Letters to my Grandchildren

by David Suzuki

  NANA AND I had an opportunity to find out more about Grandpa Nakamura when she and I were in Japan taking care of you, Ganhi and Tiis, while your mom and dad were on a speaking tour there. Did you two know that your mom is like a rock star in Japan?

  In 1992, when she was twelve, she attended the Earth Summit in Rio and gave a speech that became famous and has been published in textbooks in Japan. As a result, she is well known among young people there. I think the fact that she looks Asian and has a part-Japanese last name (Cullis-Suzuki) means Japanese kids can identify with her.

  One of the places where she spoke on her tour was Kyushu, south of Honshu, the big island where Tokyo and Kyoto are located. I knew that Grandpa Nakamura was from Kumamoto, on Kyushu, so we decided to see whether we could find out anything about him. Sure enough, we discovered that he had been trained as a samurai and that he had gone to a very elite high school, which we visited. There we learned that he had been unable to carry on as a samurai and had applied to enter the navy but was rejected because of bad eyesight. Perhaps that was the reason he decided to come to Canada.

  I don’t think he ever worked in Canada. Since he was born into nobility, working was not part of his background. There is one story about him that I love but that may not be true. He was in Trail, a mining town in British Columbia, when the workers at one of the mines went on strike. The company decided to break the strike by bringing in “scabs”— people who were willing to do the work for low wages—and many happened to be Japanese. The strikers threatened to beat up any scab who tried to cross the picket line, and the Japanese were terrified. They asked Grandpa Nakamura to lead them past the strikers, and he agreed. When he walked up to the strikers, they could tell by the way he carried himself that he was tough, so they moved aside and let the men in. Great story, even if it is about strikebreaking—which I don’t support.

  My grandparents never learned to speak more than a primitive level of English. They knew Japanese people in Canada who spoke English well enough to help them get established, and as their kids—my parents—grew up, they interpreted for their parents. I never learned to speak Japanese, because after the war, Mom and Dad were anxious that we be Canadians and not draw attention to our differences by speaking another language.

  How I regret that! The more languages we know, the richer our lives can be. I studied French for five years, Latin for four years, and German for three years, all in high school. But I have needed Spanish for the many Latin American countries I’ve done work in. Tamo and Midori, you are so fortunate that your dad took you to Chile and other countries in South America and that you learned Spanish.

  I never got to ask my grandparents why they left Japan, what the trip was like, what the conditions were when they arrived, and whether they were glad they had come. So many questions that will never be answered! I never got a chance to thank them for making that incredible journey and enduring the hardships in this foreign place so that their children would have a better future and their grandchildren—my sisters and I—could grow up as Canadians.

  My grandparents are called issei, the first generation of Japanese in Canada. My parents, your great-grandparents, were born in Vancouver—Dad in 1909 and Mom in 1911—and are called nisei (second generation, but first Canadian-born). They were among the first nisei in Canada and truly straddled the two cultures, being fluently bilingual in Japanese and English. Their knowledge of Japan was only secondhand, however, as neither ever lived in Japan (Dad went for a month when he was five). Because they were bilingual, they carried out all the family transactions in English from an early age, and their parents felt less and less pressure to learn the language. And because my parents had to work when they were still young and act as interpreters for their parents in everything they did, Mom and Dad both grew up fast.

  I am a sansei (third generation), and like most of those in my generation, I was born around the time of World War ii, when Japan was the enemy, and so I was not encouraged to speak Japanese. During the war my grandparents must have been torn emotionally—they had relatives in Japan, but they had moved to Canada.

  Each subsequent generation is also identified by the number of generations since the first generation of Japanese arrived here. Your moms, my daughters, are yonsei (fourth generation). You are all gosei (fifth generation), but by now your Japanese heritage is pretty diluted. Ganhi and Tiis, you are half Haida, so it’s ridiculous to consider you fifth-generation Japanese, especially when your dad’s ancestry in Canada goes back perhaps thousands of years.

  My mother and father, like most nisei at that time, grew up without elders or grandparents because those generations remained in Japan. My parents’ primary connection to the “old country” was through language, food, and some cultural activities, like odori (dance) or martial arts such as judo or kendo.

  Can you imagine growing up without ever knowing Bachan (my first wife and grandmother to three of you), Nana, or me? Until recently, this lack of grandparents and other elders was significant for children of immigrants to all new and distant lands, not just Canada, because it meant they had only the shallowest of roots to the old country and no roots at all in the new one. Today, of course, we have long-distance phone calls, Skype, and jet travel to keep us connected with elders who live far away.

  ALTHOUGH THE ISSEI who arrived here at the beginning of the twentieth century faced anti-Asian racism and discrimination, Canada offered opportunities that Japan didn’t. When the issei arrived, they did not have the historical or cultural attachment to the land that indigenous people have, and so they saw it as a commodity or real estate. If there were fish, catch them and sell them; if there were trees, cut them down and sell them; if there were minerals, dig them up and sell them; if there was rich soil, plant vegetables and sell them. Everything was a resource to exploit for economic return. That’s why people sought new lands, and that’s the way it’s been with new immigrants ever since the great wave of exploration, con-quest, and settlement in North and South America, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand that began more than five centuries ago.

  As you know, Nana and I have worked a lot with First Nations people in Canada and with other indigenous communities in other parts of the world. We have learned so much from them about radically different ways of seeing the land. For people who have lived in an area for thousands of years rather than decades or even centuries, land is far more than a commodity; it is their home and is sacred.

  Indigenous people didn’t automatically venerate the earth, however. They learned to respect it through the mistakes and insights of their ancestors. Remember, my background is in genetics, and I have been amazed to see how scientists can use dna, our genetic material, to trace the movement of people across the planet over time. And all trails lead back to Africa 150,000 years ago. That’s the birthplace of our species, meaning that we are all Africans by origin.

  Can you imagine what Africa must have been like when humans first appeared on the planet? The plains must have been teeming with animals in abundance and variety far beyond anything we would see in the Serengeti today. And if we think about our earliest ancestors, who would have been a small group of people lacking in size, speed, and strength, as well as acuity of vision, hearing, and smell, compared with the other creatures, we have to wonder how we ever survived with all the large, strong, fleet-footed animals around. Our big advantage was the two-kilogram organ buried deep in our skulls—the human brain. It endowed us with a prodigious memory, insatiable curiosity, keen observation, and astonishing creativity, qualities that compensated for our inferior physical and sensory abilities.

  The Nobel Prize–winning French geneticist François Jacob once told me that the human brain has an “inbuilt need for order.” In other words, we don’t like it when things happen that don’t make sense to us. So, as curious creatures, constantly looking, tinkering, and learning, we acquired knowledge about our surroundings, and, if Jacob is right (and I think he is), we had an itch to put everything together
in a cohesive picture of interconnection and causal relationships, or what some call a worldview, in which everything is connected and nothing exists separate and in isolation.

  Using their big brains, early humans found ways to exploit their surroundings. They could coat themselves in mud or camouflage themselves with grass or branches to sneak up on prey. They could dig pits to trap animals, spear even bigger creatures like mammoths, drive animals over cliffs along walls of rocks they had placed there. With simple baskets or wooden hooks, they caught fish. They made shelters in caves using rocks, branches, and reeds. What observant, imaginative animals our ancestors were! They had to be to survive.

  As their numbers increased, things they found uses for—certain trees, medicinal plants, mammals, and birds— would have decreased in number, and there would be pressure to find more resources (and maybe teenagers wanted to find some excitement and check out the Neanderthal ladies over the mountain, since there is evidence that humans and Neanderthals crossbred). In their search for more resources, people began to explore beyond their normal territory. As they moved into new territories, they found more big, slow-moving animals that were easy targets. What I find amazing is that even with such simple tools as spears, clubs, and stone axes, those early people were able to drive species to extinction.

  Scientists suggest that humans eliminated mammoths (one animal would have fed a lot of people for quite a while), giant elk, marsupial lions, giant sloths, and aurochs. As humans moved into new areas, they extirpated some of the plants and animals. When people reached Australia over forty thousand years ago, the continent was covered with a vast forest. Those early migrants brought the technology of fire, and burning remains a key part of Australian aboriginal culture today. As a result, the entire country has been completely transformed.

  Tamo, Midori, and Jonathan, you may have heard the classic story about Easter Island. When Europeans arrived there, they found giant stone carvings of heads. But people lived lives of extreme poverty and violence, often raiding and even eating each other. How could such miserable people have had the knowledge and ability to carve the monoliths? Then the Europeans found the place where the stone was quarried and discovered that the stones had been moved to the sites along the island’s edges on rollers made of trees. The island had once been covered in forest, and at some point, the people must have seen that it was disappearing as it was being overcut. Yet they continued cutting until all the trees were gone, and their way of life disappeared. At least that’s one way people have constructed the story.

  Early people learned through their mistakes that their survival and well-being were utterly dependent on nature. They also came to understand that we are created by Earth’s fundamental elements—earth, air, fire, and water— and therefore that Earth is our mother.

  Over very long periods of time, as people moved to different parts of Earth, they began to recognize that nature was the source of their lives and livelihood and that Earth should be treated with respect and care. This knowledge became the basis of indigenous understanding and cultures, which are the result of hard-earned lessons gained over thousands of years. That is why it is so important to fight to keep those cultures alive. Once they are gone, they will never be reproduced.

  This is not to say that indigenous people are always in balance with nature. But they have a different perspective on our relationship with our surroundings. Thinking of the biosphere as Mother Earth and understanding that we are literally created by her body of air, water, earth, and sunlight is radically different from thinking of the world as a resource; when that happens, Mother Earth becomes a motherlode. And indigenous people have learned this truth by their own acts of extinguishing plants and animals.

  I HAVE TOLD you these stories because they have been an important part of my learning, and I hope they will help you understand your place in the world. Ganhi and Tiis, your Haida father and nannai (grandmother) and chinnai (grandfather) have taught Nana and me a great deal and have already instilled in you that sense of connectedness to place. Tamo, Midori, Jonathan, and Ryo, I hope you have also gained that sense from us.

  {two}

  RACISM

  MY DEAREST GRANDCHILDREN,

  You are growing up in a very different time from when I was a boy. Even though I was a Canadian, born in Canada like my mom and dad, we were suspect because we were of Japanese descent. Equality before the law, freedom of speech and movement, and the right to vote are principles of democracy that you all take for granted, but they did not always apply to everyone. Ganhi and Tiisaan, you know your nannai’s and chinnai’s parents couldn’t vote because they were Haida, and my parents couldn’t either. It’s important to remember that and to understand that today you might not feel discriminated against, but that bigots who hate Muslims, Jews, gays, or any other group because of colour, religion, ethnic group, sexual orientation, or even poverty could just as easily turn against you because they are ignorant and, in their ignorance, are afraid of people who look different or behave differently. We must always stick up for someone who is being picked on because one day it could be our turn, as it already has been.

  It’s funny how when we are kids, we don’t see the differences that adults do. We learn what to fear or hate from our parents or others around us. When I was a boy and we were living in the small town of Leamington, Ontario, a friend and I were playing in an empty lot one day when Dad came by from work on his bike. I yelled to him and he waved back. My friend looked at me wide-eyed. “How do you know him?” he asked.

  I laughed and said, “He’s my dad, dummy!”

  “But he’s a chink!” my friend blurted out.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or to be mad because he had used a racial slur. But I realized that when we played together colour made no difference. Yet he could see racial differences, as he recognized in Dad, and he must have been told something bad about “chinks.” Nana has said that when she was growing up in West Vancouver, she only knew of one family of Chinese people at her school. Yet when it was pointed out that one of her teachers was Chinese, she said, “I didn’t think of him as Chinese; he was just my math teacher.”

  We’re all aware of differences in people, and these differences can run in families. I remember a girl whose red hair was just like her dad’s, and, Ganhi, your dimple is exactly like Nana’s. These are examples of “traits” or “characteristics” that seem to be passed on from one generation to the next.

  You know that as a scientist I studied heredity. In very early times, tens of thousands of years ago, when people lived as nomadic tribal folk, they may have been able to recognize similar physical traits in people from their territory and must have known about similarities that ran in families. But when the Agricultural Revolution occurred about ten thousand years ago, and people realized that seeds could be collected and planted to produce plants that could be eaten or used for some other purpose, farmers began to apply the basic concept that defines genetics: like begets like. That means if you breed the offspring of, say, sheep that have slightly longer hair or plants that grow bigger fruit, chances are they will give rise to longer hair or bigger fruit. That is still a basic principle of genetics today. What is remarkable is that within a few thousand years, those early farmers were able to select most strains of animals and plants in forms that we would recognize today.

  Domestication of plants and animals transformed our way of living. Because people were able to settle down instead of following animals and plants through the seasons, they could now rely on a stable source of food. Settled in one place, people could build permanent homes and villages. And because people now lived together in one place, agriculture ultimately gave rise to complex civilization and cities.

  But the misunderstanding of heredity plagues us to this day. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, people believed that differences in class, wealth, and gender roles were inherited biologically. So an aristocrat or a nobleman would feel justified in considering all of hi
s privileges a “birthright,” sanctioned not only by the law but also by biology. In the same way, the idea that a “woman’s place was in the home” was defended as a reflection of biological difference.

  Modern genetics began as a discipline in 1900, when rules governing heredity that had been defined earlier by a monk named Gregor Mendel were rediscovered. The field exploded as scientists working on heredity in plants and animals made spectacular discoveries that genes are located on chromosomes, that radiation and chemicals induce mutations, that genes determine the production of proteins in the body, and so on. Not surprisingly, but insidiously, scientists began to apply findings from their new field to human behaviour and intelligence. Now scientists began to say that there was a hereditary basis for intellectual differences, criminality, laziness, drunkenness. A whole field arose, called eugenics, which looked at how to improve the hereditary qualities of people and which attracted some of the top scientists of the day. Eugenics courses were taught in universities, and eugenics journals and professional societies were established. At fairs, eugenics booths displayed posters purporting to show through family trees that criminality, poverty, and mental defects were inherited traits, and calling for people with such defects to be sterilized. Not surprisingly, those qualities seen to be desirable and therefore encouraged to be passed on were sobriety, church attendance, diligence, and being educated, traits exhibited by white and upper-middle-class people.

  Laws were passed in North America in response to many of these ideas. Eugenics acts allowed the sterilization of patients in mental institutions to prevent further inheritance of “bad” genes. And in Canada, especially the province of Alberta, those laws were enforced until the mid-twentieth century. In the United States, acts were passed to restrict immigration of people from countries considered “inferior” or “undesirable,” traits that were assumed to be not cultural or social but hereditary. Several states passed laws preventing intermarriage between two people of different racial backgrounds on the assumption that mixing of genes would lead to “disharmonious combinations.” Under such laws, that would have meant that Nana and I and all of your parents would not have been able to marry and none of you would ever have been born! What is ironic is that hybrid corn is the basis of a lot of farming today, a result of the observation that two different highly inbred strains of corn (like different racial or ethnic groups), when interbred, lead to “hybrid vigour,” or “heterosis,” which means that the offspring are much more vigorous in size, health, and survival than either parental strain. And I feel that is true when I see many “hapas,” or offspring of interracial couples.