What defines us?

What defines each of us?

This question surfaces from time to time and has been on my mind more presently since I found the book A Number of Things. What defines me? What defines me and allows me the freedom to continuously re-define myself, unburdened by expectations, authentically and without hypocrisy?

What I discovered most poignantly this past year is how I see myself is so intriguingly different than how others define and view me. This is of course something I had always known though not quite so painfully as these recent experiences have so glaringly reminded me. Not so long ago, I believed I needed to close this gap between the internal and the external. Then I realized that even if I shed my own masks, I am only one part of the interaction. When I re-order my energetic matrix, it is my own programming that is being deleted and my patterns, de-activated. Others continue to make their own choices.

To my condo security and cleaning crew, I’m the woman with the dogs – the elderly dogs, the big dogs, the scary dogs, the beautiful lovely dogs, depending on their own experience and perspective. To me, my dogs are my guardians, companions, friends, protectors, family and they are at once elderly, big, beautiful lovely and still can be trouble-makers. Identity to me is multifaceted though oftentimes we are held to one-dimensional versions by others.

And how do we take on a new identity? When we become divorced, are we forever marked by a “failed” marriage? Are we only valid if we are once again coupled and have reproduced? What about when we switch vocations or start following a calling that is so diametrically opposite to our previous job? When a parent loses a child, are they no longer a parent? And how do children become adults in the eyes of their parents?

Our identity is always in flux, isn’t it? If we allow it to be, when we do not wrap up in our identity concepts like acceptance, love, worth, etc. To what degree can we morph? Can we one day be an illustrator and the next month be an insurance agent and then a writer the next, dropping and picking up what we do? How do most people perceive us as we change from one thing to another? Many people see that as unstable and fickle and it can be. What if these experiments are part of a larger soul journey or are merely aspects of who we are in this lifetime? Are people able to separate the essence of who we are from the job titles we may or may not hold?

A Number of Things by Jane Urquhart is a collection of stories about 50 objects to describe and celebrate what Canada is and what it is to be Canadian. Each one is beautifully illustrated by Scott Mckowen. How did the author distill 150+ years of history, the diversity of experiences and peoples into only fifty artifacts? The author said how she chose them “can only be connected to serendipity.”

For every Canadian, the fifty artifacts that define their birth or adopted country will be different. I haven’t thought of what my fifty would be though I know they would not be the same. I grew up in a different part of the country, in a different time, without the long family history in Canada and even without the stories of ancestry as the author. I think it would indeed be an interesting journey to discover my own 50 objects that capture what my beloved Canada means to me.

The inclusion below of national, ethnicity, religion, or tribal identity is to reflect the diversity in Canada, a country of immigrants who came to lands already inhabited by First Nation peoples. The old school curriculum included only cursory lessons of the many many First Nations peoples of Canada and this book was certainly educational for me, giving me new reference points to start reading more deeply. To me, the bright future belongs to those who are able to both honour and celebrate our differences and traditions. The landscape of countries across the globe is changing and how we define ourselves as a nation can strengthen us or not.

Here is the list of the author’s 50 and a brief introduction of each. The highlighted words – hat, neon, tiger – are the chapter’s names. So simple and yet the stories behind each are rich stories from Canada’s own historical annals and the author’s history as a descendant of immigrants.

What would you choose? Behind the words woman, mother, writer, driver, etc that we may each use are also powerful stories that propel us through life. As Canadians we are all these and while our stories are different, the one unifying experience is we are all Canadians, an ever-evolving concept perhaps. We joke when asked about our identity that “we aren’t Americans” though of course we have many American friends. Our identity, I feel, is rooted in a love of the environment and for inclusion, even as we struggle to find balance, reconciliation, and a true expression of that. Into this tapestry, we the people have our own stories to add.

… The hunter-gatherer Beothuk peoples who once lived on what is now known as Newfoundland used to make box-and-skin body bag for burial and at this burial site only a mother’s “ochre-painted” legging “of beaver hide and decorated with bird claws and bone pendants” was found to clothe the child on her spirit world journey mostly likely because not enough of her people remained to continue the tradition, the skull of Marquis Louise-Joseph of Montcalm who perished from wounds suffered at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the hat of Major General Issac Brock who died in Queenston (a major part of why we are Canadian, not American today), votive ships made by sailors at the Nortre-Dame-de-Bon-Secourts Chapel in Montreal, Black Rock, “the Stone” to “remember the six thousand sons and daughters of Ireland who died in Montreal” having fled Ireland’s Potato Famine, the engine cowcatcher that our first lady (wife of our first prime minister) rode to get a better view of the Rocky Mountains (Yoho and Glacier national parks were established shortly after their return), sampler, a piece of cloth many a girl and many a woman would have drawn coloured threads through (with a story about one of Alice Munro’s great-great-grandmother’s. Alice Munro was the first Canadian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature), books (because “Canadians love their libraries and their small bookstores” and our own authors), the tractor and the story of a small farmer, the Glenora Ferry that joined different landscapes across the reach, the broken pieces of Staffordshire Dogs like the broken pieces of the life of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the author of one of the most beloved stores, Anne of Green Gables, the barn as a story and artifact of Canada’s agricultural landscape, rope – the fate of Louis Riel who championed the rights of Métis like himself, branded a traitor then but we know the truth, the crosscut saw that replaced the hand-held timber axe that fell great trees across our nation which while bringing prosperity to both sides of the Atlantic is an ecological disaster that is also depriving us of old-growth forests and species now extinct, the shoe that is a “metaphor for everything that became unfenced and unlaced in Emily Carr and through her art, we came to see the indigenous culture that predated us in the forests she so loved, the Arctic and the obsession with finding the Northwest Passage that proved to be the grave for many young men, the canoe that for the longest time took people to the most remote of places and how many experienced the Canadian wilderness, the bird feeder that many Canadians keep especially for the over-winter birds because “Canadians believe in the miracle of birds, and we feed them in the winter to keep the miracle alive”, memorial, built across the country to remember those who perished in war, including the one at Stratford Ontario with “two bronze figures on the plinth combine strength with sorrow” rather than celebrate the glory of war, the Cherry Tree and the story of one of our most appalling chapters in history, the forced removal of Canadians of Japanese descent who were declared enemy aliens as a category, the prospector tent that belonged to the author’s family friend, the tent being the only Canadian home for this man who, like so many, left Ireland for a better life, Saskatchewan’s Danceland, made of Douglas fir with a vaulted ceiling and floating maple dance floor, that was filled with “music of the band demanded physical action”, skates for enjoying ponds by daylight or moonlight, playing hockey, figure skating, and the story of the Old Order Mennonite girls, “preferring the privacy of semi-darkness, the Innu Tea Doll that carried tea harvested from a tundra rhododendron species and were carried by the children of the nomadic tribal Innu of northern Quebec and eastern Labrador, Nero, Regimental Horse Number 295 of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, preserved in 1972, neon sign of Five Roses Flour and “Lake of the Woods”, the Torah and the author’s search for her Jewish ancestry and the first synagogue in Belleville, Ontario, the whale bucket, a ceremonial bucket decorated with whalebone talismans and charms, that held fresh water to offer to a newly killed whale, greatly respected by the Inuit, Nobel Peace Prize (1957), the medal our 14th prime minister was awarded for his role in diffusing the Suez crisis as secretary of state for external affairs, the tiger-skin rug from the British Empire that hangs in the Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia, the Snowman of Beardmore, Ontario, also home to an infamous hoax of a Viking relic and the birthplace of Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau,

Ojibwe Cosmology (creative commons from Wiki)

microphone and the story of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the robe designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch for the play Richard III in which Alec Guinness played for the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, the glasses for farsighted of the visonary Tommy Douglas, son of a Scottish ironmonger and immigrant to the prairies, head of the NDP party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation premier of Saskatchewan, and the “Father of Medicare” who established the first provincial universal healthcare system which eventually led to a nation-wide universal healthcare system, the initial 1988 denial of entry by Baltej Singh Dillion into RCMP because of his turban, and now the appointment of Harjit Singh Sajjan, who served as lieutenant-colonel with the Canadian Armed Forces, as the minister of national defence in the Trudeau liberal government, the story of William McMurray, Alexander Mackenzie, the fur trade, the machine of the tar sands enterprise, and our natural world, the bush plane that supplied prospectors, explorer, and others who settled the North, that delivered news, that doused forest fires as water bombers, the beautiful prayer mat that can be placed in any clean space, whether simple or ornate, a reminder of the common need for community and sanctity, the Cree basket woven at Wanuskewin, an ancient site north of Saskatoon where different First Nations tribes gathered and a 600-acre heritage site opened in 1992; a basket from her visit to this site with her friend Cree poet Louise Halfe or Sky Dancer, the poet laureate of Saskatchewan, a basket has moved home to home with the author, who is always reminded of the “wise, kind face of the grandmother who made it”, the first lighthouse built (1734) and the story of lighthouses as sentinels and their keeper, “often the only human heart beating in a vast, empty terrain fronted by ferocious and seemingly endless waters”, the symbolic and ceremonial mace that must be present for Parliament to be in session and the story of the 1916 fire that reduced it to “a conglomerate no larger than a tennis ball”, codfish, the livelihood of Newfoundland and Labrador, the near extinction of cod from foreign multinational fishing corporations, and the resulting moratorium set in 1992 on fishing that resulted in the largest layoff in Canadian history, the story of the Guadagnini violin made in 1782 and her journey to Canada with Jewish prodigy Jacques Israelievitch who immigrated here to become the concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in the late 1980s and for whom the Guadagnini violin and the Pecatte bow would be played by his favourite student, Muslim Canadian Amir Safavi as he was laid to rest; Mountain Spirit masks of the Nuu-chah-nulth (“all along the mountains and the seas”) peoples whose traditional territory is the western coast of Vancouver Island, Mazinaw Rock, whose “undeniable power and mystical spirit” draws to this place “the ancient Ojibwa with their ochre paintings of profound systems of belief, the large-hearted American poet (“Old Walt“) who loved all humanity, my great-uncles, shaping the world with their labour, and the artists of the new country”, Africville Church of the African Nova Scotian community established in the 1840s that was replaced in the 1960s, a replica that too was lost when Africville was deemed a slum, is a reminder that “still strong, energy can rise from the ashes of that which is mistreated, undervalued, and ultimately erased”, the oyster and the Acadians, 17th century French refugees who settled what is now our Maritime Provinces, who were banished by the British, and who harvested these oysters, which “call forth intriguingly complicated emotions” and “telegraph a beautiful forlornness because of its associations with banishment and exile”, the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Temple of the Hindu community, which has been part of Canada for about 100 years, from a small group mostly in BC to half a million today, the author’s “simple but beautiful” table hewn from pine trees as the council table for the Cramahe Township and the Constitution Table on which Queen Elizabeth II signed the Royal Proclamation of the Constitution Act in 1982, giving Canada right to amend our own constitution and a reconstructed Haisla partially burnt mask housed in the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria which is placed beside the statement by a Kitamaat woman who said that her grandmother’s uncle burned everything when Christianity came because “he had heard that the Lord will not receive you if you still look to your treasures.”

As you can see, the stories of the author’s own and her family’s past are very much part of her stories of Canada. Where we come is a powerful force. This book is as much about Canada as it is about the author and that is the beauty. Our stories are threads of a larger story, whether it is the tapestry that forms a community or a nation. How I see Canada is different and in reading the author’s stories, my understanding and appreciation of this country can only be enlivened, deepened, illuminated, and richer.