Our Canada Our Country Our Stories

by Our Canada Magazine a Division of Reader's Digest

  “It’s a type of cookie!” she squeaked.

  A cookie? Again, a few moments elapsed while my niece and I looked at each other and tried to understand the new reality called a bear paw cookie. Once again I started to laugh, as did my niece. We turned to share our delight with our fellow shopper, but the bear-paw-cookie-eater had quietly and speedily disappeared…still, we’re all Canadians, eh?

  —by Karen Taylor, Edmonton, Alberta

  Bilingualism at Its Best

  Learning to speak two languages in one sentence

  I am lucky because my two wonderful grandchildren, Meredith and Benjamin, have always lived next door. They are adults now and have busy lives, but I still see them often. When they were young, they spent a lot of time with me. During our visits together, they often said things I found amusing and, for fun, I started writing about those occurrences.

  Ben, at four years old, was already bilingual, but he used both languages in the same sentence. I really noticed it one day when he was playing at our house, pounding nails in a board with a hammer. He stopped pounding, so I looked to see what he was doing. He was trying to balance the hammer on one finger and, when he saw me watching, he said, “Look, I hold the marteau with one doigt; I gooder than you.” Well, maybe he is “gooder” at balancing his hammer on one finger, but I speak “gooder” English!

  When Meredith was around two-and-a-half years old, it was hard to have a conversation with her. Her parents spoke both English and French to her and at that time, Meredith wasn’t fluent in either language. In fact, when you began your conversation, you first had to try and figure out which language she was using, and then try to determine what she was saying.

  Her other grandmother even gave up for a while. Because she didn’t see Meredith very often, she couldn’t understand her at all and finally declared, “It sounds as if that child is speaking Japanese!”

  Just a few examples: “I going out dehors.” That one isn’t too hard to figure out. Then, “Je veux un Ralph.” That one means “I want a dog.” My sister’s dog was named Ralph and Meredith loved him.

  My daughter-in-law suggested to Meredith she call her grandfather Pop, but she couldn’t get it right and it somehow became “Putt.” She called her little brother Ben “DoDo,” because when he was a baby everybody was always telling her, “Il fait dodo.” If you wanted to know if she would like to go swimming, you asked her if she wanted to “Go boom dans l’eau.” That one is too complicated to explain!

  Finally, the day I found myself telling her, “Don’t put that in your bouche because it is sale,” I decided that, after all these many years of struggle, thanks to Meredith, I was finally bilingual. Hurrah!

  —by Dorothy Hannah, Lacolle, Quebec

  Boot Camp, Indigenous-Style

  The ancient Indigenous art of mukluk-making brings cultures together at the “Storyboot School” in Toronto

  As thousands of Canadians slept in on their day off, or headed to brunch with family and friends, a group of people came together on a Sunday for the Manitobah Mukluks Storyboot School at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto to embark on a project: the wonderful yet complicated task of creating traditional Indigenous mukluks. This may seem like simply an art class full of crafty people to many, but for this Indigenous woman, it means so much more.

  Recently, there has been so much incredible work done around the concept of reconciliation. For many people, Canadian and Indigenous, this word seems like a light of hope at the end of a long, dark tunnel. However, if you sit down and ask someone what reconciliation means to them on a personal or practical level, the answer is often, “I have no idea.” It is a concept that is attractive and fills Canadians with a warm, hopeful glow, but it is often difficult to translate into meaningful action.

  As an Indigenous person, I have asked myself this question many times. I don’t claim to be any great political thinker; however, I am well aware that I am a political being. Most Indigenous people are—we have to be. Our country’s history, one of political and cultural interaction, has been tumultuous, to say the least. At the core of this broken relationship was lack of respect, understanding and compassion by the mainstream society towards the Indigenous nations. As an Indigenous person, I can only speak to how this relationship affected Indigenous peoples. Our nations have been impacted at every level: socially, culturally and politically. We’ve been devastated by the impact and legacy of governmental policies that sought to eradicate who we were. We are still reeling from this today.

  However, there is hope. Today there is a new generation of people who optimistically seek an equal, socially just and stronger Canada. The question remains, though: How do we do this on a foundation with such enormous cracks? How can we reconcile? How can one person embrace reconciliation?

  In the words of hereditary Chief Dr. Robert Joseph of the Gwawaenuk First Nation, “Reconciliation has to begin as an inside job,” meaning you have to start within you. In your heart and spirit, you have to commit to making change at a personal level.

  At the Manitobah Mukluks Storyboot School, 18 youths came together to do just that. This group of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people got to work on this “inside job.” Whether they know it or not, they staked a claim on reconciliation through the act of cultural revitalization.

  How is mukluk-making considered reconciliation? I grew up seeing groups of people beading and actively carrying on cultural practices. It would often be around a kitchen table, and there would be tea and gossip and lots of laughs. Through this shared action with my family and friends, we would strengthen our cultural and family ties, as well as share our expertise with one another. This is passed down through generations of Indigenous peoples. This is how we survived and flourished.

  For this course, the Bata Shoe Museum, with the generous backing of the TreadRight Foundation, provided guidance with their expertise in sustainability (in particular their support of local artisan activities), hosted students from all walks of life and enabled them to sit down together around a table. They shared a journey. They helped to claw back some of what was lost. They helped to renew a relationship in a very positive way. They shared their personal histories and cultural stories.

  In the end, more people know the beautiful art of mukluk-making, and can pass this knowledge on. They learned how hard and time-consuming it is, and developed a hands-on understanding of what generations of Indigenous peoples made to keep their families warm in the winter. They will be proud of their hard work and share in this personal accomplishment with their peers.

  Most of all, the reconciliation (through mukluk-making) was done together. It will strengthen the ties between our past, our present and our shared future.

  —by Waneek Horn Miller, Ottawa, Ontario

  Heart to Spirit to Hand

  From the internal creative process to the creation itself, art is an extension of healing and community-building

  I was born in Manitoba of Santee Oglala Sioux parents. I spent my early childhood on my mother’s reserve but at the age of six was forced to attend an Indian residential school. I continue to be active in presenting this terrible history to students throughout Canada.

  In 1964, I moved to Ontario, where I settled into a career as a legal secretary. I was encouraged by those I worked with to consider taking up law myself. They saw my passion and that I cared about the values of justice and fairness, but after several years in that setting, I realized that the legal system was still a broken thing, in particular in the way it addresses my people’s needs and values. Had I stayed in that setting, I knew it would end up making me bitter and angry, which are not what I knew we needed to make the changes my people, and all of the communities we live in, need.

  During my time with lawyers, I was asked to take on running a Native Friendship Centre in Cochrane, Ontario. While the Friendship Centres had been established to provide safe places for First Nations peoples, I quickly realized that they had become crisis intervention centres, though without
the tools needed to address those crises. Working with the Cree of Northern Ontario, I began to see a direction in my life towards community engagement and healing. It was art, however, that would bring that direction into focus.

  Since I was a child, I have drawn from my imagination and from the world. Like breathing itself, perhaps, I would cover whatever spare paper I could find with images and visual stories. Heart to spirit to hand, this just came naturally to me. The drawings were how I would see the world around me, a way of speaking to that world, and slowly over subsequent years, a way of speaking about it.

  A chance encounter with internationally-celebrated playwright Tomson Highway while working in Cochrane, where he admired some of my paintings that I hung on my office wall, brought me back to Toronto, where I took on a position with the Ontario Native Council on Justice, addressing the needs of First Nations inmates in and out of Ontario prisons and jails.

  The work, after being specifically approved for the position by the Native Sons group at the Guelph Correctional Centre (formerly known as the Ontario Reformatory Guelph), involved doing research and interviewing First Nations inmates and former inmates throughout Ontario, in detention centres and prisons, in district jails, community resource centres, and even at a logging camp back out in the bush. The project was part of what is still an ongoing process of addressing the destructive relationship between First Nations communities and the criminal justice system.

  This work began to sharpen my sense of purpose as a First Nations woman, residential school survivor, and slowly, as an artist. I began working with established artists, developing and refining my skills and my vision, always with a clear sense that whatever the work I was doing, it was about building a healing community for my peoples and all the communities they belong to.

  In March of 1980, I had my first solo exhibition, at the Thompson Gallery in Toronto. Since then I have exhibited throughout Canada and the United States. My work is visionary in its embrace of resilience, cooperation, and a deep commitment to the spirit and history of my people and of all peoples. But it has not been art alone that has sustained me and guided my work. Art has been a tool for a broader and deeper engagement with the issues most pressing for all of us.

  In 1985 with Mohawk composer John Kim Bell, we created the Canadian Native Arts Foundation, later the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation. It began with a focus on the arts in First Nations communities, but over time the foundation expanded the scope of its support to acknowledge the achievements and the struggles of First Nations communities in a widening range of fields of accomplishment.

  The foundation honoured elders for their lifetime of achievement and encouraged and supported First Nations youth as they set out on their own challenging roads to learn their own stories and develop the skills to tell new ones. I continued my work with the foundation for 20 years, before passing leadership on to a new generation. That commitment to speaking across and supporting generations in collaboration with each other has been a key part of my life since stepping down from the foundation.

  While continuing as an artist, I have dedicated my time, energy, and resources to working with children not only in First Nations communities but throughout Ontario. I speak to classes of high school students, encouraging them in their visions and their education. I share my stories and my encouragement with young First Nations artists and entrepreneurs, as well as with community groups working on building strong and resilient futures.

  I have lent my voice and my art to projects to improve the health and well-being of First Nations women and girls, whether in projects related to maternal and infant health, or most recently, in a collaboration with the Native Women’s Association of Canada in their work to raise awareness of the brutal dangers facing First Nations women. I continue to seek new challenges and opportunities to present my work as witness to the power of reconciliation.

  —by Maxine Noel, Stratford, Ontario

  Harmonizing Cultures

  A meeting of two generations, music genres and cultures

  After presenting a paper at the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education conference in Montreal several years ago, I decided to explore the city. Having heard so much about the charm of Old Montreal and the splendour of the St. Lawrence River, I couldn’t wait to begin sightseeing and feast my eyes. I needed to feel the rhythm of the city.

  I went to the shopping district along Ste-Catherine Street and, as I browsed for shoes for my son, I heard a familiar Bob Marley song. When I looked up, I saw a Rastafarian man (rasta) across the way, strumming his guitar and belting out “Don’t worry ’bout a ting, ’cos every likkle ting’s gonna be all right…” I smiled and swayed to the beat of the music.

  A salesman approached me and, in his Haitian accent, asked where I was from. I answered, “Originally from Jamaica, but I’m Canadian.” After he tried out a few Jamaican expressions with me, I said goodbye and went across the street to enjoy the rasta’s Bob Marley renditions. By then, a French-Canadian youth had joined him and was rapping during the pauses. It was an amazing mix of reggae and rap. Both men represented different generations and genres. They had just met for the first time and the music was the glue. It was like being at a street party.

  After about three more songs, the impromptu concert ended, and the Canadian youth thanked the rasta for allowing him to sing along. As I dropped a tip in his pan, he said, “Irie. T’ank yu, dawta!” Ah! An authentic Jamaican accent. What serendipity! I thought. “You Jamaican?” I asked. He said yes and then invited me to different upcoming Caribbean events in Montreal.

  Before we said goodbye, I asked him if he liked living here. He said, “Yeah, man. Canada nice!” I realized we had two things in common. We were both immigrants from Jamaica and we both loved Canada. I walked away feeling delighted to have met a countryman and wondering what his story was. Did he even speak French? How did he get to Canada? I began thinking about the numerous immigrants I’ve met since I’ve lived in Vancouver and visited other cities for conference presentations. Some came to Canada for financial opportunities, while others came to get away from harsh dictators. Everyone has a different story, but the common thread is a better life.

  I came here with my husband and two young sons 11 years ago because I wanted to be free and safe. That was how I felt walking around in Montreal: free and safe.

  Seeing the rastaman reminded me that Canada truly is like a smorgasbord, rich with diverse cultures. Watching him and the French Canadian underscored one of the benefits of living in Canada: meeting and sharing with people from different cultures. I’ve met so many people from different backgrounds since I’ve lived here; learning about their different cultures has been enriching and rewarding.

  I walked away feeling fortunate and proud to have been given the opportunity to be a Canadian. After all, as the rasta said, “Yeah, man. Canada nice!”

  —by Tanya Haye, North Vancouver, British Columbia

  Conserving Canada’s Wild Species

  Studying, understanding and fighting for the protection of Canadian plants and wildlife

  There is little I value more than the beauty of the nature that blesses Canada—especially the slice of heaven on the edge of the Canadian Shield in Lanark County, Ontario, where I am grateful to live. From the log house on 17 acres that my wife Mary Lou Carroll and I inhabit, I relish daily gifts such as melodious songbirds and peeping frogs in spring; tail-slapping beavers, sun-soaking turtles and yodelling loons in summer; flaming maples, ashes and aspens in autumn; and deer, coyote and fox tracks in winter.

  Thrilling me with their magic and infusing me with joy, wild species are essential to my happiness. No wonder, then, that I count myself among the half of adult Canadians who, according to a 2012 survey, have chosen to live where we do in part to be close to nature.

  However, as I enjoy our land and other wild parts of Canada, I am saddened by the fraying of our country’s natural heritage. A report I recently co-wrote for the national charity
NatureServe Canada, and supported by some of Canada’s most accomplished biologists, documents 381 species and 188 subspecies that are at risk of being lost forever to extinction. These include flowers, ferns, beetles and butterflies, as well as dragonflies, fish, turtles and snakes. The list also includes songbirds, seabirds, bats, seals, whales and more. Two hundred and thirteen of these animals, plants and lichens are found only in the “True North strong and free,” meaning that Canada alone has responsibility for their fate.

  Since 1844, at least 16 animals and plants formerly of Canada have gone extinct, from the famous passenger pigeon to the virtually unknown Macoun’s shining moss. Biologists cannot yet be certain, but other flora and fauna may be extinct as well due to human activity. For example, the Vancouver Island blue, a butterfly known only on the island, has not been observed since 1979. Honey-flowered Solomon’s seal, a plant known only from a few sites in Ontario and Michigan, has not been seen since 1937.

  Many of Canada’s species and subspecies at risk have highly restricted ranges. Kluane draba, for example, is a flower whose worldwide population exists entirely within Kluane National Park and Reserve in the Yukon. False northwestern moonwort is a fern-like plant known only from a few locations along the north shore of Lake Superior. The Ungava seal, uniquely living year-round in freshwater, dwells within a handful of lakes in northern Quebec. They, along with 108 other animals, plants and lichens are “critically imperiled” across their global distribution—perilously close to extinction.

  Some other species and subspecies at risk have very wide ranges. Among them are the ghost tiger beetle, known from five provinces and 36 American states; piping plover, a shorebird known from nine provinces and 38 states; and the hoary bat and silver-haired bat, both known from nine provinces and all 50 states. Despite such breadth of geography, each of these is now globally vulnerable to extinction.