Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Nominated for National Magazine Award
My story, 'The Good, the Bad and the Booze' has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, in the society category. Fingers crossed.
Friday, April 16, 2010
A university in Canada's North?
Erin Freeland Ballantyne looks bushed. It’s not surprising for a woman who commutes between Victoria, where she’s studying, and the North, where her heart resides. The electric-smart 28-year-old was raised in a lodge north of Yellowknife, leaving for Montreal to get a bachelor degree, then to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. But she was magnetically drawn back to research her still-unfinished PhD in Fort Good Hope. And now, whenever she returns, Freeland Ballantyne pushes similar university opportunities for Northerners – in their own back yard.
She’s just emerged from meetings with the government about Dechinta, her game-changing idea. The word means “bush” in Dene languages, and this June, the bush will stand in for a university campus: Sixteen aboriginal students will descend on Freeland Ballantyne’s family lodge where professors and aboriginal experts will teach a specially developed Northern curriculum, and have it count as university credits. “We’re challenging people’s conceptions of what a university is,” Freeland Ballantyne says. “We’re saying, ‘This is what university and higher learning looks like in a bush-based environment, where indigenous knowledge and values are at the forefront of what’s going on.’”
Most of all, Dechinta intentionally puts a spotlight on 50 years of government malaise. The idea of a university in the North has been talked about since John Diefenbaker was prime minister. But the talk has never stopped. Ottawa and the territorial governments still have no official plans to build a university here, which, considering the region’s future of billion-dollar natural gas pipelines and international sovereignty disputes makes even a dropout snicker. Long viewed as the nation’s storehouse of natural resources, Freeland Ballantyne says it’s beyond time to focus on the North’s human resources. “The future of the North is all about the strength of its people,” she says.
To tap their strength, she and many others say we need a university in Northern Canada. The sooner, the better.
Whitehorse was the first Northern city to dream of a university but not the last. The idea sprung back in 1960, and spread to Fort Smith, Dawson City, Hay River, Tuktoyaktuk (imagine: “Tuk U” hoodies), Iqaluit, and Yellowknife. None succeeded, though in the late 1960s the Mackenzie Institute, in Inuvik, offered classes that didn’t count as university credits. Only the University of Canada North, conceived in 1969 by Richard Rohmer, a Toronto lawyer, impressed Ottawa enough to be seriously considered. Years later, after Rohmer ran out of energy and handed the idea to others, Department of Indian Affairs minister Jean Chretien deemed it “impractical.” And so it died, having never taught a student.
Rolf Hougen, a Yukon business lynchpin, was part of UCN. It complimented other projects he’d created, like the Yukon Research and Development Institute, which sought to collect economic data in lieu of the non-existent government agency doing so. Hougen saw a university as a tool to improve the lives of Northerners. “I always singled out the Indian and Eskimo people, as they were called at the time,” he says. “Their future was in the North. So if they were going to progress they needed an education base, and it’s pretty difficult to go south to get that education.” But today, Hougen feels UCN was too much, too soon, and backs education evolution, not revolution. That’s fitting, as he’s now chancellor of the territory’s college and that’s its goal.
The failure of UCN provided the impetus for the creation of Yukon, Aurora and Arctic colleges. They were seen as steps toward universities, and were aimed at stemming racial divides. In the 1960s, most Yukon students using territorial grants to attend university in the south weren’t aboriginal. As Amanda Graham writes in her master’s thesis on UCN, The University that Wasn’t, many white Yukoners “keenly wanted some inexpensive way of leaving the North.” For aboriginal people not wanting to leave there was no post-secondary education available before the colleges were established, in the 1960s.
How have they faired? In the absence of a university (or universities), the three territorial colleges have bridged the gap, to a point. All offer an appetizer menu of university degrees, and critics say they tend to produce workers for jobs rather than independent thinkers. Still, Terry Weninger, president of Yukon College, the most university-like of the trio, says students can receive bachelor’s degrees in environmental science, education and social work at Yukon College without having to leave, thanks to partnerships with southern universities. The college also offers a few master’s programs (but you’ll have to leave for those), and boasts 16 international students amongst the 220 or so enrolled in its degree programs.
Like Hougen, Weninger believes in moving the colleges step-by-step toward a university. It makes economic sense, and Ottawa seems to agree: The only explicit policy Indian and Northern Affairs has on the issue is in a 2008 report that recommends Ottawa continue to support the colleges “as the instrument of choice for developing expanded university-level degree programs” in the North. As Ottawa is a must-have participant in university projects, it seems one with bricks and mortar is officially on hold.
Enter the University of the Arctic. The three colleges are part of this virtual university, which launched in 2001 and offers a bachelor of circumpolar studies through online classes, tapping resources from more than 100 schools in the circumpolar world. To enhance their access and contribution to the University of the Arctic, the territorial colleges are seeking $2.5-million from Ottawa to improve video-conferencing. “What we want to get away from is going for hundreds of millions for infrastructure,” Weninger says. “The infrastructure that we need [for university courses] isn’t for buildings, it’s for electronic delivery of courses and programs. It would be good to have a live feed that could go to Pangnirtung, for example.”
But some see the colleges as obstacles, as the still-flawed first draft that policy-makers refuse to abandon. “To create a university in Canada’s North, I think we need a bigger vision than to expand the programs of the three existing colleges,” says Brian McCutcheon, a member of a university advocacy group in Yellowknife. While McCutcheon feels there’s a niche for the colleges, “almost all the programs offered are job related.” What’s needed, he says, is something much grander -- a world-class research centre tackling Northern issues, like climate change, energy projects, mining and marine biology.
The university curriculum being taught at the colleges is often imported from southern schools, says Kyla Kakfwi Scott, program manager with Dechinta. That leads to many of the same problems with cultural relevance students face when they take courses at schools in the south. And the colleges are also pursuing several targets at once. Daniel Vandermeulen, president of Nunavut Arctic College (and, it must be said, a firm believer in the step-by-step model) recounts a recent meeting: “Our topics ranged from basic literacy and how the college can support it, to how we can get more Nunavummiut to come back to school for academic upgrading, to trades training, to what we’re doing with university programs, to thinking about master’s degrees,” Vandermeulen says. “We’re very small in quantitative terms, but we’re very complex.”
While success stories are easy to spot (the Akitsiraq law program graduated 11 Inuit lawyers in 2005 though a partnership between Nunavut Arctic College and the University of Victoria, and Yukon College’s Cold Climate Innovation Centre continues to expand), many of these are one-offs. While Weninger sees a future where university research in the North is “directed by the North and administered by the North,” many ask how. How, with the colleges juggling so many balls and with large chunks of their budgets devoted to basic adult education, will this happen?
Where many want to shoot for the stars on a Northern university, the colleges, it seems, can shoot only as high as they’re able.
In N’Dilo, a First Nations community in Yellowknife, residents peer across an idyllic bay at Giant Mine, a graveyard of oxidized buildings and paint-peeled silos. Opened in 1948 and shuttered in 2004, the former gold mine was once an industrial engine of the North, but has since become its most shameful mess. While Giant’s buildings are in shambles, hidden below them in the mineshafts are hundreds of thousands of tonnes of lethal arsenic trioxide.
Ted Tsetta, the chief of N’Dilo, says Giant reminds him why aboriginal Northerners need a university that respects their ways while teaching outside knowledge. “If we knew 100 years ago, 90 years ago, that this was going to happen, if we had educated people back then for how mineral and exploration drilling can contaminate the water, the air and so on, we could have done it differently,” Tsetta says. “We had no say.”
Tsetta has just returned from Dene Nation meetings in Fort Simpson. There, he tabled two resolutions calling for the creation of a university in Yellowknife and for aboriginal treaties to be taught there. The ideas aren’t unique, but Tsetta says the process is: it’s the result of long consultations with Dene governments in the NWT (many university projects haven’t done this, and have died as a result); it’s supported by Shawn Atleo, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations; and the resulting ideas will be tabled at an AFN meeting this July.
A university in the North will open doors for aboriginal people, Tsetta says, allowing people to become lawyers and doctors while also keeping their culture – living in two worlds, as they do now, but successfully rather than struggling. “On weekends, they could be out there practicing their traditional knowledge,” he says. “On weekdays, they could be in school studying what’s out there, how to protect the water, the animals.”
It’s an important point. Many reflexively ask why Northern students can’t just go south for university, and judge them when they do, and fail. But culture and tradition matter more to students moving from one world to another than they do to southerners, who live in a familiar cultural milieu. The University of Saskatchewan’s Greg Poelzer, author of Education: A Critical Foundation For a Sustainable North, writes that, “among those who do leave the North, many do not succeed in alien southern institutions because they have been separated from critical support networks. Bringing post-secondary education physically closer to where they live increases their opportunities to participate.”
Kirt Ejesiak agrees. No stranger to the public eye (he ran to be Nunavut’s MP for the Liberals in 2008) or to university (he went to Harvard) Ejesiak is part of Iliturvik, a group of five Nunavummiut pushing for a university in Nunavut. Much like Dechinta, and inspired by the small but successful government-funded university in nearby Greenland, Illisimatusarfik, the group hopes to see a culturally relevant school created in Nunavut that also offers access to outside knowledge. “I really felt, having an opportunity of having gone to the Kennedy School [at Harvard], why can’t we have a world-class institution closer to home?” Ejesiak says.
Studies have shown most university students in Canada attend schools close to their homes, and for Ejesiak, leaving was definitely a hurdle. “Major,” he says. “You know, [leaving] my partner and my newborn baby. And the cost.”
But Sarah Wright Cardinal, president of Aurora College, sees the situation differently. Wright Cardinal earned her master’s degree studying in southern Canada, the U.S., Europe and Asia, before returning to the NWT. There isn’t a university in the North, she says, because it’s not part of tradition here. “While in other parts of Canada there’s been a philosophical or cultural value of university education, in the Northwest Territories, people moved from a land-based bush life to structured communities in the last 40 to 60 years,” Wright Cardinal says. The transition from one world to another is still happening, she says. Over the next 18 months, Wright Cardinal is speaking with people across the territory about what they want to see next in education.
For many, though, that process just isn’t fast enough. “It’s been talked about for 20 to 30 years,” Tsetta says. “If we take things slowly, we’ll be waiting another 30 years. Now we have Aurora College. There’s a big building there. But let’s not give up on university programs. We truly need it.”
While the talkers have long talked of the stop signs along the road to a university – too few people, too much distance, too many different governments, too little support at the grassroots, too complex a political landscape – few have pondered the cost of not building one.
Imagine 100 Canadians enter a room in Toronto: Roughly six will have a university degree, 28 a trade or non-degree education and 65 a high-school diploma or less. Now, imagine the same room in Iqaluit, one that only allows Inuit inside: About one lonely Inuk will have a university degree, 78 will have a high-school diploma or less, a handful will have a trade, and the rest will have little formal education. The same room of aboriginal people in Whitehorse and Yellowknife will have a few more university grads and fewer uneducated, but the North still trails the national aboriginal average.
Now, include non-aboriginal people and prepare to be floored: The territories suddenly have the most highly educated populations in Canada. Why? Southerners have taken advantage of education where they grew up, and the lack of it in the North, taking high-paying jobs locals aren’t qualified for.
Northern students are generations behind the national average in literacy, high-school completion and university-degree attainment, writes Poelzer. These problems will only be solved by improving university access. “Notwithstanding the often-asserted platitude that the North is crucial to the Canadian identity, the region and its residents have long been neglected,” he writes.
Neglect costs dollars. While little research has been done on the cost to the North (what university would do it?), McKinsey & Company, an American research firm, recently studied the impact of that country’s education gap with better performing countries like Finland and Korea. It concluded that if the U.S. had closed the gap in the 1990s its GDP would be between $1.3-trillion and $2.3-trillion higher today. Education gaps create “economic dead zones,” write the authors – communities where poor schooling produces economically unsuccessful people “due to a concentration of low skills, high unemployment, or high incarceration rates.”
Sound familiar?
Low skill levels means the Baffin Regional Hospital in Iqaluit failed to meet accreditation standards. It means the NWT government, with an 18 per cent vacancy rate, is raising wages to attract more qualified workers from elsewhere. It means people forced out of one way of life aren’t allowed to participate in the one they must adopt.
The lack of a university in the North also means our Arctic experts are well-tanned compared to their international peers. As Poelzer notes, all seven other circumpolar nations have a university in their north. Our Northern research centres, on the other hand – the Arctic Institute of North America at the University of Calgary and the Canadian Circumpolar Institute at the University of Alberta – are thousands of kilometres away.
The need is also exploding: In the Northwest Territories, the population is growing 1.6-times faster than the Canadian average; in Nunavut, it’s growing 2.5-times faster.
A big question is who will pay? The jurisdictional overlap is hazy – Ottawa has an educational obligation to First Nations people, but the territories are responsible for education. All territories want anything that’s built to be in their backyards – a sure way to keep everything in limbo. But consider that, each year, Ottawa sends more than $3.5-billion to the territories in transfer payments. You begin to understand Tsetta’s frustration. “If they don’t teach people of the North to a higher standard . . . they’re just sending money North, right? What’s the return? The return is very little.”
While the North has been forced to subsist on 50 years of talk, several successful schools with similar challenges have proven naysayers wrong. Thunder Bay, Ontario, is home to about the same number of people as the territories. Likewise, it’s separated from southern Canada by huge distances, and much of its population is aboriginal. But the university there, Lakehead, is a success: It has 7,900 students, 2,250 staff and contributes an estimated $250-million yearly to the local economy. Then there’s the University of Tromso, Norway, at 69 degrees North. Since it was built in the 1960s, the city’s population has bloomed from 12,000 to more than 65,000. And then there’s the University of Saskatchewan, which has become critical to that province’s economic and social success, says Richard Florizone, vice-president of finance and resources. “I shudder to think of if we didn’t have a university with 20,000 students here, what that would mean for the local talent pool, for industry,” he says.
This is why many see now as an ideal moment to restart the push for a Northern university. Settled land claims have reaffirmed aboriginal rights over land, traditional knowledge is finding a foothold in business and academia, and Canada is gradually emerging from a colonial mindset toward aboriginal people.
The Toronto-based Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation recently paid for a study of university activism in the North, and has given Dechinta $100,000 in seed money. Vice-president James Stauch says its’ clear something is afoot. “There’s a kind of Jungian process at work, a collective unconscious,” he says. “A lot of grassroots initiatives are percolating. At the same time you have some pretty prominent national voices, like [Governor General] Michaëlle Jean, who’s mentioned [a Northern university] quite publicly a number of times.”
But can they overcome the neglect? Two years after the prairie provinces were hacked off of the Northwest Territories, they got universities; 50 years after the same idea was presented by Northerners, it still doesn’t exist. “We’re really at a point where it’s a disservice not to be encouraging and developing higher education,” says Freeland Ballantyne, as she talks of plans for Dechinta. “Until we’re having a real conversation and offering real courses with real credit, we’re just talking. The time for that passed long ago.”
Originally published in Up Here Business magazine.
She’s just emerged from meetings with the government about Dechinta, her game-changing idea. The word means “bush” in Dene languages, and this June, the bush will stand in for a university campus: Sixteen aboriginal students will descend on Freeland Ballantyne’s family lodge where professors and aboriginal experts will teach a specially developed Northern curriculum, and have it count as university credits. “We’re challenging people’s conceptions of what a university is,” Freeland Ballantyne says. “We’re saying, ‘This is what university and higher learning looks like in a bush-based environment, where indigenous knowledge and values are at the forefront of what’s going on.’”
Most of all, Dechinta intentionally puts a spotlight on 50 years of government malaise. The idea of a university in the North has been talked about since John Diefenbaker was prime minister. But the talk has never stopped. Ottawa and the territorial governments still have no official plans to build a university here, which, considering the region’s future of billion-dollar natural gas pipelines and international sovereignty disputes makes even a dropout snicker. Long viewed as the nation’s storehouse of natural resources, Freeland Ballantyne says it’s beyond time to focus on the North’s human resources. “The future of the North is all about the strength of its people,” she says.
To tap their strength, she and many others say we need a university in Northern Canada. The sooner, the better.
Whitehorse was the first Northern city to dream of a university but not the last. The idea sprung back in 1960, and spread to Fort Smith, Dawson City, Hay River, Tuktoyaktuk (imagine: “Tuk U” hoodies), Iqaluit, and Yellowknife. None succeeded, though in the late 1960s the Mackenzie Institute, in Inuvik, offered classes that didn’t count as university credits. Only the University of Canada North, conceived in 1969 by Richard Rohmer, a Toronto lawyer, impressed Ottawa enough to be seriously considered. Years later, after Rohmer ran out of energy and handed the idea to others, Department of Indian Affairs minister Jean Chretien deemed it “impractical.” And so it died, having never taught a student.
Rolf Hougen, a Yukon business lynchpin, was part of UCN. It complimented other projects he’d created, like the Yukon Research and Development Institute, which sought to collect economic data in lieu of the non-existent government agency doing so. Hougen saw a university as a tool to improve the lives of Northerners. “I always singled out the Indian and Eskimo people, as they were called at the time,” he says. “Their future was in the North. So if they were going to progress they needed an education base, and it’s pretty difficult to go south to get that education.” But today, Hougen feels UCN was too much, too soon, and backs education evolution, not revolution. That’s fitting, as he’s now chancellor of the territory’s college and that’s its goal.
The failure of UCN provided the impetus for the creation of Yukon, Aurora and Arctic colleges. They were seen as steps toward universities, and were aimed at stemming racial divides. In the 1960s, most Yukon students using territorial grants to attend university in the south weren’t aboriginal. As Amanda Graham writes in her master’s thesis on UCN, The University that Wasn’t, many white Yukoners “keenly wanted some inexpensive way of leaving the North.” For aboriginal people not wanting to leave there was no post-secondary education available before the colleges were established, in the 1960s.
How have they faired? In the absence of a university (or universities), the three territorial colleges have bridged the gap, to a point. All offer an appetizer menu of university degrees, and critics say they tend to produce workers for jobs rather than independent thinkers. Still, Terry Weninger, president of Yukon College, the most university-like of the trio, says students can receive bachelor’s degrees in environmental science, education and social work at Yukon College without having to leave, thanks to partnerships with southern universities. The college also offers a few master’s programs (but you’ll have to leave for those), and boasts 16 international students amongst the 220 or so enrolled in its degree programs.
Like Hougen, Weninger believes in moving the colleges step-by-step toward a university. It makes economic sense, and Ottawa seems to agree: The only explicit policy Indian and Northern Affairs has on the issue is in a 2008 report that recommends Ottawa continue to support the colleges “as the instrument of choice for developing expanded university-level degree programs” in the North. As Ottawa is a must-have participant in university projects, it seems one with bricks and mortar is officially on hold.
Enter the University of the Arctic. The three colleges are part of this virtual university, which launched in 2001 and offers a bachelor of circumpolar studies through online classes, tapping resources from more than 100 schools in the circumpolar world. To enhance their access and contribution to the University of the Arctic, the territorial colleges are seeking $2.5-million from Ottawa to improve video-conferencing. “What we want to get away from is going for hundreds of millions for infrastructure,” Weninger says. “The infrastructure that we need [for university courses] isn’t for buildings, it’s for electronic delivery of courses and programs. It would be good to have a live feed that could go to Pangnirtung, for example.”
But some see the colleges as obstacles, as the still-flawed first draft that policy-makers refuse to abandon. “To create a university in Canada’s North, I think we need a bigger vision than to expand the programs of the three existing colleges,” says Brian McCutcheon, a member of a university advocacy group in Yellowknife. While McCutcheon feels there’s a niche for the colleges, “almost all the programs offered are job related.” What’s needed, he says, is something much grander -- a world-class research centre tackling Northern issues, like climate change, energy projects, mining and marine biology.
The university curriculum being taught at the colleges is often imported from southern schools, says Kyla Kakfwi Scott, program manager with Dechinta. That leads to many of the same problems with cultural relevance students face when they take courses at schools in the south. And the colleges are also pursuing several targets at once. Daniel Vandermeulen, president of Nunavut Arctic College (and, it must be said, a firm believer in the step-by-step model) recounts a recent meeting: “Our topics ranged from basic literacy and how the college can support it, to how we can get more Nunavummiut to come back to school for academic upgrading, to trades training, to what we’re doing with university programs, to thinking about master’s degrees,” Vandermeulen says. “We’re very small in quantitative terms, but we’re very complex.”
While success stories are easy to spot (the Akitsiraq law program graduated 11 Inuit lawyers in 2005 though a partnership between Nunavut Arctic College and the University of Victoria, and Yukon College’s Cold Climate Innovation Centre continues to expand), many of these are one-offs. While Weninger sees a future where university research in the North is “directed by the North and administered by the North,” many ask how. How, with the colleges juggling so many balls and with large chunks of their budgets devoted to basic adult education, will this happen?
Where many want to shoot for the stars on a Northern university, the colleges, it seems, can shoot only as high as they’re able.
In N’Dilo, a First Nations community in Yellowknife, residents peer across an idyllic bay at Giant Mine, a graveyard of oxidized buildings and paint-peeled silos. Opened in 1948 and shuttered in 2004, the former gold mine was once an industrial engine of the North, but has since become its most shameful mess. While Giant’s buildings are in shambles, hidden below them in the mineshafts are hundreds of thousands of tonnes of lethal arsenic trioxide.
Ted Tsetta, the chief of N’Dilo, says Giant reminds him why aboriginal Northerners need a university that respects their ways while teaching outside knowledge. “If we knew 100 years ago, 90 years ago, that this was going to happen, if we had educated people back then for how mineral and exploration drilling can contaminate the water, the air and so on, we could have done it differently,” Tsetta says. “We had no say.”
Tsetta has just returned from Dene Nation meetings in Fort Simpson. There, he tabled two resolutions calling for the creation of a university in Yellowknife and for aboriginal treaties to be taught there. The ideas aren’t unique, but Tsetta says the process is: it’s the result of long consultations with Dene governments in the NWT (many university projects haven’t done this, and have died as a result); it’s supported by Shawn Atleo, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations; and the resulting ideas will be tabled at an AFN meeting this July.
A university in the North will open doors for aboriginal people, Tsetta says, allowing people to become lawyers and doctors while also keeping their culture – living in two worlds, as they do now, but successfully rather than struggling. “On weekends, they could be out there practicing their traditional knowledge,” he says. “On weekdays, they could be in school studying what’s out there, how to protect the water, the animals.”
It’s an important point. Many reflexively ask why Northern students can’t just go south for university, and judge them when they do, and fail. But culture and tradition matter more to students moving from one world to another than they do to southerners, who live in a familiar cultural milieu. The University of Saskatchewan’s Greg Poelzer, author of Education: A Critical Foundation For a Sustainable North, writes that, “among those who do leave the North, many do not succeed in alien southern institutions because they have been separated from critical support networks. Bringing post-secondary education physically closer to where they live increases their opportunities to participate.”
Kirt Ejesiak agrees. No stranger to the public eye (he ran to be Nunavut’s MP for the Liberals in 2008) or to university (he went to Harvard) Ejesiak is part of Iliturvik, a group of five Nunavummiut pushing for a university in Nunavut. Much like Dechinta, and inspired by the small but successful government-funded university in nearby Greenland, Illisimatusarfik, the group hopes to see a culturally relevant school created in Nunavut that also offers access to outside knowledge. “I really felt, having an opportunity of having gone to the Kennedy School [at Harvard], why can’t we have a world-class institution closer to home?” Ejesiak says.
Studies have shown most university students in Canada attend schools close to their homes, and for Ejesiak, leaving was definitely a hurdle. “Major,” he says. “You know, [leaving] my partner and my newborn baby. And the cost.”
But Sarah Wright Cardinal, president of Aurora College, sees the situation differently. Wright Cardinal earned her master’s degree studying in southern Canada, the U.S., Europe and Asia, before returning to the NWT. There isn’t a university in the North, she says, because it’s not part of tradition here. “While in other parts of Canada there’s been a philosophical or cultural value of university education, in the Northwest Territories, people moved from a land-based bush life to structured communities in the last 40 to 60 years,” Wright Cardinal says. The transition from one world to another is still happening, she says. Over the next 18 months, Wright Cardinal is speaking with people across the territory about what they want to see next in education.
For many, though, that process just isn’t fast enough. “It’s been talked about for 20 to 30 years,” Tsetta says. “If we take things slowly, we’ll be waiting another 30 years. Now we have Aurora College. There’s a big building there. But let’s not give up on university programs. We truly need it.”
While the talkers have long talked of the stop signs along the road to a university – too few people, too much distance, too many different governments, too little support at the grassroots, too complex a political landscape – few have pondered the cost of not building one.
Imagine 100 Canadians enter a room in Toronto: Roughly six will have a university degree, 28 a trade or non-degree education and 65 a high-school diploma or less. Now, imagine the same room in Iqaluit, one that only allows Inuit inside: About one lonely Inuk will have a university degree, 78 will have a high-school diploma or less, a handful will have a trade, and the rest will have little formal education. The same room of aboriginal people in Whitehorse and Yellowknife will have a few more university grads and fewer uneducated, but the North still trails the national aboriginal average.
Now, include non-aboriginal people and prepare to be floored: The territories suddenly have the most highly educated populations in Canada. Why? Southerners have taken advantage of education where they grew up, and the lack of it in the North, taking high-paying jobs locals aren’t qualified for.
Northern students are generations behind the national average in literacy, high-school completion and university-degree attainment, writes Poelzer. These problems will only be solved by improving university access. “Notwithstanding the often-asserted platitude that the North is crucial to the Canadian identity, the region and its residents have long been neglected,” he writes.
Neglect costs dollars. While little research has been done on the cost to the North (what university would do it?), McKinsey & Company, an American research firm, recently studied the impact of that country’s education gap with better performing countries like Finland and Korea. It concluded that if the U.S. had closed the gap in the 1990s its GDP would be between $1.3-trillion and $2.3-trillion higher today. Education gaps create “economic dead zones,” write the authors – communities where poor schooling produces economically unsuccessful people “due to a concentration of low skills, high unemployment, or high incarceration rates.”
Sound familiar?
Low skill levels means the Baffin Regional Hospital in Iqaluit failed to meet accreditation standards. It means the NWT government, with an 18 per cent vacancy rate, is raising wages to attract more qualified workers from elsewhere. It means people forced out of one way of life aren’t allowed to participate in the one they must adopt.
The lack of a university in the North also means our Arctic experts are well-tanned compared to their international peers. As Poelzer notes, all seven other circumpolar nations have a university in their north. Our Northern research centres, on the other hand – the Arctic Institute of North America at the University of Calgary and the Canadian Circumpolar Institute at the University of Alberta – are thousands of kilometres away.
The need is also exploding: In the Northwest Territories, the population is growing 1.6-times faster than the Canadian average; in Nunavut, it’s growing 2.5-times faster.
A big question is who will pay? The jurisdictional overlap is hazy – Ottawa has an educational obligation to First Nations people, but the territories are responsible for education. All territories want anything that’s built to be in their backyards – a sure way to keep everything in limbo. But consider that, each year, Ottawa sends more than $3.5-billion to the territories in transfer payments. You begin to understand Tsetta’s frustration. “If they don’t teach people of the North to a higher standard . . . they’re just sending money North, right? What’s the return? The return is very little.”
While the North has been forced to subsist on 50 years of talk, several successful schools with similar challenges have proven naysayers wrong. Thunder Bay, Ontario, is home to about the same number of people as the territories. Likewise, it’s separated from southern Canada by huge distances, and much of its population is aboriginal. But the university there, Lakehead, is a success: It has 7,900 students, 2,250 staff and contributes an estimated $250-million yearly to the local economy. Then there’s the University of Tromso, Norway, at 69 degrees North. Since it was built in the 1960s, the city’s population has bloomed from 12,000 to more than 65,000. And then there’s the University of Saskatchewan, which has become critical to that province’s economic and social success, says Richard Florizone, vice-president of finance and resources. “I shudder to think of if we didn’t have a university with 20,000 students here, what that would mean for the local talent pool, for industry,” he says.
This is why many see now as an ideal moment to restart the push for a Northern university. Settled land claims have reaffirmed aboriginal rights over land, traditional knowledge is finding a foothold in business and academia, and Canada is gradually emerging from a colonial mindset toward aboriginal people.
The Toronto-based Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation recently paid for a study of university activism in the North, and has given Dechinta $100,000 in seed money. Vice-president James Stauch says its’ clear something is afoot. “There’s a kind of Jungian process at work, a collective unconscious,” he says. “A lot of grassroots initiatives are percolating. At the same time you have some pretty prominent national voices, like [Governor General] Michaëlle Jean, who’s mentioned [a Northern university] quite publicly a number of times.”
But can they overcome the neglect? Two years after the prairie provinces were hacked off of the Northwest Territories, they got universities; 50 years after the same idea was presented by Northerners, it still doesn’t exist. “We’re really at a point where it’s a disservice not to be encouraging and developing higher education,” says Freeland Ballantyne, as she talks of plans for Dechinta. “Until we’re having a real conversation and offering real courses with real credit, we’re just talking. The time for that passed long ago.”
Originally published in Up Here Business magazine.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Farley Mowat: Liar or Saint?
To many, he's still ‘Hardly Know It.' That's particularly true in the North, the place that put him on the map. But it turns out Mowat put the North on the map, too -- so after 50 years, why do we still hate him?
By Tim Querengesser
Few knew it, but Robert Service wrote The Cremation of Sam McGee having yet to see the Klondike goldfields. Service knew it, though. By 1911, he was rich and soaked with guilt. With a birch-bark canoe, the former banker, who only moved to Dawson after the poems were published, set out to prove he could have been a sourdough, like his fictional characters Sam McGee and Dan McGrew. He’d use the longest way possible: the 3,200-kilometre “Edmonton Route” that meanders north along the Athabasca, Slave and Mackenzie rivers and then south, against the current, along the mighty Yukon. During the 1898 rush, this trail killed more Stampeders than any other. And indeed, as he paddled and pulled, Service nearly joined them in the icy riverbeds. He considered quitting, but wrote in his journal, “If you do . . . you’ll never respect yourself again.” Service eventually made it. Only then, after cheating death, did he consider himself authentic.
His guilt wasn’t unique. The North has forever condemned its successful writers as phonies. Perhaps because they spent so little time here compared to the status they gained from it, many Northerners have grudges with the heavyweights – Service, Jack London and even Dawson native Pierre Berton. Though they’re held in reverence elsewhere, the North assigns them an asterisk. Farley Mowat, the most successful of all, gets an asterisk the size of the sun. Considered a fudger-of-facts on both sides of the divide, he nonetheless has few detractors in southern Canada. But in the North, Mowat is largely seen as part villain, part buffoon. Speaking his name here pushes a button. “Oh, you mean Hardly Know It” some say, rehashing a nickname that’s 50 years old. Some scoff, or laugh, while those who support him steel themselves to argue in his defense.
All this is well-trampled dirt. In 1952, a review in the magazine The Beaver dismissed People of the Deer – Mowat’s debut, and his first of many books set in the North – as “totally erroneous.” This charge clung to him. It reached its nadir in 1996, when Saturday Night magazine ran a cover image of Mowat as Pinocchio. The accompanying story, titled “A Real Whopper,” meticulously documented the half-truths, omissions and fabrications in his Northern books.
So why reopen this debate? The answer can’t be avoided: Mowat is 88 years old, and declared 2008’s Otherwise his last book. At some point rather soon he will no longer be with us. That’s the sentimental answer. The serious one is that no other writer, even today, attracts to the North the audience and enthusiasm that Mowat does. Isn’t it time we shake the foundation of the grudge against him to see if it’s still solid?
Mowat always had eyes for the North. In 1947, aged 26, he traveled to the Barrens near Ennadai Lake, in the southwest corner of what’s now Nunavut. He came as a field biologist for the Arctic Institute of North America. But this was already his second trip to one of the remotest regions of the tundra. When he was 15, his uncle brought Mowat to Churchill, Manitoba, where they shot birds for scientific studies. Mowat’s second trip, though, had a much darker subtext. He’d just returned to Canada after the madness of the Second World War. As biographer James King writes in Farley, to the young Mowat the Arctic seemed “like a good place to run.” The war had ground his belief in Western society into dust. When reading Mowat’s first Northern books, the young man’s state of mind on this and a subsequent trip the next year to study caribou should be considered.
On both trips, Mowat encountered the story of a starving tribe of Inuit – the Ahalmiut, or caribou eaters. He heard through second-hand sourced that they were dying, under the nose of the government. The tale confirmed his dim views. So, as Mowat told the people’s stories in People of the Deer, first published in 1952, he added his beliefs on the cause of the famine. For a first book it’s remarkable – an accessible masterwork that captures Arctic geography in pure emotion. “It was a soft white nightmare that we were flying over,” Mowat writes of first seeing the tundra from a plane. “An undulating monotony of white that covered all shapes and colours. The land, with its low sweeping hills, its lakes and its rivers, simply did not exist for our eyes.” But Mowat knits a challenging accusation into the book. The Canadian government is declared indifferent to the Ahalmiut famine; other Northern institutions, like the Hudson’s Bay Company and the RCMP, are also criticized for their part in creating it.
After People of the Deer was released, Mowat’s indictment was passed around like a grenade. Some denied the Ahalmiut existed, though Mowat wasn’t the first to document the starvation. Mowat himself was called a “liar” in the House of Commons. His facts were quickly given energetic scrutiny and some were found lacking.
In the foreword to the second, 1974 edition of People of the Deer, Mowat addresses this directly. He writes that, when the first book was published, “it was impossible for me to obtain documentary corroboration for much of the story.” This was because the “Old Empire” of the North – the missions, the Mounties and the government – held the proof, he claims. “I was therefore forced to be somewhat circumspect.” For readers wanting the story without omissions, changed names or time and space distortions, the version given in The Desperate People – the 1959 follow-up to People of the Deer – “is the correct one.”
Of course, that incorrect first book had already changed Canada and the North. In the early ‘50s, People of the Deer was well received for a Canadian book, published in the Atlantic Monthly and, aside from a few harsh receptions, showered with glowing international reviews. Canadians were shifting their eyes north thanks to the Cold War and Mowat gave this newly discovered land a human face. A cause was born: Save the Inuit! The government jumped. By 1960, the surviving Ahalmiut were relocated to the coast of Hudson Bay. Whole towns were erected, and emergency food was shipped.
To some Northerners, Mowat’s ends justify his means. “There are people alive today who would likely be dead or not even be born if Farley Mowat had not written about the famines in the Keewatin region in the 1950s,” says Jim Bell, the outspoken editor of the Nunatsiaq News, in Iqaluit. “That is a legacy that can never be taken away from him.”
But the “Old Empire” mandarins in the North, as well as many Inuit, mostly noticed the errors. “It all stared with People of the Deer,” explains Jonquin Covello, a long-time Yellowknifer who once lived in the Keewatin, counted Mowat as a friend, and who’s now writing an English doctoral thesis on Northern literature. “People who’d been to Rankin and Ennadai said, ‘What is he talking about? He’s taken these people’s names and completely misrepresented them.’ It’s like any other piece of non-fiction or even fiction. If you recognize somebody you know you immediately say, ‘Well it’s not right. This guy’s an idiot.’ It always amazes me that Northerners are – how long ago was it, 1948? – still basing their opinions on things Farley said 50 years ago.”
John Goddard has nothing but fire for Farley Mowat and his facts. It was 13 years ago that he wrote the Saturday Night article that exhaustively catalogued Mowat’s entire mistruths. But even today, as I discuss with him Never Cry Wolf – Mowat’s book on wolves in which, he claims, he urinated around his camp like a wolf – Goddard laughs, bitterly. “People actually believed this happened when they read it,” he says.
He comes to the interview armed. In Otherwise, Mowat’s latest book, his main points are again illustrated, he says – that Mowat uses people in order to paint himself a hero, and that he fabricates. He points to quotes in Otherwise that are apparently drawn from Mowat’s Arctic journals. They are “totally made up,” he says. He then quotes a passage about Andy Lawrie, Mowat’s companion during his caribou monitoring in 1948, and one of his best friends. It’s now known, thanks to Goddard, that Mowat left Lawrie alone in the Barrens in order to see his wife in Toronto. In Otherwise, however, this fact is artfully reversed: It’s Lawrie who leaves for Toronto. To some this is perhaps just a detail, but to Goddard it’s part of a pattern. “This is one of the closest people in his life,” he says. “It’s disgusting to me.”
It was almost by accident that Goddard became an expert on Mowat’s errors. In the 1980s, he worked as a Canadian Press correspondent in the North. One day in Rankin Inlet, he says an Inuit man referred to Mowat as Hardly Know It. “I thought ‘What’s this?’ It sort of planted the idea in my mind.” There it sat until 1996, when Goddard looked deeper. What he found at the National Archives in Ottawa, he says, “astounded” him. It was a termination letter, dated 1948, addressed to Mowat from the Canadian government. In People of the Deer, Mowat doesn’t mention that he was canned. Instead, he speaks of himself as a noble writer and scientific explorer who visits uncharted Northern lands and discovers starving people. With this, Goddard knew he had a story. Later, he went to the McMaster University archives, to which Mowat had sold his Arctic journals. There he found dozens more inconsistencies.
The resulting Saturday Night article lists them with precision: the time Mowat spent in the North – and that he observed wolves – was overstated; the fact he never encountered a starving Ahalmiut in person was glossed over; many people accompanying him on his trips were omitted. Goddard also documented what appeared to be a pattern, by comparing what Mowat wrote in his journal to what he put into print. “Where the books show Mowat calling for government relief of the Inuit,” Goddard wrote, “his journal shows him fed up with [government] handouts [for the Inuit].” Could Mowat’s whole thesis that the government was indifferent be fiction, too?
The charges Mowat made, in Goddard’s view, required he get them right. As a reporter at the Toronto Star, Goddard lives in this black and white world. So, even today, far removed from the debate, he bristles when considering the pass people have given Mowat. On Bell’s argument that Mowat alerted the nation to the starvation, falsities and all, he disagrees. “By making those claims and doing that writing he got a lot of people worked up,” he says. “There was a lot of talk in Parliament and public debates, and it was a lot of energy spent on an entirely bogus point. That’s where the destructiveness comes in. It’s beyond me why people believe anything Mowat writes. It is so twisted, so distorted, so destructive, so anti-Canada and anti-North.” To Goddard, Mowat is the Ben Johnson of Canadian literature “except he didn’t get caught.” Despite the facts on Mowat being out, though, he believes Mowat will likely remain a hero. “Who’s going to care about that after 50 years of idolization?”
The only time I ever bagged school to read a book was on account of Farley Mowat. I was 11; the book was Lost in the Barrens. I still remember the basic plot if not its details, including thinking it weird that the characters had a cabin made of tree logs – weren’t they supposed to be lost . . . on the Barrens? But I didn’t put it down that day. And what stayed with me since is an interest in the North. Mowat was my entry point, even if I never credited him.
There’s a trend today in literature to attack non-fiction writers, from those who authored the great works of the past to the bestsellers on Oprah Winfrey’s book list. The list of those who’ve been, for lack of a better term, ‘outted’ as fabricators of facts is constantly growing. Mowat’s condemnation came before all this, but his comments on facts have done little good in the new environment. “Fuck the facts,” he writes in his introduction to his journals in the McMaster archives. When interviewed by Goddard 13 years ago, Mowat said he didn’t “invent.” But he later added, “I never let the facts get in the way of the truth!”
While the case of the North’s continued dismissal of Mowat may seem to be about the facts, though, it falls to pieces when you look at them. After reciting Mowat’s ‘Hardly Know It’ nickname, only a few people who I talked to could tell me why they said it. Fewer still had read his books. Yet everyone, from people at bookstores and museums to long-time Northerners, shared what appeared like a hand-me-down grudge. The condemnation is no longer about pure facts.
This point is amplified as I talk with Eric Anautalik on the phone from Baker Lake, Nunavut. Anautalik is an Ahalmiut. He was a baby during the starvation in the Barrens, though he has few memories of it. “My dad had no more energy because of starving,” Anautalik recalls. “I was still on my mother’s back, in an amauti. We were in mud hut and I remember my mom told us to eat the ‘white ones’ on the wall. It was some sort of plant and it gave us energy. That’s the only thing I remember.”
Fifty years later, Anautalik saw The Desperate People at the library in Baker Lake. He was startled. “The cover page is a picture of my mom and my sister.” This stirred emotions about his family. But as I ask Anautalik how he feels about Mowat, he isn’t sure. “Oh, it’s hard to say,” he says. “It’s something useful, I guess, if it’s the truth, if there’s a starvation and somebody’s gotta get help in Ottawa. That’s what they were trying to do, I guess. To tell you the truth, I never read the book.”
Thanks to the North’s feeling towards writers, it’s likely Mowat would have been considered a fraud whether he got everything right or not. For his faults he could have repented in the search for authenticity, like Service. Perhaps the North would have forgiven him then. But the truth is Mowat didn’t need to. People of the Deer and his following books on the North sparked mass interest in the place. Students still read them and are coaxed into dreaming of life beyond the 60th parallel. Fifty years on, has Mowat’s stock not been tarnished enough to allow us to accept him, exposed warts and all? We now have guides, such as Goddard, to warn us to read him for his stories and not his facts. So shouldn’t we thank him for turning people’s eyes Northward at some point soon? “We don’t have stories of our land,” Covello says, “except the ones that Pierre Berton tells and Farley Mowat tells. Those are the stories of our land, as far as I can see. And those are the stories that a lot of people love.”
To properly reconsider Mowat’s legacy in the North, you couldn’t do much better than retracing his steps. Writer and filmmaker Karsten Heuer has. Heuer lived in Inuvik for three years, then went on to shoot his popular documentary, Being Caribou, in the northern Yukon. In 2008, as part of his Finding Farley project, which will result in a film and book, Heuer – along with his wife and their two-year-old son – canoed and sailed from their home in Canmore, Alberta to Mowat’s summer home in Nova Scotia. Along the way they retraced Mowat’s literary trips, and encountered his baggage as they did. In Lac la Ronge, Saskatchewan, Heuer ran into historians who “really tore a strip off us for how we were holding up Farley to a high esteem because of all the things he hadn’t quite gotten right.” This encounter, so pointed, changed their perspective. As they headed north by canoe, “everything was thrown into doubt,” Heuer says.
The trio arrived at Nueltin Lake, where several of Mowat’s Northern books are set. “It very much felt like we had been there before,” he says. “We could literally use the description from Never Cry Wolf to steer ourselves from the ruins in this old camp where Farley based himself for a couple summers to the actual wolf den he describes in that book.” A wolf paid a visit to them the following day.
By the end of the trip, as they eventual found Mowat at his summer home, Heuer says his reverence had returned in full. Mowat “really captured the gist of these places, the sense of the people and the sense of the landscape,” he says. He considers Mowat somebody who takes “all sorts of artistic license” to create compelling stories, but does it in a “greater subservience to a greater truth beyond facts.” The two talked at Mowat’s home. “People never quite got what he was doing,” Heuer says. “I think he feels a little bit slighted because he’s been accused of not standing up to something he’s never portrayed himself to be.”
This article was originally published in Up Here magazine.
By Tim Querengesser
Few knew it, but Robert Service wrote The Cremation of Sam McGee having yet to see the Klondike goldfields. Service knew it, though. By 1911, he was rich and soaked with guilt. With a birch-bark canoe, the former banker, who only moved to Dawson after the poems were published, set out to prove he could have been a sourdough, like his fictional characters Sam McGee and Dan McGrew. He’d use the longest way possible: the 3,200-kilometre “Edmonton Route” that meanders north along the Athabasca, Slave and Mackenzie rivers and then south, against the current, along the mighty Yukon. During the 1898 rush, this trail killed more Stampeders than any other. And indeed, as he paddled and pulled, Service nearly joined them in the icy riverbeds. He considered quitting, but wrote in his journal, “If you do . . . you’ll never respect yourself again.” Service eventually made it. Only then, after cheating death, did he consider himself authentic.
His guilt wasn’t unique. The North has forever condemned its successful writers as phonies. Perhaps because they spent so little time here compared to the status they gained from it, many Northerners have grudges with the heavyweights – Service, Jack London and even Dawson native Pierre Berton. Though they’re held in reverence elsewhere, the North assigns them an asterisk. Farley Mowat, the most successful of all, gets an asterisk the size of the sun. Considered a fudger-of-facts on both sides of the divide, he nonetheless has few detractors in southern Canada. But in the North, Mowat is largely seen as part villain, part buffoon. Speaking his name here pushes a button. “Oh, you mean Hardly Know It” some say, rehashing a nickname that’s 50 years old. Some scoff, or laugh, while those who support him steel themselves to argue in his defense.
All this is well-trampled dirt. In 1952, a review in the magazine The Beaver dismissed People of the Deer – Mowat’s debut, and his first of many books set in the North – as “totally erroneous.” This charge clung to him. It reached its nadir in 1996, when Saturday Night magazine ran a cover image of Mowat as Pinocchio. The accompanying story, titled “A Real Whopper,” meticulously documented the half-truths, omissions and fabrications in his Northern books.
So why reopen this debate? The answer can’t be avoided: Mowat is 88 years old, and declared 2008’s Otherwise his last book. At some point rather soon he will no longer be with us. That’s the sentimental answer. The serious one is that no other writer, even today, attracts to the North the audience and enthusiasm that Mowat does. Isn’t it time we shake the foundation of the grudge against him to see if it’s still solid?
Mowat always had eyes for the North. In 1947, aged 26, he traveled to the Barrens near Ennadai Lake, in the southwest corner of what’s now Nunavut. He came as a field biologist for the Arctic Institute of North America. But this was already his second trip to one of the remotest regions of the tundra. When he was 15, his uncle brought Mowat to Churchill, Manitoba, where they shot birds for scientific studies. Mowat’s second trip, though, had a much darker subtext. He’d just returned to Canada after the madness of the Second World War. As biographer James King writes in Farley, to the young Mowat the Arctic seemed “like a good place to run.” The war had ground his belief in Western society into dust. When reading Mowat’s first Northern books, the young man’s state of mind on this and a subsequent trip the next year to study caribou should be considered.
On both trips, Mowat encountered the story of a starving tribe of Inuit – the Ahalmiut, or caribou eaters. He heard through second-hand sourced that they were dying, under the nose of the government. The tale confirmed his dim views. So, as Mowat told the people’s stories in People of the Deer, first published in 1952, he added his beliefs on the cause of the famine. For a first book it’s remarkable – an accessible masterwork that captures Arctic geography in pure emotion. “It was a soft white nightmare that we were flying over,” Mowat writes of first seeing the tundra from a plane. “An undulating monotony of white that covered all shapes and colours. The land, with its low sweeping hills, its lakes and its rivers, simply did not exist for our eyes.” But Mowat knits a challenging accusation into the book. The Canadian government is declared indifferent to the Ahalmiut famine; other Northern institutions, like the Hudson’s Bay Company and the RCMP, are also criticized for their part in creating it.
After People of the Deer was released, Mowat’s indictment was passed around like a grenade. Some denied the Ahalmiut existed, though Mowat wasn’t the first to document the starvation. Mowat himself was called a “liar” in the House of Commons. His facts were quickly given energetic scrutiny and some were found lacking.
In the foreword to the second, 1974 edition of People of the Deer, Mowat addresses this directly. He writes that, when the first book was published, “it was impossible for me to obtain documentary corroboration for much of the story.” This was because the “Old Empire” of the North – the missions, the Mounties and the government – held the proof, he claims. “I was therefore forced to be somewhat circumspect.” For readers wanting the story without omissions, changed names or time and space distortions, the version given in The Desperate People – the 1959 follow-up to People of the Deer – “is the correct one.”
Of course, that incorrect first book had already changed Canada and the North. In the early ‘50s, People of the Deer was well received for a Canadian book, published in the Atlantic Monthly and, aside from a few harsh receptions, showered with glowing international reviews. Canadians were shifting their eyes north thanks to the Cold War and Mowat gave this newly discovered land a human face. A cause was born: Save the Inuit! The government jumped. By 1960, the surviving Ahalmiut were relocated to the coast of Hudson Bay. Whole towns were erected, and emergency food was shipped.
To some Northerners, Mowat’s ends justify his means. “There are people alive today who would likely be dead or not even be born if Farley Mowat had not written about the famines in the Keewatin region in the 1950s,” says Jim Bell, the outspoken editor of the Nunatsiaq News, in Iqaluit. “That is a legacy that can never be taken away from him.”
But the “Old Empire” mandarins in the North, as well as many Inuit, mostly noticed the errors. “It all stared with People of the Deer,” explains Jonquin Covello, a long-time Yellowknifer who once lived in the Keewatin, counted Mowat as a friend, and who’s now writing an English doctoral thesis on Northern literature. “People who’d been to Rankin and Ennadai said, ‘What is he talking about? He’s taken these people’s names and completely misrepresented them.’ It’s like any other piece of non-fiction or even fiction. If you recognize somebody you know you immediately say, ‘Well it’s not right. This guy’s an idiot.’ It always amazes me that Northerners are – how long ago was it, 1948? – still basing their opinions on things Farley said 50 years ago.”
John Goddard has nothing but fire for Farley Mowat and his facts. It was 13 years ago that he wrote the Saturday Night article that exhaustively catalogued Mowat’s entire mistruths. But even today, as I discuss with him Never Cry Wolf – Mowat’s book on wolves in which, he claims, he urinated around his camp like a wolf – Goddard laughs, bitterly. “People actually believed this happened when they read it,” he says.
He comes to the interview armed. In Otherwise, Mowat’s latest book, his main points are again illustrated, he says – that Mowat uses people in order to paint himself a hero, and that he fabricates. He points to quotes in Otherwise that are apparently drawn from Mowat’s Arctic journals. They are “totally made up,” he says. He then quotes a passage about Andy Lawrie, Mowat’s companion during his caribou monitoring in 1948, and one of his best friends. It’s now known, thanks to Goddard, that Mowat left Lawrie alone in the Barrens in order to see his wife in Toronto. In Otherwise, however, this fact is artfully reversed: It’s Lawrie who leaves for Toronto. To some this is perhaps just a detail, but to Goddard it’s part of a pattern. “This is one of the closest people in his life,” he says. “It’s disgusting to me.”
It was almost by accident that Goddard became an expert on Mowat’s errors. In the 1980s, he worked as a Canadian Press correspondent in the North. One day in Rankin Inlet, he says an Inuit man referred to Mowat as Hardly Know It. “I thought ‘What’s this?’ It sort of planted the idea in my mind.” There it sat until 1996, when Goddard looked deeper. What he found at the National Archives in Ottawa, he says, “astounded” him. It was a termination letter, dated 1948, addressed to Mowat from the Canadian government. In People of the Deer, Mowat doesn’t mention that he was canned. Instead, he speaks of himself as a noble writer and scientific explorer who visits uncharted Northern lands and discovers starving people. With this, Goddard knew he had a story. Later, he went to the McMaster University archives, to which Mowat had sold his Arctic journals. There he found dozens more inconsistencies.
The resulting Saturday Night article lists them with precision: the time Mowat spent in the North – and that he observed wolves – was overstated; the fact he never encountered a starving Ahalmiut in person was glossed over; many people accompanying him on his trips were omitted. Goddard also documented what appeared to be a pattern, by comparing what Mowat wrote in his journal to what he put into print. “Where the books show Mowat calling for government relief of the Inuit,” Goddard wrote, “his journal shows him fed up with [government] handouts [for the Inuit].” Could Mowat’s whole thesis that the government was indifferent be fiction, too?
The charges Mowat made, in Goddard’s view, required he get them right. As a reporter at the Toronto Star, Goddard lives in this black and white world. So, even today, far removed from the debate, he bristles when considering the pass people have given Mowat. On Bell’s argument that Mowat alerted the nation to the starvation, falsities and all, he disagrees. “By making those claims and doing that writing he got a lot of people worked up,” he says. “There was a lot of talk in Parliament and public debates, and it was a lot of energy spent on an entirely bogus point. That’s where the destructiveness comes in. It’s beyond me why people believe anything Mowat writes. It is so twisted, so distorted, so destructive, so anti-Canada and anti-North.” To Goddard, Mowat is the Ben Johnson of Canadian literature “except he didn’t get caught.” Despite the facts on Mowat being out, though, he believes Mowat will likely remain a hero. “Who’s going to care about that after 50 years of idolization?”
The only time I ever bagged school to read a book was on account of Farley Mowat. I was 11; the book was Lost in the Barrens. I still remember the basic plot if not its details, including thinking it weird that the characters had a cabin made of tree logs – weren’t they supposed to be lost . . . on the Barrens? But I didn’t put it down that day. And what stayed with me since is an interest in the North. Mowat was my entry point, even if I never credited him.
There’s a trend today in literature to attack non-fiction writers, from those who authored the great works of the past to the bestsellers on Oprah Winfrey’s book list. The list of those who’ve been, for lack of a better term, ‘outted’ as fabricators of facts is constantly growing. Mowat’s condemnation came before all this, but his comments on facts have done little good in the new environment. “Fuck the facts,” he writes in his introduction to his journals in the McMaster archives. When interviewed by Goddard 13 years ago, Mowat said he didn’t “invent.” But he later added, “I never let the facts get in the way of the truth!”
While the case of the North’s continued dismissal of Mowat may seem to be about the facts, though, it falls to pieces when you look at them. After reciting Mowat’s ‘Hardly Know It’ nickname, only a few people who I talked to could tell me why they said it. Fewer still had read his books. Yet everyone, from people at bookstores and museums to long-time Northerners, shared what appeared like a hand-me-down grudge. The condemnation is no longer about pure facts.
This point is amplified as I talk with Eric Anautalik on the phone from Baker Lake, Nunavut. Anautalik is an Ahalmiut. He was a baby during the starvation in the Barrens, though he has few memories of it. “My dad had no more energy because of starving,” Anautalik recalls. “I was still on my mother’s back, in an amauti. We were in mud hut and I remember my mom told us to eat the ‘white ones’ on the wall. It was some sort of plant and it gave us energy. That’s the only thing I remember.”
Fifty years later, Anautalik saw The Desperate People at the library in Baker Lake. He was startled. “The cover page is a picture of my mom and my sister.” This stirred emotions about his family. But as I ask Anautalik how he feels about Mowat, he isn’t sure. “Oh, it’s hard to say,” he says. “It’s something useful, I guess, if it’s the truth, if there’s a starvation and somebody’s gotta get help in Ottawa. That’s what they were trying to do, I guess. To tell you the truth, I never read the book.”
Thanks to the North’s feeling towards writers, it’s likely Mowat would have been considered a fraud whether he got everything right or not. For his faults he could have repented in the search for authenticity, like Service. Perhaps the North would have forgiven him then. But the truth is Mowat didn’t need to. People of the Deer and his following books on the North sparked mass interest in the place. Students still read them and are coaxed into dreaming of life beyond the 60th parallel. Fifty years on, has Mowat’s stock not been tarnished enough to allow us to accept him, exposed warts and all? We now have guides, such as Goddard, to warn us to read him for his stories and not his facts. So shouldn’t we thank him for turning people’s eyes Northward at some point soon? “We don’t have stories of our land,” Covello says, “except the ones that Pierre Berton tells and Farley Mowat tells. Those are the stories of our land, as far as I can see. And those are the stories that a lot of people love.”
To properly reconsider Mowat’s legacy in the North, you couldn’t do much better than retracing his steps. Writer and filmmaker Karsten Heuer has. Heuer lived in Inuvik for three years, then went on to shoot his popular documentary, Being Caribou, in the northern Yukon. In 2008, as part of his Finding Farley project, which will result in a film and book, Heuer – along with his wife and their two-year-old son – canoed and sailed from their home in Canmore, Alberta to Mowat’s summer home in Nova Scotia. Along the way they retraced Mowat’s literary trips, and encountered his baggage as they did. In Lac la Ronge, Saskatchewan, Heuer ran into historians who “really tore a strip off us for how we were holding up Farley to a high esteem because of all the things he hadn’t quite gotten right.” This encounter, so pointed, changed their perspective. As they headed north by canoe, “everything was thrown into doubt,” Heuer says.
The trio arrived at Nueltin Lake, where several of Mowat’s Northern books are set. “It very much felt like we had been there before,” he says. “We could literally use the description from Never Cry Wolf to steer ourselves from the ruins in this old camp where Farley based himself for a couple summers to the actual wolf den he describes in that book.” A wolf paid a visit to them the following day.
By the end of the trip, as they eventual found Mowat at his summer home, Heuer says his reverence had returned in full. Mowat “really captured the gist of these places, the sense of the people and the sense of the landscape,” he says. He considers Mowat somebody who takes “all sorts of artistic license” to create compelling stories, but does it in a “greater subservience to a greater truth beyond facts.” The two talked at Mowat’s home. “People never quite got what he was doing,” Heuer says. “I think he feels a little bit slighted because he’s been accused of not standing up to something he’s never portrayed himself to be.”
This article was originally published in Up Here magazine.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
A vision for Yellowknife
By Tim Querengesser
I've just returned from a live radio panel on the CBC. I was on air discussing Yellowknife's upcoming municipal election. As anyone who's done live radio will understand, I didn't get to say most of what I'd hoped to say. So, after reading Richard Florida and Spacing magazine, and pondering a Yellowknife of the future for an evening, I've decided to put my notes somewhere for people to read, disagree or agree with and to comment on.
I was asked to ponder if Yellowknife mayoral and council candidates have a vision for the city, and if not, what sort of vision I'd like to see. Here's what I had in my notes.
Yellowknife needs a long-term vision. Big time. It needs a leader who can dream big and inspire people to join their vision and plant their lives here. Without it, people will move here with the booms and leave during the busts.
To achieve this, the mayor and city council should:
Embrace new ideas: Credibility in Yellowknife politics is often built through the length of time you've been here rather than your ideas. That's a problem. Consider that we have one of the youngest, most highly-educated demographic profiles of any city in Canada but an incumbent mayor in his 60s and only four of 16 council candidates younger than 40. Hmm.
Build the infrastructure of citizenship: Why does everyone love Folk on the Rocks? Other than the music, I think it's because it allows us to be Yellowknifers, together. We need more of that. The city should support cultural groups and organizations that are already struggling to make the city more entertaining, livable and recreational, despite the lack of support. How to improve? Build an arts facility that amateurs can afford (ever tried to rent NACC?) to host their events, from indie film premiers to comedy nights to photography exhibits. Further, embrace culture and lifestyle as ways to make Yellowknife a destination city. I'll come here for the work opportunities, sure, but I'll stay for the lifestyle and the sense of community.
Aspire to more: Dreaming big can sometimes lead to big things. Tromso, Norway, at 69 degrees north, has added 30,000 residents since the 1960s not through industrial development but through the soft stuff: they built a university, they marketed their quality of life and recreation, they concentrated on creating a more beautiful city. People move to places for that nowadays. Can we imagine a Yellowknife where people choose to live here but, say, commute to work somewhere in the south? At the moment the inverse is often true. Over in Whitehorse, it isn't. That needs to change.
Mix everyone together: Ever wondered why everyone in one of Canada's most walkable cities feels they need to own a car? We work downtown yet most of us live in suburban areas where there aren't any shops or other services. Many of these areas are homogeneous rather than mixed. Renters live in ghettos while homeowners live in relative splendor. Planning is at the root of a livable, enjoyable city. The cities most cite as great all share common things: they're walkable, they integrate residential space with coffee shops and bookstores and grocery stores, and they stay open. I live downtown and at night, it's my little kingdom: no one's there. How can you have life downtown if the lights go out at 6 p.m.? How can you convince people to come? Culture. Life.
Build a sense of ownership: Living downtown and loving all the benefits that brings, I'm tired of people complaining about how unsafe it is. It's only perceived this way because nobody comes downtown after they leave their office and drive home. Anywhere there are empty streets there will be a feeling of insecurity. On top of people coming to a vibrant downtown after work, we need civically minded people to take their city and improve it. Don't like downtown? Do something to help the people you'd like off the streets. A city of so many civil servants shouldn't struggle with such a concept so much.
I've just returned from a live radio panel on the CBC. I was on air discussing Yellowknife's upcoming municipal election. As anyone who's done live radio will understand, I didn't get to say most of what I'd hoped to say. So, after reading Richard Florida and Spacing magazine, and pondering a Yellowknife of the future for an evening, I've decided to put my notes somewhere for people to read, disagree or agree with and to comment on.
I was asked to ponder if Yellowknife mayoral and council candidates have a vision for the city, and if not, what sort of vision I'd like to see. Here's what I had in my notes.
Yellowknife needs a long-term vision. Big time. It needs a leader who can dream big and inspire people to join their vision and plant their lives here. Without it, people will move here with the booms and leave during the busts.
To achieve this, the mayor and city council should:
Embrace new ideas: Credibility in Yellowknife politics is often built through the length of time you've been here rather than your ideas. That's a problem. Consider that we have one of the youngest, most highly-educated demographic profiles of any city in Canada but an incumbent mayor in his 60s and only four of 16 council candidates younger than 40. Hmm.
Build the infrastructure of citizenship: Why does everyone love Folk on the Rocks? Other than the music, I think it's because it allows us to be Yellowknifers, together. We need more of that. The city should support cultural groups and organizations that are already struggling to make the city more entertaining, livable and recreational, despite the lack of support. How to improve? Build an arts facility that amateurs can afford (ever tried to rent NACC?) to host their events, from indie film premiers to comedy nights to photography exhibits. Further, embrace culture and lifestyle as ways to make Yellowknife a destination city. I'll come here for the work opportunities, sure, but I'll stay for the lifestyle and the sense of community.
Aspire to more: Dreaming big can sometimes lead to big things. Tromso, Norway, at 69 degrees north, has added 30,000 residents since the 1960s not through industrial development but through the soft stuff: they built a university, they marketed their quality of life and recreation, they concentrated on creating a more beautiful city. People move to places for that nowadays. Can we imagine a Yellowknife where people choose to live here but, say, commute to work somewhere in the south? At the moment the inverse is often true. Over in Whitehorse, it isn't. That needs to change.
Mix everyone together: Ever wondered why everyone in one of Canada's most walkable cities feels they need to own a car? We work downtown yet most of us live in suburban areas where there aren't any shops or other services. Many of these areas are homogeneous rather than mixed. Renters live in ghettos while homeowners live in relative splendor. Planning is at the root of a livable, enjoyable city. The cities most cite as great all share common things: they're walkable, they integrate residential space with coffee shops and bookstores and grocery stores, and they stay open. I live downtown and at night, it's my little kingdom: no one's there. How can you have life downtown if the lights go out at 6 p.m.? How can you convince people to come? Culture. Life.
Build a sense of ownership: Living downtown and loving all the benefits that brings, I'm tired of people complaining about how unsafe it is. It's only perceived this way because nobody comes downtown after they leave their office and drive home. Anywhere there are empty streets there will be a feeling of insecurity. On top of people coming to a vibrant downtown after work, we need civically minded people to take their city and improve it. Don't like downtown? Do something to help the people you'd like off the streets. A city of so many civil servants shouldn't struggle with such a concept so much.
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