this should work -
https://www.facebook.com/james.raffan.92/posts/10205357791016499?hc_location=ufi - but in case it doesn't James Raffan's remarks follow:
"Hearty congratulations to The 180 for putting the canoe in the crosshairs of radio. We’re well overdue for a critical examination of ‘the vessel without decks’, particularly in light of the findings of Justice Sinclair and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and especially as we prepare to mark Canada’s Sesquicentennial. Intrigued as I was by the piece and to the extent that I actually agree with some of what she had to say and laud her for saying it, in the end I found Professor Dean’s occasionally churlish analysis disappointingly narrow and thin.
Canoes in public art and advertising from coast to coast to coast indicate that, as a symbol, this image, this idea has far broader appeal than might first appear. Tie that to canoes on coinage and paper money and on stamps going back at least a century, indicates a far more catholic and complex set of interrelated and overlapping messages—dare I say “narratives” — so tired of that word, why not just say “story,” or choose “palimpsest” which is more apt metaphor for a discussion such as this— linking to canoes in our (shared) indigenous heritage dating back to fur trade times and beyond, yes, but also canoes in sport, canoes as an industrial technology, canoes as a design element, canoes as transportation, canoes in recreation, and as an object of imagination and innovation.
Records of the Wilderness and Canoeing Symposium (
www.wcsymposium.com), held annually in Toronto, going back to the mid 80s show that gender balance of canoeophilia in that packed house is not nearly as male-skewed as Prof. Dean suggests, both on the presenter lists and in the audiences. Tie this to the alumni of the dozens of girls canoe tripping camps, some of which date back to foundings in the late 19th century and it makes the gender hegemony claim based on a wee bookie like Cairn Notes seem comically hyperbolic or even mean-spirited in its myopia.
But what genuinely surprised me in its insult to First Nations was Prof. Dean’s apparent lack of awareness of the resurgence of great canoes on the West Coast. Since the mid-80s a program called Pulling Together (one of several similar programs across the country) has been employing canoes and canoe trips to bring together police and social service personnel with First Nation elders and youth as a vessel and context for new conversations and shared experience. And the impressive and inclusive Tribal Journeys that have been inspiring people up and down the West Coast, from Seattle to Bella Bella and beyond … those have been celebrating the resurgence of cultural pride and purpose since 1989, or so, with the canoe right at the center of the politics of reconciliation and renewal.
And then, as you move east across the country, there are the Cree communities of central Saskatchewan, like Peter Ballantyne and Pelican Lake, who annually race big canoes as a youth development initiative. The prize for the winning team has been a hand made birchbark canoe made on the waterfront at Pelican Narrows. There is the Fort William First Nation, among others, that had a very successful bark canoe building program with their youth last summer.
And on it goes, with the canoe inspiring cultural resurgence right across to places like Miawpukek in Newfoundland where Chief Misel Joe, tired of hearing the Miqmaq got to Newfoundland on the deck of a Basques sailing ship, decided to build a bark canoe and paddle it to Nova Scotia, which he and a crew did several years ago. They’re at work right now, making another canoe to paddle west in 2017.
While we at the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough welcome the infusion of energy Prof. Dean has brought to the conversation, we feel that there is more to be said because, in this nation of rivers, the canoe has much to tell us about who we are and where we have been but it also has much to say about ‘being in the same boat’ and ‘pulling together’ toward a renewed and common future.
What we need to do—and Prof. Dean has kick-started this process—is to do what poets do in making the familiar strange or the strange familiar. We need to examine the canoe as if for the first time, to put it under a jeweler’s loupe, to look again at both its liabilities and potentialities as a symbol. Yes, we need to find ways to come to terms with the ongoing legacy of conquest. If there is a truly Canadian idea, rooted in our shared historiography and geography, a vessel that can tell us about respect, relevance, reciprocity and, yes, reconciliation, it is surely the canoe."
I trust James will not mind them being reprinted and shared here.