Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  Along with industrial advances and the invention of the telegraph, which allowed news dispatches to be delivered rapidly, newspapers began hiring reporters and sending them out to gather news from battlefields, the Western frontier, and the gold rush. All of these measures gave rise to a more news-oriented and egalitarian journalism that was aimed at a mass audience, in obituaries as well as elsewhere. In the same way that the gruesome death tolls in the trenches of northern Europe would have a numbing effect on British obituaries in the 1920s, the post–Civil War era in the U.S. saw a dashing of sentimentality about noble or romantic death. “Obituaries no longer dwelled on the act of dying or its religious implications — death had become far too familiar,” Hume writes about the New York Times in 1870 in Obituaries in American Culture.

  Although the nyt did not set out to romanticize death and rarely gave prolonged descriptions of the cause of death, service to country was celebrated. Major General Joseph E. Hamblin was described as one of the “most gallant soldiers that fought for the union in the late war . . . and only sheathed his sword when his country had no further need of his services.” As the country recovered, long lists of young men killed in battle were replaced with obituaries of men working as lawyers, merchants, and manufacturers as wealth and social status took a more prominent role than personal valour.

  Hume argues that nineteenth-century obituary writers, who were more concerned with virtuous character traits such as courage, honesty, and gallantry for men and piety for women, were succeeded in the twentieth century by writers who downplayed individual character in their preoccupation with the work ethic and the reflected glory that came from being linked to business and social institutions and associations. Consequently the “ideal American,” at least as represented in newspaper obituaries, changes with the times and meets a specific social need depending on the historical era — for example, the rugged individual in the frontier era, the entrepreneur in the industrial era, the compassionate citizen during the Depression, the hero during wartime. In other words, “Virtue is not stagnant, but adapts to the new cultural demands of a changing society,” as Hume states in Obituaries in American Culture.

  By the mid-twentieth century, American obituaries tended to be factual news stories that concentrated on the fact of somebody’s death rather than the virtues and accomplishments of the deceased’s life. All of that changed, at least at the nyt, when the Canadian-born editor and writer Alden Whitman (October 27, 1913 – September 4, 1990) was appointed chief obituary writer in 1965 by A. M. (Abe) Rosenthal (May 2, 1922 – May 10, 2006), another Canadian-born journalist who eventually became executive editor of the paper.

  Here’s how Whitman himself, in The Obituary Book, describes the situation at the nyt before he arrived on the dead beat: “Previously, it had been the Times’s practice to print a matter-of-fact and rather brief account of a person’s life. Containing few quotes or flashes of perception, these obits were as dreary to read as an entry in Who’s Who. In this respect they were not much different from obits that appeared — and still do — in most American newspapers, where the practice was — and still is — to hand out obits to young reporters (to teach them a sense of discipline in writing), to rewrite men for knocking out in an idle moment, or to older reporters spinning out the days to retirement . . . The result has been dull writing, or, even worse, puffery.”

  Lacking any sense of false modesty, Whitman set out to change all that. He specialized in advances, writing long biographical sketches on statesman, aged worthies, and people whose health appeared to be failing, although even he admitted it was “impossible to anticipate every big death.” Whitman’s true innovation was interviewing subjects about their lives for their advance obituary. “From these conversations — all the more frank and open because the person knows that what he says is not for immediate quotation — emerges some of the best material. The task is to distill it and integrate it with information from other sources into a finished article. It is never, for me at least, an easy job . . .”

  Not everybody agrees with interviewing subjects. “I tend not to encourage it, though I leave it to the author,” Ian Brunskill, obituaries editor of the Times of London, said in a 2008 interview with Adam Bernstein, obituaries editor of the Washington Post. “What’s the effect likely to be? Either the subject will be horrified or delighted and tell you stories you have to spend hours checking. It’s a minefield.”

  I’m of two minds. Interviewing a subject in advance gives you a physical sense of the personality behind the achievements, but I have learned that the encounter is useful only if I’ve done all the research and honed my queries into a few salient points. Sitting there with a tape recorder running is not the occasion to troll for biographical details, because most times the person can’t remember specific dates or the conversation gets bogged down in myriad details. On the other hand I have had such memorable conversations with some of my subjects — actor William Hutt, Chatelaine editor Doris Anderson, and poet P. K. Page come to mind — that I have never forgotten them. Believe me, that is not what usually happens to a journalist who has interviewed thousands of people in the course of her job.

  I interviewed only one of the ten builders in this chapter — Celia Franca — specifically to write her obituary. When the time came, I found I had little room for the descriptive passages I had written two years earlier, and my own perspective had become more nuanced with time. And that is true of these lives as well. I wrote obituaries of each of them in a hurry under the space and time constraints of newspaper deadlines.

  For this book I re-researched and rewrote them all because I had continued to think about them in the intervening years in terms of how they related to the world and each other. That’s why, for example, I have combined artist and writer James Houston and Kananginak Pootoogook in the same essay. Kananginak was one of four apprentices in Houston’s printmaking studio, but he stayed in the Arctic, built the Co-op after Houston went south, and became both an internationally collected artist and a revered elder in his community. Their lives are both linked and yet very different. The same is true of Duff Roblin and Louis Robichaud. They were premiers — from different political parties — at about the same time. Each transformed his province. That connected them, even though they came from very different circumstances.

  And that is the final thing I want to say about obituaries as biographical building blocks: they give you a way of seeing the past and recognizing how previous lives have enriched our times. That is what each of these builders represents to me.

  Frank Calder

  Politician and Nisga’a Chief

  August 3, 1915 – November 4, 2006

  SHORT OF STATURE and towering of vision, Frank Calder, who called himself the “little chief,” was an inspirational leader of the Nisga’a Nation in British Columbia. He was the first status Indian admitted to a post-­secondary institution in Canada and the first aboriginal cabinet minister. Most of all, though, he will be remembered as the driving force behind the Nisga’a land treaty, a monumental piece of legislation that has been emulated across the country and as far away as New Zealand.

  After more than a century of negotiations and disputes between the Nisga’a and provincial and federal governments, Calder took the Nisga’a people’s claim to own and govern their ancestral lands all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. Although they lost in a 4–3 ruling, which determined that their ancestral rights had been extinguished, the 1973 decision caused then prime minister Pierre Trudeau — the man who had long argued that “you can’t right historical wrongs” — to consider reversing his government’s policy and putting aboriginal rights on the national agenda. He opened negotiations with the Nisga’a and enshrined aboriginal rights in the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms (they were later increased). The Nisga’a Treaty, which was finally signed in 2000, gave the Nisga’a ownership of about two thousand square kilometres in the Nass Valley of northern B.C. Every
modern First Nations land claim, from the Cree of James Bay to Delgamuukw in B.C. to the Inuit in Nunavut, is built upon the legal rights that Calder fought so hard to establish.

  FRANK CALDER’S DESTINY as a leader of his people was set even before he was born. In 1913 Arthur Calder, or Na-qua-oon, the traditional chief of the Nisga’a Wolf clan, and his wife, Louisa, were paddling down the Nass River to seek jobs at the newly opened salmon cannery. Their small son fell out of the canoe and drowned. The tragedy was both personal and political: the Calders had lost their son, but the Nisga’a Wolf clan had also lost its next chief.

  About eighteen months later, an old woman in the village of Gingolx (Kincolith) had a powerful dream in which she envisioned Louisa Calder’s younger sister, Emily Clark, conceiving a son who would carry the “chiefly spirit” of Na-qua-oon’s dead child. The dream, reminiscent of the biblical account of Elizabeth’s foretelling of the Immaculate Conception, came to fruition after a third son was born to Job and Emily Clark on August 3, 1915, in Nass Harbour, north of Terrace, B.C. In a traditional adoption ceremony, the Clarks gave their baby, Frank, to Arthur and Louisa Calder to raise as their own child.

  When the Nisga’a clans met four years later to discuss their ongoing struggle to claim title to their traditional lands, a task some chiefs felt was akin to shifting “an immovable mountain,” Na-qua-oon presented the “dream child” and said: “I’m going to send this boy to school where the K’umsiiwan [white people] live. And I’m going to make him learn how the white man eats, how the white man talks, how the white man thinks, and when he comes back, he’s going to move that mountain.”

  Frank Calder, as he was now called, spent several years in the Anglican Church’s Coqualeetza residential school in Sardis, near Chilliwack, B.C. Although these institutions have been widely reviled — Calder himself received $8,000 in 2006 under the federal redress program for survivors of the residential school system — his experience was not completely negative. He learned networking and negotiating skills that he would need in leading the legal challenge, and he made connections with other children who grew up to be aboriginal leaders.

  In the summers, Calder, who had been welcomed onto the Nisga’a land committee by the tribal elders when he was only nine, went back home to work with his father in the fish cannery at Nass Harbour. That’s where he received a different kind of instruction: the ways of a future chief.

  The summer Calder was twelve, Na-qua-oon, who was unable to write or read English, gave his adopted son a copy of the federal “blue book.” These were the bound documents that recorded Ottawa’s arbitrary decision to end discussions about land claims and threatened jail terms for Natives who gathered in groups numbering more than five people. “Start reading,” Na-qua-oon ordered.

  After residential school, Calder went to Chilliwack High School and the Anglican Theological College (now affiliated with UBC), the first status Indian ever admitted to that institution. By the time he graduated in 1946, he had become involved with a group of Native activists who were lobbying the B.C. government for the right to vote in provincial elections (at the time Manitoba was the only jurisdiction in Canada that allowed Natives to vote without relinquishing treaty rights). Politics had become his new religion, so he decided against ordination as an Anglican minister.

  Calder and his fellow activists realized a victory when the franchise was extended to Natives in British Columbia in 1947. Two years later, Calder ran successfully for the CCF (the precursor to the New Democratic Party) in the provincial riding of Atlin and became the first aboriginal elected to a Canadian legislature. Articulate, intelligent, and doggedly patient, he made his maiden speech in 1950, calling for, among other measures, a bill of rights — a decade before Progressive Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker tabled similar legislation in the House of Commons.

  The following year, the federal blue-book decrees — those same documents forbidding any discussion of land treaties that had been given to Calder as a boy of twelve — were finally abolished. That opened windows and put an end to what Calder called “a time of darkness and despair for all aboriginal people.”

  While Calder was pushing Native rights and issues in the provincial legislature, he was also encouraging the Nisga’a clans to work together on their land claims. By 1955 he had revitalized the old land-claims committee as the Nisga’a Tribal Council. Three years later, he became one of the most significant Nisga’a leaders when he inherited the title Chief Long Arm from Na-qua-oon.

  It was in this capacity that he made the momentous decision to approach a young white lawyer named Thomas Berger. As a politician, Calder had the wisdom to know when he needed help and the persuasive powers to go out and acquire it. He wanted Berger because he was the lawyer who had argued successfully before the Supreme Court in Regina v. White and Bob in 1965. That ruling, which gave two aboriginal men the right to hunt on unoccupied land, based on the terms of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, also established that those rights had not been extinguished over the centuries.

  “Pard’ner, we want you to represent us,” was Calder’s informal approach, as Berger later recalled. “We are going to bring a lawsuit to establish our aboriginal title.” The Nisga’a launched their suit in September 1967, centennial year. The Calder case, as it was known, came to trial in April 1969. After losing at trial and on appeal, the Nisga’a applied to be heard by the Supreme Court of Canada.

  In November 1971, chiefs and elders from the four villages in the Nass Valley travelled to Ottawa for the five-day hearing before seven Supreme Court judges. Both sides were wearing their traditional robes — a graphic display of aboriginal versus Anglo hierarchies. Fourteen months later, six of the judges agreed that the Nisga’a had had aboriginal title before the Europeans came; three of them, including Mr. Justice Wilfred Judson, felt those rights had been extinguished, and three, including Mr. Justice Emmett Hall, argued that their rights could still be asserted. The final judge dismissed the case on a technicality without considering the issue of aboriginal title. Consequently the appeal was denied in February 1973.

  Even so, the timing was propitious for political change. Both Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his minister of Indian affairs, Jean Chrétien, were impressed by Judge Hall’s arguments in the Calder case. As well, the minority Liberal government was being pressed by the Progressive Conservatives and the NDP to recognize its obligation to settle Native land claims, a combined leverage that exerted additional pressure if the Liberals wanted to avoid an election.

  In August 1973, Chrétien officially opened the land claims negotiations. They were finally resolved provincially and federally more than twenty-five years later, when the Nisga’a Treaty passed second reading in the House of Commons in December 1999. By then Chrétien was prime minister and Calder, eighty-four, had survived several upheavals in his own life.

  As the CCF transformed itself into the NDP, Calder had continued to represent his rural riding of Atlin. When Dave Barrett became NDP leader in B.C. and handily defeated W. A. C. Bennett’s Social Credit Party in 1972, he named Calder a minister without portfolio in his first and only government. Calder’s appointment to Cabinet — a first for an aboriginal in Canada — was both historic and problematic: he was a minister of the Crown in one of the very governments he was suing to secure aboriginal title for the Nisga’a.

  But there were other issues. Calder, who enjoyed a drink and the company of women, was arrested in July 1973 (a few months after the Supreme Court decision) following a consensual situation involving a female companion, alcohol, and a car parked at an intersection. Although Calder was not charged with a crime, Barrett fired him from Cabinet. The Nisga’a, distressed by their leader’s public humiliation, also responded negatively and voted for James Gosnell to replace Calder as president of the Nisga’a Tribal Council in 1974.

  Calder quit the NDP and ran successfully the following year for Bill Bennett’s Social Credit Party. He
held his seat until 1979, when he lost the riding by one vote to the NDP candidate and retired from party politics. He was sixty.

  A prolific reader and an intelligent public-policy thinker, Calder avidly followed the drawn-out Nisga’a treaty negotiations even though he was no longer officially involved in the deliberations. And he was not averse to making his feelings and opinions known. “Had I been the leader, I would have stuck to issues relating to the land question. I do not believe that self-­government is an aboriginal right; it is a civic right for all Canadians,” he said six months after the treaty was ratified. The Nisga’a never argued with him publicly, and they later named him Chief of Chiefs in tribute to his monumental efforts in shifting the “immovable mountain.”

  In 1975 he married Japanese-born Tamaki Koshibe (named “Bright Star” by the Nisga’a), with whom he later had a son, Erick. About the same time, he bought a family plot in the Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria. He wanted to be buried near the provincial legislature rather than on his ancestral lands so his grave could remind visitors to Victoria of the Nisga’a and their hard-won land treaty.

  His health began to fail in the late 1990s and he moved into an assisted-living retirement home. In September 2006 he went into hospital for cancer-related surgery and from there to a convalescent hospital with palliative care facilities. That’s where the man who changed the history of First Nations died on November 4, 2006, at age ninety-one.

  Duff Roblin

  Premier of Manitoba

  June 17, 1917 – May 30, 2010

  &

  Louis Robichaud

  Premier of New Brunswick