I’m in the waiting area of the Dutch Harbor/Unalaska airport in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. I’ve been here for less than 24 hours accompanying some colleagues on some consultations with Alaskan fishing communities. This place is all about fish, and that is all: pollack, halibut, salmon, cod and of course the world famous crab fleet which plies its trade in the Bering Sea on the World’s Deadliest Catch. The motto on the wall here at the airport is “The highest degree of opportunity” and that is indeed what this town is all about. Opportunity abounds to make money for sure but also in many other less savoury ways. This town has been cobbled together from old Russian church missions, native communities, from army and navy bases, from decades of fishing the richest waters on the planet. Everything here is opportunity, roughshod and utilitarian, sometimes brutal and vicious, but set in a landscape that is stunning.
Everything here is lifted and dropped. The mountains have been lifted from the sea and the fish and crabs are lifted from there too and dropped on deck, offloaded at the plants. People are lifted and dropped too – rocketing to wealth and falling to ill health and misfortune. Everything on these islands has been lifted onto a boat or a plane and dropped off here: years of industrial materials, commercial material, food, building supplies. The beaches in some areas are littered with disused and discarded equipment, nets, machinery and gear.
The land is incredible. Not a tree stands on these islands, so they are covered in thickets of cover bushes and everything is in flower now in the late summer. The glaciers and snowpacks in the mountains are at their dirtiest, but the summer here is short, if not non-existent. The water is never more than 10 or 12 degrees Centigrade and fog, rain and wind besets the place at any time. Flying in here is an adventure, with the runway carved out of a cliff face and running a mere 3900 feet to the apron. You are never sure if you will get in or out or, as happened to me, you will arrive but your bag will not. In this landscape, on this ocean you can only be humble. There is no illusion of control. You roll with flow and get where you’re going whenever you get there.
It’s a shame that I’m only here for a short time. I would love to explore these mountains more, to see the seabirds and the humpback whales that are breaching gleefully just around the corner from the harbour. As it was I was able to watch pink salmon run in the Iluliuk River today swimming in a channel between a processing plant and a senior’s centre, and I managed to get to beach by the airport and stand up a rock or two. But it’s ahrd to believe that I would ever be back here, so I leave with a little regret that I couldn’t stay longer. A warm bed awaits in Anchorage, and from there a medium haul home tomorrow.
My summer is drawing to a close, although the weather is still lovely and I’m only easing back into work. Coming off ten days in Ontario where I was at my sister’s wedding, enjoying some extended time with an extended family that lives all over the world. We only come together for weddings and funerals and this is the far better reason of the two.
The wedding was in Thornbury Ontario, where my parents live, in the heart of Ontario’s apple growing country. From there we went down to Peterborough where my new brother in law Steve Weir is from. It was delightful cruising around a town I lived in for five glorious years, from the age of 18 to 23. It was in Peterborough that I met my wife Caitlin, and it was really fun to take our kids to the exact spot where we first met one another, in the exhibit space of the Peterborough Art Gallery.
Last night we stayed in Toronto and visited a little more with my brother’s family. We went downtown to Yonge and Dundas Square to see a movie. I was shocked by the changes there. I used to hang around Yonge and Dundas back in my high school days and it looks more like what my brother calls “a poor man’s Times Square” now. With the buckets of warm rain coming down it reminded me starkly of Bladerunner. The city I grew up in is gone.
Heading west this morning first to Vancouver and then on to Anchorage. I’ll be there for a couple of days and then a couple out in the Aleutians in Unalaska aka Dutch Harbor. I’ve never been out there before, on a thin island between the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea. It’s my first of two far north trips this month, with another going to Kuujjuaq in Nunavik, northern Quebec later in September.
Back to the arts of travelling, hosting, reflecting, and blogging.
On the stepe of the Chugach Mountains north of Anchorage.
I’m still trying to figure out Alaska. When i was here in 2002 I was up in Fairbanks, working largely with non-Native people doing peacemaking work in the school system. Fairbanks struck me as an interesting place, one in which you defintely had to have a deep intention to live in. I enjoyed the people and the land – which is incredible – and I liked the feel of the town, which in all of its glory and ugliness, felt like northern towns everywhere.
Anchorage is a different beast. There is very little beauty in it. It’s a pretty utilitarian place, especially once you leave the small core of downtown, which is actually full of little treasures like restaurants Orso and Ginger. Other than some ice sculptures and snow sculptures in a cool town square, it is mostly a city designed to huddle against the elements and get you from one place to another on four or more wheels. What pieces of interesteing difference there are – the Namaste Shangri-la curry house for example, or Ray’s Vietnamese – lie hidden away in cold suburban plazas surrounded by divided roads, equipment dealerships and super stores. There is community here for sure, and its a darn interesting one, but the physical look of the city leaves much to be desired.
But the land around here, the Chugak Mountains rising up behind us and the moose languidly traipsing across the frozen golf course in front of us, the majestic mud flats of Cook Inlet…all of that is very magical, very wild, very much a landscape that does not tolerate mindless interaction. It is important not to make mistakes here or do things that are out of alignment with what the land wants.
That is an art of course, and that is what we are learning here nrunning an Art of Hosting with 25 emerging Native leaers from all over the state, from the Arctic north slope, to the remote west coast on the Bering Strait, to the storm battered Aluetian Islands in the south, the rainsforests and glaciers of the south east panhandle and the little towns and villages on the braided rivers and folded mountains of the interior. The multiplicity of landscape here is reflected in the people, in the cultures that are in this room, in the questions that are among us and the gifts we are uncovering.
And I’m learning something about the state of Native life in Alaska too. Since 1971 when the Alaska Native Claims Settlement was reached, people have lived not so much as citizens of a community or members of a nation of Tribe, but as shareholders of a corporation. And as shareholders, the wealth of the land is reflected in the economic activity that is generated on that land. This has resulted in a number of swirling dynamics including accelerated prosperity of some Native communities while at the same time, degradation of the land and subsistence lifestyles are changing, and traditional cultural values meet wealth and the easy money of corporate dividends, with the dividends winning out. One of our participants is active in the middle of a massive project between local communities and the proponent of a gold/copper.molybdenum mine called the Pebble Prospect that would combine an open pit and a shaft system in the lake country above Bristol Bay, which is home to one of the most prolific and diverse wild salmon runs left on the planet. People are largely lined up against the proposal which stands to affect the salmon and the water and land to the worse, and already jewlers from the UK, the USA and Europe are pledging not to use gold from that mine, but it is not so easy to be black and white when you are a local person whose communities could benefit for a long time from the wealth created from a mine like that. Being shareholders of corporations brings people into a very different relationship with their land. Better vs. worse, good vs. bad, becomes a slippery polarity. Even when it seems obvious what to do.
I have long been suspicious of the benefits of easy and steady money schemes in Native communities like casinos and, here in Alaska, the corporate structure. There is no denying that they provide money and resources to people who would otherwise be victims and marginal to the massive development taking place around them, but at what price? When your citizenship becomes tied to a dividend paying share, what is the incentive to work for democratic participation? In Alaska the power lies with structures that pay the people. Even the state government does it, with benefits paid to Alaska citizens from the royalties from oil and gas and mineral development. How does a government compete with a corporation when both take on the characteristics of each other? What does it mean to be a citizen? Who guards the culture? Who guards the past and the connection to the land? Does it even matter anymore? To the young emerging leaders I am working with, and to their families and children, it matters a lot.
Big questions alive in this big country. Taking my cue from Africa, where truth is not scarificed at the alter of a happy ending, I notice that finding the truth in all of this is that perhaps what Native people are trying to here is find the best bad ending to deal with, and as the long term evolves, sustain what is needed so that when it all goes away, there is still abundance left.
And then just like that, you hop a plane from Johannesburg, stop after 8 hours in Dakar for refuelling. Take another 9 hours to arrive in New York, take a cab into the city with a great driver who hails from Guinea and is going back there to work on the democratic elections this spring, and you get dropped in front of a small boutique hotel on Madison Avenue. The air is cold and crisp and the city seems to be in a good mood.
The woman at the check in counter at The MAve Hotel directs me to Penelope, a great little breakfast place at E 30th and Lexington Ave, where I have just downed a great tasting egg and pesto sandwich on a croissant, surrounded by people talking about real estate deals, high blodd pressure medication and book promotion tours.
It’s a huge difference in some ways and just another city in other ways. I am reminded how much I love being in New York City, and how much I love eastern North American cities in general in the winter – New York, Boston, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa. All places I have some lingering presence in, some impression left on me from the dark and blustery days of winter, the days when, as a young man, I crept away to late night coffee shops to read and write poetry, or out to hear jazz and blues muted behind closed doors and windows dripping with condensation.
Just as languishing over the weekend in the leafy northern suburbs of Johannesburg brought me to my childhood growing up in Toronto – and to my partner’s childhood in South Africa – being here in new York this morning evokes a kind of nostalgia and a kind of energy for exploration. I feel like a young man again, half my age, a free day in New York, bracing air and bright eyed people. Somehow cleansed from my trip. Clear eyed.
It’s Groundhog Day in the United States, a strange holiday. The day in which one solitary animal in Pennsylvania awakes from his winter hibernation, takes a look out of his burrow and gauges what he sees. If he sees his shadow, it’s six more weeks of winter.
Somehow this captures what it is like to have arrived here in the United States from Africa. Today is a good day to wake up and see our shadows. Can we see the connection between the the crime and poverty and disparity of wealth and the apartheid-by-another-name of South Africa and daily life on the streets of midtown Manhattan? A cab driver dreams of returning to Africa to work for a democratic solution to the turmoil in Guinea, a country that hasn’t known the ethnic conflicts and civil wars of its neighbours. he worries that unless people get to work, that might change and Guinea could descend into bloodshed because the bigger powers in the world, some of them in the office buildings above us, may decide to act ruthlessly for the oil and resources that the country is endowed with.
North America and Europe has a nearly trillion dollar arms industry, much of which, in the form of small arms, ends up in Africa. the hands of despotic leaders, paramilitary death squads, gang leaders and petty criminals are filled with this deadly engineering that generates huge amounts of wealth for the North. The oil and precious metals that power our economies are extracted from the coastal platforms of Senegal, the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the diamond mines of Kimberly. Whatever we want in North America we can have. Cross some palms with dollars and ammunition and turn away from the shadow. A bright day dawns.
Our shadows are all around us, and to see them this clearly means two things. First, it means more winter – that the hard times are not yet done that weeks complicated and mindful living still lie between now and the promise and ease of spring. Second, it means that the sun is shining, something is warming my back, throwing my silhouette on the ground. And that the winter continues.
What a complicated world! What an untidy conclusion! What a way to try and capture the truth of this strange trip I’ve been on!
On the way into Manhattan today my cab driver, Bubu, asked me what my impression of Africa was. I admitted that it was limited – I had only spent a week there, most of it in a middle class suburb or on a safari ranch and all of it in the company of middle class people. But I said that the overwhelming impression was that Africa differed from North America in a key way: in Africa, the truth is valued above everything else. Here in North America we are quick to sacrifice truth at the alter of a happy ending but African stories would never do that. To do so is the ultimate betrayal of promise. To tell the story of South Africa as a successful miracle of transition to democracy would be to betray the promise of what the struggle was all about. It was about truth. Clear, shiny, complicated, messy, dark truth.
Bubu, my driver, smiled widely. “Exactly,” he said.
Been here nearly a week now and I’m starting to get a very limited sense of this incredible place. I have a few random thoughts and notes, offered up as they come to mind.
***
I visited The Apartheid Museum today. The museum sits next to a small amusement park with roller coasters and helicopter rides. The screams from the roller coaster and the thwapping of the helicopters could be heard at the museum and had the unnerving effect of recreating the soundscape from the late 1980s when the state of emergency was in effect here and helicopters and screams were a part of daily life in many parts of Johannesburg and the surrounding townships.
The museum really traces the history of apartheid from 1948 until the Constitution was completed in 1996, with a post script about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and modern day South Africa. I was struck by the section on the 1940s and how there was one huge wall full of all of the laws that went into setting the legal framework for apartheid. Many of them are echoed in Canada’s Indian Act of the time, including laws about everything from owning land, to pass laws to drinking liquour and entering into contracts.
The museum pulls no punches. There are hours of video presentations with brutal violence perpetrated against both blacks and whites, with scenes of police brutality, torture, right-wing white terrorism, necklacing and murder. One room, devoted to the legacy of execution of political prisoners contains dozens of nooses hanging from the ceiling, one for each person who was killed by the state. There is a whol gallery focused on the violence of the early 1990s that almost took South Africa to the point of no return. If you had any illusions that the legacy of apartheid can just be wished away, they are dispelled in this place. It makes the subsequent work of constitution, nation building and reconcilliation seem miraculous.
I spent a great deal of the morning in tears, and when I emerged from the museum after three hours of intense learning, I sat quietly in the garden and sobbed. When I was a young man in the 1980s I was active in anti-apartheid support groups in Canada, calling for sanctions and insisting that my Church, the United Church of Canada divest itself from the country. Today I was reminded of the conviction I felt back then and it came back in waves of anger, grief and astonishment. What a place.
***
The Apartheid Museum is interesting in another way too. It doesn’t have a typical story arc: peace – crises – resolution. There is no happy ending here, just the ongoing struggle for balance, justice and peace. And no one is under any illusions in this country that that struggle has ended. Over the past week I have noticed that South Africans do not tell stories with happy endings. Instead they tell stries with a much more real structure, stories that live in the cyclical nature of time, of events repeating themselves, of small choices taken with large implications at every turn. I have been inquiring a little about this as a particular African form of storytelling. In North America we like the Hollywood ending. Here, they smell bullshit a mile away.
***
The other day my friends Busi Dlamini and Vanessa Sayers and I were having dinner which included ostrich neck stew by the pool where the zebras were drinking and we were talking about unusual foods. I was sharing some of the North American standbys like oolichan grease and fermented seal meat and they were returning the favour with fried grubs and goat hoofs, they told me about a special dish that is made from the head and feet of a chicken. The dish is called “walkie-talkie.”
***
There is a brilliant film that I saw on the way here called Jerusalema about a gangster/community organizer in Hillbrow, the roughest part of Johannesburg. At one point as he is flirting with a life of crime he gest out only to run into his former boss at a gas station. The boss says “crime is the fastest growing industry in the new South Africa” to which our hero replies that actually private security is.
There is no doubt that this is a dangerous city, although I have been staying in affluent suburbs and have perhaps a false sense of security about the place. On these suburbs, the sidewalks are lined with walls which in turn are topped with either razor wire, spikes, barbed wire or, increasingly, high voltage electrical fencing. The walls have doors in them that lead to courtyards and gardens, but the streetscape looks like a corridor, covered over with trees. Occasionally instead of walls you see “palisades” – tall fences topped with three or seven spikes and sometimes with razor wire on top. Most streets have a roaming security guard whose job it is to immediately report suspicious behaviour which is met with “armed response.” The largest security firms are ADT and the curiously named “NYPD.” In the public parking lot across from the “Wollies” where we have been buying food, there are three or four car guards patrolling the lot. The take note as you park and presumably also call for armed responses if someone else leaves in your car. All of these security folks are really nice. They chat and say “howsit” as you pass by and they are friendly. But these guys are on the low rungs. The armed security guys around are tough looking and aloof.
***
Everything is privatized here, not just the police. The public transportation system is terrible, largely due to the fact that there is a huge fleet of “minicabs” private vans that run on largely predetermined routes. The minicab lobby is so strong that any attempts to build new public infrastructure are met with threats and actual strikes from the minicab operators and the whole city comes to a halt. Minicab trf wars break out frequently, wth shooting and murder and maiming a part of business, rendering the services effective on the one hand but insanely dangerous on the other.