Friday 30 June 2017

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians. The Anthropologist Who Sold Out The First Nations; Chapter 37, Part Two. by Dave Jaffe

  The Anthropologist Who Sold Out the First Nations. By Dave Jaffe. Part Two.


        Stanley Whitehead was a political conservative. He had little time  for the movements that had sprung to life in the late 1960's. These movements included gay liberation, feminism, First Nations groups, environmentalism and anti-war activism. Whitehead usually voted for the federal Progressive Conservatives and the Social Credit Party in provincial elections.
     Yet the First Nations groups were now on the march in the 1980's. They also now had their own anthropologists and their tribes started to lay claim to large parts of British Columbia. They also insisted that oral testimony and history counted as evidence in court cases. This was a most important issue since most aboriginal groups didn't have a written language before some white or Caucasian colonizers showed up.
    In the 1980's, important court cases involving First Nations took place. In one case, Gitskan and Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs in northwestern B.C. laid claim to 55,000 square kilometres of land. "This is our land," they said in effect. "And it must be returned to us." Whitehead got a doctorate in anthropology while this case came to court. It had taken him some time, lots of hard work and some money to get it. So by the end of the 1980's he was now an anthropologist and an accredited expert on First Nations issues.
     Whitehead got his Ph.D. or doctorate by working with two aboriginal groups and exploring their history and culture. Without their help, he wouldn't have got his Ph.D. Then along came B.C. Chief justice Allan McEachern who was ruling on another important aboriginal land claims issue.  McEachern denied a First Nations group the right to the land they were claiming. He based some of his decision on evidence that came  from anthropologists. One of those anthropologists happened to be Stanley Whitehead.
     "This is betrayal with a capital 'B'", said someone who met Whitehead in the 1980's. "Natives helped him get his Ph.D and yet he  sided with the B.C. and Canadian governments against other native groups." Whitehead got paid well for his help. Yet he insisted that he didn't twist the truth against the land claimants. He was a trained anthropologist who dealt with the facts. "Just the facts," Jack Webb as Sergeant Friday used to say in the 1950's t.v. show 'Dragnet'. That's all that Whitehead claimed he was dealing with in the writings that he gave to the government. He just supplied the facts.
    Yet Whitehead didn't get off completely unscathed as we'll see.

Wednesday 28 June 2017

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe:Chpater 37, Part one. An Anthropologist Who Sold Out the First Nation. Pat One

  The anthropologist who sold out the First Nations. By Dave Jaffe: Chapter 37, Part One.


       Stanley Whitehead was smart. "My son is doing well in school," his English-born mother would tell her friends in the 1950's. She was right. Her son Stanley, born in the early 1940's, was nearly always at the top of his class in England and later in Canada. For in the mid-1950's, Stanley's family moved to Canada. They ended up in the Okanagan area of southern B.C.
     Stanley kept his clipped middle class English accent nearly all his life. He never really developed a Canadian accent. And he loved to talk and talk and talk. "Wow that guy sure can go on and on," a man who met Stanley in the 1980's said. "He rarely listens to you. He's smart that's for sure.  Yet there's no dialogue with him. It's all a one way conversation."
    By the 1980's, Stanley had already tried to be a lawyer. He passed his bar exams but he didn't like practicing law. This short stocky brilliant man then took up studying anthropology. He found a tribal group to study in the northwest area of British Columbia. He wanted to write a Ph.D or a doctorate on this tribal group. So he went back to university to study anthropology.
     By the time Stanley was reading anthropology textbboks, some troubling issues had popped up. Anthropology was developed in the 19th century by white people. This was the same time that some white people were colonizing parts of Asia and Africa. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead, Franz Boaz and Claude Levi Strauss were progressives who forged new paths in the discipline. Yet many tribal peoples often saw anthropology as a tool of white men  to dominate tribal peoples and destroy their culture. The Oglala Sioux theologian Vine Deloria Junior said in his book 'God Is Red' that anthropology had caused immense harm to First Nations people.
      By the time Stanley Whitehead studied anthropology in the 1980's, First Nations people were in revolt  all across  Canada. They blockaded roads to  stop highway construction and megaprojects. They challenged court rulings  and laws that had turned them into poor people living on depressed reserves. They demanded that Canadian governments give back to them the lands that they once lived on. They also demanded that the governments give them money because of the terrible treatment that they had endured in residential schools.
    "Colonization has certainly done its damag3e to our young men," says the First Nations Oneida activist D.J. Danforth. And white people's colonization, Danforth said, has not only hurt aboriginal men, "but also women and children of our First Nations communities."

Monday 19 June 2017

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: Chapter 36, Part Two by Dave Jaffe

       A True Believer: by Dave Jaffe. Part Two.


    Matt Hodge ran for a provincial nomination in 1972. He hoped to be a Member of the Legislative Assembly in the upcoming provincial lection. Alas for him, he was defeated in the nomination contest. He became a little embittered when he lost and the N.D.P. went on to win the B.C. election and the riding in which he lost the nomination. He never ran for office again. Yet he remained a loyal New Democrat, even though sometimes an unhappy member of the N.D.P. Dave Barrett., whom Hodge never liked, was now the provincial premier. And the man who beat Hodge in the nomination battle was great friend of Barrett's.
   Hodge was a handsome man who found male and female lovers in the New Democratic Party. "He was bisexual," one of his friends said. "He went both ways in love and had both men and women partners."
     After quite a few affairs, Hodge settled down with a lady we'll call Caroline. Hodge had no time for people who were not firmly committed to the New Democratic Party. He also loathed people who wouldn't join him in the feuds and factions that sometimes racked the N.D.P. "You're a slippery slimy political operative," he told one man who backed out from  supporting Hodge's candidate in a fierce nomination battle. "I'd never trust you at all."
    Hodge liked a drink or two. His fondness for whisky and beer probably cut a few years off his life.  He died with Caroline at this side in about 2015. He left the N.D.P. five times over policy matters. Yet he always re-joined the party. He died as he lived: A true believer in the New Democratic Party.

Friday 16 June 2017

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 36, Part One. A True Believer.

    A True Believer. Chapter 36, Part One by Dave Jaffe


     Many years later, as he was dying of cancer, Matt Dodge recalled his childhood days. When spring came along, he'd sit in a small chair in his mother's back garden. In this small garden of  a compact house in Vancouver's Kitsilano district, his mother had planted roses, laurel bushes and flowers. There was also a small apple tree that the young Matt Hodge liked to sit below. Here, he'd listen to the twittering of birds and gaze upwards to ther tree's big white blossoms that flowered in the spring.
     One spring day in 2014, Hodge hobbled slowly  into the back garden. The apple tree was still there though it had grown a lot in the last sixty years. Hodge had had it trimmed many times. Hodge's mother Hazel was long gone.
  Soon, Hodge realized he'd be gone too. Liver cancer was pushing him to his death at the age of 67. "I miss my mother," Hodge told his partner Caroline. "She joined me up in the N.D.P. you know." Caroline knew this quite well for Hodge had told her this fact several times before."
       In fact, Matt's mother Hazel had enlisted her son in the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation or the C.C.F. as it was called when Matt was only 13. Later he spent over 50 years in the C.C.F.'s successor, the New Democratic Party. "You were an orange diaper baby," a man he met in the N.D.P. in the 1970's joked with Matt. "I didn't wear orange coloured diapers," Matt replied. "But I could have." Orange was the official colour of the N.D.P. It was as if nature was following or showing off Matt's politics because his hair was an orangy red colour when he was young.
      A single mother, Hazel watched her son and only child, grow up into a big muscular man. Matt went to the University of British Columbia where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in the social sciences.
He then worked for a while in a rice factory hauling 50 pound rice sacks around. Then he found a job as a postman and ended up walking a postal route not far from where he lived. This was his lifetime job.
   Yet Hodge also walked the political path too. He became friends with activists and politicians in the New Democratic Party. He first canvassed for the N.D.P. in the 1963 provincial election that was won yet again by the Social Credit Party and its beaming leader William Andrew Cecil Bennett, or "Wacky" as he was called. Hodge favoured Tom Berger the lawyer and leader of the N.D.P. in the late 1960's. Hodge was heartbroken when Berger led the N.D.P. to yet another trouncing by W.A.C. Bennett in the 1969 B.C. election. He was also dismayed when the cheerful social worker Dave Barrett took over as leader of the N.D.P. when Tom Berger stepped down from politics.
    "Back in those days," one former New Democrat recalls, "there were two main groups in The N.D.P." One group, this lady said, were followers of Tom Berger. After Berger retired from politics, Berger's supporters swung towards Dennis Cocke, the intense Member of the Legislature from New Westminster and his wife Yvonne Cocke. This group, the lady points out, was called "The Cocke Machine". The other group in the N.D.P. were staunch supporters of Dave Barrett.
     "These two groups didn't like each other, period," the woman said. "Still, they worked together to keep the N.D.P. as a strong opposition party and both sides buried their feelings towards the other group when they faced the public or the Social Credit government."
    

Thursday 8 June 2017

Right, Left and Centre: the Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. The Woman Who Walked Away. Chapter 35, Part Three.

  The Woman  Who Walked Away; Part Three by Dave Jaffe


        Roberta 'Bobbie' Stern went to hear Betty Friedan speak in Seattle. Yet she left the meeting feeling depressed. Friedan attacked or put down lesbians and warned them that they would not take over the women's movement. While driving north back through the rain to Vancouver, Bobbie realized that even some feminist icons like Friedan were just like anyone else. They too were people with flaws. Yet she also decided that Friedan was a bitch.
      Then there was the New Democratic Party where Bobbie had by now spent a lot of hours. Its endless meetings, personality clashes and big conflict-driven male egos were  now turning her off politics.
     As she got out of her car in the late evening and went inside to her and William's one bedroom apartment in the west side neighbourhood of Kerrisdale,  she wondered what to do with her life. Where could she find a place to park her hopes and her ambitions?
    Then a few months later a church came into her life. It was a liberal Christian place not too far from where she lived.  Bobbie liked the minister and his sermons. She was Jewish but so what? Her parents weren't religious and rarely went to synagogues. She and William got married in this church on a sunny Saturday afternoon in 1977. Her mother Esther showed up but her father Leon stayed away. Her brother and sister sent her presents. And Aunt Frieda sent her a check for $75. Roberta felt happy on that day. She'd come a long way from her depressed adolescent moods.
     20 years later, a somewhat heavier and greying Bobbie was single again. She now had two teenage children named Fern and Tyler. She worked in a government insurance office doing identification checks and other clerical tasks. She also lived in a three bedroom house in Port Moody, an eastern suburb of Vancouver. She no longer went to political meetings or caucused with feminists. Yet she still went to church though now it was a different nearby church that was close to her home.
     "I've learned only one big thing," she told her daughter Fern who was vigorous 16 year-old soccer player. "Don't stay in one place or one job or one relationship if it's hurting you. Just move on and your life will improve. Mine has."  And Roberta 'Bobbie' Stern was right. Her life had improved. She had moved on.

      
     

Wednesday 7 June 2017

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe Chapter 35, Part Two of 'The Woman Who Walked Away.

    The Woman Who Walked Away, Part Two.


       By the late 1960"s, Bobbie stern was part and parcel of Vancouver's booming counterculture. She dressed in sloppy jeans and raggedy sweaters. She had used LSD quite a few times and smoked hashish and marijuana when she felt like it. She also used the pill as she slept with quite a few men. She also took part in anti-Vietnam War marches.
      Yet after awhile she got tired of the hippies. She needed something more than taking drugs and going to be-ins. She also got tired of being referred to as some man's 'chick'. Plus she found that some of the hippies were disturbed people. "We believe in peace and love," many hippies declared. Yet a few of the men that Bobbie met in the counterculture were violent. Hell's Angels really frightened her and some of them often showed up at hippie events.
     She started to move on again. She wasn't following her aunt Frieda's advice. about staying put. One weekend afternoon she wandered into a downtown hall and heard Dave Barrett, the new leader of the B.C. New Democrats give a speech. "Work in the N.D.P," Barrett urged the mostly young crowd that had its share of hecklers. "Help us build a new British Columbia that's more just, more peaceful and  more full of love." Bobbie liked Barrett's message and ended up working for free in a Vancouver N.D.P. office.
    Yet the work she did was just like the work she did in the outside world namely, typing, filing, answering the phones and putting stamps on envelopes.
      "This is shit work," a tall blonde woman called Monica told her one day in the N.D.P. office. "We should be doing something else like the men d. For instance we should be politicians too." Bobbie listened and agreed. Soon she and Monica became friends. Monica turned Bobbie on to feminist books like Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique' and 'The Descent of Women' by Elaine Morgan.
     For the next three years, Bobbie, Monica and a few other women, mostly below the age of 30 formed a consciousness raising group. They denounced patriarchy, or rule by men of women. They organized marches in favour of abortion and crashed a fashion show where they threw tomatoes at ultra thin models paraded in gleaming dresses. They also hurled insults at the male fashion designers..
    By now it was the 1970's. Bobbie went back to school, to a community college to study political science. Now she remembered her liking of social science and she was ready to learn more about politics and history. Her new boyfriend William was studying to be a lawyer and he helped Bobbie sometimes with her courses. Still, Bobbie was restless again. She wanted to move on. The feminists groups she belonged to, were now boring her. One incident played a major role in her evolution.
     She went down to Seattle to hear Betty Friedan give a speech at the local university. Up to this point, Bobbie admired Friedan. Yet Friedan, a short powerful speaker spent part of the time denouncing lesbians. "I will not let lesbians take over the feminist movement," Friedan said. "Feminism must be a mainstream American movement and not a lesbian one."
    Bobbie was shocked at this part of the speech because she knew that lesbians had been the main organizers of the meeting.

Tuesday 6 June 2017

Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 25, Part One of "A Woman Who Walked Away.

   A Woman Who Walked Away. Chapter 35, Part One by Dave Jaffe.
 


    "Your father always believes in hard work and never quitting," Roberta's aunt Frieda  once told her. These words of wisdom were told to Roberta when she and her family lived in Toronto in the early 1960's.  Yet to Roberta, a teenage skeptic all her father's hard work and never quitting attitude didn't seem to help her family.
     Here was her father Leon Stern, a short moustached  man who was earning about $60 a week
, working as a salesman in a furniture store. He was Frieda's brother. Roberta's mother, Esther filed records in a hospital. Meanwhile the whole Stern family which included Roberta's younger brother Harvey and her older sister Marilyn just scraped by. They were squeezed into a two bedroom apartment in Toronto's east side. Harvey slept in the living room while the two sisters shared a small bedroom.
    Day after day for five days a week, Roberta got up and made her way to Fraser Collegiate High School. There, Roberta took typing classes, gym workouts, biology and other subjects. Roberta loathed the high school with its cliques and hierarchies. "It's horrible there," Roberta repeatedly told her mother. "I loathe it." The only subject that turned Roberta on, was social studies. Roberta did like hearing about history and government.
    Once Roberta graduated from high school, off she went to slave away at an insurance office. She didn't like the work there either. It bored her and paid very little. "There must be a better life than this," she told one of her friends. So she started saving money and after a two years on the job, she quit and headed off to Vancouver.  "Vancouver?" her mother asked when Roberta told her parents where she was going. "Its far away and all it does there I'm told is rain."
      The rain that often flooded Vancouver streets didn't bother Roberta as much as the snow did in Toronto. And she didn't tell her folks that one of Vancouver's main attraction was its distance from her family.
Once in Vancouver,Roberta found a room in a rooming house in Vancouver's West End.  Then she moved across the Burrard Inlet to Kitsilano. It was 1966 and the hippie movement was in full swing.
      "Tune in, turn and drop out," the guru of LSD Timothy Leary was telling the young people of North America.  Roberta's dark hair, trim figure, big brown eyes, and medium height attracted quite a few men. Also she shortened her name to 'Bobbie'. It sounded more free. and less pretentious. than 'Roberta'. Soon she was dropping acid and smoking hashish. She wore jeans and raggedy sweaters. She also went down to the local welfare office to get money to live on.
     Fifty years later Roberta or now 'Bobbie' read a piece of journalism  by Donald Trump's strategic thinker Steve Bannon that the cultural shifts in the 1960's was responsible for all the subsequent troubles that the U.S.A. ran into. "Maybe yes, maybe no," Bobbie thought. "But the 1960's sure was a hell of a time.: