News & Reviews
Review of Jon Swainger’s The Notorious Georges: Crime and Community in British Columbia’s Northern Interior, 1909 – 25. UBC Press, 2023. $32.95. Swainger sets out to prove four points. The first is that the early history of Prince George shows how the town quickly (by 1910 – 11) acquired a reputation for its “alcohol-fuelled…
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We are, for good or bad — people with a past. There is no escaping this fact, erasing it from living memory, or rewriting our history books. It’s not that simple. No morality police squad, cancel culture club or “me too” tag team can change the fact that many men in history, who we now…
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What follows is an attempt to understand what organized groups were represented at the January 6 riot at the Capitol building, and what these groups stand for. I’ve tried to be as objective as possible, and make no personal comment, though words are connotative as well as denotative, and are read by individuals who have…
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Organizers of, and participants in, Word Play literary events used Zoom technology to overcome restrictions on the size of public gatherings and hold a poetry reading Sept. 24. From his home in the Hart, Marcus Sinclairus of the College of New Caledonia was moderator inviting participation from poets across a wide region and from…
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The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests against systemic racism, happening now all over the western world, feature something that didn’t characterize the American civil-rights protests of the 1960s — the toppling, defacing, beheading and removal of statues of historical figures, in a series of events referred to by some as “the statue wars.” What’s interesting…
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Jeanne Clarke Local History Awards ceremonies drew about 120 people to the Central B.C. Railway and Forestry Museum. There were four awards presented for publication of history books centring on Northern B.C. One was given to Curt Garland for Uphill Both Ways. The second was for Tyler McCreary’s Shared Histories: Wetswit’en — Settler Relations in Smithers, B.C. The third…
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I played baseball a couple of times with Ken Belford. It was in the 1980s, in a league where our team of writers, which had George Bowering, Mike Barnholden, Norm Sibum, and bookseller Jim Allen, played against other print-related teams—Duthie Books had a team, there was a team of newspaper guys run by Vancouver Sun…
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I knew Ken through Barry McKinnon, my colleague in the English Department at the College of New Caledonia (CNC). Barry regularly included Ken in his series of Canada Council readers, a series that started in 1969 and ran into the mid 1980s. Starting in 1972, I worked as Barry’s factotum in this enterprise, printing posters,…
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“Postnorth brings together experienced poets and emerging writers,” said Graham Pearce, College of New Caledonia creative writing instructor, in his introductory remarks. He continued: Postnorth is an attempt to hustle passion and trouble onto the page. . . . Postnorth is a moment where anything can happen . . . . To the writers, I say this:…
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Fred Speckeen’s talk, part of CNC’s 50th birthday celebration, was a personalized, humorous, and necessarily abbreviated account of some rather complex history. That history started about a decade before Speckeen turned up at CNC, with UBC President John B. Macdonald’s 1962 report on post-secondary education in BC, a report that recommended the establishment of two…
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Fawcett’s “enquiry” is “impolite” in the sense that it attempts objectivity in a context that isn’t currently welcoming it. As he says, cultural appropriation and misappropriation is “a hot-button question.” However, it’s “a sub-issue of the cultural self-determination that every minority in a multicultural society has the right to pursue” and, as a sub-issue, “it…
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