Clean Water

Elders from the Lhoosk’uz Dené community tasting water from their new water treatment system (Photo source)

I was excited to read recently about a small Lhoosk’uz Dené community in northern British Columbia which finally has a steady supply of clean tap water. Village leaders approached the University of British Columbia to help them develop a water treatment system that uses a combination of ultraviolet light and chlorine disinfection to ensure the water in the community is safe enough to drink.

The innovative system is simple to operate and can be maintained and repaired without having to call in specialists from other places or pay for expensive parts. The community partnered with a team of scientists and engineers that use a collaborative, community-driven approach to develop practical drinking water solutions for rural Canadian communities. The new water system in the Lhoosk’uz Dené village ends a 14-year boil water advisory.

The good news story reminded me of an installation I saw at the Art Gallery of Ontario a few years ago by Ruth Cuthand. It was called Don’t Breathe, Don’t Drink.  The blue tarp on the table is the kind used for hastily constructed shacks people on one reserve had to move into when black mold was discovered in the drywall in their homes.

The glasses of water on the table contain plastic and beaded representations of the different kinds of bacteria and parasites found in the water on northern Canadian reserves that have boil water advisories. 

The artist put some of the bacteria-filled water into baby bottles to remind us that children may be drinking this contaminated water too. 

I am glad those kinds of problems are over for at least one Indigenous community. According to a government of Canada website as of today, there are still 32 communities in Canada with boil water advisories in effect. Let’s hope that innovative solutions like the one found for the Lhoosk’uz Dené community can be created for those 32 communities as well.

Other posts………

She Is Gripped By Terror

Blackwater- A Book That Connected With Me

Locked Away

Aunt Olly

Olly Penner

We didn’t have Sesame Street or Paw Patrol or Blues Clues when I was a kid. We had Aunt Olly. Olly Penner hosted a program on the radio station CFAM for kids called Children’s Party and I was a devoted fan in my childhood.

Like many families in the late 1950s and early 1960s we didn’t have a television and along with thousands of other children from all over western Canada and the central northern United States I sat near the radio every afternoon while Aunt Olly read stories like Tall Fireman Paul, Big Red or Johnny Appleseed and played funny songs like I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly and There’s a Hole in the Bucket. If your mother sent in a request, Aunt Olly would also wish you a Happy Birthday over the air and even tell you where your Mom had hidden your present.

I remember hurrying home from school and sitting down at the table with the snack Mom had ready for me and listening to Aunt Olly.

Photo from the CFAM radio website of Aunt Olly and her sidekick Gus

In 1989 I was on the staff of the magazine The Mennonite Mirror and was assigned to write a feature story about Olly Penner for the magazine. I was excited to have the chance to interview my childhood idol. I found out that not only had Olly done a children’s program for CFAM she had also hosted a variety of other shows like Ladies First, Hints for Homemakers, The Garden Show, and Social Calendar. She co-hosted the radio station’s morning show with anchor Jim McSweeny for 13 years.

Remember this was a time when most women did not work outside the home, something Olly Penner was criticized for by some radio listeners. She said the support of her husband Vic who was the editor of the Altona newspaper The Red River Valley Echo but was often referred to by the public as ‘Aunt Olly’s husband’, made it possible for her to keep up with all her radio station commitments which included many public appearances. She also found time to write a regular newspaper column, publish a cookbook, and be an active participant in several community organizations, all while raising two sons.

Children’s Party souvenir from Greg Lindenbach

The day I interviewed her she showed me the thousands of fan letters she had received from children. Many had sent her photographs and drawings and I recognized some of the names. But Olly also had fan mail from adults; grandparents who enjoyed her show, farmers who listened to her while driving their tractors, recent immigrants who said they were learning English by listening to her, and parents who said they got their children to behave by threatening to take away the privilege of listening to Children’s Party. She even had a fan letter from a clergyman who said he’d ‘fallen in love with her voice’.

Olly Penner

Olly retired in 1987 and when I interviewed her in 1989 she was already a grandmother and was enjoying traveling with her husband, and spending more time with her family. Olly Penner died in 2015 at the age of 86. She had a legion of fans in a time when media programming aimed specifically at children was a rarity.

The full original article I wrote for the Mennonite Mirror can be accessed on page 4 of the May/June 1989 issue here.

Other posts………

Radios Good and Evil

What a Woman!

My Childhood Reading Heaven

They Wore Masks Too

Kids going to school during the dust bowl

COVID -19 isn’t the first time children in Canada have had to wear masks. The children in the photo above are setting off to school in the 1930s when a series of severe dust storms and long periods of drought caused great hardship. This era has come to be known as the Dust Bowl. Although the pandemic has been a difficult time for Canadian kids the Dust Bowl was much worse in many ways.

If a dust storm was advancing everyone tried to stay inside and if they had to go out they wore masks because people could choke to death if their lungs filled up with dust. If there were any cracks in the walls or floors of a house the dirt and sand would find their way inside and into food and onto furniture. Children sometimes slept in clothes and beds gritty with sand and dirt.

Family walking in a dust storm

Kids continually had red irritated eyes from the dust and some contracted dust pneumonia when too much dust got into their lungs. Babies had wet clothes placed over their mouths and noses to keep dust from choking them. Children often went hungry because no crops or produce could be grown and stores were forced to close as were schools, sometimes for weeks at a time.

School children covering their mouths and faces during a dust storm in the 1930s

There was no weather forecasting so people just had to watch the skies and many parents didn’t send their kids to classes because they were scared they would be caught in a dust storm going to and from school. If children were at school when a dust storm started their classroom could suddenly grow dark like it was nighttime and teachers had to light lanterns in the middle of the day so children could see to read and write. Their classroom could quickly fill with a kind of dusty fog. If they thought it was safe enough children and teachers would walk home with towels over their faces, but sometimes students were kept at school overnight to make sure they didn’t lose their way walking home or choke on the dust.

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If children couldn’t go to school and had to stay inside there were no televisions, video games, or even many books to entertain them. Most children lived on farms and they also witnessed their parents’ distress about their devastated crops and gardens. They watched the family livestock die due to a lack of food and water.

An abandoned Dust Bowl farm.

Countless children became homeless as crops failures led to their families losing their houses and property. Sometimes the roof of a home would literally collapse under the weight of the sand and dirt on top of it. On the Canadian prairies, some 250,000 families simply abandoned their homesteads. Some families wandered nomadically looking for a new place in a different province to make a home and have a chance to start over.

Migrating family during the Dust Bowl

The pandemic has been very hard on children there is no question about that, but we may take at least a little solace in the fact that children from another century experienced much greater hardships and survived, going on to build meaningful lives for themselves and their families.

Other posts……….

An Inspiration For Our Time

My Grandmother’s Childhood

The Remarkables

Three Determined Women

Learning about the history of a woman’s right to vote in Quebec City

They worked for more than 20 years to earn the right to vote!!  When I visited Quebec City I learned about an amazing trio who dedicated themselves to securing the right to vote for Quebec women.  Canadian women earned the right to vote federally in 1918 but it wasn’t till 22 years later that women in Quebec attained the right to vote in provincial elections. Equal voting privileges for women became a reality because of the dedication of Thérèse Casgrain, Idola St. Jean and Marie Lacoste Gérin-Lajoie.

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Thérèse Casgrain, Idola St. Jean and Marie Lacoste Gérin-Lajoie played a key role in achieving the right to vote for Quebec women.

Thérèse Casgrain led the League for Women’s Rights and hosted a Radio Canada program for women called Fémina. Idola St. Jean was a McGill professor who led the Canadian Alliance for Women’s Vote in Quebec. She wrote a bilingual column for the Montreal Herald. In 1933 she founded the magazine La Sphère féminine. Marie Lacoste Gérin-Lajoie was on the Provincial Committee for Women’s Suffrage. She organized female workers and fought for the right for women to attend university. She wrote a book about women and the law.

These determined women and their organizations faced all kinds of adversaries. The clergy, politicians, journalists, and even most women in Quebec did not think women should be full-fledged citizens with the same legal rights as men. They believed a woman’s place was in the home raising a future generation of French- Canadians.

A statue on the grounds of the Quebec Legislature honors these determined women.  They repeatedly organized marches in Quebec City to gain recognition for their cause. They sent King George V a petition signed by 10,000 Quebec women. Each year they managed to find a politician willing to sponsor a bill in the Quebec legislature granting women the right to vote. It took the introduction of fourteen such bills before one was successfully passed on April 18, 1940.

These three Quebec women fought long and hard for the right to vote. At a time when many states in our neighboring country are passing laws that will make it harder for some people to exercise their right to vote, we need to remember that within some of our own provinces here in Canada it wasn’t that long ago that the right to vote excluded half the population. Thérèse Casgrain, Idola St. Jean, and Marie Lacoste Gérin-Lajoie remind us to appreciate our right to vote and never take it for granted.

Other posts……….

The Canadian Woman Who Painted the United Nations

The Great Canadian Nanaimo Bar

James Bond Is From Winnipeg

Nature and An Excellent Book

You may have noticed I’ve been off the internet for the last couple of days. I didn’t post to this blog or do any posts on social media. My brain and body needed a little break and I took it by going camping for the first time in some forty years.

We slept in a tent and woke to the sound of the dawn chorus of the birds.

We did some hiking and cooked meals over a fire.

We went for an evening boat ride spotting eagles and loons and pelicans and beavers and admiring the perfect reflection of the trees in the glassy water.

Instead of the daily writing, I usually do, I read Michelle Good’s book Five Little Indians which just won the Governor General’s award for literature. Five Little Indians tells the story of five residential school survivors. Michelle develops her characters with rich language and descriptive scenes that allow the reader to get to know them in a deeply personal way. Each of the five protagonists narrates their own story but their lives are braided together in many different ways.

The author of Five Little Indians sixty-five-year-old Michelle Good is a member of the Saskatchewan Red Pheasant Cree Nation and the daughter and granddaughter of residential school survivors. She is a lawyer who has represented residential school survivors and she has studied hundreds of psychological assessments of survivors of childhood abuse in order to understand how that experience could impact people’s lives. She writes from a place of experience and knowledge.

The five characters in Michelle’s book were sent to the same residential school in British Columbia. Their residential school stories are sad, terribly, terribly, sad and sometimes I wanted to just close the book and not read on. But……..Michelle follows each child into their challenging adulthood and helps us see the strengths of their character and their innate goodness. Unlike many books, I have read about the devastating consequences of the residential school system, Michelle’s book actually left me with a feeling of hope. I so admired the resilience of her characters.

Many people wondered how best to mark this Canada Day in the face of the devastating news about the discovery of so many graves of residential school children. Should it be a time to celebrate, as usual, or a time to mourn, a time to learn, a time to protest?

Spending a couple of days in the beauty of Canada’s natural world and reading an ultimately hopeful book about a tragic chapter in our country’s past seemed a good fit for me.

How did you spend July 1?

Other posts…………..

15 Reasons I Am Thankful to Live in Canada

Canada – A Country For All Seasons

Two Breathtakingly Beautiful Books

Paris/Ojibwa

Paris/Ojibwa by Robert Houle – photographed at the Art Gallery of Ontario

During this time when the world has been dealing with a deadly virus, I have been reminded of an art installation I saw at the Art Gallery of Ontario in the summer of 2017 that illustrated the impact of a deadly virus on a group of Indigenous dancers.

Created in 2010 by the renowned Indigenous artist Robert Houle who is originally from Winnipeg, the work titled Paris/Ojibwa is a moving memorial to Ojibwa dancers who died while entertaining the French Court in 1845.

The story starts with American artist George Catlin who travelled extensively in the west painting hundreds of portraits of Indigenous people.  He decided to bring his ‘Indian Gallery’ to Europe and display it there. He thought he might attract more viewers for his exhibit if he brought along an Indigenous dance troupe organized by George Henry Maungwudaus an Ojibwa interpreter.

George Henry Maungwudaus the leader of the Indigenous dance troupe that went to Paris. His wife and three of his children were among those who died on the trip to Europe.

The troupe performed in London and at the royal court in Paris where King Louis Philipe presented the dancers with medals.  Unfortunately, six of the troupe caught smallpox in Europe. They died never to return to Canada

Robert Houle, Paris/Ojibwa (detail) image from an essay by Shirley Madill for the Art Canada Institute

Robert Houle has included the names of some of the dancers at the very top of the installation. He has shown the dancers as a Shaman, Warrior, Dancer and Healer respectively and they are seen looking out at the horizon of their home in Canada. Each horizon has a specific physical reference. They are views of the prairie from the Sandy Bay First Nations cemetery near Lake Manitoba. Artist Robert Houle is a member of the Sandy Bay First Nation.

Robert Houle, Paris/Ojibwa (detail) image from an essay by Shirley Madill for the Art Canada Institute

Underneath each portrait is an image of the smallpox virus that killed them.

Robert Houle has created the portraits on the walls of a reconstructed Parisian salon with a marble floor. There is a bowl of sage on a pedestal at the front of the salon and I could hear soft drum beats as I viewed the installation. 

According to an April CBC article Indigenous people make up 10% of Manitoba’s population but account for 70% of COVID-19 infections. It also states that American First Nations people are dying of COVID-19 at twice the rate of the white population.

Robert Houle’s artwork reminds us how the effects of colonization have impacted the health of Indigenous Canadians for nearly two centuries.

Other posts…….

Art That Makes You Feel Sick

Old Sun and Emily Carr

Locked Away

You Should Have Asked The Kids!

I saw this graph on social media yesterday. It was from an Abacus Data survey and illustrated Canadians’ knowledge about residential schools.

The fact that only 34% of Canadians were fairly familiar with the residential school system seemed very low to me. Before the pandemic, I worked in Winnipeg schools as a supervisor for university education students and I had a second job as a guide at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. I found the children I encountered in both these situations to be fairly knowledgeable about residential schools.

Teachers I observed were talking about this tragic but important part of Canadian history, reading books about it and planning lessons and assignments related to it.

Norval Morriseau at work on one of his many vibrant paintings

We have many works at the Winnipeg Art Gallery by Indigenous artists. If I would mention to a group of students I was taking on a tour that an artist like Norval Morrisseau for example, had been sent to residential school, most students had an understanding of why that experience was a negative one for him.

If I showed them Kent Monkman’s compelling painting The Scream most recognized without me telling them, that it was depicting the way Indigenous children were rounded up to go to residential school.

From my personal experience with young people ages 8-18 here in Manitoba, I would have said at least 75% of them are fairly familiar with what residential schools were all about.

I would venture to guess that the vast majority of educators in the province have been to professional development sessions to learn about the Truth and Reconciliation document and its implications for education. More and more resources are being put in place all the time to help teachers talk to their students about residential schools.

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There are many excellent books by Indigenous authors for teachers to use with children of all ages to help them understand the residential school experience

I decided to explore the graph above further and sure enough, all the respondents had been 18 years of age or over.

“They should have asked the kids”, I thought. I think the results would have been different if they had.

This age-specific graph while it didn’t measure children’s familiarity with the residential school system does show that it is the youngest category 18-29 who are the most familiar with the residential school system.

I realize we have a long way to go before Canadians are as educated as they need to be about what happened at residential schools, but I think the younger generation of Canadians give us hope that we are headed in the right direction.

Other posts………..

Things Are Changing

10 Things About The Scream

Not A Fair Comparison

What a Woman!

Recently I was walking by Laura Secord School where I attended kindergarten in 1958-1959 and I saw a sign erected in honour of Lillian Beynon Thomas. I had never heard of Lillian. I was curious. Who was she?

Lillian Beynon Thomas

I discovered Lillian was one of Winnipeg’s first newspaperwomen and the page she was responsible for in the Winnipeg Free Press at the turn of the century was called Home Loving Hearts. Many of her readers were prairie farmwives who wrote to her about their lonely and often isolated lives. Some of them had been abused or abandoned by their husbands and many had no right to inherit their family homesteads if their husbands died. Lillian started advocating for them in the paper interspersing her opinions among the recipes, homemaking hints and fashion tips she featured on her page.

Lillian Beynon was a school teacher in Morden Manitoba in 1906 when John Dafoe the editor of the Winnipeg Free Press travelled through town. Lillian boldly asked him for a job. He gave her one writing a woman’s page for the paper.

Affectionately dubbed ‘Lilly Kate’ by her family, Lillian Beynon was born in 1874 in the city of Mississauga Ontario. When she was five years old she developed tuberculosis and it left her with a damaged hip which would make walking difficult for her for the rest of her life. Ten years later her family moved from Mississauga to a farm near Hartney, Manitoba.

Lillian went to Toronto to finish high school because with her weak hip she couldn’t have walked to the school in Hartney. She came back to Manitoba when her family settled in Winnipeg and Lillian became one of the first women to get a BA from the University of Manitoba.

Alfred Vernon Thomas Lillian’s husband – photo Manitoba Historical Society

In 1911 Lillian married Alfred Thomas who also wrote for the Winnipeg Free Press. He encouraged Lillian to become a part of the Manitoba Political Equality League in 1912 as they fought to get women the right to vote in Manitoba through a variety of tactics including a satirical play called A Women’s Parliament which was staged at the Walker Theatre in 1914. It was Lillian’s idea to stage the play and she had a role in the drama which helped achieve voting rights for Manitoba women in 1916.

Lillian in the back to the left with cast members of the Women’s Mock Parliament.

Friendly and with a warm personality Lillian also started a literary club in Winnipeg and was an active member of the Canadian Women’s Press Club. When World War I broke out her husband Alfred was fired from the Winnipeg Free Press because he refused to support the conscription effort. The two of them moved to New York where Lillian did charity work and took writing courses.

Lillian’s novel New Secret was published in 1946

Alfred got a job at the Winnipeg Tribune in 1922 so they moved back to Winnipeg and Lillian kept on writing this time successful plays and novels. She won a short story prize sponsored by Macleans Magazine for a piece she wrote called Five Cents for Luck. In 1961 when she died at age 86 she was trying her hand at writing episodes for television dramas.

Actors from the Winnipeg Masquers Club recording a radio version of Lillian’s play Jim Barber’s Spite Fence in Toronto for a coast to coast broadcast

I was happy I had made the effort to get to know Lillian Beynon Thomas. I was inspired by how she overcame the physical challenges she faced from the time she was a child to become a pioneer as a newspaperwoman and a suffragette and then as an author and playwright. She was always ready to try new things. What a legacy!

Me setting off for kindergarten at Laura Secord on the first day of school in 1958 with book in hand

I’m glad Lillian Beynon Thomas is recognized on the grounds of the very first school I attended. I can only dream of leaving the kind of legacy she did!

Other posts………

Finding Nellie’s House

International Women’s Day

Kindred Spirits

She Painted Battlefields And Helped Start An Art Gallery

Ypres Cathedral by Mary Riter Hamilton – photo from the Canadian archives

Why would a 50-year-old Canadian artist with a successful career and many lucrative portrait commissions go to Europe and spend six years creating paintings of abandoned World War I battlefields?

That is exactly what Mary Riter Hamilton did.

Mary Riter Hamilton’s first job was in a millinery shop- photo from the Canadian Encyclopedia

Mary was born in Ontario but moved to Clearwater Manitoba as a teenager and found herself an apprenticeship in a millinery shop. When the millinery owner moved to Port Arthur Ontario Mary went with her and it was there she met Charles Hamilton who owned a successful dry goods business. They married in 1889 but four years later Charles was dead and Mary, his heir was suddenly a wealthy woman.

Easter Morning by Mary Riter Hamilton- from the collection of the Winnipeg Art Gallery and photographed there

She moved to Winnipeg, opened an art studio and gave lessons teaching women how to paint china. Later she studied art in Europe where her work was displayed in the Paris Salon, quite a feat for a woman.

Mary Riter Hamilton working in Paris

In 1906 Mary returned from Europe briefly for a Winnipeg exhibition. Journalists used Mary’s work as an example of how the arts might enrich citizens’ lives and exhorted readers to consider opening a city art gallery.

The first Winnipeg Art Gallery opened in 1912 was in the Board of Trade Building – photo by L.B.Foote

Mary mounted another Winnipeg exhibit in 1912 and in press interviews insisted it was high time Winnipeg had an art gallery.  In December of 1912, the Winnipeg Art Gallery opened. Many think Mary deserves some of the credit for that happening.

Reflections by Mary Riter Hamilton

Mary moved to Victoria, British Columbia.  She did very well in the next eight years, teaching, exhibiting, making connections with influential people, and garnering lucrative financial remuneration for painting portraits. She was awarded impressive commissions. 

Mary painting in Europe

Then in 1919 at age 50, Mary decided to go back to Europe this time to paint abandoned World War I battlefields. She lived in deplorable conditions as she painted the scarred and decimated landscapes of Belgium and France which the armies had left behind. She had no official status or income which was only granted to male artists.

War Material by Mary Riter Hamilton

She lived in a tin hut and painted outside in all kinds of weather, surrounded by unexploded artillery shells and collapsing trenches. She even survived an attack by bounty hunters.  She grew gravely ill and often went hungry but she persevered. Mary would create some 350 artworks in Belgium and France during the next six years.

Mary at work painting battlefields July 1919. Photograph by Anthony d’Ypres. Flanders Fields Museum, Ypres

Mary returned to Canada in 1925 and faced many obstacles trying to get her war paintings exhibited. In 1926 she donated them all to the Canadian Archives. The last twenty- five years of Mary’s life were marked by lost friendships, time spent in and out of psychiatric hospitals and financial instability. She died in Vancouver in 1954.  

Mary Riter Hamilton

What drove Mary to leave her safe comfortable life and thriving career to do war paintings and endure the hardships of post-war battlegrounds?  I have read many different biographies of Mary and no one really seems to be able to say for sure. When asked, she said it was her duty and honour to commemorate the places where her brave countrymen had fought.

Canadian Stamp honouring Mary Riter Hamilton

Other posts……….

Oviloo Tunille

Imitating Emily

The Canadian Woman Who Painted the United Nations

Not A Fair Comparison

Many people on social media are expressing their outrage over a Winnipeg Sun article written by Brian Giesbrecht, a retired Canadian judge. In his opinion piece on June 4th, he says we need to put the issue of residential schools to rest. He claims the topic has been exhaustively explored and the large number of children who died in residential schools only represents the era in which those deaths happened, a time in history when a lack of medical knowledge and medical services in Canada meant young children everywhere died in large numbers.

Children at a residential school in the North West Territories

To make his point Giesbrecht compares Indigenous children sent to residential schools to the home children taken from their impoverished parents in England and sent to Canada between 1869 and 1922 to work as free farm labourers.

British home children arriving in Canada- photo from the Canadian archives

Giesbrecht claims the home children’s fate was similar to that of residential school students. Many of the home children’s stories are indeed tragic but there are three big differences between the two groups that Giesbrecht conveniently neglects to mention.

Young girls at the Birtle Residential School in Manitoba- photo from Great Plains Publications

1. We have a documented paper record of what happened to the home children. Library and Archives Canada, state they hold unique, detailed and extensive files about them. This is not the case for the Indigenous children sent to residential schools since according to a CTV News report the Catholic Church has refused to release records related to residential schools and the Canadian government has destroyed 15 tons of paper documents related to the residential school system between 1936 and 1944, including 200,000 Indian Affairs files.

Brothers taken from their impoverished mother in England and sent to Canada in 1912 where they were separated and worked as farmhands until they were adults. – photo from the Kingston Whig Standard

2. For the most part, home children were sent to live in situations where they were allowed to speak their own language. They lived with families who shared their Christian faith and practised many of the cultural and social mores that were familiar to them. Indigenous children on the other hand were forbidden to speak their birth languages, were forced to practice a foreign religion and heard their traditional spirituality severely criticized. They were punished for engaging in the cultural practices of their families.

Children at the Brandon Residential School

3. Home children were sent to farms where most did not experience the crowded unsanitary living conditions that caused so many deaths in residential schools. In the early 1900s, Dr Peter Bryce repeatedly warned the Department of Indian Affairs that tuberculosis was running rampant in residential schools. After visiting dozens of schools in the Western provinces he wrote about the lack of ventilation, poor health practices, fire-prone buildings and unsanitary conditions that he said was creating an alarming mortality rate among Indigenous children attending the schools at that time. Nothing was done to correct these conditions.

Male students in the assembly hall of the Alberni Indian Residential School, 1960s. Photo from the United Church Archives

According to an article published by the BBC as late as 1945, the death rate for children at residential schools was nearly five times higher than that of other Canadian schoolchildren. In the 1960s, the rate was still double that of the general student population.

The story of the home children sent from Britain to Canada has tragic aspects we need to acknowledge and learn more about, but Mr Giesbrecht is being decidedly unfair when he compares what happened to them to what happened to Indigenous children sent to residential schools.

Other posts………..

10 Things About Kent Monkman’s The Scream

Locked Away

Another Shameful Chapter in Canadian History