Old friends and new connections

A cascade of coincidences set me thinking about a man I knew years ago

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Everything has made me late to send out today’s stack, and I apologize. It’s one of my more personal pieces, which I mix in with book reviews, posts about how I do research—which can involve going to spas as well as to archives—along with writing tips and remaining alive to the world. Its oddities. Its beauty. Its teachings.

Enjoy.

Old friends and new coincidences

I had a friend in high school, a guy I never saw afterward, although I always thought fondly and vaguely that we might eventually meet again. Then one day I got a high school update saying that Derek had suffered a stroke. He had lived with the after-effects for several years but had died not long before, aged sixty. I was surprised how upset I felt. It couldn’t be true! I was going to head up the coast any day!

His name was Derek Wilson and he was a member of the Haisla nation in northwestern B.C., a hereditary chief who became an exceptional artist, a printmaker and carver. He worked under his uncle, master carver Henry Robertson, and was renowned himself for crafting beautiful jewelry.

Seeing my upset, my husband went online and found a gallery in Vancouver stocking a gold pendant that Derek had made, photographed above. Our friend Jan bicycled over to make sure the gallery wasn’t ripping anyone off, and when she said it was okay, my husband ordered the pendant and gave it to me for my birthday.

That was part of it: Derek and I shared a birthday, November 29. The other part was that Derek was quietly clear he intended to be an artist, and I was rather more defensively and aggressively clear that I intended to be a writer, and I believed him and he believed me. There was never any romance between us; we just hung out. But since he was four years older than me, I learned a great deal from Derek, things I’ve thought about ever since.

Nothing else changed until last year, when I went out to the coast to visit friends and found a tee-shirt I thought my daughter-in-law would like, one made by an Indigenous artist. It showed a stylized octopus, and the tag said the octopus is a symbol of creativity in some coastal cultures. My daughter-in-law is an artist so I got it for her, and it turned out that my husband made note.

My main Christmas present last year was a second piece of art by Derek. It’s the octopus shown above, and it was a complete and delightful surprise. Along with it came some books I’d asked for, including The Knowing by Tanya Talaga, about the scandal of residential schools in Canada. Ever since, my presents and the past have been rubbing against one another, and I’ve been thinking about what was really going on when we were teenagers, Derek coming down the coast to go to high school, me cutting a path along Mosquito Creek from a suburban house my parents could barely afford.

The school was called Carson Graham, and it was a liberal 1960s experiment in suburban North Vancouver, a low-slung modern structure located near the Capilano reservation of the Squamish people. It brought kids from all kinds of backgrounds together for grades 11 and 12, and it did so while offering a variety of programs usually siloed into different schools: commercial art, which I believe Derek studied, industrial arts, auto mechanics and business/commercial, an academic stream that I was in, others I don’t remember and a chef’s training program that made our cafeteria a gift.

Even more unusual was the Indigenous focus, since the school not only served students from the Capilano reserve, it taught teenagers like Derek, kids who came down the coast from villages without high schools so they could study for their diplomas: Haisla, Haida, Kwakiutl students (now often spelled Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw), kids from other nations.

They boarded with families on the Capilano reserve, and in the terminology of the time, there was an Indian Senate at the school where the Indigenous students met to debate school policy. Carson’s honorary principal was Chief Dan George, the famous Hollywood actor who made us feel all glitzy when he opened school assemblies. Eventually, Indigenous languages would be taught there. It wasn’t one of the awful residential schools that Talaga writes about in The Knowing, which plucked children from their families and subjected them to horrendous abuse, although residential schools were still operating at the time.

It never occurred to me when I was a kid to question how the Carson Graham experiment had started, whether Indigenous elders had wanted to create a high school program for coastal kids, or whether it had begun as a well-meaning white liberal initiative. If anyone knows more, please let me know. There’s no history of the program online, and it’s an unfortunate fact that a few people I might have talked with about it have died, either long-ago friends like Derek or the writer Lee Maracle, who didn’t go to the school but was Chief Dan George’s granddaughter.

I can’t find any criticism of the program either, but one of the things I remember Derek saying involves the cultural differences between coastal students and people on the Capilano reserve, and how this could make life difficult.

“They don’t realize it’s like sending a Swede to live with a Greek.”

They, I remember him saying, but it didn’t occur to me to ask they were. I focused on the fact that Indigenous cultures were very different from each other, which I hadn’t stopped to think about before, even though it was right there in front of me. I also remember what he said because it grew into a standing joke between us. My father came from a Swedish family, and when I told Derek that, he started calling me “Swede.” It ends up echoing strangely into the future, given Derek’s key involvement in a years-long initiative during the 1990s to bring a totem pole home from an ethnology museum in Stockholm, where it had been held since 1929, although I’ll get to that next time.

I remember quite a few things Derek said at school, since he was both articulate and a natural teacher. He would teach later on, mentoring emerging artists. Meanwhile, I was very young and ignorant, only fourteen when I started Grade 11, having been taken into a gifted program when I was nine years old that accelerated us through the system. I never fit in very well. The majority of the other kids came from middle- and professional-class families when my father was a machinist, although one who thought he was owed the post-war suburban life for his service during World War Two, which explains the house our family couldn’t quite afford. I found Carson a relief, making friends with people more like me—I’m speaking of class here—and that included Indigenous kids.

Yet there’s something else I remember Derek saying quite soon after we met. We were outside in the quad, where smoking was permitted. He smoked, I didn’t. Mainly it was a place to hang out with friends. I remember holding up my arms and turning around in a circle saying, “It’s such a beautiful day!”

When I stopped, I found Derek looking at me steadily. Finally he said. “We don’t say that. When you say that to someone, you’re implying they’re too stupid to notice.”

I believe this is the first time I realized that people not only came from different cultures, they looked at the world differently; that culture isn’t just people speaking different languages and wearing different clothes, but owning a different set of assumptions; assumptions that are equally valid and entirely fascinating, which is a good thing for an aspiring writer to learn.

Before Tanya Talaga published her residential school book, she wrote the multi-award-winning Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death and Hard Truths in a Northern City. It’s about kids coming south from northern Ontario reserves to attend a high school in Thunder Bay. Talaga writes about seven students who died violently while attending the school, far from their families. Five of them were found dead in rivers, foul play never adequately investigated.

They attended an Indigenous-run school, where kids were boarded with people who were carefully vetted, if not always Indigenous themselves. This was more than 40 years after Carson Graham had opened, but the school in Thunder Bay was still regarded as experimental.

As Talaga writes, the racism the displaced teenagers faced from the community was relentless and frequently violent. White hooligans would heave things at Indigenous people from passing cars, not just insults but bottles and heavy objects that injured some of them badly. It’s a hard book to read, kids having to deal with all that, too many of them binge drinking as they tried to obliterate life’s meanness.

Looking back, I don’t remember any violent deaths among my schoolmates, and I would. It’s also true that they could retreat to the Capilano reserve, even if they felt like Swedes living with Greeks. But there was endemic racism in the suburb and they couldn’t have escaped it. I’m sorry to write down something so nasty, but I remember white suburban parents often calling to their kids, “You stop that or Chief Matthias Joe is going to get you.”

Matthias Joe was the Chief of the people on the Capilano reserve, an elder who was universally respected and loved. My father knew him and spoke of him very highly. Yet my father was an outlier as well as a troubled and difficult man, one whose sole meeting with Derek I want to write about—which is hardly surprising since I write about my father all the time, although usually in fictional form.

My father had signed up in the Canadian army as soon as war was declared in 1939, a Prairie kid of 22 with limited education. He soon shipped overseas, and by the time they sent him home in 1944, he was in dreadful shape, most recently from having contracted hepatitis during the invasion of Italy and malaria after being sent to recover in a North African field hospital, two liver illnesses that left a six-foot-two-inch man weighing less than 100 pounds.

Then came the end of his first marriage and the loss of his daughter, my half-sister, in the divorce. I also think he suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, although they didn’t talk about PTSD at the time. I remember his nightmares throughout my childhood, his frightening rages, his sulks and melodrama and roars.

On the other hand, my father was a shop steward in his union, and I think it’s fair to say he identified with other people who were having a hard time rather than with the successes, which is something I think we’re missing in society these days. His hero was Dr. Martin Luther King, and I remember him leaning down to me once and saying, “Dr. King says all men are created equal. You hear that? All men.” If my brother and I made too much noise when the news was on: “Dr. King is speaking!” When Martin Luther King was assassinated: “They won’t even let us have him.”

He also had a couple of buddies on the Capilano reservation, and I remember something he said to one of our neighbours while they spoke over the fence. The neighbour had passed a comment about “drunken Indians,” and my father replied, “Well, Jeff, I know a hell of a lot of Indians who aren’t drunks, and a hell of a lot of drunks who aren’t Indians.”

I riffed off this part of my father in my latest novel, which is set in a fictional Vancouver suburb during the Cuban Missile Crisis. After my brother read it, I asked him if he thought the character was anything like our father, and he said no, not at all. I asked if maybe the character was the person our Dad had wanted to be. “I never knew him well enough to know what he wanted,” my brother said, and I realized that I never had, either.

So this was the man Derek met one night when he came to our house. I’d finally convinced my parents to let me have a party and invited all my friends. But Derek got the date wrong, and I looked out the kitchen window to see him at the top of the driveway the day after the party. He looked magnificent. He wore his hair long, and there was a feather where it was tied in the back, maybe an eagle feather. He also wore a tan leather vest open over his bare chest and an impressive amount of jewelry. Jeans, boots.

I didn’t know how to say he’d got the date wrong. I knew he’d be terribly embarrassed, as I was, and frittered a bit to my father, who was sitting in his usual place at the head of the kitchen table looking out the window at Derek. What should I say? What should I do?

“When somebody comes to the door,” my father said, “you invite them in.”

So I invited Derek inside and told him what was going on. He was ready to turn around and leave, but by then my father was getting to his feet, which was a difficult process. He was already beset with the arthritis of the spine that probably came from riding a motorcycle at speed over cobbles in England, carrying despatches during the Battle of Britain. You couldn’t just leave when someone was going to a great deal of trouble to get you a Coke. My father said Derek needed a drink before heading back, and laboriously opened a couple of bottles of Coke—he already had his coffee—telling me to take them and inviting Derek to take a seat, which he did.

I don’t remember saying much. It’s entirely possible we said next to nothing. It could have been like the times my father sat with his cousins at the kitchen table when we went to the farm in Alberta, the women talking in the background, the men silently drinking their coffee or beer or rum-and-Coke, one of them emitting the occasional unconnected, “Yup.” Maybe my father said, “Yup.” I simply don’t remember.

Yet the mood slowly lightened and the mistake was put aside. Derek had just dropped by for a visit, that was all. When he said it was time to go, my father offered him a ride home, and he declined. My father offered another time, and he still declined, so that was that. I would like to tie off the memory with some insightful remark Derek made, but back at school on Monday, I don’t remember either of us ever referring to it again.

We remained friends until we graduated, then I went to university, as my father had hoped, and I believe Derek went to art school downtown. I never saw him again—at least until a few days ago, when I watched a documentary about the return of the G’psgolox pole to Kitimaat village in northern B.C., and my heart broke.

Derek Wilson in his later years

Next week, I want to write about the National Film Board documentary directed by Gil Cardinal, in which a 50-year-old Derek features prominently with his brother Barry and their uncle, master carver Henry Robertson. If you want, you can watch it now here.

After that, I’ll go back to my usual schedule, posting every second Thursday. Please let me know what you think about both the post and the sked. I would appreciate it.