Editorially speaking...
Where did it go?
2021, I mean—it’s November!
But down to business. This in from the Nanaimo Historical and in time for those Chronicles readers who are so inclined:
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Join the BCMA on November 10, 2021, for a day of reflection and relearning.
Who do you remember? Diversification in Military Narratives
Wednesday, November 10, 2021
10:00 am – 11:00 am PT
Join the BCMA in commemorating Remembrance Day with a panel on the historical contributes of marginalized groups. Hear from author and historian, Steven Purewal, on the untold stories and contributions of Indian soldiers in the First World War. Indian calvary, artillery, and infantry would fight as brothers-in-arms with Canadians throughout the war in many key battles on the Western Front. The battle of Ypres in Flanders, the Somme, and Vimy Ridge is a proud shared history by both ‘Son’s of Empire’.
Fellow panelist, Dr. Scott Sheffield, from the University of the Fraser Valley will be joining to speak on his life’s research – Canadian Indigenous participation in and experiences of war, and the striking parallels to be found in Indigenous peoples’ experiences in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
Register HERE.
Food and the Home Front
Wednesday, November 10, 2021
3:00 pm – 4:00pm PT
Join historian Dr. Stacey Barker and museum recipe tester Kathryn Lyons as they explore recipes from the Canadian home front during the Second World War when food restrictions required some creative cooking. Try your own wartime recipes and see if your pandemic shopping experience has required similar resourcefulness.
We invite participants to cook their own WWI snacks: Honey Carrots biscuits.
Event sponsored by the Travelling Exhibitions Program of the Canadian Museum of History and the Canadian War Museum.
Register HERE.
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And, after a year of renovations, exhibition planning and "so much more," the Cumberland museum is reopening its doors, effective tomorrow, November 5th. There's an open house event from 1-4 p.m.
That's in downtown Cumberland, of course.
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There was a poignant column in the Cowichan Valley Citizen recently. With all the negative news about residential schools these days, reporter Robert Barron was writing about an interview he'd had with Bill Dennis whose father had been a student at local Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School.
The students there were non-Indigenous, orphans or the children of impoverished families in Britain who were shipped across the Atlantic in the 1920s and '30s, not always with the parents' consent, to be taught farming skills in the case of boys, domestic work in the case of girls, then placed with Canadian families or workplaces.
Mr. Dennis, whose father was one of the students who was negatively imprinted by his experience, has paid for a new plaque at Duncan United Church to commemorate the approximately 100,000 'home children' that were sent from Britain to Canada between 1869 and 1958.
This took me back, perhaps 20 years, to a man who approached me about a book he'd written and published. It was based on 100s of hours of interviews with a friend who'd since passed away. That friend, a student at Fairview, Cowichan Station, had died an alcoholic on Vancouver's notorious Eastside.
The author had written the story as a fictionalized biography. As with all 'fiction' that's purports to be based on facts, a reader never knows how to distinguish between the two. The book impressed me as being more or less the truth. The self-published author wanted me to review it in the Citizen.
But the story was brutal.
Sure, I'd heard whispers of an athletic instructor at the school who abused boys, of another who sadistically mistreated the farm animals. But this was way before the Truth and Reconciliation reports, the Kamloops residential school cemetery horror and on and on...
There are people living in the Cowichan Valley who attended Fairbridge or who had a parent who had. People who, so far as I know, have no negative memories. There's even a Fairbridge School historical society.
This book, the story of a former student, literally blew the roof off what allegedly (and that's the key word here) really went on behind the scenes at Fairview.
But it was presented as fiction. As such, after considerable thought, I came to the conclusion that I, personally, wasn't going to help promote the story that accused the school staff of abuse without real evidence.
SoI left it there.
Fast-forward to the present; for years now the news has been filled with tales of systemic abuse within churches, within residential schools, within orphanages--even a B.C. school for the deaf.
I'm going to re-read that book. When I do I'll decide if I still want to sit on it or whether a sense of duty impels me to write about it after all. I never did see any reviews, I've never seen it in a book store, I've never, in fact, heard mention of it since. Maybe--maybe--it's time to reconsider. Too late for the author, I'm sure, but...
For those who so callously say, "That's ancient history, move on," I say there should be no statute of limitations on inhumanity and that we'll never learn, never change unless we know.