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Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence 2009
In his acceptance speech, Terry Glavin cited previous winners of the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence and encouraged British Columbians to "find themselves"; in local stories-to rebel against the parochial. "This requires not just an alertness to the local, but a conscious rebellion against the parochial, the cosseted, and the preconceived.";
Here are some excerpts.
ACKNOWLEDGING HIS PREDECESSORS
(P.K. Page, Gary Geddes, Patrick Lane, Jack Hodgson, and Robert Bringhurst)
"When I was in high school, I came upon Gary Geddes' 15 Canadian Poets, which led me to P.K. Page and Pat Lane. Drawn deeper into the interior, upriver, and upcoast, I saw in Jack Hodgson's Spit Delaney's Island a magical landscape, in a work of fiction, that I immediately recognized as the real world, which was also a kind of a hidden world that I was only then discovering around me.
"I'd been noticing that there were words in the language I spoke, and I didn't even know where they came from. They were words like skookum, cultus, hyack, and klootchman.
"I found myself returning, puzzled and awestruck, to the epic stories the old people used to tell in places like Katzie and Popkum and Musqueam.
"I didn't fully understand why until years later when I read Robert Bringhurst's translations of the oral literature of the Haida mythtellers, and the stories of Ghandl, the blind poet of Sea Lion Town.
"On the old maps, such works of grandeur and beauty were supposed to be located only in such places as the Ramayana, or the Epic of Gilgamesh.";
ON FALSE IMAGES
"The old maps show Alexander Mackenzie's route from Canada to the coast in 1793, and you will be told that he was the first white man to do it, and fair play to him, but they do not show the route the Algonquian chief Mongsoaeythinyuwok took on his own overland journey from Lake Michigan to the Pacific in 1728.";
ON JAMES DOUGLAS
"New parochial histories admonish us to be ashamed of our colonial legacy, and fair play to shame. But there is nothing to be ashamed of in our first governor, James Douglas, the grandson of a "free coloured"; woman from Barbados, or in Douglas's wife, Lady Amelia, an Irish Cree, both of whom were followers of the great British abolitionist, William Wilberforce.";
ON CROSS-CULTURALISM
"Unless you've been listening to Todd Wong, the animateur of Vancouver's annual Gung Haggis Fat Choy celebrations, you might not know that the Cantonese merchants of Chinatown were celebrating Robbie Burns Day as far back as the 1930s.";
ON UNIVERSAL VALUES
"If I hadn't listened closely to old people like Vera Robson on Mayne Island, I would never have known about the white people who fought against the internment of their Japanese neighbours in the 1940s.
"I would not have known that from the camps, the Japanese sent back Christmas cards with maps that showed the places where they'd hidden troves of sake for their islander friends, as presents.
"Those are the maps worth keeping and studying. On those maps are the small kindnesses and the purely local affairs that make up what is universal in
human affairs, and no true story can be told without them.
"Throw away the old maps that don't show these things. Listen closely to the stories the old people will tell you in places like Gitanmaax and Captain George Town and Yakweakwioose, and you'll learn that the old maps are wrong, that there are no impenetrable mountain ranges between the wild and the tamed, nature and culture, or language and landscape, and there is no unfathomable sea between east and west.
"Throw out the old compasses, sextants and chronometers. Travel back overland across Canada without them, and you will notice that this is not a western country. It is just as much an eastern country, especially out here, and out here is just as much Canada as anywhere else.
"Take this method with you to such places as the Russian Far East, Afghanistan, or Guangdong, and you will notice the same.
"The compasses that never worked here won't work there, either, so you put them aside, and you see there is no such thing as "western values,"; only universal values.
"There is only the whole world and its stories, and we're right in the middle of it all, no matter where we are.";
[BCBW 2009]
Here are some excerpts.
ACKNOWLEDGING HIS PREDECESSORS
(P.K. Page, Gary Geddes, Patrick Lane, Jack Hodgson, and Robert Bringhurst)
"When I was in high school, I came upon Gary Geddes' 15 Canadian Poets, which led me to P.K. Page and Pat Lane. Drawn deeper into the interior, upriver, and upcoast, I saw in Jack Hodgson's Spit Delaney's Island a magical landscape, in a work of fiction, that I immediately recognized as the real world, which was also a kind of a hidden world that I was only then discovering around me.
"I'd been noticing that there were words in the language I spoke, and I didn't even know where they came from. They were words like skookum, cultus, hyack, and klootchman.
"I found myself returning, puzzled and awestruck, to the epic stories the old people used to tell in places like Katzie and Popkum and Musqueam.
"I didn't fully understand why until years later when I read Robert Bringhurst's translations of the oral literature of the Haida mythtellers, and the stories of Ghandl, the blind poet of Sea Lion Town.
"On the old maps, such works of grandeur and beauty were supposed to be located only in such places as the Ramayana, or the Epic of Gilgamesh.";
ON FALSE IMAGES
"The old maps show Alexander Mackenzie's route from Canada to the coast in 1793, and you will be told that he was the first white man to do it, and fair play to him, but they do not show the route the Algonquian chief Mongsoaeythinyuwok took on his own overland journey from Lake Michigan to the Pacific in 1728.";
ON JAMES DOUGLAS
"New parochial histories admonish us to be ashamed of our colonial legacy, and fair play to shame. But there is nothing to be ashamed of in our first governor, James Douglas, the grandson of a "free coloured"; woman from Barbados, or in Douglas's wife, Lady Amelia, an Irish Cree, both of whom were followers of the great British abolitionist, William Wilberforce.";
ON CROSS-CULTURALISM
"Unless you've been listening to Todd Wong, the animateur of Vancouver's annual Gung Haggis Fat Choy celebrations, you might not know that the Cantonese merchants of Chinatown were celebrating Robbie Burns Day as far back as the 1930s.";
ON UNIVERSAL VALUES
"If I hadn't listened closely to old people like Vera Robson on Mayne Island, I would never have known about the white people who fought against the internment of their Japanese neighbours in the 1940s.
"I would not have known that from the camps, the Japanese sent back Christmas cards with maps that showed the places where they'd hidden troves of sake for their islander friends, as presents.
"Those are the maps worth keeping and studying. On those maps are the small kindnesses and the purely local affairs that make up what is universal in
human affairs, and no true story can be told without them.
"Throw away the old maps that don't show these things. Listen closely to the stories the old people will tell you in places like Gitanmaax and Captain George Town and Yakweakwioose, and you'll learn that the old maps are wrong, that there are no impenetrable mountain ranges between the wild and the tamed, nature and culture, or language and landscape, and there is no unfathomable sea between east and west.
"Throw out the old compasses, sextants and chronometers. Travel back overland across Canada without them, and you will notice that this is not a western country. It is just as much an eastern country, especially out here, and out here is just as much Canada as anywhere else.
"Take this method with you to such places as the Russian Far East, Afghanistan, or Guangdong, and you will notice the same.
"The compasses that never worked here won't work there, either, so you put them aside, and you see there is no such thing as "western values,"; only universal values.
"There is only the whole world and its stories, and we're right in the middle of it all, no matter where we are.";
[BCBW 2009]
Submitted on June 2, 2009 in By David.
