Hidden in
an attic in the village of Canton, just north of Port Hope, Ontario, lay for
many years the dusty journals of J. David Ford, born in the eastern arctic in
1910. Recently discovered and edited by
Marnie Bickle, a family relative, Native
Born Son (2018) chronicles Ford’s youthful adventures as a member of a long
line of fur traders living among the Inuit at the north end of Hudson
Bay – namely Coats Island and Southampton Island. The stories include, as well,
high school at St. John’s, Newfoundland, but more dramatically the journey on
land, snow, ice and sometimes water to obtain foodstuffs, after the annual
supply ship failed to arrive, blocked by ice, circa 1930.
Full disclosure: as it turns out, Ford was husband to my own grade 9 Geography teacher, though I did not learn this until after purchasing the book. We all knew her as “granny Ford” (it was her last year of teaching) at Port Hope High School. Little did we know that Ruth and David Ford corresponded with each other over the course of WWII, and upon his return from overseas - when they married and built a home together - he dealt with “shell shock” for the remainder of his life, such was the difficult transition from the arctic to the theatres of war.
But anyone
wanting to discover the hardship of Canada’s nomadic north well before the era
of snowmobiles and – now – climate change and would benefit from reading this
book. Consider the following sample passage.
When the igloos were ready, we beat the snow
from our frosted parkas and crawled in through the snow house door on hands and
knees. We felt some warmth
immediately. A caribou tallow candle was
lit; then we prepared a feast of beans and pemmican made from seal and caribou
meat, raisins, salt and pepper. We had
tea and bannock that had been fry-baked in seal oil. The bannock was very easy to eat and seldom
froze in spite of the -60 [degrees] F weather.[1]
Who builds
igloos today? Ford articulates how
wooden structures, such as the HBC store or his home, would be completely lined
with blocks of snow for insulating purposes.
Given the current melting of the permafrost, much that Ford
describes in his journals has disappeared, known to perhaps a few Inuit elders
today, if any. Reading Native Born Son recovers knowledge of
the past but unfortunately does not restore some of the most important elements
(aside from the human) – the need for snow and ice.
The
journals are lively, but at a sublime level they are also suggestive of a new
(but still ancient) paradigm – one that admires (or feels closely connected to)
Indigenous and Inuit ways. Ford’s life
in the arctic straddles two different cultures, but he is almost totally
immersed, communicating in their language and respected by all generations.
Today numbers of people want to replace the prevailing model of man’s power
over nature and its resources as the accepted modus vivendi. Reading the memoir invites us to consider a more
sustainable example of cohabiting with nature, valued by this growing minority to
be the way of the future. Thus, parenthetically-speaking,
it should not come as a surprise, for example, that some in the Green Party now
want Jody Wilson-Raybould to lead them, given that Elizabeth May has stepped
down.
This
paradigm shift reflects the degree to which we have experienced (for lack of a
better term) a kind of ‘Indigenous revival’ in recent years, compensation in
part for Canada’s original sins at Residential Schools. Ford himself was raised a Christian, yet he
defended the Inuit absence of a religion (leading them in prayer only once when
the risks faced by the group were particularly high). In broader terms, while the Lord’s Prayer is now
absent from our classroom rituals, it has been replaced by regular public
acknowledgements by “settlers” gathered on unceded Indigenous territory. Northrup Frye’s The Great Code (1982), which examined the Bible’s lasting influence
on imaginative literature in the West, has been supplanted by John Ralston
Saul’s work, A Fair Country (2008),
which alleges that Canadians are more métis than European in origin, a questionable claim.[2] It is worth surmising, however, that we seem
to be developing a new kind of secular code, and Native Born Son belongs to the literature which unearths and
esteems Indigenous ways – and European man’s cooperation with its wisdom.
[1] J.
David Ford, Native Born Son: The Journals
of J. David Ford, ed. Marnie Hare Bickle (Cobourg, ON: Blue Denim Press, 2018),
p. 200.
[2]
See my book review of A Fair Country
posted to this blog site.
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