Sortie: Winnipeg

　

　

　

　

　




　

　

1.

The City of Winnipeg was built where two large, sluggish rivers intersect on the flat Manitoba plain. No hills grace the city and it has no lakes, only the great confluence of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers. Near this confluence, called "the Forks", Manitoba’s legislative building rises, a polished limestone block with allegorical figures at its cornices surmounted by a pinched dome. Atop the dome, a naked figure with gold skin bearing a torch and a sheaf of wheat runs northward – this is the so-called "Golden Boy". About 800,000 people live in the cheerless provincial capitol.



2.

Around 1982, civic leaders in Duluth finally accepted an unpleasant economic reality: the city’s industries, mining and grain storage, were moribund. Employment was declining and those who worked at the elevators or loading taconite on the huge iron piers extending over the seaport were poorly paid. Mining is unsustainable in the long run and commodities hostage to unpredictable business cycles. Duluth was poor but beautiful, dramatically situated in a deep and intricate harbor where the great St. Louis river flowed into the turbulent inland sea of Lake Superior. And, so, the place was re-visioned, re-invented as a city catering to tourists – the waterfront dives were transformed into airy bars and dining rooms where women and children were welcome. The nasty slums around the harbor were cleared and replaced with luxury hotels. The utilitarian piers extending into the brutally cold waters of the great lake were restored and, then, loaded with boutiques and food arcades. The city’s ancient, moldering train station became a museum. In this way, the city was saved but, in a meretricious form, unrecognizable to its older inhabitants.

3.

Thunder Bay, the twin ports in Ontario at the head of Lake Superior, was similarly transformed. And, now, it seems that the city of Winnipeg has embarked on this sort of metamorphosis as well. An enormous museum dedicated to the history and commemoration of human rights rises over "the Forks". The city built this vast and spectacular building because, of course, there are humans living in Winnipeg and they have rights and, so, why not commemorate that subject in a destination museum – a facility with aspirations to be like Bilbao’s craggy Guggenheim, a place that would attract tourists. Downtown, the humble Winnipeg Art Gallery ("WAG") is excavating foundations for another wing on the curious wedge-shaped tract of land where the museum stands. WAG has a world-famous collection of aboriginal art, mostly soapstone and ivory carvings from First Nations people living in Northern Manitoba and Labrador. Clearly, the objective is to make this museum a tourist destination as well. Like Duluth and Thunder Bay, Winnipeg is a place in the process of re-imagining itself – but this transformation is infinitely more difficult, I think, in this city because there is in the place something inherently, and resolutely, opposed to glamor.

4.

Three landforms meet at Winnipeg. A few miles to the East, the territory is raw with granite outcroppings and swift rivers that plunge through stone gorges connecting networks of wilderness lakes – this is the Laurentian shield, terrain that extends across upper Minnesota and Ontario to the St. Lawrence Seaway. Pines cluster around cold, stone-girt lakes, water surges over cascades and falls. North of Winnipeg, boreal forests enclose vast tracts of tamarack swamp. The forests surround enormous, frigid lakes – Lake Winnipeg, about 100 miles north of the city of that name, is the tenth largest fresh water lake in the world. Beginning near the confluence of the Assiniboine and Red River of the North, flat, featureless prairies run west 800 miles to the Rocky Mountains.

5.

Presumably, people in Winnipeg enjoy winter sports. The city is famous for hockey. But there is no place for downhill skiing, not even a hill sufficiently imposing for a decent toboggan-run. The rivers flow in barren gullies about thirty-feet deep. Outside of town, there is a place called Bird Hill. This is a conical prominence, unnatural in appearance, possibly a garbage dump where the detritus of a hundred years has mounded to forty or fifty foot pyramid clad in brown prairie grass. (Guy Maddin’s film, My Winnipeg, confirms this impression – in fact, the place was a garbage dump.) A couple pathetic ski-runs are gouged into the side of the hill and there is a sort of plexi-glass structure on stilts at the top of the chutes used for sledding – the plexi-glass structure looks like a post-modern deer stand.

6.

Winnipeg is an unsightly city: it has few public parks and most neighborhoods are humble, small brick or frame houses tightly assembled along nondescript residential lanes. Despite the nightmarish cold in winter, it seems that most of the smaller homes don’t possess garages with the consequence that cars are parked along the streets at curb-side. These parked cars narrow the streets and create siphons too narrow for two vehicles to pass one another in opposite directions. If this is how the streets function in the warmth of early autumn, what is it like when the lanes are further narrowed by monstrous accumulations of snow? Because many neighborhoods were built for one-car families, before most house-wives drove, small groceries, hardware stores, and dry-cleaning businesses are interspersed among the homes. To ameliorate the town’s ugliness, artists have been commissioned to paint innumerable colorful murals on any wall that is the size of semi-truck trailer or larger. But this amenity isn’t uniformly successful – some murals are gloomy, enigmatic, or simply executed poorly. Along the side of a hair-stylist’s emporium, three gents with Edwardian moustaches and military hats look down upon the street – these are Canadian heroes from the Great War and the painting is drab -- its colors which were mostly dun and ocher are now fading. One of the Wild Things as imagined by Maurice Sendak lounges in an easy chair in a small room. Fur traders and Indians transact business. A First Nations man, who looks drunk, leans against a street lamp that emits a scream of expressionistic yellow light – the man outstretches his hands as if crucified and vignettes show other Native men, some of them dressed as soldiers or playing in rock bands or kicking soccer balls. The side of a bakery is decorated with faded aquamarine images of large, predatory fish swimming among parking meters and cars and, on another wall, a Buddhist luck god, fat and merry as a sea lion, stands in a landscape blue and green and white with waterfalls. The murals are innumerable – even people who live here have not seen them all. Some of the paintings are like fever-dreams emanating from the morose commercial buildings that they decorate. Winnipeg is an unreal city – it seems to be always sleeping.

7.

An endless commercial street runs east and west. At one point, a mostly treeless golf-course is on one side of the road. The zoo is on the other side of the road. People go to the zoo to experience a hike called "Passage to Churchill" – this is a series of curving walkways that leads to a great, barren enclosure where polar bears are kept. The path descends along an imperceptibly sloping ramp until the visitor is within a concrete grotto. The grotto leads through a glass tube to a viewing station situated so that the spectator can look into the murky blue depths of a plunge pool agitated above by simulated cascades. Some aerodynamically-designed, sea lions with eerie white eyes – it seems that they have cataracts – are effortlessly propelling themselves through the depths: oblong shadows with whiskers that perform loop–de-loops showing their slick black backs on the up-stroke and their white bellies, navel-puckered on the descent. A big polar bear stands on a ledge overlooking one of the plunge-pools and worries a soccer-ball sized slab of salmon. The polar bear is also designed for swift swimming – on land, it is ungainly, a kind of white torpedo supported by stubby legs, but the beasts prowl the water with the lethal aplomb of a shark. "He is a sweetheart," a zoo guide tells the people marveling at the vast creature. "Very gentle." The bear’s paws are a half-a-yard long decorated with obsidian claws each the size of my hands.

8.

Beyond the underwater observation grotto, an exit (sortie) leads to a road. The road runs a hundred yards to a mock-up of Churchill on Hudson Bay, a remote village that is Canada’s only deep-water Arctic port. (Churchill is 650 miles directly north of Winnipeg on the 57^th parallel – train service from Winnipeg passes through the Pas in Saskatchewan and, then, curves back to Churchill, a distance of 1063 lineal miles or about 1700 kilometers.) Most people in Winnipeg have never been to Churchill and it is an exotic place for them – the encampment at the zoo displays a couple of Snowcats, two quonset huts and a replica of a saloon facade. The saloon facade, in fact, is the entry to the Tundra Café, a little cafeteria where you can buy foot-long hot dogs and hamburgers. A great glass wall with a vista of barren grassland and boulders, faux-tundra, displays a small blonde woman dressed like a janitor and wearing knee-high rubber boots. The woman pitches heads of cabbage, strewing them across the fake tundra. Then, the polar bears come, ambling clumsily across the uneven grassy hillocks. They graze on the cabbage heads like cows, showing their white and furry rumps to the people who are likewise feeding on foot-long hot dogs in the tundra café.

9.

Over the weekend, 34 bears had to be trapped in Ottawa, some of them within a few kilometers of the Canadian capitol buildings. It’s been dry and hot in Ottawa and there is a huge natural preserve, the Parc de Gatineau, on the Quebec side of the Ottawa river. Bears are good swimmers and they paddle across the river and, then, wander the streets of Ottawa looking for food that the drought has otherwise denied them. Cars smash into the bears and they climb eight or nine meters high in trees and lounge there and so the beasts must be trapped, inspected for disease, and, then, carried deep in the Gatineau preserve to be returned to the wild.

　

10.

Also over the weekend, tremendous rain fell in Winnipeg. More rain fell in 12 hours than is normally measured for the entire month of September. Low spots in parking lots were flooded and some of the fields outside town reflected acres of gloomy sky in water ponded there. This part of Manitoba is flat – the water simply spreads out across the sodden plain. The sky is angry-looking and congested. In the city, everyone wears coats and windbreakers and, even, woolen gloves – this seems odd to me since the temperature is always between 56 and 70 degrees. But it’s autumn and a few of the trees show golden in the groves lining the Red and Assiniboine rivers and people here know that the weather is unpredictable – in the course of a few heartbeats, the rain can turn to snow and the winds can whirl into a tempest and, then, all the world goes polar-bear white.

　

11.

WAG was mostly closed. A flooded pit stood next to the windowless prow of the current gallery. A new larger museum is under construction. Architectural renderings of the new museum show floor to ceiling cases filled with art objects made by aboriginal people from the Arctic. Open galleries in WAG feature large sculptures of sea mammals and birds with human faces embedded in them. The sculptures are Brancusi-smooth and seem inviting to the touch, cool and slippery as a fine glass paperweight and some of them are the size of large suitcases. There is some scrimshaw ivory delicately incised and paintings that show ravens and bears bearing lunar human faces in their bellies. One statue shows a glaring, hideous troll with strings tangled between prongs in her hair – the statue is labeled "Grandmother String Game" and it is from Nunavik, that is, made by a First Nations’ sculptor in Dorset Bay. A wall-sized pen sketch, elaborately hatched and shaded like an engraving, shows a squat native man stretched between a huge raven with scimitar-shaped beak and a missionary pulling the hapless Indian in the other direction. Almost all of the art is visionary, based on the experiences of First Nations’ shaman. Shaman are practical mystics, people who can inhabit the bodies of birds and orca and polar bears – they know the future and can heal the sick.

12.

Nunavik is the northern third of Quebec, the part of Canada that was once called Labrador. It is vast, comprising territory larger than the state of California – about 12,000 people live there. The Atlantic coast in the Arctic is an autonomous zone with uncertain political affiliation to Canada. This territory is occupied by Inuit people who claim self governance – this claim is opposed by some corporations with mining interests in the area and the Metis people, the half-blood Cree or Dene and French population. Much of the art displayed at WAG comes from this area.

13.

What do you call a female shaman? A shawoman? Usage varies – some writers favor "shamaness"; others use the word "shamanka", applying the "ka" that signifies "female" or "woman" in Russian to the term. The idea of the "shaman" derives from Russian ethnographic studies of its Siberian and Arctic natives.

14.

My wife once knew an authentic female shaman. Each year, an organization called Split Rock conducts seminars in Duluth. These seminars are geared to affluent women who have the leisure to paint or write elaborate diaries or compose poems and short stories. Seminar participants live in dormitories on the University of Minnesota high atop the bluffs overlooking Lake Superior – those dormitories are empty during the summer and, therefore, ideal as lodging for the women enrolled in Split Rock programs. During the day, the teachers instruct the students in pleasant studios overlooking the great bay where the St. Louis River pours itself into the icy inland ocean. My wife’s friend, a talented artist, enrolled in a class in print-making and painting conducted the shaman, a native woman from Alberta, Canada. The shaman is now quite famous, in fact a member of the prestigious Order of Canada – I will refer to her as "Sue."

15.

Sue was a skinny woman born in the early 1950's. Once, she had been beautiful, with exotic Asian features and dark skin. When my wife met her in Duluth, she was still striking – her long hair was grey and straight and she was skinny to the point of emaciation with perfect, erect posture. The artist told her students that she was a shaman. She pointed to scars on her arms and legs that marked her as a result of healing other people from illnesses and taking their pain into her own body. The shaman was from a tiny hamlet far north in Alberta, a place where sea-planes landed on a huge lake that flowed like a river. In the summer, no roads access that village. During winter-time, there are treacherous ice highways that lead to other hamlets on the tundras. Trucks cross innumerable frozen lakes and rivers transporting goods and, often, the drivers pick up native girls fleeing the isolation of their tiny villages, offer the hitchhikers passage to Winnipeg or Edmonton and, then, after raping them, throw their strangled bodies into the rivers to be swept away when the ice breaks up. There was no electricity in the hamlet where Sue was raised until 1959.

17.

Sue’s mother died from tuberculosis when she was 6. She was raised by the German schoolteacher’s widow, a German woman who scarcely spoke English let alone the Cree language that was the little girl’s tongue. The schoolteacher had fled from Germany. He was an educated man and had a picture of Hegel framed in his little study. Hegel understood that life is transformation, one thing becoming its opposite and, then, transforming into a third thing – this is the essence of shamanism. Sue was sent to a residential school in Edmonton and, later, attended college where she took a degree in cell biology. In the evening, she attended art classes. Her art teachers recognized her potential and Sue went to graduate school in New York City at Columbia. She became a world-famous artist – her work is the National Gallery in Ottawa, and featured in the collections of the great art museums in Montreal and Toronto. She frequently shows in Paris and is represented by the Bear Claw gallery in Edmonton where she now lives. Her paintings are brightly colored, contain photographs and other found items (including in some cases eagle feathers) and depict native themes. She has made a series of paintings in vibrant Art Brut style depicting shamans howling at the sky – the pictures look to me a little like Dubuffet or, even, Basquiat.

18.

It was unseasonably and dangerously hot in Duluth when my wife attended the Split Rock conference at which Sue was teaching. Dormitories built for cold weather were stifling. Sue and her companion, an old Indian man, complained that they were suffocating. They dragged their mattress out of the oven of their room and slept in the courtyard, under the stars. But there were mosquitos and it was still unbearably hot and humid with no respite until the hour before dawn when the winds stirred from the lake and carried a hint of the smell of icy water to the hilltop. There wasn’t much wind and the lake looked glassy when the sun rose, strange limpid causeways of motionless water making intersections over the depths. Sue told the Split Rock administrator that the heat was abusive and that, unless she was installed in a hotel at the program’s expense, she would contact the Canadian consulate. In high season, in the summer, it is very hard to book a hotel room in Duluth, but, after much effort, the program director found her a room in an old motel between the train station that was now a museum and the point with the Lift Bridge into a precinct of boutiques and restaurants.

19.

For the other participants in the Split Rock program, the relentless heat and humidity was wearying. The only thing that could be done was to find a tavern and sit in the air-conditioning drinking beer. Although Sue had a cool hotel room, she said that she sympathized with her students and so went to the bar that they frequented, regaling them with stories about her life and hard times so long as they picked-up the tab for her Leinenkugels. The old man sat in the corner scowling at the table where the pretty ladies sat around the shaman. He was a heavy smoker and, so, every half hour, he would go outside for a cigarette. Sometimes, he walked down to the bus-stop a couple blocks away to talk to the other Native Americans, mostly teenage kids, who frequented that area, begging for money from the passing tourists. After a few hours in the bar, the ladies would go to an expensive restaurant with a view of the smooth, glossy lake. Someone would always buy Sue’s dinner. When they ordered wine, Sue arranged for an extra bottle that she could take back to the hotel to drink with the old man. He didn’t go with them to the restaurant, instead, preferring to remain in the tavern. One of women participants in the program paid for the wine with her credit card. Sue had expensive taste in wine.

20.

My wife’s friend, Pam, thought that there was something fraudulent about Sue. There was a quarrel and Sue put a curse on Pam. Sue showed everyone the scars on her body incised in her flesh after battles with demons of mental illness and alcoholism. The heat continued. Sue repeated her mantra: "Everyone wants to fuck the shaman." When Sue cursed Pam, they were at her hotel room. The old man had a bottle of something and he had gone down the street to the Lift Bridge in the harbor and the esplanade along the canal where Native kids stood around cadging small change and dollar bills from tourists. My wife noticed that Sue wore tight white men’s jockey shorts. Dirty underwear was strewn around the room. Sue sat on the bed and offered to remove the curse from Pam. Pam said she wasn’t worried about the curse. Pam was a doctor’s wife and her husband could cure just about anything. "It’s a burden," Sue said. "Everyone wants to fuck the shaman."

21.

Can a shaman transform herself into a snow-mobile or a snow-cat? Why aren’t their carved soapstones showing human faces embedded in Arctic cat snowmobiles? Could a shaman become a rifle? Could a shaman hike out into a desolate place, flat and treeless, where two brown and sluggish rivers bend ever so slightly from the parallel toward an intersection that both streams seem to reject, an imperceptible joining of waters that are on their way to a big, cold lake and, then, a bigger, colder bay -- could the shaman stand at the point between the rivers and, then, envision a city and elaborate its streets and alleys and sidewalks from within herself? Could a shaman transform herself into an unreal city complete with glass towers and shopping malls and neighborhoods comprised of thousands of little stone and lathe houses arrayed across an endless grid flat as a sheet of paper and, perhaps, as perishable, a windy place where a naked boy covered with gold kicks up his heels atop a pinched dome and polar bears wander in the vacant lots?

22.

Across from the river where Louis Riel is buried, the Museum of Human Rights rears up, an implausible and vast apparition. The structure is embedded in the river bank atop a slightly sloping gradient planted in tall grass prairie and adorned with wild-flowers. The Museum is comprised of three elements, a raw-looking ziggurat opaque and heavy with brick that embraces a glass facade shaped a bit like the wings of a dove. The wing component, vertically oriented, is made of big glass panels that overlap one another, thatched like the feathers on a bird. A thorn-shaped tower, also made of glass rises from the top of the building, ascending another hundred-fifty feet upward – this is the Israel Asper Tower of Hope. The interior of the museum is an unlikely combination of grotto-like dark sheds, soaring atriums with glass sides and ceilings, and transparent elevator shaft that rises like a needle to pierce the sky. From the small, warm glass case atop the tower, the visitor can look down into Winnipeg – you can see the ruins of St. Boniface, the Romanesque castle of the Fort Garry Hotel, and the tops of the smaller towers in the city.

23.

A traveling exhibit of artifacts associated with Nelson Mandela occupies the first dark shed adjacent to a brick lobby with a long pool and a wall on which animated figures inscribe the word "freedom" in forty languages. In the exhibit, you can see identity cards, shackles, a mock-up of the cell where Mandela was confined on Robyn Island together with video showing marches and massacres. Mandela’s shadow is projected against the side of his cell – not surprisingly he shadow boxes. The exhibit ends on a hopeful note. Ramps ascend to other galleries where the narrative is the same: homo homini lupus – man is wolf to man – but, then, there are reforms and the rights of the oppressed are tentatively acknowledged and, though there is always the possibility of backsliding, some progress is made. Every kind of oppression is visualized in video imagery and artifacts and, then, manifestos opposing that oppression are quoted on the walls. In one gallery, heroes of human rights stride forth in the form of illuminated stelae: Mandela, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and others. The life-size photograph of Aung San Su Mi, the Burmese politician and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is pointedly shut off – no light emerges from her figure which stands dull and shadowy amidst those brightly lit figures that were previously thought to be her comrades. Some of the exhibits are surprisingly witty and it’s not as grim and dull as you might expect.

24.

The visitor to the Museum of Human Rights strides ever upward, crossing over cavernous voids on glowing bridges made from alabaster. The bridges rise as ramps forming an criss-cross pattern of ascent within the big, echoing hollows of the structure. In the ancient world, medicines were kept in alabaster jars and vases – the stone was thought to have healing properties. Therefore, the climb upward over these innumerable soaring ramps symbolizes the ascent to truth, a slow passage that involves reversals every sixty feet. To use Kojeve’s formulation, this is the Hegelian ascent from the darkness below to the recognition that Desire desires Desire – that is, that each of us becomes human only in his or her desire that another recognize us as desirable, as a human being and, therefore, an end intrinsic to itself. The ascent culminates in a fast dash in the elevator up to the vertiginous, glass viewing platform overlooking the city. The apogee of human rights, therefore, is the vista over Winnipeg.

25.

A docent stands on the patio-like balcony from which the elevator ascends. She tells us about the symbolism in the building. For instance, the garden of contemplation in one of the atriums is comprised of small pillars of basalt set among reflecting ponds. "Basalt is the most common rock on earth," she says. "It symbolizes that all human beings are more or less alike in their needs and desires." I ask her: "What about the Palestinians?" She must get the question often. "We want to let history sort this out," she says. "Once history has sorted this out, we will have an exhibit." Canadians in Manitoba pronounce "out" as "oot." The docent’s statement seems questionable to me: if we let history sort itself oot withoot human agency, we would probably still have slavery, child labor, and prisons full of suffragettes.

26.

A walkway that seems to have been designed by Simon Calatreva crosses the river, a bridge supported by a web of white cables angling down from a central mast in the center of the span. On the other side of the river, Saint Boniface, now a part of Winnipeg, but once a Francophone village stands. The shops are small and Parisian, selling chocolate and expensive clothing. The area is named after a big Catholic church that burned in 1960. The church facade with a great barrel vault entrance remains as do some of the grey stone sidewalls of the vanished building. In the church cemetery, a visitor encounters the grave of Louis Riel. Behind the ruins of the church, now immaculately preserved in a garden, a Catholic college with a white cupola occupies a couple of city blocks. On the lawn of the Catholic college, some high, polished granite walls form a semblance of a vast cell. Confined within the cell, a knobby, tortured giant gestures at the world. The giant looks like a monster made by Henry Moore – he is contorted and full of voids and sinuous hollows. The name of the monument is "The Torment of Louis Riel."

27.

Louis Riel is the unlikely hero of modern Winnipeg. His journey from criminal terrorist to being proclaimed as "the father of modern Manitoba" is a curious exercise in historical revisionism. This ascent from martyrdom to icon justifies the optimism cautiously implicit in the Museum of Human Rights. As we ascend the alabaster ramps of history, healing occurs and those once disdained or feared become heros.

28.

In 1863, when the U. S. Army was chasing the Dakota Sioux across the empty grasslands of what is now North Dakota, their pursuit was interrupted by a curious encounter. The army found that the river valley that it was crossing was blocked by a vast procession. More than 10,000 people were migrating along the water-course, hunting as they went. The people pushed carts with six-foot tall wheels laden with their belongings and pitched tent cities each night as encampments. Men, women with babies, children, marched together each day, hunting parties scouring the bare hills and badlands for game. At night, around the fires, people sang and danced and many of the older men carried fiddles that they played. The people spoke a strange creole – a language called Michaf in which the verbs were all Cree and the nouns French. Most of the people were Catholic and there were black-robed priests among them. These were Metis, that is a half-breed population, the result of French-Canadian voyageurs and fur traders taking Cree women as their wives "after the manner of the country." The Metis were numerous and occupied an ambiguous status – they were neither Indian nor White. Later, the Canadian government entered into treaty obligations with the so-called First Nations, that is, the Indians. But the Metis were not Indians and no one made treaties with them. They were also not White and, therefore, didn’t possess the rights of the European settlers. Louis Riel was a Metis and, therefore, disenfranchised – he led two rebellions of Metis and Cree people and, ultimately, was hanged for his role in these insurrections.

30.

Riel is a strange figure, part politician, part terrorist-guerilla, part religious visionary. At present, people in Manitoba regard him as a freedom fighter for the rights of the Metis and numerous statues and monuments suggest a bad conscience about what happened to him. These monuments are regarded as evidence of reconciliation between the Catholic French-speaking population in Manitoba, now a tiny minority, the Cree and Assiniboine Indians, and the dominant European people, largely Protestant Scotch Irish. Of course, the reality is intricate and far beyond the scope of what I might present in this essay. However, a few notes are in order.

The south part of Manitoba from Fort Garry at the Forks of the Assinboine and Red Rivers to Pembina in today’s North Dakota was owned by the Hudson Bay Company and called Rupert’s Land. At that time, Manitoba wasn’t a province in which the Hudson Bay Company was resident – rather, the Hudson Bay Company was a private firm that, in effect, owned a vast territory. After the American Civil War, Canadians feared that the aggressive and warlike Minnesotans would invade what is now Manitoba and seize it. So the Hudson Bay Company sold Rupert’s Land to the Canadian Federation. (Thus, a Minnesota invasion of the Red River country would be an offense against both Canada and the Commonwealth.) A territorial governor, an English speaker politician, named MacDougal was appointed, much to the dismay of the French-speaking and Catholic Metis.

In the late 1860's, the Dawson road was being built. This was a highway from the Red River Colony at St. Boniface (now Winnipeg) and Port Arthur on the upper coast of Lake Superior. One of the laborers on the Dawson Road was a thoroughly unpleasant fellow named Thomas Scott. Scott was a trouble-maker and brawler, an Orangeman from Northern Ireland. Scott led a strike on the Dawson Road work, assaulted some people, and was fired. He moved to Winnipeg where he distinguished himself by bullying "half-breeds" – that is, the local Metis people. Scott was affiliated with the territorial governor, also an aggressive and racist Protestant. Louis Riel was the leader of the Metis people congregated in St. Boniface, across the river from Fort Garry where the governor and Scott were headquartered. On the steps of the St. Boniface cathedral, now an imposing ruin, Riel gave a fiery speech and, then, led a rebellion. With about 400 men, he crossed the river and seized Fort Garry. The uprising was bloodless and no one was hurt in the coup that resulted in the Metis occupying the fort.

At first, Scott was captured. But he was so belligerent and obnoxious that Riel’s men let him go, ordering him out of the Red River Colony. Scott continued to harass the Metis at St. Boniface so Riel had him to be arrested again and jailed at Fort Garry. While imprisoned, Scott developed a severe case of diarrhea which distressed both his captors and fellow prisoners. Scott continued to insult everyone and make threats, but, now, he was also physically filthy and malodorous. The combination of a foul mouth and diarrhea was simply too much to tolerate. Riel convened a firing squad and told his men to execute Scott for "insubordination" – presumably failure to control his bowels. Scott was blindfolded, protesting his innocence and persisting in making hair-raising threats. The firing squad was drunk and, although lots of shots were fired, Scott was only wounded. One of the men tried to administer the coup de grace with his pistol, but his hand was shaking and, despite the close range, he missed. The bullet ripped through Scott’s cheek and, then, exited through the cartilage of his nose. This wound knocked Scott out, but, apparently, didn’t kill him. The executioners loaded Scott into a makeshift casket, but the ground was too cold to bury him (it was January) and so he was dragged outside to the banks of the river in the rough pine box. There, Scott revived and begged someone to put him out of his misery. The wounded man screamed for five hours before Riel himself hiked out to the casket and shot him through the heart.

Most of this narrative is murky and every point disputed. When Scott’s casket was exhumed a few years later, no corpse was found in it. Riel denied that he had executed Scott personally although he boasted that it was "a good thing" that he had done ordering the man to be shot. The Canadian government sent an expeditionary force to the Red River Colony, ostensibly to defend the place against the dangerously aggressive Minnesotans, but, more probably, to roust Riel from Fort Garry. Before the expedition reached Manitoba, using the Dawson Road as its thoroughfare, Riel issued declarations pronouncing that the territory would henceforth be a part of Canada, established to afford equal rights to its Metis and English-speaking citizens. Riel, then, fled, moving to Plattsburgh, New York. He was tried in absentia and convicted of the murder of Thomas Scott. Despite this conviction, he was three-times elected, also in absentia, to represent the Red River Colony in the Canadian parliament’s House of Commons.

Thomas Scott, who seems to have been a thug, was regarded as a martyr by the Protestants in Manitoba. On Princess Street, not far from the Manitoba capitol building, an elaborate Romanesque building with towers and a cavernous portico, its shadowy half-circle doorway round as a train tunnel, still stands. Although without name now, this structure was once the Thomas Scott Building.

　

31.

The first insurrection led by Louis Riel, concluding with his escape to the United States in 1870, is called the Red River Rebellion. The second uprising that Riel fomented is the so-called Northwest Rebellion, a brief conflict that ended in 1885. In the interim between these two armed conflicts, Riel had become a religious fanatic. During his exile in upstate New York, he took refuge with the Oblate Fathers. Gradually, Riel developed a religious mania that led him to disrupt Roman Catholic Church services with wild proclamations that "Rome has fallen." Some friends spirited him over the Quebec border and he was confined in a lunatic asylum for several months under the name "Louis David." (Although he was a member of the House of Commons in absentia, warrants remained outstanding for Riel’s arrest.) During his mania, Riel prayed for hours and hired servants to hold his arms upright in a crucified position for days on end. After a while, Riel recovered his senses and, then, moved to Montana. Indefatigably political, he tried to curtail the whisky trade to the Indians and mixed blood people in the Sun River territory and, then, ran for the legislature as a Republican. He married and, ultimately, his wife had two children.

When the bison were hunted to extinction in what is now Saskatchewan, the Metis people in that area starved. The government tried to educate the nomadic clans in the ways of dry-land farming. But the Metis were not willing to surrender their old ways without a fight. They gathered at a village named Batoche in north-central Saskatchewan and drew up a list of grievances to present to the government in Ottawa. Riel was recalled to Canada and went to Batoche where he issued manifestos demanding treaty rights for the Metis. His religious mania had returned and Riel was reported to be agitated and erratic in his behavior. Riel now was the proponent of a new form of Catholicism that made common cause with the Protestants against Rome. He called his congregation the Exovedote – a neologism meaning "the ones who have been ousted."

There is dispute as to whether Ottawa was about to accede to some of the Metis demands when Riel declared war. Allied with the Cree, Riel’s Metis cut telegraph lines and attacked the railroad. The world was different in 1885 and the government was able to send a large force of soldiers cross-country by train. The buffalo were gone and the Indians were debilitated with booze and sickness and the frontier had closed. The Royal Mounted Police and the army fought the rebels at Batoche and defeated them. Riel was captured. The Cree continued fighting for a few weeks but were decisively defeated in the battle of Loon Lake.

Riel had declared himself the "governor of the provisional state of Saskatchewan." He was transported to Regina and tried for treason. The jurors said that Riel was "tried for treason but convicted for the murder of Thomas Scott." The rebel’s lawyers pled with Riel to allow them to advance a plea of insanity. But Riel refused saying that "life without dignity" was not worth living. Appeals were argued in Ottawa. The head of the judicial council there is reported to have declared: "He shall die though every dog in Quebec bark in his favor." This remark reveals the persistent schism in Canada between its English and French-speaking people – one of the terrorist cells of the Quebecois separatists in the seventies was named Louis Riel. Riel’s appeals were rejected and he was hanged in the Northwest Mounted Police barracks in Regina on November 16, 1885. The hanging was botched – he died by strangulation after struggling on the end of the rope for four minutes. Before the hood was pulled over his face, Riel said: "Remember Madame Forget". No one knows for sure what this was supposed to mean. When the hood was removed from his head, Riel’s features were said to be composed and his eyes closed. People cut souvenir locks of hair from his head.

The great rebel’s body was sent to Saint Vital near Winnipeg and Riel was buried in the graveyard at Saint Boniface, across the Red River from Fort Garry and the place on river bank where the Human Rights Museum now points its glittering glass finger to heaven.

32.

Twice life-sized Louis Riel stands indignant and four-square on a plinth overlooking the marble landing where water taxis deliver passengers on the Assiniboine River to the legislative building. The sculpture is imposing, but primitive – it seems rough-hewn, a monolith with human features mostly dominated by a big bronze moustache under a big bronze nose. Riel leans forward slightly, nodding his giant head, and he holds a legislative enactment rolled as a scroll in his right hand. Between 1999 and 2011, 13 bills were introduced in Canadian parliament pertaining to Louis Riel, most of those were devoted to a posthumous pardon or reversal of his conviction. Since 2008, the third Monday in February is declared Louis Riel Day in Manitoba – in other provinces, the holiday is called "Family Day."

33.

Across the street from the monument to Louis Riel, another symbol of Manitoba stands on the legislature building’s grounds. This is a ten-foot tall Inuksut, that is, a cairn of balanced rocks built by the Inuit to mark places of significance in Arctic. The Inuksut on the parliament lawn made from bronze or, possibly, concrete and has a kitsch aspect. The base of the imitation cairn is comprised of two hunched polar bears on which the simulated stones are stacked. This Inuksut has the form of a niungvaliruluit – that is rocks piled to form a window-shaped opening that aims the eye at some geographical feature significant to the hunters traversing the empty landscape. (The place aligned with the sighting window may be a bay where seals are common or a low pass frequented by caribou or simply an ancient trail leading along the barren sea-shore.) I walked up to the Inuksut and looked through it but saw only a couple of nice brownstones beyond the parliament lawn. Trees have grown up blocking the view, something that would not happen in the Arctic, and, perhaps, the window was aligned toward the statue of Louis Riel on the river-bank although shrubbery prevented me from testing this hypothesis.

34.

Many facsimile Inuksuit (the plural of Inuksut) grace Winnipeg. A massive cairn made from what seems like ocher-colored fiberglass stands at the entrance to the Churchill journey at the zoo in Assiniboine Park. Actual Inuksuit in the Arctic are small, knee-high or, perhaps, as tall as a man, although there is one cairn on Southwest Baffin island that is nine feet in height. The faux cairn in the zoological garden is probably eight feet high. It is accompanied with a explanatory plaque that says that the Inuit word Inuksut means "that which acts in the capacity of a human being." Some Inuksuit look like doorways ("tupqujaq"); others are shaped like men with extended arms and globular stone heads. Simpler forms include turaaq – that is single pointer stones identifying alignments – napataq which are upright monoliths and caribou spirit stones, smaller boulders set side by side by big rock outcroppings. Phallus cairns complete with testicle boulders are common. Some of the Inuksut are very ancient and thought to have been built in the time before there were human beings in the land – spirits made them or polar bear people. Ancient Inuksut are often covered with colorful lichen. In some ceremonial sites, there are dozens of them. The Inuit understand that each rock cairn or monument of this kind is significant and must be paid respect but, often, even the elders can’t recall what the stones are supposed to mean. In Winnipeg, the Inuksut are entries opening into the far North. They form pathways to the Arctic, a place whose spirit, it seems, suffuses the city.

36.

Everyone at the Holiday Inn where we are staying is Native. In the elevator, two teenage boys wear hoodies. "Do I look punk enough?" the one kid asks his friend. They are bound for downtown where Metallica is playing. People have flown in from the Arctic to see this concert and every hotel is full of Indians who have traveled to Winnipeg for the show. On Portage Street downtown, we see a great queue of Indians waiting in line for entry to the gleaming glass concert hall. Later in the month, Sir Paul McCartney will play that venue. The Metallica fans are well-behaved and none of them seem to be drunk.

37.

Metallica’s fans in Churchill (who are legion, I suppose) had to fly down to Winnipeg. The train line to Hudson Bay was washed-out by flooding in the Spring of 2017. Aerial photographs show the brown abraded tundra, broken by eskers where little twisted trees shelter in the lea of piles of fractured rock. Lichen-painted stone shelves hold bog-water and the train tracks seem soggy, sinking into the muskeg. The parallel rails are warped and the sleepers are rotten and in disarray. The Winnipeg Free Press announces that there will be a great celebration in Churchill in mid-October 2018 to commemorate the restoration of rail service from Winnipeg to the deep water port on Hudson Bay. But the line is not yet fixed and there are a number of shattered places a hundred miles south of Churchill that wait repair. The October celebration seems more hopeful than is, perhaps, warranted, but, perhaps, is intended as an incentive to the railroad to complete these repairs. It is important to remember that the vast majority of Canada is without roads and without rail access. In the Free Press’Sunday supplement, an article praises a First Nations tribe that has just completed a 100 mile road down from where the reserve occupies an isolated peninsula on Lake Winnipeg to the trans-Canadian highway. The reservation is very poor and has bad water – the people have been under a "boil water" advisory since the late 1980's. The road will allow the people in the tribe to seek employment in Winnipeg and travel back and forth from their homes without availing themselves of the expensive services of a bush pilot.

38.

Lake Winnipeg, as I have noted, is not at Winnipeg, but north, eighty to 100 miles depending upon the side of the vast body of water to which you drive. I went to eastern shores of the lake to the tip of the peninsula on which Victoria Beach is located. The road to the lake passes through the Brokenhead First Nations reserve and, then, forges a way through dense pine forests to the resort town of Great Beach. There isn’t really a town at that place, just some narrow gravel roads that curve into the woods where there are cottages built next to the water – you can’t really see the lake from Grand Beach: it’s the place where the trees stop and a plain of grey water shows as a dull glint. A couple of trailers, along the little gravel lane in the woods, have been painted in Day-Glo colors, reds and blues and eye-assaulting yellows and some naked mannequins stand sentinel to the tee-shirt and souvenir shacks built as lean-to’s against the garish mobile homes – one of trailers is placarded "Langey’s: home of the 24 inch hot dog." Farther up the peninsula, the road slides a little downhill out of the woods and crosses a big marsh (grand marais) where lagoons and muddy canals shimmer in several acres of brown, man-tall reeds. Once this was an estuary, but it is now a marsh vibrating with bird songs and the belch of innumerable frogs. A tower stands on the higher ground above the marsh, a ridge that dips its finger northward into the cold waters of the lake. This is Victoria Beach, a place marked by a cast-iron archway in which the name of the settlement is displayed in wire letters against the cold, crisp air. A broad, grassy lane runs down to the water. There is a windowless stone bunker of a wastewater treatment facility at the point. Some wooden steps lead to a beach covered with toppled sofa-sized boulders. The horizon is all sky and water although there is an island across from the point with low, grey cliffs facing to the south. The cottages along the shore are hidden – you can surmise their location by the Maple Leaf flags trembling in the wind above the tops of the birch and fir trees.

39.

The sand yields under my feet. Some water has slopped between two reddish-brown boulders lying on the edge of the lake. Waves slap against the stones. I stoop to dip my finger in the lake’s water. The wet brown sand is sprinkled with white, smashed sea shell fragments.

40.

Fort Alexander is a very old settlement where the Winnipeg River flows into the great lake at Traverse Bay. Ojibway (Anishinaabe) Indians have lived there for hundreds of years and the French explorer, LaVerendrye established a fur trading post near the bay in 1739, although the exact location of this place is disputed. It is clear that the Northwest Company and Hudson Bay Company operated competing trading posts at Traverse Bay, these outposts built beginning in 1795. A large residential school for Indians was constructed at Fort Alexander in 1912. (This is a bit ironic because the local First Nations Sagkeeng Ojibway are participants in a class action, the so-called Scholar Day litigation, seeking redress for abuses committed at just such schools.) Today, the place looks impoverished. The headlands above the wide, turbulent-looking river mouth are bare granite and little shacks are strewn atop the rocky promontory, small wooden structures that look like ice-fishing huts, temporary, it seems, with tin chimneys pushed up through their shingle roofs. The inlet is dotted with small row-boats where natives are fishing for their supper. The bay is windy and the trees growing from fissures in the big boulders crouch and cower. The water glitters with icy-looking white-tops and, where the bay narrows, the river gushes forth through a canyon mouth, incensed with the distance that it has flowed from Rainy Lake on the Minnesota border. There are signs along the road winding through the reservation that order people to boil their drinking water – unpumped septic tanks have overflowed and poisoned the soil. Some larger wooden buildings are half-lost in the woods. It’s a barren-looking place, lichen growing like graffiti on the big granite outcroppings, and the houses are horned and antlered with trophies and an ancient Inukshut would not look out of place on the slabs of stone above the bay.

41.

Off the reserve, the villages along the Winnipeg River are ghost towns. Once there was a big paper mill in Powerview, a few miles inland from Fort Alexander. But the plant failed and was torn down in 2012. Some hydro-electric dams block places in the river where there were waterfalls once – it doesn’t take many workers to staff those plants which provide power to Winnipeg. The towns are empty and the sad little graveyards overgrown.

42.

At the provincial Capitol, an official Manitoba Deputy Hierophant is in the well of the rotunda, Dan-Browning for an attentive group of elderly people. The Chief Hierophant wearing a suit coat and a grey tie stands to the side, attending to what his deputy is saying to the tour group. Sometimes, he gently corrects his deputy, mouthing a word or making a gesture to revise something that the Deputy Hierophant has said. The Deputy Hierophant has already had the visitors count the number of steps leading up to the broad floor under the capitol dome – 13 steps in three ascents: 39. He has shown them the 13 stars in the cupola above and had them count the alabaster balustrades around the opening down to the rotunda well where the old people are now ranged along the wall listening to him. Above on the balcony one-third of the way to the top of the dome, there is a whispering gallery. The tour guide has shown them the acoustics at that place and had them count the carytids bearing the dome on their shoulders – thirty-nine as it turns out. In the well of the rotunda, the Deputy Hierophant says that the corner stone was laid on a day in June 1908 when Venus was conjoined with Mercury. Mercury is Hermes, the trickster, and he appears atop the capitol dome as the Golden Boy of Winnipeg, dashing toward the promise of the north with torch in hand. The child of Venus and Mercury is Hermaphrodite. The Deputy Hierophant points out that the bronze torch posts supporting electric-light globes in the rotunda show a bearded male on one columnar side and a bare-breasted maiden on the opposing surface – "Hermaphrodite," the Hierophant says. He adds that the astronomical conjunction of Mercury and Venus occurs only once every "several years" – the Chief Hierophant raises three fingers: "Every three years," the Deputy Hierophant tells his listeners, amending his account.

43.

Tradition holds that, if you stand in the middle of the rotunda surrounded by the 39 hermaphroditic torch-bearers and whisper your wishes out loud, they will come true. The Deputy Hierophant stands atop the 13-pointed star embedded in the floor and sotto voce whispers his desire that Winnipeg’s hockey team win the Stanley Cup this season. Everyone laughs. One by one the old people stand upon the 13-pointed star and whisper their wishes. When they have departed, I walk to that place and whisper something about world peace, but it’s insincere – in fact, I am wishing to see the grain elevator and cold shores of Hudson Bay at Churchill where the great white bears wander, so many of them that on Halloween, men stalk the streets among the trick-or-treaters carrying flares and pepper spray bear-repellant, each cradling a shot gun or thirty aught six in their arms.

44.

One wall in the capitol rotunda unfurls a large mosaic image of wounded and victorious Canadian soldiers returning to their homes after the Great War. The colors are autumnal except the shroud-like white bandages worn by the injured soldiers. Bronze Canadian soldiers are everywhere in the town, blowing whistles to encourage troops forward, waving their arms in the air, or running into a hail of bullets bent over as if breasting the icy pellets of a Manitoba blizzard. (It must be remembered that, as members of the British Commonwealth, the Canadians fought in all of the major engagements of the war – by contrast, American doughboys were deployed only in 1918, that is the last year of t he Great War.) I see no monuments anywhere to World War Two – perhaps, this is due to shame. The City of St. Louis, a German cruise-liner crowded with Jewish refugees tried to dock repeatedly in Halifax and other cities on Canada’s Atlantic coast but was denied entry into those harbors. The St. Louis returned to England and, then, France and more than half of its passengers were later captured by the Nazis and murdered. The story is told in the Museum of Human Rights under the sleek, glass tower aimed at heaven.

45.

The 39 steps to the rotunda are flanked by massive life-size bison cast in bronze. The bison are immensely heavy and they seem to bear down on the marble pedestals that they are pawing with their mighty hooves. The legend is that the bronze bison were so heavy that it was feared that hauling them into the building would mar the delicate terrazzo flooring underfoot. So crews cut slabs of ice from the Assiniboine River below the place where Louis Riel now waves his scroll-shaped manifesto. The bison were set on the ice-slabs and, then, slid into the building.

46.

Ye’s Buffet across the street from the Polo Park mall is a few blocks south of Ellice Avenue where we are staying. It’s a popular place with a chaotic parking lot always full with some vehicles idling and, even, double-parked. Inside, the banquet hall is immense with high ceilings where fans are lazily rotating and dark stone walls decorated with colorful murals of Chinese people feasting. The buffet offerings, set out under sunny-looking heat lamps, are numerous – each long table with its multitude of steam-trays adorned with a great green jade dragon at its end. The place is packed with Natives eating as if their life depended upon it. During the hour that Jack and I were at our table, we didn’t see anyone departing the hall – grim-faced patrons picked at their food or drank beer, waiting for their second- or third-wind. A group of Chinese nerds, apparently just released from some gaming or robotics convention, charges into the room and the boys are huge and look very hungry and the Asian waitresses in their black blouses and slacks grin at the boys, covering their mouths as they giggle to one another. A cardboard sign posted on the table says: "Love food. Don’t waste it." Ye’s up-scale place is good because all Chinese buffets are good in their own way, but there is nothing special about the food which is, in fact, generic Chinese buffet food. Ye’s operates restaurants in Kitchener and Toronto. The toilets have spectacular fixtures and obsidian-black walls but the ebony marble floor is entirely puddled with urine and, accordingly, the stone is very slippery. The ostentatious stone-work creates an unnecessary hazard.

47.

The night before we ate at Ye’s, we drove to the buffet but found the parking lot so crowded and so confusing with narrow one-way lanes that we drove down Ellice west all the way to the Peripheral Highway and, then, beyond where pagoda-shaped kiosks mark the entry to the big Assiniboine Downs race-track. West of the race-track, the prairie is mostly empty all the way to Brandon and big storm clouds were scouring the flat, dark land. Finding no place to eat on the outskirts, we drove back down Ellice toward the city and stopped at the Yafe café, a Palestinian place. I couldn’t see any parking places on Ellice and, so, I turned into the residential neighborhood, a dark lane where small brick houses stood closely pressed together on tiny, withered lawns. For some reason, there were two sidewalks running parallel to one another and enclosing a boulevard where sad trees stood in a line on a sliver of grass, wet leaves plummeting down on our heads and shoulders in the cold drizzle. Ahead, I saw a square brick building, a commercial structure with its downstairs store-front dark but a frieze of brightly lit windows on the second floor – the windows were like a mural looking into the early 1960's, several mannequin-like people peering out into the intermittent rain, the men wearing suits and the women top-heavy with big bosoms and bee-hive hairdos, a sort of social club from which faint music was emanating from the blue-tinted and tiled interior.

48.

Almost all of the food on offer in Winnipeg is ethnic. But it isn’t good ethnic. Rather, it’s cheap, hand-me-down ethnic food made to be micro-waved and poured onto plates from cans. If you want an elegant dinner in Winnipeg, you have to go to one of the licensed supper clubs where you can sit in comfort on slick, red upholstery in small booths in a dimly lit room lined with velvet and bordello paintings. Here you can eat chops with baked potato while, whispering from hidden speakers, Sinatra croons to a tune by Henry Mancini.

49.

Homer’s is a Greek restaurant, a little like the old Italian places near the University where my father took me when I was a little boy. The outside of the windowless shed is painted with the Aegean Sea and, next to the door, there is a stucco bust of the blind poet. The tables are set under bowers that are made from white-washed lathe and wire with plastic grape vines heavily laden with plastic grapes tangled around them. Another mural inside shows some cliffs and the snow-white domes and turrets of a fishing village a little like a wedding cake – the picture is labeled "Sandorini." On the wall by the cashier, a TV screen displays images of Tuscany. I don’t think Tuscany is in Greece, although, I suppose, there may once have been Greek colonies in that place – on the screen, I can see an Etruscan tomb surrounded by funereal pines. Homer’s is about three blocks from where Winnipeg’s film-poet laureate was raised. Guy Maddin lived in the building at 800 and 802 West Ellice. Today, the place is Tam’s dry-cleaning and tailor-shop, a chunky, heavy-set structure with a grim-looking storefront and residential quarters upstairs. Maddin’s mother was a hairdresser and operated a salon out of the family’s home. The place was mysterious to Guy, a female sanctum, and, sometimes, his films feature delirious recollections of the salon and its habitues. Across from the dry-cleaning place, a Korean restaurant, "licensed" with a sign that says "dine-in or take-out" flashes to the empty intersection that it is "open." Jack says to me that the place looks absolutely poisonous.

50.

Guy Maddin’s first film shown in the United States was Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988). Gimli is a little town founded by Icelanders about 90 kilometers north of Winnipeg on the great lake. Maddin’s film struck me with the force of a revelation and I admired it intensely – his sensibility was unlike that of any other film maker known to me. One night, at a party at my house, we got a little tipsy and tried to call Maddin. I dialed the International Operator and, in fact, was given his phone-number. At that time, the director still lived year-round in Winnipeg. We drank some more beer to stiffen our resolve and, then, I dialed the number. The phone rang for a long time but no one answered.

51.

Louis Riel’s walking stick occupies a glass case at the Manitoba Museum. The stick is cherry-colored, so brightly polished that it glistens like a finely tumbled agate. The stick is gnarled, with a spiral, corkscrew grain. When Riel was captured after the Battle of Batoche, he expected that he would be executed and, so, he gave the stick to a friend and told him to keep it. The museum is immense and brilliantly designed. There are sad tales of blizzards and diptheria epidemics and small Indian children cruelly confined in residential schools. A number of panels depict the heroic efforts required to complete the train line to Churchill. An aerial shot of Churchill shows some big grain elevators standing in front of piers extending into a green lagoon. Another Inuksut monument dominates a room devoted to the doomed Franklin expedition lost in it’s search of the Northwest Passage. In a nook, you can put on headphones and listen to elderly Inuit recalling how their grandfathers told stories of strange white men starving on islands where caribou grazed and the seas were full of fat merry seals, wonderful places made for human beings to hunt and be happy.

52.

Karst-country is pierced with sinkholes and there are caves underground. Narcisse, Manitoba lies in the center of this formation and, in that place, the sinkholes dotting the prairie are full of garter snakes, thousands of them tangled together in dense balls. The snakes spend the winter underground, coiled together to conserve body warmth – they are in a state called brumation (this means they wake sometimes to eat and drink water, but, then, become inert again.) In the Spring, the sunlight stirs the snakes and the females release a pheromone that attracts males, twenty or thirty at a time. The snakes form mating balls, tightly knotted globes of writhing serpents. The snake dens at Narcisse are about one hour from Winnipeg, a half-hour from Gimli and so the exhibit in the museum is a bit redundant – after all, you can drive out to the dens in May and see the pits filled with living carpets of garter snakes. But the diorama in the museum is spectacular and I take some pictures to send to Julie: "Snake Den near our Hotel" is how I caption the images. Crows and ravens gather over the snake dens and feast on the serpents – snakes with their bellies ripped open sometimes drop out of the sky when you are gazing down into the fifteen-foot deep sinkholes. The guides will tell you that garter snakes may bite, but they are not venomous – this is untrue: in 2000, it was discovered that the rear teeth in a garter snake’s mouth exude venom when they bite, but that it is very weak. The web site for the famous snake dens at Narcisse say that you can handle the "snakes so long as you are gentle with them."



53.

Near the Manitoba museum, the Ukrainian culture center occupies an old Victorian building that was, once, a Labor ("Labour") Temple. The structure is heavily built with turrets and a crenellated cornice. Inside, there is an exhibition of icons painted on the lids of ammo boxes that contained AK 47 bullets. The ammo boxes were retrieved from battlefields in the Ukraine where Nationalist forces have fought the Russians, particularly near the Donetsk airport. A Tv set plays a loop explaining the conflict and the icons – the Russians are alleged to have used poison gas at Donetsk and other places. The icons are beautiful. One of them shows the Madonna as the Theotokos (or "God-bearer") – she holds seven swords and the epithet that describes her is "the Softener of Evil Hearts." On the Tv, the narrator reminds us that "after every war, peace must come." The icons, it is alleged, are not about the war, but about the peace after war.

54.

At WAG, sculptures adorn a rooftop terrace. Some angular steel works that look like industrial equipment occupy pedestals near the door that leads to the elevators. Metal chairs accompany a nondescript table on which someone has left a can of diet Pepsi dive-bombed by a fat bee. A big Inuksut with a window-torso beckons from atop a smooth travertine plinth. The raw texture of the cairn stones, all irregular and fractured, contrasts with the sleek platform on which the man-tall Inuksut has been erected. Two conical heaps of irregular stones the color of cardboard support the long vertical uprights that frame the window. Stubby arms protrude from the side of the cairn, rock flippers that seem to channel the breeze and the Inuksut is crowned by a small pile of rubble on the flat stone serving as the frame’s upper cross-member.

If you look through the window, sighting across the roof tops, the frame encloses the northeast quadrant of the city where there are low towers built in the 1890's with heavy stucco cornices and, in the distance, a great expanse of parallel train-tracks, engraved as if with a burin into the horizon. The view through the stone frame vibrates almost imperceptibly with the heartbeat of the broken rocks that "act in the capacity of a human being." The light inside the window has a different texture than that surrounding the monument, radiance that is more mixed with shadow and, thus, casts things in sharper relief. Far away, above the gleaming rails, you can see a little cloud, not more than the size of a fist that approaches on the faint respiration of the breeze. The cloud sheds grey lobes in its wake and the air darkens. Snow plunges from the cloud, driven downward by a burst of air and mist rises from the river, grey with faint blue highlights if you stare into it long enough. Traffic slows on the streets, impeded not so much by the fog but by the pingos erupting like volcanoes at the intersections and asphalt is shattered by the frost into polyhedral patterns. The concrete and brick sides of the building are painted with lichen and the trees along the boulevards are stunted larch and white spruce, avenues ending in sedge meadows and muskeg with tussocks where herds of caribou are grazing. Igluvigaq line the sidewalks and you can hear dogs barking in harness to a gamatik that someone drives across an intersection that is like a frozen lake. The biting flies arise from the muskeg and moving shrouds of mosquitos roll across the land and Frog, Oma-ka-ki, who is the king of the insects, sings in the alley that is a deep, hollow cistern. The unreal city unfurls from its center and the white bears prowl the rim of the sea where the great weight of ice has displaced the permafrost and tilted it upward like the cup-shaped edge of a crater and the field of train-tracks becomes a harbor where pods of orca are hunting the swift, lithe seals. The sun is fixed in the sky and can not set and hunters emerge from their caribou skin lodges to survey the desolation around them which is not desolation at all in their eyes, but the navel of the earth and a bounteous table set for their delectation and, then, the white whirls in as a great polar bear sits silently beside a manhole in the center of an empty, snow-clogged street, waiting for a seal to emerge from the sewers and, then, the great darkness comes and the sky is full of sheets of green and violet flame shaken the way a woman might shake-out a rug during Spring cleaning.

55.

On our last night in Winnipeg, Jack suggested that we drive downtown to see the statute of Louis Riel standing by the legislative building on the Assiniboine River bank. The street on the south side of the capitol lawn was empty and we parked close to the monument. The lawns around the legislative building were silent except for the rhythmic cries of Oma-ka-ki who is the king of insects. Louis Riel was lit by a street-lamp over his shoulder and his features were in shadow except for the great bronze moustache bracketing his lips and giving his head the aspect of a winged being. The colossus tilted toward us, the bludgeon of his metal manifesto in his right hand. We went down the steps to the river flowing soundlessly past the marble landing. Park police in an amber-lit, electric-powered cart glided by and a solitary jogger appeared from the river-walk, complicating his run by repeatedly dashing up and down the steps in front of the Great Rebel. The jogger was bald and the street lamp put a little highlight on his bare skull. From the stone landing, we could look up and down the river. The only bridge was to the west and the river walk in the opposite direction led along the winding course of the stream for hundreds of yards, shadowed by trees and shrubs that shone emerald-green where the street lamps lit them. The moon had risen and was bathing her toes in the place where the Assiniboine bent toward the Forks and, above the bronze insurgent, hovering over the darkened capitol dome, the Golden Boy shone in the sky like a remote and faded planet.

56.

It was windy in Grand Forks. We reached that place about noon and, so, Jack and I stopped to eat at a Ruby Tuesday restaurant. The afternoon was hot – it was 94 degrees. The gale stripped corn husks away from the corn and pitched them, like discarded snake skins, across the four-lane highway. Out in flat distance, combines were sitting in pale splashes of dust. The dust was shapeless and bright in the hot sunshine. I decided to drive back to Austin instead of stopping at Alexandria as had been my plan. Later, around sunset, we drove into Northfield and ate at a McDonald’s. On the way to the freeway, the nose of my car was pointed into the setting sun. The sun was bright red and had spilled its blood all over the highway so that I seemed to drive on the asphalt’s soft scarlet tongue.

57.

An hour earlier, we were driving through Brooklyn Center a north suburb to Minneapolis. A big sign advertising a Ford Dealership said: Welcome to the North Country. I was skeptical about the billboard. "The North Country?" No, not exactly – in fact, not by a long shot.

On the Lost Museum

　

1.

When the Summer Olympics were scheduled for Rio de Janeiro in 2016, the government announced plans to thoroughly renovate the old Museu Nacional at Quinta de Boa Vista. Established in 1818 and one of the first universal and scientific museums in the world, the place was in tatters. Most Brazilians in Rio were more than a little embarrassed by the old, dowdy museum. Termite seethed in its walls and the elaborate stucco reliefs inside the structure, the former imperial residence, were prone to come crashing down onto the water-wrinkled wooden floors. The exhibits on display were labeled only in Portuguese; wi-fi and internet access didn’t exist and there was no reliable way to install electronic beacons to guide visitors through the huge crumbling mansion. The electrical wiring complied with no known code and some of it was exposed where the lathe and plaster walls had cracked open. Admission was next to nothing. Visitors asked about a gift shop in vain. No such thing existed. If you wanted to eat at the museum, meals were a bargain – the staff ushered you through some moldy backrooms to a tiny commissary where the employees ate their lunches and breakfasts. The big windows in their elaborate stucco moldings were always shut and, in fact, probably couldn’t be opened any longer. This was also unfortunate because the hilltop where the museum is located overlooking Guanabara Bay is a fine, breezy point and the park where the building stands is cool in the shade of its ancient trees. But the galleries in the big mansion were usually stifling, musty with the close, still heat of an old attic.

As often happens in Brazil, money ran out and good intentions didn’t translate into acts. Some funds were used to renovate the zoo nearby to avoid the outcry of those sympathetic to the idea of animal rights, but nothing was done to rehabilitate the old museum. After all, the place wasn’t even all that popular among Brazilians – in 2017, the Museu Nacional had 192,000 visitors; by contrast, 289,000 Brazilians visited the Louvre in Paris in that same year. In any event, it’s all moot now: the museum burned to the ground on September 2, 2018.

　

　

2.

In the Cincinnati Museum of Art, the American Indian collection contains an Adena Tablet. These tablets are 4 to 5 inch rectangular pieces of limestone that have been deeply engraved with a bone awl. The tables look a bit like decorations and images in the Irish Book of Kells – the limestone has been incised to show highly stylized animals, apparently vultures and spiders and deer, locked together in a system of symmetrical, labyrinthine lines. Only 14 of these tablets are known to exist and only one was discovered by a professional archaeologist – hence, the provenance of 13 of the tablets is more than a little unclear.

The tablets are thought to be associated with the Adena culture, eastern woodlands Indians who lived in south Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Although the meaning of the tablets is uncertain, and, in fact, their iconography disputed, they have been imagined to be astronomical calculators or, perhaps, templates that could be used to emboss patterns on leather garments. Others have speculated that the tablets are templates for tattoos inscribed on human skin. But no one knows for sure.

Here is the point of my digression: at least, three of the 14 known tablets were discovered in museum collections, one in California and two in county historical societies in Ohio. Museums don’t always know what they possess and, in fact, often they are unaware of the significance of their own artifacts. Some dusty, unassuming bit of wood or carved stone, a feather from an unknown bird, a emerald-colored beetle – these things may be immensely consequential if understood. Often, understanding must catch up with acquisition and mere hoarding.

　

3.

A series of fires had plagued the collections of the Museu Nacional – several other buildings owned by the institution had burned, beginning with a fire in a conservation laboratory in 2011. The most devastating of these fires was one that destroyed the resources of the Faculty of Languages. Thousands of tape-recordings of indigenous, undeciphered languages were lost – these are human languages that no one speaks, that are now extinct. Who knows if careful linguistic study of those tapes, perhaps, aided by computer analysis, might not have established connections between aboriginal languages still existing and the lost tongues that could be heard whispering and declaiming in fogs of static interrupted, now and then, by the startling cries of birds? What we don’t know today we may understand sometime in the future. But if the tapes are lost, carbonized by fire, there is no hope for any further study – a language spoken by a group of human beings that no longer exist has suffered extinction twice: first when the last speaker died, and, second, when melted the last recordings of that language.

On September 2, 2018, at about 9:30 pm, fire was reported in the Museu Nacional. Fire trucks raced through the Paco de Sao Cristavao, the large and elaborate grounds where the imperial palace stood. The fire hydrants near the museum were rusted shut and almost impossible to open. Once the hydrants were wrenched into flow, it was discovered that there was almost no water pressure. The water drizzled from the hydrants in a trickle. (The museum occupies the highest point on the tall bluff overlooking Guanabara Bay). By this time, the orange flames could be seen man-high and dancing in the elaborately framed vertical windows on the front facade of the building. Pumper trucks were dispatched to a nearby lagoon where water was sucked into their reservoirs, but there was duckweed and algae and the water was difficult to spray. Some museum staff risked their lives by charging into the building and carrying out a few armfuls of artifacts. But these efforts were in vain. The museum’s roof collapsed at about 11:00 pm sending pillars of sparks skyward. At dawn, the front facade of the building was all that remained upright. Studding the top of that facade where yard-high stucco figures, little pawn-shaped gods and goddesses. Blackened with soot, they stood sentinel over the ruins.

　

4.

Although the museum was built as an imperial palace, and used as a royal residence until the military coup in 1889, visitors remarked that there was little trace of opulence inside the structure. Most of the palatial rooms had been gutted and replaced with nondescript plaster walls enclosing the galleries. The ambassador’s quarters were an exception, a dim suite of rooms representing interior decoration in the 1880's – perhaps, one or two chairs in that suite of rooms were original. The throne room was also preserved, a surprisingly unostentatious space with a carved wooden chair, high-backed and upholstered in scarlet and green satin. The most-visited relic from the imperial family was the chapel built by Empress Teresa Cristina. The empress was a long-suffering and kindly woman still recalled with fondness as "the Mother of the Brazilians". Her husband, Pedro II, was a well-known philanderer, something for which he was also admired. (He installed his mistress in the palace where his wife lived.) Teresa Cristina was twice deposed – once in 1861, when the family had to flee Rio for Lisbon, and, then, later after a brief restoration, again in November 1889. In the latter case, after a military junta seized power, Pedro and Teresa went to Spain where the Empress died in December 1889, supposedly of a broken heart, longing for her lost empire in Brazil.

Empress Teresa Cristina was an avid collector of Greek and Roman antiquities. Because of her, the museum owned the largest collection of classical archaeological artifacts in Latin America.

　

5.

Several of Brazil’s emperors were whispered to be Freemasons. This society traces its lineage to the Temple of Solomon and the pyramids of Egypt. As a result, the Egyptian collections held by the museum were extensive – six human mummies and innumerable mummified cats and vultures and crocodiles. One gorgeously decorated sarcophagus in which reposed the mummy of Sha-Amun-en-es, the famous singer of Amun, was never opened – it is one of the very few mummy cases in the world that hasn’t been disturbed. (No one will open it now – it has been reduced to ash and slag.) Princess Kherima, who was elaborately embalmed and mummified, was also on display. Each of her fingers and toes was separately bound in multi-colored ribbons, a mortuary treatment unique to this mummy. The preserved cadaver of Princess Kherima, the Princess of the Sun, was said to induce trances and hallucinations in those sensitive to psychic influences – Rosicrucians from around the world came to stare at her corpse and several women wrote well-reviewed novels about her life and loves. Of course, the collection also contained many limestone stele, now cracked and blackened, golden masks, and alabaster canopic vessels.

The museum owned four majestic frescos peeled from walls in Pompeii – dark works depicting the bottom of the sea where octopuses and dolphins and sea-dragons frolicked. A headless Kore from the fifth century BC graced one gallery. There were red- and black-figure kraters, hydrai, askoi, and oinochoe, phallic amulets, and thirty or so mysterious Tanagra figurines made from baked clay. The Meso-American collections included a set of Inca quipus (knotted message strings), several exceedingly rare Jivaro shrunken heads (most such artifacts are fakes – shriveled skull-less monkey heads with eyes and lips sewed shut), incredibly beautiful and fragile Nazca textiles knit from llama and Andes camelid hair, obscene Moche ceramics, Wari textiles and delicate filigree gold and silver work made by Chimu and Lamabeyeque artisans. Several naturally formed mummies from the Atacama desert were on display as well as an Aymara mummy found at a ritual site amidst the snow-covered mountains overlooking the barren heath around Lake Titicaca. A family group of mummies found in the Caverna de Babilonia in the Minas Gerais of Brazil was also on display.

The rarest and most important collection of human-made artifacts was the Museum’s exhaustive holdings documenting Brazil’s indigenous cultures. Since most of those people are now extinct, the objects in those collections were literally irreplaceable – I am writing, of course, in the past tense. The museum held extensive artifacts from the Marajoaro tribe including the peculiar figurines that show obviously female goddesses molded into the form of a phallus. There were zoolites from the Trombetas River culture, many of them exquisitely carved fish and jaguars, funerary urns from the Maraca people, Kondreri potbelly ceramics, and so-called Muirooquitas – that is, tiny statues carved into emerald and other green gemstones made by the Santerem Indians.

In a glass case, visitors could see the oldest human remains discovered in Latin America, the fragmentary skeleton of a slender teenage girl nicknamed Luzia. Several halls were full of taxidermied specimens – jungle cats and peccaries and giant rodents from the Amazon basis. There was a corridor lined with mountings of rarely seen parrots and other birds from the jungles. Vitrines showed hundreds of amber specimens with insects and flower petals trapped in them, herbal samples used in indigenous medicines, thousands of dried flowers, butterflies, huge horned beetles with iridescent walnut-sized shells, plate-sized bird-eating spiders, the world’s largest collection of lace-wings and Amazonian walking-stick insects. A huge articulated skeleton of a Maxikalisaurus dinosaur loomed over one gallery, the beast’s bony head and jaws hovering close to the water-blistered stucco ceiling of the museum. In filing cabinets, there were uncounted numbers of rare photographs showing scenes from Brazilian history, Indios families cooking food under ornate palm trees, the grass and wicker habitations of lost tribes, an image of Albert Einstein quizzically looking up at the dragonish Maxikalisaurus fossil, Marie Curie inspecting some of the museum’s large collection of meteorites. Indeed, the largest meteorite ever recorded as crashing to earth in South America, the so-called Bendego stone, a big chunk of space slag, pitted and corroded iron that little children were invited to touch when they came to the museum with their parents.

The fire burned amidst all these things.

　

6.

Brazilian news media claimed that the Museu Nacional held 20 million artifacts in its collections. I doubt the accuracy of this figure – when it comes to large numbers, people are unreliable estimators. Let’s say that the museum, in fact, held two million objects, discounting the official estimate by 18 million. Then, let’s imagine that there were fifty scholars employed by the museum, biologists, ethnographers, and archeologists who, perhaps, had an understanding of 10,000 objects each. This means that the staff affiliated with the museum could, perhaps, accurately index, explain, and catalog 500,000 objects in the collection. This leaves 1.5 million artifacts unclassified and, therefore, essentially unknown – tens of thousands of botanical and insect specimens, thousands of pieces of ceramic, hand-tools, arrow-heads, fragmentary bones, bits of textile, small carved cartouche-shaped stones like the Adena tablets, gems, fossils, shreds of papyrus, a galaxy of things that no one had examined for, perhaps, a hundred years. These things, objectively treasures, were mostly destroyed and are lost.

Even if some of these materials can be sifted from the ruins, the identifying labels and other catalog or indexing materials are lost. And, so, the hanks of hair and bone are just debris, garbage, more or less, unaccountable curiosities of no real value because without provenance.

　

7.

Museum staff squatted in ash and cinders looking for artifacts.

Nine Torah scrolls from the Fifth Century A.D. were found, more or less, intact. Perhaps, God had spared these holy books.

Someone’s boot kicked over a human skull. Some other bones were found, nearby, charred but still intelligible as fragments of a skeleton. The authorities were called – perhaps, some homeless person had broken into the museum and died in the fire. The bones were carefully photographed in situ. When measurements were taken, the skeleton was identified – it was the Luzia, the Indian girl who died 11,500 years before flames burned down the National Museum of Brazil.

September 9, 2016