Author Archives: gus

Beautiful Book, Beautiful Pages

Journey With No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page
By Sandra Djwa, McGill-Queens University Press
322 pages (398 including notes).

Reviewed by Arleen Pare

I admire biographers. Biography is a daring, sometimes dangerous genre, requiring time-consuming, research and a finely-tuned sense of diplomacy vis a vis informants, including the subject — in this case Victoria’s illustrious poet and artist, P.K. Page. These qualities of stamina and tact are clearly evident in Sandra Djwa’s Journey with No Maps: A Biography of PK Page. The research is impeccable, the life details, sharp and clear, and the text is always respectful.

This is a beautiful book about a beautiful woman who lived a (largely) beautiful life. The glossy dust-jacket displays a detail of Britten Miller’s gorgeous portrait of the young P.K. Page: she’s wearing her signature red lipstick, her half-face serious against a turquoise sky background. I could hardly get beyond the cover.

Journey is the public version of an artist’s life lived very much in the public eye, both in terms of her role as an icon of the twentieth-century Canadian literary establishment, and her role as the wife of prominent Canadian diplomat, Arthur Irwin. Page broke literary ground. She became a respected woman poet early in the century, when poetry was a hard (male) club to break in to. She appears to be in control of her public image and, despite her death in 2009, PK seems still to have been in control in this admirable accounting of her life. No skeletons, no dirty laundry. Djwa’s writing is scholarly, but refreshingly accessible, and her research is meticulous. There are over fifty pages of endnotes, over ten pages of bibliography and a useful index of thirty pages. The many personal details Djwa has chosen to include are charmingly enhanced by numerous quotes from Page’s own journals, letters and poetry. PK Page kept almost everything, it would appear, and so her life, told chronologically, unfolds in a convincing manner. Very little detail is missing. But the essential, if I may use that term, Pat Page remains elusive. For some reason, I was not able to develop a clear picture of her emotional life. I read about her family background, her interest in Jung, in Sufi philosophy, her passion for words and for paint, her good looks, charm, friendliness, even about her periodic black depressions, but I was not able to develop an emotional sense of her.

Nevertheless, her biography is a major contribution to the study of literature and visual arts in Canada. It reveals that Page actually studied how to live the artistic life as a woman by applying the ideas from Virginia Wolfe’s Room of One’s Own. Page made significant inroads into the male poetry establishment and influenced and mentored many younger, now renowned, poets. P.K. is now considered an important twentieth-century figure. As a diplomat’s wife she also made many international art and literary contacts and won enormous acclaim and countless awards for her visual art as well as for her writing. Her art was shown in numerous galleries and in universities. Toward the end of her life, P.K. Page was named Companion to the Order of Canada in recognition of her life’s work. Journey is a must read for anyone interested in poetry, art, or women in Canada – or, of course, in P.K. Page.

Arleen Pare has an MFA in writing and many pages of her own work published

Long-Term Thinking with Technologies: A Panel Featuring George Dyson

WHEN: 9:30 – 11 am, Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2012

WHERE: Harry Hickman 110

PANELISTS:

* Barbara Bordalejo, Department of English, University of Saskatchewan

* Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, Department of Anthropology

* Jeffrey Foss, Department of Philosophy

* David Leach, Department of Writing

* Jentery Sayers, Department of English

* Victoria Wyatt, History in Art

Littlechild’s work vibrantly political

George Littlechild: The Spirit Giggles Within
By George Littlechild
Heritage House, 176 pages, $59.95

Review by Candace Fertile

Just in time for Christmas giving (or maybe even for keeping and sharing), George Littlechild: The Spirit Giggles Within is a stunning art book with commentary by the artist on each of the more than 150 pieces contained within the covers. Littlechild’s brief explanations of his art focus on his personal history as a Plains Cree man who discovered at the age of 17 that his father was white.

Littlechild laments the loss of parents and the chance to grow up in the Cree culture. His mother, Rachel Littlechild, was forced into a residential school; her son George was part of the “Sixties Scoop” when many aboriginal children were fostered or adopted by white families. Littlechild is grateful that he had loving foster parents who encouraged both his exploration of his cultural background and his artistic talent. But the discovery of his true biological parentage sent him on a search for his family. Fortunately he has found an extensive and welcoming community of relations who have helped him gain insight to his parents and himself.

Littlechild selected the work in this book, and it gives an overview of his career and his personal life. They are inextricably intertwined. And while giggling isn’t a huge part of aboriginal history in Canada after the arrival of Europeans, Littlechild prefers to deal with the wonder of life rather than the tragedies of his people. He certainly does not avoid the brutal treatment his people faced, but he tends to celebrate the courage, perseverance, and beauty of his people while educating readers in a gentle direct way about the past.

Littlechild’s artwork is political in that regard. And many of the pieces, whether paintings or mixed-media works incorporating family photographs, are portraits. Perhaps the most emphatic aspect of Littlechild’s work is its vibrancy. Images spring off the page in a fabulous concoction of colour. Reds, pinks, and purples predominate. The images, which often have black in them, are placed on a black background to punch up their effect.

The pictures can appear deceptively simple, but time spent looking at them and then reading the brief commentary opens up the richness that is Littlechild’s synthesis of imagination and reality. Horses are a key feature, as are stars. The more recent artworks incorporate elements of west coast aboriginal art (Littlechild has lived on the west coast since 1990 and currently lives in Comox).

The reproductions cannot possibly capture the vibrancy of the originals, but Littlechild himself points to the importance of access to art when he says in the commentary to Even Mrs. Horsechild Gets the Blues that he was fascinated by his foster brother’s art books and was particularly entranced by Egyptian imagery, a transformative imagery which he uses in his works. Mrs. Horsechild has a human body and a horse’s head.

It’s obvious I’m a fan of Littlechild’s work, and I have been since seeing his work in the 1980s at Asum Mena (the Alberta Native art show) in Edmonton. I feel a personal affinity for Littlechild’s work as Cree blood flows from my maternal ancestors. And his vivid colours affirm life, even when depicting sadness and misunderstanding as in Red Horse in a Sea of White Horses.

The message of Littlechild’s work is optimistic. He believes that through education people can move away from racism and other form of prejudice such as denigrating women or homosexuals. He believes that art is important. As he says in his introduction, “In my work, I am committed to righting the wrongs that First Nations peoples have endured by creating art that focusses on cultural, social, and political injustices. As an artist, an educator, and a cultural worker, my goal is a better world.” This book demonstrates Littlechild’s determination. It’s a visual feast — a treat both for newcomers and those already aware of his concerns.

Candace Fertile still has a Littlechild poster from one of the Asum Mena shows years ago.

 

The essential, inconvenient book for all Canadians

Author Thomas King drew a huge crowd to First Peoples House November 16, 2012, when he visited Victoria to promote his new book, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (Doubleday, 270 pages, $34.95). “When we look at Native-non-native relations, there is no great difference between the past and the present,” King observes in his witty but serious way. Taiaiake Alfred, professor of Indigenous governance and political science at UVic, interviewed King about his new book, which is essential reading for Canadians of all colours and stripes.

The Inconvenient Indian delivers some hard truths and has a real edge to it. It seems, to me anyway, like a shift from the approach you’re known for, softening the blow using irony and humour. Are you getting bolder as you go along, or maybe angrier?

I’m too old for that now. I was a pretty noisy activist in the 60s and the 70s. I’d yell and scream and jump up and down. But I discovered that doing that, I was entertainment. I wasn’t having much of an impact . . . White organizations would invite me in and I would give them hell. They would all clap at the end. They enjoyed it, and I would go away. Besides, it just scared the shit out of me when someone did point a gun in my face. There were other guys who were a lot braver than I was. I just decided at some point that I had writing skills that I could use, and that’s what I was going to do. I’m not going to try and be something I am not. I just said. “This is who I am,” and if somebody doesn’t like it, well, I can’t do much about it. I discovered that humour and satire were much better weapons. As I’ve gotten older, I’m still using those narrative tools because I think they are very effective. But it hasn’t taken the edge off of my anger because I’ve lived long enough to see the same kind of shit just come around again and again and again. And people keep saying that things are getting better. If they are getting better, why are Native people still defending their land base? If things are getting better, why do we still have to justify our existence? Why do we have to keep telling non-native North America that treaty rights were not given to us like loot bags at a movie gala? So yeah, I still get pretty hot. But this book was my only kick at the can of non-fiction. I’ve gotten older so I can’t move quite as fast as I used to and I can’t write another one.

Is there a moment in your life you can point to that made you most angry in understanding our collective oppression as Indigenous people?

It was a whole bunch of little cuts and a couple of big whacks. I’ll tell you one thing that got me. There was a photographer out of Utah who had done a book on Native sacred places. He went around and photographed sacred places and what they look like now. One sacred place now has a Wal-Mart on it. Another sacred place is all paved over for basketball courts, stuff like that. I’m a photographer too, and I’d been going around taking portraits of Native artists in North America and so I saw his book and liked it. I wrote him and said, “Do you want to trade a couple of photographs?” He said, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll do that” because he’d seen my work. And so I got one photo from him of tombstones at the Carlisle Indian School, gravestones of kids who died there. I remember getting it in the mail, opening it up and framing it. It’s on the wall at my house right now. Just looking at that, you know, I’m reminded of all the kids who died in residential schools. I say in the book that [Whites] knew at the time there were problems with the residential schools, but they were betting that something good would come out of it. The only thing was, they could make that bet easily enough, because they weren’t betting with their money, they weren’t betting with their community, they weren’t betting with their kids. I think that really sort of summed it up for me, the residential school experience: “If we’re wrong, so what? It’s just, you know, it’s just Indians.”

Dead Dog Café, the iconic CBC radio show you wrote and performed in, was beloved by millions of people and influential in shaping the way people thought of Indigenous people. But things have changed since that show was on the air. Indigenous people are doing social commentary and comedy, not only on the radio but using social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and podcasting. What do you make of this change in the media landscape and the opportunities or challenges it presents for writers?

I’m so technologically ignorant; I don’t know where YouTube or tweeter … twitter … twitter. I couldn’t find my butt with a board along the Internet . . . So I don’t know who’s doing what. It’s not me . . . . I could have written this book and just put it on line. But I’m an old fart and I like looking at a book. When Dead Dog was on, CBC wasn’t looking at any of the other shows. They had their “Indian” show. That’s unfortunate. I’d like them to have said, “Dead Dog Café was a success. Let’s do some other shows with Indians at the same time.” But they didn’t do it because of course you got your Big Indian on Campus and once you have one, you don’t need any others . . . . my sense of humour when I was 25, 35, 40 years old was pretty stupid. It wasn’t Dead Dog humour. But when I got up into my 50s and my 60s, I think I started to refine that. Sometimes I think you just need some age behind you to do certain things. And it may be that Dead Dog was successful because I was old enough to pay attention to what I was doing, rather than just go for the funny laugh. I mean the one segment I always liked was, 10 Reasons Why It’s Good to Have Indians in Canada, and the first reason was because they gave the RCMP live targets to practice on. I thought for sure the lawyers would shut that down and they didn’t. So it told me right there that I could come really close to the edge. I could really push this thing on CBC as far as I wanted to. So we did.

What’s it like being a perpetual exmatriate living away from your homeland? How do you maintain your connection to your Cherokee heritage and nationality?

That’s a tough one for me because I was born and raised on the West Coast. My father is Cherokee. He came out to the West Coast during [the Second World War] and met my mother. My mother is Greek. My father took off when I was about three years old, just after my younger brother was born. We never saw him again. So that part of the family, we know part of the history on it and other parts of the history we don’t know . . . . it really is almost impossible. For one thing, I don’t have the “Cherokee by blood” card, and there is little chance that I will ever be able to get it. I have been back to Oklahoma a number of times, checking in with relatives. But being raised on the West Coast and not being raised within the Nation, it’s tough. So what I’ve decided is that I’m a sort of nomadic Cherokee, if you will. Like a turtle. I just carry myself and the culture and everything else that I have been able to pull together around with me like a turtle does. As a matter of fact, on my jacket lapel, I always wear this turtle pin just to remind myself that it’s okay.

I think that your book Truth and Bright Water truly captures what it is like to live on an Indian reserve, and to be a First Nations person confronting the realities of our colonized existence. Soldier, the rez dog, as a character, the lost White girl looking for her duck, the pathetically beautiful imagery of Tecumseh and Swimmer bringing the buffalo back to the prairie, I loved it. That book was published in 2000. What book is yet to be written about Native American life and who do you think is going to write it? Better yet, who should write it?

Oh boy! I should of course. Well, oddly enough I’m working on a book right now called The Back of the Turtle. And what I’ve decided to do is take the stories that have literally fallen from the sky, the Creation story. I’m trying to craft a story that talks about the contemporary world in which we live, Native and non-natives, but using a Native narrative strategy, not something like Green Grass, Running Water. I mean, Green Grass was serious but this is a more serious piece, a more satiric piece. I love satire; I think it moves people a lot more than anything else does. It’s a great weapon. I don’t know if that’s the kind of book that still needs to be written. It’s the kind of book that I need to write. And I think that’s what you’re going to find. You’re going to find Native writers who, as they move along, say Sherman Alexie, as he moves along, and Louise Erdrich, as she moves along, maybe deciding that as they get older there’s one book that they have to write. I think you’ll find it coming from one of the older writers, only because we can’t fool around with just knocking out books. There are some writers who just pump them out as fast as they can because they’ve got to pay the rent. At this point, I don’t have to pay the rent like that. I could take my time. Louise could take her time. Sherman could probably afford to take his time. I don’t know where it’s going to come from. I don’t even know what it’s going to look like. I do know that Truth and Bright Water is my favourite novel that I have written. Oddly enough, it got the least amount of play. I think it’s because people have decided that Green Grass, Running Water was my masterwork, so now they can leave me alone and find somebody else. Writing’s a funny business. The Inconvenient Indian was six years in coming. And in the meantime, I sort of lost my place in the great mandala. So now I’m happy it’s out there. But all that means is now the clock is ticking on the next one.

Taiaiake Alfred is working on a memoir about his father and Mohawk ironworkers.

 

Three Good Reasons . . .

At The Mike in conversation with John Vigna, Lee Henderson, and John Gould.

Tuesday, November 27
7:00 PM
Cadboro Bay Books
3840B Cadboro Bay Road
Victoria, BC

John Vigna’s debut story collection, Bull Head, has been described as “the arrival of an important new voice in Canadian fiction: tough, supple, tender, and resonant.” John is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of British Columbia and an alumnus of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines, and anthologies, including Cabin Fever: The Best New Canadian Non-Fiction, The Dalhousie Review, Grain, Event, sub-Terrain, and The Antigonish Review. Please visit www.johnvignaink.ca.

Lee Henderson is the author of two award-winning books — the story collection The Broken Record Technique and the novel The Man Game, which won the BC Book Prize and the Vancouver Book Prize in 2009. Lee’s fiction and art writing are regularly published in The Walrus and Border Crossings magazine, and other short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and journals. Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. Please visit www.leehenderson.com.

John Gould is the author of two books of short stories — including Kilter, a finalist for the Giller prize—and the novel Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good, described by the Vancouver Sun as “a marvel of delicacy, depth, and insight . . . a damn-near perfect book.” His fiction has appeared in literary periodicals across the country and has been adapted for short films. John teaches writing workshops at the University of Victoria and elsewhere, and serves on the editorial board of the Malahat Review. Please visit www.johngould.ca.

Drop by for an evening packed with great stories and conversation. Everyone welcome. Free admission.
http://www.facebook.com/events/455384611164141/

For more information, contact Cadboro Bay Books at 250-477-1421 or Brindle & Glass at info@brindleandglass.com.

Cage teaches us how to inhabit our world

Cage 100 Festival
Victoria Symphony Orchestra
Tania Miller, conductor
Tzenka Dianova, piano
Rick Sacks, percussion
Alix Goolden Hall
Saturday, November 17, 2012

Reviewed by Jennifer Messelink
Sit. Breathe. Listen.

When was the last time you sat in intentional silence with a hundred people, including an orchestra? The Victoria Symphony, directed by Tania Miller, gave us the opportunity on Saturday night at Alex Goolden Hall, performing works by Charles Ives, John Cage and the world premier performance of Rick Sacks’ Water Music. Victoria is host to The Cage 100 Festival. Curated by UVIC professor of composition Christopher Butterfield, the festival celebrates the centennial birth of American composer John Cage, his influences, and his lasting legacy.

The program began with three works by Charles Ives: Tone Roads No. 1 and No. 3 and The Unanswered Question. Charles Ives was a significant influence on John Cage; both composers used music in new forms, often employing elements of chance and non-traditional techniques. The Unanswered Question is an early example of aleatoric music, or music composed by the principles of chance operations. The work is a collage of three elements, the strings and solo trumpet in the distance off stage, and the woodwinds on stage. The dialogue is notated, but still allows for improvisation through the exchange between the groups. Director Tania Miller commented that, “for music over one hundred years old, Ives’ ideas of polytonality are still fresh, and taking us in new directions. We don’t need to follow tonality, we can go in many directions and at the end come together.”

The Victoria Symphony skillfully presented the tension of Ives’s dissonant chords and extreme dynamics, under layers of familiar tunes of another time. It was a pleasure to hear this music in a live performance.

No John Cage festival would be complete without his most famous, and most notorious work: 4’33”. We live in a world of constant background noise, people talking endlessly on cell phones, the blare of radio and commercials in most public spaces. To sit in silence in a concert hall feels, perhaps more radical now than ever. The ritual of preparation for the performance was usual, but there was noticeable anticipation in the air. The entire orchestra arrived onstage, tuned their instruments and . . . silence. Sitting quietly, one becomes acutely aware of the ambient noises: a car passing outside, whispering in the distance, chairs creaking, shifting, a cough. Applause.

The music of both Ives and Cage is extremely visual, and elements of both could be heard in Rick Sacks’s world premiere of Water Music. Familiar melodies layered on each other, a march and fanfare, and a large percussion section made this work thick with textures and bright sonorities. This work was also visual like Cage and Ives, but in a more direct way. As the work began, a large clown fish and a huge shark floated above the stage and through the audience. It was a fun and effective visual tool, but I found the handlers with their remote controls chasing the watery creatures throughout the hall more than a little distracting.

After Cage’s The Seasons came his Concerto for Prepared Piano, performed by Tzenka Dianova. John Cage experimented with prepared piano to the extent that it became otherworldly, a totally different instrument. The effect is extraordinary when experienced live. When Dianova played a chord, what was expected was not what was heard. The orchestra played with style, very little vibrato and open, bright sonorities. The Concerto for Prepared Piano was written in traditional form, but the effect is distorted yet absolutely beautiful.

Charles Ives and John Cage were revolutionary, both in their compositions and philosophy. The Victoria Symphony handled a challenging, and unusual program, and made it remarkably accessible. John Cage believed life itself can be art, but instead of creating it, we would be altered by it. Let us raise a toast to the centennial birth of John Cage, and to our continued awareness of our place on the canvas.

Jennifer Messelink is a music lover who’s not afraid of silence

 

 

 

Local documentary hits Vision TV

Over the past year, local filmmakers and writers David Springbett and Brian Paisley have been obsessed with the “what if” while preparing their new documentary Apocalypse . . . When, which debuts Nov. 19 on Vision TV. The five-part series explores the origins, implications, repercussions and psychology behind “doomsday” thinking. Lynne Van Luven talked on email with the pair, to find out what they discovered.

1. David, as far as I know, you’re not an “apocalypticism” proponent, what was the precipitating event or idea that got this series started?

I’d just finished a book called Future Babble – about why we continue to trust experts, even though they’re wrong more often than not. Add to that a conversation (OKAY, it was in a pub) about 2012, and Doomsday Scenarios in general, and it all just came together.

2. Brian, what drew you into the project?

The opportunity to dig around a popular myth and expose and explore its foundations. The fact that Doomsday predictions continue to enthrall us despite every previous one being an utter and undeniable failure suggests deeper human concerns and motivations…

3. What was the most interesting thing each of you learned in the making of the series?

BP: That our fascination with apocalyptic thinking extends far beyond simple End Days’ predictions and actually influences how we look at our world and deal with it on a day-to-day basis.

DS: Beyond the big picture of Apocalyptic ideas influencing our culture, a number of our interviews led us in directions we hadn’t previously considered. The siege at Waco, TX, for example, could have been avoided had the ATF and FBI understood the apocalyptic mindset of Koresh and his followers. One of the most interesting interviews was with Marcelo Gleiser, an astronomer and physicist, who connected early culture’s relationship with the heavens to such recent events as the Heaven’s Gate cult in the 1980s.

4. Do you have any fears that just by showing Apocalypse . . . When? Vison — and thus you two — might be setting off a whole aftershock of new Doomsday thinking?

BP: Positive aftershocks – yes!. If you watch the show from start to finish, you’ll be thinking and talking about the way we look at our world, and perhaps what we should be doing to ensure we never usher in a human-made Doomsday.

DS: If we can stimulate new Doomsday thinking that includes our potential for a self-created Apocalypse — we’ve done our job !

5. Your key question, “What happens when nothing happens?” is intriguing. What answer have you come to in the “aftermath” of all your research, writing and filming?

BP: What happens is, people keep believing. Despite all the historical evidence, every experience telling us the human race is still alive and kicking, and the blatant fact the sun just rose on another day, true believers will find a way to rationalize their beliefs and continue to follow their prophetic fixations – “It might not have happened this time, but wait, it will – and very soon!”. There’s even a name for that kind of antithetical persistence: cognitive dissonance – our ability to hold two obviously contradictory points-of-view at the same time. Fascinating!

www.apoclaypsewhentvseries.com

“Apocalypse. . . When?” coming soon to VisionTV, 8 p.m. Nov. 19 to 23

Three Gods Walk into An Alley . . .

The Good Person of Setzuan
By Bertolt Brecht
Directed by Conrad Alexandrowicz
Set by Simon Farrow
Costumes by Kat Jeffrey

The Phoenix Theatre

Reviewed by Leah Callen

Imagine three gods touring Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, instructing the locals on the path to Enlightenment. In Bertolt Brecht’s play, three aspects of Buddha find no room at any inn in impoverished Setzuan. When Shen Te, a streetwalker who can’t say no, shelters them for the night, they bless her with a financial windfall. However, this gift from the gods unleashes a wealth of suffering when the commandment to do good splits her like lightning.

Now two-faced, her male alter ego, Shui Ta, sells opium secretly in the tobacco shop. Veronique Piercy’s masculine strut as Shui Ta made me crack up. It was terrific. Shen Te also falls for a pilot, Yang Sun, who is equal parts charisma and con with no real desire for a woman to co-pilot his life. Alex Frankson was gutsy in this role; Veronique reacted with the pitiable vulnerability of women who love the wrong men. As this falling angel struggles to protect both her pocketbook and her heart in a corrupt city, we wonder can one pray and also prosper?

The costumes add a rich dimension to this production. Each character bears a corporate logo from Starbucks to Playboy to Enbridge. The only exception is kind-hearted Shen Te who wears a charity logo: the World Wildlife Fund panda. The gods wear prayer beads and backpacks patched with oms and peace signs. Watching the Enlightened Ones wander uncomfortably through the garbage strewn streets in the Water Seller’s dreams was fabulously ironic. Their statue-like headwear gave the actors an otherworldly, idolatrous aura.

After slumming it among mortals, they too move from the mystical to material. I’ll never look at Facebook the same way again. This twist was a clever spin on what could have been clichéd: a prostitute with a heart of gold or bashing religion for every evil under the sun.

The cast was an amusing, vivacious ensemble. Characters broke out into song unexpectedly which gave relief like a water bottle on a hot day. There were some striking, surreal moments as characters literally fell for opium and workers were cut down like trees. I loved how Derek Wallis as Shu Fu gestured and spoke with choreographed precision as his mind calculates. I was torn about Brecht’s ending — which was both cheeky and frustrating. It struck me as more of a punchline to a “three gods walk into an alley” joke than a philosophical finale. I didn’t know whether to laugh or gasp.

No one in this story wants to see the truth except for our heroine whose heart breaks because of it. Even the gods turn blind third eyes to injustice. Watching this play, I stepped into Shen Te’s shoes before a mirror and asked myself: How good am I?

The show runs until Saturday, November, 24.

Leah Callen is an aspiring poet-playwright-screenwriter studying at the University of Victoria.

Savage confronts prairie’s sad forgetting

 

A Geography of Blood:
Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape
By Candace Savage
Greystone/David Suzuki Foundation, 214 pages, $26.95

Reviewed by Lynne Van Luven

It’s both gratifying and unnerving to read a book that simultaneously challenges and affirms one’s own struggle with Western Canadian history. Candace Savage’s A Geography of Blood is such a book. And I’m not the only one to think so: two days after I finished reading it, and was ruminating on this review, Savage won the $60,000 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize. Ironically, the winner is yet another of those titles created by Greystone Books, an imprint of the backruptcy-ridden Douglas and McIntyre. (Sad proof that publishing good, relevant books is not enough in today’s beset publishing world?)

Savage obviously put her entire heart, soul and intellect into A Geography of Blood: it’s a personal, thoughtful and sternly researched piece of writing in which the author confronts the literally buried history surrounding the small (population 600) Saskatchewan town of Eastend, where she and her partner have bought a get-away property. In this confrontation, she calls into question the entire triumphalist “settler history” of Canada. An august member of the Royal Society of Canada and the Rachel Carson Institute honour roll, Savage is the author of over two dozen books on the natural world and its denizens. This book should give her the national and international reputation she so richly deserves.

Older Canlit readers will recall that Eastend is the site of Wallace Stegner’s iconic book Wolf Willow, which I’ve always thought was a proven precursor to today’s creative nonfiction just by its very subtitle: A History, A Story and A Memory of the Last Plains Frontier.

Once she gets over the delights of the quaint seclusion, the prairie light and the terrain where “the plains of northern Montana meet and morph into the prairies of southern Saskatchewan,” Savage, like any honest researcher, becomes obsessed with what and who preceded European settlement. And that, of course, was once-immense herds of buffalo and First People’s long inhabitation of the land around the Cypress Hills.

Savage does not have to dig very deeply before she discovers the full import of the past: Big Bear, Little Pine, Lucky Man and the ensuing 1883 confrontation with the heartless deceit of “the Great Mother” Queen Victoria and her minions. While personally searching out the “lost” history buried within the Cypress Hills terrain, Savage interviews a contemporary woman, Jean Francis Oakes, also known as Piyeso ka-petowitak (Thunder Coming Sounds Good). While trying to internalize Oakes’s hunger-camp stories, Savage writes one of the most compelling sentences in the book: “There are limits to my capacity for shame and sadness.”

And this is the essential message of A Geography of Blood: that the shameful stories of how the prairies were wrested from the “savages” and “settled,” must be told. And retold — until Canada’s collective capacity for both shame and sadness is replaced by a new, inclusive narrative in which First Nations people at last enjoy equal rights and opportunities as citizens.

Lynne Van Luven grew up on a farm near Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan, which is surrounded by five reservations, further legacies of the hunger camps

 

Hush little babies, listen up: Sweet Lowdown Releases Third Album, “May”

May

The Sweet Lowdown

The Sweet Lowdown 2012

Produced by Adrian Dolan

Reviewed by Andrea Routley

If you’re a Sweet Lowdown fan, you probably fell in love with them for their rich bluegrass harmonies, formidable musicianship, and old-time folk sound. You’ll be thrilled with their third album (with 12 tracks), May.

As always, Sweet Lowdown delivers banjo and fiddle solos that impress the most experienced musicians, and for the rest of us, make us nod dumbly, follow with, “Wow. She’s good.” And just so you don’t forget that, May includes four instrumental tracks incorporating elements of bluegrass, celtic folk and even Indian-style melodies and arrangements as in “Lucknow,” a song inspired by an Indian city which banjo player Shanti Bremer visited. I’m not usually big on instrumental numbers, but I was sucked into this one instantly, with the fiddle mimicking a harmonium’s drone and the crazy Indian gypsy melodies in the banjo.

But May delivers an overall sound that I feel is signature Sweet Lowdown. With simple song forms, unadorned vocals, and three-part harmonies, May offers a kind of folk lullaby. The opening track, “The Heart Is A Hollow Thing,” evokes this lullaby quality not only musically, but lyrically, with lines like, “sticks and stones, Oh, hollow bones, bird take wing, fly high and sing.” This song is written by primary vocalist Amanda Blied (formerly of Balkan Babes), and her love of lullaby is evident in her other compositions, too, like “Hushabye,” which she calls “a lullaby for hard times,” and “What Goes Up,” a song about tobogganing on the winter solstice: “So just like Jack and Jill, we’ll go back up the hill. Just to ride right back down again like friends.” I loved this one for the Sarah Harmer-like melodies. You know the kind–the ones that feel like they’re coming to an end, but there’s still those last two words that carry the line downward in that suprising way.

I was also happy to hear Blied rip it up a little, vocally, in the cover of “Reuben’s Train.” Why “Reuben’s Train” in this album of water imagery, snow and flowers? Because every Canadian folk album must have a train song, of course!

But Blied isn’t the only songwriter with surprises. Banjo player Shanti Bremer showcases her talents in that exciting instrumental, “Lucknow,” and title track, “May.” And Bremer is a singer, too, with two of these songs on the album, “Please Take Me Home,” and “Drink It Down.” Bremer’s voice almost sounds timid on their previous album, but here she sings with steady confidence, while maintaining that angelic quality. Bremer pulls the album into the political with “Drink It Down,” a song about water rights and the impending shortage, and how she considers this in the context of the water-rich Pacific Northwest.

My favourite song on this album, though, is “Let It Go,” by fiddle player Miriam Sonstenes. It is the only song she sings, and I’m not sure why. Sonstenes voice has a clear, straight-forward quality that gives it a youthful naivety which I really loved. “Let It Go” is a song about visiting “old haunts with a dear old friend,” as Sonstenes writes in the insert. Having just recently visited my hometown for an old friend’s memorial service, I found myself connecting deeply with this piece. Sonstenes evokes a connection with place simply and poignantly with lines like “for every grain of sand there’s a tear that I have cried.” But my music-self loved the chorus best. With phrases of three measures, this asymmetrical pattern propelled the song forward in an unhurried yet exciting way. It’s a simple thing, but has a big effect. And you can always count on Sweet Lowdown to offer those simple yet stunning little juicy bits, whether in their stellar musical leads or little unexpected melodic thoughts.

 

You can see The Sweet Lowdown live–and pick up their new CD– at their CD Release show Thursday, Nov. 15 at the Victoria Event Centre:  Doors open at 7 p.m, tickets $13.