Editorially speaking...
If anyone really believes that history is about the past, the long ago, they’re not keeping up with current news.
The Victoria Times Colonist, for one, has recently been filled with lengthy articles, some of them as much as a full page: the unfolding Royal B.C. Museum mess (do you think Premier Horgan can spell “debacle”?); the Kamloops Residential School’s tragic anniversary of the discovery of 215 unmarked graves; Prime Minister Trudeau’s apology to survivors and their families; the attempted resurrection of the dormant E&N Railway.
The Haida residents of Queen Charlotte City want to change its name to Daajing Giida; the Pope is coming to Canada to apologize for the residential schools; the provincial government is researching property titles for covenants from past owners who sought to prevent the sale of their properties to people of minorities and colour; and so forth.
All of these current stories have their roots in our past but are alive and well and are, too often, problematic, hurtful and divisive.
The sins of the fathers...
If you think experience is a hard taskmaster—try history.
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Went to lunch last week with Uvic history professor and award-winning author Dan Marshal and Blake Mackenzie, host of the amazingly popular Facebook website, Ghost Towns & Gold Creeks of B.C.
Seeing myself on Facebook reminded me I really must trim my beard and get a haircut. —Courtesy of Blake Mackenzie
Purely on impulse, and using Blake’s smartphone for a camera, we shot three quick Facebook videos: the Pioneer Methodist Cemetery on Herd Road, the Robert Service memorial and the John Bull Inn (on the site of today’s Masthead Restaurant) at Cowichan Bay. There were no scripts, it was purely ad-lib.
The Bard of the Yukon, Robert W. Service who spent some time on the Corfield Farm, Cowichan Bay, as a “mudpup” before achieving immortality for his poems on the Klonkie gold rush. —Wikipedia
That was the day of the big wind storm, you may remember, and while at the cemetery, with large, broken branches flying at us like spears, we cut it short rather than push our luck. (I write about widow-makers but that’s as close I want to get to them!)
Blake posted them Wednesday evening. By Tuesday morning they’d had over 15,000 visits. YouTube, here I come!
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Emails, queries and comments keep flowing in. Brian commented on my mention of the Air India tragedy of June 1985 with its shameful Duncan connection. A second bomb was involved, one that killed two baggage handlers at a Japanese airport. Brian wrote:
“By happenstance, I knew one of the two pilots of the CPR jet that carried the second Air India bomb. Again, happenstance again, jet stream head winds set the flight arrival at Narita back by 30 or 40 minutes. Thus the reload of the baggage compartment on Air India was stalled and blew up at the airport...of Narita with unintended deaths, very sad for sure, but perhaps saving several hundred souls. 1 or 200, murder is murder.”
Amen.
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