Many reasons for Thanksgiving gratitude

Photo: Sunday roast

For the first Thanksgiving in many years, I did not cook a turkey dinner. Instead I partook of a festive meal prepared by my daughter and her partner. Time passes, conditions change, customs evolve. There were no turnips at our table, but there were brussels sprouts.There was no stuffing, but there was gravy and Yorkshire pudding, even though the roast was lamb rather than beef. There were, of course, potatoes and carrots, both essential vegetables of the harvest season.

In the midst of our meal, cooking being done elsewhere in the building caused the firebell to ring. Fortunately, this led only to a brief alarm, until the cause was known and resolved.

Hearing the fire alarm and then discovering that all was well was also a salubrious reminder of how very much we have to be thankful for, starting with the basics: safe homes and food shared with those we love.

Chief Big Bear

Photo: Our Legacy

The Cree Chief Big Bear was born in 1825 near Fort Carlton, Saskatchewan in a time of great historic upheaval. his Cree name, Mistahimaskwa, came from a vision of the venerated Bear Spirit. In French he was called Gros Ours.

In the 1860s, Hudson's Bay traders reported him as living near Forts Carlton and Pitt. In 1870, he was involved when the Cree fought the Blackfeet at Belly River, near present-day Lethbridge.

In the years following Confederation, the buffalo populations were dwindling, threatening the traditional livelihood of the plains people, including the Metis. In 1874 a Hudson's Bay trader was sent to the camp of Big Bear to distribute gifts of tobacco and tea and explain the coming of the Northwest Mounted Police, who were supposed to keep peace in the West.

Later the Lieutenant Governor came to negotiate Treaty 6 and found Big Bear disinclined to sign. The chief foresaw the coming calamity represented by the imminent demise of the buffalo, and knew that in this situation, the treaty money the government was offering would be of little use.

As conditions worsened in the 1880s, Big Bear determined to go to Ottawa. He travelled east with a band of 500 in 1884. They stopped at the camp of Poundmaker for a Thirst Dance, alternatively known as a Rain Dance. By then, the government had expressly forbidden such ceremonies. At this large gathering, hostilities broke out between a young warrior and a white farm instructor. Thanks to Big Bear and Leif Crozier of the Mounties, peace was maintained.

Big Bear's demands for his people were set out in speeches he made at Duck Lake and Fort Carlton the same year. Sadly, the government was not only unresponsive, but dismissive. A few months later, the NWMP under Crozier were routed at Duck Lake by the Metis. This was the beginning of long and difficult hostilities.

Big Bear tried to keep the peace and protect the interests of his people. Instead of espousing force, he employed wisdom and reason in his efforts to unite the Plains people and resist white control.

During the Riel Rebellion, he'd avoided taking part in the hostilities, but after Batoche, he was tried for treason in Regina, sentenced and imprisoned in Stony Mountain. As his health worsened, Crowfoot and others petitioned for his release, and he was allowed to leave the jail. By then his health was broken and the buffalo gone. Big Bear died on the Poundmaker Reserve in 1888.

Lynda Barry teaches creativity for writers

"Writing the Unthinkable." It was a thought-provoking title for Lynda Barry's workshop offered last weekend as part of the Vancouver Writers Fest.

Lynda talks about the different brain aspects she calls front of mind and back of mind, and teaches how to tap into the non-thinking side of the brain to promote creativity. Lynda herself is a cartoonist, a novelist and a teacher. As a presenter, she is sincere, engaging and hilarious.

Participants were given food for thought. We humans are changing our brains as we do less and less of such brain friendly activity as rhythmic movement and singing. Throughout history, every culture has sung and danced, but now, we believe creativity is owned by talented entertainers, so we suppress our individual creative gifts.

Lynda's creativity, though, is in full swing. This year she has made a coup in her inroads into academia. "I have wormed my way into the science department," she said. The University of Wisconsin at Madison didn't know where to offer her course. Last year it could be counted as an arts elective, or an English course. This year, it can also count as a science credit.

"Everybody should know this stuff," she said, as with a few tricks she got her audience writing short vignettes we didn't know we had in us.

Want to journal but don't have time? Try Linda's quick and easy version. The four-minute daily journal, she says, is a practice that promotes creativity. Check it out here. If you do it every day, Lynda promises, "you'll start to notice what you notice."

Buskers back at Broadway

 Photo: trekearth.com

Commercial-Broadway, I should say -- I still think of my transit station as Broadway, the old name I knew it by for so long.

The buskers are back. Monday I rode down the escalator to the sweet sad strains of Farewell to Nova Scotia. A tall thin fiddler was giving his music to the crowd. Today, a musician was playing an instrumental piece.

The 2010 Olympics put a damper on transit station busking, when some bureaucratic busybody decided that buskers had to audition and pay licencing fees. For a long time after that, I saw no buskers at all.

I've missed these musicians, and feel they should have the right to play in public places for tips. If they want to make music enough to stand in the cold and hope someone will throw in a coin, they should be allowed to. Music makes the commute so much more pleasant.

Welcome, Broadway buskers. Good to have you back.

His Illegal Self, by Peter Carey

Photo: Peter Carey life

This is the amazing tale of a boy who is "accidentally" kidnapped. Anna Zenos, nicknamed Dial (for Dialectic) is an SDS operative who is taking the child from the custody of his grandma to his radically revolutionary parents when a violent explosion derails her plans. Now fugitives, the woman and child are on the run: from New York to Philly, from Seattle to Brisbane and beyond. On the way, Anna and the stolen child fall for one another.

Told by turns from the point of view of the brave and intelligent eight-year-old Che (or Jay, as his Park Avenue grandmother prefers to call him) and Anna, this novel places the reader (or listener) in the heart of sixties activism.

Anna's planned life has been interrupted by her revolutionary politics. Instead of becoming the Vassar prof she was meant to be, will she become the guardian of a child whose fate is determined by his birth into a particular place and time in history? And how is her fate tied to that of her Greek father, a revolutionary himself?

Brilliantly conceived and lushly executed, the book conjures up the era, the characters and the Australian landscape in a way that awakens the senses. The plot twists and turns to the very end. Will Che grow up in a remote hippie commune at Remus Creek, or will he return to the privileged American life that awaits him, the same one his mother so violently turned her back on? We're kept guessing until the very end.

Peter Carey was born in a small town in Australia in 1943 and moved to New York in 1990, where he continued to write novels. His other titles include Illywhacker (shortlisted for the Booker in 1985), Oscar and Lucinda (Man Booker, 1988) and The True History of the Kelly Gang (2001).

His Illegal Self was published as a book by Knopf in 2008, and the audiobook, narrated by Stefan Rudnicki, came out the same year.

A few good events for readers

This is a good week for readers to meet writers and hear their stories. Yesterday evening in Surrey, Anita Rau Badami read at Central Library.

This evening at VPL Central, MG Vassanji will be reading at 6:30 pm. Those unable to attend can hear him interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel on an archived CBC radio podcast: the Vassanji interview follows one with the British military historian John Keegan here.

Thursday at Cottage Bistro is the monthly TWS reading series. This month, writer Jane Silcott and poet Daniela Elza are featured, along with Esmeralda Cabral, who has just returned from the Disquiet Literary Program in Portugal, and several other readers. It promises to be a great evening.

On Wednesday, October 10, the well-known Canadian historian Daniel Francis will be talking at the monthly CAA meeting at the Alliance for Arts and Culture on Howe Street at 7 pm.

We're now on the run-up to the annual SIWC and the Vancouver Writers' Fest, so it's a great time for readers to get out and see the people whose work they love to read. Great days for the literary arts.

Alexander Mackenzie

Photo: PBS.org

"Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand, seven hundred and ninety-three."

Painted in a mixture of vermilion and grease on a rock at Bella Bella, the triumphant inscription announcing his arrival at the the coast is still visible. Others probed the Arctic for the elusive Northwest Passage, but Mackenzie remained focused on finding the "Western Sea."

In 1793, with a North West Company partner and native guides, he achieved that ambition. The English king, George III, knighted the Scottish-born Mackenzie, out of recognition that he was the first European explorer north of Mexico to reach the Pacific Ocean by an overland route. Later, Americans Lewis and Clark duplicated the feat of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, arriving at the Pacific near Portland, Oregon in 1805.

The Mackenzie River and the town of Mackenzie, BC, bear the name of this explorer. Schools are also named after him in Vancouver and Hagensborg, BC, and in Cochrane, Alberta. This past June, Sir Alexander Mackenzie School in Inuvik, which opened in 1959, closed along with another school named after explorer and naturalist Samuel Hearne. The two will be replaced by a larger, more modern facility.

Alexander Mackenzie was also the name of Canada's second Prime Minister, a Liberal, but that namesake was not born until 1822, long after our fur-trading explorer had accomplished his most memorable feats. His memory continues to be honoured by BC Grizzly Tours.

Photo: Mackenzie's inscription, from Beyond the map.