Courses yet to be delivered, contexts yet to be constructed

I have been planning a course for next January--an introductory course called "English 122: Texts and Contexts." The idea is to build a course around a theme that emerges in different contexts. I have been thinking of "Gold Rushes and Gold Mountain"--two variations on a bigger theme in Canadian immigration history: the "Promise of Eden" theme or the "Promised Land" theme. So many stories of risks taken to make it big in the New World; so many stories of desperation to find a place free of the limitations and restrictions of various Old Worlds.

Gold Mountain is a Chinese name for our "west" that was a long boat ride to their east, across the Pacific to the goldfields and construction camps of California, British Columbia and the Yukon. To Gold Mountain, where they found a future built on building railroads for others, or feeding those who did the building. A future of loneliness and separation from wives and children whose future depended on labours in the fields and valleys of others' dreams.

Coming from the other direction, earlier and as contemporaries, whose stories were those of the seekers of political or religious or economic freedom, those who wanted to find land a resources on which to build or extend family wealth. And of those who were sent over as spouses, servants and slaves to the first (sometimes all of the above, functionally if not legally).

The thing is, are these stories of success or of failure? And according to what standards?

Literary practice, or paradigm, becomes a determining factor as much as does actual physical or financial fate. Write a success story in which the men overcome nature to build thriving farms on the prairies? Write it in the Twenties or Thirties? If your name (pen or otherwise) is Frederick Philip Grove? Or a host of others writing in a naturalistic vein. Not a chance.

Yet my maternal grandfather Elmer Hornby (a man I barely knew, but by all accounts would have benefited from knowing better, knowing for more than the gruff figure I recall) did it. Not a well educated man in terms of years in school, but a man who knew what mattered and what needed to be done. A man whose opinion meant something in the Melfort area of Saskatchewan. A man who came west from Ontario, built a sod house, brought to it his Breton-born wife Victorine (a woman I can scarcely remember, other than as a cancer-ridden figure breathing her last the summer of 1957 from the front lawn of their retirement home on a small acreage along the King George Highway in Surrey, B.C.), herself the daughter of another immigrant settler from farther away but of more recent arrival to the St. Brieux / Pathlow area. Built the sod house in which she gave birth to her first two children. Built with her the farm that supported them and their seven children through a period better remembered for its disappointments than its deliverances.


The fact is, other than the First Nations people who according to their own stories were created here, but according to archaeology were the real first immigrants, we are all in this country the results of people who acted out stories of need for a more promising future, who listened with eyes bright with hope or desperation or illness bred of poverty and want, or a touch of all the above, listened to fabrications about this land of opportunity, of gold or of a golden age--real or figurative--just waiting to open to their ease and make their dreams come true.

And enough of them made truths out of those lies to make homes and histories for the rest of us. To provide contexts for the texts of failure and success we offer our introductory-level students, many of whom, I note from the advance class list, are coming from abroad for another kind of opportunity, or for more of the same kind of opportunity embedded in the latest versions of those stories of a golden land to the east and west of wherever they start from.

Which makes me and people like me, their teachers, their leaders-out-of and leaders-into (I think the word "educator" has roots in the Latin verb "ducere"--to lead), texts and contexts yet to come.