The welfare State

Social democracy

 

The welfare state is not a bogeyman. I am not a socialist though I have a lot of sympathy and lot in common with them. I consider myself a social democrat instead. I remember Premier Ed Schreyer in 1969, who made the same distinction after he led his party of New Democrats to power in the Manitoba provincial election.   A social democrat is a person who understands that the welfare state is essential to democracy, and at least enlightened business leaders have come to realize that.

Frankly I believe that socialism is as outdated as capitalism.  They were old foes that were both wrong. A Social Democrat realizes that government is a useful tool to bring about economic well-being and justice. It is not the enemy of the people. It is not the goal of the social democrat to have government own all businesses or to control, or as Marx said, “the means of production.”  The social democrat is content to have those owned privately. However the social democrat realizes that the owners of businesses and properties should not be allowed to have unfettered power because if they do they will use that power to exploit the less powerful in what they perceive, often mistakenly, as their own interest. That is not in the public interest. The Social Democrat speaks for the public interest–i.e. the common good.

Many Capitalists and most neo-conservatives want to see government shrunk. They are constantly on the warpath against ‘Big government.” They believe that almost everything of value comes from private enterprise and that government is only a chain around it. Government is seen as a hindrance, as a purveyor of red tape that strangles private enterprise. Famously, an American neo-conservative once said he wanted to shrink government until it was so small it could drown in a bathtub!

The Social Democrat also realizes that often public goods are just as important, if not more so, than private goods. Both are goods!  For example, the Social Democrat appreciates schools, hospitals, fire departments, highways, sidewalks, parks, ecological reserves, national and provincial/state parks, recreational facilities and much more, as great goods every bit as important as private goods.

Well-known Social Democrats were Tony Judt and Eric Hobsbawm.  They appreciated all the goods that governments had brought about in the 20th century and that it was crazy to suggest that all these goods had been brought about by private enterprise.

As Ed Broadbent stated in a speech in 1997, the welfare state is not a matter of altruism or charity.  Rather, it is a grand bargain that reconciles citizens to the inequalities that arise in the capitalist system by offering them equitable treatment in at least some fundamental areas of life.  As he said, “the marriage of the welfare state brings together the two dispositions of fairness and self-interest.  Like all marriages, it is precarious– and the balance between the impulse to solidarity and to self must be constantly monitored.”  In the years of the neo-conservative retreat this delicate balance was disturbed and often forgotten.

One of the interesting by-products of the success of the welfare state was to increase the number of working class families open to neo-conservative arguments.  It is easy for people to forget the help that they have received and give themselves sole credit for their own achievements. For example, many people, including successful entrepreneurs, came to believe that their success was the result of their own efforts alone, ignoring the benefits, direct and indirect from the complex networks of the welfare state.  Many successful people forget about the subsidies that they have received from the welfare state, such as state subsidized education, housing, transportation, entertainment, health care, care for their elders, assistance to their business or profession.  They think that just because they did not receive direct social assistance that they have received no help.  Then by hypocrisy that even politicians would find impressive they declare themselves “self-made men!”

Social Democracy v. Socialism

Moral Humility, Social democracy

 

We heard some Conservative Americans on the radio complaining about the rise of socialism. To them “socialism” is a very dirty word. It is about on par with child molester. I really think the issue of socialism will be very important in the next Presidential and Congressional elections.I hope so.  Many Conservatives think the Democrats are handing them the next election because they are going so radical. Is that true?

I know Trump has already been active in referring to the Democrats as leftists, or, even worse, radical socialists. They point in particular to Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and worst of all–the Green New Deal. Talk about a bevy of boogey men. Republicans think they are being handed the next election on a platter. As a result I think it is a good idea for us to be clear about what a socialist is and is not.

What is a socialist?  This is not as clearly defined as one might like. When I went to university we defined a socialist as a person who believed that the means of production should be owned by public. That does not mean there should be no private property, but I still think it goes too far.  I thought the definition had changed since then, but I have not found a better one. According to this definition, a socialist believes the infrastructure of production–such as factories, businesses, and the like should be socially owned, not privately owned.  In this sense of the word I have never been a socialist. Even in the days of my misspent youth.

I have been more attracted to the term “social democrat.” I would say that a social democrat is one who believes that the public should have significant control (not ownership) of the important private property, such as the means of production, but including other things–that can have a substantial impact on society.  Social democrats don’t want to own all these things. But they do want society to have social control exercised in a democratic manner over the vital instruments of social influence. This includes the means of production but many other things as well. “Democratic” means are important to distinguish Social Democrats from Communists. Communists clearly demonstrated how things go awry when democratic means are abandoned. Without democracy the apparatchiks are as bad as the capitalists.That control must be used for significant social goods, such as greater equality (not absolute equality), greater freedom, and greater fraternity. These are really the goals of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Some aspects will have to be controlled fairly tightly. Others hardly at all. The amount of control will vary greatly depending on how influential the instruments are and how pernicious their effects.

Social democrats don’t have a strict ideological position on what needs to be socially controlled and what not. As a result social democrats don’t have a principle such as ‘that government is best which governs the least’—the principle of libertarians and neoliberals.  Nor do Social Democrats believe by rote that people should be allowed to do anything provided it does not harm other people–classic liberalism. The people will democratically decide from time to time, how much control to exercise in particular circumstances and this can always be debated freely in each case under consideration. Social Democrats, unlike Socialists, Communists, or neo-conservatives are not governed by rigid ideology but by rational decision making on a case by case basis based on evidence, data, and careful thinking.

Social Democrats will not hesitate to use government as the means to their social democratic ends. Social Democrats do their best to keep out bias in decision-making. Social Democrats don’t have a recipe; they have a technique–i.e. reasoning based on the best evidence, analysis, and logical reasoning. These goals are humble and modest. That is one of the reasons I like them. Those are some of the reasons I call myself a social democrat.

Big Ideas

Climate change, Conservative

I agree with Greta Thunberg. We are in a climate emergency but no one is acting like it. At best, our political leaders are treating it like a problem, not an emergency.  We really need to transform our thinking. It is much too late for little ideas. We need big ones.

Norman Brandson, the former deputy minister of Manitoba Department of Environments wrote well on the subject in the Winnipeg Free Press. He said,

 

Big ideas are transformative, visionary. U.S. president John F. Kennedy did not check with the General Accountability Office before presenting the American people with the vision of reaching the moon.

Although having a big idea ought to be part and parcel of political party agendas, it’s also necessary to have a good big idea, one that captures the imagination, enthusiasm and support of the voters, and is achievable. If either test fails, the big idea fails.

 

If we had dealt with the climate change issue 50, or even 30 years ago, when we were first alerted to the danger, we might have got by on modest ideas. Frankly, I have a deep preference for modest ideas over radical ideas. I guess that makes me fundamentally conservative (in the true sense of the word, not in the modern perverted sense of the word.) We squandered those decades, now it is too late for anything other radical new transformative ideas. Now we need ideas as radical as the Green New Deal in the United States. I will comment on that later.

Brandson put it this way:

“The big idea we ought to be talking about — not just at election time, but all the time — is the transformations necessary to enable the transition to a world economy that runs on renewable energy and is carbon-neutral (zero net emission of greenhouse gases); the essential precursor to the Green party’s big idea.”

Actually we need to discuss an even bigger idea—the need to change from a consumptive society to a much more modest society, but I will leave that as well for a future occasion. I am thinking about the election that we just had in Canada. Brandson mentioned that Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party in Canada is much too savvy to be talking about transformative ideas like that during an election. This reminds me of what Kim Campbell said in her one and only election while she was leader of the Conservative Party of Canada: “An election is no time to discuss serious issues.” Sadly, she might be right.

.        I have called the idea of constant growth the original sin of economics and the capitalist system. David Suzuki called this the creed of cancer. The idea that it would be possible and even desirable to have constant growth is what is killing us. This idea is poisonous. It does not have legs. It is the current big idea, but it is dead. We need a new big idea. This new idea was described by Norman Branson this way:

“It would be seen as an attack on the universally accepted measure of economic success — at least in the financial sector — growth. It would be a challenge to the reigning economic philosophy so successfully promoted by the Chicago School of Economics and its acolytes — deregulated free-market capitalism.

The Green party has called for a war on climate change, but of course you don’t wage war against a phenomenon; you wage it against the causes or, in this case, the economic and social paradigms that are the cause of climate change and the interests vested in those paradigms. Such talk is not likely to win too many seats in Parliament, at least not yet.

What we require is an adjustment to, not an abandonment of, our current economic thinking. We need a Chicago School-style philosophical revolution that articulates an economic philosophy appropriate for our time, a time in which we are facing the existential threat of climate change. We need to decouple economic health and growth, leading to a system that generates profit without growth.”

Many people are not sure this is possible. Pundits keep saying if we don’t have growth we have stagnation or worse, decline. If they are right, capitalism is dead in the water.

Naomi Klein is right about one thing: the climate emergency “changes everything.”  This was what America conservatives feared for decades and they proved to be right. Climate change is a fundamental challenge to capitalism. Their worst nightmare is coming to fruition and frankly they have no one to blame but themselves. American conservatives for years have been spending vast sums of money to convince people that the climate crisis is not a crisis and as a result they caused people in the US and Canada to delay action for decades, during which time they reaped enormous profits, but during which time the fuel for a revolution, like fuel in national forests, was increasing every year, until we are all now about to experience a conflagration of epic proportions. This is the hell that America conservatives have purchased. They bought it with vast sums of money that was used to manufacture lies that have now been exposed. They have sown the wind, now they have to reap the storm. I can’t believe these conservatives will ever be believed again, but particularly in America, though in Canada too, one should never under estimate what people can be persuaded to believe no matter how unbelievable.

I don’t know if this big idea is the right idea; I just know that no small idea is the right idea.

We need Conservatives

Climate change, Conservative

Where are the conservatives when we need them? Around here all they want to conserve is the right to earn money without barriers, and the right to continue their destruction of the natural world. None of them want to conserve what is critically important—the natural world.

The science is clear—unless we change course we are headed towards a disaster and it is a disaster that we cannot really calculate.  We are conducting an experiment with our planet unlike any done before. The dangers are extreme.  One would think that conservatives would want to avoid such foolish risks.  Yet the Conservatives I see want to ignore the risks and continue with business as usual. They are not prepared to make even modest changes to our behaviors. In the face of an emergency, that is not conservative, that is batshit crazy.

Greta Thunberg is mocked by most of the conservatives I know. But she has a very simple message: ‘Listen to the scientists.” To me that seem simple and rational. The conservatives around here seem content to ignore the warnings from scientists. To me that seems radical.

Most of us see going on strike, as Thunberg’s young climate change resisters did recently, is usually understood as an extreme act done only when all else fails. Is that not what has happened? All Thunberg and other young climate strikers are saying is that they want a future for their generation. This is not really radical is it?  All they are asking for, as Simon Dalby explained in a recent Winnipeg Free Press article, it is this:

“A future in which one can live well, have children and obtain a decent job, maintaining a world of predictable social order, is what conservatives usually wish for. Instead, so-called conservatives across much of the English speaking world are telling us we have to burn more stuff—oil, gas, and coal—and ship it around the world so others can join in on burning things as well…There is nothing remotely conservative about assuming we can destabilize the climate system and somehow society will be fine because at least some people have amassed major wealth with money made by burning things.”

With the consequences of climate change now clear, and the science able to much more accurately predict what is coming if we stay on our existing course of using ever more fossil fuels, it is the fossil fuel industry, its propagandists and supporters who are the radicals, and very dangerous ones at that.

I wish conservatives had not abandoned conservativism. But at least we have the young conservatives.

Evolving Economies on the Plains

Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact

The Eastern woodlands of North America was home to Indigenous people for at least 10,000 years and maybe more. Although the first North Americans, eastern Paleo-Indians, who lived there used stone tools  they were not by and large hunters of big game.  They stuck close to the “river roads,” by which was meant the amazing rivers of North America.  They were nomadic, but usually travelled along those major rivers and systematically took advantage of the seasonal availability of grasses, fruits, nuts, fish, and game. Meandering you might say. This was wise. As Hurst Thomas said, “Their broad spectrum adaptation spread out the risk and buffered people against the failure of any particular plant or animal species. This generalized ecological adaptation was to gain them a head start toward the more intensive gathering economies evident in later periods. As their population increased, Eastern Woodland people became more efficient, intensifying their economic exchanges with others, and improving their ability to store food for the future. They learned to protect themselves against year-to-year fluctuations in resources.”

Unlike European farmers, they knew enough to avoid monocultures like they avoided plagues, at least until they came across a plague they could not stop.

According to David Hurst Thomas, “The earliest true pottery in North America appears about 2500 B.C. in coastal and riverine Georgia, unassociated with any archaeologically visible trace of agriculture.”

As always happens, some people are better at producing food in their environments than others. When this happened, inevitably, as if following the rules of Adam Smith, trade followed. With time it was noticed that in some North American indigenous societies that were often very egalitarian moved away from that to more rigid and unequal societies. Archaeologists have discovered this from examining graves. Status was reflected in the disparity of the goods kept in graves. Perfection is as hard to maintain as it is to achieve.

There was one famous archaeological site which I would love to visit. This is Poverty Point in northeastern Louisiana. I think I drove past it a couple of years ago without knowing what I was missing. As I keep saying, life is hard when you are stupid.

Around about 1300 B.C. Indigenous people there began to construct some spectacular earthworks. One in particular was very large and bird-shaped. It was about 75 feet high. Nearby were 6 huge concentric ridges that were likely used as dwelling sites. The outer perimeter extended about 2/3 of a mile. It was necessary for the people to move millions of cubic feet of earth to build the structures.

The people who lived there participated in far flung exchanges that were used to trade copper and other stones. Even though they lacked the stones that Indigenous people in California could use to heat up and drop into baskets for heating up the water,  they cleverly  “manufactured” artificial stones out of clay balls.

Although the people there probably cultivated small gardens, the site was eventually abandoned, like so many other sites in North America, and it took another 1,000 years before North America would again see such elaborate ceremonial spaces.

We have a lot to learn from Indigenous people.  It is very unfair to call them savages, as Canadians at one time routinely did.

Unsheltered

Truth Seeking

The Unsheltered Search for truth

by Barbara Kingsolver

It is a pleasure to read a novel by Barbara Kingsolver right after reading one by Toni Morrison. Both are outstanding novelists, but they are different from each other. As I have said before, Morrison’s novels are difficult. You really have to work at them, but the rewards for doing are immense. With Kingsolver, reading is effortless. You can breeze through her books, but that does not mean the book is an “easy read.” It is and it isn’t.

I recommend you take things slowly. I am a meanderer. Even when I read, I meander through the book. That means I have to go back to the beginning or somewhere else earlier in the book. With Kingsolver that is also worth the trip.

I recently read her book Unsheltered. It is a story about 2 families more than a century apart with a strange connection. The connection is a ramshackle old house in Vineland New Jersey that is about to fall apart and crumble into oblivion because of an unsound foundation. It just takes a century or more to do that. Is she trying to say something about America?

The book is about more than that however. It is about a search for truth and the importance of summoning the courage to speak that truth. The Thatchers are the first of the families to occupy the house. They do so in the late 19th century. Thatcher Greenwood is a science teacher at school and “he felt his soul touched by light.” Thatcher thought, “an active mind should be fed the meat of the world…wonderments, of any kind that compel her. Things that are real.” He saw “the world divided in two camps, the investigators and the sweeteners.” Sadly, his lovely wife is on the side of sweetness while he is searching for truth and that gets him into trouble. The truth is not always sweet, no matter how we wish it were.

The second family to occupy the house has done everything right but is assailed by bad luck. It is led—well sort of led—by the matriarch Willa Knox a magazine journalist out of work because the magazine has folded. Similarly her husband, Iano is a lecturer at a small college that has also folded. This family is floundering in its dubious shelter about to collapse. But the family has a steady and surprising rock, the daughter Tig, fittingly named after a Greek tragedy, Antigone, but amazingly resilient. Her name means “worthy of her parents” and that she is. She is the unlikely solid foundation of the novel.

Thatcher is a teacher who is enthralled with the new ideas of Charles Darwin but is forbidden by his principal from teaching them. How can he get in trouble by seeking and speaking the truth? He will lose his job if he does not renounce those ideas. Thatcher knows “we are often persuaded that what is convenient is also right.” He also knows that this is the enemy of truth seeking. As Nietzsche said, desire is the enemy of truth.

Thatcher knows that to his students “Science was a bewilderment they approached with fixed expressions of disbelief, the young ladies adding to this sulkiness owned by their gender, peering up at teacher from under an eave of curled fringe.” How can he abandon his charges?

He is trying to get his students to see what is not visible. It must be inferred. His students are dubious. He holds up a bottle that contains a gas, but his students are sceptical because they can’t see it. Yet one male student admits that we can’t see it “but we smell it sure. When my pa passes gas you’ll know in the next room. Specially if he’s been at the liver and onions.” This wisdom came from Willis Chester who looked startled when his classmates burst into laughter.” While Chester is wise, his Principal, Mr. Cutler, is not and Thatcher must deal with that. He knows it is a horrible task. “Thatcher wondered what task could be more wearisome than shoring up a stupid man’s confidence in his own wisdom?”

Thatcher wants to treat his students to the wonders of the scientific method. “We study unseen particles by observing their effects. Discovery comes from the small increments of weight and measurement we call data, providing answers to questions we have carefully framed.”

The poor students have a brilliant teacher saddled with a dead-beat Principal Mr.Cutler  who gets his science from the Bible. “Experiments alarm him. Modern scientific theory enrages him, discussion of Darwin particularly, but not only this. The suggestion of taking students outdoors to study nature, he treats as blasphemy.” Reminding me of the current President of the United States, Cutler, “reads nothing. It might interfere with his knowledge of the universe.” Cutler  instead holds, “to answer all his questions, using scripture bent back on itself like a fish hook.”

Thatcher is aided by his neighbour, a brilliant scientist, Mary Treat, who explains that humans are often blinded by fear of the new ideas. “A humanity derived from the plain stuff of earth frightens them even more…Presumptions of a lifetime are perilous things to overturn.” Mary gives Thatcher a very difficult task: “Your charge is to lead them out of doors to see evidence for themselves, and not to fear it. To stand in the clear light of day, you once said, unsheltered.”

It is not easy to stand up to a mob. Even a mob dressed in proper clothes like attendees at a school debate. With clear echoing of modern events, where another mob in another place, shouted in front of a modern demagogue, Thatcher says,

“I wonder what service is possible, Mary.  When half the world, with no understanding of Darwin at all, will rally around whoever calls him a criminal and wants him hanged.

She said nothing to this. But it was no exaggeration: the crude effigy dangling from a noose, the monkey’s tail pinned to the stuffed trousers, the murderous crowd chanting lock him up! The provocateur was an itinerant preacher in a threadbare rabat and pieces of an infantryman’s uniform, boots, and greatcoat he must have pulled from a dead soldier. Thatcher had stood astonished, watching violence in its own bloody birth canal.”

To this Mary replies, again echoing modern events, “When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.” Thatcher makes the scary reply, “If that is our nature, then nature is madness. These are more dangerous times than we ever have known.”

Thatcher’s friend, Carruth, also seeks the truth and decides to tell it, no matter what the consequences. Again, as in modern times, Carruth wonders how people can be bamboozled by demagogues against their own interest.  How is that possible? Thatcher explains, “They are happier to think of themselves as soon to be rich, than irreversibly poor.” Carruth nodded thoughtfully, “A delicate business, telling the truth.”

Cutler,  Thatcher’s superior at the school, knows nothing of Darwin. Nor does he want to discuss the scientific method of searching for the truth. “His brand of science is an edifice built of scriptures and saints.” It is a strange science. One willing to convict Thatcher of being a veritable witch entirely without evidence. Such men fear the truth. “Men like him dread new views, for fear they’ll set aside their hard-earned credentials and begin their climb again at the bottom rung.” He compares these men to persecuted Darwin: “Darwin explains geographic distribution with beautiful simplicity, compared with the buttresses and gargoyles of Cutler’s angel bridges. His strange science is a falling house. If I train young eyes to be observant, they will see cracks in his construction of the universe.” Cutler’s “science” is as shaky as Thatcher’s house.

Cutler “speaks to those who want nothing new. And that is most people nowadays. They hunger for any crumb of explanation that sustains their old philosophies.’ Thatcher thought of the riot he’d seen in the Boston square, the scarecrow Darwin hanging from a lamppost, the crowd terrified witless at the prospect of shedding comfortable beliefs and accepting new ones…People want comfort.” Yes people want shelter. Being unsheltered is scary.

But I have been neglecting the modern family. They too face being unsheltered, and no one finds this more challenging than Willa the matriarch. Her husband seems oblivious to the danger. Her son is off chasing money. But her daughter, Tig, who never got anything right, so it seemed, finds she can deal with it. She is resilient.

In fact Tig is critical of Willa and her father. They kept searching for the security of tenure, by moving from town to town, and in the end when he finally got tenure, it dissolved in his hands.  As Tig says, “You made such a big deal about security that you sacrificed us any long-term community.” Now her mother is worrying about a shaky house when the world as they know it is dissolving. Here is part of their conversation:

“Mom. The permafrost is melting. Millions of acres of it.”

Willa tried to see a connection. “And I’m just worried about my house. That’s your point?”

Tig shook her head.  “It’s so scary. It’s going to be fire and rain, Mom. Storms we can’t deal with, so many people homeless. Not just homeless but placeless. Cities go underwater and then what?  You can’t shelter in place anymore, when there isn’t any place.”

Willa tucked her hands between her knees and declined to believe those things.”

Willa desired a different truth. So Tig like Thatcher more than a century earlier has to deliver the bad news—truth in other words—to people who don’t want to hear it. They just decline to believe it. The world is collapsing but people just don’t want to hear about it. They want to worry about their house without a foundation, when all of civilization has no sound foundation.

Willa can’t see changing their lifestyle.  She tells Tig, “I’m human, Tig. We live, we consume. I think that’s just how we have to be.” To this resignation to collapse Tig replies, “Of course you think that. When everybody around you thinks the same way, you can’t even see what you’re believing in.”

Tig envisions the world to come. So different than the world of her mother. Her mother wanted her kids to have more than her. A natural motherly reaction. Are we parents not all like that? But the world has changed and the old one is not coming back. Someone has to face that truth. People seek comfort and instead get uncomfortable truths. Dusty, Willa’s grandson won’t have the same life his grand mother had. He will have to deal with it.

As Tig says to Willa,

“He’ll have to learn to be happy with what he’s got. He doesn’t’ get a choice. He got born in the historical moment of no more free lunch. Friends will probably count more than money, because wanting too much stuff is going to be toxic. We didn’t’ ask for this, it’s just what we got. ”

“Thou shalt not want.”

Something like that. Waste not, want not.”

But Willa cannot face this truth from her daughter. It is not the truth she wants.

“…You’re offering me this Mad Max scenario of pirates taking everything they can grab, and I just can’t accept it. It’s to horrifying.”

“Seriously Mom? It’s here. One percent of the brotherhood has their hands on most of the bread.  They own the country, their god is the free market, and most people are so unhorrified they won’t even question the system. If it makes a profit, that’s the definition of good. If it grows, you have to stand back and let it. The free market has exactly the same morality as a cancer cell.”

Only Tig in her family can face this ugly truth. Like Thatcher earlier. In a court of law, of all places, he finds another truth that  the people of Vineland cannot face—that their lord and master, killed a man without justification. The jury does not want to face that truth. That truth is also too ugly for them. It is too uncomfortable.

At last Thatcher sees light and air coming into the court when a court reporter lifts the window. This was a “heaven sent vision.” Thatcher realizes he cannot say more. He has done his bit to deliver truth:

“He was finished with declaring himself to a public without ears to hear his language. Without shelter, we stand in daylight, she’d insisted once, and he had thought only of death. Simple man. He might sleep in a bed of cactus thorns or a tree under the stars, but he could choose the company he kept and it would not be this fearful, self-interested mob shut up in airless rooms.  They would huddle in their artifice of safety, their heaven would collapse. His would be the forthright march through the downfall.”

So both owners of the house fail to bring the truth to people who can hear. But—perhaps—not all is hopeless. There is some slim hope. Ilana Masad, commentator on National Public Radio reviewing the book may have got it right by saying, “Kingsolver doesn’t give us solutions, but she reminds us to take comfort in one another when we can, and that hope is necessary even when all seems lost.”

The Bread Basket of the World is not quite what you think

Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact

After decades of working with famers there is one thing I have learned: farmers are smart.  There is no denying that. On our way home from British Columbia this past summer, we naturally had to cross the Great Plains. This of course is my home. I’m a prairie guy. And the prairies now are the home of farming. The breadbasket of the world they like to say. And, of course, Canadian and American farmers take the credit for this and they certainly deserve some of the credit (and blame) for this. But this history of farming on the plains is not as simple as I was always thought. This is what David Hurst Thomas said in the book The Native Americans,

 

“Pick up any traditional textbook on “Western Civilization,” and it will tell you that agriculture originated independently in three places: wheat farming in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East, rice cultivation in Southeast Asia, and domestication of maize in highland Mexico. It would be remarkable, indeed, if farming had been invented independently at three different times, in three different places.

However, the textbooks have it wrong. Archaeologists have just discovered a fourth localized centre of plant domestication, entirely separate from the others. It is in northeastern America.  Although early explorers recorded extensive maize agriculture through the Eastern Woodlands, full-blown maize agriculture developed there only five centuries before the Europeans arrived.

The agricultural roots of native American society runs much deeper. We now understand that over the past four thousand years, the transition from foraging to farming along the rivers of the Eastern woodlands involved three key steps. First came the domestication of native North American seed plants about 2,000 B.C. Then, between 250 B.C. and A.D. 100, food production economies emerged based on these local crops. Finally, maize was introduced, and, between about A.D. 800 and 1,100, the role of maize changed from minor to major crop.

This still-unfolding story is yet another example of Native American ingenuity and enterprise.”

 

We have a lot to learn from Indigenous people of North America. Its time we started to appreciate that.

Gitxsan

Indigenous Issues, Indigenous People before Contact

In the year 2001 our son Patrick was involved in the Katimavik program. As a result he spent about 3 to 4  months in 3 different parts of Canada. One was Newfoundland, one was Quebec, and the last was British Columbia. The way it operated was that he was part of a group of young people who worked usually for a non-profit company of some sort living together in a house where they lived communally with minimal adult supervision, but strict rules, and then a couple of weeks or so with a local family. This was repeated in each of the 3 towns. Specifically, he stayed in St. John’s Newfoundland, a small town in Quebec not far from Montreal, and New Hazelton in northern British Columbia.

One day Pat phoned up Chris and I and said we should come up to see him and beautiful northern B.C. I had never thought about going to northern BC, but it did not take long for us to agree. Being travel sluts we were soon eager to go. This trip opened us up to experiences we had never had before.

 

One of the first places we saw was Kispiox where they had some fine totem poles.

I must admit that one    One of the things I had never considered or thought about before to any significant extent was indigenous people. It seems unbelievable now, but after 7 years of university, I had never really thought much about Canada’s indigenous people, until, in Hazelton, we visited Ksan an historical village and museum just outside of the town at the confluence of the Skeena and Bulkley rivers

 

‘Ksan Historical Village and Museum (‘Ksan) is located near the ancient village of Gitanmaax,  at the confluence of the Bulkley and Skeena Rivers in the community of Hazelton, British Columbia.

As a replicated ancient village, ‘Ksan illustrates many features of a Gitxsan village from the distant past. For example, like its predecessors, ‘Ksan’s houses form a single line with each building facing the river. From this position, the large decorated house fronts and totem poles of the village are visible from the water. In conjunction with other features, such as the smoke house and food cache, ‘Ksan illustrates characteristics typical of a past Gitxsan village.

Found within Gitxsan Territory, Ksan Historical Village stands where the village of Gitanmaax has existed for centuries. It is the desire of Ksan to preserve and truthfully portray the lifestyle of the people who have always lived here.

This is not a great photo but there is an Indigenous fisherman fishing it the traditional manner on the rock to the left. For centuries and possibly millennia, Gitxsan’s have maintained communities at important canyons and junctions on the Skeena River. This location was an important fishing site and transportation hub.

 

 

On the way we saw some lovely mountains. Pat had convinced us to come here by telling us it was as beautiful as Banff and Jasper without all the people. He was not lying.

 

We also drove from Hazelton to Alaska only about 3 hours away. Near Hyder in Alaska we saw a glacier from above it. I will never forget that day.

Many years later when I actually started to read a little about our Indigenous people in Canada, I was surprised, very surprised to read in the history book I was reading, that this First Nation was mentioned on the very first page of their book, A Concise History of Canada’s First Nations.  According to Olive Patricia Dickason and William Newbigging, “The west coast Gitksan people maintain that the Upper Skeena River Valley, in the northwest part of the land that came to be called the Americas, is their Garden of Eden.” From my experience of this area nearly 20 years ago I can’t say that they exaggerated.

Years later I also realized that this area we visited with our son was the location of some historic cases on Aboriginal rights and titles and a modern treaty that has been a landmark precedent for relations between the Crown and Indigenous people, that I want to comment about in this blog at a later date. First I want to set the background for first contact with Europeans.

It is easy to see why Indigenous people loved the land and maintained a strong connection to it. This glacier was right beside the highway. I have Pat to thank for opening my eyes. I am grateful.