Coast Salish culture gets its day in the sun

Susan Point's wall sculpture "the First People" is one of the highlights of the new exhibition at the Royal B.C. Museum. (Below) A bone carving, dated from 450 to 1700, was recovered from a potlatch site on Orcas island. Photographs by Deddeda Stemler.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 19, 2009

VICTORIA

The items are crafted from bone and antler, yew and cedar, dried grass and mountain goat hair.

They include bowls and baskets and blankets.

Some are tools. Some are household goods. Some are intended for ceremonial purposes.

All are artworks.

The world is coming to British Columbia for a two-week party in February. The athletic competitions will take place on territory home to the Coast Salish peoples, whose traditional lands take in all Olympic venues.

Across the Strait of Georgia, perhaps soon to be officially known as part of the Salish Sea, the Royal B.C. Museum is showcasing the rich culture of the Coast Salish in an exhibition timed to introduce Olympic visitors to the history of this land.

The exhibition is called S’abadeb, pronounced sa-BAH-deb, a Coast Salish word meaning “gifts” but implying so much more.

“The concept may not be translatable,” said Martha Black, the museum’s curator of ethnology. “It is tied into a larger concept of giving your time and your resources.”

The show was originally organized by the Seattle Art Museum in consultation with Coast Salish groups on both sides of the border, including a dozen bands on Vancouver Island.

To walk through the exhibition, which opens tomorrow (Friday), is to stroll through the millennia from a kitchen midden along the Fraser River to a contemporary art gallery.

Simon Charlie’s “Welcoming Figure,” a large wooden figure with open arms, has been moved to the entrance of the second floor Exhibition Gallery, beckoning visitors to enter what is billed as the first comprehensive exhibition of Coast Salish art and culture.

Inside, a map shows territorial lands stretching almost as far south as the Columbia River and north to take in all the southern British Columbia coast, as well as a swath of southern Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands.

Among the oldest artifacts on display is a miniature pestle, carved from antler to portray a great blue heron. Recovered at the Great Marpole Midden, it is estimated to be as old as 1100 BC.

Some other pieces managed to survive despite long exposure to the elements.

An atlatl carved from yew was discovered in the Skagit River in 1936. A tool aiding in providing leverage in the throwing of a spear, the piece includes two finger holes to provide a secure grip. The carved figure likely depicts a sea monster with plume-like crests atop a human head. It was preserved over the centuries in river mud.

In 1976, a fragment of a hat made from red cedar bark was found in Wapato Creek at Tacoma, Wash. The rot-resistant bark preserved part of the hat in a site saturated by water, which delayed decomposition. It was found at the remnants of a weir.

Several years later, the weaver Karen Reed was commissioned to create a complete basketry hat based on the fragment’s design. As it turned out, her grandmother had lived on the creek, part of the ancestral home of the Puyallup people. The two hats — one hinting at its origins, the other a magnificent artwork — are welcome companions.

More whimsical is an entire tea set weaved from cedar root, bear grass and cherry bark. The basketry includes a pot, cups, a spouted creamer, a lidded sugar bowl, and a tray with handles, made by hand by Josephine George around 1925.

A model canoe of wood and leather depicts two sturgeon fishermen, one paddling, the other wielding a three-pronged spear. They appear to be singing and, if so, it would likely have been a “power song” to aid in capturing one of the large fish found at the bottom of the Fraser.

Among the 165 artifacts are combs, paddles, fish clubs, spindle whorls, and a whalebone adze. A dish is carved with a bowl in which dried salmon can be dipped into seal oil.

The exhibition brings together pieces scattered around the globe, including the British Museum in London and the Perth Museum in Scotland. Some of the items date from George Vancouver’s expedition in 1792, returning to these lands more than two centuries after being removed.

Included among them are four horn bracelets collected by surgeon’s mate George Hewett. Only 20 are known to exist.

There are carved houseposts near the entrance, modern works of art in the last room of the exhibit. The most striking of these is a wall sculpture of red and yellow cedar depicting eight faces amid a flowing form similar to river grass. The piece, titled "The First People," is by Susan Point, an artist born in Alert Bay who now lives in Vancouver. Over the years, the Vancouver International Airport has commissioned several pieces from her, including the 16-foot carved red cedar spindle whorl titled, “Flight.,” which undoubtedly will be admired by visitors arriving for the Winter Olympics.

The museum’s S’abadeb show, which closes March 8, also includes robes and blankets. A showcase of Coast Salish knitting is, of course, the Cowichan sweater, a familiar and comforting object. Forget the Olympic knockoffs for sale by a major retailer. This is the real thing, a work of art that keeps you warm.

David Vickers, lawyer and jurist (1934-2009)

David Vickers spent 17 years as a justice of the B.C. Supreme Court before retiring earlier this year. (Below) A campaign button from his unsuccessful 1984 bid to lead the B.C. NDP.

By Tm Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 17, 2009

VICTORIA

David Vickers, who has died, aged 75, has been called the best premier British Columbia never had, high praise for a reluctant politician.

Mr. Vickers died early Saturday morning at Victoria Hospice. He had been diagnosed earlier this year with cancer of the pancreas.

His reputation for possessing a sharp legal mind, his empathy for society’s less fortunate, and his own family’s story, in which education made it possible for the son of a working-class family to achieve success at law, hinted at the possibility of a sterling political career. It never happened.

A defeat at the polls in 1986, two years after his unsuccessful bid to become provincial NDP leader, led Mr. Vickers to return to the practice of law, where he was known as an effective advocate for the rights of the mentally disabled.

This passionate cause found expression after the birth of his third daughter, named Pamela. On the insistence of her parents, she became the first student with Down syndrome to be integrated in the province’s public school system. She received a certificate from Oak Bay High not long before succumbing to a congenital heart condition in 1990.

Mr. Vickers spent 17 years as a justice of the B.C. Supreme Court.

Two years ago this month, he issued a landmark, 473-page decision in which he ruled the Tsilhqot’in native band had established aboriginal title to a large portion of their traditional territory.

The ruling was hailed as a victory by lawyers for the band, though the judge’s ruling was non-binding. After a trial lasting 339 days, he urged all parties to negotiate.

“Trials in a courtroom have the inevitable downside of producing winners and losers,” the judge wrote. “My hope is that this judgment will shine new light on the path of reconciliation that lies ahead.”

The decision is under appeal.

Appointed to the bench in 1991 by Progressive Conservative Justice Minister Kim Campbell, the judge earned headlines two years later with an extraordinary publication ban. “A court’s decree somewhere in Canada on Tuesday prevents the public from hearing about a certain court case,” this newspaper reported on the front page. “The Globe and Mail is not permitted to reveal where the case is being heard, what the case is about or who and what is involved.”

When the gag order was overturned, it was revealed that a controversial stock promoter had sought to prevent the CBC from reporting on a drug conviction he had earned in the United States as a youth. The judge later acknowledged he had erred in granting so broad a ban.

In 1973, Mr. Vickers was named deputy attorney-general in NDP Premier Dave Barrett’s government. He served for four years.

In 1984, he contested the NDP leadership after Mr. Barrett stepped down following his third successive defeat at the polls. Opponents criticized Mr. Vickers as a johnny-come-lately to the party. A rival camp whispered that he had represented management in a bitter labour dispute 18 years earlier.

Bob Skelly, an MLA who was the first choice of few delegates, triumphed over Mr. Vickers on the fifth ballot of a memorably cantankerous convention. In the subsequent provincial campaign, Mr. Skelly proved to be a jittery campaigner and Social Credit, by then under the charismatic leadership of William Vander Zalm, cruised to victory. Mr. Vickers finished fourth in the dual-member riding of Saanich and the Islands.

The bruising nature of electoral politics left Mr. Vickers cold, as he felt such distractions only delayed efforts to forge social justice.

In 1990, he was stabbed as he helped protect a female client being attacked by a knife-wielding man in a Vancouver courtroom. Mr. Vickers needed 28 stitches to close his wound.

His earlier advocacy, coupled with his knowledge about life with mental illness, as well as with drug and alcohol addictions, made it difficult for the judge to jail such people.

“For me that was the most difficult part of the job, the sentencing, because of the lack of resources, the lack of attention paid to individual needs of the person you are sentencing,” he told the Globe’s Justine Hunter earlier this year.

“How does this government justify the construction of a new jail when those social programs are not being addressed?”

He retired from the bench at the start of the year, having spent almost a half-century in the law. He joined the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness, an issue which he hoped to help tackle in his retirement. Those efforts ended with the unexpected and sudden deterioration of his health.

David Herbert Vickers was born on Oct. 14, 1934, at Montreal, where he grew up in the Rosemont neighbourhod. He was the son of the former Ivy Jessie Tyler, a secretary, and Herbert Vickers, a labourer and boilermaker at the Canadian Pacific Railway’s Angus Workshop. Both parents had come to Canada from England as children.

Mr. Vickers graduated from the High School for Boys, where he was class valedictorian.

By coincidence, his future wife, Patricia Goddard, graduated as valedictorian of the High School for Girls the same year. They had not yet started to date, though they had known each other since age 13.

Mr. Vickers completed an arts degree at Sir George Williams College (now Concordia University) before marrying Miss Goddard in 1956. The couple worked briefly at a summer camp in Ontario before embarking on a cross-country trek to Vancouver. He began studying at law school at the University of British Columbia, while she took a job as a probation officer.

Mr. Vickers graduated with a law degree in 1959, winning a $25 prize for proficiency in a course on mortgages. He was called to the bar the following year.

He articled with Ladner Downs, a prominent firm, later becoming a partner. He opened his own law practice in Victoria in 1979.

Mr. Vickers leaves Pat Vickers, his wife of 53 years; two daughters, Cheryl and Janice Vickers; a son, Clifford Vickers; and, four grandchildren and an adopted granddaughter. He was predeceased by a daughter, Pamela, who died in 1990, aged 20.

Young DJ's music rocked the boat, and Britain, in the Sixties

Gord Cruse takes a break behind the microphone in 1966 while wearing a skulls-and-crossbones T-shirt at Radio Caroline, the legendary pirate radio station. (Below) Cruse, now 67, wears a knit beanie made by a fan while holding 45-rpm records in his Victoria yard. Photograph by Deddeda Stemler.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 16, 2009

VICTORIA

Gord Cruse left the Canadian prairies and pre-med studies to enjoy London in the Swingin’ Sixties.

He financed his adventure by working as a labourer packing crates of garden furniture.

One day a workmate asked if he listened to Radio Caroline.

“What’s Radio Caroline?” he replied.

The only radio he had heard since arriving in England was the BBC, a staid broadcast in which music so puerile as pop was aired rarely, if at all. No Beatles and no Rolling Stones, no Merseybeat and no rock ‘n’ roll.

Even the name struck him as odd, as he was more familiar with the alphabet-soup call letters of North American stations.

So, Mr. Cruse tuned in to Radio Caroline, broadcasting from a ship off the coast of England, thus skirting British radio regulations.

He liked what he heard. At 24, he had already been behind the microphone, working at station CFQC in Saskatoon while studying at the University of Saskatchewan.

He asked for an audition.

He was midway through reading a practice newscast when the door to the studio slammed open.

He did not take this as a good sign.

“When they burst in on you,” he said, “they’ve usually heard enough and bring it to an end.”

Instead, he heard five words he’ll never forget.

“Can you start on Monday?”

Turns out the mid-Atlantic accent of Canadians was precisely the sound being sought for a station whose symbol was a skull and crossbones.

He joined a wild bunch of rogue disc jockeys whose adventures are the subject of the comedy Pirate Radio, a movie that opened on the weekend.

Mr. Cruse’s career as a broadcast buccaneer began as a newsreader for Radio Caroline South, spending two weeks of every three aboard a ship anchored in the Thames estuary, just outside of British territorial waters. He later moved to another rust bucket vessel in the Irish Sea.

A nervous debut before a microphone screwed into a desktop — a necessity to avoid movement in rolling seas — included the unhappy sound of water sloshing as he took a breath between news items.

He earned a starting salary of 25-pounds per week with free food and laundry, as well as a supply of beer and cigarettes.

“It was,” he said, “a pretty nice deal, a luxurious lifestyle.”

Life aboard ship was madcap. Keith Hampshire, a London-born but Canadian-raised jock, hosted Keefers’ Uprising in the morning and Keefers’ Commotion in the afternoon, ending each day with the invitation to “join me tomorrow for three solid hours of finger-snapping, toe-tapping, knee-knocking, thigh-slapping, knuckle-cracking, finger-popping, leg-pulling, wrist-twisting, tongue-tangling, foot-stomping rock ‘n’ roll music.”

(After returning to Canada, he scored a chart-topping hit in 1973 with the Cat Stevens’ song “The First Cut is the Deepest,” later earning a gold record for the ballpark favourite “OK Blue Jays.”)

Another swashbuckling pirate was Michael Pasternak, the son of a Hollywood producer who was known on-air as Emperor Rosko (aka Kaiser Rosko, El Presidente, the Happy Gringo, Senor Loco), the “mayor of mayhem,” a “lean, mean record machine,” a jive-talker with plenty of patter.

Even the newsreader earned a following among the British youth. Mr. Cruse received a knit beanie from a fan hailing the Big Crooser. He befriended The Bachelors and other music groups, took in the Rolling Stones from a front-row seat (“I could hardly hear the guys singing because of the girls screaming”), and received a wild reception when introduced to a crowd at The Phonograph in Manchester.

“Imagine this Canadian stubblejumper being introduced at a nightclub in England,” he said. “It just blew me away.”

The pirate ships were scuttled by the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act in the summer of 1967.

A few months earlier, Mr. Cruse left to see the world, winding up at CFAX in Victoria in 1969. Seven years later, he abandoned radio to become a youth supervisor at the Victoria Youth Custody Centre.

Accustomed to earning his living by talking, he had to develop a different skill.

“Listen, listen, listen,” he said.

“I guess what’s common to both (jobs) is communication.”

He retired in 2002 after 26 years on a job in which he wound up admitting into custody the children of offenders who were locked up when he began. On a happier note, two of the youth with whom he worked named sons after him.

A few years ago, he wrote a touching book about his time with adolescent criminals.

He once had to take a 16-year-old offender to his mother’s funeral.

“Handcuffed to my wrist,” Mr. Cruse writes in “Juvie: Inside Canada’s Youth Jails,” “he stood quietly over the open casket with no tears, no expression and no words. We stood in heavy silence for about a minute, and then not able to voice a feeling, he tugged at the cuffs and we moved away.”

Mr. Cruse, now 67, took in his fifth showing of Pirate Radio on a weekend in which he was also remembering the second chapter of his working life.

A 14-year-old schoolgirl was beaten and drowned by bullying classmates on a chill November day 12 years ago. Mr. Cruse supervised the offenders and befriended the late girl’s parents.

He now sponsors an academic prize in criminology at Camosun College, providing financial assistance to a student intending to work with juvenile offenders. He has named it the Reena Virk Youth Justice Award.

In escape from a miner's life, soldier found himself in prison camp

Denys Cook kept a secret diary during his five years as a German prisoner of war. Photographs by Deddeda Stemler.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 11, 2009

VICTORIA

Denys Cook’s fighting war ended with him facing the business end of a machine-pistol held by a German solider.

After uneasy days hiding from the enemy around Boulogne, France, Mr. Cook, a sergeant in the Welsh Guards, knew he had no choice but to place his hands in the air.

The gun was pointed at his gut. His captor spoke to him in English.

“For you, Winston Churchill boy, the war is over,” he said.

Winston Churchill boy?

He later realized the German had seen the patch on his shoulder, misreading his regiment’s initials for those of the British prime minister.

The date was May 24, 1940. What would be the bloodiest conflict in human history had yet to complete its ninth month. Mr. Cook, aged 20, spent five long years as a prisoner of war.

Mr. Churchill had become prime minister of a coalition government only a fortnight earlier. Behind barbed wire, Mr. Cook belatedly learned about Dunkirk, Dieppe, Pearl Harbor, and Stalingrad.

By the time of the D-Day invasion in June, 1944, he was better able to keep up on war news through the ingenuity of his fellow prisoners. The subterfuge nearly cost him his life.

Mr. Cook is 89 now, a tall man with a long face framed by a beard and a sea curl of wispy white hair that crosses his brow like foam. His voice still carries the lilting cadences of the Welsh valley that was his birthplace.

His father and uncles returned from the mines each day as a dark as the night sky, bathing in a zinc tub before having the evening meal. Only after forming a union did the miners get showers at the mine head.

The boy knew he wanted nothing to do with coal.

“It was useless work. Underground, dirty work. The people were slaves to one man.”

He ran away at 13, working for several years as a kitchen boy for the family of an English teacher. At 17, he enlisted in the Welsh Guards, an athletic lad desperate for regular meals in those dark, Depression days.

He became a physical education and small arms instructor, becoming schooled in the use of rifles, mortars, bayonets, hand grenades and machineguns.

As Europe teetered towards war in 1938, he was ordered aboard a troopship. He thought he might be sent to defend Czechoslovakia from Germany’s appetite, though appeasement left him assigned to Gibraltar, where the garrison was being reinforced lest the Spanish dictator be tempted to snatch a British possession.

The time on The Rock would later seem a dream. A tall, lean athlete, Mr. Cook was assigned duties as chef lifeguard.

“My uniform was swimming trunks, a pair of plimsolls, and a pith helmet,” he said.

The revery did not last long. Ordered back to England, he was dispatched to France as the German army tore through Belgium and the Netherlands.

Not long after landing at Boulogne, amid the chaos of retreating Allied forces, Mr. Cook was captured, ending days of close scraps with snipers. In those frantic hours, he had to abandon a friend whom he had seen lying face down in a ditch, the back of his head a bloody mess.

He would see death on the battlefield, on the railroad cattle cars transporting prisoners, in the camps.

The sergeant’s initial reaction at arriving at prison camp was to flee. But the camp at Marienburg, within sight of the medieval Malbork Castle, was in Prussia, far away from any frontier offering refuge. Escape was impossible.

He began to keep a daily record, a diary he had begun shortly before capture when he recorded an incident in which one of his soldiers deliberately shot off his thumb to avoid facing combat. The blast left the sergeant deaf in his left ear.

Packages from home helped stave off starvation, as a diet of potato soup did not provide near enough sustenance for each day’s hard labour. A nonsmoker, Mr. Cook traded cigarettes for food — five buying an egg, 25 a pork chop.

The thousands of British prisoners brought with them all manner of skills, both ancient and illicit. “We had every profession,” he said, “except prostitution.” He taught himself shorthand, a skill that attracted the attention of the men who had built a radio inside a working record turntable

It became his duty to transcribe broadcasts about war news. To be caught with a working radio was a death sentence.

On one nerve-shattering day, a German guard spotted Mr. Cook wearing a headset while scribbling in the odd hieroglyphics of shorthand as a record spun on the turntable. Challenged, Mr. Cook took off the headset and offered the guard a listen. In that moment, a colleague flicked a switch on the machine, replacing the radio feed with that of the platter.

He had another, happier, shock while a prisoner. He spotted the friend he had last seen in the ditch with a grievous wound.

“What the hell,” Mr. Cook said, “I left you for dead.”

The men renewed their friendship, which would continue after the war.

As the Soviet armies approached, the prisoners were force marched to the west. Mr. Cook and a handful of compatriots fled in hopes of finding American or British troops. He was liberated in Bavaria, spending six weeks recuperating in a Canadian-run hospital. He weighed just 98 pounds (44.45 kilograms).

He became a policeman after the war before immigrating to Canada in 1957. He eventually became superintendent of Alberta law enforcement, retiring in 1973. He also became a prominent artist.

Today, the basement walls of his Esquimalt home are lined with his art. He still has the two prison diaries he wrote in a miniscule hand, the better to preserve scarce paper. Mr. Cook also has the manuscript of a memoir he wrote immediately after the war, a book yet to have found a publisher. For many years, his family knew little about his wartime experiences. Even the unpublished book was a secret. Now, a granddaughter is at work on a documentary.

He plans to take a few minutes this morning to reflect on those who did not make it home from the war. He has never attended a Remembrance Day service and does not plan to start doing so now.

He blames politicians for starting wars and hears enough from them without having to do so on Nov. 11.

“Yes, there has to be some remembrance,” he said. “But for me personally it’s a bad time, so I don’t go.”

Tales from the hood

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 9, 2009

VICTORIA

The world has philatelists and numismatics and oenophiles, the attraction of their passion obvious even to those who do not share their obsession.

A postage stamp provides a panorama of world history on a thumb-sized canvas. Coins jiggle in your pocket and buy stuff. The hoarding of wine makes sense if one acknowledges the eventual tippling of each cherished bottle.

Dr. James Colwill is not one to indulge these common hobbies.

He is an aficionado of flying ladies, a maven of mascots, a boffin of bonnet decorations.

Step into the grand entrance of his Samuel Maclure-designed heritage home on a Saanich hill, descend the narrow steps into the basement, and a visitor is confronted by walls covered with automobile detritus.

A radiator from a 1913 Packard hangs from one wall. An old Ontario sign designating The King’s Highway No. 2 is posted in a corner. Old license plates are nailed to the walls.

These are mere appetizers for the heart of his collection.

He owns more than 700 hood ornaments, or, as the British prefer to call them, automotive mascots.

Think not of the Beastie Boys wearing a Volkswagen badge around their necks as pendants.

These relics of the junkyard are miniature artworks in nickel-plate.

Arranged in display cases are a speedy bestiary of rabbits, jaguars, greyhounds; a rookery of owls, parrots, pelicans; a wee folks gathering of pixies, brownies, sprites; an antipodean assortment of cockatoos, kangaroos, kookaburras; such good-luck symbols as horseshoes, wishbones, four-leaf clovers, and (pre-Nazi) swastikas; muscular paragons of grace and power such as a surfer, a football player, and Superman; and, such fantasist’s delights as nymphs and such horrors as chimeras;

Speaking of monsters, among the odder ornaments is a bust of Henry Ford, the genius of the production line who used his profits to bankroll anti-Semitic quacks.

He is a rare figure from history to take his place among such mythological figures as Atlas, Diana, Triton, Minerva, Hermes, and Vulcan.

The retired obstetrician takes a trip back in history in contemplating his collection.

“A rendezvous with time,” he said.

He was raised on a farm in St. Thomas, Ont., the Railroad City of southwest Ontario, where, incidentally, Jumbo the Elephant met his sad end when struck by a train. He attended class in a one-room schoolhouse where it was his duty to ensure the fire remained stoked throughout the day.

His parents were farmers who did not purchase their own automobile until 1953, settling on a Nash. On the hood was a reclining woman, a voluptuous figure designed by pinup artist George Petty.

In the 1960s, as he studied medicine in Toronto, the young student met the owner of a automotive plating company interested in mascots. He began a collection of his own.

As a doctor in Colorado, he discovered junkyards in which hood ornaments and radiator caps had not been stripped from abandoned vehicles.

“It was like opening Christmas presents,” he said. “You’d be wondering what you would find another 100 yards down the road.”

Remembering bargaining sessions with overalls-clad dealers, he got a wistful expression on his face.

“You could offer them $1, or $2 each.”

Those days are long gone, as a valuable ornament now goes for far more than the original price of the automobile to which it had been attached.

The Holy Grail among collectors — what to call them? Hoodies? Hoodwinked? Mascot maniacs? — is the trumpeting elephant found on the radiator cap of the Bugatti Type 41, popularly known as the Royale. Designed by Ettore Bugatti as a luxury car for European royalty, few orders were made during the Great Depression and only six were ever assembled. One survived the war after being bricked behind a wall to avoid seizure by the Nazis.

The rearing elephant is believed based on a sculpture by his brother, Rembrandt Bugatti, who committed suicide many years earlier. Fortune magazine calls it “the world’s most expensive car,” valued a decade ago at $10 million US.

Dr. Colwill will not be adding it to his collection anytime soon.

He has published three glossy books based on his collection, a series titled, “The Automotive Mascot: A Design in Motion.” He is now at work on a fourth, photographic volume.

The retired obstetrician’s expertise helps other collectors discern the cheap, knockoff reproductions from the magnificent, and sometimes bizarre, mascots found in his basement.

He has a kewpie doll, a Shriner in a red fez, and an Uncle Sam in a red, white and blue top hat.

He has such advertising characters as the Red Devil from Bosch and Bibendum from Michelin.

He has a coiled snake that once could be found on the car driven by movie heartthrob Rudolph Valentino, who starred in the 1925 silent film “Cobra.”

Sometimes, the ornaments were designed with whimsy in mind.

In one, a monkey hugs a cooking pot from which the steam from the radiator would be released.

Another includes a miniature roulette wheel, spun by the wind.

“Everyone kicked money into a pot and selected a number from one to 20,” Dr. Colwill said. “When the car stopped, they’d get out to read the marker and award the money.”

As distracting as a cellphone call, but infinitely more fun.

Philosopher kids

Tiffany Poirier uses finger puppets to make a philosophical point in her elementary classroom. Photograph by Candice Albach.

By Tom Hawthorn
The Torch
Autumn, 2009

As a little girl, Tiffany Poirier lay awake at night pondering the big questions. What is happiness? How did I get here? What happens when we die?

She sought answers from the grownups in her life, a fruitless exercise. Then, as now, children were not considered capable of handling profound truths. Instead, she heard fairy tales and folk wisdom. She was told to not bother her pretty head with such thoughts.

Today, at age 29, she still seeks answers to her early questions, having embarked on a lifelong quest that has taken her from University of Victoria lecture halls back to elementary school classrooms. She is a teacher who encourages her precocious charges to be as inquisitive as she had been at their age.

She may have more understanding today than she did as a child, but the supply of unanswered — and, sometimes, unanswerable — questions is never exhausted.

It is her belief, which she puts into practice every working day, that children are natural philosophers.

“Some people think philosophy is the domain of university professors in tweed blazers with long white beards in some book-bound library covered in cobwebs,” she said.

She prefers to introduce philosophy to adolescents with scuffed knees and a natural curiosity. Often, it is the teacher who gets lessoned.

“Kids have so much wisdom,” she said.

Poirier was forced to confront the big questions at an innocent age because of a shocking tragedy that befell her family. Even today, a quarter-century later, memory of what happened quickly reduces her to tears, an understandable reaction to so deep a loss.

Poirier brings passion to any conversation, especially one touching on teaching. On a recent visit to Victoria from her home in Surrey, she brought with her to a downtown coffee shop a thick binder of teaching notes, through which she eagerly searched for examples of the lessons she uses in class.

She has flashing eyes, a clever sense of humour, and a rapid-fire patter that no doubt enraptures even unruly classrooms. She would be played in the movies by Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick in “Election,” all the achievement without the Machiavellian plotting. Poirier has accomplished much since graduating from UVic (Arts, ’04), gaining an education degree and becoming an accomplished public speaker and conductor of teacher workshops.

She has contributed to “The Teacher Diaries,” a series published by the online magazine The Tyee.

Did we mention she has won awards as a teacher? As a vocalist? A songwriter? As an actor?

Earlier this year, O Books published her children’s primer, “Q is For Question: An ABC of Philosophy,” which she both wrote and illustrated.

“This is a book of questions,” she tells children. “There are no answers. You have the answers.”

Children should be introduced to philosophy at their level, she argues, not through instruction from old textbooks.

Even simple misbehaviour in the classroom raises philosophical questions. Take a pupil tapping a pencil. The irksome noise is disruptive, but Poirier is not distracted by the tap tap tap. She hears the student asking, “Do I matter? Do you hear me? Am I alone?” A push in the schoolyard, while obviously transgressive, also poses questions: What are society’s rules? What can I get away with?

A lot of philosophical lessons come from child’s play. While she was a teacher at General Brock Elementary on Main Street in Vancouver’s gritty Riley Park neighbourhood, some students complained about the condition of the playground, which they regarded as ugly and dirty.

She told them a former pupil, the entrepreneur Jimmy Pattison, was donating $50,000 to improve the facility. She asked the students to consider what would make an ideal playground.

Giant slides, someone offered. Bumper cars, another suggested.

Some children had objections based on their own experiences. What about kids in wheelchairs? How about a bus service to the new playground for poor children?

“Young people, their hearts are open,” she said. “They’re open to these truths.”

The children slipped easily from describing a dream list of features to negotiating which playthings should be included, and why they should be. Next, she had them construct an architect’s model in cardboard of their perfect playground.

Sometimes, the lessons are delivered in response to trauma. One of her nine-year-old students came to class one morning eager to talk about the aftermath of a gang shooting he had witnessed. The boy had no end of questions. Why did that happen? Will that happen to my brother? Will it happen to me?

“Forget the curriculum,” Poirier recalls thinking that morning. She also knew she had to address the incident. “You can’t protect kids from the world completely.”

So, she altered the day’s lesson by having the class talk about the event their classmate had witnessed. She asked, Why do you think someone would shoot another person? “He’s sad,” one child answered. “Nobody loves him.” The discussion went from there.

“They’re so fresh and honest. They didn’t go home and practice their didactic speech. It’s happening in the moment.”

Another time, she had a dialogue with the class in which they wrestled with the question, Where is your mind?

Some had a knee-jerk response: “It’s your brain and it’s in your head.”

One boy got frustrated because the other students said what he was thinking before he got a chance to speak. When it was at last his turn, his anguished response caught the teacher’s attention. “I think my mind is all around me,” he said. “Every time I’m about to say something, somebody takes my idea.”

Whoa. Now, that’s a statement worthy of philosophical contemplation.

If Poirier has a keen understanding of the thinking of children, perhaps it owes to the trauma she faced at age five. Her father, a firefighter, departed the family home to go to work fighting a blaze in a forest in the interior of British Columbia. He gave his daughter a hug and kiss, promising to bring her back a gift on his return.

On June 29, 1985, the Bell 206 Jet Ranger helicopter in which he was a passenger crashed and burned while trying to make an emergency landing on Highway 23, about 50 kilometres south of Revelstoke. Roy Friesen would not be coming home, a fallen firefighter.

“I was mad,” she says now, blinking tears, “because I felt he never came through with his promise.”

Before long, she began wrestling with such questions as, “Where does that love go?”

She did not get any satisfactory answers.

Later still, she suffered the stigma of not having a father to participate in Career Day at her own school. “I was ashamed,” she admits. “It was so shameful I didn’t have a nuclear family.”

Her own brilliant academic career, which included graduating as top arts student at Abbotsford Senior Secondary, led her to UVic, where she more fully indulged her querying nature. She interrupted her work towards a bachelor’s degree with several semesters at the Canadian College of Performing Arts in Victoria.

Her time in this city was also one of newfound freedom and experimentation, an opportunity to push boundaries. Against her own best judgment, she took up skydiving.

Why?

“He never came down from the sky.”

For her, jumping from an airplane was “a way to take back that event from nature.”

She called it quits after 25 successful jumps.

These days, her working life is spent encouraging children to indulge such thoughts as, “ ‘I exist. I’m thinking about thinking.’ It’s like a play within a play. As soon as someone gives you the language, your thoughts make sense.”

Should she ever become a university philosophy professor, Poirier thinks she would use the same lessons of hands-on philosophy. She’d use popsicle sticks and she’d have a discussion group pass around a ball of yarn as they exchanged ideas, building a dialogue web. Just like she does in Grade 5.

“Philosophy classes should be more like playgrounds of the mind. I think we’d get more done.”

In the pain of her childhood loss, she wrestled with big questions, launching a lifetime of enquiry for herself and those around her. In a way, you might think of this relentless curiosity, this never ending quest for understanding, as a father’s gift to a little girl he never intended to leave.


Selections from Tiffany Poirier’s “Q is for Question: An ABC of Philsophy,” published earlier this year by O Books of Britain:

Existence
“What is existence?
Can you define it?
Is there a boundary?
What is outside it?

At the edge of space,
if you poked your fist,
could you scoop in
your hand
what doesn’t exist?


Happiness
What is happiness?
What is worth?
Is pursuing happiness
our purpose on Earth?


Rights
What are your rights?
Are rights equal for all?
Which rights apply
to an animal?

Need and hunger never take a holiday

By Tom Hawthorn
Boulevard Magazine
November/December, 2009

About this time of year, when the daytime air smells of fall and winter fog rolls in at night, children are distracted from the approaching darkness with the great promise of free candy.

The giddy fun of dress-up is an annual rite on Halloween. Some schools encourage children to attend class in costume, desks occupied by ghosts and witches and princesses and little wizards. The ringing of the end-of-the-day bell means they are mere hours from beginning the happy ritual of shaking down the neighbours for sweets.

Before they leave for the eve’s fun, they receive a chunk of cardboard pressed flat. Little hands fold and bend the cardboard into a little box with a coin slop in the top, to be worn on string around the neck, or carried in a free hand.

“Trick or treat for Unicef!” was a cry heard at the door, eager voices calling for candy for themselves and coppers for the world’s poorest children.

The campaign began in 1955, a genius idea in which greedy goblins learned the joy of helping others (without the suffering of sharing the extorted treats). Over a half-century, some $96 million was raised by Canadians for projects supervised by the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund.

The charity stopped handing out the boxes three years ago, the labour needed to roll pennies — and the costs of shipping such heavy packages — too prohibitive. Now, children take part in a classroom program called Schools for Africa, for which money is raised in school and on the streets for students in Malawi and Rwanda.

This is the season when Victoria’s charities do the bulk of their fundraising. We will be inundated with pitches and appeals, asked to reflect on our good fortune even as we contemplate the heartbreaking circumstances of others.

As if anyone walking downtown could ever forget the many in need who surround us. We would do well to heed the little voices in our lives, because they see even when we turn our heads.

Children are great ones for charity. If not natural philanthropists, they have the right instincts.

The girls in my neighbourhood, who jokingly call themselves The Famous Five, as though they were a rock band, or a band of girl detectives, once spent a summer week selling lemonade to passersby. They set a table with chairs for themselves and for customers, taped up handprinted signs, ransacked their parents’ homes for cups and pitchers and sugar and lemons.

They spent hours in the sun, proudly showing at the end of the day a tinkling jar of coins and a small wad of crumpled bills.

They money, they insisted, go to Royal Jubilee Hospital. They were rightly proud of themselves, but not nearly so proud as were their parents.

My daughter has a friend with a birthday near Christmas, her annual party one in which her friends contributed small gifts to be placed in packages for children at the Cridge Centre for the Family, cake and ice cream served after all helped to organize the gift baskets.

The desperate circumstances of others can be jarring. Those of us in middle-age can remember the wrestler Whipper Billy Watson promoting the annual March of Dimes campaign, perched on his shoulder, or being carried in his massive arm some poor child with leg encased in an Eiffel Tower of metal braces and leather straps. Who wouldn’t give up on buying a pack or two of hockey cards for that kid? (Beside, we feared Whipper Billy might lay a smacking on us if we didn’t.)

Not so long ago, the major charity in every city was the United Way and maybe a Christmas fund sponsored by the local daily newspaper. The business of charity has become more sophisticated with heart-wrenching direct-mail appeals and easy online donations. As well, hardly a summer weekend slips past without a runathon, bikeathon, or, in the Inner Harbour, paddlethon, all exertions for a worthy cause. We buy Girl Guide cookies at the door and at the office; sign up to sponsor laps and kilometres; donate clothes to Big Brothers Big Sisters, or to Canadian Diabetes, or to Goodwill, the goods to be left at the front door, clearly labelled, before 8 a.m.

Not to forget bottle drives.

Or Cops for Cancer.

Often, the charitable impulse is sparked by a personal connection. We lose a friend or family member to cancer, or to heart disease.

I’m not immune to those appeals, but the ones that get me in the gut are the ones that aim for the gut.

That’s why I’m a fan of Gordy Dodd and his cornball furniture commercials. He and his family play host to an annual Thanksgiving Dinner for the homeless, 600 hungry folks served butterballs by a happy goofball.

Down in Trounce Alley, the Tapa Bar has been celebrating its tenth anniversary all year long. For every pizza they’ve sold this year, they’ve sent $2 to the Our Place Society, which provides meals, showers and other assistance to the homeless.

Over at the Mustard Seed at Queens Avenue, the lineup for groceries at the food bank starts hours before the doors open in the morning. It is cold on the sidewalk at that dark hour.

Once, this sprawling building was used as a marine garage. Now, volunteers offer coffee and snacks, distribute clothes and food.

“In the midst of it all I stood — a little transfixed — by the lives touched by poverty, brokenness and pain,” Rev. Chris Riddell wrote in a recent newsletter.

“A child in a stroller, unaware of their circumstance, just making due with whatever mom gives her; an addict asleep at the table amid the surrounding hustle bustle and a dear elderly man gathering bread from the abundant supply for friends back home at the complex, too frail to venture out for themselves.”

For every dollar the charity receives this year, 70 cents will be donated in these few weeks at year’s end.

On my last visit to the Mustard Seed, I watched a waif in a thin pink dress, the edges ragged from wear, reach for a heavy box filled with milk cartons. She was gently shooed away, lest the box land on her noggin. With her big eyes and thinness, she looked to me like Cindy Lou Who, the little girl in “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” who knows the spirit of the season is found not in glittering gifts but in sharing.