The Point

Friday, December 21, 2007

B.S.F, Edition #1







Groooooss. Algae picture courtesy of the Lake Doctors Inc, apparently.

It seems like an appropriate moment to bring you the first edition of the B.S. Files on this blog. As an Albertan who was reluctantly-so for many years and has lived in a few different parts of our home on Native land (did I say that?), I try to have a generous heart when thinking about the things my fellow Canadians say and do. Sure, people from Toronto often seem incredulous to hear Edmonton's got a hip hop scene (or black people), but then again, we Edmontonians have a dim sense in general about things like, well, like the fact that in Toronto or Montreal, multiculturalism doesn't just mean having a black kid at the back of the class.

There must be something strange going on in Ontario since I've been away, though. A toxic bloom of algae on Lake Superior that went unnoticed for months, until it'd made some brains over there sufficiently addled to chuck reason or common sense completely off their mental bookshelves. How else to explain Harper's gushing, smirking, self-satisfied explanation in slow and small words to Peter Mansbridge last night that Canadians were going to be really, really upset when they started seeing that it was going to cost money in the short term to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions? Was it just my imagination, or did Nicholas Stern really publish a report last year that outlined very clearly and specifically the billions of dollars more in costs we would incur in the decades to come if we chose not to act on climate change immediately? I was under the impression that this was a fairly definitive statement that yes, doing things now are going to cost a lot of money, but a hell of a lot less than waiting until 2020 to achieve insultingly inambitious almost-reductions. Pretty sure that was all cleared up. Why are we still talking about this?

Also on the algae file: the Halton Catholic School Board, and their absurd decision to ban Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy from their libraries. As if it weren't humiliating enough that it took them about a decade to notice the books were on their shelves, one might imagine an organ of a body with such a long and storied history of banning and burning things like the Catholic Church might have realised by now that taking a book off your shelf won't make the ideas in it go away. The board said in its decision that the books are not in keeping with 'the Catholic values that we are trying to teach children.'

They're right, of course. Absolutely. The books quite definitively take aim against some of the most cherished and fundamental tenets of Christianity. But come on. Yes, it's an outrage that the school board has so little respect for the critical thinking skills of the kids in their schools that they seriously believe that students are a) incapable of making up their own minds about what's in the books and b) stupid enough to not realise the books exist or go find them if they're not on the shelf at school. But more outrageous is that the board is clinging to a belief that was long ago bludgeoned, bloodied, pepper-sprayed right in the eyes, and shattered into tiny pieces of intellectual shame: that hiding ideas makes them go away at all.

When really revolutionary thinkers go about challenging dangerous or deeply-held beliefs, they don't hide the old beliefs away or burn them, they come up with new and compelling ways of seeing things. To a small number of confused and terrified people's surprise, it works. Darwin didn't need to burn copies of the Torah to get people to believe our history stretches into unfathomable depths of time, times when our hairy little ancestors bore very little resemblance to Sun Yat-Sen or Shaq or Diana Ross at all. Apple didn't need to start locking up people's CD players to convince us that a pretty little mp3 player was a very, very useful thing. To really present a fierce challenge to an idea, you don't ban it. You argue about it, you refute it, you hold it up critically and show that what you're holding in the other hand is a whole lot better.

The failure to realise this is probably much better explained by Naomi Klein, of course, in The Shock Doctrine. But I haven't read enough of it to learn much more than the 8-minute Alfonso Cuaron movie they put out about it, so I'll come back another day to her thesis about modern capitalism's inability to seriously assert itself as a global ideology without banning or burning the ideas that oppose it - through state terror, international financial blackmail, you know. The usual.

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posted by Christopher at 4:57 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

I have confidence

JUNE AND CENTAVO, IF YOU'RE READING THIS, I APOLOGISE. It was just too timely to wait. You know how I love confluence and coincidence? Our embarrassingly perfect book club recently picked Walsh, the 1978 play about Sitting Bull and Superintendent Walsh by Sharon Pollock, as our yuletide reading. It's a precipitous tumble down a cliff side full of genocidal brambles, cruelty and pride in the l870s as Sitting Bull and the Lakota Sioux he led crossed the Canadian border into the North West Territories seeking refuge from the enraged American government. The callous self-interest of the Canadian government then came sharply to my mind this week as Canada's Supreme Court approved compensation for survivors of another atrocity in our recent history: the residential schooling system.

In 1998, then-Minister of Indian Affairs Jane Stewart formally apologised on behalf of the Canadian government for nearly a century of Church and governmental efforts to give children a 'free and equal chance to that of children in urban centres.' The residential school system was brought in in the late 1800s by the Church of England and the federal government in the hopes of solving the 'Indian problem' our new nation faced in their eyes; by teaching them a proper language, a real religion, and welcoming them with open arms into white Canadian society.

What it amounted to was a systematic effort to destroy aboriginal cultures across the country, taking children away from their families and communities at a young age; away, of course, from the corrupting influence of being brought up 'on the wigwam' in their own culture. In what Justice Minister Irwin Cotler has called 'the most disgraceful, harmful and racist act in our history,' residential schools created an environment of shame, hostility and backwardness for Indian children toward their own culture, Cree, Miq'mak, Haida or Ojibway.

Walsh addresses Canada's difficulties rationalising its national mythologies with aboriginal peoples by introducing us to a proud man brought to his knees by North American conceptions of identity and empire. Sitting Bull, as we meet him, is fleeing the United States with five thousand of his people to avoid their certain massacre in retaliation for the events at Little Bighorn in 1876. Taking hope from the recent grant of a reservation to the Santee Sioux in Manitoba, Sitting Bull hopes to find refuge, and food, for his people. The titular James Morrow Walsh was the North West Mounted Police officer charged with taking up Sitting Bull's case. Pollock, a thoughtful and relatively trusting playright (trusting in her audience, that is), plays well with the friendship that grows between the two men as they gain respect for each other in the black numbness of the seemingly intractable situation.

In neither Canada nor the United States do aboriginal cultures sit well within our heroic national mythologies of conquering wild lands to found nations of freedom and prosperity for all. In the absolutism of that vision, of appropriating an entire continent into one (or two) common vision(s) of wealth and justice for every man, we are somewhat uncomfortable when forced to acknowledge the genocidal atrocities against First Nations that took place in order for us to carve out Trudeau's romantic nation of birch-bark canoers and Henry Ford's oh so democratic land of Model Ts and endless highways. American commander General Terry assures Sitting Bull his people will be safe to come back to the United States, and that no harm will come to him. But with the thousands of 'renegades' he leads who have left their US reservations in protest of the destruction of their way of life, he is certain suffering awaits them south of the 49th.

In Canada, though, his people face the imminent prospect of starvation. In a land once teeming with opportunity for the Sioux, the buffalo are now on the verge of extinction. As a herd finally heads north from Montana, the Americans light fires along the border to drive them back and let the Lakota stew on their hunger (no pun intended). Walsh, a truly compassionate man in the play, is forced to refuse to give any aid on behalf of the Canadians. To the Ottawa government, peace with the Americans is more important than handing out food to some hungry Sioux from the wrong side of the border. They will tolerate their presence in the North West Territories, but nothing more.

Walsh is a play about the suffering myths can cause when seeing them through means destroying people whose way of life does not fit into them, (perhaps worse?) destroying their songs, their dances, their stories, so no myths exist but that of the victorious conqueror of the wicked and the beastial. Residential schools, as plays like Wendy Lill's Sisters so squarely tell us, were an instrument of that myth in action. Undermining children's sense of worth and pride in themselves and in their native culture came with sexual, emotional and physical abuse for many students and a legacy of depression, suicidal tendencies, and a loss of identity that some say continues today.

The most promising thing, then, about the approval of this settlement is the $100 million earmarked for a truth and reconciliation process such as South Africa has seen since the end of apartheid. This, and opportunities like the new Residential School Museum in Portage La Prairie for stories to be told of what happened to those who lived through the system, are what give me confidence that we may hear stronger voices speaking about the destructiveness of our more absolutist mythologies, and of new stories that speak of respect, and of healing, and of trust.

On this point, my friends, I think we may be hopeful.

On perhaps a different note altogether (though is anything ever totally unrelated to anything else?), I'm pretty alarmed about Chuck Strahl's decision to fire Adrian Measner, head of Canada's Wheat Board until earlier today. Speaking of politicians using brute force to bully their ideologies into fruition...

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posted by Christopher at 11:32 p.m. | link | 0 comments
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