It’s a shame about all those little sparrows, eh?
Note: Two tiny edits, January 2022.
The “meeting alert” on my computer never fails to prompt me to break in to Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime” (1970).
That kind of thing – musical prompts – happens a lot to me, and music trivia – or, better, trivial music – seems to be a recurring theme for me (see my post March 6 “Music Lessons”) < http://mike-r-hunter.blogspot.com/2020/03/music-lessons.html>
When the boys were younger, like any good father/step father I took great pleasure in annoying them in myriad ways, most often with song. I delighted in afflicting them with my ability to turn the slightest allusion to or use of some random word or phrase into a musical phrase or line from an old song, which I would of course deliver with the zeal of a gameshow contestant. If possible, the spontaneous rendition would include a pun, preferably a bad pun in order to evoke those cherished adolescent groans and eye-rolls.
For example, if we were out hiking in the Highlands, a mountain would evoke Donovan Leitch: “There is a Mountain.” Donovan was always good fodder: mountain, sunshine [Superman], caterpillars, the colour yellow (“Mellow Yellow”), etc.
The game has waned as we all age, but it still happens from time to time; when it does I am still somewhat surprised at the volume of lines and melodies on the playlist of my nearly 70 years. I very much doubt I could sing a complete song other than the national anthem (don’t test me), and I don’t always remember the artist, but somehow have stored up countless trivial tidbits of tunes. Just two or three musical notes, or a distinctive drum or guitar sequence will trigger a tune and a song, and my brain is off and running until another riff supersedes. A rock in a stream might evoke “The Island” (Kenzie MacNeil).
Want a pickle? “The Motorcycle Song” by Arlo Guthrie (‘I don’t want a pickle / I just want to ride on my motorcycle’). Oddly, though I hesitate to admit it I occasionally find myself humming or even silently singing excerpts that surprise me, songs I wouldn’t have been caught dead even acknowledging in my youth. That rock in the stream should evoke “Rockaria” (ELO). Instead, it’s “Rock of Ages.” Instead of “Mr. Blue Sky” (ELO again), a blue sky sometimes brings on “My Blue Heaven,” when it should be “Blue Skies” by Willie Nelson, or “Rainbow Rider” (Ian Tyson). That last one’s a good one: ‘The sky was 1950 blue / green was the colour of a greenback dollar / he rode them broncs with a hoop and a holler.’ And off goes my mental gramophone onto portions one or two other songs on that album.
Do you remember any campfire songs? It seems that I do – camp songs like “Quartermaster’s Store” (‘My eyes are dim, I cannot see / I have not brought my specs with me’) which, to my youthful ear and sheltered life was “The Corner Master’s Store.” Or, from around the campfire, “Kumbaya [My Lord]” (Warner Chappell Music). Or “The [Ladies of the Harem of the] Court of King Caractacus” (Rolph Harris), which older and more worldly camp counsellors sang as “...Horny King Erecticus.”
Worse because I am an avowed secularist (as a former colleague, Richard Keshen, politely frames atheism) – I have of late found myself remembering a couple of, wait for it, children’s hymns. Not just children’s songs – actual hymns. What fried and forgotten part of my brain is responsible for this? Unlike the other prompts just described, they are not prompted by a key word or tune. They just “appear” out of nowhere, and I can tell you it gives me quite a start. And it has occasionally caused me to look over my shoulder to (a) make sure no one is nearby, or (b) make sure a spectre of the Grim Reaper or Demon Dementia aren’t right behind me.
Mind you, children’s hymns were very popular in the elementary school of my youth, and they say that as we age our memory circuits hit replay. In those days, every school assembly began with “O Canada” and ended with “God Save the Queen,” but in between, our school’s principal, Ron Mitchell, led us in at least two children’s hymns. And, oh my, did we little angels love to sing them! I recollect that his favourites, and therefore our most rousing renditions, were “Jesus Loves Me [This I Know]” (Barbara Warner) and “God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall” (Maria Straub). A few lines and links are pasted below for your further enjoyment. Good luck with the ear-worms they’ll trigger.
My memories of childern's hymns in elmentary school assemblies is trivial, but there is nothing trivial about what they spark in me of late.
Principal Mitchell and Jesus loved us little children, especially the little angels who were seen but not heard – in the parlance of the times – other than when singing or rhyming or reciting. I was definitely not one of the angels, and knew what it meant to fall from Mitchell’s grace. He was a big man and, let me tell you, when he swung his thick, reinforced black leather strap from his great height onto my comparatively small outstretched adolescent hand, it really stung.
Most show-offs who endured Mr. Mitchell’s corrective corporal punishment were actually okay with it, despite the ignominy of shedding a tear or, god forbid, a sob. That’s because they knew they could get much worse at home if the infraction had warranted a phone call from the principal instead.
Now, I do not believe that Ron Mitchell was a tyrant or a sadist or generally cranky or frustrated. I don’t for a moment believe he was anything more than a believer in discipline, a believer in the rightful place of children who needed to be taught the difference between good and bad behaviour, between right and wrong, in preparing us for life in the real world. It was for our own good. After all, “spare the rod and spoil the child” was the old adage – a Biblical adage, I might add. More than once I was stung by my father’s leather belt for failing to agree that white was black or black was white.
But this recollection is from my schooling in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Mitchell wouldn’t get away with that today, we’d say. But God knew and everyone understood that it was important to proper comportment; it’s not like anyone died from corporal punishment.
As a boy, you took your licks – inside the school from the principal (or, if he was tired out from correcting others, maybe the shop teacher), and in the playground or the park across the street from the neighbourhood bully. Then, you went home to your family, had supper, did your homework and, if they were none-the-wiser about your still-stinging hands, your parents might let you outside to watch over the neighbourhood kids playing hide-and-seek before bedtime prayers. Like happy little sparrows, we did it all again the next day. That’s just how it was in our little corner of our little world. Like I said, it’s not like any kids died at the hands of Mitchell or any other teacher. There was no cemetery behind my school.
In the same time period, the sixties, not much more than fifty years ago, in another world out of sight and out of mind, little sparrows were indeed falling like the song says. In that other world, corporal punishment in pursuit of conformity had an entirely different meaning – more sinister, sometimes deadly.
All across the country there existed – at the same time – a wholly different school experience for thousands of students of whom we were oblivious. “For their own good,” thousands of kids were taken from their families and placed in Indian residential institutions. I had the luxury of arguing with and disrespecting my parents as I grew up; I can’t imagine how things might have turned out without them in my life on a daily basis. What if I had lived day and night with Mr. Mitchell? Geez, if he was impatient with me once or twice a month, imagine our relationship if it were 24/7!
We’re not talking about medieval times, or industrial revolution child labours, but the 1960s. In my lifetime! In my country. In Canada. In Lester Pearson’s Canada. John Diefenbaker’s Canada. And yes, in Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s Canada. And I had no idea.
For Christ’s sake, Christian teachings and Ron Mitchell drilled brotherly love into our soft little hymn-loving heads. Christian leaders shelter children from abuse, not expose them to it, or ignore the actions of colleagues who were abusive.
Every now and then someone will posit that our government and our Churches thought they were sheltering Indigenous children – it was “for their own good.” And every now and then someone will opine that the forced removal of children from their families and extended families (communities) was just the ignorance of the times – “they thought it was for the best.”
Perhaps the clergy misunderstood Matthew 19:14 (King James version of the Bible), which quotes Jesus saying "suffer the little children."
There’s a frequently uttered caveat that we aren’t personally responsible for the mistakes of those times, of those of our ancestors who either conceived of, participated in, or ignored the travesty. While I do not agree, I’m going to let that one slide for now, except to point out that in our time we continue to uncover abuses by clergy – often deviant.
Not too long ago someone pitching a book idea to me related stories from their rural school days when their teaching nun would frequently use corporal punishment to leverage better behaviour by her students. My old principal, Ron Mitchell had nothing on this nun who, so the story goes, frequently drew blood! Another story reached my ears quite recently about nursing training by nuns who frequently resorted to physical abuse to reinforce lessons. These are anecdotes within my general age group and lifetime.
Earlier I referenced camp songs. My experience at week-long summer camps came from numerous summers at YMCA’s boys’ Camp Pascobac. According to the camp’s history, the name Pascobac is “an Indian word meaning ‘side bay’.” I won’t take too big a detour here, save to note that the Indian theme was prominent at camp. Cabins in which we boys slept were all named for Indian tribes. The hillside behind the camp – the terrain of a great many adventures and nature-oriented games, and a rustic outdoor chapel – was punctuated by piles of rocks, which we were told were Indian burial sites (but were much more likely to be evidence of the clearing of fields by early European settler farmers to the area in the 18 and 19th centuries). Aside from canoeing, crafts, campfires and swimming lessons, crystal in my mind is an image of a hundred sunburned white kids playing capture-the-flag wearing loin cloths and “war paint.”
Ironic, isn’t it – and not ironic in a fun way – school-age white kids imitating Indians (however whitewashed the imitation) in a forest in rural New Brunswick, while school-age Indigenous kids are dressed in European-style uniforms and forced to unlearn their language and heritage. The thought of it makes me cringe.
I recently had a conversation over lunch with a retired psychiatrist. It was not clinical or instructional, just a wide-ranging and casual discussion running from dementia, mass shootings, mass hysteria and fake news, to sexual deviance and post trauma stress theory. I learned some things about each of these topics, but it was something from the latter that has stuck with me. In his experience, as I recollect it, all PTSD sufferers had something in common. Don’t quote me on the data behind “all,” but the common denominator was childhood trauma.
In their book, What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, co-authors Dr. Bruce D. Perry and Opera Winfrey synthesize their interviews, conversations and ongoing interest in childhood trauma. My curmudgeon-self is disrespectfully suspicious of celebrity revelations of childhood trauma and abuse, but I am finding this book to be extremely helpful in getting my head around trauma as it relates to brain function and brain repair. At time of writing (I’m wasn’t quite finished as I took a few minutes to work on this rant) they have related only about childhood trauma – adverse childhood experiences (ACE) more precisely – from the perspective of abuse, neglect and other forms of violent mayhem. What I’m learning is that the way the brain processes information – from experience, to memory, to reason – explains a lot about why people can’t just “get over it” or “suck it up.”
For my purposes here, I want to focus ever so briefly on just two points that may be points of consternation of lots of people besides me: (1) how we (well, how our brains) experience, respond, learn, remember and reason, and (2) generational memory (Perry refers to epigenetic memory). I’m not qualified, so I’ll be brief.
First, the human brain grows quickly and therefore processes a tremendous amount of input by which we learn, input stored as experience memory. Additionally, input brings about reaction, our response memory. Reason/cognition is achieved only after the learning and response experience have been processed. Our evolutionary (genetic) memory and instinctual memory get priority, and when we experience an event that resembles something we’ve processed before – be it good or bad – our responses get the jump on our reason. Reaction before reason.
Musical ditties aside, that time the unexpected smell of peanut butter on the gondola ride up Whistler Mountain triggered a memory of Margaret Fitzpatrick was because her hair smelled faintly like peanut butter. Or, stranger still, that time the unexpected smell of Gitanes triggered a memory of the French couple who lived in the next apartment when I was six months old. When a fireworks display makes my heart skip a beat, it’s because of that time Ross Meuller lit a match to the string of firecrackers he had surreptitiously attached to the arse of my jeans, despite the fact that I have no actual recollection of such an event. I don’t have to be cognizant of the root cause of the triggers, the memories are pre-cognitive. The lower regions of my brain react in a way that is seemingly inexplicable. (In fact, though I would not have put it past him, no such incident occurred. Or did it, hmm?)
So, the way in which I experienced an incident in my past, even in my “forgotten” past, can be triggered before I am fully aware of it – indeed without my being aware of it. When a loud and resounding CRACK!! makes me jump, I don’t think of principal Mitchell or Ross Mueller, but some part of my brain remembers and I jump nonetheless.
This sequential memory process is interesting, and brings to mind an ancient piece of advice repeated frequently by our father. Maybe it was our mother. “Count to ten.” Before firing off a snappy retort to an opposing viewpoint – count to ten. Before uttering a string of obscenities when you hit your thumb with a hammer – count to ten. When some teenage hot-rodder cuts in front of you only to slow down and turn right – count to ten. I’m getting a little off topic, but it illustrates the notion of sequential memory. Impulsive reactions are sometimes based on incomplete or immature responses in turn based on unrelated experiences rather than taking a moment to let the cortex reason things out. Perry writes: “[T]he more threatened or stressed we are, the less access we have to the smart part of our brain, the cortex.” Take a moment. Count to ten. You’ll thank yourself later – and perhaps avoid unnecessarily escalating an argument or, God forbid, making an ass of yourself.
Now, here’s a surprising factor related to all of this, and my second takeaway from the book: epigenetic memory – possibly generational.
According to Dr. Perry, adverse experiences, especially in the brain-formative years, can have biological effects. Most of us now accept that stress can contribute to hypertension and heart problems, and by the same token, cellular mechanisms can affect our genes. Every like cell has the same genes, but not every like cell has the same ones “turned on.” Sometimes the body sends chemical messages to the genes “causing certain of them to turn on or ‘turn off’.” Cellular mechanisms can turn key genes on or off to help continually “regulate” the processes of the body, “trying to keep us in balance.” Our senses and our brain translate our experiences into “biological” activity.
“[A]nything that can cause unpredictable, uncontrollable, or extreme or prolonged activations of the stress response will result in an overactive and overly reactive stress response. [O]verreactivity contributes to ... emotional, behavioral, and physical health problems.”
“In some cases, these epigenetic changes will be stored in the egg or sperm and be passed on to the next generation.” Huh?
Now for the double-whammy. “[Y]our history of relational health—your connectedness to family, community, and culture—is more predictive of your mental health than your history of adversity.”
Think about that in the context of Indian residential institutions. (I recently paid attention to an interview in which it was pointed out that we can hardly call those places schools. Schools teach us something. Those places un-taught. Or tried their damnedest to.)
Connectedness – community, culture – is paramount to mental health, but let’s tear Indian children away from that and pound some sense into them. Let’s cut their apron strings and change them into someone/something more to our liking. And, let’s do it in the name of God and good government. Christ! What were they thinking?! And if you don’t want to find fault with the out-dated morals of the 19th century, remember, this continued to happen into the 1980s.
It didn’t stop with traumatized children; it traumatized their families and their communities. Post-contact Indigenous people were very nearly extirpated, which didn’t work, so the next best thing is death by a thousand cuts. Take their children. The fallout from that collective trauma won’t go away anytime soon, as we learned from Dr. Perry’s explanations. Politicians, educators and religious leaders of the past got it wrong, and we continue to pay for their sins. It cannot simply be relegated to the pages of “lessons learned.”
We cannot continue to ignore or avoid this racist colonial legacy. The racist behaviour of our ancestors is still with us in spite of those who say “that was then, this is now.”
There is a terrific article in The Tyee, an independent online news magazine from BC, that everyone should read: “Against Residential School Denialism: Eight ways to identify and confront efforts to undermine Indigenous peoples’ harsh experiences under Canadian colonialism.” I’ll paraphrase for thesake of brevity, but here’s the link.
“Positive” framings of the residential school system as well-meaning but misguided only justify ongoing colonial approaches that continue to harm Indigenous peoples. Obscuring the truth about Canada’s policies ultimately protects the status quo (as well as guilty parties). Apologists, writers and academics, right-wing and anti-Indigenous editorialists and relatives of residential institution staff who uncritically work to defend reputations are neither informed nor objective commentators.
I don’t know how to end this rant. Indeed, I’ve laboured over it for months. What took me so long? Indeed, what’s taking us so long to make honest efforts toward reconciliation for this and other glaring travesties of colonialism?
To those who will say that “we can’t change history,” I paraphrase the words of the mayor of New Orleans a couple of years ago when that city announced it would remove statuary valorizing Confederate “heroes.” he said that we cannot change history, but we can make history. We must tell the truths of history and find our way to overcome the strictures of our past.
In our own lives we have to confront unpleasant moments in our past – sometimes traumatic – in order to move forward. That’s not always easy, but as my psychiatrist friend would no doubt counsel, you can’t bury the past. You can cover it up for a time, but it can fester and become malignant.
And so I think it is with reconciliation. No amount of anxious wailing and gnashing of teeth will forestall what must be done. No band-aid is big enough to cover these wounds. No amount of silent prayer can fix it, no hymns, and certainly no intimidation – no flags at half-staff, no national holidays. The fact that the outcome cannot be foreseen is disconcerting to be sure, but I truly believe that the process will be liberating.
It would seem fitting to close this the way I started it, with a line from a song – one I regularly butcher thus: “O Canada / our stolen native land....”
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postscript – here are the lyrics excerpted from those children’s hymns I mentioned, along with links to the full versions.
for the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to him belong;
they are weak, but he is strong.
~~
God sees the little sparrow fall,
it meets his tender view;
if God so loves the little birds,
I know he loves me too.
Refrain:
He loves me too, he loves me too,
I know loves me too;
because he loves the little things,
I know loves me too.
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