In Chicago, where he settled, William Henry Jackson, British settler, transformed himself into Honoré Jaxon, Métis freedom fighter. He identified so closely with the Métis struggle for justice that he became one of them. He had no trouble convincing others that he was a Native and probably had no trouble convincing himself either.
I remembered past ordeals: a U.S. official who squeezed out my toothpaste tube on the train from Montreal to Philadelphia, another who hauled me off a bus for a lengthy interrogation that culminated in his shouting that the friend I was visiting in Boston could not be American if she had a Hispanic name.
Several years ago Ian McKay, a Queen’s University history professor, published a book called The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McGill-Queen’s University Press)in which he argued that the image many of us have of Nova Scotia as a tartan-wearing, bagpipe-squealing mini-Scotland is pretty much a fabrication.
Bologna, Italy, known as both “the Fat” and “the Red,” is a city to a make a bookish vacationer salivate. Less overrun by package tours than Rome, Florence or Venice, Bologna combines superb food with the wonderful bookstores that seem to be the inevitable companion of left-wing politics.
Art museums and geographical exploration curiously share a common story. The first chapter of the story takes place in Peru. In 1540, the conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro, lost in the strange Amazonian jungle, entrusted one of his men, Francisco de Orellana, to take their remaining brigantine and set off down the Napo River in search of provisions.
The theatre is plush, high-ranking and named after the Queen. I don’t know the name of the play but C does. C brings me to the theatre when I go. I undergo a pleasant transformation when I go to the theatre. I wear a tie, black shoes and a sports coat. At first it was difficult, “not my style.”
Eighty-five years after Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, another film on the identity of the Inuit was hailed as a masterpiece around the world. This time, the director was himself an Inuit, Zacharias Kunuk, and his film told an Inuit story, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Something new, something that demanded a different receptive method for a different voice, was being shown, and, in the process, the audience was taught another way of seeing, a viewpoint from within the other culture itself.
Here’s how all this began. There’s a shop in my neighbourhood near English Bay in Vancouver that sells swimwear all year round, though more of it in the summer than in the cold, wet months, when First Beach is deserted except for treasure hunters with metal detectors, dogs retrieving Frisbees and individuals who look so disconsolate that I fear they may be contemplating suicide. When passing by this shop in early spring I was surprised to see a window display of bikinis made to look like military camouflage, in the familiar green-and-brown woodland pattern.
In 1952, Princess Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip visited Kenya, then a British colony, and stayed for a night at Treetops, a tiny, rustic structure in the branches of a fig tree, where guests could watch the wild animals that came to drink at an adjacent waterhole. During the night, Elizabeth’s father, King George vi, died, so when she clambered down out of the tree in the morning she was the Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (and, of course, Canada).
