Culture and Belonging

The Province of Ontario is currently holding a series of “Culture Talks.” These are town hall-style meetings across the province designed to help shape Ontario’s first culture strategy.  The goals are: (1) to establish what Ontarians value about culture, (2) to identify opportunities to better meet the needs of the arts and culture sector, and (3) to ensure that the government’s policies and programs reflect Ontario’s diverse populations and communities.  Much of the discussion, I’m sure, will revolve around the issue of why culture matters.

There are many reasons to promote culture, but I am going to suggest one that doesn’t often occur to people.  I think artists—and I’m thinking primarily of writers and painters here—create a sense of place.  Wallace Stegner, who memorialized the southwest corner of Saskatchewan in Wolf Willow, wrote: “No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments.”  He went even further: “[N]o place is a place until it has had a poet.”

Bruce Feiler, writing in Walking the Bible, wonders why, as an American, the landscape of the Holy Land feels so familiar to him, almost like a homecoming, even though he has never visited before.  At the end of his long journey, having travelled through Turkey, Israel, Egypt and Jordan, he is resting on Mount Nebo, sharing the same view of the Promised Land as Moses once did, and he asks his guide, Avner, if this feeling of “coming home” is rooted in his DNA. No, says Avner, it’s your cultural DNA—your Bible. In other words, it is the stories Feiler was raised on that link him to Holy Land. It is the stories in the Bible that create the feeling of coming home.

By contrast, many Canadians do not feel at home in their own country.  Writers and critics as diverse as Susanna Moody, Douglas LePan, Northrop Frye, and Earle Birney have complained of Canada’s newness and our lack of ghosts.  Canadians from our First Nations and from Quebec have stories and myths which root them in the landscape, but many of us still look elsewhere for home. Yann Martel famously (or infamously) compared Canada to a large motel, and he was chided for it, but he had a valid point.  

Diarist and diplomat Charles Ritchie wrote that he thought of “this country not as young but as old as nature—antedating Athens and Rome—always these hidden lakes and waiting woods.” I’ve always felt the same way about the Canadian Shield country.  It feels ancient. Men feel insignificant, as if our ascendency is also insignificant, a blip, a ripple on the stream of time.  We have yet to fully inhabit the landscape.  Northrop Frye accused us of having a “garrison mentality” and felt that there was some part of the Canadian identity that fears the emptiness of Canada and builds a psychological barrier against it.  I would argue that this is where artists and writers can help. They can give us images and stories that help us to imaginatively inhabit the landscape and allow us to begin to feel at home.

The importance of this sense of belonging goes beyond mere comfort.  If we don’t feel we belong in a place, we will not value it.  We will allow terrible things to happen to that place, like strip mining, clear cutting, or farming the soil to the point of exhaustion and using our water as a source of income or as a place to dump mining sludge or industrial effluent.  There is a difference between a place we simply live in and a place we call home. We protect our homes, we don’t see them as things to be used, but as places we inhabit and value.

Canada has a number of writers and painters who have helped to define us.  They are often, by necessity, regional writers, but that is not a bad thing.  Lucy Maude Montgomery has shaped the way we think of Prince Edward Island.  Orillia will always be the “little town” of Stephen Leacock’s invention.  The Yukon has been claimed by Robert Service’s “men who moil for gold.”  Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven have given us a vision of northern Ontario that has become iconic.  Whenever I see a twisted tree on the shore of Georgian Bay, I think of Thomson’s painting “The West Wind” and the world I see is beautiful and familiar.  It feels like home.

Have a great Thanksgiving weekend.

--Ken Haigh