**For our upcoming Republic of Kanata Day, an excerpt from my upcoming book: 1497 and so on: A History of White People in Canada. Kanata: it was a Haudenosaunee word of the Six Nations, meaning Our Village. Canadians are best in their own villages, and not striving to become grasping big city idiots or evangelists. Its there in the small places that we lived peacefully alongside the Indians and made the Metis Nation together and fought for our rights against the railroad owners and bankers and catholic priests. A hard stream of romance runs through us, but we are cautious of adventure, which is our biggest tragedy, almost. I know this to be true, for when I was barely six years old and just awakening to the vast wonder of the Manitoba sky, a pulse of excitement led me on my bicycle out into the countryside, where I tore along the dirt roads and explored long abandoned homes of former settlers, still scattered in the occasionally unplowed land southwest of Winnipeg. All of the lives of those long-gone people lay strewn about me in their decaying homes, in bits of letters and school reports, family photos and World War medals and citations for valor kept safe behind broken glass, along with the assortments of lives that were devoted to one another, in the small family groups that gathered together around the fires of love stoked against the cold, unpredictable prairie nights. From those remnants of other lives, my childs heart drew something that has never left me, which is simply the glory of doing what is right for our neighbours: perhaps not an original impulse, but one without which I would have blown away like so much dry prairie thistle. The same impulse that is still the fibre of our real country. After surviving mustard gas and Vimy Ridge in World War One, and refusing his veterans pension so as not to take it away from a more crippled survivor, my grandfather Ross Annett captured that real Canadian spirit in his Depression era stories that he wrote for The Saturday Evening Post in America because, naturally, his own country wouldnt publish them. Grandpas tales were about a widowed farmer named Joe who refused to abandon his dust bowled land in southern Saskatchewan but fought to keep it a home for his daughter Babe and son little Joe, against every conceivable odd. Maybe a corny premise for a modern tale, the Babe stories were among the most popular ever read by the Posts vast audience, even though they were mostly Americans. For in every simple and often humorous tale, the courage and decency of the walked-over characters shone through, and gave farmer Joe and his children more luminosity than any prince of the realm. We got a Princess too Joe remarked to the visiting Queen of England in one of Grandpas best stories, as the farmer placed his worn and adoring hand on the golden hair of his tattered little Babe, and stared unashamed at royalty and posterity, unbowed and unconquerable. That image of Joe and his little Babe is my real country of Kanata. And I know well get there again, once we cease being afraid, and stop fooling ourselves. So good luck to all of us. And long live the Republic, you hosers! ............... Kevin Daniel Annett is a Recovering Canadian who was conceived on a lovely spring morning somewhere west of the Lakehead in the back of a green chevy. Fleeing the prairie cold against his better judgement to a placid west coast life against which he has ceaselessly rebelled, Kevin divides his time between writing, occupying churches, engaging in paint ball warfare and conspiring to overthrow the state. Having worked as a waiter, mail sorter, steel fitter, professional student and non-conforming clergyman, Rev Kev knows that theres nothing that beats working better than not working. He is presently composing a new syllabus of the mating habits of catholic clergymen and criminally convicted popes. Rev Kev is presently dividing his time between Nanaimo, the Cannes Film Festival, the Vatican lavatories and the Stansted Airport Immigration Prison. But mostly hes planning his eventual retirement somewhere on the Prairies under perfect skies, where he will someday lie decaying in and adding to the good soil of the true Republic of Kanata. ** KevinAnnett
Posted on: Wed, 11 Jun 2014 04:43:01 +0000