So far, this'll do...

We are a multicultural society; it’s hard to imagine a country that is not. The Americans have their southerners, their cowboys, their 49ers, their New Englanders; the French their regions; the British, the Russians and the Chinese theirs. Our cultural multiplicity does not exist past the borders of our own country, and does not have its sources there—the sources are right here at home. There is the complex culture that builds up around endless unpopulated flatlands and on living on a rock; there is the comfort that comes from being embraced by mountains or the sea that builds another; there is a special strength bred in lands of perpetual winter darkness and frozen earth; there is a culture that arises from living with the majority that causes people to call themselves “central”; there is a culture, notwithstanding, that grows in a distinct society; there is another born from history and shared by a relative handful living in forests of small trees and next to a raging ocean. We have them all and more and that is what makes us multicultural.

Whichever one of those cultures we come from we must accept that those from outside will come to accept ours as their own. We have to expect those from centres of eastern hegemony who come to the west accept what we have and not to bring their eastern ways and force them upon us, just as we, when we move to those same populated centres of the country, have to accept their ways and not hold the beauty of our homeland too much in their faces when the plum blossoms come out in February. We have to expect that our own traditions and the institutions that we hold dear, our hockey team, our music and our historic love of baseball, for example, will not have to play second fiddle to those in Cape Breton or Toronto; we have to expect that the “culture” of CBC is not always The Rankin Family over the Spirit of the West, that “the battle of Ontario” will not preempt any part of the broadcast of a game that really matters here on the Coast, or that the continuing success of our Lower Mainland baseball teams goes unknown and unsung across the country; and we have to expect that those who do come from those faraway eastern lands will not cling so arrogantly to their symbols and attire when they are here. Our cultural heritage, the one of being British Columbian—or more particularly in my case, of being from the Coast—must be allowed to thrive undiluted by some other notion of what it is to be Canadian. That is what it is to be multicultural.

Yes we are a mosaic, but the tiles that form the greater picture are not imported from other countries but formed, like the giant quiltwork of the prairies, by our geography and our local histories, and not by a centralized broadcast network, “national newspapers,” or, as George Bowering has put it, by those purveyors of upper Canadian nationalism “who would have us be hewers of wood, drawers of water, sweepers of porches.”

History is living here and everywhere else; its life is lived up here in the west just like it is lived down there in the prairies, north in the untamed and unspoilt wilderness, in the Shield, amongst the lakes, along the great industrial valley and beside that faraway unsettled sea. People come from all over the world to contribute to those histories and to become part of them, and we have to realize that those who come from the west, from far across our own most giant and peaceful of oceans, are doing that in the same way as those from the east across our giant wall of mountains and the vast expanse of the North American continent, and those from south of the long arbitrary and often unsatisfying line joining us to that other multicultural behemoth below. All guests should be treated with the same hospitality and with the same expectation that they will try to find their place within the process of developing our culture here on the Coast.

It is a sad part of all of our collective histories in Canada that marauder minorities from eastern lands have come and demanded submission from the majority living everywhere from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island; the demand reaches its ugliest when it is made by genocide, and has extended linguistically even to the point where we are to call those easterners “Western” against all our better judgement and the geographical reality before us. They have demanded that we include them in our own “we,” to the point where we privilege them above all those others they would have us call “they.” We should have learned better by now; should know that our strength comes from our own developing history right now, and that Canada’s strength comes from preserving the right of all those separate histories to develop naturally, unhindered and unmanaged by those around them, like those histories do in and around the centres of money and power along Lake Ontario and the Ottawa River.

The past is behind us and though we cannot forget the ugliness of the genocide that preceded us, we cannot put that same genocide of the past on a “People’s History” pedestal in order to hide the cultural slaughter that we are being convinced to execute upon ourselves right now. Our history is not European, Upper or Lower Canadian, but is our own, long and involved, ugly and beautiful, but decidedly ours. Let’s keep it that way in the name of the multiculturalism that we have had thrust upon us as an ideology, and in the name of the real multiculturalism that will make the country a great one.

A Visit

Green light against
Browning. Messages
beyond the spine
corners of Sordello
Luminescent shimmer
as a squirrel walks by—
high wire show
behind slats
disturbing
the vision Neck lock
fingers find
thirty-two, seventy-eight who
knows?
leaves twist, offer solace
against the burning distance
the falling of the near
future
A voice, fine grit against cedar,
takes tongue and lifts
the broken soul into
lights of language
questions of sole
purpose of direct
shun the light
darkness
rests.