Reflections by Jim Harding
I came to the K-W area in the fall of 1970 when Dumont was a twinkle in the eye. For me, as a prairie boy adapting to living in the Golden Horseshoe, there were always blurred boundaries between Dumont, the Chevron, Integrated studies (IS), Environmental Studies, and OPIRG. But entering this nexus changed the direction of my life.
This is where I met my lifelong partner, Janet Stoody, who was a typesetter and proofreader at Dumont. Our first son, Joel, spent his formative years going back and forth with us between Thunder Bay and K-W, and, with his younger brother, Dagan, took regular trips to K-W to see the Stoody grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins after we moved to Saskatchewan.
I made lifelong friends and activist colleagues in K-W. Being hired in the pioneering Environmental Studies (ES) program transformed me into a militant political ecologist. Trying to help avert the climate crisis, and it going from the frying pan (of fossil fuel GHGs) into the nuclear fire, became a very personal commitment after my time with ES (1972–76). And I have had to learn to deal with my gnawing outrage that this steadily worsening global catastrophe is taking so long to sink in.
I came to K-W because I was hired as a Resource Person in Integrated Studies. I had done a multidisciplinary doctorate at SFU, entitled The Ideology and Logic of Scientism (on-line if you are interested). My last chapter was on how the scientism of the compartmentalized university serves the corporate society.
I had been part of the Political Science, Anthropology and Sociology (PSA) department, which spearheaded university democratization, including student parity, but was finally dissolved after being placed under administrative trusteeship. In 1968, Students for a Democratic University (SDU) activists won daycare through one sit-in, and won equitable transfer credits, for working class and racialized students, through the mass student occupation where 114 of us were arrested. But in 1969 we lost the big battle after our strike failed to overthrow the PSA trusteeship.
It was a political purge. Some faculty and several of us TAs were fired. I was blacklisted, could not find work in BC, and no social science department across Canada would consider me. Peter Warrian, a colleague from SUPA and CUS, informed me about IS and so I applied. (I had some connection with the University from SUPA, which held its Xmas gathering there in 1966.) Howard Petch asked some very pertinent questions during our lengthy one-on-one interview. I was pleasantly surprised at his interest in critical studies of education and the university. I also “passed” the informal student interview.
I thought I was entering Integrated Studies, which are so desperately needed in our dangerous times of compartmentalization, fragmentation, polarization, and conspiracies. But I soon found that it was going to be Independent Studies. I recall some students, like Dave Palmer, being particularly keen while others seemed caught in their developmental anomie. There were some mental health challenges. I was happy working in a farm house on the edge of the campus, where we could hold discussions around a campfire. And I felt more personally grounded after I discovered the Grand River. But after my second year I was enticed over to Environmental Studies by Colin De’Ath, who sometimes hung out at IS, and by George Francis, who had witnessed, through UN work, what was happening to the global environment and had a strong vision of a multidisciplinary environmental curricula. It was the perfect learning-teaching environment for me. I entered the huge world of planetary co-evolution and biodiversity under threat from the ever-accumulating impacts of industrial society. It was overwhelming. I focused on occupational and environmental health, which was to reshape my life commitments.
I prefer to forget about the toxic, dead-end CPC-ML “politics” occurring on the campus at this time.
My relationships with people in the Dumont Nexus deepened. I had many a discussion, especially with Steve Izma, also an IS student at the time, about the history of religion, philosophy, technology and science, which went into the wee hours of the morning. The reified categories of traditional ideologies were crumbling. Events around the Telos journal enriched the critical discussions taking place.
Through Janet I have stayed in touch with many valued friends formed at that time, including Winnie Pietrykowski and Liz Janzen, who also worked at Dumont. Many, many people from coast to coast, from the K-W network, have visited us in the Qu’Appelle Valley over the decades.
The revolt of Paris students in May 1968 unleashed the imagination of a new generation. The liberation of imagination was going to become a foundation of the liberation of the species. We desperately needed to break out from living under the threat of nuclear war and neo-colonialism. The emerging generations struggled to move towards anti-authoritarianism, along with anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, but the stumbling blocks of neo-liberalism and identity politics were still to come. Liberation was to become fragmented into libertarianism, though the COVID pandemic may start to turn this around.
We were all trying to overturn inherited historical narratives. No one in K-W was a buffalo hunter or a guerrilla warrior but Gabriel Dumont’s name nevertheless rose to the top. (Janet and I gave our youngest son, Dagan, the second name “Gabriel,” also in deference to the Métis struggle.) At SFU we had tried to change the university’s name, “Simon Fraser,” a European who got his rivers mixed up, to Louis Riel University, after the Métis father of Canadian Confederation. However, when the SFU SDU briefly held student government, its president was a British grad student and the two of us who were VPs were both from Saskatchewan. Perhaps if we’d known more about West Coast political economy and labour history, we might have considered renaming the university after “Ginger” Goodwin, the strike leader and draft dodger who was murdered in 1918.
Networks grew along with the Dumont Nexus. Janet brought publishing skills to Thunder Bay, which helped us launch the community paper The Black Fly in 1974. Our land in the boreal forest became a stopover for many counter culture people travelling across the country. We had regular visits from people from K-W; Steve Izma and Peter Lang came once and Peter never left the north. Sandy Cameron and Linda Hudson would stop enroute to or from Regina.
Special things happened because of the network linking Ontario’s metropolis and hinterland. I was teaching environmental health, which included case studies such as on the devastation of Indigenous communities and habitats from mercury poisoning from pulp and paper plants in Northern Ontario. The Black Fly did some of the first coverage of this ecological disaster. OPIRG was forming at the time and I got to know Terry Moore, who continues to do such good work. We ended up bringing Ralph Nader as the keynote speaker for an activist Teach In organized in Thunder Bay. We showed films from Minamata, Japan, which had also been struck by corporate mercury poisoning. The network between north and south helped facilitate the trips of Indigenous people from Kenora to Japan and of a Japanese delegation back to Canada. Interregional networks were turning into international ones.
Later, a similar thing happened when Dene from the NWT, who had endured uranium mining for the Manhattan Project, visited victims of the A-Bomb attacks on the Japanese. Global consciousness grew with these international activist networks.
My activism to expose asbestos in Lake Superior or to combat uranium mining in Saskatchewan was inspired by the integration of knowledge occurring around Environmental Studies.
I got to know Ralph Torrie and Bruce Steele through Environmental Studies. Ralph was my physics tutor, especially on the nuclear fuel system and spent fuel, and these conversations were invaluable when I returned to Saskatchewan and Janet and I joined the non-nukes who were resisting the NDP government’s expansion of uranium mining. (My book, Canada’s Deadly Secret, grew out of this activism.) Bruce Steele introduced me to some of my earliest conversations about how information technology was going to transform “human community.” He later joined the notorious Regina community of K-W ex-pats.
Many unexpected benefits accrued from the Dumont Nexus. When my father, Bill, retired back to Regina from his UNDP work around the globe, he hooked up with several CUSO-OXFAM returnees. The collective we formed (Edna Curren Society) bought and upgraded Huston House as a centre for development education. Because it was maintained by volunteers, we could lower rent for activist non-profits. The Sask Council for International Co-operation (SCIC), which survived many cuts from Conservative governments, has been housed there from its formation in the 1970s. The Open-Door Society, still providing support to new immigrant families in 2021, was launched there. The Greens have used the facility as a base. I was involved with the Regina Committee for World Development, the Regina Group for a Non-Nuclear Society, or RGNNS, and Briarpatch Magazine, which were all housed there. Briarpatch is still operating out of there in 2021.
A decision was made to create a co-op print company, called First Impressions, to provide income for Briarpatch. Rosco Bell, who had worked at Dumont and graduated from IS, was one of the original staff. Gary Robins brought his publishing and photography capacities to Regina, which benefitted many organizations including Briarpatch. With his help in production, RGNNS Publishing was able to complete several small books that have challenged the rigid technocratic mindset about energy and environment in the province.
Communicart, Little Red Hen Theatre, the Exchange and the Club, important outreach and community-building projects, all grew out of a blending of friendships, talents, and visions among Saskatchewan activists and K-W ex-pats. Ross Taylor was always game and his home was always welcoming. Liz Willick and Ron Colpitts, also a prairie boy who returned home, were always in this strong circle. Liz brought her many CUP-honed skills to her work on rural women and development.
Deeper connections evolved: Ross Taylor became my mother, Bea’s, personal handyman. Gary Robins is partner with Lisa Brownstone, whose father, Meyer, was a personal mentor, a close colleague of my father, who also went on to do important international development work heading up OXFAM international.
There have been many positive outcomes from the rich nexus. When Steve Izma was at WLU Press, I worked with him to publish a book on social policy and social justice. BTL carries on publishing material that would, otherwise, never see the light of day. BTL published the magnus opus, New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness, which came out of the Queen’s conference on the sixties, held in 2007.
Similar things happened elsewhere; in BC, New Star Books also carries on. It, too, evolved out of the student activism and communal living of the sixties. And remember another important organization, and network, coming from those times, that is celebrating its 50th. Many people still do not know that Greenpeace originated out of the anti-nuclear demonstrations against US testing of nuclear weapons in Alaska, during the Vietnam War. The organization first linked the peace and ecology movements. We still have a lot of dots to connect to enable the new convergence of activism to maximize its effects.
There is a rich history of friendships, loves, creativity, comradeship, and vital outcomes coming from the Dumont Nexus. So, huge congratulations on the 50th. Keep the stories coming; it is now or never if there is going to be valuable documentation from these watershed times.