My Log 636 August 21 2018: Chronicles from the Tenth decade: 72 A book recalls the slow process of my cultural education: Peter Hall’s Diaries

I was 17 when in 1945 I quit after four years of high school, and got a job on the lowest rung of journalism. Looking back, I was ill-prepared for life, had a rather limited breadth of knowledge about the world and how it works, and a very narrow range of interests.  Of course, I knew an immense amount about cricket and its history. And I was accustomed to having on my bedroom wall photos of All Black Rugby teams since 1905, and knew the names of every player. But I can hardly describe such knowledge as an adequate foundation on which to embark on a working life.

In addition I had been brought up in complete ignorance of sex and its essential place in modern life; and I don’t believe that at the time I had ever heard of such concepts as homosexuality, nymphomania,  or any other of the many specialties into which such knowledge is  divided. In other words I had been brought up in such a way as to make it almost impossible for me to embark on rewarding relationships, especially with the opposite sex.

In one thing I was extremely lucky. I found the profession of journalism ridiculously easy, so, once I got into a writing position, which happened after six months, I was able to leap  ahead at double quick pace, and after two and a half years I was regarded as a trained journalist of senior rank (as defined in the union agreement), a position that should have taken me seven years.

At the age of 22 --- far too young --- I married, and my wife and I headed off to have a look around the world. First to northern Queensland, where we experienced for the first time the discomforts of a really tropical climate, with its multiplicity of wild and dangerous animals, later to India, where the dreadful condition of life of a majority of the world’s people was brought home to us, and finally to Englsnd, where --- to get on to the subject of this Chronicle, at last ---  for the first time in my life I became a customer of what is generally regarded as the high culture of modern society, in this case, the incomparable British theatre.

I have already described, I am sure, probably in an earlier Chronicle, how we were able to be present at performances by the world’s greatest actors, simply by laying out the magnificent sum of one shilling and sixpence for a seat in The Gods, the far upper reaches  of a modern theatre for drama. I have to confess my introduction to high drama did not come particularly easily for me. I had been bored out of my skull in high school by Shakespeare, had never understood a word of it, and in our frequent trips to the Old Vic theatre, the London seat for Shakespeare productions in the 1950s,  I was for quite a while far less than enthralled. Fortunately, at other theatres, great actors playing more naturalistic theatre were much easier to understand.  I remember one occasion --- I think it was in Caesar and Cleopatra --- a play by Bernard Shaw written in 1898, when, as Caesar, Laurence Olivier, in a position well back from the audience, and with his back to us, whispered the answer to a question which, even to those of us up in The Gods, was perfectly audible, a demonstration of voice control that completely astounded me.  Another great pair who were playing a series of Shaw plays were John Clements and his wife Kay Hammond. The play that I enjoyed most I think was The Doctor’s Dilemma, written in  1906, a very amusing story about a dying genius, a thoroughly detestable, self-centred person whose genius nevertheless commanded maximum efforts to save him. Unfortunately, he was handed on from one medical specialist to another: each of them had his own specific cherished solution to every illness. One I remember was the doctor who claimed he was suffering from a nuciform sac, whatever that was, and insisted on treating him, unsuccessfully for that.  Shaw’s prescience with this play has always impressed me. Years later, in Montreal, my wife appeared to fall seriously ill, fell into the hands of a man described as the greatest heart doctor in the city, who scared her half to death by equipping her with an arm band that would enable anyone to see at a glance what was wrong with her should she collapse in the street, as he seemed to think inevitable. She remained in this half-stricken condition until a younger member of the profession, who happened to be the son of one of our friends, asked the eminent doctor if he could examine her. When he did so he discovered there was nothing wrong with her heart: she was simply suffering from post-menopausal hormone imbalance. I have since heard of a number of people who have suffered from the obsessions so amusingly illustrated by Shaw in his play undermining the medical profession and its pretensions so long ago.

I have other vivid memories from my theatre-going in those early days of my education. Sam Wanamaker, a harsh-voiced but riveting American actor, teamed with Michael Redgrave in a Clifford Odets play about a drunken shell of an actor who was offered by the American producer a chance for one more attempt at rehabilitating his reputation. With Googie Withers playing the hard-done-by wife, this play was so compulsive that I returned to it at least twice. Wanamaker, a refugee from the oppressive political system that was imposed on much culture in the United States in the 1950s, later adopted as his personal project a scheme to rebuild on the South Bank of the Thames, in almost the exact place of the original Globe theatre in which Shakespeare’s plays were first performed, an exact replica of the original theatre --- a project triumphantly brought to a conclusion, so that it is possible to see the plays in the same conditions as Londoner originally saw them in the seventeenth century  --- truly a gift from abroad that Londoners must  cherish.

Do not worry, dear reader, I did eventually get on to Shakespeare, and I can remember the exact occasion: it was in Edinburgh, where Claire Boom and Alan Badel combined to play Romeo and Juliet and at last their speaking of the lines was so luminous and clear that I was able to follow what they were saying  and become throroughly engrossed in the story.  Alan Badel was a magical actor, a man with a voice that was itself like a musical instrument, and although Bloom was not his equal, she was so lovely to look at as a young girl to make up for any other inadequacies.

I have at last arrived at why I decided to write this. Today, passing my favourite bookshop, The Word on Milton street, I chanced upon a huge volume of 500 pages called Peter Hall’s Diaries, for the customary out-front price of 50 cents. When I returned to London in 1960 to represent The Montreal Star Peter Hall, who had been a wunderkind in the British theatre since his first production at the age of 23, had founded a new company, the Royal Shakespeare Company, at the Aldwych theatre in central London, with the object of introducing the best of the great bard plus the best of international theatre. Working with the even more brilliant talents of Peter Brook, this company attracted me, as a persistent theatregoer by this time, to many unforgettable productions. I will never forget the  feeling in the audience at the conclusion of Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Representative, about the alleged indifference  of the Pope to the fate of the Jews in Nazi Europe.  When one entered the theatre one was confronted not with a stage curtain, but with two vast rolling metal doors, the doors to a gas oven. Every scene played by the Pope was played inside this oven, and when the play was over so intense had it been that the audience sat, without applause, in stunned silence for at least three minutes, before they could even stir themselves to leave the theatre.  That was not Hall’s work, but it represented the sort of challenging theatre he and Peter Brook placed, month after month,  before the London audience.

I notice since I started to write this that Hall died last September at the age of 86, and was generally agreed to have dominated the British theatre in its last 50 years.

The Diaries are not the sort of book I would normally read, but I started in on it this afternoon, and am already deeply interested in the rivalries and tensions revealed during the 1970s, when Hall’s Shakespeare Company was merged with the new National Theatre that had been directed by Laurence Olivier for its first years before it had its own new theatrical home.

I can tell I am going to read on: already the sharp dislike of Hall for Kenneth Tynan, the acerbic critic who was the dramaturge for the National Theatre during Olivier’s reign, has added a bit of spice. When the question of Hall’s taking over from Olivier as director of the theatre was raised, Hall made it clear that if Tynan were to stay, as he was manoeuvring to do, Hall would not take the job. Although he accuses Tynan of creating problems for his takeover, when the two eventually met, someone had tipped the wink to Tynan who accepted it without further debate. He was out, and Hall was in.

Hall had four wives, the first of whom was the French actress and dancer Leslie Caron. From each of them he had children, six in all, and one of them, Rebecca, is one of my favorite actresses presently working. A mistress of seduction, even though she is only moderately good-looking: she seems to have inherited from her father an instinct for the drama that was on show in Woody Allen’s beautiful film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, in which she plays the plain English girl who is pursued by Javier Bardem, as a typical Latin lover. To my mind she ran away with the picture, even against such strong performers as Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson, and Bardem.

My Log 635 August 20 2018: Chronicles from the Tenth Decade: 71 I am once again held in thrall by the bell-like clarity of the prose of Bertrand Russell; I remember with approval his after-90 political activism

 I have begun to read a book that I think I have had in my library for some years without reading it, and have, not unexpectedly, been completely gripped by it. The book is called Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell, published in 1927 (incidentally, the year before my birth), when this great man, one of the seminal intellectuals of my time on Earth, was 53, and had already published 26 books on, it seemed, almost every subject under the sun.

I have always considered Russell to have been one of the greatest writers ever of the English language, for the bell-like clarity of his prose. But I have an even more personal connection with him, for I will never forget the day in October of 1962, when I stood in Trafalgar square clutching the hand of my two-and-a-half year old son, wondering, like everyone else in the huge crowd, whether in the coming week we would be incinerated by a nuclear bomb, as this ancient philosopher, 91 years of age, as thin as a rake, was carefully handled up on to the plinth to make a speech denouncing the suicidal stand-off between Kennedy and Khruschev. These two men were madmen, he proclaimed in his high-pitched, squeaky voice. I had to rub my eyes to actually believe that I was listening to this intellectual giant who had many years before transformed the field of mathematics, and had since gone on to emerge from the stuffy halls of academia to urge on his fellow citizens policies that he said would lead human society into new realms of happiness and co-operation. So little was he confined to the halls of academe that as early as 1920, only three years after the Soviet revolution, he went to Russia with a group of intellectuals, travelled extensively, had a one-hour interview with Lenin, and returned with a generally unfavorable view of their determination to follow the Western path of industrialization, in contrast to his travelling companions, who returned with as much more favorable atttitude towards what was underway. Then he went to China for a year, returned wth as much more favorable attitude, realized they were in many ways superior to the /western model, and wrote extensively about it, insisting that they had retained human characteristics in their society that the Western model was in process of killing. His idea was that both Russia and China were what he called "artist" countries, in that they had preserved more traditional values, rather than allowing their cultures to be sublimated to money, as had happened in the Western world.   

Of course after the Great War, none of the policies towards an ideal world had come about, and certainly we are further from them than ever nowadays. In other words, though he had high hopes for human societies of the future, his trust in the commonsense of humans has been betrayed. But surely no one could fault his many years of dedication to the ideals of pacifism during the destructive wars through which he lived. I have always remembered one fact from his superb autobiography, published in three volumes during the 1960s. where he described during the Second World War having to borrow the money for his bus fare to get him to a lecture he was scheduled to give at the City College of New York. Later, that appointment was annulled by a court judgment that found him morally unfit to teach because of his opinions on sexual morality. I thought: what a remarkable  comment on human society that such a man had become so strapped for money as to not even have the bus fare.  Whatever else might be said of him, he could never be accused of enriching himself unduly: at his death in 1970 he was declared to have an estate of 69,000 pounds.   

In recent years he had not let his advanced age bring his agitations for peace to a halt; he was at first active in the mass-movement Campaign for  Nuclear  Disarmament. But when it showed signs of faltering before the implacable opposition of the State, he had formed a smaller movement, the Committee of 100, which entered into non-violent civil disobedience.  I remember being present as an observer in Whitehall on the occasion on which he sat down before the War Department, from which position he was gingerly lifted by police officers who deposited him into the paddy wagon, and thus to jail. 

The book I have started to read is full of remarkable descriptions of society, and I have already been stopped short by ideas that have made me examine my own opinions. On an essay on The State, for example, he broadly approves of the internal powers exercised by the State, but inveighs heartily against the primitivism of the State’s external power, and against the conditioning that prepares citizens to go to war against foreign countries whenever told to by the State. Personally I have for many years defended the existence of strong government because I realize that it is the only authority that can equalize  income and wealth, which, I suppose is the primary reason that strong government is opposed by the oligarchs who now control our societies.   Russell also sees that as a virtue, along with  compulsory education, and other essential services.

His  opinion of the intense dangers of government are illustrated by indirection in a strange article called The World As It Could Be Made, which he wrote in 1918, presumably under the influence of the Great War, which showed that all his hopes for a bright peaceful future for human society had been exploded by the greatest war ever fought to that time.  This article is simply a dream of a human society organized according to the principles of anarchism, as espoused by Kropotkin, mixed with Guild syndicalism, which is still defined as “a movement that advocates direct action by the working class to abolish the capitalist order, including the State, and to establish in its place a social order based on workers organized in production units.”

In other words, capitalism, the economic system that turns one man against another, one class against another, one country against another, would be abolished and replaced by a free system of worker control of industry. All this would only be possible if man’s preconceptions could be entirely transformed through an education system that would be entirely free, compulsory to the age of 16, followed thereafter at the desire of the pupil, and which would have been free of all persuasion directed to produce aggressive people ready to go to war at the drop of a hat.  

This prescription for a utopian society provided that women’s work in the home should be paid, since “this will secure the complete economic independence of wives, which is difficult to achieve in any other way, since mothers of young children ought not to be expected to work outside the home.”

He adds: “Government and law will still exist in our community, but both will be reduced to a minimum. There will still be acts which will be forbidden --- for example, murder. But very nearly the whole of that part of the criminal law which deals with property will have become obsolete, and many of the motives which now produce murders  will be no longer operative.” Economic fear and most economic hope in such a society “will be alike removed out of life. No one will be haunted by the dread of poverty or driven into ruthlessness by the hope of wealth.”

Nor does he shrink from rewriting the rules about marriage. “One of the most horrible things about commercialism is the way in which it poisons the relations between men and women.” He says that the effect of economic conditions on marriage seem to him even worse than prostitution, since there is not infrequently in marriage ”a suggestion of purchase, of acquiring a woman on condition of keeping her in a certain standard of material comfort.”  Thus, very often a marriage differs from prostitution only in that it is harder to escape from. ”Economic causes make marriage a matter of bargain and contract, in which affection is quite secondary, and the introduction of the law requires that each submit to some loss of his or her liberty, for the pleasure of curtailing the liberty of the other. When he wrote this he had already been married once, and eventually he had four marriages: each lasted many years, and when he felt he no longer loved his wife he had no hesitation in telling her so and moving on.

He allows himself to wonder whether a League of Nations might be created after the war, and one can only sympathize with the man when he was confronted by the rise of Nazism. Although it is not mentioned in this book, published  in 1927, he at first apparently opposed rearmament, but he changed his mind as Hitler swept across Europe.

In the light of man’s subsequent descent into the unimaginable slaughter of World War II, his article reads more like a sophomoric dream of Utopia, than the work of one of the great minds of our time.  But the man wrote 60 books, thousands of articles, and countless pamphlets, and gave advice on every aspect of human life, so I guess the odd miss can be excused. With the war ended, he lost no time in using his undoubted authority to harass and harangue the world’s statesmen with advice to come together instead of falling apart. He does pose in his article a desideratum-world which would be as far as one can imagine from the current world situation in which the so-called world’s greatest democracy  appears to have fallen under the control of hugely wealthy industrial-military entrepreneurs, and  has greater military force than the rest of the world combined, with the apparent intention  to ensure the obedience of all nations to its will.

My Log 634 July 30, 2018 Chronicles from the Tenth Decade: 70; Joe Fafard’s beautiful Wolf disappears from the McGill campus, leaving us defenceless before those who would destroy the planet

I notice my ambition to produce Chronicles from the tenth decade of my life  has been suspended for almost a month, which is to say only 19 weeks after my tenth decade actually began when I turned 90 on March 21, suspended while I have been dealing with various health issues.  A feeble excuse, but mine own.

 Instead of keeping my nose pressed to the keyboard grindstone, as any real writer would have done, I have been submitting to repeated tests designed to discover what has caused that pain on the right side of my chest: a totally fruitless exercise, all these tests, because, as I told the doctors in mid-flight, if you keep testing a 90-year-old body, testing it and testing it, each time you will find something new that is not functioning as it should. So these tests, with their dramatic results,  are endless.

Meantime, while I have been so preoccupied, the world has been going crazy around my head, all sorts of highly significant events piling up around my almost lifeless body.

One of the most important of these events has been the unforgivable disappearance from the McGill University campus of something I had come to accept as a permanent fixture, the wonderful bigger-than-lifesize, completely naturalistic statue in painted bronze, of a wolf by the great Saskatchewan artist Joe Fafard, who, until I saw this giant and impressive wolf, I had always associated with tiny works. 

The statue was one of several that were installed in the McGill campus last summer, as part of the celebration of the foundation of Montreal 375 years ago, almost all of them except this one being either monstrously ugly or impressionistic or abstract in nature.  I remember a heavy, heavy stone statue that was said to represent tai-chi, that lighter than air Chinese physical exercise for the aged.  And, queen of the uglies was a huge, multi-coloured caricature of a woman that cast its baleful presence over Sherbrooke street during the summer. Apart from Joe’s wolf, the most striking installation was the presence of eight squatting Chinese men in a circle, called “the meeting”, a work that had been already exhibited in Europe and elsewhere, and whose disappearance I regretted as the autumn descended upon us.

Only one other statue survived to accompany Joe’s Wolf into the winter. It was a comfort every day I walked through the campus among the throngs of students and their teachers thoughout the bleakest days of winter to look over and be re-asssured that the Wolf was still there, looking after us, guarding us all, making sure that nothing could go wrong for us.

Until the day I looked over as the winter morphed into spring, to discover the Wolf had disappeared.  If only I knew who to write to in the vast corporation that is McGill University, I would have written indignantly to inquire what they mean by letting their protector go in this way. Where has it gone, and why? Could it possibly be that the hugely wealthy university could not afford to buy such an important and (eventually) indispensible part of their landscape, one that would guarantee the institution’s safety far into the future? Or was it just that they had a lease on it that ran out? Or that some idiot within their decision-making corpus decided that the beautiful animal was too fine, too straight-forward, too easily understandable, to grace the increasingly complex values of a great modern university?

Well, that’s my number one global catastrophe that has occurred during my days of pre-occupation. Of course, of more prominence has been the clown-show happening every day in Washington D.C. which would be very amusing were it not so serious. And then the invasion of a similar scenario into Ontario, whose citizens, a notably capricious bunch, have decided to elevate a member of the semi-literate majority into a position of power, from which no good can possibly emerge.

And then, one final thing, I have noted an extraordinary phenomenon that I never expected to see, which is that our political, media, and corporate elites appear to have coalesced around the idea that  the potentially planet-destroying Tar Sands of Alberta, which have already laid waste vast tracts of beautiful wilderness in the greedy search for oil, should be extended and increased, an action that will make nonsense of our national promise to work towards the reduction of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, which are already galloping along towards  a disastrous increase in the heat of the planet that could conceivably have the effect of either wiping out the human race, or very much reducing its size, leaving only a fraction of what exists now in the way of civilization and its achievements, to be presided over by a confused remnant of  homo sapiens, stumbling around in desperation as we try, finally, but too late, to adjust to the new reality of an Earth whose fundamental building blocks we would have destroyed.

And for what? So that we can sell this cancerous oil at a higher price to Asians than we can get for it now from the United States. In fufilment of which purpose our befuddled government has already spent $7.4 billion (of an expected $15 billion total price), that could have been better spent to bring clean water to First Nations reserves, or build affordable houses for lower-income or homeless people, or to clean up our polluted waters, damaged soils and choking air, the fundaments of all life.

What are Canadians thinking about their government that has persisted in arguing that this is all simply a matter of jurisdiction, of federal against provincial powers, leaving aside completely the essential question as to the future of the Tar Sands  and the drastic impact of their oil on all life, as if it were a matter of no consequence?

 I wonder if Joe Fafard’s Wolf, in its infinite wisdom, could have saved us from this folly. The inscription that accompanied it read:

“This monumental sculpture is more kind than threatening. The  Wolf, or mahihkan  in Cree, is an animal known for its subservience to hierarchy and its solidarity with its brethren. In fact, when hunting, wolves never feed on their prey until they are able to share it with their pack. This lesson, central to the First Nations values, who view the mahihkan as a symbol of empathy towards others, also carries a universal message.”

We need that universal message now more than ever before.

My Log 633 July 2 2018: Chronicles from the Tenth Decade: 69 ; Gushy tributes on Parliament Hill to Canada’s glowing qualities sound ludicrous when measured against the facts: First Nations, Inuit and Metis have little, if anything, to celebrate

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Here is a paragraph about Canadian history, written by somebody else, every word of which I agree with:

It is impossible to disentangle the making of the Canadian state from the history of European – and particularly French and British – imperialism and colonialism. In acts of incredible hubris and chauvinism, the territories of the Americas were claimed by Europeans – mediated by the great European churches – and pillaged, conquered, and divided, with the Indigenous peoples subjected to genocide, enslavement, subordination and marginalization. In the consolidation of the space of the contemporary Canadian state, that came with Confederation on July 1, 1867 and the subsequent nation-building project of the National Policy, the decisive act(s) was the suppression of the First Nations peoples of Canada.

This was written, this week, by an anonymous author of the Socialist Project, an online source that over the years has  contributed a lot of sense to the political discourse in Canada, and I admit I was thinking along the same lines as the above-quoted author as I watched the fatuous celebration of Canada Day yesterday on Parliament Hill. It was impossible to believe that any of the speakers extolling the diversity of this great country could actually have believed a word they said, certainly not if any of them had made even a cursory study of Canadian history. 

I had a general impression that the celebration was not so much of Canada, as of Canadian women. Some of the speakers betrayed a faint note of hysteria: which I guess was understandable, since they were confronted by the need to emit a string of meaningless clichés, never an easy task at the best of times. I was surprised to discover that one of the most eager cliché-mongers was the wife of the Prime Minister, who, when he was dredged up by televisual link from Leamington, Ontario, which he described as Canada’s tomato capital, outdid them all in clichés. He gave us a full-bore Happy Times exegsis. He should try it on the Trump.

As an aside I could observe that the mention of Canadian tomato-growers reminded me of an NFB film I worked on in 1975 in which a Canadian farmer complained bitterly to a minister in the Liberal government of our present Prime Minister’s father, that their permission for American tomatoes to enter the Canadian market was making it virtually impossible for him, on his Canadian farm,  to make a living.  The minister acknowledged their problem, but his advice was, “Don’t hold your breath,” in the hope of any relief. Later in the interview he coolly admitted that anyone with any money to invest would be better to put it into Canada Savings Bonds than into a farm. No work; no trouble, and a better financial return.  With leadership like that, is it any wonder we are now serving as hand-maidens to the powerful American capitalists?

As it happens, for the last few weeks, as I have  been observing the apparent collapse of decency and imagination in the politics of North America, I have been ruminating along the same lines as our above-quoted author,  hoping that I might have an opportunity to  recall to people’s minds that the so-called rule of law of which we boast so frequently, is, after all,  based on the ignorance, arrogance and implacable greed of the colonists who came here from Europe, intent on taking over the land from its occupiers, whose existence, in the strictly formal sense,  they denied from the get-go, using the imaginary legal concept of terra nullius to argue that the land was empty of people, and therefore ripe for their plucking, a concept enthusiastically backed by the European religious authorities, who regarded the colonists as God’s warriors.

My above-quoted anonymous writer added that in setting up the Canadian state, the first thing was to seize the land from the Aboriginal peoples:

The intent of the Canadian state and emerging capitalist ruling classes was quite explicit – appropriation of the Aboriginal lands, extinguishment of Aboriginal title (actually written into the Manitoba Act, and found, in assorted ways in the various treaties), marginalization of the First Nations to tiny and divided reserve territories, and settlement and commodification of the dispossessed lands by Europeans to build Canadian capitalism as an extension of the European political-economic space. 

Of course, one could hardly expect that all those experts bloviating on Parliament Hill on Sunday in their desperate attempt to whip up Canadian nationalism would actually have any idea of the foundations of Canada as a nation. In fact, we didn’t get off to too bad a start when George III signed the Royal Proclamation by which the French-English battle for North America was concluded. In there he undertook that Indian land should not be settled or developed without the agreement of the “several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom we are connected, and who live under our Protection,” and that such agreement could be arranged only “at some Publick meeting or Assembly” of the Indians with the colonial authorities, and that no private persons should be permitted to buy Indian lands. This was a measure designed, says the Proclamation, to avoid repetition of “the great frauds and abuses” that had already occurred in the purchasing of Indian lands.

The problem came with the application of this noble ideal. Many treaties were signed, it is true, mostly covering the best agricultural lands across southern Ontario, where various native tribes accepted to surrender their rights to millions of acres of land for derisory sums. .The Indians (I am using the term, no longer in much use, but the one by which the indigenous people were normally described throughout these fateful years),  never initiated these treaties, and did not much influence their terms.  Once they had alienated their title, it was simply assumed they would simply retreat from the advancing settlement by Europeans into more remote hunting territories. The pattern henceforth, right up to the present day, has been that such treaties were and still are negotiated, only when the land on which the Indians are living has become useful for European settlement.

The view taken of the Indians by the colonial authorities was a contemptuous one, used  by  the Colonial Secretary in 1830 when he said that they were “in a state of barbarism”, and that efforts made to provide them with the “industrious and peaceful habits of civilized life” had failed.  Therefore he believed they should be gathered together in one place, so as to be out of the way of the industrious settlers, in some preferably remote  place where they could be encouraged in religious knowledge and education.

When the infamous residential schools were established some decades later, they were actually established in the written intention to detach Indian children from the barbarous lives of their parents. When one thinks for a moment about this purpose, its cruel inhumanity, its assumption of infinite superiority by Us over Them, one cannot surely be anything but convinced that the framers of such purposes were both arrogant and ignorant. The laws they began to write through the 1820s to the 1870s, when they were cohered into the Indian Act that is still to this day the instrument of control over the First Nations, were and are redolent with this sense of superiority.  The Indian Act purported to, and actually did, exert control over every aspect of Indian life, even including such things as who could be, and who could not be, regarded as an Indian.  This was taken so far at one time that any Indian who passed through a university with a degree was automatically stricken from the rolls, and no longer regarded as an Indian.

This is a  diabolical system, with twists and turns that are scarcely believable, such as the disbarring from Indian status of any woman who marries outside her race, and the acceptance into full status of any white woman who might have married a status Indian man.  This particular idiocy is being slowly corrected, bit by bit, but the process towards its full  abolition is slow and tortured.

I have to add one thing more: an admirable, persistent, unquenchable resistance to the future laid out for them by the Euro-Canadian lawmakers, should be one of the glorious chapters of Canadian history, if only it were known more widely.  I have travelled widely across the country to many indigenous communities, and I know the story has been the same everywhere; deprived for many generations of an equal education --- still the same thing today, in fact --- they nevertheless threw up their own leaders who stuck to their guns against government schemes designed, ultimately, to abolish them as a race of people.

Unfortunately, this is a history --- and the full story, in all its glory, is fifty times worse than I have described --- about which most Canadians have a very hazy notion, if that. And it is one which would give me serious pause before standing on Parliament Hill to extol the virtues of our law-abiding society.