Ideas - Kate Beaton: What's lost when working-class voices are not heard

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Kate Beaton and her family have deep roots in hard-working, rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. In her 2024 Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture, the popular cartoonist points out what is lost when working-class voices are shut out of opportunities in the worlds of arts, culture, and media. *This episode originally aired on March 26, 2024.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. They're driving over a cape and it's high and windy

and the little rocks are tumbling in the water far below. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Suddenly, the scenery isn't so scenic. The wind is demonic. That's Kate Beaton reading a travel article in Harper's Magazine from 1886. Here's a quote. The life of the region seems to be personated by a withered old man whose ragged homespun hung on him as on a skeleton.

She is a cartoonist, artist, and author. Her comics and graphic novels like Hark! A Vagrant and Ducks! Two Years in the Oil Sands, have won acclaim and awards in Canada and around the world. He bent low over his scythe and with tragic eagerness tried to mow the few spears of wiry grass sticking up from the barren earth. Kate Beaton is from Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, which is also the setting of that article about the withered old man. It's published in a magazine aimed at the 19th century elite,

a story written by an outsider, supposedly about the working class of Cape Breton. Then he says, So, he had to look at poor people. Yuck! That made him sad. Sad as the night. That made him sad. Sad as the night. Back in 1886, the good people of Cape Breton may not have appreciated their region being reduced to one old farmer scratching out a living. But Kate Beaton says that dynamics still exist today.

That the lives of working-class Canadians are filtered through the pens, cameras, and microphones of middle and upper-class people. Beaton said so during the 2024 Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture at the University of Alberta. In her talk, she describes her own life in Cape Breton, how the world of arts and culture can be a playground for the well-off, and what we lose when working-class people can't speak for themselves. From Edmonton, here's Kate Beaton. Thank you. My neighbor tells a story that makes me laugh. When he was a kid, he and his family went to a restaurant for the first time in his life.

It was very exciting. Order whatever you want. So he ordered bread and molasses. It wasn't on the menu, and the waitress was perplexed, but that's what they ate at home. That's what everyone ate at home, because it was cheap, and no one had any money. And we laughed because this is a child's social gaffe. You're supposed to order off the menu. You're supposed to know. This is a talk about class. And I can think of lots of times in my own life where I just did not know what I was supposed to know, according to those above me, and how that felt.

But it works both ways. The knowledge deficit is on the other side as well. For the purpose of this talk, I should define for you what I mean when I say working class. It's an elastic term, even in my view. There's no one definition that satisfies. It was once the proletariat. People who only had their labor to sell is economic value, but not anymore. It used to mean people without post-secondary degrees, but many workers have those, or they have occupation-specific training. It used to conjure images of factories, but most working class people today are in the service industry.

To cut off the working class from the poor and the middle class by one income amount feels arbitrary to individual experience. I think self-identification is what makes it. We work, but we are poor. We are working class. Even that has its issues. Wolfgang Lehmann, sociology professor at Western University, often found his subjects, who were working class students, unable to name themselves as, in fact, working class, even when there were obvious signifiers, as in they were the first in their families to go to university and their parents were mechanics and beauticians.

When asked, they supposed they might be middle class by virtue of having grown up in a house and having employed parents. This is backed up by the research. Last year, the Angus Reid Institute published a large survey on class in Canada. It found that most Canadians don't think or talk that much about social class, and most of us, for better or worse, consider ourselves as hewing towards the middle class, whether we are below it or above it. And isn't that who politicians are always talking to anyway?

The average Canadian? But the same study also points out that class mobility is difficult in real life. And even though Canadians believe in meritocracy, believe in getting ahead through hard work, it's hard to get from the bottom to the top. Yet class division has always been central to our national makeup, whether we acknowledge it or not, often not. This is as true in the arts as much as anywhere. The economist Carol Jan Borowiecki, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, did a survey of 160 years of U.S. demographic data. It told the obvious, but it showed it on paper. If you come from more money, you are more likely to become an artist than someone who did not. Someone who had a family income of $100,000 is twice as likely to become an artist, an actor, a musician, or an author than someone else from a family of $50,000. If you raise that income

to a million dollars, you are 10 times more likely to become an artist. It's easy to understand why to leap into a creative field is to walk into the arms of an industry that might not love you back financially. The stakes are high for someone with no money. If there is no one to catch you when you fall, it's just a choice that you can't make. You can only be a starving artist if you or your family are not actually literally starving. The New York Times added a little finesse to this data with its own study of surveys finding in 2017 that way more young people pursuing an art career get a financial bump from their parents and a higher amount of it compared to their blue-collar peers. financial bump from their parents and a higher amount of it compared to their blue-collar peers.

In short, the arts is full of more people who come from wealthier backgrounds than not, people who in turn decide what stories are told, whose voices are heard, and in essence, who decides what our culture is. I've been aware of class my entire life. My parents worked very hard for very little, but they would be the first to point out it's not like anyone else had anything either. That's life in a working class community. As a child, you accept your life as normal, whatever the circumstances. If you have no money, it doesn't matter that nothing looks like the house is on TV, nothing is ever new, that toy commercials mean nothing because, yeah, dream on. But you still know what's going on. If parents have anxiety over what to spend money on, kids are the first to tune in. I'm learning this because I have a four-year-old

and a two-year-old, and kids are always listening. Class is there. It's in the backdrop. When you get older, though, you start to make your way in the wider world. Class reveals itself in sharp relief, especially in all the ways that you are found lacking, the connections that you don't have, the skills that you never learned, the accent you speak in, the way you look, and of course the money you don't have and possibly never will. When I speak about class, this is how I understand it, really. This is how I know who I am.

Today, I'm a cartoonist. That means that I'm a writer and an artist and an illustrator, and I get to do it all. I wanted so badly to be an artist from a young age, but I'm from a have-not place. At that young age, I had no resources. I didn't have the tools to navigate the system that I thought I needed to become what I wanted so badly.

My village was small, and my school only had so much. They were used to sending the bright students off to teaching and nursing degrees, sensible choices in a place with limited options. The last thing that they wanted to do was set us up for failure by setting us off to a career in the arts, where they knew there was little that they could do to help us and no money at home to carve a way to success. I said that I wanted to be an animator,

and I think the guidance counselor and I both started sweating. I said that I wanted to be an animator, and I think the guidance counselor and I both started sweating. It was demoralizing. I recall a sad scene in the small village museum where I worked in the summer. My father came to drop off the university course packet that came in the mail on his lunch break. But the course packet was not the one that I longed for. I was going for a Bachelor of Arts instead of Fine Arts or an animation degree that I had longed for, the one that I had dreamed of for years.

With a BA, you can always be a teacher or a lawyer, so keep your doors open, always keep your doors open. My father was proud to drop off the university mail, but I wept for my broken 17-year-old dreams, and he didn't know what to do. What were my parents supposed to think anyway? They were nothing but supportive and proud, but they came from an even harder reality than I did. When my mother's oldest sister went away for work, the first thing that she did with her money was install a bathroom in the old house. Imagine the luxury that you think

your kids have when you didn't have a bathroom. The first thing I did with my money, of course, was pay off my own fancy education. No print market would have wanted me when I started making comics I was working in a camp in an oil sands mine I was a woman from a poor town making crude looking comics on my time off because I had 12 hour shifts and I wasn't even that familiar with comics Rural poor places didn't have them I had never had an art class and it showed. I could smell the rejection letters baking in the oven. I had one stroke of fortune. The internet was, at that time

anyway, a great equalizer. There were no gatekeepers. It was like jumping the turnstiles to get on the train. You just made these things and put them up, and anyone in the world could look at them. And I was making these jokey comics about history and literature and things that I was interested in, and something I started at university, but posted online after I graduated. People who also liked these things responded in kind, and it felt so good to be seen.

I was doing it for nothing, for the joy of it. My day job was in a mine and living in a work camp and there was harassment and isolation and pollution and drugs and so many other things but I put these comics up at night and people would see me as I wanted to be seen and that was worth so much Then someone else who was making comics online

in the same way started a company that sold merchandise for people's websites and invited me to be a part of it so I could make some income. And I did. And though my career changed a lot, I've been making comics for a living since 2008. It's a great shame that that window of time where the internet was open as it was when I came in shifted and shrank and you can't do it that way anymore. I did get published eventually. After I was legitimized by popularity, got an agent, the works. But it wasn't just me who came in through the back door at that time. Without gatekeepers, the internet brought down class barriers, but it also gave similar entry and

acclaimed queer people, racialized people, people telling stories that felt unmarketable or imprintable. Now comics, which used to be synonymous with white men, is one of the most diverse mediums we have, which is very cool. And now, being one of the rare artists who manages to come from the working class and make a living from creative work alone, I want to reflect on representation

of people like me in literature where I'm from. I can't speak for class broadly as it spans the continent, but I can speak for myself, and I can tell you that representation or lack of it has an effect. It empowers or edifies you, or it stereotypes and diminishes you, or worse, it erases you. I said before that there are those who decide what our culture is, but behind that is another idea, a request, a need that we have, that culture should belong to everyone with the same authenticity and power. And it doesn't always work out that way. So let's go back, way, way back, woo, way back to 1886. There's a travel article from Harper's New Monthly Magazine out of New York by one Charles H. Farnham. He's come to Cape Breton, my island, to get out of the flash and fizz of the city, those

are his words, and look at people the way they used to live. Simple people who aren't spoiled by modern noise. The article is called Cape Breton Folk. The thing about looking for something specific is that if you go that far to get it, your mind is made up, and you might convince yourself that you found it no matter what you see. Farnham wants to see simple people, and so simple people he sees. He takes a lot in, wigs, marriages, festivals, scenery. And he gets to my village. And when I found this article, I was very excited. I was like, I can't wait to see what he sees when

he gets to my village, because we don't have a lot of records of this kind of thing. But he gets there, and suddenly the scenery isn't so scenic. They're driving over a cape, and it's high and windy, and the little rocks are tumbling in the water far below. The wind is demonic. He says it's all personified by a poor old man who's trying to farm something. Here's a quote. The life of the region seems to be personated by a withered old man whose ragged homespun hung on him as on a skeleton, and whose unkempt flocks flew about with the wind.

He bent low over his scythe and with tragic eagerness tried to mow the few spears of wiry grass sticking up from the barren earth. A little more steepness and he had rolled into the sea as the stones did. A little more wind and he had whirled away as the leaves of November. Then he says, nights seem more in harmony with such bleak poverty than the glory of sunset. It enshrouded us all as we threaded our way homeward. So then he travels to the next town. And he says, Waikagama was doubly charming after the bleakness of the seacoast and the fatigue of travel.

I settled down in a comfortable inn to continue my rambles in Cape Breton through the Indian summer. This is one of the prettiest places on the island. So, he had to look at my rambles in Cape Breton through the Indian summer. This is one of the prettiest places on the island. So. He had to look at poor people. Yuck! Ugh. That made him sad. Sad as the night.

He came to see delightful, wee, simple folk. Not gross poverty. But then he woke up at a charming inn came to see delightful, wee, simple folk, not gross poverty. But then he woke up at a charming inn in a more affluent village, and that made things better. New day, new adventures

for our man Charles. I'm going to pause here. We're going to put a pin in the withered old man in ragged homespun holding a scythe, the poor man in my home village. I don't want you to feel too bad for my forebears, not even the ragged old man on the cliff. The village in which Charles Farnham landed and found a comfortable inn at the end of that passage was Waikagama. That's a 30 minute drive from my house right now. He finds it, as he says, beautiful and prosperous. Ooh,

but this is Canada. And in Canada, we should know that a darker truth is underneath that. The truth is that Waikagama, beautiful as it was, was an indigenous settlement, a Mi'kmaq reserve. But it had been encroached on and taken by white squatters, who neither cared that Cape Breton Unamagi was unceded land as a whole, or that the reservation specifically was not theirs. Around that time, estimates suggest that half of Cape Breton was settled by squatting. The settlers either had no money to petition for land, or the system was not set up to accommodate them, so they just squatted.

Chief Peter Gugu of Waikogama wrote a petition to the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia in 1885, appealing for help because the squatters were taking land that was precious to them, some of it already cultivated, and they were in fear of their future. No help came. But another petition came out two years later, this one from the settlers themselves, asking the government officially for more Mi'kmaq land, because in their opinion, they were best suited to civilize the area, and the natives were dying anyway. It's signed by a lot of people. The third signature on that second petition is a Beaton.

I don't know who he is exactly, but he is a potent reminder of who I am. know who he is exactly, but he is a potent reminder of who I am. Heir of the colonizer and a beneficiary of the system that they created. Class does not exist alone. It has many bedfellows and race is the most intertwined among them. Everyone was poor, but this is the truth about class as well. Poor white people have always been the first in line, class-wise, to receive the benefit of the doubt, the leg up, the open door, the extended hand. I've benefited from that fact as sure as I'm standing here in front of you right now so it's 1886

and the ragged man with the scythe has put Charles Farnham off his lunch he's attempting to mow a few spears from the barren earth before the wind blows his skeletal frame into the sea Charles departs for greener pastures the man has left where he is. He has no interiority. He's just tragic. This kind of travel writing is common about Cape Breton, and we'll get more into that. But by its very nature, travel writing is all about looking at

things, and the main character is the writer. It interprets what the writer sees through the writer's lens. It assigns value through the writer. It can only give you so much. But the man has interiority, a family, a community, a culture, and in a way we can let him speak for himself. I don't know who this man is,

but I can introduce you to my great, great, great grandfather. His name was Angus McAllister, and he was a bard, a poet. He was born in Mabu in 1817, the same place I was born, 166 years later. We are lucky that any of his songs survived. He was not fluent in English. Gaelic was his tongue, which is the case for many in the area. He was a protege of Alan the Ridge, a famous poet of the region. I understand your mileage on famous may vary.

And when that guy left the village and the two poets parted, Angus bought his farm, and it was, unfortunately, kind of a shitty farm. But to be fair, the crop blight of the 1840s was making farming difficult for anybody to get under. And so Angus, poor and blighted, put pen to paper and wrote this. Oren do rasky avar, the song to the crop failure. And in this, he's writing about really hard times.

He's not flinching away from the reality of poverty and the devastating effects of the crop failure that gives the song its title. The potatoes are blackened. The wheat and the oats won't grow. Disease takes the cattle. It's bad. But there's humor here. He wants a drink at the tavern, but he can't have it. There's no money. But by the end of the song, his wife winks. She goes to the chest, and she pulls out a hidden bottle of whiskey. And then she pours him a big old drink, and she says, chin up.

And he has a big swig and and then he everywhere he looks good fortune and poverty is gone and that's how all right but the line that i like the most is when he said things are so bad here that i can't grow anything but children. It's a funny line. And he would know he had nine. But you wouldn't suppose there was humor through the hardship if all you had was that travel writer's brief disdain. Well, let people speak for themselves.

Of course, of these two accounts of poverty in Mabu at that time, one was published by a writer in a famous magazine we all recognize the name of. Even now, if you Google it, you can find it. It has a wider cultural cachet, no matter how archival it becomes. The other is housed only in the physical special collections at St. Francis Savory University's Celtic Studies Department, or in the tiny museum in my home village, or in memory. If you want to understand what life is like at that time, it would not be hard to look for one, but you have to look very, very, very hard for the other one. Even 150 years later, class is power. Thank you. Hey there, I'm Nala Ayyad. GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about.

Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. Kate Beaton is an award-winning cartoonist and author. Her most recent book, Ducks, Two Years in the Oil Sands, won CBC's Canada Reads competition in 2023. In the United States, it won both the Eisner Award and Harvey Award, given to the best comic artists and writers of the year. Here is the second part of the 2024 Chrysal Lecture with Kate Beaton from the University of Alberta. There's a funny reoccurrence in medieval bestiaries. Change of subject.

And a bestiary is, if you don't know, it's animal drawings. So the funny reoccurrence is elephants. A lot of artists who drew the bestiaries had never seen an elephant. Why would they? They were European monks who lived in monasteries. But they were charged with producing an image of one based on what they were told. So, okay, you've heard what an elephant looks like. It's a four-legged animal, large, two big ears, two enormous tusks, a tail, and most curious of all, a long nose. Like a trumpet or a hose? I don't know.

So what would your drawing look like if you didn't know what an elephant looked like? The answer is bizarre. Bizarre. Anything between a giant pig, horse, dog, or boar with something crazy coming out of its face. And this is how I feel sometimes looking at portrayals of the working class or poor people when they are written by somebody just going off of what they have heard. Those middle class writers who give us so many of our lower class characters. They're writing off of an idea and other images and books and media that they have consumed that told them this is what it is. They don't need to live it.

They have the authority that comes with looking down. How many more depictions of poor people do we need to see how their economic status, their poverty is a personal failure instead of a systematic one? It is inherent in how they are bad parents, addicted to something, lazy or stupid or dirty or crude or violent compared to their middle class counterparts. How many times are they an object of ridicule? How many times have we looked into a working class home on television or a movie and seen a bleak hole where a family should be?

No, you don't want to live there. Defined by everything that they do not have according to their betters. You maybe want to hear about the one who escaped all this, not the ones who live it. The one who is palatable is the one who is different than all the rest. How can we reveal a truer culture with empathy and understanding of one another without a real understanding of one another's circumstances. If there is no authentic representation, then all you have are medieval drawings of elephants. Earlier generations of writing in Cape Breton did not trade so much in the stereotypes of lower classes as we have now, people as failures.

They had a different image in mind, that of the folk. What do I mean of that when I say the folk? Let's get into it. There's a seminal work, so I heard some moaning in the audience. There's a seminal work from 1994 called Quest of the Folk by Ian McKay that has influenced all writing around literature about Atlanta, Canada, since it was published. It is very hard to find a bibliography without it. Quest of the Folk comes for us all. It came for me on a syllabus

in an anthropology folklore course in university. It's so popular because it lays bare the machine that helped create Nova Scotia as a place of the mythic folk ideal, that of the backwards rural people, simple, friendly, and pre-industrial living in a golden age the rest of the country is sentimental for and ready to be discovered

and McKay's book goes heavy in the ring with folklorist Helen Creighton who scoured rural Nova Scotia for folk songs and folklore during her career in the early 20th century but selected for publication only that which she deemed authentic and appropriate to her taste. That taste was very conservative, sanitized, and racially selective. Her work was very popular and helped promote an anti-modern aesthetic for the region which the middle class and outsiders flocked to, but it did not represent the reality which was modernizing, industrializing, racially diverse, and often cruder than she would allow.

McKay argues a strong case that Nova Scotia commodified a folk culture for tourism and commercial interests. In these images and texts, the province looks bucolic, purposefully stuck in the past, often very white, particularly Scottish or Acadian, erasing Indigenous people and Black communities and other immigrant settlers. Yet the oldest black communities in Canada are situated in Nova Scotia. In all these arguments, McKay is very on the money. The folklorists all came from the middle class. They had the equipment and the cars to drive around because they had the leisure to do so.

They could publish books about what they chose to include as culture and what they chose to include as culture and what they chose to admit but we all had Helen Creighton's books growing up and everyone else did too and I remember wishing that Helen Creighton had come to my town because the people in those books all had a record of themselves on paper where we did not it felt like proof of something that That's all I knew. You also can't deny the impact of tourism images and literature on how the rest of the world sees us and how we see ourselves in the world. McKay writes of the Nova Scotia folk that they lived generally in fishing and farming communities, supposedly far removed from capitalist social relations and the stresses of modernity. The folk did not work in factories, coal mines, lobster canneries, domestic service. They were

rooted to the soil and the rock-bound coast and they lived lives of self sufficiency, coast to nature. You can conjure that in your mind, you've seen it. It's an East Coast postcard. It's beautiful, powerful image, pervasive one. But if that was who we were, if that was how the rest of the country saw us as backward rural simpletons, then you know how it affected the way that people were allowed to live their lives. Should those people in that image make decisions for themselves? No, they're too backward. Should they aspire to more? No, they're stuck where they are, but they'll like it.

Should they have a voice? No, better educated people should talk for them. The maritime provinces are always accused of being too sentimental for their own good, as if that, at its core, wasn't also something partially manufactured and put on them by people who wanted it that way. I also think that Cape Breton has just always existed in the imagination of people in and outside of all this as a refuge from modernity by its very geography. If you look at it on the map, islands carry their own romance, and there on the edge of the continent, it looks like a place to get away from it all.

In the 1950s, Timothy Ash, a young anthropologist, not a tourist, would later become famous in his field. He was sent to my village to document the way people used to live because there, they still lived that way. They were an official control group for the past. So let's go on a trip. Let's go on a trip. Let's go on a trip with Edna Stabler. A friend of mine handed me a book by Edna Stabler called Cape Breton Harbor. This is a book published in 1972 chronicling Stabler's visit to Neal Harbor, a fishing village in northern Cape Breton.

to Neal Harbor, a fishing village in northern Cape Breton. Edna Stabler is a well-known, this is where she was, a well-known Canadian journalist from Kitchener, Ontario. She wrote for publications like Chatelaine, but she's best known for a cookbook called Food That Really Schmecks. Some fans. She helped found the literary journal The New Quarterly, along with Farley Maurit and Harold Horwood. Wilfrid Laurier University has a creative writing award in her name. But in 1948, she was

yet unpublished, and she was visiting Cape Breton, and she was taking notes for what would be her first ever published article, a piece for Maclean's magazine that would jumpstart her career. The book about this visit was published years later in 1972. Among all her writings, she said that this was her favorite. And it is an interesting book to read today, not because it's famous, but because of the way that it's written and how much she shows her hand. Stabler was coming to the island on vacation. She may have been writing in 1948, but the book was published only a decade before I was born. The copy on the back, the marketing, tells you a lot immediately. The spell of the sea will be on you as you read this finely illustrated story of

Edna Stabler's discovery of a fishing village on the Cabot Trail. Like a seashell or a pocket full of sand, this book will talk to you of people, the sound of gulls in the sea long after you have read it. She grew to love the people who in turn accepted her into their lives. Here's an intimate look at what many people mean when they think of the Marathons. Ooh. Count me in. Well, it certainly paints a picture. It evokes McKay's The Folk, to be sure. Like you pick up a rock, oh my God, a fishing bill.

I found it its dust jacket is written for the middle class to come out of the city and discover something more primitive when she lands in Neal's Harbor, she thinks it's ugly and poor and the food is bad she learns to love it and appreciate it quickly and that you might say is the point of the book. However, we as the reader would take what we are given and we are told that is a dump right away and so we have to believe it especially since if we are the upper Canadian

middle class to whom this book is marketed. When she says right away, I certainly won't stay here a week. I won't even unpack my bags. The red Malcolm woman is hostile. The fishermen might be filthy old men and I won't be safe in their boats. The glitter on the sea is menacing. Pierre Burton said that Edna immerses herself in the story. She becomes part of the narrative. She lives the lives of the people that she writes about. She listens to their problems, and they become her friends. To Pierre Burton, she broke boundaries, and she did break boundaries. She was a pioneer of literary journalism. She was a woman in a field heavily dominated by men. She worked hard at it. It was also clear that Edna Stabler loved Cape Breton. Her biography

makes that explicit. When her marriage was souring, she wrote in a letter to a friend, I want much of the time to run away, to find the joy I had when I was in Neal's Harbor. the time to run away to find the joy I had when I was in Neils Harbour. She would go back and she felt more at home there than anywhere. Contentment. She felt welcomed and she was welcomed. So I don't mean to pick on poor Edna Stabler. Certainly there are many more villainous writers who can prove the point. This is a big chunk of the 20th century. Travel writers everywhere are gallivanting and they are writing things that horrify the modern eye. Try Margaret Warner Wally's 1900 book Down North and Up Along where she, a biologist, indulges in her own personal race theory throughout. Thanks, I hate it.

How about 1948's Cape Breton Isle of Romance by Arthur Walworth? The New York Times says, it gives a leisurely, intimate view of the semi-primeval life of the Scotch, Irish, French, and Mi'kmaq Indians who occupy the island. This man has a Pulitzer Prize in literature. They give those to anybody. Now, Edna Stabler is interesting because she is not so easily dismissed like some of these others. She loved Cape Breton. She tried hard to engage with people and as a person with a writing career, you root for her to succeed, but she still can't escape the fact that wherever she looks,

she is applying a certain gaze. As much as you might admire, enjoy the company of, or feel at home with the working class, these writers don't want to be them, could never be them, the authenticity on the page is the author's alone. If you gave someone from Neils Harbor a chance to write a book about Edna Stabler's three weeks there, would they write everything that they say to sound different than what you sound like? Probably not. Would they write, would they introduce their village to the reader as a desolate dump? Probably not. But they were also busy working. Well, she was there for three weeks on a summer holiday,

which is still the case in Cape Breton and everywhere in the rural maritimes, places that burst with visitors all summer. Who muses at the lifestyle? Oh, it's so nice here. Well, everyone else is working and often specifically working for them. specifically working for them. And yet, and yet, on whose shelf is this 50-year-old book still standing? I would say most of the book collections of the casual readers of Upper Canada or wherever, we're making real villains of Upper Canada because we're in Alberta. I imagine those book collections have long dusted this one off the shelves.

But I got it from a friend who had it in her bookstore in Cape Breton where people often pick up used copies with interest. And I do guarantee that people in Neils Harbour have this book. They most of all. Because we all want to be represented. If you don't have people's authentic voice,

then other people will come in to fill the gap. And if that is all you have to see yourself with, or if that is the majority of what you are going to get, then you will never feel fully realized and seen in the larger culture. You will always be a caricature of some kind, pass through the lens of someone different, maybe someone who can't even help but feel better than you. And you know that that is consequently how others will perceive you as well. When you look outside of your small world, there will always be people looking back

at you. But to be beholden to what they think they see, or what they want to see, instead of being able to speak for yourself, is a terrible price for just having less. There was a documentary in the 1970s called The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler, and it made the case that all the fiddlers had disappeared from the island. They hadn't really. All the best ones were just working at Chrysler's car plant in Windsor, Ontario. How bizarre to have these two images competing for the mask that you wear in public, depending on which one people see when you tell them that you're from Cape Breton.

I've had people light up, charmed. I've had also people immediately look down on me. I've also had many people not know where in the hell that is. But I graduated high school in 2001, and this was a particularly rough time for the Cape Breton history and economy. They were shutting everything down, and communities suffered. Everything was going. The pulp mill in Port Hawkesbury, Sydney Steel, the last coal mines on the island, my school was razed to the ground, even the post offices were closing. The grocery store that had employed my father had changed hands about three times in the past

few years and was the only store left in town. Everything felt untenable. End of days. End of days is a cool thing to wake up to. When I was in grade 11, in the last year before they closed my school, there were 23 kids in my grade and there were seven in grade primary. It was like the population was just going off of a cliff. And we were told to leave, just leave.

There's nothing for you here. There was a sense that young people were living out a life of options in other places, and you were just eking out the sputtering death of a statistic of what happens in these places. So I left. We all left. so I left we all left and so you would be forgiven for thinking that my story

is one of a net cultural loss if you read ducks and felt a hole somewhere inside I can't blame you for that it's a difficult read but it is a disservice to my community to let you think that way so I want to close this talk

with my beautiful truth the truth being that I am here today with a career as an artist to let you think that way. So I want to close this talk with my beautiful truth. The truth being that I am here today with a career as an artist, as a cartoonist, a writer, and the whole nine yards because I am the beneficiary of a long history of a community that values art.

And that is a working class legacy also. Art for no money, art for each other, art for shared history, for storytelling, for pleasure through hard times, art for each other, art for shared history, for storytelling, for pleasure through hard times, art because it has value. In the working class, your body of labor is what it is. There are not many options. Then the job is available and it's good and you have to take it.

Your body has to take it, but your mind is a different story. In my life, I may have lacked confidence as anybody might. I might have worried that I may have lacked confidence as anybody might. I might have worried that I was not as good as other people. I might compare badly with those who have more resources, but I never once questioned the value of my mind, and that is the gift of my community. Even as I shit my body out for unforgiving labor, I never felt like my voice wasn't worth something. Story is what we are all about, isn't it? And I have been telling you a story about Cape Breton for a while now, so let me tell you a different one.

First of all, I should mention something about my culture in my small part of the province. Up until the recent past, where you see more diversity, it has been predominantly the culture of the settler gale, people of Scottish descent but not Scottish. They were not the only ones. There has been a sizable Dutch population since World War II. Their names have loyalist origin.

To the north and south you will find Acadian communities, and to the east, Mi'kmaq communities. But in the enclave of communities from which I hail, there is a strong Gaelic presence, and that is the culture that I claim. So I'm speaking for myself when I talk about my community. The tourism industry that we have talked so much about, built heavily on the romanticized version of these people, the Tartans, the bagpipes, the mysticism, the dominance of this image, at the expense of and purposeful erasure of other cultures, especially if they were not white.

And it worked. Tarjanism is hard to shake. But it was a package created for the consumption of the white middle class and foreign visitors who wanted to see kilts and had a mania for Bonnie Prince Charlie and Robbie Burns. It made caricatures of actual people who never heard of Robbie Burns Day and never owned a kilt. And I think you guys can relate to this a little bit because you have your cowboy stuff. I've seen it around a little bit. My husband is from Alberta and he's like,

yes, the farmers wear ball caps and the like bank guys at the stampede wear the cowboy hats anyway so when i speak of my culture i know i'm contending with this image it's cringy stuff but there were real people and real cultures here long before the folklorists and the tourist industry more came after nova scotia is diverse and full of as much cultural truth for itself alone as it has been subject to or even participated in cultural construction for others. Do you remember the poet from before? Angus, my great great great grandfather, the one who wrote the crop failure song? He's not the only poet from around then.

I mentioned his mentor, the locally famous Alan the Rich MacDonald. Alan wrote a poem one time. He spent the night at his neighbor's house. When he woke in the morning, it was to the sound of a woman named Catherine singing to a baby in another room. Her grandchild. And lying there listening, he would write a poem, a song in her praise. In the song he writes that he awoke to the steady, tranquil sound of her voice, which enthralled his mind and gladdened his heart.

How true a friend she was, cheerful, singing to the child, more beautiful a sound than the birds on the tips of branches or of any street instrument. He praises her manner, her dignity, her husband and family, and in the end, he concludes with, I am well able to relate this. They were my good friends. It's very beautiful. I love this. They were my good friends. It's very beautiful. I love this. I love this song.

Catherine, the woman. I have her name these many generations later. She is my great, great, great, great grandmother. She should be lost to time for all that her station in life was. She could not read or write. She had not a word of English. But she comes alive because the poetry of her people

was a poetry of community. And are I fortunate for that? That's a treasure for me, to know the ways that beauty, love and connection have always been a part of life. People really like to punt around their opinions of the Gaelic language but it is for me to decide how much this means to me and it means a lot. It's mine.

Here's another story. I was always jealous of the musicians because music talent was such a prize. There's always famous fiddle players and the like, and you might know some famous fiddle names yourself, but it's only in the last 20 years or so that you could actually make a career of it. And before that, even the most genius musicians

either worked at something else or they lived in poverty if that's all they were doing. But they were revered as legends, and they were legends. They knew more about music than you could ever imagine. Not just how to play it, but to make it, the lore around it, and they could tell the stuff from one village to another where you only heard the same sound. They would say that music was in you, that it followed a lineage,

that it was in your family, that it was natural. It didn't have to be, but it was often found in families, you know, particular talent, fiddlers, piano players, singers and dancers cropping up like carrots in a patch. We had so much art around us in different forms. it's in a patch. We had so much art around us in different forms. Wit and humor were prized. When I was interviewed about making comics, when I was doing humor comics, people often asked like, where do you think the humor came from? And I was always like, home. But it was hard to get into it. How do you explain humor? All you knew from a young age was that you wanted to be as funny as the people around you. You wanted them to notice you. Lyndon McIntyre put it this way. He said, every kid grows up wanting the favorable attention of an adult, and the best way to get it is to play the fiddle. If you can't play the fiddle, you have to tell the story. So there's an oral tradition passed between generations embedded in stories from simple, ordinary lives.

Turning that into something that holds attention puts a high premium on clever speech and humor. You learn to embellish antidotes from daily living and make them entertaining enough so that people remember you. Hmm. Bang on. I feel like this quote about where storytelling comes from

culturally I recognize it he's only from down the road you know if you were good with humor you could almost be immortal maybe we didn't get the music in my family but we had the stories and the humor and everyone knew it. And it made me feel like I had it and that I could do it.

And I did. We did. Stories, music, poetry, dance, humor, all of these things kept a tiny corner of the world connected through generations. I'm informed and enriched by it. It's about finding value in each other and so in yourself that gives you strength or to borrow from my musical kin it is mellifluous. And when I tell a story I'm pulling from the strength of something deep inside of a woman who can't read or write singing to her grandbaby early in the morning with a clear and beautiful voice a man who is poor and keeps a sense of humor about it in poetry and song a fiddler who is a composer and a genius pulled from the middle of making hay to play at a wedding a cartoonist who wants to be as funny as the people around her and tell stories because that

is who I am and that is who we are. I write, I make art, I know who I am, and I am grateful for the story within my community which taught me that I had a voice that mattered, that culture belonged to me with power and authenticity as it should to us all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You were listening to Ideas and the 2024 Chrysler Lecture by Kate Beaton from the University of Alberta. Special thanks to the University of Alberta's Sarah Kratz and Grant Wang. Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast. a broadcast and a podcast. So if you liked the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive at cbc.ca slash ideas,

where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. This episode was produced by Matthew Lazen-Ryder. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Sam McNulty. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.