Friday, November 29, 2002
A visit to polar bear country, in Manitoba
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
While the good people of NYC were sweltering in a belated mid-November heat wave, this family was up in Manitoba, Canada, in a little town by name of Churchill, the polar bear capital of the world, looking for the creatures and suffering near frostbite at -17C, which is sub-zero Fahrenheit.
What chilled me more was the worrisome attitude of the Canadians, our old- time allies. On Broadway in Winnipeg, passing the sportswear factory/store of Nygard Co., I saw a sign, "United we stand with America," signed by Peter Nygard, the president of the company. Yet a few blocks further, at the palatial Legislative Building of Manitoba, there was a crowd with huge signs spelling out "No War." Not a huge crowd, but nevertheless. Since a few days earlier my second most favorite Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, had reported a proposal to withdraw their 2,000 man Canadian peacekeeper contingent from Afghanistan, at the same time that the impact of bin Laden's threatening letter was disclosed by Al Juazeiro, the trend became apparent. The Canadians have had an easygoing attitude towards immigrants, to boost their huge country's population of 30M. Consequently, they have unwittingly harbored a number of notable terrorists, 9/11 pilots and others, with a porous border to the US. Now they are getting worried, and may want to get on the good side of the Muslims. This, combined with Canadians' always suspicious attitude towards the US, hurts the prospects for peace.
We flew to Winnipeg, the town of 700,000 that gave Winnie the Pooh his name (short version: a British officer gave his pet bear to a zoo, frequented by A. A. Milne and son), via Minneapolis/St. Paul It is the least touristy hub (to polar bears, Hudson's Bay whale watching, birds and flowers of the taiga and tundra) that you can find - no tee shirts, no coffee mugs, no postcards, no strip joints or "inappropriate word/phrase removed" bars (except for local consumption, I'm told). But there are two casinos, not easily found.
The tourist Winnipeg is a square bounded by boulevards named Kennedy, Portage, Main and Broadway and their extensions. The crossing of the last two is closest to The Forks, where Red and Assiniboine Rivers meet, and the site of Fort Garry that gave its name to our chateau-style landmarked hotel. It was built by the Grand Trunk (a.k.a. Canadian Pacific) Railroad in 1911, with brass, marble and statuary to knock your eyes out, and it still works. A little Manitobiana: the land was first seen our "Half-Moon" sailor, Henry Hudson in 1610, on his fourth voyage, looking for the northwest passage to China. He was known to push the envelope; this time he failed and "Discovery" spent a winter of misery frozen in ice. In the spring angry sailors set him adrift, to perish in the Texas-size bay eventually named for him. They were not prosecuted, and some came back two years later, with Thomas Button. A Dane, Jens Monks, in 1619, lost all but two of his party to the cold (and to the eating of supposedly health-giving polar bear livers, to this day known to be riddled with bacteria). The "heartland" was eventually settled by two Frenchmen, Radisson and Chouart on the "Nonsuch," a ship financed by Prince Rupert, cousin of England's King Charles II. Their success prompted the founding of the legendary Hudson's Bay Company in 1670. Meanwhile, French "voyageurs," fur traders for North West Company, rivals of the HBC, settled the area and intermarried with the friendly Cree and Assiniboine. Their progeny, the Metis, were the white majority until waves of hungry Scots arrived after 1812, following the Industrial Revolution and the depredations of the sheep industry upon the tenant population of Scotland.
The newcomers settled in the choice Forks, and the Metis fought them. The representative of the Metis, Louis Riel, occupied Fort Garry and demanded a provisional government for Manitoba. He failed and had to flee, but Manitoba was eventually granted the status of a province. When Riel returned, he was tried for treason and hanged. Today the decorated statue of this founder stands in front of the Legislature Building, yet the history section of the official Manitoba Museum never mentions his name.
From friendly Winnipeg we flew, aboard a 40-year old Hawker Siddeley 40-passenger turbo-jet, to icy Churchill. Calm Air has a one-page weekly schedule, servicing the 400,000 Manitobans north of Winnipeg and the 23,000 Aboriginals/Indigenous people in the Canadian Arctic territory of Nunavut, which encompasses 1/5 of the Federation's landmass. Churchill, with 671 inhabitants, also serves as the hospital center for the north, and the mostly Inuit (Eskimo) people come here to give birth, with the certificate reading "Churchill, Nunavut" (there are government benefits for Nunavut people.) Aboriginals is the name of choice for Inuits, used to distinguish themselves from the First Nations (Indians; the terms indigenous and natives are also involved), whom they consider shiftless. Alcohol is the great enemy that seduces both groups.
Nunavut Territory (est. 1999, capital Iqualuit with 3,600 inhabitants) has 26 communities, and 1/4 of the population are artists, creating stone art (no wood above Arctic Circle), with the best pieces certified by a Canadian Government label. The official languages are Innuktatut, English, French and Denne, a native tongue The Innuktatut alphabet is syllabic, with an orthogtaphy of some 40 symbols and more than one format available for the PC. It was invented by a Bible teacher around the end of the 19th Century, and has been adopted to the point that young Inuits read and speak the ethnic languages and ignore English. So I'm told by a guide, lifetime friend of the indigenous people, who also thinks that giving them unlimited use the salmon and caribou ends in waste. He's seen native hunters kill a herd of 56 caribous, for their tongues, a delicacy. Education! Next week, the lowdown on polar bears and their attitude training.
While the good people of NYC were sweltering in a belated mid-November heat wave, this family was up in Manitoba, Canada, in a little town by name of Churchill, the polar bear capital of the world, looking for the creatures and suffering near frostbite at -17C, which is sub-zero Fahrenheit.
What chilled me more was the worrisome attitude of the Canadians, our old- time allies. On Broadway in Winnipeg, passing the sportswear factory/store of Nygard Co., I saw a sign, "United we stand with America," signed by Peter Nygard, the president of the company. Yet a few blocks further, at the palatial Legislative Building of Manitoba, there was a crowd with huge signs spelling out "No War." Not a huge crowd, but nevertheless. Since a few days earlier my second most favorite Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, had reported a proposal to withdraw their 2,000 man Canadian peacekeeper contingent from Afghanistan, at the same time that the impact of bin Laden's threatening letter was disclosed by Al Juazeiro, the trend became apparent. The Canadians have had an easygoing attitude towards immigrants, to boost their huge country's population of 30M. Consequently, they have unwittingly harbored a number of notable terrorists, 9/11 pilots and others, with a porous border to the US. Now they are getting worried, and may want to get on the good side of the Muslims. This, combined with Canadians' always suspicious attitude towards the US, hurts the prospects for peace.
We flew to Winnipeg, the town of 700,000 that gave Winnie the Pooh his name (short version: a British officer gave his pet bear to a zoo, frequented by A. A. Milne and son), via Minneapolis/St. Paul It is the least touristy hub (to polar bears, Hudson's Bay whale watching, birds and flowers of the taiga and tundra) that you can find - no tee shirts, no coffee mugs, no postcards, no strip joints or "inappropriate word/phrase removed" bars (except for local consumption, I'm told). But there are two casinos, not easily found.
The tourist Winnipeg is a square bounded by boulevards named Kennedy, Portage, Main and Broadway and their extensions. The crossing of the last two is closest to The Forks, where Red and Assiniboine Rivers meet, and the site of Fort Garry that gave its name to our chateau-style landmarked hotel. It was built by the Grand Trunk (a.k.a. Canadian Pacific) Railroad in 1911, with brass, marble and statuary to knock your eyes out, and it still works. A little Manitobiana: the land was first seen our "Half-Moon" sailor, Henry Hudson in 1610, on his fourth voyage, looking for the northwest passage to China. He was known to push the envelope; this time he failed and "Discovery" spent a winter of misery frozen in ice. In the spring angry sailors set him adrift, to perish in the Texas-size bay eventually named for him. They were not prosecuted, and some came back two years later, with Thomas Button. A Dane, Jens Monks, in 1619, lost all but two of his party to the cold (and to the eating of supposedly health-giving polar bear livers, to this day known to be riddled with bacteria). The "heartland" was eventually settled by two Frenchmen, Radisson and Chouart on the "Nonsuch," a ship financed by Prince Rupert, cousin of England's King Charles II. Their success prompted the founding of the legendary Hudson's Bay Company in 1670. Meanwhile, French "voyageurs," fur traders for North West Company, rivals of the HBC, settled the area and intermarried with the friendly Cree and Assiniboine. Their progeny, the Metis, were the white majority until waves of hungry Scots arrived after 1812, following the Industrial Revolution and the depredations of the sheep industry upon the tenant population of Scotland.
The newcomers settled in the choice Forks, and the Metis fought them. The representative of the Metis, Louis Riel, occupied Fort Garry and demanded a provisional government for Manitoba. He failed and had to flee, but Manitoba was eventually granted the status of a province. When Riel returned, he was tried for treason and hanged. Today the decorated statue of this founder stands in front of the Legislature Building, yet the history section of the official Manitoba Museum never mentions his name.
From friendly Winnipeg we flew, aboard a 40-year old Hawker Siddeley 40-passenger turbo-jet, to icy Churchill. Calm Air has a one-page weekly schedule, servicing the 400,000 Manitobans north of Winnipeg and the 23,000 Aboriginals/Indigenous people in the Canadian Arctic territory of Nunavut, which encompasses 1/5 of the Federation's landmass. Churchill, with 671 inhabitants, also serves as the hospital center for the north, and the mostly Inuit (Eskimo) people come here to give birth, with the certificate reading "Churchill, Nunavut" (there are government benefits for Nunavut people.) Aboriginals is the name of choice for Inuits, used to distinguish themselves from the First Nations (Indians; the terms indigenous and natives are also involved), whom they consider shiftless. Alcohol is the great enemy that seduces both groups.
Nunavut Territory (est. 1999, capital Iqualuit with 3,600 inhabitants) has 26 communities, and 1/4 of the population are artists, creating stone art (no wood above Arctic Circle), with the best pieces certified by a Canadian Government label. The official languages are Innuktatut, English, French and Denne, a native tongue The Innuktatut alphabet is syllabic, with an orthogtaphy of some 40 symbols and more than one format available for the PC. It was invented by a Bible teacher around the end of the 19th Century, and has been adopted to the point that young Inuits read and speak the ethnic languages and ignore English. So I'm told by a guide, lifetime friend of the indigenous people, who also thinks that giving them unlimited use the salmon and caribou ends in waste. He's seen native hunters kill a herd of 56 caribous, for their tongues, a delicacy. Education! Next week, the lowdown on polar bears and their attitude training.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:15 PM 
