Photo by James Cullingham

On July 4, American Independence Day, the Queen of Canada, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper called her throughout her recent visit, attended a Sunday morning service at St. James Cathedral in downtown Toronto. Four days after Canada Day, the choice of a service at St. James, one of the most visible manifestations of Toronto’s increasingly atavistic ‘English connection’, was a reminder of the living presence of history.  This was poignantly apparent in Queen Elizabeth’s personal decision (according to Kevin S. MacLeod, Canadian Secretary to the Queen) to present two peals of hand bells to the Chapels Royal of the Mohawks.

In so doing, as the Archbishop of Toronto Colin Johnson and the day’s homilist Cathedral Rector Douglas Stoute reminded the 700 sweltering bodies inside the Cathedral and the thousands lining King and Church Streets outdoors, the Queen honoured a relationship that pre-dates the existence of Canada by more than 150 years.

Photo by Norman Einstein

In 1710, a Six Nations delegation visited the court of Queen Anne asking for her support. The first Mohawk Chapel was built in 1712 in the Mohawk Valley. Following the American Revolution and the defeat of British forces, loyalist Six Nations people were awarded a sizeable land grant in the Haldimand Treaty of 1784; and the first ‘Mohawk Chapel” was erected by the Crown in 1785. The relationship between Crown and some Iroquois was enhanced by the continued loyalty of Grand River people during The War of 1812. The present day Mohawk Chapel, renovated in 1983 in Six Nations territory on the Grand River, is the only Royal Chapel in North America. It was so designated in 1904 by Edward VII.

Photo by James Cullingham

As a historian, one is struck by Elizabeth’s choice of July 4 as a date to commemorate the 300-year relationship between the British Crown and the Mohawk Nation. Further, given the contentious, sometimes even bloody, relationship between the Canadian state and the Six Nations since Confederation, the import of the Queen’s decision to pay such homage was not lost on the Mohawks present, or on attentive observers of indigenous-settler relations in Canada. The silver bells that Queen Elizabeth presented on July 4 are engraved with the words The Silver Chain of Friendship 1710-2010; according to notes provided by the government of Canada, they “are symbolic of the councils and the treaties that originated between the English colonies in North America and the Iroquois Confederacy.”

Photo by James Cullingham

Predictably enough, that historically replete moment at St. James was overtaken by news coverage of a woman approaching the Queen without permission; and of later visits to a horse race and the home of the annoyingly ubiquitous Blackberry. The next night Prime Minister Harper retreated to even safer ground when (following a black-out due to decaying infrastructure in downtown Toronto), he feted the Queen to a state dinner before an almost entirely caucasian crowd in a ballroom at the Royal York Hotel.  (A casual observer would have thought that even the government of Canada would be savvy enough to know that the crowd assembled in no way visibly represented the population of a multicultural Toronto, but whatever…)

Photo by James Cullingham

In his well delivered, but somewhat charmless, platitudinous remarks, which included boilerplate references to family, hockey and a kids’ charity run by a donut company, Stephen Harper paid no heed to the kind of history the Queen had underscored powerfully just the previous day.

References
Government of Canada, Media Guide and Itinerary: Tour of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth

Toronto, known to some as The Big Smoke, has world class horrible traffic and at least a fair smattering of all your basic urban ills. The city that knows no hockey also has some unexpected lesser-known natural and historic charms. To begin with, the Toronto Islands get less attention than they deserve. Enough said. Stay away.

Then of course there’s Cherry Beach where a person can emerge on a warm summer evening from a stand of cottonwoods along a sizeable sand beach and paddle a canoe or travel under sail on Lake Ontario in the relative shelter of the human-made, now forested, Leslie Street Spit just on the outer side of the islands while watching the Toronto skyline pass silently, rather surreally, by in the distance.

However, my principal unknown pleasure of Toronto is upriver from the lake along the Don River. The Don ends ingloriously when it submerges under the concrete of the Don Valley Parkway (DVP) just north of the lake.

However, thanks to the efforts of urban conservationists, the Don actually flows quite gracefully in wooded areas just out of sight of the DVP. The real charm is in the neighbouring ravines of Carolinian forests that create a maze offering surprising delights to anyone who takes any number of trails down into the valley.

The oddest spot is just where the Pottery Road crosses the Don River. At the bottom of a steep hill two at the bottom of the valley odd-fellow historical sites sit side by side.

From the mid twentieth-century: Fantasy Farms. This rather bizarre venue has been a place for newlyweds to tie the knot since the 1940s. Service clubs meet there occasionally, but its main business is still weddings. With its medieval, fairy tale exteriors and horse statuary on beautiful grounds with enormous willows, Fantasy Farms is about as camp as Toronto gets. It’s common to meet elderly Torontonians who remember a wedding or their high-school prom there.

Across the street: Todmorden Mills. With its brick smokestack and nineteenth century buildings Todmorden Mills presents a puzzling face to drivers whizzing by on the DVP. The area was travelled by indigenous groups using the Don as a means to enter Lake Ontario or to ascend the river into the area known now as the Oak Ridges Moraine. Since 1793 Todmorden has been, among other things, a sawmill, a distillery, a paper mill that supplied William Lyon Mackenzie’s Colonial Advocate, a brickworks and a prisoner of war camp during World War II.

These days trails are being rehabilitated around a pond bordered by indigenous plants and flowers; a theatre group uses one of the industrial buildings; a small historical centre is housed in one of the houses from the early nineteenth-century. A local historical restoration concern is even conducting test digs along the nature trails in search of evidence of the aboriginal and settler past.

Fantasy Farms and Todmorden Mills sit along a Don trail system that’s increasingly extensive. The efforts of those who have removed garbage and planted trees is bearing fruit. Last fall, I saw a healthy red fox emerge from the valley near Queen Street. If one wants to combine some reclaimed urban nature with local history just head slightly north along Pottery Road as you stroll or bike through the Don. The DVP will remain as a testament to a time when North Americans believed urban river valleys were destined for expressways alone, but Torontonians are slowly pushing back.

SOURCES

Robbins, Li “Hot To Trot,” Toronto Life, June 2004.

Sauriol, Charles. Tales Of The Don. Toronto, Natural heritage/Natural History Inc., 1984.

Just back from Cuba where the sun was shining and temperatures ranged from 25-30 degrees. Very nice, thanks.

More than two years following the retirement of Fidel Castro, some change is apparent in Cuba.

To begin with, Fidel’s successor, his brother Raoul Castro, has overseen a mild lessening of consumer constraints in the Cuban socialist system. Mobile phones are ubiquitous. Markets for crafts and garden produce are increasingly evident in the cities.

Darker aspects of Cuban life also appear more transparent than in earlier visits. Prostitution is much more visible.  Based on my non-scientific observation, it would seem that a certain class of European, often German, tourist now freely considers Communist Cuba a sex destination. This must gall survivors of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary generation which took aim at the infamous flesh trade of the 1950s as a primary target for social reform.

Black marketers trade in rum, cigars and coffee wherever tourists congregate, offering prices that undercut the government run shops. In my experience, this has always been the case, but not to the extent I witnessed in April.

Print journalism and information television are generally woefully weak and subservient to the government’s point of view. While satellite television brings signals in many languages from across North America, Europe and China to many parts of Cuba, there is precious little access to publications that contradict the official view. Communist party publications such as the newspaper Granma have some interesting, intellectually valid content, including often fascinating columns from Fidel Castro himself. Sadly, Granma and related regional publications, also publish vitriolic nonsense of a Stalinist tinge about the Communist Party’s opponents.

On the political front, there were signs of how Cuba maintains its uneasy consensus over the government’s revolutionary, read authoritarian, goals. Although you may never read about them in North America’s mainstream English language media, elections of a kind do take place in Cuba. Last month elections for regional municipal representatives were held. In a one party state, these elections largely only offered choices between Communist Party members, or those approved by the authorities.

I was allowed access to one polling station in the Caribbean city of Trinidad de Cuba where it appeared voters marked and deposited their ballots secretly. Such political practices are but an antidote of a limited kind in a country where freedom of expression is severely curtailed, and in which prisoners of conscience molder behind bars for ‘crimes’ of political thought.

Of course, everything in the previous paragraph is true to a greater or lesser extent in many countries, including China, which does not suffer the demonizing that North American and European media and political spokespersons regularly visit on Cuba. Perhaps it’s the production of cheap consumer goods for North American and European voters that is the charm in the Chinese instance.

I am not an expert on Cuba. I have a broad understanding of its history; comprehend and speak Spanish in a middling manner; and have visited the country about seven times over the past 15 years. For me, certain truths emerge. The social successes of the revolution cannot be dismissed out of hand. Strengths in general health, nutrition, literacy, education and the omnipresence of a diverse cultural heritage in music, dance and visual arts are undeniable. There also exists a patina of fear. Intellectuals palpably hesitate to utter even mild criticisms of the system to a foreigner.

Cuba’s Revolution has entered its 52nd year. To date, the transition of power from Fidel Castro is occurring without cataclysm for Cuban socialism or an overt opening to North American and European political mores.

Editor’s Note: For more on the transitions in Cuba over the past couple of decades see Yves Montenay’s paper comparing Cuba and Vietnam since the fall of the Soviet Union.