Ernestly ?!Ernestly ?!By ERNIE NEUFELD, Weyburn Review Associate Publisher
Jigsaw puzzles have never been my forte, so it may be inappropriate to compare them to any personal challenge I have assumed. Nevertheless, it seems fitting to compare a personal conundrum to the frustration of trying to fit three pieces from three dissimilar puzzles into a meaningful picture.
The first piece of the puzzle is over a century old, but my own connection with it dates back only 24 years. A drop in the bucket, you will agree, the way decades roll by nowadays.
In early 1966 a student at Western Christian College, Bob Hamilton, came to me with the unpublished diary of his great-grandfather, Staff Sgt. Walter Francis Stewart, who had joined the Midlander Battalion at Port Hope, Ontario, in March of 1885 to serve queen and country by helping to put down the Northwest Rebellion arising in northern Saskatchewan, by Metis settlers under the leadership of political activist Louis Riel.
The hand-written but legible and articulate diary covered the full period from the writer's enlistment, through the trying westward trek along an incomplete railway line and via Saskatchewan River steamer to Batoche; through that historic battle, and to his eventual discharge in July of the same year. Riel, you know, was captured, tried for treason in Regina, convicted and hanged, but is credited nowadays with being a champion of an ill-used Metis people.
The Review published the diary in eight weekly instalments. It was a fitting component of the volume of this paper in the year preceding the Centennial of Confederation. No doubt it was read by many readers of the day, but soon existed only on the yellowing pages of our archives. In recent years I have thought of it often, and wondered whether it might not be reproduced as a booklet suitable, among other things, for use by classes studying one of the few armed conflicts on Canadian soil.
I tried unsuccessfully several times to contact Mr. Hamilton and Ontario relatives of Stewart to explore the desirability of such a booklet, but so far have failed to establish contact. A further question that suggested itself was how educators might use such a product. This raised a wide spectrum of related speculation.
Then early this year, I heard a presentation by a World War 2 vintage seaman introducing a "Living History", focused on "triumphs and tragedies" of the Canadian armed forces in peace and war during the past century. To this end, he had recruited a modest number of veterans, qualified and willing to visit high school classrooms and bring this phase of history to them from personal perspectives.
At first I saw this as a tie-in for my own project, but as I heard him out, I realized that while the initiative had experienced some success where accepted, a number of new obstacles quickly became apparent. Obviously, the narrowing "window" of living veterans was a major concern, as well as the need to screen individuals and presentations for suitability. Further obstacles manifesting themselves were the teachers' lack of knowledge and disinterest in history; opposition; educators' fear of the political correctness of the thrust of the program, and unfamiliarity of student bodies (in the changing Canadian mosaic) with Canadian conventions, traditions and values.
Certainly I didn't see much hope in trying to weave the 19th century Riel "adventure" into an already beset and besieged program.
Soon after hearing the foregoing, I read: "'Tis", a memoir of Frank McCourt. As a young Irish immigrant to the United States trying, about 15 years after the Korean War, to inculcate a hard core New York City high school class with cultural and social diversity, with appreciation for reading and writing. In a fit of frustration, he clears a years-old accumulation of old test papers from a classroom closet, and discovers essays written by neighborhood students recently returned from World War 2, and others conveying the thoughts, hopes and prayers of the lonely girls who had waited for them.
Guided by inspiration or mindless desperation, he hands out essays, requires students to read them, and soon sees tears flowing as the class discovers the writings and memories of brothers, parents, uncles, cousins, friends and neighbors. They do not miraculously turn into dedicated scholars, but they have learned a bit of history and a need to register their own thoughts.
I'm still not certain just how these three puzzle-pieces fit together, and just what I am proposing. But my thoughts turn to the possibility of simple collections of letters, essays, diaries and even personal presentations that might be used in school classrooms perhaps just once in a while to bring the experiences of familiar people who have served in wars, kept the peace in foreign countries, broken the prairie sod, endured the privation and dust storms of the Dirty Thirties, visited Expo 67, lent their expertise to the people of developing countries or whatever.
Perhaps like too many of my "good ideas", this one is a hopeless potion of wishful thinking that no one will want to drink. But perhaps someone could kick it around and come up with a practical semblance of it that might work without necessarily changing the world.
My address (also listed on the Review's Website) is ernestly@pathcom.com.
Box 400, 904 East Avenue
Weyburn, SK
S4H 2K4
Phone: (306) 842-7487
Fax: (306) 842-0282
E-mail: weyburn.review@sk.sympatico.ca
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Review (1987) Ltd.
