Getting the Questions Right...

A very serious weakness with any research project is that the information that gets gathered is only as good as the questions the researcher thinks to ask. I began this project assuming that Shawville’s longevity and persistence had to do with some combination of its location in the Ottawa Valley (and on the Québec / Ontario border), its economic base in agriculture, mining and logging (with cycles of employment and unemployment), and its socio-linguistic identity (predominantly Irish, Protestant and English-speaking). The questions I have asked, and the people I have spoken to, reflect this set of assumptions. Have I missed the real questions? If I asked you what holds this community together what would you tell me? If you got to have the last word what would you want me (someone with the audacity to write about your community) to know?

Of Strawberry Socials and Resilience Building

One of my recent conversations highlighted the seasonal round of local gatherings – strawberry teas, wild game dinners, and harvest suppers – gatherings that affirm a sense of place and time and community in their rhythm and repetition. This community is rich in such events. Every issue of The Equity, past and present, reports on the successes of a recent ‘happening’, or announces some up-coming occasion, from fishing derbies to theatre nights. What interests me particularly about these gatherings is their continuity over time, the way in which they serve to measure time and connect the past and the present. Not long after we came to Shawville I spent a wonderful day ‘putting up’ beet salad with two dear friends who had been making beet salad together on a similar early-September day for forty years. While we worked, they talked, and I listened. They laughed about their earliest beet-salad-making days, and about the years with various configurations of their children helping or getting underfoot. The inevitability of ripe beets in the fall became a back drop for changing circumstances and enduring friendship. It is the same relationship between place and time and community that is affirmed in the ritual of strawberry teas in early summer, or Grandma’s zucchini loaf at the cottage, or s’mores around the campfire… Please send me your stories about community and food and gatherings. I am interested in both the rituals you still repeat, and the ones that have been lost. There is a great deal of history, particularly local and community specific history hidden in what we eat, and how and where we eat it.

Agriculture and Resilience

June's article in The Equity turned to agriculture and asked readers to comment on how changes on local farms have affected the community in the past 25 or so years. The ‘agriculture file’ in the Shawville archives is full of clippings about mini-courses and information sessions for farmers, many of them responding to changes in technology and government regulations. A local farmer I spoke to confirmed that while regulation is not new, the amount of regulation and the centralization of policy making are increasing, and the quantity of regulation does represent a significant change that farmers have had to accommodate, in terms of both the cost of licenses and the time it takes to deal with paper work. The ‘agriculture file’ also reflects a good deal of experimenting with potential new enterprises: sheep, millet, grapes, hemp, hops, rice… I find myself wondering how much of the impetus for experimentation comes from inside the local farming community, and how much is driven by the structure and assumptions of rural development projects and agencies. To what extent are Pontiac farms tied to provincial and national policy agendas? How much autonomy do local farmers have? How much room to maneuver do individual farms have while they try to balance costs and opportunities, and manage risk?

Strong ties through time.

I had the opportunity at the end of June to talk about my research here in Shawville at the University of Cambridge in England. Cambridge recently celebrated its 800th anniversary as a community of scholars. In the shadow of Cambridge’s sense of time my claim that this community shares a long collective memory might seem somewhat hollow. In fact, it is not difficult to demonstrate or explain Shawville’s sense of having a long shared past. Many of you have spoken to me about your parents, grand parents and even great grand parents as part of your sense of belonging here. The sense of continuity in this place is strong. It is also possible in many cases to stretch that sense of continuity across the sea to Ireland and the shared experiences of emigration and settlement in the Ottawa Valley. One of the stories shared with me recently told of a husband and wife from Shawville who visited Ireland and found their separate ancestors lying side by side in the same village graveyard, clear evidence of continuing connections within the community over time and distance.
I want to test my sense that the community of Shawville (representing the English-speaking community in the Pontiac) has a collective memory and shared worldview coloured by its roots in Protestant Ireland, and the experiences of emigration and re-settlement. Stories told at family gatherings, experiences of “The Glorious 12th and connections to the Orange Lodge, visits “home” to Ireland, or family connections across the Ottawa Valley will all be interesting and valuable in my research!