News from the Black Holes

I learned a couple of interesting things about my country and its people this week.

The New York Times told me about interesting developments on Fogo Island, a small piece of Newfoundland sitting in the North Atlantic. It is an isolated place, geographically and historically; population 2,700 with little work since the cod fishery collapsed.

Zita Cobb, a local who made a name and money for herself as a corporate executive in the U.S., returned to Fogo and began putting thought and much money into reviving the island. She formed the Shorefast Foundation, which is trying to revitalize the economy with a variety of projects, including art studios and a five-star inn.

From the Muskoka Weekender I learned about one man's inspiring late-life campaign against illiteracy. Clarence Brazier, who died April 15 at age 105, was 93 before he learned to read. When he did, he became a powerful advocate for adult literacy, taking his inspirational message to many, especially young people.

He won several awards for his work, including the Governor-General’s Caring Canadian Award and the Canada Post Literacy Award.

Brazier worked bush and mine jobs in which it was easier to keep secret his inability to read and write. His wife Angela covered for him, writing and reading on his behalf.

Stories like these - which tell us who we are and how we live our lives - are becoming fewer. Outside the major population centres there are expanding black holes from which we hear or read little about people and their lives. News media coverage has shrunk as smaller budgets mean fewer news staff and increased focus on news close by and cheaper to cover. More and more news coverage is of government and politics because it is pretty much spoon-fed news, quick and easy to report.

Thankfully there are some news people around, certainly at the New York Times and Muskoka Weekender, still telling us important stories about people.

Government does not a nation make. Nations are created by people living their lives, and reporting their stories should be a priority of any news organization.

Spring of Fear

It’s hard to go through April without recalling the worries of the Spring of Fear nine years ago. April 2003 was when we all feared that a new disease named Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) would become a devastating pandemic.

SARS killed 800 people around the world, 44 in Canada, before disappearing in the autumn.  We all breathed easier, although medical experts still warn that there will be other serious outbreaks created by new or mutating existing bugs.

Since then, there has been an important developing change in how public health thinks about viral outbreaks. Nine years ago, public health reacted to SARS, as they had with previous influenza pandemics, attacking full force, eventually winning, and then going back to business as usual. Now, however, there are indicators that public health will do more to predict outbreaks and work to prevent them.

A major force behind the change is Dr. Nathan Wolfe of Stanford University and founder of Global Viral Forecasting, which specializes in early detection and control of epidemics. He also is author of The Viral Storm: The Dawn of a New Pandemic Age published late last year.

Viral outbreaks occur regularly, but the public only hears about, or at least becomes concerned about, the ones that break loose and spread worldwide, like SARS, HIV and the killer influenzas.

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Most outbreaks start with animal to human transmission. So Wolfe and his organization have taken to monitoring human-wild animal interfaces in Africa and Asia where people have close contact with bushmeat, or wild animals taken for food. They gather detailed information through field and lab work and data from social media, cell phone contact and other sources. They are trying to create a system that provides real-time information that will anticipate viral threats and block them before they spread.

Viral outbreaks spread as quickly as a 777 can fly from one continent to another. We live in one closely connected world and a deadly virus that gets loose, could quickly kill millions of us.

Developing an early warning system and turning public health’s thinking toward fighting possible outbreaks in advance is the best way to make sure killer viruses no longer get loose.

The Lily of the Mohawks

So, the silliness has begun over the impending canonization of Kateri Tekakwitha as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. The Toronto Star stirred the pot in January with a story about the ‘damned Yankees’ trying to steal away a Canadian saint.

Kateri Tekakwitha

Tekakwitha was a Mohawk child who was four in 1660 when her mother, father and brother died in a smallpox outbreak that ravaged Iroquois settlements in what is now upstate New York. She also had smallpox but survived with severe facial scarring and partial blindness. She was taken in by relatives and later began to develop devotion to Christianity brought by Jesuit missionaries.

Many of the Iroquois tribes did not like the Jesuits or the new religion. Priests were killed, and people who followed their religion were marginalized and mocked.

Kateri was among some Mohawks who moved with Jesuits to a Christian settlement now called Kahnawake on Montreal’s south shore. She became known there for her piety, acts of penance and care of the sick. She died at only 24 and those at her bedside said that as she passed away, the smallpox scars on her face disappeared and she became beautiful to look at.

The Catholic Church has been investigating miracles associated with her for well over 100 years. In 1943, the Vatican declared her a possibility for sainthood and beatified her in 1980. In October, she will officially become the church’s first native North American saint.

The fuss over whether Kateri was American or Canadian has been going on for decades. It will intensify now with her elevation to sainthood. It’s totally ridiculous. She is neither an American, nor a Canadian saint. She is a saint of the Mohawks, who were a distinct nation long before the Europeans arrived, and still consider themselves a nation despite all the attempts to assimilate them.

Kateri Tekakwitha is an interesting story, whether you believe in saints and miracles or not. More on Tekakwitha and the Mohawks will be found in Smoke Signals: The Native Takeback of North America’s Tobacco Industry, my latest book that will be published this fall by Dundurn Press.

Millionaires in a World Gone Mad

It is 20 degrees Celsius and I am sitting overlooking the lake, reading and reflecting on the decline of the daily newspaper industry. The ice on the lake is blackening and perhaps will be out before April for the first time in history. Most of the snow is gone from the bush, unheard of in middle March.

A World Gone Mad

The world has gone mad, but it has little to do with the weather.

I am reading about the severance package handed out to Craig Dubow, former CEO of Gannett newspapers. Gannett owns USA Today and 80 other U.S. newspapers.

Dubow worked 30 years at Gannett, the last six as CEO. The Associated Press news service, on whose board he sat as a director, reported that Gannett's print advertising revenue dropped from $5.2 billion in 2005 to $2.5 billion last year. The company's stock price nosedived 86 percent while Dubow was CEO, dropping from $72.69 to $10.45.

He resigned at age 56 because of hip and back problems after having medical leaves in 2010 and 2011.

His severance? Thirty-two million dollars, a $6.2 million insurance policy, $70,000 in health insurance benefits, secretarial help, a home computer and financial counselling.

New York Times CEO Janet Robinson retired recently, snagging a $23 million adieu package.

More than three billion people in the world live on less than $2.50 a day. One billion children around the world - one in two - live in poverty.

Ontario is getting deeper into the casino-gambling business in a desperate move to keep the province from going bankrupt.

Truly, the world has gone mad.

Birth of a Shooting Star

It was 244 years ago in March, time of the declining snows, when a Shawnee woman lay in her bark birthing hut and watched a brilliant comet light up the early evening skies. Not long after, she gave birth to her third child, a son who would become a North American symbol of fighting for your culture against impossible odds.

Some months later, the child had a naming feast, at which an elder pronounced him Tecumtha, or Tecumseh -- Shooting Star.

Tecumseh became a Shawnee war chief at the time North American Indians were being driven farther away from their homelands by colonial advancement. He travelled thousands of miles on horseback trying to organize a pan-Indian confederation that would stop the westward march of the new American society.

He is best remembered as the man who fought alongside General Isaac Brock in the War of 1812 against the Americans. However, Tecumseh was no Canadian patriot. He fought for Canada but had no more liking for the British Canadians than the Americans. His sole interest was to hold some of the homeland being taken by people from afar.

His leadership and the battles he won against the Americans were important to Canada, however. His leadership inspired confidence and helped stiffen Canadian spines, which Brock himself noted were somewhat lacking.

In October 1813, Tecumseh died in battle along the Thames River not far from Chatham Ontario. He fell while trying to hold back the troops of William Henry Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory, and who would become president of the United States.

More on Tecumseh can be found in: Tecumseh: Shooting Star, Crouching Panther published by Dundurn.

An Author with a Head on His Shoulders

Where is Robert K. Massie’s head at?

Well, fortunately it’s still on his shoulders, unlike some of the folks he describes in his biography of Russia’s famous empress, Catherine the Great.

Off with Their Heads



In a bizarre twist to a great book, Massie interrupts the fascinating story of Catherine to give the reader a chilling mini-history of the guillotine. The guillotine came into use during Catherine’s time (late 1700s) and became famous during the French Revolution.

Massie notes that it was invented by Dr. Joseph Guillotin as an instrument for delivering instant, painless death. However, Massie questions whether the guillotine really did kill instantly. He cites cases in which the eyelids on severed heads blinked.

One respected French medical doctor experimented with a severed head. He called the victim’s name after the head dropped from its body. The eyelids slowly lifted up and stared at him. The eyelids closed but opened again when the doctor again called the name, and focussed on him.

After the diversion of severed heads, we get back on track with Catherine’s story. There is a valid connection between Catherine, the guillotine and the French revolution. Catherine worried about revolutions like the ones in America and France erupting in Russia, which happened a little more than a century after her death.

Massie’s diversion to the guillotine is bizarre but interesting. For instance, I didn’t know it was used in Germany between 1933 and 1945.  Also, anyone who researches and writes as well as Massie has the right to take us off on tangents occasionally.

Catherine the Great, Portrait of a Woman is an excellent read that provides insights into Russian history and culture. Massie is the author the Pulitzer-prize winning Peter the Great and the book about the last of the Romanovs, Nicholas and Alexandra.

Massie is 82 and plans another book. He says he has to continue writing because he keeps having children. The youngest is 11.

No Eating the Pets

"God, I love watching them," my wife sighs with happiness. "I don't know if I could eat one now."

I see my plans for hunting wild turkey evaporating. I had taken the mandatory weekend course, acquired the certificate, bought the licence, camo pants, camo jacket, hat and face net, and special turkey hunter's vest with seat. I had steeled myself for cold. dark mornings, sitting and waiting and calling as they come out of roosts to feed.

A Spring Romance

Now my wife is turning the prey into pets.

Wild turkeys returned to Ontario after the government began a reintroduction program in 1984. Today, 70,000 wild turkeys live in areas across southern Ontario.

They started showing up at our cottage appearing skinny, so my wife decided to feed them. It was love at first sight, and now she sits by the window watching them snort up many dollars in bird feed.

They are big birds, males (gobblers) standing up to four feet high and weighing more than 20 pounds. They are tall, dark, but not handsome. They have fleshy, featherless heads and necks that look like posts where kids have stuck their used bubblegum. The colours even look like bubblegum, varying shades of red, white and blue-gray. The flesh lights up bright red on gobblers when the turkey is angry or sexually aroused.

On their beaks is a flap of flesh called a snood, which biologists say is a hearing organ five times more effective than the human ear. Their feet are odd as well, four yellowish toes making a foot. The gobblers have spurs on the backs of their legs and they use them for fighting.

 Their wing and body feathers are pretty, in a way. Dark buff or chocolate brown tipped with white. The body feathers are rich looking with a copper-bronze iridescence. The feathers on males are spectacular during spring mating displays when the tail feathers are fanned.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell gobblers from hens, but one way is to look for the beards. The beards are tufts of feathers that grow out from the chest an average of nine inches long. However, just to complicate things, a small percentage of hens also have beards.

You have to be able to distinguish between gobblers and hens for hunting purposes. But judging from the romance developing through the cottage window, I won't be out hunting them anyway. Or if I do, I suspect I’ll be doing my own cooking.