Places By the River
Places By the River
In the late 1990s, I had the opportunity to visit Canada to study indigenous health services. I was working at the time for Auckland University, and for one of the local Māori health care providers. As expected, I found many parallels between Canada and New Zealand, with a number of treaties having been signed there in the 1800s, which like ours have been (in the words of Queen Elizabeth II that I heard at Waitangi in 1990) “imperfectly observed.” For me, with my experience of having worked in the Anglo-French colony of Vanuatu, there was the added interest of a history of dual colonisation by Britain and France. One lasting impression, however, which surprised me when I thought about it, was of the influence of a Canadian singer on popular music and culture.
I travelled in our summer; their winter. It was going to be cold. I needed to prepare. A Canadian friend from my social ice-hockey team at the time advised me to take all the warm clothes I had; and wear them all at once.
My trip started in Vancouver. I met with Marshal, an academic at the University of British Columbia. He told me about the Coast Salish people, the indigenous groups who formerly occupied the land that has become the modern city. The Salish have been in the area for more than 8,000 years. They lived by hunting, including salmon and shellfish, and by trading widely with surrounding groups. Traditional hunting and fishing remain important activities. The Salish people now own fishing companies, land development businesses, eco-tourism ventures, and participate in the wider metropolitan community. They still do traditional crafts such as weaving. Food and clothing derived from natural ingredients may for them assume a cultural significance. However, to the casual visitor, they are largely invisible.
I was interested, after this discussion at the university, to see the totem poles in Stanley Park, the 1000-acre wooded area on the edge of the city. Another central feature of the park is Beaver Lake; all walks on the map lead towards it. I was excited at the thought of being able to see a beaver lake. The only other places I had seen beavers were on T-shirts, and on the five-cent coins. Unfortunately, it turned out there were no beavers—a sign said they "visit occasionally"—and very little lake. The whole thing is being taken over by introduced waterlilies and is expected to dry up within fifty years. There was a compensatory turtle and a few colourful ducks. I discovered an aquarium in the middle of the park. I wondered if they would have any beavers I could look at. No. None. Salmon? No. The man at the ticket office mentioned hopefully that there was an interesting display of fish from the Amazon. I decided it wasn't worth the $38 admission charge.
I went into the Chief's Book Shop in Gastown where I bought some art prints, and a book called Aboriginal Health in Canada. There are indeed many parallels with New Zealand. Since the first contact with Europeans in the 16th Century, indigenous peoples have been misunderstood, marginalised, neglected, or even massacred. Large populations were wiped out by introduced infectious diseases. Canada has a number of linguistically and culturally diverse groups, which the early potential colonists characterised as "nations", and several treaties were signed in different areas, mainly at the instigation of the British, and mainly with the intent of gaining control of land and resources. It was all depressingly familiar.
In the evening, I enjoyed another compulsory cultural experience: NHL ice-hockey; watching the Vancouver Canucks play the Edmonton Oilers at what was then called GM Place. I paid around a hundred Canadian dollars for a seat near centre ice. It was well worth it: it was a close game, two-all at the end of the second of three periods. Beside me were a young Canadian couple who would have paid a similar price. The woman slept through what I thought was a sustained passage of exciting play. Then a fight broke out between the two teams. The man beside me nudged his partner. "Wake up," he said. "Something's happening now."
Ice-hockey is supposed to be the fastest non-motorised sport in the world. I could believe that from what I was watching. Luckily for the Cannucks, they had a tall player on the wing who seemed to be able to move even faster than all the others. Perhaps they had been holding him back, which is possible, the way the coaches rotate the players, until the Oilers were tired. In the third period, he skated round the helpless Edmonton defenders, setting up scoring opportunities for his forwards. The Cannucks won. Probably just as well: apparently the Vancouver fans can be a bit violent if their team loses at home.
The next day, I took the train, part of the marvellously preserved provincial railway network, up the coast, past Whistler, then inland to Lillooet. I stayed with another Trevor, an ecologist, bravely making honey and apple juice in a bear-infested part of Canada and acting as a consultant for land and forestry companies wanting to negotiate with indigenous groups. He took me to what he said was his favourite place. We walked down a path through the pine forest to where he had carved out a seat in a clearing above the Fraser river. He liked to sit there and meditate, lose himself in his thoughts, and contemplate nature. It was a magical and peaceful spot.
In the evening, I met Henry and Lisa, a linguist couple studying the St'at'imc language. We shared a salmon that had been gifted to them by one of their indigenous friends. The next day, I was hosted on the Fountain Indian reserve by Carol, a public health nurse. She took me to their health clinics and explained how they worked. She also told me about her own upbringing, which had been difficult. Her parents, as native Canadians, had both been compulsorily removed from their families and brought up in boarding schools. In her experience, they “knew nothing about parenting”.
Next, I flew to Montréal. Once we cleared the Rockies, it was a long and mainly featureless flight over the prairies. The Canadians are determinedly bilingual. On all flights, there are long announcements in both English and French, but not in any of the dozens of Native Canadian languages. Some off-duty Air Canada staff sitting in front of me summed up the difficulty in a mock announcement of their own:
"We're sorry," they said, "the in-flight entertainment has been cancelled due to the need to tell you everything in every language."
In Montréal, although many people speak English, most written information, including road signage, is in French. This suited me. I can read French, though I struggled to make any sense of the mangled vowels in the Canadian version of the spoken language. Others might not be so lucky, though there does seem to be some health-and-safety requirement that emergency signs have to be in both languages. In the hotel, there was a sign next to the lift in large letters advising "Utiliser les escaliers en cas d'incendie," then in a much smaller font "In case of fire use the stairs." At the bottom of the stairs another sign, on the inside of the door, reads "Tirez" but not the English translation, which is "Pull." I imagined an English person in a panic, after failing to read the fine print, might be consumed by fire in the stairwell while hopelessly pushing on the heavy door in a futile attempt to get out.
I tried my luck at a café. The two customers before me ordered in French. "Bonjour," I said bravely. I liked the look of the almond croissants. They were called "croissants aux amandes." I asked for one of those. I wanted it warmed up. The woman serving asked me a question. I said "Oui." She warmed it up. Next, I wanted a hot chocolate: it was a cold day. I said some French words including the expression "un chocolat chaud." The woman repeated this last bit, pronouncing it correctly, in a Québecois sense. She held up two cups of different sizes and asked me another question including the word "moyen." Probably medium, I thought. I asked for "moyen." The woman selected the smaller one; it didn't matter. The woman asked me another question. This time I had no idea what she was talking about. "Would English be easier for you?" she asked. "Yes," I replied gratefully. "What is your name?" she asked. "Trevor," I answered. She wrote it down. A man made me my hot chocolate and handed it to me across the counter. "Thank you," I said. "You're welcome," he said. "Have a nice day." Then he and the woman I had been dealing with earlier talked away to each other fluently in perfectly accented English.
Montréal, along with Québec, the slightly older city down the river, is a bustling North American metropolis. Since the 18th century, it has been a centre of the struggle for influence between the indigenous peoples and the colonising armies and navies of Britain and France. Captain James Cook made his mark here in 1759 charting the navigable parts of the St Lawrence river to prepare for James Wolfe's successful attack on Québec City. There is lots of history to know about. Montréal is also the hometown—though I think I was only vaguely aware of this at the time—of the singer Leonard Cohen. He was a major influence on contemporary western culture when I was growing up. The haunting strains of his first major hit, “Suzanne”, have been with me since 1967. But I will say more about that song later.
Cohen was a novelist and poet, who came late to the music scene of the 1960s, with his songs about religion, politics, and sex. A slightly older man, he took full advantage of the opportunities offered by the prevailing emphasis on free love—freely given, and freely taken. His fluid approach to commitment and relationships was laid out in his songs. In “Hey That’s No Way to Say Goodbye”he sings about a love changing like the shoreline and the sea. In “So Long Marianne” he likens the attentions of his long-time girlfriend to a spider web, fastening his ankles. In “Sisters of Mercy”, he reassures the listener he won’t be jealous if he hears any rumours about what the sisters might get up to, and would not have been jealous even if it turned out the sisters had been among his lovers.
A memorable and extreme example is the song “Chelsea Hotel”, later revealed at a live performance to be about a 1968 liaison between Cohen and the singer Janis Joplin. Cohen sings of Joplin performing oral sex on him after meeting in the elevator. The song has a dismissive conclusion. Cohen implies Joplin was nothing special, compared with his other lovers, and reveals he doesn’t often think of her. Cohen was 33 years old at the time, Joplin 25. I turned 14 in the year of their meeting, still at school, was 18 when an early version of the song first came out. It was indeed heady stuff.
On my first morning in Montréal, I met with Ann, a professor of family medicine at McGill University, who has a special interest in indigenous health. She sent me to the Jewish hospital to meet with her colleague Laurence, a professor of transcultural psychiatry, and a friend of some of the psychiatrists I had worked with in New Zealand. Later, Ann took me with her to a clinic she visits in Kahnawake, an island on the south side of the St Lawrence river.
Kahnawake is a Mohawk Indian territory. The people there built the railway bridge across the St Lawrence in 1886 and have gone on to participate in several other projects requiring workers with specialist skills in high-altitude steel girder construction, including the Empire State Building and World Trade Centre in New York. There is a famous photo of some of them sitting on a high girder having lunch. This is clearly dangerous work. The settlement is littered with crosses, made from the same steel girders, each of which marks where one of Kahnawake's residents has been buried after being killed on the job.
Ann took me to the hospital, for a lunch-time seminar where health care providers were sharing ideas about involvement of indigenous communities in providing health services. Then, while she did her clinic, Ann left me with Charlie, a traditional healer specialising in herbs and massage, and his daughter Mary. We shared a delicious bowl of home-made vegetable soup and fresh bread. Then Mary took me around the traditional wooden lodges where the people participate in sweet-grass ceremonies, slowly burning herbs to cleanse the mind. The best-known herb is tobacco—one of North America's more unfortunate exports to the rest of the world—but there are others.
The Canadians have had some successes in delivering health care to their indigenous peoples. Kahnawake stands out as one example. As in New Zealand, the key to good outcomes seems to be community ownership of local health services and empowering indigenous people, over a long period of time, to make decisions about their own care. I felt I was among friends.
I found other reminders of home. McGill University has a Rutherford Park, a leafy spot named after the famous New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford, who first “split the atom,” and worked at McGill from 1898 to 1907. There is a sign commemorating him. I took a photo of it. There were some students in the park practising American football.
In the evening, I was left to my own devices. It was not too cold, so I walked down to the old port by the river, looking for somewhere to eat. France, like Britain, has benefited from the food of its former colonies. "New France", as Québec was originally called, is no exception. A visitor can find any number of Vietnamese, Moroccan and Lebanese restaurants. The Canadians have added mainly game-based alternatives such as salmon, elk, and bison. Québec has its own regional dish, an unlikely mix of fried potato, gravy, and curds of cheese, called poutine. I didn't try it. I opted instead for a meal in one of the many French restaurants. I spotted New Zealand lamb on the menu, but the waiter advised me, "If you are from New Zealand, sir, I would suggest you have something else."
I walked into the Notre Dame de Bon Secours church and admired the ornate interior. On the roof there is a famous statue of the Virgin Mary, facing the river, blessing the passing ships, called "Our Lady of the Harbour." Mostly I just walked and took in my surroundings. Nearby, although I didn't know it at the time, was the house where Leonard Cohen lived, the cafes and restaurants where he liked to hang out, and the cemetery containing his parents' graves, where Cohen himself is now buried.
The world has experienced something of a resurgence of interest in Leonard Cohen and his life and work, starting with the inclusion of a cover of his 1984 song Hallelujah in the 2001 film Shrek, his tour to countries including New Zealand in 2013, and his death at his home in Montréal in 2016. Also, these days, with the advent of the internet, it is possible to re-experience his music on-line, as I have done repeatedly, and to look back and closely examine the more meaningful parts of his life. There are many excellent videos, including one of a 2006 interview with him in his home in Montréal reflecting on his life and his music. Cohen, an old man at the time, comes across as vitally interested in life and relationships. The interviewer asks him directly if he is in any way apologetic for his previous exploitative behaviour and tell-all lyrics. In reply, he quotes the title of a song by Edith Piaf: "Je ne regrette rien."
I also discovered on the internet a 2011 acceptance speech of an award to Cohen from the Prince of Asturia in Spain. Cohen speaks eloquently of his favourite guitar, made from Spanish cedar, and of the links back to the soil from which it grew. He also tells of the mysterious young Spanish backpacker who he says taught him to play flamenco guitar in the last few days of a tragically short life. He talks about using poetry to "express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all." People compare it with Bob Dylan's long-delayed Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and ask why Dylan, not Cohen, was awarded the prize for literature.
Available on-line, is a clip from 1967 of a live performance of “Suzanne” the rights to which Cohen says were "stolen from him" by an unscrupulous promoter, something he claims he is "happy about" because "it would be wrong to write this song and get rich from it too." There are numerous internet sites that demystify the lyrics of the song. “Suzanne” tells a simple story of Cohen visiting his friend Suzanne Verdal at her place near the St Lawrence River. He describes what does appear from all accounts, to have been a platonic friendship.
The watery setting, and what seems for Cohen to be the unusual idea of non-sexual love, is extended to Jesus walking on the water and hanging alone on the cross. There are other allusions from Cohen, who was Jewish, to Christian imagery. Then Cohen links this religious diversion back to his comments about his friendship with Suzanne, as a meeting of body and mind. He sings of the sun pouring down on Our Lady of the Harbour. Old Montréal is portrayed as a strange and intriguing place of mystery.
There was no sun pouring down on anything the day I visited. It doesn’t matter. The memory has stuck with me. Driving to work, many year later, I turn the song up on the car stereo, listen carefully to the words and the music, and Leonard Cohen’s bleak voice transports me back to that cold evening at the place near the river, and the many things I learned on my trip to Canada.