My Log 276:Documentary on “Experimental Eskimos” throws a sorry light on the arrogance, ignorance of Canada’s northern administration --

Image via WikipediaI hardly know where to begin to write about the documentary film screened tonight by CBC --- The Experimental Eskimos. It dealt with the experience of three notable Inuit --- Petger Ittinuar, Zebedee Nungak, and Eric Tagoona, --- who were especially chosen by educational experts in the north, because of their exceptional abilities, to be sent south for higher education. That the experiment had both positive and negative effects was shown by the film, directed by Barry Greenwald. But what has to be written first, I think, is that the positive results, such as they were, were political and formal; and the negative results were entirely, devastatingly, personal.

Allow me first to go back into history just for a moment. The great panjandrum of Canadian anthropology in the 1940s and before, was a man called Diamond Jenness, a man born in New Zealand (like quite a few others who have become prominent in the affairs of aboriginal Canadians).

He wrote a five-volume study of the Eskimos, as they were then known, and in 1968 published his conclusions in a slim chapbook. Whatever his immense accomplishments in his earlier life, the conclusions he published in this book must remain as a blot on his career. He advocated that there was only one solution to the problems of Canada’s Inuit, which was to move them south, where they would be able to get jobs. That was published when Jenness was at the end of his career.

At about the same time, the Northern Science Research Group, headed by the remarkable AJ.Kerr (affectionately known as Moose throughout the north) published a study of Eskimo Relocation for Industrial Employment, by D.S. Stevenson. This was also a slim chapbook, but it contained one paragraph that has refused to leave me over the years since.

“Frustrated, confused and downtrodden peoples everywhere have had recourse to alcohol, drugs or religion,” wrote Stevenson. “For the Eskimos in the south, the placedo is alcohol…It seems sometimes as if those least assimilated people deliberately use alcohol to blot out reality. I have been at drinking bouts where one woman, holding a naked baby in her lap, sat alternately sipping cheap rye whisky and vomiting into a cardboard box at her feet: she and some others were coimpletely drunk, yet they kept on drinking until absolutely unconscious.”

That, in face of such evidence, a famous anthropologist could have recommended that all Eskimos should be moved south simply to get jobs, could surely stand as a template for the Euro-Canadian insensitivity to the problems confronting them as they moved – uncomprehending, for the most part, ignorant to a very large degree and, it has to be said, prejudiced on racial grounds --- into the north to establish administration.

I mention this because the tale of the three men who were subject of the documentary broadcast tonight is that their personal lives were ruined by the experiment. None of them, or their families, was consulted or asked permission to send these three boys to Ottawa for European advanced schooling. That is typical of the insensitivity and arrogance of much that has passed in Canadian history for governmental administration of our northern regions.

One conclusion that the film comes to after examining the experience of the three men is that possibly --- just possibly, mind you --- the best option would have been for Euro-Canadians to have left the Inuit alone, not to have interfered with them, allowed them to continue their traditional way of life and to make their own accommodations with Euro-Canada as and when these became necessary.

I knew Zebedee Nungak fairly well during the fight over the James Bay hydro project in Quebec in the early seventies. He was an amusing, effective spokesperson for his people, but his humour and goodwill evidently were overlayers to hide the dreadful experience it had been for him to have been chosen by Euro educators for special treatment as an experiment. Zebedee helped to negotiate the James Bay agreement, and was one of its signatories. His evidence in the film was that he suffered from that, because in Povingnituk, where he came from, a large segment of the population opposed the James Bay agreement and held his approval of it against him.

Similarly Petger Ittinuar negotiated a rocky path in the white man’s world. He was the first Inuit elected to Canada’s Parliament, for the NDP. He played an important role in the interface between his people and the government, but later suffered because of criticism of his stand taken in support of this white man’s project. He switched parties, another no-no in the white world for which he was severely criticized. When he left Parliament he took refuge in alcohol, as indeed did all three of the experimcntal Eskimos, at various times in their lives. Eric Tagoona, from Baker Lake, played a role in obtaining the inclusion of aboriginal rights in the Canadian constitution. But he perhaps suffered more than any of them by entering a downpath of alcohol, drugs and abuse that has led him to spend the rest of his life as a recluse in Baker Lake.

One statement rang out from the film for me: when Zebedee Nungak was denied by the white politicians, he said, he would never stop urging his fight for Inuit rights, and his son, standing behind him, and his son’s son later would continue to fight their sons and the sons of their sons.

This is a documentary that it must have been salutary for Euro-Canadians to see, for it exposes, not only the fact that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but the lack of wisdom and empathy that has characterized so much of Canada’s interaction with aboriginal people.

Link of the Day, Sept 25 2011: Pax Americana Is Over in the Middle East. A sober assessment of thesituation by Dr Leon Hader, a Washington-basedanalyst, writing in Haaretz, of Israel.

Link of the Day Sept 12 2011: Robert Jenson, a professor at the University of Texas, in Austin, writes in an Al Jazeera commentary that ten years after the 9/11 attacks, US foreign policy remains aggressive and unrealistic. “The problem is not that we have strayed from our founding principles, but that we are still operating on those principles: delusional notions about manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, the right to take more than our share of the world's resources by whatever means necessary.”

(“….it's tempting to argue that we should refrain from political debate on the 9/11 anniversary to honour those who died and to respect those who lost loved ones. I would be willing to do that if the cheerleaders for the US empire would refrain from using the day to justify the wars of aggression that followed 9/11.”)

Image via Wikipedia Link of the Day Sept 6 2011: A calmlydispassionate account by Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz of the cost ofAmerica’s recent disastrous wars. For everything one needs to know about theparlous state of the United States, read his article The Cost of 9/ll,published online in the Project Syndicate.

 (“Indeed, when Linda Bilmes and I calculated America’s war costs three years ago, the conservative tally was $3-5 trillion. Since then, the costs have mounted further. With almost 50% of returning troops eligible to receive some level of disability payment, and more than 600,000 treated so far in veterans’ medical facilities, we now estimate that future disability payments and health-care costs will total $600-900 billion. But the social costs, reflected in veteran suicides (which have topped 18 per day in recent years) and family breakups, are incalculable.”)

My Log 275: Surprising outpouring of affection for Jack Layton means his shoes will be almost impossible to fill.

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The outpouring of public affection for Jack Layton took me by surprise, as it must have taken many other people, and it also set me seriously to think about those Canadian values that are so often spoken about, and so seldom defined.

This remarkable event cannot be seen in isolation: after all, when the CBC gave Canadians a chance some years ago to vote on who they considered the greatest Canadian of all time, their choice was Tommy Douglas, who as premier of Saskatchewan marched Canada into the modern world by creating what eventually became the national health scheme for the entire country.

This program had to be fought for bitterly, as it has in every country it has been introduced, but it is now so thoroughly accepted by Canadians that it is often regarded as the single thing that Canadians believe makes them different from Americans.

Now comes this extraordinary outpouring of affection and respect for the man who has led the NDP to its greatest electoral success ever, making a massive breakthrouth in Quebec, a territory that had previously been immune to the siren call of social democracy, having always preferred to vote for their nationalism, or ethnicity.

Of course, much of the affection came from Layton’s long and fruitful service as a municipal councilor in Toronto, whose citizens remember him as a decent man and an honest man, but also as a man whose optimism and humanity marked him off from the common herd of politicians.

A great deal of the admiration for Jack must have come from the last election, when he was seen --- a sick man --- bravely stumping the country, cane in hand, keeping up a pitiless schedule in his successful effort to lead his party to its huge breakthrough.

Still, the scale and intensity of the outpouring of public regard was a surprising thing. After all, until his recent breakthrough, the NDP had always been very much the third party in Canada, important for its policy initiatives, essential for its success in keeping the social democratic idea as part of the Canadian political discourse, and therefore a major element in the differentiation of Canada from the United States.

But can anybody have seriously believed such support exists for the values espoused by the New Democrats throughout the country: values of community, sharing, the idea that we are our brother’s keeper, essentially the value of equality and egalitarianism, the idea that everybody in the nation has a right to a fair chance, to develop his or her talents to the maximum. This is a way of saying social democracy that seems to suit Canadians, and yet, time after time, year after year, Canadians have voted against these values that they now seemed --- at least for a week or so --- to be so vociferously espousing.

Personally I have only twice joined a political party: the first time was when I arrived in England in 1951 in time for Labour to blow the immense majority they won in 1945 to let the reactionary Churchill back into office; the second time was when Layton was going for NDP leadership, and I joined to give his effort some support.

I have to confess that in neither case was my membership long-lasting. Although I have always supported the NDP in Canada, I have extravagant hopes of left-leaning parties that are never satisfied, and when I saw that Layton was not really a radical leader, I allowed my membership to lapse.

I never met Layton, not really, although on the one occasion I was introduced to him as he worked a room, he delivered a kind acknowledgement that he knew my work. I never heard from him again.

Anyway, politics isn’t about the stroking of egos, and I have always said --- I said this in relation to the fact that it took me 26 years to apply for Canadian citizenship --- that I believed I voted every day through the medium of my work.

The memorial service, as I would prefer to call the state funeral service held in his honour, was a very moving occasion that allowed a wide range of expressions of admiration for the man and his unquenchable optimism and friendliness --- which, I have got to admit, is something that separates him from me, a perennial grouch and pessimist. I could have done with less of the religious gentleman, whoever he was, a friend of Jack’s, who did manage, in the last moments, to invoke God and his blessings on everyone, something that I wuld have thought was against Jack’s inclinations.

Perhaps as a total event, it was a little over-the-top. How could it help but be when graced by one of Stephen Lewis’s over-heated tributes. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the event was that it had been ordered by the Prime Minister. And the most remarkable thing at it was when the entire crowd rose with a burst of wild applause when Lewis described Jack’s last letter as “a manifesto for social democracy.” That caught Harper and his Conservative Cabinet ministers on the hop, not sure whether to rise with the applauding crowd, or to mark their disapproval by just sitting there. Eventually Harper, bowing to the inevitable, rose to his feet and began to applaud, surely some kind of apotheosis for him.

Well, Jack is gone, and the choice os his successor lies ahead. Personally I would like someone like Libby Davies, a sound radical politician, but I know they will never support her, and it is almost certain that she would not succeed in building on Jack’s achievement, if only because she doesn’t speak French.

Some may have begun to wonder whether Lewis’s ringing elegy might not herald an effort by him to take over the party: he certainly would be a good choice, but I doubt if he would succeed in earning the trust of Canadians any more than he did last time when he led the Ontario NDP in the provincial legislature.

Besides, having been involved so internationally, one doubts if his ego would permit him to retire to the national stage again.

I have no idea who should be the leader: clearly, he has a tough act to follow, and whoever he or she is, it seems unlikely to be anyone with Jack’s common touch. We now have to just wait and see to what extent the outpoiuring for Jack has touched the hearts of Canadians, if at all.

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Link of the day: “Another climate-related record will soon be broken, but it's not like those you've been hearing about: the heat waves, droughts and torrential floods setting calamitous precedents everywhere. For a change, mark down this next one as a sign of hope. It's that Washington will play host to the largest act of civil disobedience for the climate in US history,” writes Montrealer Martin Lukacs, in The Guardian, of London. Lukacs is a courageous campaigner for aboriginal rights and environmental sanity, and his excellent article draws attention to a decision that has been taken: that the only way to stop the world’s climate from spiraling into disaster is a massive confrontation between the aware people and the wealth-owners, who are supported by governments like those in Canada and the U.S. He describes our awful Canadian government as having developed into “the foreign branch of the tar sands industry… scrambling to beat back the ferocious attack by the US environmental movement" against the Alberta tar sands – the world’s dirtiest oil.

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Link of the day Aug 8 2011: We are all wondering “What Happened to Obama?” the question raised in an insightful article in the New York Times by Drew Westen, professor of psychology at Emory University.

(“Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue….Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted ‘present’ (instead of yea or nay) 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.”)

My Log 274: Sarajevo, desperately trying to rebuild its reputation for culture, multinationalism and calm, unhurried beauty

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The Moslem quarters, Bascarsija,of Sarajevo

I found a paradox at the heart of the beautiful city of Sarajevo, which I visited this week. It is a city that emanates an unusual sense of human warmth, creativity, amusement and even adventure. And yet it has become a symbol for one of the most dramatic and appalling acts of civic barbarity in modern times. It is a city whose recent experiences would reduce to tears anyone who cares about the quality of human life.

In other words I fell in love with Sarajevo, and felt like weeping for what it had to endure during the 1990s Yugoslav war, when it was besieged by the Yugoslav National Army, and Serbian Bosnian militias, who mounted their guns in the hills surrounding the city and made it almost impossible for anyone to leave their houses.

The four-year siege of Sarajevo has been extensively written about and celebrated in print, song, dance and every conceivable medium of expression, so there is no point in my recalling it in any detail. A sort of grim humour has arisen about the war, and a little book I bought, a sort of fake Michelin guide written in 1992 and 1993, exemplifies how unconquerable is the human spirit. It says its purpose is to instruct visitors on how to survive “without transportation, hotels, taxis, telephones, food, shops, heating, water, information, electricity”, and claims to show the city as a place where “wit can survive over terror.”

“This book was written at the site where one civilization was dismantled in the course of intentional violence…” writes the book’s author, Miroslav Prsojevic, “and where another had to be born.” It is a “picture of civilization that emerges out of cataclysm, which makes something out of nothing, gives some messages for the future. Not because the future is necessarily a future of wars and disasters, but because humans are growing older and being born into a world which is ever less secure.”

They begin their chronicle by saying that in April 1992, appeared around the city “two-hundred-sixty tanks, 120 mortars, and innumerable anti-aircraft cannons, sniper rifles and other small arms…..At any moment…any of these arms can hit any target in the city. And they did hit, indeed, --- civilian housing, museums, churches, mosques, hospitals, cemeteries, people on the streets. Everything became a target. All exits from the city, all points of entry, were blocked.”

Well, on to the present day, to the city that seems to have been largely rebuilt, although it is rather a strange landscape when these shiny new buildings share the cityscape still with innumerable monstrous ruins of huge buildings that once were functional, but were bombed into uselessness, ever-present reminders of what happened.

Under the guidance of a friend who had been there several times we headed for the older part of the city known as Bascarsija. A guidebook writes about a man called Gazi Husrev Bey who was born in 1480, became ruler of Bosnia for 20 years and laid the foundations for the city as it is today, building it up to a city of 50,000. An Islamic school he built has been open for 470 years, and when it was founded it was dedicated to gifted and good pupils who would be taught “rational and traditional sciences.” He built Mosques and Franciscan monastries, one of the most beautiful Orthodox churches, public drinking fountains, inns, Turkish baths and a soup kitchen offering free meals to the poor. A foundation that this man created is still functioning after five centuries, financing stipends for students, feeding the poor and engaging in other charitable work. He is buried next to a former prisoner of war, a Christian, whom he freed and gave the title of a Duke.

In these early acts, surely, can be seen something of the spirit of the city that remains today. For myself, I can say I have seldom if ever been in a city whose inhabitants seem to be touched with such a particular grace.

For example, on our first day there our friend led us to a delightful spot, a courtyard hidden in behind one of the pedestrian streets constructed for the most part of wooden buildings, low-lying, expressive and friendly (every shop has a folding bench in front for the weary traveler or citizen to sit on, for example). This courtyard was quiet, although the streets around were vibrant and full of the bustle of a normal city. It sheltered under an immense tree, and was surrounded by small but elegant shops selling beautiful carpets mostly made in Iran. Some art works, of astonishing vivacity, were made of carpet, and although our friend enjoyed the peaceful ambience, he regretted that a tea shop that had existed there before the war had disappeared. I could not help but think that any people who could create such a perfect environment, so full of quiet human values, must be an exceptional people. And this was confirmed by the next place we visited.

This section of town is the Moslem section, of course, and --- perhaps this was exceptional because Ramadam had just started --- it was impossible to find a place in any of these beautiful little streets that served any alcohol. We asked a taxi driver, a garrulous, helpful middle-aged man, who undertook enthusiastically the assignment to find us a place where we could have a meal with some wine,by driving us up some very steep hills until reaching a point that he couldn’t go any further.
We had to walk the last precipitous slope up to a restaurant which, like the coffee shop in the courtyard, was another example of creative design. The restaurant existed on several levels, each room being complete in itself, each sharing the exceptional views over the city. (I counted 19 mosques in sight as I ate my meal.) Over an ember fire at the back of the room turned a lamb on a spit for which, unfortunately, we were too early. But we left it to the helpful and friendly waiter to choose what he served us. So we started with a totally delicious Bosnian soup, went on to a mélange of dishes comprised of chopped meat, marinated and cooked in sauces, mushrooms, vegetables, and ended with a superb dessert of the eastern variety. The cost of this triumphant invention was about half of what a similar meal would have cost in Toronto or Montreal. I know both of those cities have superb eating places, but I doubt that either could rival this Sarajevan restaurant for atmosphere, its air of quiet civility, and its magnificent view.

On the way back we had to order another taxi. But again we found an enthusiastic middle-aged man anxious to fulfil what we wanted: our objective was to go somewhere we could have a final drink before retiring, He took us to a place across the river from our hotel, to a pub the like of which I have never seen in all my wanderings. It was a tall building, open to the roof several stories above, its central space surrounded by balconies where meals were served while the ordinary people got on with their drinking downstairs. The design of this place was amazing: exquisite designs on the ceilings, even those above the bar, just another evidence of the civilized air of this whole city.

It was raining lightly the next morning, but not enough to prevent us from wandering through the city streets, themselves a feast for the eyes, past the dozens of coffee houses, and shops selling everything under the sun. If this part of town was damaged, rather little evidence of it remains: that stands to reason, because the rebuilding of these low-rise streets of mostly wooden buildings would not have required the vast financial operation needed for your modern high-rise blocks of offices, which have been built further along, although not verfy far away, in town.

We visited a modest little museum devoted to the occasion in 1914 on which the 20-year-old Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, an event that is said in history to have precipitated the First World War. There were seven assassins among the crowds through which the Royal coach moved. One of them threw a bomb that hit the coach and rolled under the following vehicle, exploding. Incredibly, the procession continued. Some of the assassins lost their nerve. Princip went to have a coffee, and when he emerged he discovered the procession had taken a wrong turning. Finding the Royal couple right in front of him, he fired twice, and killed both the Archduke and his glamorous wife Sophie.

That evening another equally helpful taxi-driver took us out of town to a roadside restaurant where we enjoyed the Bosnian specialty dish, lamb, again an excellent meal. On the way back the same taxi-driver --- who had told us he was bringing up his children to believe we were all brothers, everyone, no matter of what religion or ethnicity, belongs, and is one of us --- offered to show us around at his own cost. He took us to a small park built around a spring, a beautiful place.

Well, we didn’t spent a lot of time in Sarajevo, but long enough to contract a deadly disease Sarajevo-itis, which will no doubt demand that I make another visit, if I live long enough to do so. On the way back to Dubrovnik we passed through immense mountains of bare rock, stratified and exposed in an unusual way, which seemed to suggest that the whole area had at some time in the distant past been thrown up by some convulsive movement of the earth’s surface.

Dramatic though these mountains are, they can’t hold a candle to the city, the work of men and women, people of evey race and religion, the city pre-eminent in Europe for its successful building of a multicultural, multilingual, multireligious civilization that was relentlessly attacked just 18 years ago by men bent on imposing their barbaric ethnicity and nationalism over all others.

Related articles

• Video: Angelina Jolie Accepts Heart of Sarajevo Award in Bosnia (shoppingblog.com)

My Log 273: Award-winning Croatian film eloquent on the problems of the diaspora

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I saw a Croatian film last night that dealt in subjects that should be familiar to Canadians, including the agonies of people who become members of diasporas of whatever country, and of the problems of families that are divided by emigration. The name of the film was Kotlovina, a reference to some local dish that was being prepared for a monster family gathering when three sisters who had not seen each other for 35 years finally managed to get together. The director was Tomislav Radic.

This film only last week won the grand prize at the Pula film festival. Radic is a former head of production of Croatian TV, and in 2005 he made a widely praised film called What Iva Recorded, about a 14 year-old girl who was given a present of a video camera with which she began to record her family.

That probably gives a clue to Radic’s interests --- family dramas --- and this film was entirely about the whole family, the sisters, their husbands, their children, their neighbours, as they all set up for the party.

My knowledge of Yugoslav film is sketchy. I remember well the remarkable film W.R.: The Mysteries of the Organism, made in 1971 by the experimental Yugoslav director Dusan Makavejev, which purported to be an examination of the work of William Reich, but actually was an examination of the role of sex in a Communist country. The film was a great success in the Western world,it came like a breath of fresh air, but it was banned in Yugoslavia and earned Makavejev exile from his home country.

During his exile he made a scandalous film called Sweet Movie, so sexually explicit that the Canadian actress Carole Laure quit it before it was finished in disgust at some of the actions called for by her character (she was making love on the Eiffel Tower when she was interrupted by a group of nuns, for example) and Laure’s resignation from the film prompted the director to shoot an entirely different sequence around a different actress. Later, Makevejev made a film in Australia called The Coca Cola Kid, starring the remarkable American actor Eric Roberts (brother to Julia), so it seems that the diaspora has never been far from the thoughts of Yugoslav directors.

I found the opening sequences of Kotlovina to be almost tiresomely slow, although they did succeed in delineating the characters. Two of the sisters were traveling by car to the home of the third, in these earlier sequences, and on the way the one sister, a 40-ish widow, who had returned from Australia, where she had been taken as a child of four, got involved in a sexual romp with the stepson of one of her sisters, a virile 20-year-old lad. During the course of her liaison she was bitten by some insect, and her bite required treatment. She had also lost her panties, which her sister found later in the young man’s overcoat. This led to a huge confrontation after the Australian returned from a visit to the hospital for a shot of anti-rabies vaccine.

The film ended with a really remarkable sequence of the family party, as all the participants became drunk, and started yelling at each other. A visitor (daughter of the woman doctor, who was invited to the feast, thus establishing the neighborliness of Croatians), began to yell her detestation of the diaspora, populated, as she claimed, by a group of people whose only objective in leaving their home country was to have a swimming pool. Finally, the visitor in her turn burst out her resentments with her unsatisfactory life in Australia: she had had no pool, she complained, all she had was a marriage to an older man who didn’t love her any more than she loved him.

The party almost broke up over these quarrels, and would have done if the doctor’s daughter had not flaked out entirely, having drunk far too much. Seeing to her, getting her home, occupied everybody’s attention, taking their minds off their quarrelling, and the film ended with the three sisters clutching each other affectionately, and laughing gently at their ridiculous quarrelling.

I don’t think this film is destined to do particularly well abroad. I can understand if it becomes a success in Croatia, but its slow beginning will prevent it from capturing the attention of foreign audiences.

What was interesting was to find a movie that dealt with such important subjects in such an intense, concentrated manner. After all, in a world rent with emigration, much of it designed simply to improve the conditions and standards of living of the emigrants, these resentments are bound to become more intense as time goes on.

I felt I could relate to it myself. I lived in Canada for 26 years before becoming a citizen, and for all of that time I never considered myself truly Canadian, although I felt I was qualified because I was performing work that was essential to the quality of Canadian life. At least I thought so.

After returning briefly to New Zealand, my home country, I realized I didn’t belong there, either. I could have complained, as the protagonist in this movie did, that I was neither one thing nor the other, neither a Kiwi nor a Canuck. But I figured I had been operating according to an outmoded set of beliefs about one’s personal roots. Your roots, I discovered are created by your friendships, acquaintances, working life, your beliefs and actions, the whole corpus of your life, not from some phony attachment to a particular place.

The Australian protagonist in this film announced her intention of going back to Australia. How many emigrants have done exactly this: gone home, discovered it is no longer your home, and returned to their new home, more contented for the experience.

My Log 272: Quebec minister’s visits to Algonquin communities takes me down memory lane from 50 years ago

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Lake Kipawa

Some news has come across my e-mail that the Wolf Lake Algonquin community in Quebec has been given a grant of some $200,000 by the Quebec government to rebuild a camp located on the shore of Lake Kipawa, which will be developed into a centre for ecotourism.

Wolf Lake is a small community of people who live in what used to be called the Hunter’s Point settlement, on an island in the middle of Lake Kipawa, and is one of nine Algonquin communities in Quebec, seven of which I visited over the years when I was more active.

I made a trip around these communities in 1969, when I first started writing about native communities as a reporter for The Montreal Star. My guide was the chief of Timiskaming band, Mike Mackenzie, who was interested in signing up as many of the Algonquin people as he could to become members of the Indians of Quebec association, in which he held some executive position. Mike had been for many years a worker in the paper mill in Temiskaming, and he took me not only by plane to the community of Hunter’s Point, but north along the course of the Ottawa river to Ville Marie, and then east by logging roads to the community of Winneway, today an Algonquin village of 461 people which is the site of the Long Point band.

Already as we moved on from one Algonquin community to the next I had become accustomed to the fact that none of them ever appeared on the maps of Quebec, and that their few people --- there are still, even today, only a total of some 6,000 people in the nine communities --- were existing on tiny reserves that had been carved out for them, usually without their participation or consent. I was surprised to find in these remote, hidden places that people were still speaking their Algonquin language, but there was a fairly common assumption in those days that the language was doomed.

Years later, in the late 1980s, when I became involved in the struggle of the Barriere Lake people to defend their traditional hunting territory, which was contiguous with La Verendrye wildlife reserve --- a highly ironic title, since the reserve was and is being clear-cut by loggers --- I discovered that the language was still in use, as it still is today: in short, the Algonquins of Quebec, hidden away for the most part in their nine remote communities, were expected by many Canadians to more or less disappear. But they have defied these somber predictions, and appear at the moment to be on the verge of a comeback.

One thing that struck me in the late 1960s was that almost everywhere we went, even when it was just by some rough logging road through the wilderness, when we would come to the site of an Algonquin community, we would always have to ask where the people lived --- and then we would find them living around some corner, hiding even from the small amount of traffic that passed through their settlement. I remember one such community, known as Rapide-7, where we discovered a beautiful young woman who had been out somewhere for schooling, but had returned to her home in this wilderness where she was doing --- well, what was she doing exactly?

The only two of these communities I have never visited are Grand Lac Victoria and Lac Simon, but I still remember running across some anthropologists or scientists of some kind who had just come from these villages, and who assured us if we wanted to see aboriginal life in its natural state, those were the places to go to.

On other occasions I have visited the Algonquin communities of Maniwaki (known as the River Desert band, or more recently as Kitigan Zibi), and Amos (now known more generally as Abitibiwinni or Pikogan First Nation, a sort of northern outlier on the Harricana river more in the region of Abitibi than the other reserves).

As a result of these travels I have discovered that the history of the few surviving Algonquins is a typically infuriating, tragic Canadian story, but one which lies at the very centre of Canadian history, although it is not mentioned very much in Canadian history books. As a tribe the Algonquins have been divided for many years between the few small commuities in Ontario, and those in Quebec. That is the result of the machinations of the white invaders who worked their way into the Algonquin territories along the Ottawa river as they began the intense logging industry on which white European prosperity in the region was based. First, they displaced the Algonquins whom they encountered living along the river in Ontario, but they had less success in dislodging the northern Algonquins, who lived in Quebec. The people fought persistently for their rights, but were always swept aside by the arrogant governments. Then the government/church tandem decided on the grand gesture of gathering all of the displaced people who had collected around the monastery at Oka into a big reserve at Maniwaki in Quebec. This was a decision of the priests and the government, but it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that its real purpose was to remove the Algonquins from the path of so-called European progress --- in other words, to get them the hell off the land so the Europeans could do what they wanted with the land and its resources.

In this they have not been altogether successful: the northern Quebec communities decided not to join the rush to Maniwaki, and when I asked about that once I was told that they did make a long canoe journey down to Maniwaki on one occasion, but a number of their paddlers fell ill by contracting one of the European diseases, and they then withdrew for good.

After that, the history of, for example, the Barriere Lake people has been a terrible one, a story of white arrogance and greed, and of church and state collaboration which has left the reserve today one of the most impoverished in the entire country, but one that is fighting like a tiger to defend its right not only to exist, but to have some control over the remaining resources from the land that they have always considered to be theirs, land that they have neither surrendered by treaty, nor lost through conquest.

In other words, these Algonquins who have received four visits from the Quebec minister, Geoffrey Kelley, are fighting for their lives. They deserve to be better treated than they have ever been before --- their historical treatment being a virtual template for how not to treat native people decently --- and with any luck, with support from non-native supporters, of whom there is a determined nucleus in Montreal, and with the sheer naked determination they have recently begun to show not to be any longer the doormats for European civilization and its acquisitive values, they will eventually win through to a better life.

Let’s hope so, anyway.

My Log 271: Once again, I stray among the classicists, and am put off when they pander to my depraved tastes

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The Rector's Palace, Dubrovnik

Last night I attended a concert by musicians whom I had reason to expect were among the best in Europe.

They were all members of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, playing together as a smaller group as Soloists of the Munich Philharmonic, founded in 1999 by a musician called Sreten Krstic, who previously had founded a group called the Munich Philharmonic String Sextet.

There were 12 of these musicians, playing in the open air patio, or atrium, of the Rector’s Palace, a beautiful building constructed in the mid-15^th century, damaged later by an explosion, and rebuilt after a huge earthquake in 1667, with
Renaissance and baroque architectural elements. The building was the seat of government when Dubrovnik was a city-state, and a republic, and the Rector after which it was named was an official elected by the Great Council to represent the Republic for a month during which he wasn't allowed to leave the palace at anytime except on government business.

This was held to have fitted exactly the principle of the Dubrovnik republic that is inscribed in Latin over the door of the Great council hall, "Forget private and deal with public business" (a message that we could do with in our own capitalist-controlled times in most countries of the Western world.)

The Atrium is regarded as an ideal location for the chamber music concerts that are held frequently during the Dubrovnik summer festival: indeed, last night I noticed various members of the 12-person group of musicians looking around them in wonderment at their surroundings.

Well, that’s as may be: the musicians were clearly expert on their fiddles of various kinds, and the soloist, a woman cellist called Monika Leskover, was a wonderful artist.

Readers of this site will not be surprised, nevertheless, to know that this music left me more or less cold, since I have no knowledge of classical music, and would, to be perfectly honest, rather attend a concert by my son’s raucous rock and roll band, Grady, out of Austin, Texas. I was not surprised to read that she had been highly spoken of by such luminaries as Mstislav Rostropovich (whose master classes she had attended) and Yehudi Menuhin, but the information that she had performed with three “world famous conductors” (none of whom I have ever heard of), and with four of “the world’s leading musicians” (whose fame has also escaped me during my 83 years) kind of suggested I had strayed into an environment I should have avoided.

Okay, call me a slob. One thing I discovered last night is that classical musicians are at least as self-indulgent as rock musicians: it seemed that Ms Leskover went on and on with her piece from Haydn, which, to me sounded like she was repeating the same phrases over and over, and I came to the conclusion that her piece would have benefited from being cut to the length my rock and roll experience has made more familiar to me.

The group had previously played works from Handel,
Charles Avison, and a Croatian composer called Dubravko Detoni, who was present at the concert, and whose work I thought was the most interesting of the night. He has composed some 130 productions around musicals, books of poetry and radio and TV programmes, and they were, to me, more evocative than the more classical works.

But then, with all this completed, the group launched into a bizarre evocation of what I have always considered the tripe composed by the Beatles, whose rubbishy tunes were disguised (though barely) as baroque compositions. She Loves You, a Hard Day’s Night, Here Comes the Sun? As baroque compositions? Do me a favour, fellers, better that you stick to your last and don’t try to curry favour with slobs like me.

Maybe my uneasiness was caused by the fact that, with a standing room ticket, the only place I could find to perch was on the medieval stone staircase, on to which I was crowded with dozens of others, (who seemed just as uncomfortable as me).

I gotta admit, the audience was enthusiastic, as they should have been before these master musicians. But I was glad to escape with my sanity more or less intact, and my bum bruised, cold, but still functioning. I think.

My Log 270: Tribute to Merchant-Ivory film productions, whose work is at an end following Merchant’s death

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The late Ismail Merchant

I have always loved the film productions of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, most of whose best work over forty years was written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Last night I went to one of their last productions, The White Countess, which was written not by Ms Jhabvala, but by Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japanese-born, British-raised writer who became famous with his novel The Remains of the Day, that was translated into one of the most wonderful of the Merchant-Ivory productions, for which Ms. Jhabvala wrote the screenplay in 1985.

Part of the success of this trio surely must have come from the fact that they were such a mixed bag, Merchant being an Indian Moslem, Ivory an American Protestant, and Jhabvala a German Jew. Yet from 1965 when they burst on to the scene with Shakespeare Wallah, until the present day this team has produced one intelligent, thoughtful, inspiring film after another. Personally I can remember Heat and Dust, (1983), featuring one of the most delectable performances by the glorious Julie Christie, A Room With a View, (1985) an adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel, Howard’s End (1992) another Forster adaptation by Ms. Jhabvala, and the wonderful Remains of the Day (1993) that the team adapted from Ishiguro’s superb novel.

Merchant died in 2005, which has brought an end to this string of successes, and it seems that at the age of 84 Ms Jhabvala has laid down her pen, which gives me permission to say that The White Countess was the least successful Merchant-Ivory production I can remember, although it was crowded with distinguished and excellent actors.

Unfortunately Ishiguro’s screenplay moved too slowly to really grab one: and for that matter, for a story set in 1930s Shanghai, the tale was too convoluted and interiorized within its major characters. The Merchant-Ivory productions, although always about interesting personalities, also usually managed to lay out the socio-political background in which the major characters found themselves. In this respect, this movie was somewhat deficient, I felt, although it certainly tried hard to suggest the confusing politics of those years as the Japanese were preparing to invade China.

The main character was played by Ralph Fiennes, and was called Todd Jackson, a former American diplomat who had lost his wife and child, and himself become blinded, in an explosion. No longer active in politics, he wanted to open a high-class night club in which he could rub shoulders with the leaders of society. He made the acquaintance of a Russian émigré countess who was earning a living as a taxi dancer for herself, her daughter, and a family of hangers-on, all of them White Russian nobility, and, impressed, he asked her to join him in his enterprise, which he named The White Countess, after her. (In the cast were a parcel of Redgraves, Vanessa, Lynn, and Natasha Richardson, filling the roles of the White Russians.)

This was all clear enough, but one kept wondering when the real action was to start, and what form it would take. Great prominence was given to a mysterious Japanese who befriended Jackson, but against whom he had been warned, because he was said to be a man who turned up just before the Japanese walked into wherever he was. In other words, a dangerous man, as indeed he eventually turned out to be.

With the arrival of the brutal Japanese, the expatriate citizens of the French, British and European sections of Shanghai decided to decamp, and rushed for the boats that could take them to safety. The countess’s family had insisted on keeping from her young daughter knowledge of the disreputable work she did to keep them all alive, and decided they should leave her behind when they left. The denouement, as the blind diplomat, obviously now in love with the countess, struggled to find her in the crowd, and finally did so, was full of action and tension.

The acting of Fiennes and Natasha Richardson (who died from a head injury while on holiday in the north of Quebec) both gave beautiful performances in the featured roles, but these were hardly enough to rescue the somewhat somnolent pace of the movie, or the confusions of Ishiguro’s script.

This is probably the last we can hope to see of the great Merchant-Ivory productions, and I cannot let them go without expressing my appreciation for their wonderful work over the years and my regret that we will see no more of them. They have been an ornament to the craft of film-making, and no mistake.

The night before I saw an even more confusing Italian psychological thriller called The Double Door, which was about a couple who were attacked by robbers as they were guarding a palace full of precious works of art, which the robbers got away with. The man was supposed to have been killed, leaving the woman to undergo a series of remarkable events, all of which turned out to have been figments of her imagination while she was in a three-day coma. Rescued from her coma, she got together with the man who had been thought to be dead, but was very much alive. And the climax to the film came when the woman was discovered to have been involved in the robbery, after which she went off to South America with her lover, one of the robbers. A bit of a struggle to keep all these confusing strands straight in one’s mind. I am not so good at that as I used to be, I guess I have to admit. One of the penalties of age.

My Log 269: French and British: two versions of working class reality in two enjoyable films

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On successive nights I have seen two interesting movies dealing with working class subjects, but movies very different in their approach. Both were set in the early 1960s, but one was French one English, and perhaps that was one of the major differences between them.

The French film was called The Women on the Sixth Floor, and it was a sort of domestic comedy contrasting the mores of a French bourgeois couple with those of the floor-full of upstairs maids who served them, without being seen by them in any real sense for many years.

The English film was Made in Dagenham, a hard-nosed political film about how a group of machinists working for Ford in Dagenham, east of London, decided to go on strike for equal pay for equal work. Both were full of humour, but the humour was quite different in each film, although both had what might be called a soft-core centre allowing good to triumph in the end. But I have to admit I preferred the English film, mainly for ideological reasons.

The French film, directed by Phillippe Le Guay, opens in one of those ancient Parisian apartment buildings that are normally presided over by a concierge past whom even an army would find it hard to penetrate, usually an aging battleaxe with her nose in everybody’s business. This was true in this apartment house, which appeared to be owned by a character expertly played by Fabrice Luchini, married to an idle rich woman who filled her days with trivia of one kind and another. Into Mr. Luchini’s life came a pretty young woman from Spain, come to join her aunt, who is one of the maids living upstairs. Mr. Luchini welcomes her, tells her her predecessor has left, that she earned 250 francs a week (or was that a month?) and he immediately finds a piece of steel behind her affable, smiling exterior.

“Four hundred,” she says firmly.

He pretends he didn’t understand what she was saying, and insisted the pay would be 250. “Four hundred,” she said again, still smiling affably. He promised to talk to his wife about it, and the next day, somewhat entranced by the pretty new maid, comes back with a solution. “You will be paid 400, but as far as the mistress is concerned, you will be getting 250 --- not a word about this arrangement to her,” says the brave bourgeois, and so the arrangement is made.

The predecessor had worked for the family all her life, but when the family’s mother died she could not adjust. Quarrelling with the master, she is given her cards. Monsieur explains her severe loss to the pretty new maid, telling her the old girl was like family. “Where is she now?” asks the new girl. Monsieur did not know. “And yet she was like family?” asks the impertinent one, setting a tone for the mores on show in this film.

The new maid is a model of modernity, she boils his morning egg exactly as he demands it (three and a half minutes, he explains, anything either softer or harder spoils his entire day), she keeps the dishes washed, the clothes ironed, everything turns upward in the household arrangements, and he finds himself attracted to the young woman in a way that seems rather strange to him.

Somehow or other she persuades him to go upstairs to meet the other Spanish women who have been living up there, unregarded, for years, and he finds their toilet is horribly blocked, and orders in a plumber to clear it out. Thus the film gets underway, and the comedy is broad among the working class women from Spain, who seem to have inherited a much more modern attitude to life than the hidebound French bourgeoisie, in spite of having been dragged up under the tyrannical Franco regime. At least these women stick together: one of them has only to send out a call from her window for help and the rest appear as if by magic to wash, dry, vacuum and the like. Eventually the master quarrels with his uptight wife, who doesn’t believe his story that he was invited to dine with the maids upstairs, and she kicks him out, expecting him to return any moment. He moves upstairs into a cubby hole, living with the maids, and suddenly finds himself happier than he could have ever imagined being, as he is alone for the first time in his life, and making his own decisions without any interference from mother, father, wife or anyone else.

Part of the solidarity of the maids comes from their adherence to the rituals of he church, which appear as a joyful inheritance, that rather turned me off, to tell the truth. But eventually monsieur’s beautiful young maid confesses she has an eight-year-old son born out of wedlock, and surrendered for adoption. When one of he maids her aunt says she knows where the boy is, the young woman decides she must return to Spain to be near him. And after surrendering briefly to the romantic advances of monsieur, she disappears, and he is left with no option but to return to his loveless marriage.

Three years pass: and I will aleve it to readers to guess what happens: it is all resolved with delicacy, and most happily.

Well, that’s the French version of a working class dilemma: the British version is rooted in the poverty of he Cockney workers at the Ford plant, women workers who are egged on to demand equal pay for equal work by their shop steward, in a beautiful performance by Bob Hoskins. He confronts the comfortable senior pooh-bahs of the union movement, who call in the striking women and tell them how they should go back to work, and leave it to them to negotiate an increase in wages. No, says the young woman who is discovering leadership qualities as she becomes the spokespeson for the women workers. No, we don’t accept these compromises. We are striking for equal pay for equal work. But that will ruin the Ford company, cry the bosses, echoed by the union pooh-bahs.

As the strike drags on, the plant runs out of the materials provided by these women, and the factory closes. Then the pressure comes on their husbands: will they support their wives? In a pig’s eye they will. They tell their wives to stop all this nonsense and get the factory working again so they can get some money into the house.

The film is excellent as it shows the intense pressures created by strike action. It also ha wicked portraits of the higher-ups who are forced to make decisions about this kind of industrial action: the company executives, under pressure from Detroit; the Labour government ministers, compromising all along the way since they got elected (“I wasn’t running the country then,” as Harold Wilson remarks when challenged by his active socialist minister Barbara Castle with a memory of his policies when in opposition). Anyway, this too has a happy ending. This strike apparently actually happened in 1968, and the victory of the women workers led to the passing of Equal Pay legislation that was quickly followed in other countries, and has helped to transform the situation of working women.

I liked this film very much: one seldom sees serious movies dealing with politics, and when one crops up, one is obliged to give it its due, recognizing that almost all of the media, including films, are biased overwhelmingly in favour of establishment attitudes and practices.

My Log 268: A trip to Mostar: monument to our modern capacity to carry out outrages as bad as any in the past

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I visited Mostar yesterday, and if I ever needed reinforcement in my view that war is berserk (I don’t need it, actually) I found it there.

Mostar is that beautiful little town, 150 kilometres from
Dubrovnik, in the heart of Bosnia, where, in an act of monstrous cruelty and cultural blindness that we all watched on television, the Croats destroyed a famous bridge that had spanned the river Neretva since 1566, and was regarded as one of the marvels of Ottoman architecture.

As The Guardian remarked in an article published in 2004 when the bridge was officially restored: “The Old Bridge stood for 427 years until a failed Croatian theatre director-turned militia leader, Slobodan Praljak, trained his artillery on the structure in November 1993, when his forces were driving Mostar's Muslim population into an east bank enclave.”

Along with others who collaborated with him in the destruction of Mostar, Mr. Praljak has been in custody in The Hague for some years, undergoing trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. This is the tribunal that issued indictments against 161 people for crimes against humanity and the like during this ridiculous war, and the last of these 161 people was arrested last week, 16 years after hostilities ceased. Some 64 of these people have been sentenced, 13 acquitted and 14 trials are still underway. (To plunge into the Web site of this tribunal is to take a voyage into the murky world of ethnic hatred, and to expose oneself to a recital of the follies and absurdities of which human beings are capable.)

The bombing of Dubrovnik is one crime that the tribunal has concerned itself with, and the destruction of Mostar is another. Mostar was said to be the most ethnically integrated population in the whole of Yugoslavia, but the war put a stop to that. At first the Croats fought with the Moslems against an attack by the Serbs, whose leaders had declared that they wanted to unite all Serbs in Yugoslavia under one government. But in the middle of this, the Croats turned on their allies, and began a vicious attack against the Moslems, driving them across the river into the east section of the town, and then bombing their houses mercilessly.

Today, Catholic Croats and Moslems still both inhabit the town, but they live separately, on opposite sides of the river. The Catholics have built a new church, complete with a huge tower that looms over the entire town, and along with the rebuilding of the bridge, the market areas around the bridge have been largely rebuilt too. But the Moslem side of town lags in redevelopment behind the Christian side, which, naturally, has been favored by Western world supporters. I believe the Serb population from before the war was driven out of town, and has not returned.

During the war the city was first attacked by the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), essentially a Serbian outfit, which established control over the town. Within three months, forces of the newly-established republic of Croatia managed to force the Yugoslav Army out of the town. The JNA then shelled the town, destroying a Franciscan monastery, the Catholic cathedral and the bishop's palace (with a library of 50,000 books), a number of secular institutions as well as fourteen mosques.

In 1991 Croats living in the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina had proclaimed the existence of the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia, as a separate "political, cultural, economic and territorial whole," on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A result of this was that Mostar was divided into a Western part, which was dominated by the Croat forces and an Eastern part where the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was largely concentrated.

When the Yugoslav Army moved out fanatic Croat Catholics destroyed Orthodox monastries and cathedrals, and bombed the ancient bridge, for which their leaders are still on trial in The Hague.

We went on a bus tour to Mostar. It took more than five hours to travel the 150 kilometres from Dubrovnik, not because the roads are bad --- indeed, they are beautifully surfaced --- but mainly because the modern Yugoslavia-as-was is now divided into six independent nations which maintain border posts whose utility is beyond the understanding of a simple guy like myself. We passed these border posts six times on the way there and back: it was never clear whose nation controlled the post, and the personnel running the posts appeared to be dressed identically. By peering closely at the small notices posted up one could gather that this post might be Bosnian, this one Croat, but there is nothing like what one has become accustomed to at most border posts, a clearly demarked area between an exit post of one country and the entry post of the next. In fact, I noticed at one post that on the way to Mostar our bus pulled into a long line of buses which were facing in one direction, with a small low hut in front of us through a window of which the drivers had to produce some documentation or other, which had a tiny notice that it was Bosnian, but on the way back the buses pulled up in the same line, except it was facing in the opposite direction, and an identical window in an identical hut seemed to belong to the other nation: the two posts were together, in other words. If this is the only benefit they have received from their war, it can hardly have been said to be worth it.

Nevertheless, the journey was very much worth taking. On the way to Mostar we stoppd at a village that I can only describe as amazingly beautiful. This was Pocitelj, a tiny place on a hill beside the Neretva river (the same one that runs through Mostar) whose population before the Homeland war in 1991 was 900. But this village was founded in the fifteenth century, and came under Ottoman rule for four centuries, during which a walled town was built, testimony to its strategic importance as a defensive position. When the Ottoman rule was replaced by Austro-Hungarian rule the town lost its strategic importance, which fortuitously enabled it to maintain its unique architectural mix. But in the 1990s, once again, Croatian forces bombed and shelled it destroying Pocitelj's sixteenth-century master works of Islamic art and architecture and displacing most of the town’s Moslem population.

Since the war, outside experts in ancient monuments have expressed their concern over the fate of this exceptionally beautiful town and in 1996, thanks to work of the Universities of York and Sarajevo, it was named as one of the world’s 100 most culturally endangered heritage sites. A restoration program arising from that designation has brought about the rebuilding of damaged and destroyed buildings, the encouragement of the return of the refugees and displaced persons to their homes, and the long-term protection and revitalization of Pocitelj's historic urban area.

We enjoyed a luncheon in the Mostar market area, an old-time local dish known as “under the bell” --- meaning lamb cooked under a bell that is submerged in glowing embers, utterly delicious --- served by an old-time waiter in a modest café sitting above the river. Not far away the merchants were just wrapping up their morning at the market, and shops selling tourist trinkets, and for all I know, precious, locally-made artifacts, were crowded with tourists. I suppose it could be said that Mostar has returned to some kind of normalcy --- but the populations appear to be living still at dagger’s drawn, on either side of the river. Mostar is, if anything, a monument to the fact that our modern civilization, with all our knowledge, artistic sensitivity, and ethnic tolerance, is still capable of outrages that rival those of past centuries.