President's Message
November/December 2008
(as published in Arch Notes New Series 13(6))
It's late November. The leaves are all down off the trees and either carted off for municipal composting or mulched into my yard. We've had our first snowflakes in the national capital region. Remembrance Day was particularly moving this year with the literal passing of the torch from Canada's last surviving First World War soldier, through the hands of Second War veterans, Korean Conflict veterans, Peacekeepers and finally to a veteran of the current Afghanistan mission.
I know that as I stood in the crowd around the National War Memorial, I shared with many others a most moving experience from the week before when we saw the names of distant relatives projected onto the Cenotaph in downtown Ottawa, in provincial capitals, and in Trafalgar Square in London. For a few fleeting moments, they were there with us. Norman J. Pilon of Windsor, Ontario, who died 90 years earlier, to the day that his name was projected, stood there, a gallant young man of 22, proud that he had been able to do something that so many thought was the right thing to do. Perhaps he also was wishing that things had turned out differently, that he had been able to come home to the cheers and adulations of a grateful young country.
But the reality is that they lie in distant lands and only rarely are their tombs visited by Canadians, let alone by relatives. Does it matter? And with the passing of the symbolic torch and the passing of a generation, what will truly become of those distant battlefields where so much young Canadian blood was spilled? For some, that blood made that land sacred, but is that what those youngsters wanted? Or did they want us to live life to the fullest, to learn and grow and love in their everlengthening shadows? Is that not the gamble for which they were prepared to lay down their lives?
The battlefields of Europe's XXth century wars are more and more difficult to recognize for what they were. Soon after the First War, locals wanted to return to their damaged land and reclaim it as fast as they could. For this, labourers from elsewhere in the Empire were employed. And they also paid a price. More than 2,000 members of the Chinese Labour Corps (which included many Chinese Canadians among the nearly 100,000 strong corps) lie buried in Europe, falling to unexploded ordinance or the Spanish Flu.
How are those landscapes to be treated? For Canadians, places such as Vimy Ridge and Beaumont-Hammel are carefully tended and respectfully interpreted. They are kept as memorials to those who fought and to those who died, but they are also places of national reflection where new senses of nationhood were born, if not in reality, at least in hindsight. To some, they are sacred places. Is this what those young men wanted of us?
Many years ago I went to see the Peterborough Petroglyphs with my then young family. My children were about two and seven respectively. There were no other visitors inside the building that protects the carvings. Like all young children brought to a place which did not interest them very much, they began to play, running around on the boardwalk and making noise as young children are wont to do. After a few minutes, they were hushed by the staff person on duty. I asked myself then, and I continue to wonder, what would the creators of those glyphs feel about having young people visit that spot and make the sounds of pure joy only children can make? Somehow, I doubt they would have been upset. In fact, I think they would be pleased to hear laughter and to witness playing and know that a special place for them was becoming a special place for others, but in a different way.
Both of these examples allow us to see how the meanings of things and places change with time and with new actors who come onto the scenes. Things and places which represented incredible boredom, punctuated with pure terror and sometimes remarkable happiness, have been covered over and forgotten or occasionally given sacred status, as if the other similar places don't matter as much.
In the second example above, a place where people commemorated facets of their world view and their place in it, has acquired a character that has taken it out of the realm of the accessible world and essentially made it untouchable and has even imposed upon the people visiting that place expected behaviours that may not have been wanted at all by the people who first carved those images.
I was once told that any object touched by an elder in the past was sacred. For this person, everything we find in archaeological sites is sacred and as such we should not disturb them. That kind of perspective would quickly lead to a rapid crisis where everything would be sacred. For others, everything is sacred. All matter is the product of human or natural genius in its creation and use. But are all things deserving of the same treatment or level of respect?
The notion of sacred, if applied equally to all things, becomes useless and empty. The really significant element is the treatment we accord things; both as reflecting our appreciation of those 'sacred' items, as well as a mark of appreciation for those who feel these things are 'sacred'.
Equally important in this discussion should be the respect that was originally anticipated and expected.
In northern Manitoba, elders from the community of Southern Indian Lake insisted that the government of Manitoba take steps to salvage burials, which were being exposed by newly created reservoirs following the construction of hydro-electric dams on the Churchill River in the 1970s. They asked for archaeological recovery and scientific study because they felt that these remains from long ago did not allow themselves to be found for no good reason. Basically, the living have a duty to learn from the past. The accidental discoveries were ways to learn from very distant elders; opportunities which could not be passed up. The challenge is finding the appropriate amount of respect to use when carrying out this learning process.
In those cases, the fullest study possible was undertaken, including destructive analysis and DNA sampling. Once the scientific study was done, the information was shared and the remains reburied.
When objects are manipulated by archaeologists, is this disrespectful? Who determines what constitutes respectful? Such notions are closely tied to cultural traditions, of course. Are the cultural traditions of today the same as those of 4,000 or 5,000 years ago? Are the spiritual and religious beliefs and practices of contemporary people the same as those of ancestors from hundreds and thousands of years ago? Are belief systems so immutable?
An article I am co-authoring on the burial patterns in the Ottawa Valley over the past 6,000 years suggests that the short answer is no. Evidence points to shifts through time in people's perceptions of the universe and the world they lived in. More importantly, the ways of properly relating to these spheres also changed.
These are all questions that rattled through my mind over the course of the recent symposium in Toronto where several Aboriginal elders shared with us their understanding of various notions of sacred and respect.
There are no easy answers and I firmly do not believe any one has the market cornered on the truth (including me). What I very much hope is that we think about and perhaps discuss, what these notions mean to each of us, and more importantly that our guiding principle always be respect, in a manner deemed acceptable to all.
Jean-Luc Pilon