Yellowknife Halifax Montreal Toronto Baker Lake
From right to left: Blair Shakell, me, Kim Smiley, unknown, Mike Hanna
Yellowknife 1968-1969
With little money, a vague plan, and a Canadian passport in case I found a way to South America, I decided to go first to Vancouver. I thought I might continue down the west coast of the US, through Mexico, to South America and find work on my own. I imagined helping Peruvian farmers build adobe houses.
In magazines, I had read about the work of British architect, John Turner, in Peru. He was making efforts to harness the energy of community building to the question of housing. I was very attracted to his approach.
John Turner
Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Process (New York: Macmillan, 1972).
John Turner is a British architect who has written extensively on housing and community organisation, his writings being influenced by a formative period spent working in the squatter settlements of Peru from 1957-1965. There, Turner studied and advised on a number of reconstruction and slum upgrading programmes which were part of a nation-wide community development initiative. During this time Peru was also a leading centre for debate on housing policy, community development and the role of self-help. Turner's own theoretical stance was formed in this context and combined aspects of the work of the Peruvian urban theorists Fernando Belaúnde, Pedro Beltrán and Carlos Delgado.
Turner's central thesis argued that housing is best provided and managed by those who are to dwell in it rather than being centrally administered by the state. In the self-building and self-management of housing and neighbourhoods, Turner asserted that the global North had much to learn from the rapidly developing cities of the global South. Through a number of empirical studies, some of which were published in a collection for Habitat International Coalition entitled Building Community, he showed clearly that neighbourhoods designed with local groups worked better since people were experts on their own situations and should be given the 'freedom to build', a phrase that became the title for an edited collection by Tuner. Whether this freedom was granted by the state or wrested from it through squatting was less important. Within this framework the state as well as private professionals such as architects and engineers, act as enablers, resulting in a shift in thinking that valorises experience and local know-how over technocratic and professionalised forms of knowledge.
In contrast to the 'aided self-help' policies of the World Bank, for which Turner is frequently credited, his vision was far more radical as he not only contended that residents should build their own houses and neighbourhoods, but that they should also have control over their finances and management. In Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Process, which was first published in 1972, Turner sets out these views, which remain relevant today. Whilst there have been some attempts in Europe to involve residents in decisions regarding their built environment, such as the work of the participatory architects of the 1960s and 1970s, the Scandinavian cohousing movement, the community technical aid centres of the UK and the work of architects such as Walter Segal, the full potential of such an engagement has not yet been realized.
In November, I flew as far as Winnipeg and then hitch-hiked to Vancouver. I slept on the couch of two Nova Scotia friends. Janet MacCachren had an office job and Betty Lou McKeigan worked from home doing deodorant market surveys on the telephone. I went to Arthur Erickson’s Vancouver office. He was an internationally famous architect. The receptionist was very sympathetic, but they had no work. “Would you be interested in cleaning out the basement? The fire inspector is coming next week. It has to be empty when they come.” The next day while I was cleaning in the dark downstairs, Mr. Erickson came to check on my progress. He was satisfied and I got paid for a few days work. Eighteen years later I met him at his exhibition in Beijing, and reminded him about my job at his office.
I didn’t have enough money to go to Peru, so I went to the Arctic. I didn’t need to go to South America; the Third World was in my own backyard. From my father I knew something about Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories because he had worked for the Canadian Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources and had been instrumental in getting the capital of the NWT moved there from Ottawa. I checked the map; there was a road to Yellowknife from Edmonton. I could hitch-hike.
My money ran out in Edmonton. I stayed one night with a friend of a friend. The next day after a good breakfast the kind lady of the house gave me a brown paper bag. I peeked inside. In addition to sandwiches there was two dollars and a package of cigarettes. They also arranged a ride for me with a friend of theirs who was going west toward British Columbia. I could get out of the city to the junction with the road that went north. From that junction it was about 900 km to the small community of Enterprise, near Hay River, just above the 60th parallel. From there it was another 300 or so km. to Yellowknife.
At the junction with the road north, I waited only a few minutes and got a ride with a man who ran a gas station in Enterprise just inside the Northwest Territories, 70 km north of the 60th parallel. He was planning to get there by nightfall. At a rest stop in Peace River, I spent most of my two dollars and arrived in Enterprise with 35 cents. As he let me out of his car, the man said, “The motel is over there”. I asked whether I could sleep on his gas station floor. He said “No.”
I was standing alone in the dark; the stars were bright. It was mid-December and 35 degrees below zero. The narrow highway disappeared in the distance; beside it a sign said, “Do not proceed without matches, shovel, hatchet, tent, extra gas, etc.” These were all needed in case your car broke down and you had to spend the night outside.
I could see a few houses, not far away. It was late; should I knock on doors? “God, please help me!” I saw a worker’s bunkhouse not far away and went inside. It was warm and no-one was around. Down a corridor I looked into a few rooms; there was one with a mattress and no sheets. I assumed it was unoccupied. I lay down and fell asleep.
The call of ravens woke me in the morning; still no-one around. I crossed the road and spent my remaining funds on a coffee. A talkative man came in with some Husky puppies and chatted with the waitress while he ate his breakfast. I learned from their conversation that he was from a farm near Edmonton, and was heading to Yellowknife to sell a truckload of fresh fruit, vegetables and eggs. As he was about to leave, I asked whether I could get a ride with him. He had timed his trip, I think, to catch people stocking up for Christmas. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Boy, I’ve been watching you; and you’re not pushy. I like that. Come on.”
Soon he pulled out a bottle of whiskey from under his seat. “No thanks”, I said. He took a mouthful as we crossed the ice over the Mackenzie River. Suddenly stopping, he grabbed his rifle from behind the seat, jumped out and started shooting. “Ptarmigan”, he said. We left empty-handed. Even without whiskey, white birds on white snow are hard to hit.
In Yellowknife, he offered me the use of the spare bed in his motel room if I would help him that week selling his vegetables. “Sure”. My first job was to go to the main supermarket, owned by a Chinese family, and look at their prices for fruit, vegetables and eggs. I surreptitiously took notes; he would sell a little cheaper. Many people came to his truck and sales were brisk. After a few days, some customers came back with complaints about the eggs; they were hard-boiled. The eggs had been too near the heater in the back of his truck. When you bring produce to the Arctic in winter you have to prevent it from freezing. He had accidentally cooked some of his own eggs.
Stuart Hodgson was Commissioner of the NWT from 1967 to 1979. He was the first commissioner to actually reside in the NWT, with Yellowknife as its capital. I asked to see him. The son of Frank Carter was warmly welcomed and I was quickly assigned to the Personnel Manager to see what work I could do. This was the only time I took advantage of my relation with my father to get work. I knew how scrupulous Dad was about not seeking advantages for family members. I was offered a position with the Northwest Territories Department of Public Works (NWT/DPW). There was the head of the NWT/DPW, the secretary of the Head of the NWT/DPW, and me, the draftsman. That was it. By the time I left, nine months later, the staff had grown from three to twenty or so.
I needed a place to live before I lost my bed at the motel. In the local bar I met a young Inuit man, Peter Green, who was also looking for a place. The bar was like a town square. In the year or so I spent there, I met only one person who was born in Yellowknife. People here were from all over Canada and the world. Peter and I didn’t know each other, but we decided to share a place. This quick trust and action was not uncommon among our age group. We answered an ad in the weekly Yellowknife newspaper, the News of the North, for a cabin on Latham Island for 60 dollars/month.
Latham Island was part of the “Old Town”, the original 1930s nucleus of Yellowknife down by the water. Two nearby gold mines started the town. In those days, before there was a road, small planes on floats or skis could come and go and easily park beside the island. Now it was the “poor part of town”, occupied mainly by a Dene (indigenous) community. Most white people lived in the New Town up the hill.
Yellowknife: a bridge connects the town to Latham Island
Connection with Latham Island
We met at the landlord’s home, jumped on the back of his antique Skidoo, and went to see a one-bedroom log cabin. We took it. There was no public infrastructure on Latham Island. Our toilet was a big paint bucket inside a larger bucket with a toilet seat and a vent pipe. Our water supply was in an oil tank on top of the kitchen counter. It was filled regularly by a passing water truck. They stopped pumping water when the overflow pipe spat back at them. When our big paint bucket was full, we put it on the road by our house. It was dumped into the back of an open truck that collected sewage. In the winter they drove out on the ice and dumped the load. I don’t know where they took it in the summer.
Heat came from an oil space-heater in the living room. You turned a small valve, let the oil flow in by gravity, threw in a match, and it started to burn. We put tinfoil on the ceiling to reflect heat back into the space. Peter used the one bedroom. He had more privacy, but I had more heat. No closet. I hung my clothes on a row of hooks behind the front door. In the unheated entrance vestibule we kept frozen char which we sometimes ate raw.
In July, the mean high and low temperatures were 21°C and 12°C. In January, they were -25°C and -33.0°C. The temperature sometimes went down to -55°C. On those coldest nights, if the fuel in our outside oil tank was a little low, the oil would turn to jelly, stop flowing, and we would have no heat. Churning the oil with a stick and banging on the oil lines usually loosened the jellified fuel.
Peter came from an isolated coastal community east of Tuktoyaktuk on the Beaufort Sea. When he was a child, a coastal hospital ship gave him a vaccination. The next year, seeing some complications, he was taken from his family to live in Tuktoyaktuk at a mission school. Like me, Peter was a stranger in Yellowknife; the Inuit home was north of the tree line, and Yellowknife was south of it, inside the boreal forest.
Neighbourhood children came to our home on weekends, one stop on their round of visits. They rolled cigarettes for us from our can of tobacco, and played Monopoly. I encouraged them to draw pictures. Most of their drawings were benign but I remember one child, eight years old, who drew a picture of himself with a baseball bat about to hit his drunk father who was beating his mother.
I was woken up one morning by a pounding on the door. I let in an indigenous man who wanted to rest. He was carrying a rifle. Soon he left, and I went back to sleep. A half hour later there was another pounding on the door and an RCMP officer asked me whether I had seen a man with a rifle. I told him what I had seen. Later that day, on the news, I heard radio reports of a hunt that included search planes. The man had shot someone in the stomach. It was still winter and the fugitive could not light a fire; it would give away his position. I never heard whether they caught him or not.
Peter had a childhood Inuit friend (Noah?) who survived in Yellowknife by gambling at pool games. When he was drunk he got into fights and often spent the night in jail; I bailed him out a few times. I dreaded his visits to our place. At Friday-night games of cards, alcohol slowly bubbled suppressed anger until it over-boiled. He was stronger and a better fighter than Peter. They were both stronger than me. Even after bone-crushing smashes to his face and his clothes ripped and bloody, Peter’s pride would not let him back down. The storm of fury whirled around the room - break a window, topple furniture, oil stove on its side, my clothes hanging from the hooks on the wall ripped down and trampled. His friend walked off with rage spent. Peter wearing no coat, chased him over the ice, crying. Later, I was asked at work why I had a boot-print on the collar of my shirt.
Late one winter afternoon there was a power failure. The sky was dark and I was walking home after work from New Town. from, The electric pumps for home oil-furnaces had all shut down; they had no heat and no light. In a few hours, without electricity, they would freeze. I looked across the channel at our cabin on Latham Island. White light was blazing out its windows. Inside, Peter had put a little cooking oil into our plates and saucers, placed strips of old rags into each as wicks, placed them around the room, and lit them all. He had made an Inuit seal-oil lamp called a ‘qulliq’. Our gravity-fed oil space heater had no pump; so we had heat. And Peter made light.
George Erasmus lived next door, one of a family of 12 children. He was a year younger than me, and worked for the Company of Young Canadians. I didn’t know him well; I wish now I had. I was unaware at the time that he devoted his life to his people. I was not conscious they needed help, unaware of the degree of their suffering, and only vaguely aware of their cultural and spiritual strengths. Many years later I learned of his accomplishments. Like my vague awareness of the social upheaval in Quebec, I was equally unaware - even though I was living in the midst of it - of the awakening in the indigenous world.
Colonization and Forced Assimilation
It wasn’t until after Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report came out, in 2015, that I - and probably most Canadians - were aware that we were party to cultural genocide. Inter-generational trauma was part of indigenous life, treaties were not recognized, and sexual and physical abuses occurred in residential schools run by Christian religions. The mission of the government and the churches was to make them ‘Canadians’ by extinguishing indigenous language, culture, and spirituality. I was in the indigenous world, but hadn’t see it.
George wanted “to break the cycle of dependence on government handouts that perpetuated a sense of inadequacy and worthlessness. He wanted to see indigenous peoples reassert their culture and regain self-rule. In 1974 he was the young “charismatic” leader of the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, later called the Dene Nation. He was the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations from 1985 to 1991.
He was appointed to the Order of Canada as a member in 1987, and was promoted to officer in 1999. He co-chaired the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1992-6 (See interview https://vimeo.com/210464622). He has also been awarded honorary doctorates by seven Canadian universities, including the University of Toronto, Queen's University, and the University of Manitoba, and the University of Western Ontario in June 2006. In 2009 he was awarded the Governor General's Northern Medal.
George Erasmus
Erasmus states, “Instead of recognition of our national right to self-determination, we have been subjected to….colonization,…forced assimilation.” He proposed that the contemporary focus should move from an emphasis on “Aboriginal Rights to relationship between peoples; from crying needs to vigorous capacity; from individual citizenship to nations within the nation state.” He suggests that the pursuit of seeking recognition of Aboriginal Rights through the Canadian courts should change because “Litigation is no way to build a community.” Erasmus reasserts instead, the importance of treaty-making as a way forward to build renewed relationships built on “mutual trust” and a bond “like that of brothers who might have different gifts and follow different paths, but who could be counted on to render assistance to one another in times of need.”[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Erasmus]
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A background depression kept resurfacing. One day I had to leave the office and go for a walk. I went into a church. I hadn’t been to one for a long time. I sat there alone praying, “God, help me; I don’t know what I’m doing.”
On a summer day (1969), I was sitting by Frame Lake in Yellowknife, reading “Remember Be There Now”, by Dr. Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Dass). An increased interest in Eastern spirituality, especially among young people, was a sign of the decline of Christianity in the West. Some called this book the hippie’s “counter-cultural bible”. I had seen Baba Ram Dass in Montreal in a large theater at Concordia University. He asked for the lights to be turned off and for all of us to chant “Ohhhmmm”. For a few darkened seconds, everything outside us and everything inside us was the same. A short-cut to oneness; fleeting but memorable.
I was reading the detachment story in his book about a Zen priest carrying a woman, when a workman with a hardhat walked by and gave me a simple, straight-forward, smiling “hello”. I smiled back and when he passed I threw the book into the lake.
I soon met Buz Gibson at one of the regular Friday night dance parties at the Moose Lodge. He was from Midland, Ontario, north of Toronto. Buz had a quiet, enigmatic smile; he didn’t drink, and he carried a prayer book in his pocket. Someone told me he was a Baha’i. I confused it with B’nai B’rith, an international Jewish service organization. We spent evenings in long talks. As I worked my way through a bottle of Johnny Walker whisky; he drank Coke. In the background we played an album by Bob Dylan and the Band called “The Big Pink”.
In July, the Apollo 8 space mission sent photos of earth from space, portraits of our collective solitude. We were on a beautiful blue sphere floating in a black void. The plaque left on the moon, attached to a strut on the lunar module, read: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
Halifax-Montreal-Toronto 1969-1970
In late summer, Buz and I both left Yellowknife. He went back to his home in Midland, and I went to Halifax to study art. I had read a persuasive ad in Time magazine about the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD). I wrote them a letter, and received an invitation to attend their Fall term. I hitchhiked to Halifax. As I passed Midland, I dropped in on Buz at his forested land outside town. He had built a nine-sided log cabin. I arrived after dark and startled him as I approached his campfire. In the morning, I thumbed his Baha’i books.
At NSCAD, for a conceptual art project, I put a block of ice in the sea and photographed it melting. I lost interest in the school and at the end of the term left Halifax. Early in 1970, back in Montreal, I tried McGill architecture for a day and walked away, again. I didn’t feel ready; every choice felt wrong.
I stayed with two former classmates, Pieter Sijpkes and Stuart Kinmond, at their place on DeBullion just below Sherbrooke. We had to pretend Stuart’s last name was Kinmondberg; he had a Jewish girlfriend whose mother kept phoning to check on him.
I slept on Pieter and Stuart’s living room floor. I had two dreams one night. In the first, a bird stood at the edge of the ocean sniffing the breeze, gazing at the sea. It started to fly and lifted itself into the air. It tried to fly high, even up to the sun. Smoke started curling under its feathers and the heat became unbearable. He turned back and dove into the sea. Bubbles streamed from under his wings as he swooped in a large arc past deep undersea creatures. Unable to breath, he curved up to the surface.
This time, in the air, a breeze lifted him and he glided upward without moving his wings…….Higher and higher until he had a good view of the sun, now just over the horizon. He was moving toward the sun, but his body -defying perspective - enlarged. It rotated to align with the horizon, with one wing covering the sky and another covering the sea. Larger and larger he grew, and more and more transparent; the feathers of his upper wing became the rays of the sun and the feathers of his lower wing became the waves of the sea. His body grew very long and thin until it became the line of the horizon. Finally, there was no more bird.
In the second dream, there is an overhead spotlight shining down on a woman sitting in a chair. She is very unhappy, and I moved forward to console her. When I got close, she pointed with her finger to a group of “beings” who were standing in a circle. There were eight of them but they had positioned themselves to leave space for a ninth. Unlike the unhappy gate-keeper woman upon whom light shone; the people in the circle gave off light from within.
The dreams felt reassuring, as though some gaps had been bridged. That day, I went to John Schreiber’s office. I had long hair and was a little disheveled. I stood outside his meeting room where he was talking to a client. I said, “I’m looking for work.” It was Friday. He turned to look at me, said, “Start Monday”, and resumed his meeting.
Soon after I started work, a world-famous architect, Ralph Erskine, came to our office. He was British, from a Quaker family. In WWII as a pacifist, he moved to Sweden and set up his practice on a barge in the harbour in Stockholm. He was a friend of my McGill Professor, Norbert Schoenauer. Norbert had a contract to design a mining town called Fermont in northern Quebec. He asked Ralph to join him to develop two schemes to give the client options to choose from. Ralph came to Canada, but needed a place to work. There was no space at Norbert’s, but John Schreiber had a spare table; so Ralph sat beside me.
He put a fat roll of tracing paper as wide as the table on a big metal spool. He pulled out table-length sheets, layer after layer. Drawing on each with thick coloured felt-tip markers - he built up his design. Sometimes he would pause to stare and think. He would throw a marker at me and say, “You draw.” He wanted to see what someone else would do. Later, Ralph suggested to John I could work with him in Sweden, if I would like to go. I declined; I wanted to go back to the peace I found on Buz’s land. I felt sure I had to go there.
There was a problem; Buz has told me he was going to move to Toronto, but I had no idea where in Toronto. At the time, I was living on Aylmer Street in Montreal with a Vietnam War draft-dodger. He made leather belts and dyed them on the ironing board that folded down from the wall. One day, my classmate, Don Johnston knocked on the door. He had failed a year and was repeating it, so we were in different classes. We had lost track of each other.
He didn’t know where I was. He was going to a different apartment in the same building and happened to hear my voice through the door.
He had just received a letter from Judy Merchant, cousin of Mary Jane, who was the wife of my classmate, Giulio Maffini. Don and I had met Judy at Giulio’s wedding two years earlier in Sydney, Nova Scotia. Judy wrote to Don saying she was about to marry someone called Buz Gibson. Buz had seen a picture of me in Judy’s photos of the Nova Scotia wedding. He didn’t know where I was, but he asked Judy to share his current Toronto address with Don, in case Don could find me. Now, with Don’s surprise, timely visit, I could find Buz. As Leonard Cohen said “Magic was alive, God was afoot”.
A few weeks later, in early April, 1970, I went to the School of Architecture with all my text books, including a very fat one, “A History of Architecture”by Sir Bannister Fletcher. I dumped them from a bag onto a table and called out, “Books for sale!” Just before leaving Montreal, I was in a bar in Place Bonaventure drinking a Daiquiri. Pieter Sijpkes happened to walk by and joined me. We said goodbye, and I caught the bus to Toronto.
Buz’s place on Scollard St. Toronto (photo taken in 2017)
I met Buz at his place on Scollard Street. It was one block north of Yorkville, the central spine of Hippie Canada. I slept on the floor in his room. Among the young, it was understood the floor was always available to an itinerant and his sleeping bag. We ate brown rice in white bowls from China with blue fish painted inside. Every night before sleeping, he read this prayer out loud:
O Lord, I have turned my face unto Thy kingdom of oneness and am immersed in the sea of Thy mercy. O Lord, enlighten my sight by beholding Thy lights in this dark night, and make me happy by the wine of Thy love in this wonderful age. O Lord, make me hear Thy call, and open before my face the doors of Thy heaven, so that I may see the light of Thy glory and become attracted to Thy beauty. Verily, Thou art the Giver, the Generous, the Merciful, the Forgiving.
While I was digesting this prayer and others, I thought I would find the beauty I was looking for on Buz’s land. I went there to camp and to be alone for a while. Living in his nine-sided log cabin, I cooked oatmeal on a campfire, read Lord of the Rings, and shaved in front of a mirror hanging on a tree. A week later I returned to Buz’s place. It was crowded with young people, mostly from Midland, but from other parts of Canada as well. They had all come to attend an annual Canadian Baha’i Convention to be held on the York University campus. They often sat in a circle on the floor and said a round of prayers, reading at random from Baha’i books. There was no coercion.
I joined their activities, including an “environment” set up at Rochdale College, the Hippie co-op on Bloor Street.[ Opened in 1968, Rochdale College was an experiment in student-run alternative education and co-operative living in Toronto, Canada. It provided space for 840 residents in a co-operative living space. It was also a free university where students and teachers would live together and share knowledge. The project ultimately failed when it could not cover its financing and neighbours complained that it had become a haven for drugs and crime. It was closed in 1975. Rochdale was originally a refuge for the nation's idealists. Ultimately, its cooperative idealism was its downfall. Dedicated to consensus decision making and granting a vote to everyone who lived (or claimed to live) in the building, Rochdale's governing body was unable to reach agreement to expel those who failed to pay their rents or otherwise live up to its ideals. According to the CBC Archives, by 1971 Rochdale had become known as "'North America's largest drug distribution warehouse.' Hash, pot, and LSD are in large supply. The Rochdale security force includes members of biker gangs".[1][2]
Rochdale's educational focus and student population declined as the drug business increased. After increased clashes with police, and unable to pay its mortgage, political pressure forced financial foreclosure by the government, and Rochdale closed in 1975. A number of residents refused to leave. On May 30 the last residents were carried from the building by police. The doors to the college had to be welded shut to keep them out.
] This week-long event held in mid-April 1970 was hosted by a group of young Baha’is from Saskatchewan. Every day there was a brief talk, and a film. As we sat cross-legged on the floor, and were served tea and oranges. The multimedia presentation included a selection from Leonard Cohen’s, “Magic is alive; God is afoot” (1966).
“Though his words were twisted
The naked magic thrived
Though his death was published
Round and round the world
The heart did not believe.”
These young people had created large paintings on cloth that hung on the walls. One, especially, attracted me. With the image were words of Baha’u’llah that made Heaven and Hell leave their portrayals in Dante’s Inferno to more a more abstract, “near” and “far”.
“O SON OF MAN!
Sorrow not save that thou art far from Us.
Rejoice not save that thou art drawing near and returning unto Us.”
I gazed at the words, feeling the length of the journey. God had thrown my soul, a seed, into the dark soil of existence and invited my return. For me, these were not just words. They were an invitation, a sudden revelation. The more I heard and read, the more I was immersed. My heart jumped; and has never returned. I felt I was in a spiritual architecture that was previously hidden from view. Is this what people call awakening, enlightenment, or conversion? I felt I was inhaling a fragrance, sensing a breeze I had never encountered before. Nothing else had this intensity and power.
Buz’s evening prayer came alive. I had actually turned my face unto a kingdom of oneness and was immersed in a sea of mercy. I saw lights in the dark night. I was drunk with the wine of His love. I heard a call. I saw the doors of heaven open. I was attracted to God’s beauty.
Although just words and metaphors, they were also bridges (another metaphor) to a world beyond description and yet, real. This unknowable “known” became the warm core of my life; a spiritual sun illuminating reality. This “discovery” has stayed with me ever since.
On the second day of the event at Rochdale College, I was serving tea and oranges. All of me had said “Yes”. Along with a ‘mystical’ experience, I was taking in Baha’i thought that made perfect sense to me. This faith focused on the unity of humanity and the preservation of cultural diversity. “The world is but one country, and mankind its citizens”, and “Ye are all the fruits of one tree, the leaves of one branch” were its banner cries.
The Baha’i Faith emphasized social issues, especially at the global scale. It’s approach to development was to focus on unity; to begin with spiritual development. We could not apply cures as ailments came up, we had to have unity first. It spoke of the need to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, to establish justice, the equality of men and women, a world language and a world government, and so on. There was no clergy; the faith was administered by elected consultative bodies. The individual was more mature than before, could study and apply spiritual writings independently and not rely on a priest. All things logical.
To help accomplish its vision, the faith includes institutions, among them an administrative system. In the workshop of their communities the Baha’is are building a working model of what they believe is, in embryonic form, the pattern for a New World Order. They (we) were building a prototype of a global community based on these concepts and principles.
* * *
In some ways, the encounter with the Baha’i Faith was akin to marriage. The heart knows first, and the heat of love forges a lasting bond upon which a family can be built. Rationality is still part of the process. If you don’t know your partner well enough, the marriage will be in deep trouble. But without the “madness” and intensity of love, the growth of a marriage - so difficult at times - would not survive. It’s a process involving all our mind-heart faculties.
This was a kind of ‘submission’, to a Path that I believed aligned me with the will of the Creator and got me closer to what I was designed to be. If there were some teachings I was unsure of, I accepted the authority of this ‘revelation’. My Creator knew me better than I knew myself; I would trust Him. This decision would be vigorously doubted and questioned later by my second wife, Hongyu, who could not understand how I seemed so free from conventions, on the one hand, and so ready to join an organized religion, on the other. The latter she regarded as the epitome of conforming to convention. I felt I had climbed a mountain, passed through dense clouds, and discovered on open vista with sunshine. How could I undo that?
I believed I was experiencing what Baha’u’llah described in the Book of Certitude:
“The universe is pregnant with these manifold bounties, awaiting the hour when the effects of Its unseen gifts will be made manifest in this world, when the languishing and sore athirst will attain the living Kawthar of their Well-Beloved, and the erring wanderer, lost in the wilds of remoteness and nothingness, will enter the tabernacle of life, and attain reunion with his heart’s desire. In the soil of whose heart will these holy seeds germinate? From the garden of whose soul will the blossoms of the invisible realities spring forth? ….Thus have We illuminated the heavens of utterance with the splendors of the Sun of divine wisdom and understanding, that thy heart may find peace, that thou mayest be of those who, on the wings of certitude, have soared unto the heaven of the love of their Lord, the All-Merciful.”[ Kitab-i-Iqan, Part 1 Paragraph 65]
May 1-3, 1970, I attended the Baha’i National Convention at York University. At this meeting, delegates from around Canada consulted about the activities of the Faith. They also elected a National Assembly that would administer the affairs of the Faith for the coming year. The Baha’i administrative system included local and national assemblies, bodies with nine members, elected annually with no nominations or campaigns.
The Convention’s social night of music and dance terrified me. Too much fervor. I hid behind one of the tall curtains beside the ballroom windows, expecting snake-charmers to appear . I retreated to a dark corner of the grounds outside to think. That night, back at Buz’s place, I signed an application to be a member of the Baha’i community.
Soon after, I was with a small group of young people who met the Toronto Baha’i Assembly. They welcomed us and asked whether we knew what we were getting into. Did we recognize Baha’u’llah as the source of new revealed knowledge for this age, and were we willing to work on applying the Baha’i message to humanity’s needs? They pointed out this path included asking us to overcome prejudices, overlook each others faults, and abstain from backbiting, sex before marriage, and alcohol.
A middle-aged “uncle” said to me the biggest challenge in the Baha’i Faith was the Baha’is. He warned me that if we or other Baha’is did not live up to the standards, or if sometimes its infant institutions lacked wisdom, we should focus on what we can do to make ourselves and our community better. He recommended making a distinction between the quality of our response to the revelation and the revelation itself. The source of guidance was in the Writings. We should put our energy into understanding and applying that guidance. We had to accept a group learning process, where we, and everyone else, were imperfect. If we were perfect, we wouldn’t need guidance. “Think of the Baha’i Community as a workshop, a work in progress”, he said.
* * *
I lived in a communal home with other young Baha’is on Bathurst and Ulster. We attended gatherings at the Baha’i Center on Brunswick near Bloor. The Toronto community had expanded with this influx of young people. Formerly, the meeting room had been filled with middle-aged and elderly believers; now it was interspersed with long-haired youth. We who were not supposed to trust anyone over thirty were sandwiched between elderly surrogate aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Everyone had let go of those limitations.
I met this group when I went to Toronto in 1970. Buz, with a mustache, is on the left wearing a lumberjack's shirt. Fourth from the left is Ted, with his hand over his stomach. He later lived in Yantai, Shandong, for many years teaching English. The curly-haired elf on the windshield is Russell Kerr from Smith’s Falls, Ontario. Most of them became Baha’is. Photo taken in Fall 1969. The Toronto city hall is in the background.
Wedding of Buz and Judy Gibson in the fall of 1970 at U of T. From right to left: Blair Shakell, me, Kim Smiley, unknown, Mike Hanna. Blair sang at the wedding.
These events confirmed and clarified my relationship with Christianity. Christ teachings were part of humanity’s collective education; I could let go of the institutions, ceremonies, and sacraments that had grown up around them. The same source of divine light rose and fell on the horizon of human experience. It came in cycles, each with a different name; Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and so on. This one light had reappeared again in the revelation of Baha’u’llah. Like my high school religion teacher had said, “Truth is One”.
This cycle of revelations was the “Return” all religions spoke of. I now had a new understanding of the Lord’s Prayer that I had heard and said countless times as a child and young teenager. “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven”, was an invocation to establish, in the future, the Kingdom of God on Earth. It gave globalization a new context and purpose; a sign that the time for the establishment of a divine civilization had begun. The impelling force for its creation - the revelation of Baha’u’llah - is what was “Blowin’ in the wind”.
Similarly, I saw Judaism and Islam in a new way; as stages in our sequential, collective growth. Christ had succeeded in being the greatest teacher of Judaism. Millions of Christians considered the Jewish Dispensation to be an authoritative part of their Bible. Muhammad said He was the return of Christ and Moses. I began to investigate Islam. I found it had been the leading edge of civilization while Europe was in its Dark Ages. Islamic advances made the Renaissance possible.
I went to Montreal to tell my friends about it. Too shy to speak to him directly, I left some Baha’i books at the front desk of the Arcop Design Office for Ray Affleck, its head. He had been a very sympathetic guest teacher at the School of Architecture at McGill. In Ottawa, I told my father I had become a Baha’i. Suppressing his shock, he said he had seen the Shrine of the Bab[ The Báb (1819-50) announced that humanity stood at the threshold of a new era. His mission, which was to last only six years, was to prepare the way for the coming of a Manifestation of God Who would usher in the age of peace and justice promised in all the world’s religions: Bahá’u’lláh.] from the top of Mount Carmel in 1942. He had heard the Baha’i Faith was a wealthy sect. I learned later from my mother that Dad, on his deathbed in 2003, talked with a priest and told him how he felt so guilty. He would soon face God with empty hands; his son had not become a good Catholic. Fortunately, the priest pointed out that Dad had done his best, and was not responsible for the choices his son made. He asked Dad whether he loved his son, and did his son love him? I believe Dad let go of some of his pain when he saw the answer to both those questions was “Yes”.
I grew up in a world divided about religion. On the one hand, there was a western post-Enlightenment anthropocentric universe in which religion was regarded as out-of-date superstition. It had been responsible for so much misery in the world and was holding progress back. And there is much evidence to demonstrate the truth of these viewpoints. Science and religion were seen as opposites. How to explain? Most of my western friends are from this modern, liberal, intellectual background. They are very suspicious of religion, understandably, and some recoil at its mention. Efforts to share it were met with incredulity, even hostility.
Others considered me weak, abandoning my independence and submitting to the crutch of a “holy” authority. Also, the Baha’i Faith was full of references to Islam and gave Muhammad a high station. At that time, Islamophia was not as strong as it is now. Islam, hanging on to its claim to be the exclusive holder of the final revelation, has sunk deeper into ignorance and lethargy. As the Islamic world became more feared by the non-Islamic world, the Islamic background of the Baha’i Faith stood out even more.
I rarely met receptivity. My ‘connection-with-God’ experience was too outrageous. It was the most beautiful thing that I have ever known and had become the thing I was most afraid to share. How do I explain? “I had a dream, I inhaled a fragrance, I heard a song from another realm….”. The response I received, implied or anticipated, was “Are you serious?”.
It was difficult to prove what I believed, to “argue” its case, but the beginning of a life-long ‘discourse’ began, a lot of it internal. I asked others, real or imagined: "Many of us in the Baby-Boomer generation recoiled from excessive materialism; by default are we not looking for something spiritual? When we look at religion, however, we tend to focus on the abuses done in its name - wars, prejudices, and lust for power and wealth perpetrated by the ignorant. We tend to blindly reject religion on this basis, and not investigate underlying common essentials, or see its positive role in human development. Veiled by clouds of cynicism, we see it as an obstacle to truth, not a source of it. Its fire can be used to burn the house down or provide light and heat. If managed well, could it not do the latter? Who’s fault is its abuse; the teacher or the student? Surely, today, in our fragile world, it needs to be reconsidered.
Has any other force awakened self-sacrifice and trustworthiness in human relations? Are our highest institutions not embodying principles from these religions? Isn’t society’s foundation the essential principles these religions promote, such as cooperation and reciprocity? How much of our cultural heritage, art, music, and architecture has been based on spiritual aspiration?”
"Einstein gave religion a role:
'Science is the century-old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thoroughgoing an association as possible...religion is the age-old endeavor of mankind to become clearly and completely conscious of ...values and goals and constantly to strengthen and extend their effect.’[ Einstein Science and Religion, 1954.]' ”
And so the ‘discourse’ went on, and on….
I had accepted a God-centered world. God was proactive. He was guiding humanity’s growth with periodic messages, defining our Path to higher and higher levels of unity and maturity. God was also personal; prayer-hearing and prayer-answering. Efforts to absorb and apply this guidance, to myself and to the society around me, triggered a whole new process of learning with searching, questions, and action. I felt inspired, hopeful, and oriented by thoughts such as these:
“That one indeed is a man who, today, dedicateth himself to the service of the entire human race…Blessed and happy is he that ariseth to promote the best interests of the peoples and kindreds of the earth….It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.”[ Baha’u’llah, Gleanings, p. 249-50.
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At the time I did not realize how large a gap I had crossed.
Yellowknife 1970
In the fall, I hitch-hiked back to Yellowknife. I was sharing my ideas with an old Alberta farmer in his pick-up truck. He said, as I got down from the cab at the end of the ride, “You know boy, you got too much head, and I got too much hands.”
I visited the Yellowknife Baha’is. I wasn’t there long enough to get to know everybody. Many Baha’is gathered at the home of a family, but I don’t remember their name. There was a space the Baha’is used (rented?) for activities. On the walls were drawings, related to the life of the Bab, done by children. One struck me. A child had taken a brush with red paint and jammed it into the paper in several spots. I asked what it was. I was told it was a painting of the bullets that hit the Bab when he was executed.
I learned that my brother, Tom, had also become a Baha’i. He had joined the faith at a public musical event with a group called “Jalál” in Yellowknife in August of 1970. He had just left on teaching trip that went down through BC and into the United States. About a year after joining the Faith, he withdrew.
I worked at odd jobs. These included a day at the News of the North, walking around in a circle collating the newspaper by hand. A small group of us did this dance all day; we were the marginal ones, the semi-employed.
I spent a week at a bush camp clearing site-lines between the steel pegs marking the boundaries of a mineral claim. We flew from Yellowknife to the camp, a well-equipped tent on a wooden platform. It was on a remote lake an hour or so away from Yellowknife. There were three of us; an experienced leader and two helpers. I was one of the helpers. The other helper was from an indigenous community near Hay River.
Our leader took us for a short walk to explain the next day’s work. He suddenly paused for a moment, and with his pistol shot a ptarmigan sitting in the spruce tree beside us. He put the dead bird in his bag for supper later. The next day we started walking the perimeter of the claim. The indigenous man and I were partners. We went in one direction and the leader went in the other. The site lines were not always obvious, so my partner and I spread out a little to search for them.
The wide open treeless Arctic was not far away. We were just inside the tree-line so the trees were not very big. We called out occasionally to keep track of each other. I was shocked to find myself back where I started; how did I go in a circle and not know it? Now, I no longer heard my partner’s calls. It was getting dark and there was snow on the ground. The leader came back but not the indigenous man. We built a large fire to guide him, and periodically the leader shot his pistol to make a loud noise.
The sun was almost down. There was something wrong with the radio so we could not ask for help. All night we kept the fire going and shooting the pistol. Our friend never showed up. The next day the radio was working. An RCMP float plane came to do an air search and many members of his tribe came to do a land search. Sadly, as far as I know, he was never found. I made a statement later at the RCMP station.
Baker Lake 1971
With the bit of money I earned, I decided to go to Baker Lake. There was a room available at the Baha’i House that had recently been built there. Baker Lake was above the tree-line in Inuit territory, and was about 1000KM west of Yellowknife, but I could not go in a straight line. Northern Canada is thinly populated and has little east-west transportation. Access to the north was mainly from centers in the south. I had to go ‘outside’ first to Edmonton, east to Winnipeg, and return north to Baker Lake.
In Edmonton, I stayed with Jamie and Gale Bond. Jamie was a member of the National Assembly of the Baha’is of Canada. He had met, and liked, my father when Jamie was an “Area Administrator”in Rankin Inlet. From Winnipeg, I took a train to Churchill. Churchill was the end of the line. From there, the only way to Baker Lake was by air. We landed on the frozen lake in front of the community: 600 Inuit people and 100 white people. The Baha’is of Canada, in the late 1960s, had erected two Baha’i Houses - one in Baker Lake and one in Iqaluit - to support the growth of the Baha’i community. I participated in, and helped organize the center’s activities.
I became aware of a statement of Abdu'l-Baha that inverted a commonly-held view of indigenous people:
“Attach great importance to the indigenous population of America …should they be educated and guided, there can be no doubt that they will become so illumined as to enlighten the whole world.”[ Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan (Paperback ed.). Wilmette, IL: Baha'i Publishing Trust. p. 104.]
The next day I got a job at the Hudson Bay Store taking care of the grocery department. By now it was December. Dawn was at 10:00 am and sunset was around 2:00 pm. The dogs slept outside overnight and let the snow drift over them, until they were invisible. On the way to work in the morning, my crunching mukluk footsteps echoed far through the squeaky snow and alerted the dogs; their ears popped through the snow, turning like periscopes.
The Hudson Bay Post was composed of a retail store, the manager’s residence, and several warehouses. The heated ones were connected to the store and the unheated ones were not. In the treeless landscape, wind-blown snow shaped huge long dunes in the wake of these buildings. I would go back and forth to the warehouses, keeping empty shelves full. Sometimes, in the store, I found packages not in the place I put them: oatmeal was where the soup should be, toothpaste was with frozen juice, and so on. As I put things back where they belonged, giggling Inuit girls peeked around corners.
One day, over two high drifts of hard-packed snow, I pushed a large cardboard box of ice cream from an unheated warehouse to the store. You could not see from one valley of snow to the next. On my hands and knees I slowly nudged the fat carton to the top of the slippery drift. From there it slid easily into the next valley. Just inside the door of the store, I carried my heavy load through the cluster of older women smoking cigarettes, seated near the entrance. With the large temperature change, my glasses fogged. It was difficult not to step on someone.
One night coming home from a friend’s house, a storm sprang up. The snow was a fine fog of blowing white powder. Only a pale light from a street lamp on a pole was visible. Hanging on to one pole, I searched for the next, barely visible up ahead. This way, pole to pole, I worked my way home. The next day, in the unheated warehouse, this same fine snow blew all night through the keyhole and started to build a cone-shaped pile on the floor. The cone of white ascended, solidifying as it grew, slowly curving, bending toward the keyhole. At last, ever more slender, it arrived and stopped, like a thin finger, pointing at the key-hole.
Jack and Sheila Butler worked at the artists’ co-op. They were artists from the south hired to teach print-making techniques to the Inuit people. Jack told me the local artists had learned enough to work on their own, and were starting to defer to him every time he went to the workshop. He said it was time for the local artists to lead themselves, and time for him to leave.
Introduction to Simon Tookoome
Canadian Postage Stamp designed by Simon Tookoome in 1971
Toronto 1971
Restless again, in April, I went back to Toronto. I moved into another hippie group home, this time on Huron Street, between College and Dundas, in China Town. There were about ten of us including Blair Shakell, Marlene Mackey, Kim Smiley, Mike Hanna, and Russell Kerr, most of them from the Midland area.
Communal home on Huron St. Toronto (at left)
Soon, a member of a Baha’i committee ran in the door and said, “We need people to move to outlying communities to help form Assemblies”. The formation of Assemblies was an integral part of Baha’i activity, of building community life. The Assembly formation day was April 21. Russell and I said, “Let’s go to King City.” King City was actually a small town in the northern suburbs of Toronto. We shared an apartment on King Road and Highway 27 in Nobleton. The Assembly formed by acclamation because there were only nine adult Baha’is.
“As with all other elected Baha’i institutions, the Assembly functions as a body and makes decisions through consultation. In addition, the Assembly is intimately concerned with the well-being of the wider community”.[ https://www.bahai.org/] Capacity to act on concerns for the wider community has increased in recent years. During the time discussed here - the early 1970s - the assemblies were very much at an early learning stage. At the first Assembly meeting I went to, in King City, a divorce was on the agenda. One of the couples in the community was breaking up. The local assemblies in Canada had been granted the authority to administer Baha’i marriages, divorce, and funerals.
At King City, among others, we met Doug and Ann Wilson, and Brian East. The Wilson’s were generous people with a heavy flow of guests constantly moving through their home. It was modern house, on a very a large lot, surrounded by farmland. It was the location for many Baha’i gatherings, including Baha’i weddings. I found out, after he had died, that it was Doug who had introduced the Baha’i Faith to Ron and Judy Price, school teachers in Frobisher Bay. They introduced it to Buz Gibson, and later, in Yellowknife, Buz introduced it to me. A circle.
In King City I met Michael and Elizabeth Rochester who were members of the National Assembly of Canada. They stayed with Doug and Ann when they came from Newfoundland for monthly meetings in Toronto. They were to become life-long friends, later, when I moved to St. John’s.
I looked for work. Near the Wilson’s home, I came across a crew repairing old graveyards. I was hired on the spot. We scythed grass all day in the hot lilac sun. On the last day of this short-term job, at a little ceremony, we thanked our boss, gave him a carton of cigarettes as a parting gift, and someone recited a poem:
"They threw Daniel down a manhole
with a lion's den beneath,
but old Daniel was dentist
and he pulled the lion's teeth".
After renovating old graveyards, I worked for one of the King City Baha’is, Brian East, who had a business re-tubing boilers. Skinny and unskilled, my work was to climb inside the boiler after the tubes were cut loose with a acetylene torch and push them out the manhole. Brian gave me several fatherly talks, saying, often, “Go back to school!” As we were want to do in those days, I opened a book of Baha’u’llah’s writings at random to see what it would say. The first sentence I saw was, “True reliance is for the servant to pursue his profession and calling in this world". I took that as a sign.
I had been wandered around Canada for over three years, finding only temporary jobs, with little that I could offer. I accepted that it might be easier to find the relevance of the study of architecture if I were inside the architectural world. I had to let go of dismissing architectural education because I felt it lacked social purpose. It had taken me over three years to let go of paralyzing doubts, and to trust whatever came. If architecture needed social relevance, I had to find a way to make that happen.
Although the years away from university were unstructured; I had taken care of myself, I had seen a lot of Canada, and I had more experience and perspectives to draw on.
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