Volume 2 February 2006


“Where do I belong?” Canadian Curriculum as Passport Home

Cynthia Chambers

University of Lethbridge

Passports

On my last visit to the United States I travelled without a passport: I had one but I lost it and then it expired. Prior to 11 September 2001, I was part of the majority: Canadians who didn’t have or need official documentation to travel. As of 11 September 2005, without a passport, I’m in the minority: over fifty percent Canadians now hold passports. So I have my passport application form completed, the photo taken, the guarantor selected; I simply haven’t mailed the application. And I must because like any Canadian who wishes to travel outside of my country, I now need a passport, even when travelling to the United States. Things were not always thus. 1

I received my first passport when I was twelve-years old. The black and white photo was embarrassing, and still is. While my cat-eyed eyeglasses were early 1960s haute couture  (and similar frames, for those lucky enough to have kept theirs, start bidding wars on E-Bay), the pimples, greasy bangs and bad haircut were not cool. Neither was the myopia that made eyeglasses necessary.

The family business—Arctic Wings and Rotors, a northern bush plane company— had been dissolved. My grandparents were using their share of the sale to finance a road trip from Edmonton, Alberta to Mexico via southern California. My grandmother, Alice, invited me to join them.

“We’ll stop in Disneyland,” Alice said, “It just opened.”

To a twelve-year old girl, raised in the Canadian North, a trip to Mexico and Disneyland sounded exotic.

I shared the back seat of the Rambler station wagon with the dog, a mature and tolerant Doberman pinscher, while Alice sat up front and chain-smoked, and her husband, Al, drove. By the time Al pulled the Rambler up to the Canada-US border, the crossing was closed so he drove us back to Cardston, Alberta to stay in an autocourt, as Alice called it, our trip delayed for a night, a long and thirsty one, as it turned out. Cardston, populated almost exclusively by members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, had no liquor vendors, no beer parlours, and no cocktail lounges; my grandparents were not used to prohibition and that night Alice didn’t hold back on her opinions about the rights of the imbibing public.

I find it a bit ironic that twenty-five years later, fresh out of graduate school, I would move to Lethbridge, Alberta, near that border crossing, almost next door to Cardston; that I would abandon a life of relentless nomadicity to settle down on the edge of the desert, near the US border, in a province known for its Americophilia and fundamentalist belief in the free-market, characterized by the privatization of liquor vending. By the time I’d moved to Alberta, in 1989, booze available around-the-clock was lost on me. I’d had to quit drinking.

The next morning we crossed the border—but our passports remained packed—we wouldn’t need them until we entered Mexico—a real foreign country. On our journey south, Alice and Al stopped in Butte, Montana. I bought a postcard of the open-pit copper mine that made the Montana town famous. We visited the Mormon Temple, in Salt Lake City, the mecca of the people who had kept my grandparents sober in that Cardston motel room; the people who would become my colleagues, students and neighbours after I moved to Lethbridge in Southern Alberta—the place that has been my home for the past seventeen years.

Our destination kept us travelling south from Montana. The stop in Las Vegas stretched from one night into several. In our motel room, I put on a one-act floorshow for the Doberman Pinscher while Alice and Al hit the blackjack tables. En route to southern California, we drove through the desert at night, eating fresh figs and listening to the radio. The gospel stations were clearest—praising their Lord to the stars. The journey, and the dream, ended where many have, in Los Angeles—at the Santa Anita racetrack. The day after I watched the legendary jockey, Willie Shoemaker, win the Santa Anita Derby Alice put me on a plane back to Edmonton.

“The Mexican border authorities won’t let the dog in,” Alice said, somewhat indignantly. “He has to be quarantined for six months first.”

I heard my mother’s version of this story much later in life. Mother said that somewhere between the blackjack tables in Vegas and Willie Shoemaker’s big win the road trip ran out of finance capital. Either version, my first exotic holiday ended just short of the Mexican border and my passport, and I, returned home, virginity intact.

When my mother died I inherited Alice’s passport photo from that aborted 1963 trip. Her face severe, almost unhappy, not at all how I remember her. I never saw Alice’s actual passport or her husband’s. But I heard the stories. Al’s passport was stamped with the word ILLEGITIMATE, in capital letters; although he was born in Calgary, and thus was a British subject, he was not legitimate, his passport a signifier for the outsider. Even today, there are passport and immigration restrictions specifically for those born outside a legal marriage; luckily not for Canadian citizens, anymore, because both my grandchildren would then have to have their passports stamped with that same signifier.

Like my “biological” grandfather who was also illegitimate. Thomas Chambers immigrated to Canada, with my grandmother, from Scotland in 1913. Born under the British crown, my Scottish grandparents (actually all of my grandparents, all of whom immigrated to Canada from the United Kingdom) had Civis Britannicus sum, the right of British citizens to free entry into Canada or any other colony or dominion in the Empire.2 This undisputed right to Canadian citizenship via British subjecthood saved my grandparents from running the gauntlet of what Gwynne Dyer calls “the racist Immigration Act of 1910, where we reserved the right to refuse admission to those who did not suit ‘the climate or requirements of Canada’.”3 Civis Britannicus sum saved my grandfather from having his passport stamped ILLEGITIMATE.

In the wake of 9/11, authorities in the United States demand stricter controls over people entering the country and Canadians are no exception. What readers might not realize is that this demand for increased border security has a long history, at least between Canadians and Americans. Prior to 1862, Canadians, as British subjects, were free to travel to the United States without passports. It was during the Civil War (1861-65) that American authorities insisted on official documentation for those entering the US from North of the 49th. So the Governor-General of the colonial government developed the first Canadian system for issuing passports.

In 1867, Canada became a country but remained a British colony until 1931. In that year, The Statute of Westminster accorded legal recognition to Canada’s status as a self-governing dominion. Formed under the British Empire, Canada remained a member of the British Commonwealth, and, as such, Canadians remained subjects of the British crown. Subject-hood as Randall Hansen of Oxford explains is “an allegiance to the Crown, a privilege-receiving status defined individually” while citizenship is “a rights-bearing status defined collectively.”4

One of my great-grandfathers, Canadian-born William Clarke, migrated from the Ottawa Valley to Vancouver Island after returning from the Boer War.5 At 2:00 A.M., (the night before he was to leave for Prince Rupert to take up the position of secretary to the Member of Parliament), the Model-T taxi he was travelling in flipped over, pinned him to the ground, and killed him instantly. His death certificate makes no mention of his citizenship or nationality: it asks only where he was born and his c-o-l-o-u-r, that is colour spelled with a /u/; but it means the same thing, race. His colour was white, in case you were curious. And so was his wife’s, Elvina Clarke, who died in a mental institution, sixty years later. It was 1972, and her death certificate still required the deceased’s racial origin defined as “traced through the father, in terms of the people or race, to which the person belongs such as: English, Scottish, German, etc. or … one of the following racial groups: White, native Indian, Negro, Chinese, Japanese or other.” And, while Elvina Clarke reminded me repeatedly that I was “fifth-generation Canadian-born Irish;” Irish wasn’t one of the choices so the death certificate declares her: White and Protestant. The word Protestant was typed at the top of the death certificate: not required by the form but declared by the clerk anyways. 

And while William Clarke’s 1912 death certificate made no mention of citizenship, his wife’s 1972 death certificate demanded her citizenship be declared. This was not gender prejudice; it was part of decolonization. There was no such thing as Canadian citizenship in 1912 when William Clarke was killed. There was no such thing as Canadian citizenship until after WWII, when Paul Martin, Sr., the father of the present Canadian Prime Minister, visited the Canadian War Cemetery in Dieppe, France. The story goes that facing the graves of 700 of the Canadians who’d died in that battle, Paul Martin Sr. conceived of a Canadian citizenship separate from, but connected to, subject-hood of the British Crown. When he introduced the Canadian Citizenship Act to Parliament in 1946, Paul Martin Sr. said, “for the national unity of Canada ... new Canadians and old, have a consciousness of a common purpose, and common interest as Canadians—that all of us are able to say with pride and to say with meaning, ‘I am a Canadian citizen.’”6 Irish-patriotism and history aside, my great-grandmother, Elvina Clarke was born in Canada, a British subject, and died in Canada, a Canadian citizen. Unlike the Aboriginal people of Canada who by virtue of their Indian status were denied the supposed privileges of British subject-hood or the rights of Canadian citizenship.  Or for those Quebecers, who did not share Paul Martin Sr.’s dream of Canadian federalism then, and do not share his son’s — Prime Minister Paul Martin Jr.—dream now.

My first passport expired in 1968 just before my seventeenth birthday. By then I was homeless, and on the run from the Children’s Aid Society and from the police. And as I hitchhiked back and forth across Canada, crashing in abandoned houses and sleeping in city parks, I often found refuge with people, older and kinder than I yet knew how to be. Such as Hy Gluestein and his wife who took me in when I arrived in Montreal from Vancouver without shoes or a place to stay. They lived in a small apartment just off East St. Lawrence not far from McGill University. I know the address of the apartment—3687 Clarke Street—because I wrote it in my passport, which I carried with me as I hitch-hiked across the nation.

Hy Gluestein and his friends, and a Rabbi Rosenburg, introduced to me to Zionism along with dietary restrictions and mealtime debate I’d never before encountered. Having made it as far as Montreal, I wanted to keep on going, leave my short but troubled past behind. I wanted to leave Canada, make a difference; and with my Canadian passport, I felt I could and should. I vowed to head for Israel and work in a kibbutz; I wanted to test my new found worldliness and naïve notions of charity. I was no more or less troubled, no more or less idealistic than many Canadian youth I have met today. I believed it was possible to make a difference in the world, but that possibility seemed much more real somewhere else, perhaps anywhere else, but home.

As for Hy Gluestein and his wife, the burden of feeding a homeless teenager, who’d taken no concrete steps to get a job or leave for Israel, grew greater than the novelty or their charity. And I found myself with my thumb out once again. But instead of Israel, I headed home to make some money, and possibly go back to school, a little like Ian and Sylvia’s duet, Four Strong Winds, but that lover headed out to Alberta and I headed North. Home.

For Canadians my age, the North is part of our imaginary. And in the imaginations of most people outside this country, the North is Canada, and Canada is the North. But for me the North was home, at least, the closest place to home that I knew. So I headed to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories with my expired passport, filled with the names and addresses of people I’d met on my travels. Like Romaine St. Jerome, my grade 10 social studies teacher in Hay River, NWT, who’d encouraged me to read philosophy before he left the North to return to teach in his hometown of Montréal. His 1967 Montréal street address is still in that passport; I never did look him up; never did say “thank you” for bringing the outside in, for bringing other worlds to a small northern town, and to a wild northern girl who while often drunk was still thirsty.

A series of rides and events took me from Montréal north to Yellowknife, and that autumn I enrolled in grade twelve a second time, at St. Patrick’s High School, and I stayed; all because of a boy, a beautiful, brilliant boy. Because that beautiful boy and I were married, thirty-five years later, our grandson will attend the same Catholic high school in Yellowknife. In the summer of 1968, that beautiful boy didn’t yet have a passport; he’d not started his travels yet--instead he had a Treaty card, an Indian status card, a different kind of passport. On our marriage certificate it named him: Native Indian. The divorce papers make no mention of his race or mine.

 

Borders

When I married that beautiful boy, I acquired his Indian status and have retained it; an artifact of the patronymic system of naming, individual rights, ownership and familial, social and political organization imported directly from British coloniality to the Indian Act. This piece of federal legislation has governed every aspect of Aboriginal life in Canada, since 1876 to today, at least for those legally defined as Indians. That beautiful boy went on to become a man, and Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, the national political organization that represents First Nations across Canada, and Co-Chair of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Georges Erasmus gave the newly instituted Lafontaine-Baldwin 2002 Symposium lecture where he stated:

For most of the years since the first Indian Act was passed in 1876 being Aboriginal or ‘Indian’ was perceived to be incompatible with being a Canadian citizen. When the option of enfranchisement, trading Indian status for voting rights, failed to attract individuals, more coercive measures were enacted, enfranchising Indians if they lived away from their reserves, joined the military, obtained higher education, or, in the case of women, if they married a non-Indian. The object of [this] policy, baldly stated in 1920 by Duncan Campbell Scott, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, was ‘to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question and no Indian Department.’ The same object was reflected in the 1969 White Paper, [introduced by Jean Crétien and Pierre Elliot Trudeau] which proposed, in the language of democracy, to make Indians ‘citizens like any other’. The response of Aboriginal peoples to all these attempts to ‘break them into pieces’ has been consistent resistance.

Thus, Indigenous peoples in Canada have long experience with citizenship, nationhood, and borders. Reserves were set aside for First Nations by treaty and law; those reserves have borders, and those borders continued to shrink through malfeasance and corruption. And for a brief period of time the Canadian government required Indian people to have tickets to cross those borders, a card to leave the reserve. A kind of passport to their own land.

More recently, for the people of the Arctic, a border forced the tension between identity and citizenship once again. On April 1, 1999 Canada’s newest territory, Nunavut, was formed. For Nunavut to come into being a border had to be drawn; right down the middle of the Northwest Territories—well, not right down the middle. It is rather a jagged line, negotiating its way through overlapping claims to the territory along the border. For the people of Holman, with whom I am working on an indigenous literacies project, the new border turned out to be a “jagged little pill,” as Alanis Morissette might say.7 Holman was situated on the border, in the overlapping territory between East and West. Some of the Holman people are kin to the Central Inuit who live Kugluktuk and Cambridge Bay both communities that voted to join Nunavut.8 But, and here is the rub, the Holman people are also closely related to the Western Inuit of Tuktoyuktak, Inuvik and Aklavik, communities that voted to remain in the West. What was Holman to do? “Where did they belong?” was the question. Should they take this historic opportunity to join a territory created out of a singular Inuit identity, even though such cultural and linguistic homogeneity is a myth, even for Inuit? Or do they choose to remain with the Northwest Territories (NWT) a multi-racial, multi-ethnic territory with eleven official languages of which Inuinnaqtun, the language spoken in Holman, is only one? In the end, the residents of Holman voted to stay in the NWT. It sounds funny doesn’t it; to stay; it’s not as if the town, or the people, moved. No, the people didn’t move, the border did.

The border has been a high-end metaphor in the re-conceptualization of curriculum around politics, identity, and difference. Curriculum theorists have used the metaphor as currency as they moved the politics of difference from its origins in class and the material conditions of our lives across the border to a place where difference embraces the libidinal, the racial/cultural, and the individual, sometimes almost eclipsing the historical and the economic.

But the border for Canadians, the International Boundary between the US and Canada, is hardly a metaphor;9 rather, it is a 9,000 km (8,893 km—but whose counting?) strip of land and water, about 150 kilometers wide along which seventy-five percent of Canadians live.10 That includes me—now. Rather than a metaphor for the complexities of identity, Norman Hillmer, Professor of History and International Affairs at Carlton University, claims the border is integral to Canadian identity: “We are a border people. The border is our livelihood. The border is our identity.”11

Prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, Canadians imagined a borderless North America, one where deep economic integration meant the “Looney” and the “Washington” harmonized while Canuk beef hoofed it south of the 49th parallel. In 1999, a star-spangled maple leaf splashed across the cover of the Canadian weekly, MacLean’s magazine. However, more recently President George W. Bush, at home in Fortress America, exuding his “with-us-or-against-us” Texan charm, has been, as Norman Hillmer (2005) points out, a gift to Canadian nationalism (at least amongst most English-speaking Canadians). Recent public opinion polls suggest that most Canadians believe that borders matter: this border, the 49th parallel in particular, marks out Canadian identity: a commitment to compromise and civil liberties; a willingness to negotiate, endlessly it seems, the tensions between individual rights and collective responsibilities; and, as Jennifer Welsh suggests, on the international stage, a national citizenship that means to give as well as it gets.12 This border protects a commitment to public health care, a refusal of the death penalty, and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms strong enough to insist on the rights of gays and lesbians to enter into state-sanctioned unions, in a word, marriage. While the decisions not to support the United States in the invasion of Iraq, and more recently Washington’s plans for Ballistic Missile Defense are political, and the motivations of the Canadian politicians complicated, if not suspect, the support of most, but not all, Canadians for these decisions means this wave of Canadian nationalism is greater than at any time since the 1960s. The force behind the wave is primarily social rather than economic.13 Canadian wage earners, whose livelihoods don’t depend directly on the United States, and a borderless North America, are at the front of this wave. Laxer claims that while American capitalists and heads of multinational corporations are fiercely patriotic, their Canadian counterparts are not. 14 The Canadian federal government is always seeking the delicate balance between appeasing Canada’s corporate citizens who desire deeper economic integration with the U.S.A. and the average Canadian citizen who resists an eclipsed Canadian identity, even while accepting the deep historical, social and economic affiliations with Americans. Some form of nationalism, then, appears to be a powerful tool for survival when your (economic) partner is both hard to love and dangerous to leave. That may be true for Québec nationalism as well.

While the old border (prior to 9/11)may have felt seamless—“the longest undefended border in the world” was the most common way of referring to the boundary between Canada and the US—the new border (post 9/11) is both visible and palpable. It seems as the walls have gone down in Europe, they have gone up in North America. Recently, the border, as an English noun, has accrued a whole new wardrobe of global adjectives: smart borders, undefended borders, border shut down, closed borders, seamless borders, as well as secure, and not-so-secure, borders. This is the language of free trade, free flow of capital and globalization of markets. Those who speak this language desire a borderless North America; one where home resides with what one can purchase in the market place.

But as curriculum theorists, whether in Canada or the Unites States we need to offer the public, especially the young, a radically different notion of home.  We need to imagine home as the places where we live, walk, write, work, and go to school; the physical, emotional and spiritual places where we learn to be at home with others, as well as, ourselves; the place where others means not only neighbours but ancestors—spiritual and familial —theirs and ours—as well as our descendants. We need to offer a home that recognizes we inhabit these places with all animate beings (the land, the stars, the animals, the plants) those with no power to purchase comfort or survival. And perhaps most importantly, as curriculum theorists we must proffer the reality of a home where we learn the hard lessons of living with our enemies, the ones who bring us suffering, as Thich Nhat Han says.15 In Canada, at least, home is that place where the past is continually present, both complicating this moment right now, and giving us and them, children and students, the courage and the confidence to face the future.

 

“Where do I belong?”

In the wake of its federal policy on bilingualism in the 1960s, Canada, under the leadership of Pierre Elliot Trudeau, adopted a new, and far less racist, Immigration Act in 1976, as well as an official policy on multiculturalism. Together these changed Canada dramatically and forever. Recognized world wide as a multicultural country, the extent to which Canada is empirically as well as ideologically multicultural is perhaps less well known.16 While an ideology of multiculturalism was created for immigrant, rather than indigenous, peoples difference is native to this land: there are over fifty indigenous groups in Canada, each with distinct languages, who belong to, or claim as home, 608 reserves or First Nations. Indigenous Canadians are at least as distinct and varied as the immigrants who followed, and then overwhelmed them. Less than five per cent of Canadians now claim to be Aboriginal.

Migration is the history of the country beginning long before colonialism up until the present. And now this trend has become a “high-speed non violent transformation of Canada from a 98 percent white outpost dominated by two rival northwest European tribes to what it is becoming today: one of the most spectacularly diverse societies that has ever existed.” So says Gwynne Dyer, Newfoundland-born historian and journalist who resides in London England.17 A recent Stats Canada report predicts that by the 150th anniversary of Canada’s nationhood (in 2017) one in five citizens will be members of a visible minority. And in its three largest cities: Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver the “visible minorities” are on the verge of becoming the “visible majorities.” What’s driving this growth is sustained immigration. Canada takes in twice as many people every year, in proportion to its population, as does the United States, and four times as many as the United Kingdom. While all early immigrants were from Europe, today along with the United States these countries account for only 20 percent of Canada’s immigration. Now, twenty-five percent of the immigrants to Canada are from East Asia, while another twenty-five percent come from South and Southeast Asia, ten percent from the Middle East, ten percent from Africa and the Caribbean and another ten percent from Latin America,18 proportions that remarkably match the distribution of the human population around the world. Canada is truly becoming, more than anywhere else, Gwynne Dyer says “the world in one country.” Toronto, touted by many as the most multicultural 19 and global city in the world, has citizens from over one hundred and sixty-nine different countries speaking more than one hundred languages. Immigration accounts for over ninety percent of Toronto’s population growth, with over fifty percent of its residents born outside of Canada, compared to a mere twenty-eight percent in New York City. 20 By 2017, Afro-Caribbean immigrants could represent twenty-seven per cent of the Montreal’s visible minority population, and Arabs twenty per cent. By the same date, over fifty percent of Vancouver’s population is predicted to be Chinese as well as South and Southeast Asian.

And because under the Employment Equity Act visible minorities are “non-white persons, other than Aboriginal persons” these statistical trends of radical difference in race don’t even include Aboriginal people, over half of whom live in the cities.21

This is not the Canada that my Scottish, Irish and English ancestors immigrated to; it is not the Ontario that my great-grandfather left for Vancouver Island; nor the Vancouver that I was born in and my mother took me from for a life in the Canadian North. But it is the Canada that my mixed-blood treaty-card carrying children have grown up in; and it is the one that my mixed-blood treaty-card carrying grandchildren have been born into.

Where do we belong? This is not only a question for the Inuit of Holman but a question that many Canadians ask, particularly when imagining ourselves as part of a collective—one of the many collectives that make up Canada. Take my family for example: I am the white British subject cum Canadian citizen who is from everywhere and nowhere all at the same time, once part of the majority everywhere they went, now part of the minority among English-speaking Canadians, particularly the kind of rabid British Protestants that kept a silver coffee pot from the Royal Orange Order in the family for generations. Born in one region of the country, migrated to another. Many of my family went North leaving the Orange Order silver pot and religious animosities behind. Some homesteaded in northern British Columbia, some moved to the Yukon, others to the Northwest Territories. With them they carried their British subject-hood and subjectivity. They were part of what Mignolo names “coloniality,” colonialism that functions within the modern world system.22 And my family was modern if it was anything. No talk of family values; no church. The women married, divorced changed their names so often, moved so many times, that even the most dedicated genealogist could only find the starkest branches of any family. Though I attended twenty-one schools by the time I graduated from St. Patrick’s High School in Yellowknife, NWT, and married that beautiful boy (in the reverse order by the way) my mother went on to move another sixty times before her death. And when I add up all places she lived as a child and as a young wife and mother, a rough calculation predicts she moved almost one hundred times in the less than seventy years she was on the planet. It would be unfair to attribute such excessive mobility to coloniality—but it played a part. The North has always been Canada’s colony within; or maybe it is more accurate to say one of Canada’s colonies within.23 The North was the frontier: the place and space of limitless possibilities, the place to earn your fortune, the place to leave once you had made it. And off my family went.

The British Crown first gave the north to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1672 (not that it was theirs to give but that seems rather obvious); and then the Company gave it back, in 1870, when the buffalo were almost extinct and the beaver were not far behind. Actually the Hudson’s Bay Company didn’t give it back; they sold it back; this time to Canada, for 300,000 British pounds and one-twentieth of the fertile areas to be opened up for settlement. Canada, particularly the North, has a long history with global corporations, like the Hudson’s Bay Co., who could see the writing on the wall; they wanted out of the fur trade and into real estate and later expanded their trade to Africa.

 Initially, the Canadian government was not all that interested in that part of the sale that bought them the North. Even less interested after the Klondike gold rush and the influx and departure of over one hundred thousand fortune seekers, mostly American, to the Yukon. In the aftermath, the only thing the Canadian government was left with was a bill for the mess and a rich mythology.24 But then the Imperial Oil Co. discovered oil in Norman Wells Northwest Territories in 1919; and then Conminco—the mining, smelting and refining corporation—found gold in Yellowknife at the height of the great depression; and then the Canadian government secretly nationalized and re-opened the Eldorado mine to fill US government orders for uranium to use in the Atom Bomb Project, uranium ore which Dene25 men hauled out on their backs, refined for use in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.26 There is not a square inch of the NWT, and now Nunavut, that has not been mapped by the Government of Canada.27 Not a square inch that one or more global corporations seeking oil and gas and minerals have not staked and laid claim to.

And now it’s diamonds. In 1998, BHP Billiton opened Ekati Diamond Mine, where my son worked; one year later that mine had already produced over one million carats of the world’s finest diamonds. In 2003, a conglomerate of global corporations opened Diavik, the second open-pit diamond mine in the North; and more are scheduled to follow. Take De Beers, for example: the largest diamond mining company in the world. They bought controlling interests in the rich Snap Lake deposits, just northeast of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. In 2007, when the Snap Lake mine opens it will be De Beers’ first diamond mine outside of Africa, and the first underground diamond mine in the Canada.28 It is difficult to ascertain whether or not De Beers is more interested in gaining Canadian diamonds or in regaining its stranglehold on the international diamond market. Northern Canada offers consumers ethical diamonds; jewels minded in a democratic country where the workers enjoy “high labour standards”29 Perhaps De Beers would rather be associated with the (so-called) ethical, conflict-free diamonds of Canada that the “blood diamonds” of Sierra Leone, Angola and the Congo.30

Remember the people of Holman, the Inuit community who had to choose on which side of the border they belonged? Holman is situated on Victoria Island in the Arctic Ocean and the new border between the NWT and Nunavut split Victoria Island in half. The western side, where the hamlet of Holman is, remained in the NWT; the larger eastern half belongs to Nunavut. Running beneath this invisible border are diamonds, or more accurately, kimberlite pipes where diamonds are found. The people of Holman, publicly and unequivocally, rejected a proposed diamond mine on Victoria Island.31 And as an educator who always roots for the underdog I hope their vote was an act of legitimate participation, part of the agonistic democracy necessary to make living along and across borders, living with all of these radical differences, some visible and others not, possible. But there is an ethical difference between individuals and groups feeling empowered and them actually being empowered to make critical decisions.32 Time will tell if the collective voice of the people of Holman was actually heard and heeded.

And then, there are the massive northern oil and natural gas fields, and the recently revived proposals to build a six-billion dollar pipeline to ship it all south. It was just such massive exploration and development that brought my family north in the first place. And like the rest of Canada, the North is expanding at a rate faster than the rest of the universe. The NWT has the fastest growing economy in Canada, four per cent a year.33 Ironically, the Government of the Northwest Territories—which hires teachers, operates schools, and develops those bits and pieces of curriculum that it doesn’t have to import from Alberta—that government is broke, flat broke. In the days when Alice and Al made their fortune in the North, (the one they gambled away in the south), all the gold and silver and uranium went south, along with the tax revenues. Along with my parents and grandparents, and me, as it turned out. And lest we think the Canadian North is no longer a colony within, while my son and grandson stay in the North, the oil and diamonds still go south, followed by all the tax revenues, which still go to Ottawa. Instead of a tax regime, Ottawa gives the Government of the Northwest Territories an annual allowance; a pittance, most northerners would argue. And this is the region of Canada where less than twelve percent of the Aboriginal people complete high school.34 That could be my grandson. This is the region where there is not a single treatment centre for alcoholism or drug abuse.35 That could have been me. Recently, Canadian writer, and husband of the Governor General, John Raulston Saul, wrote an essay entitled “My Canada Includes the North;” I can hear my sons and grandson breathing a sigh of relief. 36

In spite of De Beers’ desire to sell bloodless diamonds, how ethical are these mines and pipelines really? What will be the consequences of open-pit and underground mines, overland pipelines or tankers freighting oil in a fragile, and already precarious, arctic environment? And, who will be left to clean up and pay the bill and live on the land once the diamonds and oil have all gone south? Outside of Yellowknife, who is living in the North? Outside of a handful of large cities, who is living in Canada? Where do we belong? And, to what?

And as Canadian cities become increasingly global, one world in a city, will urban Canadians have as much loyalty to, tolerance and compassion for, those places and those people, who are not as hip, global or cosmopolitan as themselves, those citizens who live in the North, in the rural areas, in the small struggling towns and cities on the prairies, on reserves, in northern parts of all the provinces, in eastern Quebec and in the Maritimes? Those citizens who are entitled to carry a Canadian passport but who may have trouble getting, or affording, one? What kind of a passport will allow us to cross the borders within this country, as well as beyond it, to be at home here, as well as, abroad? These are significant questions for all Canadians. And these are precisely the kinds of questions that Canadian curriculum studies and its scholars must help young people pose and explore. How we, as scholars and as teachers, face these difficult questions will expose how much of a home Canada really is, not just for those from elsewhere, but for those who live on the borders, in those overlapping territories of the past and the present, the rich and the poor, the south and north, east and west, rural and urban. Curriculum in Canada faces the challenge of being the passport to understanding, and acting on behalf of, all of Canada, its more fragile people and places as well as its most robust and vibrant.

And that passport, both an artifact and a signifier of citizenship, must ensure that Canadians are more than understanding, compassionate and tolerant; more than willing to negotiate and compromise; more than polite, self-effacing and humorous—although we must be all of that. It must ensure that the rights that our citizenship bears are the rights defined and shared by all of us collectively. That passport must hold us to our reputation, as Jennifer Welsh says 37, to give as well as we get. With such a passport in hand, we might learn to face the difficult task of making Canada home for all of its citizens, so that when we go out into the world, as so many Canadians are doing, with our shared values, about which we teach and of which we are so proud, we can be assured that those values are, in fact, worth sharing.

 

"Where is home?”

Ah so why all the stories, particularly a mélange of stories that on the surface do not seem to cohere, a bit of this and a bit of that? Why don’t I just tell you what all the stories mean? And, for that matter, why didn’t I simply skip the stories and get straight to the point?

Maybe I tell all these stories because the point is the stories. In even a cursory analysis of fiction written by Aboriginal people three motifs strike the reader: the land—loved, lost and found; creation and re-creation as simultaneous events where life, time and space are one force in perpetual motion; and finally, homecoming. Oh yes, and there is a fourth: how good and evil is not a real binary; more like the indivisible subject-hood of the British Empire—good and evil; old and new; us and them all chaotically co-habiting within each person and group—or I could say, within each citizen and nation, multiplicities that constantly erupt into chaos, a chaos we must not fear but through which our stories are always map and compass. And these four strong ideas of Aboriginal writers didn’t originate in fiction, neither are they limited to it: these ideas are found in the stories from the ancestors, oral teachings that are with us today. And these motifs—of land, creation and recreation, home leaving and homecoming, and the inevitability of chaos—are found in much Canadian literature. Writers, who have made their home in Canada but were born elsewhere, infuse Canadian literature with the themes of uprooting, migration and metamorphosis, and reconciling the old and the new.38 I would venture to say that most Canadian writers writing in English—Aboriginal, immigrant or other—find themselves wandering around in these topics.  And it is these topics and the stories that illuminate them, the stories that bring the ideas to life and let them loose on the world, the stories that complicate them and us; that we must tell and re-tell; learn and re-learn. These are our stories; they are the stories that “narrate the nation;” they are our way of creating what Rushdie called “imaginary homelands” while we carry on the difficult, agonistic work of living together in this home. Canadian stories are the stories of native peoples who were here first, but their stories have the least purchase and smallest place in Canada, and in Canadian curriculum studies; the loudest and most frequently re-iterated Canadian stories are the ones of the settler peoples who came later; they have the stories with the greatest purchase and those are the stories that occupy the largest place in the landscape of Canadian curriculum studies. It is these settler stories that are behind the Indian Act, the Canadian Citizenship Act, the Immigration Act—both the racist Act of 1910, and the one in 1976 that changed Canada forever. And the settler stories are behind the Canadian Constitution and NAFTA and all the legislation and policies governing education and curriculum. And, of course, these pieces of legislation are stories, too. Canadian stories are the stories of immigrants who have come, and are still coming; bringing new stories, rewriting, the stories of those already here. And then there are the stories of those Canadians who are leaving—almost a million living in the United States alone; young Canadians, who Jennifer Welsh calls the Can-global citizens; those young people, passport in hand, who are going to bring Canada to the world but hopefully will bring more of the world back to Canada. Can Canada “be home and Native land” to all of us—native and newcomer? I believe it can but it will require a great deal of us as Canadians and of Canadian curriculum studies.

Wherever home is, and whatever it is, says Edward Chamberlin, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, and author of the beautiful book, If this is your land, where are your stories? Wherever and whatever it is, “home is always a border country, a place that [both] separates and connects us” (p. 3).39 Not only is Canada a border country, it is a country defined by borders, by lines and history that separate Us from Them, Canadian from American, English from French, white minorities from visible majorities, immigrant from those lucky enough to have gotten here first; and Indigenous peoples from everyone else. Canada is a home always in the process of separation—we have even had referendums on it and may have more—a home always separating and re-connecting. Like any home it is “a place of possibility for both peace and perilous conflict.”40 Our challenge is to find common ground, Chamberlin says, and to believe it is possible to do so. Our stories, and the places where they are rooted, may help us do just that. And so must Canadian curriculum studies.

Pico Iyer is a London-born, Japan-based Indian writer (that is, the other Indians, the ones Columbus was looking for) who has chronicled his impressions of Canada in Harper’s Magazine, Canadian Geographic and in one of his more recent books, Global Soul. Iyer believes that for many in the world, Canada has become a “spiritual home,” one that embodies the “very notion of an extended, emancipating global citizenship.”41 Efforts in international relations have won Canada a reputation as a “model citizen”42 but we must be very careful that this reputation has truly been earned before it is reified in our myths or our curriculum. Canadians best not trade in humbleness for gloating quite yet; and we best be mindful of the trickster, Coyote, Raven, Wisekiyacak or Náápi waiting in the shadows always ready to mess everything up all over again.

In closing, I apologize if these meditations on nation and narration are perhaps not even-tempered or scholarly enough; not enough about Canadian curriculum studies and its wonderful scholars and practitioners. Forgive me for being a bit too personal, too long-winded, too indignant, perhaps a bit un-Canadian. While I’m never one to underrate passion, it can be a conversation stopper; it can halt love in its tracks, smother relationships in infancy.

In his novel, Mercy Among the Children, Canadian writer David Adam Richards wrote, “There is no worse flaw in a man’s character than that of wanting to belong.”45 For me, it has not only been a terrible flaw but a wound, a wound too old, too deep to stitch up neatly in a single essay. So for the question that I posed at the beginning, “Where do I belong?” it was a good place to start but not a good place to end, because, in spite of it all, I don’t know the answer. But I do know that if ever there was a place, a nation where a citizen and a scholar, was obliged to live with this question, it is Canada. And I do know that if ever there was a field to help Canadians live with this question, it must be curriculum studies.

And now I must mail off my passport application to Ottawa. Just in case,

The next border I cross requires that passport, and just in case, once I have crossed that next border, I want to come home again.

 

Endnotes

A version of this paper was presented as Lawrence Erlbaum Presidential Address to the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies McGill University, Montréal, Québec April 08, 2005.

  1. Passport Canada: History of Passports. Accessed on November 13, 2005 at http://www.pptc.gc.ca/passport_office/history_e.asp. See also the Canadian government’s official response to the United States proposed Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. This initiative, which requires Canadians to present a passport or other documents declaring citizenship and identity, is to be implemented in two phases. “By December 31, 2006, it would be applied to all air and sea travel to or from Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and Bermuda. By December 31, 2007, the requirement would be extended to all land border crossings.” Accessed on November 13, 2005 at  http://w01.international.gc.ca/minpub/ Publication.asp/publication_id=383301&language=E
  2. “In the year 1850, at the height of the glory of the British Empire, Lord Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary, made a speech in Parliament for which he is still remembered. He borrowed the concept of Civis Romanus sum – I am a citizen of Rome – to declare, ‘Civis Britannicus sum. I am a citizen of Britain.’ At the time, London was the undisputed centre of a new, truly worldwide Empire. Palmerston declared that, wherever in the world a British subject went, that Briton could flaunt the local laws, because the British fleet and the long, strong arm of British law would defend him.” David O’Brien. (January 17, 2003) President’s Address to the Trinidad and Tobago The Chamber of Industry and Commerce. Last accessed on November 14, 2005 at http://www.chamber.org.tt/presidentsaddress03.htm
  3. Also see the dedication Nirad C. Chaudhuri wrote to his (1951) The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. "To the memory of the British Empire in India, which conferred subjecthood upon us, but withheld citizenship; to which yet every one of us threw out the challenge: ‘Civis Britannicus sum’ because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped, and quickened by the same British rule."
  4. Dyer, G. (2001, Jan/Feb). Visible majorities. Canadian Geographic. p. 45
  5. Randall A. Hansen. (2004) Citizens and subjects: The British State and United Kingdom Immigrant Policy, 1948 to 1962. In Iain Hampsher-Monk & Jeffrey Stanyer (Eds.) Contemporary Political Studies 1996: Volume 1 – 3 Proceedings of the Political Studies Association Annual Conference held at the University of Glasgow. Available at http://www.psa.ac.uk/cps/1996.htm as part of a site that integrates all the PSA Annual Conference papers 1994 - 2004 and makes them available in fully searchable electronic format.
  6. To attract (white) settlement to Vancouver Island, the British government gave out land and favours to veterans of WWI, but not the Boer War, so my great-grandfather lost out and became a house painter. For a fictional account of one Vancouver Island community formed by such WWI veteran’s and their families eking out a living on land unsuited for agriculture see Jack Hodgin’s 1998 Broken Ground: A novel.  
  7. For a detailed description see the Citizenship and Immigration Canada web page: Forging our Legacy, 1900-1977. Last accessed on 14 November 2005 at http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/legacy/chap-5.html
  8. Georges Erasmus (2002). Lafontaine-Baldwin Symposium Lecture. http://www.operation-dialogue.com/lafontaine-baldwin/e/2002_speech_6.html
  9. Female vocalist and lyricist, Alanis Morissette, seven-time Grammy Award released her debut Jagged Little Pill in 1995 to critical acclaim. Canadians often claim Morissette as one of their own, although she moved to the USA as a teenager. See http://www.alanis.com/main.html and http://www.alanis-morissette.com/biography/ for more information.
  10. For more information on the history of the people of Holman read Richard Condon’s (1996) The Northern Copper Inuit: A history. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. This book was written with Julia Ogina.
  11. From LaborLawTalk.com. Accessed at March 22, 2005. Copyrighted 2004.  encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/ International_Boundary.“Officially known as the International Boundary, the present border originated with the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which ended the war between Great Britain and the separating colonies which would form the United States. The Jay Treaty of 1794 created the International Boundary Commission, which was charged with surveying and mapping the boundary. Disputes over the interpretation of boundary demarcation led to the Aroostook War and the ensuing Webster–Ashburton Treaty in 1842 which better defined the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick and the Province of Canada. Westward expansion of both British North America and the United States saw the boundary extended west from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains under the Convention of 1818. U.S. President James Knox Polk's expansionist desires for the northern boundary of the U.S. to be 54°40′ north (related to the southern boundary of Russia's Alaska Territory), and Great Britain's claim that the border should follow the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, led to the Oregon Treaty in 1846, which established the 49th parallel as the boundary through the Rockies. In 1903 a joint Great Britain–Canada–U.S. tribunal established the boundary with Alaska. In 1925 the International Boundary Commission was made a permanent organization responsible for surveying and mapping the boundary, maintaining boundary monuments (and buoys where applicable), as well as keeping the boundary clear of brush and vegetation for 6 metres (20 feet) on each side of the line.”
  12. Hillmer, N. (2005, Winter). Viewpoint: A border people. Canada World View, 24. http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/canada-magazine/01-title-en.asp
  13. Norman Hillmer. (2005). A border people. Canada World View, Issue 24, Winter 2005. Available online at  http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/canada-magazine/issue24/menu-en.asp
  14. Jennifer Welch. (2004). At home in the world: Canada’s Global Vision for the 21st Century. Toronto: Harper Collins. Also see “Where do I belong?”: Exploring citizenship in the 21st Century (Hart House Lecture, 3). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto. Available from The Hart House Lectures, Hart House, 7 Hart House Circle, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H3. (416)978-2452. www.harthouse.utoronto.ca
  15. Daniel Drache. (2004). Borders matter: Homeland security, borders and the search for North America. Halifax, NS: Fernwood Publishing.
  16. James Laxer. (2003, September 23). The fight for sovereignty. Vive Le Canada (Leftist website affiliated with Canadian Dimension Magazine that advocates grassroots efforts “to protect and improve Canadian sovereignty and democracy in an era of corporate globalization”. Available at http://www.canadiandimension.mb.ca/extra/ d1224jl.htm
  17. Thich Nhat Hanh. (1997). Teachings on love. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press.
  18. Leonie Sandercock in her essay “Reinventing Multiculturalism” makes this distinction between empirical and ideological multiculturalism. She goes on to critique the basic assumptions of multiculturalism and its appropriateness for the radical nature of difference in Canada and proposes instead a theory of interculturalism.
  19. Gwynne Dyer. (2001, Jan/Feb). Visible majorities. Canadian Geographic, 45-51.
  20. See Endnote # 19 above. A summary of the information reported by Stats Canada, entitled Population projections in visible minority groups, Canada, provinces and regions, and released on Tuesday March 22, 2005 can be found at the website for the Canadian Centre on Minority Affairs. According to this website the “Canadian Centre on Minority Affairs (CCMA) Inc is a non-profit educational and social development that was established in 1990 to meet the growing and diverse needs of the Black and Caribbean Canadian community. CCMA programs are related to social development, youth development, public affairs and Canada-Caribbean cooperation and development.” http://www.ccmacanada.org/article.php?articleId=159
  21. Steven Fick and Mary Vincent. (2001, Jan/Feb). Toronto: A global village. Canadian Geographic, pp. 54-55. Pico Iyer Global Soul.
  22. Fick and Vincent, 2001, p. 54-55.
  23. While less than five percent of Canadians claim Aboriginal ancestry, almost sixty percent of those people live in Canada’s urban centres. Indian and Northern Affairs Canada maintain demographic statistics on Aboriginal people on their website. They use Stats Canada data for their information. However all data is based on the 1996 census and is thus dated. Accessed on April 3, 2005. Last updated on April 23, 2004. http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/gs/dem_e.html
  24. Walter Mignolo. (2000). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges and border crossings. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
  25. Mel Watkins. (1977). Dene Nation: Colony Within. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. This book is an abridged edition of material presented to the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry by the Dene and others speaking on their behalf. It was one of the clearest depictions of how the colonial imperial model of the centre extracting resources from the margins applied within Canada: how the federal government basically uses the Canadian North as its own internal colony—a place from where it can extract resources and accompanying revenues. Quebecers, of course, have made a similar claim.
  26. Kenneth Charles Eyre’s 1981 unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Custos Borealis: The military in the Canadian North, Department of War Studies, King’s College, The University of London, England.
  27. The Dene are the people indigenous to the sub-arctic (boreal forest) Canadian North. For background information see Kerry Abel. (1993). Drum songs: Glimpses of Dene History. Montréal: McGill University Press; René Fumoleau. (1975). As long as this land shall last: A history of Treaty 8 and 11, 1870-1939. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart; Cynthia Chambers (1989). For Our Children’s Children: An Educator’s Interpretation of Dene Testimony to the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
  28. There has been extensive research done on this little known part of Canadian history, including the effects being in such close physical contact to the ore had on the coolies. For more information see Gordon Edwards, Ph.D. short history of uranium in Canada at the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility accessed at http://www.ccnr.org/uranium_events.html; Deborah Simmons Co-authored with the Déline Knowledge Centre Action Group, “The Déline Knowledge Centre: From vision to reality,” International Journal of Circumpolar Health 63, 1: 102-104.
  29. Eyre, K. (1981). Custos Borealis: The military in the Canadian North. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of War Studies, King’s College, The University of London, England.  Department of War Studies, King’s College, The University of London, England. Eyre describes in detail how the Canadian military used airplanes to map and survey every square inch of the Canadian North following WWII.
  30. On their company website, De Beers (www.debeerscanada.com) anticipates “mine construction will begin in 2005 and full production in 2007. The project will employ up to 450 people during construction and will create approximately 550 permanent positions during operations.” The section entitled “Snap Lake Project” can be accessed at http://www.debeerscanada.com/files_2/snap_lake/ factsheet.html. This page was last updated on 11 August 2005 and was last accessed on 14 November 2005.
  31. See for example Ethical Igloo Diamonds website where they market their product as “ethical diamonds that pay”—extracted in accordance with Canadian environmental standards and labor practices. Last accessed at www.diamonds.ca on 14 November 2005.
  32. See Greg Campbell. (2002). Blood Diamonds: Tracing the deadly path of the world’s most precious stones. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.  See also United Nations resolution on “conflict diamonds” available at http://www.un.org/peace/africa/Diamond.html
  33. Personal communication with Emily Kudlak, member of the research team on the Ulukaktuk Indigenous Literacies project and elected member of the Holman Hamlet Council.
  34. Patrick O’Neill. (2004). The ethics of problem definition. Presidential Address to the Canadian Association of Psychologists. Available from Dr. Patrick O’Neill at poneill@accesswave.ca
  35. Based on their 2004 data, Statistics Canada reported that “[m]ining operations also prospered in the Northwest Territories, where diamonds continue to have a large affect on the economy. In total, the Northwest Territories economy rose4.2%, the best in the country, with diamond mining accounting for more than half of this growth.” Last accessed on 14 November, 2005 at http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/050427/d050427a.htm
  36. High school completion rates for Aboriginal people in Yellowknife, the largest urban centre in the NWT with over 44% of the total NWT population, are much higher than in the other communities. However the gap between the high school completion rates, and consequently employment rate, of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal NWT residents is wide and widening. See the Government of Canada, Innovation in Canada analysis of economic trends in Yellowknife NWT, including high school completion rates http://www.innovation.gc.ca/gol/innovation/site.nsf/en/ in02005.html This page was modified on16 November 2003 and last accessed on 14 November 2005. Also Stats Can analysis of educational achievement of Aboriginal people in Canada’s urban centres. This page was last modified on 31 December 2003 and was accessed on 14 November 2005. http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/81-004-XIE/2005003/aborig.htm The NWT Literacy Council has collated research on educational achievement and literacy levels of Aboriginal northerners. See their literacy facts page available at http://www.nwt.literacy.ca/litfact/situatn/page1.htm. This site was last modified on 14 October 2005 and was accessed on 14 November 2005.
  37. This is common knowledge in the NWT but also confirmed by the Canadian Drug Rehab Centres website. http://www.canadiandrugrehabcentres.com/
  38. John Ralston Saul. (n.d.) My Canada Includes the North. Published on-line at the Unity.ca website (an organization dedicated to promotion of Canadian Unity). Last accessed on 14 November 2005 at http://www.uni.ca/lb_saul_e.html.
  39. Jennifer Welsh. See above footnote At home in the world (2004).
  40. Some of these themes came from Salmon Rushie’s Imaginary Homelands (1992), p. 394.
  41. Edward Chamberlin. (2003). If this is your land where are your stories? Finding common ground. Toronto, ON: Alfred A. Knopf Canada.
  42. Chamberlin, 2003, p. 3.
  43. Pico Iyer. (2004, Nov/Dec). Canada: Global citizen. Canadian Geographic, 62-69.
  44. Welsh, 2004.
  45. Cited in Daniel Drache (2004). Borders Matter: Homeland Security and the Search for North America. Halifax, NS: Fernwood Publishing.