the Blackfoot name Potaina, or Flying Chief, the name of Pauline’s grandfather. He would later receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Calgary in 1974 and the Order of Canada the following year. Other honours and awards for his outstanding contributions to Alberta history include this province’s prestigious Sir Frederick Haultain Award.

In retirement Hugh Dempsey kept up his writing and research. One of his post-retirement books, The Amazing Death of Calf Shirt and other Blackfoot Stories (1994), recreated the world of the Blackfoot Confederacy in a series of tales containing rich cultural observations. Several new books came out after he turned 70, including Firewater: The Impact of the Whisky Trade on the Blackfoot Nation (2002), and The Vengeful Wife and Other Blackfoot Stories (2003). To write the biography of mid-19th century Cree chief Maskepetoon, Hugh conducted interviews and carried out research in Cree country. Maskepetoon: Leader, Warrior, Peacemaker was published in 2010, shortly after Hugh turned 80.

In addition to writing, Hugh constantly helps others—including me. For my last book, Mississauga Portraits (2013), Hugh presented me with notes he had taken on a talk by former Alberta Lieutenant Governor Ralph Steinhauer about his great-uncles Egerton and Robert Steinhauer, both Methodist/United Church Cree ministers. Hugh had made the notes at a meeting of the Historical Society of Alberta in Edmonton in 1955.

Last fall Dempsey brought out The Great Blackfoot Treaties, a summation of much of his work on the history of the Blackfoot Confederacy and the Stoney Nakoda of southern Alberta. Of his role as a historian, Hugh told George Melnyk in a 1995 interview that he saw himself as “a writer who has entered the field of history. I tried not to be an academic writer. When you write something you should try to communicate to your audience, whoever that audience happens to be.”

Hugh Dempsey loves what he does and he loves to work. Imagine completing a major book at the age of 85 and at the same time continuing his editing duties, as he has for nearly six decades, for Alberta History. He has said, “There’s never been a year when I wasn’t employed in some capacity.” For him, this means since the age of 7.

Born in Toronto, Donald Smith taught Canadian history at the University of Calgary from 1974 to 2009.

The post Hugh Dempsey appeared first on Alberta Views.

Decades later I read Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear, for me a profoundly moving and disturbing experience. His description of the railway laid across the plains—Cree hunters on horseback, watching from a hill the inexorable progress of the iron road—haunted me for a very long time. It had never occurred to me that this much-mythologized “nation-building” event represented the eventual devastation of an entire culture. For the train would bring us, the Galicians in sheepskin coats. And we would plough the so-called vil’ni zemli (free lands) of another people’s motherland and call it ours, telling ourselves that prior to this prodigious investment of our labour, the land had been useless, unproductive and uninhabited. We made no note of the fact that we had taken homestead title on land ceded to the Crown by Cree signatories of Treaty Six in 1876. We are beneficiaries of that treaty. What, then, is our obligation?

On September 23, 2012, I co-hosted an event in Edmonton rather ponderously called Zemlya/Nanaskomun (The land/We give thanks): A Ceremonial Exchange of Gifts. Deploying Ukrainian and Cree was meant to (symbolically?) bring Aboriginal and Ukrainian Edmontonians back into relationship, or at least to remind our peoples that there had once been a relationship. For awhile at least, stories had passed down through Ukrainian-Canadian families about Native neighbours who gave shelter in a storm, helped deliver babies, concocted medicinal brews, exchanged pelts for blankets—oral testimonies to first-contact “friendship.” Or, more likely, pioneer families told such stories once and never again. The enduring story that my forebears constructed was pure “settler,” with its tropes of busting the “virgin” sod and “building” Western Canada.

And even I, writing my revisionist text All of Baba’s Children, which attacked Ukrainian-Canadian multiculti clichés and scored feminist, anti-racist and socialist points, hadn’t a word to say about those inconvenient Others consigned to reserves and road allowances so we could get on with the business of turning land into property and eventual wealth.

But, after more than 100 years, we Ukrainian-Canadians love this country and, along with First Nations and Métis peoples in Alberta, call this land home. Some of us feel it is a gift that has been passed on and for which we “suffer gratitude,” in Lewis Hyde’s words in his classic of anthropology, The Gift.

In November 2010, on the 125th anniversary date of the Frog Lake Massacre and the mass hanging of First Nations men in 1885 in the North-West Territory (now Alberta and Saskatchewan), I was forcibly struck by the fact that these shocking events had taken place a mere 15 years before my paternal grandparents arrived to homestead near Vegreville, not so far from Frog Lake. The proximity of those two events—the mass hanging, the sod-busting—was what struck me hard. Ukrainian-Canadian narratives never assumed a history prior to their own on the land. I became determined to evoke that history, not in the spirit of “sorry” and “reconciliation”—First Nations had signed treaty and been removed to reserves well before my grandparents settled—but in the spirit of Edmonton City Council’s 2005 declaration called “Strengthening Relationships between the City of Edmonton and Urban Aboriginal People.” I would root my efforts in trust and respect.

From the beginning, I knew I wanted the commemoration structured around an exchange of gifts. Pairs of artists, Ukrainian and Aboriginal, would literally exchange gifts of their own making—dances, stories, sashes—in a ceremony witnessed by members of both communities. I wanted this event to take place somewhere in the Alberta Avenue neighbourhood where I grew up—roughly 118th Avenue and 90th Street—at the time home to working-class families of Eastern European descent and now home to Aboriginal families. I wanted to acknowledge that, as we had moved out and these new families had moved in, a kind of “Protocol of Place” still governed entry to and welcome in a community’s traditional territory. And of course I needed and wanted an Aboriginal collaborator who shared my belief in the importance of the “exchange” and the means by which to carry it out.

I turned to Christy Morin, the executive director of Arts on the Ave (described on their website as “a community-based, grassroots initiative engaged in developing 118th Avenue as the Community Arts Avenue of Edmonton”). She “got it” instantly—she is half Ukrainian and her husband is Métis, making their children the perfect synthesis—and suggested I contact Sharon Pasula, at that time vice-president of the Métis Regional Council in Edmonton. Pasula liked my proposal, particularly because, as she later wrote on a Facebook page, “Racism and discrimination had blotted out whatever was good about that period in history between the two communities.”

Early on, Sharon and Christy argued that the initial proposal (pass the hat!) was too modest. “There’s money out there!” they exclaimed. And so began two years of meetings during which the “gift exchange” morphed into an extraordinary series of concepts, now ballooning, now shrinking, as we faced the realities of donors’ expectations, artists’ availability and our own capacity to manage an event which might have lots of money, or none, attached to it. A file folder of notes, agendas, phone numbers of government and community contacts who never replied, application forms filled out and discarded, budgets drawn and redrawn, all document the process of institutionalizing an idea that had begun in a kind of reverie.

In the end, though, we had our ceremony, thanks in part to some last-minute funding and to volunteers from St. Stephen the Martyr Anglican church, whose hall just off Alberta Avenue was our venue. Guests were seated in a large circle and the entire program took place within that circle. We opened with Sharon’s and my welcome and a blessing by St. Stephen’s rector, John Gifford, and closed with a Cree prayer by Elder Leona Carter of Onion Lake First Nation and a Ukrainian prayer by Fr. Yuri Suchevan of St. Andrew’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Sharon and I read excerpts from Treaty Six; City of Edmonton poet laureate Anna Marie Sewell strode among us calling out a poem; Aboriginal and Ukrainian-Canadian participants gave group readings from my Frog Lake Reader and of published and unpublished Ukrainian/Aboriginal contact stories; and artist Lena Kostiuk showed her paintings hauled out from storage, each of which illustrated just such contact stories from the homestead era.

But the heart of the ceremony were the three formal gift exchanges: Mark McKennitt, traditional Aboriginal dancer, and Vince Rees, Ukrainian-Canadian dancer and choreographer; singers Natalia Onyschuk, Ksenia Maryniak and Irena Tarnawsky and storyteller Leona Carter; and sash-presenters Sharon Morin, Aboriginal programmer at the Musée Héritage Museum in St. Albert, and Lynnien Pawluk, coordinator for the Kule Folklore Centre at the University of Alberta.

To wind things up we passed around kubasa and bannock while people visited and took pictures. Lots of pictures. A typical response: “Thanks for an inspired event. It was very moving for me, opens up many ideas and dreams.” “The statement that we are two peoples who have a relationship should be said a hundred more times in other ways.”

Even to those who had not been there, word had gone out: Métis historian Heather Devine of Calgary wrote me the next day that “the long-standing friendships between Native people and Ukrainian settlers in east-central Alberta comprise part of a larger, marginalized vernacular Canadian history that needs to be told.” This was immensely gratifying, as far as it went. But the question must be asked: Is there a Ukrainian–Aboriginal partnership to enact this telling?

The enduring story my forbears constructed was pure “settler,” with its tropes of busting the “virgin” sod and “building” Western Canada.

Of the 85-plus attendees at our ceremony, possibly a dozen were Aboriginal. The disproportionate number of Ukrainians forces me to conclude that the ceremony was something we Ukrainians had to do, more than something Aboriginal Edmontonians needed to do with us.

At a post-mortem over pizza, the Ukrainian-Canadians who had taken part in the gift exchanges mulled over what happened. We acknowledged that, for all our celebration of our own cultural uniqueness (and our collective memory of racism, prejudice and exploitation), Ukrainian-Canadians are members of a settler culture in Western Canada and must expect Aboriginal people to be wary about our initiatives. (Although intermarriage is not uncommon—witness the celebrated fiddler the late Arnie Strynadka of Goodfish Lake—I have never heard of a mixed Ukrainian-Cree person raised as a Ukrainian, away from a reserve.)

Andriy Nahachewsky, a University of Alberta ethnologist who had, in tears, told the story of his grandfather remorselessly punished for speaking Ukrainian in a one-room school in Saskatchewan, came to this thoughtful conclusion about our event: “It was a middle-class project, really, its issues interesting to us in a professional multicultural context of shared ethnic events. We understood the meaning of the event to be a shared experience of that idea of relationship with Aboriginal neighbours, and so our stories included them. But they came as an opportunity to educate us, and didn’t mention us at all. I wonder if they have always thought of us as ‘white,’ in spite of our initial hardships and poverty and our own experience of racism Maybe we Ukrainian-Canadians walked into the event in the role of the White Settler.” Everyone agreed it was problematic in the context of the ceremony that Ukrainians’ own narrative of pain be evoked, however sincerely offered.

Nahachewsky’s observation was astute. David Garneau, a celebrated Métis artist from Regina, recently rewrote and circulated his keynote talk from last September’s Reconciliation: Work(s) in Progress conference at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie. Provocatively, he titled his talk “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation and Healing.” Note that word “Imaginary”: Settlers’ descendants may be dreaming in technicolour if we believe and insist white privilege and Aboriginality are “reconcilable.” Garneau is not a pessimist on this score—he acknowledges the supportive work of non-Aboriginal friends, colleagues and collaborators—but cautions that there is a truly irreconcilable space of Aboriginality, such as “gatherings, ceremony, Cree-only discussions, kitchen-table discussions, email exchanges,” of Blackfootedness, Indianness, Métisness and so on “performed apart from a Settler audience.” Of course, any self-identified subordinate group (ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, political) requires such spaces away from the dominating gaze of the privileged and powerful. Garneau continues: “Whether the onlookers are conscious agents of colonization or not, their shaping gaze can trigger a Reserve-response, an inhibition or conformation to Settler expectations.”

Reserve-response. I am beginning to get a glimmering of understanding of what happened at Zemlya/Nanaskomun, or, more to the point, what didn’t happen. Aboriginal resistance to the colonial need to “penetrate, to traverse, to know, to own and exploit” is not necessarily going to be an out-and-out confrontation, but rather a simple refusal to participate, to engage, even to negotiate.

We Ukrainian-Canadians wanted Aboriginal men, women and children to come to the party to remember along with us our memory of “relationship.” By largely refusing to participate, they were telling us that our mythologies are not theirs. Are these separate historical and mythological narratives irreconcilable Perhaps another way of planning the ceremony—inclusive of Aboriginal artists and elders from the beginning, open to constant revision, letting go of the “agenda”—would have produced a different outcome.

Certainly, until we “Settlers” are prepared to be honest within our own communities about our role and identity as people of white privilege, there may be nothing to “dialogue” about. For all the enthusiasm and sincerity of the Ukrainians’ commitment to the idea of the “exchange of gifts,” we didn’t once have that conversation among ourselves while we were planning the event. The only narrative we adhered to was the fond reminiscence on behalf of our forebears that we had once been “friends” with our Aboriginal neighbours out there on the lone prairie, and, nebulously, wished to be again.

Myrna Kostash is author of The Frog Lake Reader (2009) and other acclaimed fiction and non-fiction works. She lives in Edmonton.

The post On Gifted Ground appeared first on Alberta Views.

With the handover of CKUA to the foundation, the province gave away a mammoth collection of recorded sound. Today, that colossal collection—about 60,000 CDs, 75,000 LPs, 18,400 78s, 500 45s and even a couple dozen Edison cylinders—lives on, housed in a clean and spiffy new location, the rebuilt and repurposed historic Alberta Hotel on Jasper Avenue in downtown Edmonton. It’s a space vastly superior to CKUA’s funky old digs (funky in smell as well as feel), which the beloved public broadcaster had inhabited since 1955, a jerry-rigged jumble that looked as if its interior had been designed by M. C. Escher. 

But what, exactly, constitutes a treasure As the saying goes, one man’s trash etc. And might a treasure comprise more than objects While CKUA was packing away 85 years of history, preparing for their move last fall, I spent some time at the old location, rummaging through some of its historic items and speaking to people who know the station well.

I stumbled upon a set of records called transcription discs, recordings of live CKUA broadcasts from decades ago. A number of them were wrapped in a crumbling piece of cardboard box that contained the warning “Do Not Play before May 29, 1945.” Seemed safe enough to play them now. 

The name Art Ward was attached to many of the recordings. Station general manager Ken Regan, an encyclopedia of CKUA facts and trivia as well as the man charged with running the station today, says Ward covered sports for the station. One of the transcription discs contained the notation “Sask–Ed Tues. Oct. 25, 1949,” which proved to be a recording of Ward doing the play-by-play of a hockey game between the Edmonton Flyers and the Saskatoon Quakers of the old Western Canada Senior Hockey League. Another disc contained Ward’s broadcast of a Flyers–Calgary Stampeders game from Calgary, which Ward described as “another ding-dong hockey battle.”

CKUA has also become home to thousands of recordings that might have found their way to a landfill if they hadn’t been dropped off, like the proverbial abandoned child in a basket, on the station steps. For example, CKUA has a small box of 45s which appear to be recordings of Yugoslavian folk songs (or maybe pop, it’s hard to tell) from the 1970s or 1980s by artists with such names as Krunoslav Slabinać, singing “Da Sam Tvoje Rijeći Slušao, Majko / Budi To Što Jesi” (that could be two or even three songs; my Croatian is a little rusty). 

Then there are hundreds of transcriptions of BBC broadcasts—which CKUA can’t play, since they don’t have the rights. Other oddities abound. From a company called WIS Instantaneous Recording there appear to be a couple of recorded greetings. “Greetings to Mother from Stanley” reads the label from one record, dated January 21, 1948. 

A prize piece of history, however, is the actual recording that became the basis for the Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech, of King George VI’s address on September 3, 1939, announcing England’s declaration of war on Germany. 

And while recorded sound may be art when listened to, only rarely is the recording medium itself a work of art. In the case of Vogue Records, their album art was probably greater than their music. These ornately designed 78 rpm recordings were released by the short-lived label—an offshoot of Vogue magazine—in the late 1940s. CKUA found four of these strikingly beautiful records in its collection, each worth thousands of dollars.

CKUA linked rural and urban Alberta as never before. Its mandate was unique in North America and perhaps the world.

Recorded on dozens of outsized discs labelled “The Voice of the Army” are variety shows by some of the entertainment world’s biggest stars, which CKUA played for the enjoyment of Alaska Highway engineers in Alberta in 1942. 

The bulk of CKUA’s collection is in LPs, the outmoded vinyl disc format still treasured by audiophiles worldwide. The spoken word and comedy collection is a treasure trove of historical, comedic and just plain weird recordings. The gems pulled from the shelves by CKUA librarian Arianne Smith include music from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth 60 years ago; war-related recordings such as “Songs, Marches and Speeches of Nazi Germany,” featuring “Hitler” (Adolf’s greatest hits?) and a selection of recordings from the Nuremburg war crimes trial; a compilation of early recordings of historic figures, featuring Florence Nightingale, Thomas Edison and even V. I. Lenin (the liner notes on the LP say “Remember Russia’s Lenin?”); Malcolm X speeches on an LP called “By Any Means Necessary”; Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell debating peace; an impressive collection of 1960s Canadian comedy from the likes of Wayne & Shuster and Max Ferguson; and “I am Canadian,” a recording of speeches from the thunderous John Diefenbaker. 

When CKUA was first conceived of 85 years ago by a surprisingly progressive United Farmers of Alberta government, the still-new medium of radio was seen as a way to bring university-level education to the far-flung rural areas of the province. This approach was unique in North America, and perhaps the world. We can only imagine what it meant for a farmer in an isolated part of the province to hear voices coming from his radio—voices directly addressing matters of interest to him.

While plenty of educational material was aired during CKUA’s formative years, very little of it exists today. In my casual perusal of items in the old building, I came upon a few that gave a small taste of what CKUA offered. One recording, on a label proclaiming the disc to be a production of CKUA, “The Voice of the People,” was a program called “Medical Talk,” by the delightfully named Dr. Charles Tuba. His topic: the study of enzymes. Slightly less interesting was a program titled “Alberta Poultry Farm”—although for chicken farmers, this information might have been vital. 

While educational and informational programming was the bread and butter of CKUA, entertainment was not forgotten. In time, the live broadcasts of musicians who happened to drop by the station, along with recorded music which would lead in time to CKUA’s mighty music collection, became the station’s raison d’être. Along with live dramatic productions, CKUA linked rural and urban Alberta in ways that had never been done before. Now, from one corner of Alberta to the other, in large cities and small towns, from urban rooming houses to isolated farmhouses, all Albertans could listen to the same music, newscast or dramatic program. 

Over time, CKUA’s mandate expanded to emphasize recordings made in Alberta, leading the station to become the largest repository of Alberta-centric recordings. Most if not all of Alberta’s best-known recording artists—k. d. lang, Jann Arden, Corb Lund—got their first radio exposure through CKUA. And it’s not just Alberta artists who got airplay. American singer-songwriters of niche musical styles not heard on commercial radio—Guy Clark and John Prine, bluesmen such as Buddy Guy and Dr. John and such gospel legends as Mavis Staples—play to large and enthusiastic audiences in Alberta thanks to regular exposure on CKUA. 

CKUA hasn’t just recorded sounds; they’ve preserved—or, more accurately, held on to—the equipment used to record the sounds and send them out into the ether. Dozens of pieces of formerly cutting-edge equipment, with names like Stereo Modulatic Processor, are stored away, just waiting to be rediscovered. If these technological dinosaurs are ever brought back to life, there should be no trouble finding the old vacuum tubes used to run them. CKUA has boxes of them, hundreds in total, probably, many stuffed with “radiotron” tubes from the Canadian Marconi Company.

While CKUA boxed up many treasures, other valuable assets—the men and women who create the programming—only needed drive a few blocks down Jasper Avenue to their new location.

Chris Allen is one treasure who won’t be making the move, however, having retired from CKUA late last year after a 36-year career with the station. He typifies the classic CKUA host. Most radio people, removed from their microphones, still tend to sound like their radio personas. But Allen talks quietly, without the faux bonhomie of the radio DJ. That’s the classic CKUA style: knowledgeable, intelligent hosts who actually talk about the music they play—they chose it, after all—and not about last night’s American Idol reject.

Allen was the first graduate of the radio and television arts program at NAIT, in 1969. After a stint doing everything at CKSA in Lloydminster, then bumming around Europe for four years, Allen returned to Edmonton in 1976 and began looking for radio work. He had second thoughts about returning to a very provincial town after the bright lights of Gay Paree. “I came downtown on a Sunday… and I stood on Jasper Avenue and watched a bag blowing down the street, like a tumbleweed in a small town,” Allen recalls in an interview in CKUA’s album library. “There wasn’t a car, not a person on the street. I thought ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’”

Allen found a job at CKUA later that year. His niche became jazz and classical music, along with arts programming. For example, he had a hand in an alphabet soup of arts shows (all of them starting with A): Arts Alberta, Arts Alive, Artbeat, Arts & Culture Guide and Artscape. He hosted and produced numerous jazz and classics programs, and interviewed a host of Albertan, Canadian and international musical and literary greats including Chet Baker, Woody Shaw, James Blood Ulmer, PBS news host Robert MacNeil (one of his favourites), Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood, Douglas Coupland and dozens more. 

The government’s decision to sell CKUA was short-sighted, “like the Queen saying I’ll get rid of my crown jewels.”

Thinking back to when CKUA had a mere 40,000 or so LPs in its collection, Allen described the station as “an immense playground for anybody who likes music. It’s like you’ve got the best sandbox in the world and you can build any castle you want, or you can dig under the surface and build a cave. Whatever you think of as an announcer/producer, you can do. We are one of the few places in the world of radio where you can pick whatever you want to play.”

Allen was there during the darkest chapter in the station’s history, when CKUA’s government-appointed board of directors suddenly shut down operations in 1997. Allen was editing a piece on that fateful night, when Ken Davis came in and told him, “Well, that’s it. They’ve pulled the plug.” Allen was so removed from the inner workings of CKUA, he admits, “I hadn’t a clue what he meant for a second.” When Allen came downstairs from his office, he found security was already changing the locks. “That was one of the most traumatic things that has ever happened to me,” he says. 

In shock, Allen still had the presence of mind to make sure that not just anybody could waltz into the building and keep the station running. “I realized that if the board wanted to, they could try to run the station using our old playlists,” he says. “I knew where they were, so I went down to that office and pulled them all. I took them with me, because I wasn’t about to let someone else come into this station that I loved so much and run it on a shoestring using my playlist or anyone else’s.”

CKUA would eventually rise again as a listener-supported provincial radio station, unlike anything else in Canada. The animosity between free-spirited CKUA and the bottom-line-fixated provincial government now seems like ancient history, however. The provincial government recently made up with CKUA—with a big, wet kiss of a $5-million grant toward the station’s building fund, announced last October.

Perhaps CKUA’s greatest hidden treasure is its deep and unfailingly loyal volunteer base. Susan Campbell is the station’s volunteer coordinator, and she has at her fingertips a list of about 400 willing helpers. Campbell was once one of those volunteers, beginning back when she first arrived in Edmonton from Ottawa.

“I moved here in 1998, found CKUA, and the dial has never moved,” she says. Today, after 14 years volunteering, it’s Campbell’s job to round up people to help with pledge drives and festivals. Unlike many agencies that depend on unpaid volunteers, CKUA is having no trouble finding help. And supporters will do just about anything. When the station moved from the old Jasper Avenue building to the new, Campbell put out the call for volunteers to do the worst kind of grunt work—schlepping boxes from the basement. She got about 30 people out to get the job done.

CKUA volunteers are “committed to the station with a passion,” she says. While the average time a volunteer spends with an organization is a couple of years, CKUA’s volunteers stay for the long run. And they don’t scrimp on their time: in 2011, volunteers—from Athabasca to Medicine Hat—gave more than 4,000 hours. The publicity surrounding the new building has resulted in a boom in applications from would-be volunteers. And for every person who donates time, many more donate money. Since CKUA went to its “listener-supported” model in 1997, audiences have chipped in to the tune of $33,949,652. Clearly the decision to bring CKUA back from the dead was a good one.

Allen believes the government’s move to sell off CKUA was short-sighted in the first place. “It was like the Queen saying ‘I think I’ll get rid of my crown jewels, because I’ll get a little bit of money for them and won’t have to spend the time on upkeep,’” he says. But while the treasures of CKUA may no longer belong to the government of Alberta, Allen firmly believes they’re still owned by the province’s people—merely held in trust by the non-profit foundation that bears the station’s name. 

“CKUA still belongs to Albertans,” he says. “The Japanese have a term, ningen kokuho, or living treasure. These are people who make swords or whatever, who are masters at what they do. And that’s what CKUA is to this province.”

Maurice Tougas is a journalist, editor, blogger, former MLA (Edmonton-Meadowlark) and lifelong Albertan.

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The post Rediscovering the Treasures of CKUA Radio appeared first on Alberta Views.