This Is Who We Are

We’re about to describe a journey so start seeing it in your head. The first step is a drive east to Calgary, then north to Airdrie, back south to Calgary, then north west to Banff and south west through Craigellachie to Coldstream.

Much of this is familiar but something’s not quite right. If you drove east to Calgary you’d be starting in the Atlantic. If you went north from Calgary looking for Airdrie you’d be hard put to find it – and if you struck north west from Calgary to Banff you’d land on Barra first.

We’re not in Scotland, of course. We’re in Canada, travelling with two inventive and creative Scots. One is photographer and former national newspaper art director, Graeme Murdoch, who has worked with some of the world’s leading photographers and ‘done time at The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday’. His colleague is academic, Harry McGrath, who has lived in Canada for 25 years and has been Coordinator of the Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University – a name known to every piper in the world and whose pipe band is the current Grade 1 World Champions.

Graeme and Harry are here in pursuit of the most exciting and productive of the inspirations to be stimulated by the Homecoming Scotland 2009 initiative. They’re exploring the other Scotland, out west – and finding out who we are, whichever of the Scotlands we live in just now.

The route travelled on the journey above, one of many on this odyssey, says everything about what the two men are doing. They are taking a set of what we receive as familiar places, then throwing them into an entirely different relationship to each other and to us – and the result is disturbing and oddly exciting. They then reveal ‘the other’, something we know and do not know at the same time.

All of this starts to put a picture together, to show us who we are. As Graeme says, you don’t have to be a native Scot to be of Scotland. An article in Hidden Europe said of Argyll, ‘Argyll is a state of mind’. This is as equally true of Scotland as it is of any place that matters to anyone.

The top photograph is of the Bay at the original Calgary  in the north west of Argyll’s Isle of Mull. (Photo:Scottish Viewpoint) The lower photograph is of Calgary, Alberta -  the petro-capital of western Canada. The original settlement became a post of the North-West Mounted Police (now the RCMP). Originally named Fort Brisebois, after NWMP officer Éphrem A Brisebois, it was renamed Fort Calgary in 1876 by Colonel James Macleod after his home on Mull. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)

One place and another

Look at what happens if you superimpose the two maps.

Vancouver looks east to Canada’s Calgary and further east to the first Calgary on the north west of Argyll’s Isle of Mull – looking chronologically from the newer development to its source. It’s a reverse experience of standing at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, looking up the Champs Elysees through the Arc de Triomph and out to La Defense where the modern Grande Arche – the imperative of the future, dominates the horizon.

And talking of reversals, this is a world where Knoydart is a hamlet near Lismore.

Scotland’s first Airdrie can put itself in the position of its newer namesake (the photograph above shows the open plains of Airdrie in Alberta. Photo: Kori Sych ) and feel the pull of the mighty Calgary to its south.

All of this drives you to interrogate your orientation and to explore the impact of different relationships. There’s nothing so liberating as ‘What if…’.

Harry and Graeme put their journey plans together and then took off. Graeme describes them both as ‘media tarts’ so when they hit each place on their route, they make for the TV and radio stations and the local papers. It doesn’t take long for the old arterial connections they are after to start running free again.

On one occasion they were on CTV’s noon news bulletin in Calgary after what Graeme describes as: ‘… a 14 hour flight from Edinburgh via Amsterdam to Vancouver, then a 480 mile drive across the Rockies and looking like we’d been up all night, which was not far from the truth’. During the five minute interview, Ian White the anchorman, admitted he hadn’t known that Canada’s great oil and gas metropolis was named after a tiny settlement on the west coast of Mull. He does now – and so do his viewers.

This Is Who We Are

Graeme Murdoch says of the photo below: Now we are in Western Canada driving hundreds of miles on the Trans Canada Highway through rainforests, snow capped mountains, and arid plains to places where Scots have been before and left a trail of toponyms – Calgary, Banff, Airdrie, Coldstream, Craigallachie, Abbotsford – for us to follow. Ahead of us is Mount MacDonald, named after John MacDonald, Canada’s first premier. Beyond, the Rockies, and our destination, Calgary. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)

In each community in their tours of Canada – in Nova Scotia, Alberta and British Columbia – the two initiate a photography project among the local people. What they produce will eventually link back to the places in Scotland with the same names and is gradually creating a digital archive of images of the Scottish diaspora.

Graeme and Harry are shaping an exhibition from all of this. It will never be finished because there are so many Scotlands across the world to be connected with each other. But it already has a strong identity. This Is Who We Are is the title of their initial exhibition. It was launched by then Environment now Culture Minister, Michael Russell, at Dumfries on Burns Night and will complete its current cycle in an exhibition at the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood on St Andrews Day.

There can be no stronger statement about the perceived value of this work than that it has opened and will close Homecoming Scotland 2009. It is and will be the gatekeeper, the junction, the exchange of experiences, the melting pot, the new Scottish alchemy. It makes it possible for Scots everywhere to see backwards and forwards in a single gaze.

What it has already done is extraordinary. These two men have flown, driven and walked the line between Scotlands. They have been a physical and present link between them. You could legitimately use the word ‘ambassadorial’ but that word summons something more self important than life enhancing. This work articulates the incoherent heart of Homecoming Scotland, giving it meaning, dignity – freeing it to soar.

Discoveries

The men have entered the maelstrom of the diaspora and emerged clutching treasures from the deep past.

One of these was the discovery that many of the Lil’wat First Nation community in Mount Currie, near Whistler – host to the 2010 Winter Olympics – carry the surname Wallace. One of the Lil’wat Wallaces, now a friend, Stan Wallace, told how he thought they had come to have the name.

He believes that Government Indian agents went through the valley to register native people and ‘either couldn’t spell our Indian names or didn’t want to and so assigned us random names’. It seems likely that one of these agents was a Scot who used the iconic Wallace name as one of the ‘random’ names to be chosen.

Harry points out: ‘Renaming First Nation people was common practice and part of a form of cultural denigration that included banning of cultural practices like potlach and longhouses and eventually the taking away of children and placing them in residential schools far from their community. The latter happened to Stan who was taken as a child by the Oblate Fathers and put in residential school three hundred miles away near Prince George’.

Stan’s wife, Shawn Wallace who is the main continuing contact for Harry and Graeme, has her own more direct Scottish connection. Her Great Great Grandfather came from Orkney and was called Bruce – so in her life she has been both Bruce and Wallace.

Harry also says that the youth soccer team from Mount Currie has been to Scotland to play, brought here by Jim Easton who was a professional with Hibs in the 1960s and now lives in Vancouver. The most recent connection with Mount Currie is the This Is Who We Are project.

The photograph above shows Frank Wallace, a Lil’wat traditional dancer (Photo by ShawnWallace, wife of Stan Wallce whose theory about the origins of the Wallace name in the Lil’wat First Nation is above.)

Art for life’s sake

This article reflects only a fragment of the interconnections Graeme (on the right in this photograph) and Harry (on the left) have unearthed and reinvigorated and it makes you impatient and hungry for more.

The exhibition in not the sort of art that any Duke of Sutherland will ever sell to the nation for £50million for passive viewing.

This is an art that we are a part of making, that encompasses us, that shows us to ourselves in new ways, that opens doors to possibilities of all kinds. It is a fluid and living art, responsive to its circumstances, never complete. It deals in the territory between the moment and the infinite. It is not a fixed and unchanging art that draws its audiences to its own certainties.

As he opened the exhibition at its launch, Culture Minister Michael Russell said: ‘This exhibition brings us closer to the real idea of homecoming: it  presents the link that is made by people who are like us but who have faced different challenges. It is  an exhibition that is not only visually exciting but also one that  stirs emotions and thoughts’.

Jim Mather, Enterprise, Energy and Tourism Minister and Argyll’s MSP, said of the project: ‘This is a truly magical project that uses the power of photography to connect and lift the spirits of people in Scotland and Canada. For many of us on this side of the Atlantic we now have the evidence that not just hearts are Highland and Scottish but so too is the warmth of many modern photographed Canadians. Equally, these photographs confirm the great affinity between our peoples whether there are genetic links or not. The photos also show we share values and attitudes and my wish is that long may they continue to bind us together’.

It would be a privilege for Argyll to have the opportunity to be a part of this most galvanic of the Homecoming Scotland events and to engage in this conversation between Scotlands. It has to be possible and it has to be made possible.

The photograph above shows Harry McGrath on the left and Graeme Murdoch on the right.

Footnotes:

See and read the companion story to this feature under Homecoming Argyll in the top menu of this site – This Is Who We Are: photographs from the journeys to find out - a piece of photo-journalism by Graeme Murdoch on the his and Harry McGrath’s journeys and experiences across Canada, treading in the footsteps of those whose forefathers footsteps had once imprinted on the hills and glens of Scotland.

See and read too the articles below, from the media in the UK, Canada and Scotland, describing and reflecting on This Is Who We Are. There is little duplication. Each of these adds to what you see and discover about this adventure in Scottish conversations.

• Scots Canadians tell mither country who they are (Times Online)
  
• Photo project unites Scotland with Canada (Canmore Leader)
• The Scots in Canada (Video news onThis Is Who We Are: The Herald on Sunday)
• Scots connect the dots via Photos (Canada.com)
• Photo project connects with Scotland (The Advocate – Nova Scotia)

Copyright on all photographs above resides with the named photographer and are reprodced here with permission.