Evidentia

The new film Chercher le courant is worth seeing. A group of enthusiastic environmentalists make a film about their canoe journey down the pristine La Romaine river, in Quebec, asking whether a new hydro project there is really worth it.

There are already some dead zones at the bottom of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which an oil spill would only make worse. We should put a stop to Old Harry as long as all the facts on the Gulf of Mexico disaster are not yet known.

The Gulf of Mexico environmental disaster should teach us not to race ahead with other offshore drilling projects, like Old Harry in Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence

As long as we don’t know for sure why the Deepwater Horizon occurred, as long as the ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico continues to spin out of control, it doesn’t make any sense at all to push ahead with development of the Old Harry field in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. We need a full public inquiry in Canada about offshore drilling.

Along the banks of the St Lawrence River, in the Parc des Îles de Boucherville, I now realize nothing is lost. I have found one of the greatest natural treasure around Montreal.

On a visit to Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, I had the chance to talk to Damien Iquallaq, one of the great young Inuit stone carvers. He showed me some of his carvings, and answered a few questions about what motivates him to be an artist.

This interview with musician Emily Doolittle is all about the fantastic music that European blackbirds and humpbacks make.

She was the widow of Mauritania:
A woman who wanted to press her mouth on this sea of ochre dunes,
Lie in these purple hollows and dream
Spread out her arms in the sand like angel wings,
Like spikes of fated desire,
Feel the heat and dry wind invade her body.
Listen to the hot sand tingle along the ridges,
Invent enchanting secrets, beautiful secrets worth savouring,
Drive from her mind any sort of finality.

This poem tells how a medicine man, the grandfather of the Mohawk-Oneida women’s rights pioneer Mary Two Axe Earley, saved my grandfather Frederick C. Grant’s life in 1893, in Wisconsin. The story was told to me by my grandfather, and subsequently by Mary Two Axe Earley in 1984, at her home in Kahnawake, near Montreal. Mary’s mother Juliette Smith Two Axe was an Oneida nurse, Juliette’s father may have been Jacob (Doc) Smith, the Oneida medicine man mentioned above, while Mary’s father Dominic Two Axe and her paternal grandfather Martin Two Axe were Mohawk medicine men.

You loved me in the temple of love,
Among stunted columns and broken goddesses.