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!

You Can't Get There From Here.

This week, in my reading and conversations, the long-standing issue of mobility kept surfacing. Sometimes we were talking about the sheer number of kilometers of road we maintain and plow; sometimes about the distances we travel to work or study; sometimes about what we might do to draw mobile others (and their tourist dollars) here. In Suffering from a Want of Communication: A history of Transportation in Pontiac County (2000) Gordon Graham writes, “The key to developing the potential of any region …is the continual improvement of its transportation system”(53). I want to suggest that in recent years we have not only improved our ability to move around, but have also changed our whole attitude toward mobility and distance. What was once considered a long journey into town, or to the city, has become an every day event. ‘Here’ and ‘there’ no longer seem very far apart. How has our changed relationship to mobility and distance affected life in this community? What sort of plans are we making in response to the rising cost of mobility?

Becoming Quebeckers

I am still looking at the time period between 1976 and the first ‘sovereignty-association’ referendum in 1980. The academics I’ve been reading all agree that Québec’s English-speaking communities were too scattered and too diverse to consider themselves a group before they felt threatened by the PQ’s agenda and the looming referendum. After the PQ election there was a lot of work done to form a united front in order to contest the new language laws, especially as they related to schools and signs. A sociologist named Gary Caldwell argued that while organizations like Alliance Quebec offered the obvious advantage of strength in numbers, a more effective response to Québec’s growing nationalism might have been to concentrate on distinguishing Québec’s English-speaking communities from the continent-wide culture of English-speaking North America. He was convinced that without a clear claim to a particular identity in Québec, English-speaking Quebeckers would continue to be seen as outsiders in Québec, by the rest of English Canada and by the Québécois. It seems obvious that Shawville (and the ‘Old’ Pontiac) have a very strong claim to a particular identity with deep roots on the north shore of the Ottawa River. What is less clear studying Shawville’s history is whether you (The Equity’s readers) would say those roots were in Québec, or the Ottawa Valley, or somewhere else. Do you think of yourselves as Anglo-Quebeckers? Does being an Anglo-Quebecker connect you with other English-speaking communities in Québec? Or does it reflect your connection with this piece of geography?

1976 PQ Victory

Last week I asked you to think about what it is that makes Shawville distinct. I'm still hoping that you will share anecdotes about Shawville that illustrate its special character and define its community. Post your thoughts, your anecdotes, a phrase or a few adjectives that express "being Shawville" to you.

This week, I am asking you to respond to some of the data I have been collecting. I’ve spent some time reading through The Equity’s archives. It’s a slow job, because the paper is rich in community stories, and details about local events and opinions. Most recently I read through the papers from 1976, the year of the Parti Quebecois victory in the provincial election. I knew the election, and the victory, were coming of course, so I was surprised by the absence of election related content in the weeks leading up to November 15. There were some signs of English/French tensions, mostly focused on Bill 22 which was clearly seen as a major imposition, and on interaction with Québec bureaucracy, an ongoing frustration. There is no hint in the paper of big changes in the offing. In September of 1976 The Equity even began to carry one page of French content, explaining that the inclusion was a better reflection of the region’s population.

On November 17th, the election results are reported, polling station by polling station. Shawville’s vote was almost evenly divided between the Union Nationale (448 votes) and the Liberals (408 votes). It seems the Liberals did not hold a monopoly on the federalist vote. That was my second surprise. The third was the editorial on page two of the same paper that read: "The election is over for another time so we can go back to our daily routine and try not to notice what happened". The editorial writer pointed out that Lévesque had only 40% of the popular vote, Canadian stock markets did not seem worried, and all would well. Two weeks later, the same editor initiated a conversation about "the problem of keeping Pontiac County in Canada" (Dec.8:p.2), and was chided for being ready to abandon ship rather than challenge “René”. The letter to the editor appeared, unusually, on the front page and read: "We must say, "O.K. René, you have Quebec, but in getting it, you got us. Now what are you going to do?" we must not be content to be cut off from the rest of the province, or to live in a Canada without Quebec” (Dec.15:p.1).

What do you remember about the PQ victory? Was it quickly forgotten, or did you hear conversations about moving away, or moving back in order to work against separation? Did it make the Québec/Ontario border more real, as much of my research suggests? I am interested in your opinions and impressions.