Fort Whoop-up and Fort Macleod

Photo: Fort Whoop-up, University of Calgary

In 1869, the nation of Canada was two years old. BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba were still part of the Northwest Territory.

In Europe, the declining popularity of beaver hats was slowing the fur trade. The main American fur company had collapsed in 1864.

In the spring of 1869, Canadian fur barons negotiated the sale of the British-granted "lands draining into Hudson's Bay," Rupert's Land, to the Canadian government for $1.5 million dollars.

In Montana, ex-fur traders had another money-making idea. They moved north and built a whiskey post on the Oldman River, where the Alberta town of Lethbridge now stands. There they prepared to sell liquor and firearms to the local native people at a handsome profit. The ensuing trouble was critical in the government's decision to establish a national police force.

Aboriginal lifestyles had been severely disrupted by the arrival of Europeans. The buffalo on which they had long depended were dying out, and European diseases had decimated their populations. The whiskey post at Fort Whoop-up was another in a long list of disasters.

The newly constituted North West Mounted Police force was dispatched on horseback in 1873. After an arduous journey, they arrived the following year. The fort they built was named after the Assistant Commissioner, James Macleod. Their assignment was to establish law and order, gain the trust of native people, and enforce a prohibition on alcohol. They were also asked to collect customs dues, to prove Canada owned the territory. 

At Fort Macleod, the first "redcoats" carried out their riding demonstration in 1876. Now known as the RCMP Musical ride, this well-known Canadian ceremony can be witnessed daily in its birthplace at the Fort between July 1 and Labour Day. (Photo: Parks Canada). 

In a 1969 broadcast, a 109-year old veteran recalled his life with the early NWMP. The interview is available on CBC (digital archives). 

The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan

Image from rankopedia

The Chivers Audiobook I listened to was copyrighted in 1981, the same year Ian McEwan's second novel, The Comfort of Strangers, came out in book form.

As McEwan said when he spoke in Vancouver at the invitation of the Vancouver Writers' Fest in 2010, he intentionally set out to push the boundaries of the novel beyond the predictable and expected format.

He certainly did that with this novel, venturing into the territory just beyond the map of normality into the edge of the violence that accompanies sexual obsession, and probing the psychology of those who enjoy it.

Opening scene: a young couple on a romantic holiday in an exotic foreign city. The suspense begins when lovers Mary and Colin venture out after dark mapless, in search of a restaurant.

The moment an overly polite stranger called Robert grasps the wrist of Colin to lead the vulnerable tourists to what turns out to be his bar, he begins to draw them into his orbit. They drink with Robert for most of the night while he tells them stories of his ghastly childhood as the son of an oppressive and dominant diplomat father.

The novel, told mainly from the point of view of Mary, moves forward with slow inevitability. Mary and Colin have chance after chance to pull away from the unhealthy atmosphere of their self-appointed guide and his strange wife.

Yet in spite of increasingly dramatic warning signs that something is seriously wrong about Robert and Caroline, the holiday couple tacitly agree to let these peculiar strangers reel them in.

The scene where Mary swims far out into the sea and Colin follows in a panic is brilliantly executed, as is the unspoken agreement between the two to get off the ferry at a place where they are likely to encounter their alluring tormentors again.

Even though the plot has a certain inevitability, the end is a shock when it comes. McEwan's flawless prose points to the darker aspects of human nature, the primitive association of danger with sexual excitement.

By no means a pleasant story, this is still a fascinating tale that evokes a shudder of recognition: one of the things humans do is to seek out the thrill of danger, often with disastrous results.

Louis Riel

Photo: Toronto Public Library

Orator, revolutionary and author, Riel remains ambiguous in Canadian history. To some, he is heroic; to others, traitorous.

The Manitoba Act was passed in 1870, providing for about one and a half million acres of land to be used by the Metis.

The previous year, as the North-west territory was being handed over from the Hudsons Bay Company to the two-year-old nation of Canada, the Metis, led by Louis Riel, stopped the surveyors from working and seized Fort Garry (site of modern Winnipeg.)

They issued a people's declaration, set up a provisional government headed by Riel, and imprisoned a group of Canadians who had organized armed resistance. In Ottawa, the delegation arranged for the Red River Colony to enter Confederation.

In this first Northwest Rebellion, the newly declared government of the Catholic Metis executed surveyor Thomas Scott, who had mustered Scottish Protestant settlers to fight Riel's people.

The two groups had very different lifestyles. The Roman Catholic Metis, who were descended from French settlers and aboriginal people, followed the buffalo for part of the year, while the Scottish settlers of the Red River Colony were Protestant farmers who fenced their lands. Meanwhile, the buffalo herds were dwindling, threatening the livelihood of the Metis and other local tribes.

In the summer of 1870, the government sent a military expedition, a "mission of peace" to the Red River Colony. Riel, denounced in the capital as a murderer, now had a $5000 price on his head. He fled to the U.S. for a temporary period of self-exile. 

In 1873 and 1874, Riel was elected by his people and went to Ottawa; however, the anti-Catholic Orangeman Mackenzie Bowell, (later a Prime Minister), raised a motion to have him removed from the House. Though Riel was re-elected, he did not attempt to take his seat in Ottawa again.

Riel, who had become a kind of visionary demagogue, led a second rebellion in 1885. However, the now completed railway and the newly formed Royal North West Mounted Police meant it was easy for the government to suppress this opposition in the formerly isolated and inaccessible West.

The fighting lasted only two months before the final defeat at Batoche, and Riel was tried for treason in Regina and hanged. He has remained a divisive and controversial figure in Canadian history, representing historical and cultural divides between Catholic and Protestant, French and English, European and Aborignal. 

In 1971, to celebrate Manitoba's centenary, a monument to Louis Riel was erected in front of the Legislature. Before the controversy that arose over the validity of his own aboriginal heritage, Canadian author Joseph Boyden wrote a book about Riel and his lieutenant, Gabriel Dumont, reviewed here in the Globe and Mail.

Chief Piapot

Photo: Office of the Treaty Commissioner

Piapot was born of Cree and Assiniboine parentage in Saskatchewan in 1816. Both parents died of smallpox when he was young, and he lived among the Sioux with his grandmother until age 14, when a Cree war party freed them.

At age twenty-four, he became a chief and led the Cree into battle against the Blackfoot near Fort Whoop-up.

Even so, he believed in negotiating peacefully. Chief Piapot was a signatory to Treaty 5 and became known as a moderate voice. In 1875, he gave conditional approval to Treaty 4 provided that an economic base be provided for the Cree people. Although these promises were not fulfilled, like Chief Crowfoot, Piapot declined to involve his people in the North-West Rebellion of 1885.

Hunters of the buffalo, Piapot and his people resented the Hudson's Bay Company and the Canadian government for taking over the prairies.

In a non-violent protest against the incursion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, he and his people pulled up survey stakes and pitched tipis in the path of the railway workers. This protest ended when Piapot got travel concessions for his people. The town of Piapot, in the Cypress Hills of south western Saskatchewan, is named after him.

Piapot also resisted government efforts to suppress native culture and religion. He continued to hold sun dances even after they were made illegal. Although he commanded great respect among his own people, when he died in 1902, the Indian Affairs Department was in the process of trying to have him deposed as Chief.

Chief Crowfoot

Photo: Native Leaders of Canada

Also known as Isapo-Muxica, Chief Crowfoot was born in 1830 to the Blood Tribe near Belly River. He grew up among the Blackfoot and eventually became a respected chief. 

Though he fought in various tribal wars, Crowfoot made peace with the Cree and rescued missionary Father Albert Lacombe from a Cree raid.

He also welcomed the North-West Mounted Police when they arrived in southern Alberta to stamp out the whiskey trade which was doing so much harm to aboriginal people.

In his personal life, Crowfoot lost and grieved for many children. He also adopted Poundmaker, who became a great chief when he grew up.

In 1877, he took part in negotiations for Treaty 7, and in 1881 the Blackfoot people settled on their reserve. Though he was disillusioned by the government's actions afterwards, Chief Crowfoot wisely kept his people out of the North-West Rebellion of 1885.

In 1886 he was invited to Ottawa by Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, but was unable to complete the journey due to ill-health. He died in 1890 near Blackfoot Crossing.

An orator and visionary as well as a diplomat and politician, he commented as an old man on the transience of life, calling it "the flash of a firefly in the night...the breath of a buffalo in the winter time" (Canadian Encyclopedia).

Nuruddin Farah speaks at World Lit SFU

Image from Goodreads

The Westminster Savings Lecture Theatre was packed tonight when Somali-born author Nuruddin Farah visited Simon Fraser's Surrey campus yesterday to read to students and members of the public from his latest book, Crossbones. I glimpsed Anosh Irani, sitting in the front row.

Farah is a small and soft-spoken man, and at first the crowd, many of them young students, seemed hesitant, unresponsive to his humour. The audience was rapt when Farah read his opening scene, an encounter between a woman in a "body tent" and an illiterate teenage military recruit in Ray Bans and a baseball cap. The novel takes place in Mogadishu, Somalia.

After this reading, he sipped his water and looked at the MC. "Shall I go on? What is the protocol?" Signalled to continue, he delivered his formal address, "Green in the Salad of My Judgment."

In this personal essay, Farah spoke of his life as the fourth of eleven children in post-colonial Somalia. He related the trouble he got into with his first paid work as a writer. He was ten years old when, hired to write a letter for an illiterate adult, he deviated from the words the client dictated, with dramatic results.

He described being made to recite the Koran in Arabic in school though he understood it imperfectly, and he related an ironic situation in which he was accidentally offered hospitality meant for a devout Muslim Arab, and not a Somali with an Arabic name.

For his publications, works of fiction, Farah has been subjected to death threats, and exiled from his home country for over twenty-five years.

It was during the question period that the audience fully warmed to this remarkable man. In response to several queries, he expressed firm views and answered questions by telling more stories. A self-described secularist, he nonetheless believes that we are put on earth for a reason, in his case, to write.

It is a poignant reality that most of his Somali contemporaries are now dead. Some fell victim to the violence that rocked the country, while others died of preventible diseases for the lack of a simple vaccination. Thus, Farah meditates on why has he been spared.

It is in the nature of writers, he said, to take the side of justice, and writing a novel is a democratic act. He praised master writer Italo Calvino, who "could imagine a world greater than Italy." Really good stories, Farah said, could have happened anywhere.

This unassuming man, now in his mid-sixties, speaks Somali, Arabic, Amharic and English. He has published many novels and won numerous literary prizes. He has even published a re-write of the ancient Greek drama Antigone; his version features a suicide bomber. He lives in Cape Town and teaches for part of the year at at the University of Minnesota.

Kudos to SFU World Literature Program for bringing Nuruddin Farah to a Vancouver audience for the first time.

Fire in the Blood by Irene Nemirovsky

Image from amazon

Like Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky's brilliantly executed novel Fire in the Blood bears witness to the culture of an insular segment of French society in the years before World War II. Published in 2007, it was widely reviewed.

The reader, Mark Bramhall, inhabits the character of Uncle Silvio with flawless precision as he unfolds this tale of family secrets, lies, and hidden passions. Silvio is old; in his youth he travelled to exotic places and wasted his fortune. Now he has turned his back on the memory of his early years. Yet when he is forced once more to witness the violence aroused by passion, Silvio is forced to thaw his frozen emotions and recall a past when he too harboured "fire in the blood."

Irene Nemirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 but at the time of the Russian Revolution, her family left for Paris and settled in France.

Nemirovsky was a successful writer long before WWII. She published a novel called David Golder in 1935, and penned many short stories and novels that bear historical witness to the world she inhabited before her tragic early death in Auschwitz in 1942.

The story of how her later novels survived is almost miraculous. Foreseeing the possibility of being taken to the camps, Nemirovsky and her husband David Epstein arranged with friends and publishers for the protection and education of their children in case they did not survive the war. Although they both died in the camps, a trunk containing the manuscript of Suite Francaise and other papers escaped German-occupied France along with Nemirovsky's two young daughters. Of the the planned suite of five novels, only two were complete, with notes made for the rest.  

Suite Francaise was published in 2006 after Denise and Elizabeth rediscovered it, nearly sixty years after they were spirited out of German-occupied France. In 2010, a life of Nemirovsky was published by two French biographers.

The Museum of Jewish History in New York created an exhibition about this remarkable Woman of Letters.