We lived in Toronto, across the street from Gene Martynec and his then partner, Catherine, for part of the time the songs were being written, but in late 1974 we moved into our new house at Burritt’s Rapids, which is where “Starwheel,” “Arrows of Light,” and “A Long Time Love Song” came into being. The neurotic plague of 1973 seemed behind us. We still loved each other, and I continued to treasure Kitty’s inspiration and insight into the worlds both of spirit and of feeling. In Toronto we had moved on to a state of fatigue, in which I focused on my work and Kitty found validation in social connections, hanging out with a crowd of hipsters based at the Pilot Tavern. I never went there. The move to the country refreshed us both. The novelty of the house, the quiet, the old fields grown up into woods we could walk in—all gave us room to breathe.
Joy Will Find a Way reflects exposure to some new musical influences. For the few years leading up to the album, I had made a point of listening to music other than the popular genres I was familiar with. I missed a few things by doing this (David Bowie, for example), but I soaked in, and absorbed, some magnificent material. I rarely listened to other singer-songwriters. I didn’t want to be influenced by anyone who did anything close to what I was doing. I immersed myself in the sounds of other cultures: Swedish fiddling, Gambian kora, the music of Ethiopia, Tibet, medieval and Renaissance Europe. I had an album of indigenous men singing in guttural voices and playing a hollow log on a beach on Guadalcanal. My interest in jazz never entirely waned, but it took a temporary backseat to these other, more exotic forms. I also put a lot of work into the guitar, abandoning attempts to incorporate piano, banjo, and mandolin into my songs. An exception was the dulcimer, which had shown up on Sunwheel Dance and still seemed to fit.
Leaving behind the reactionary state of Salt, Sun and Time, Gene and I assembled a band to play on Joy that included Dennis Pendrith and Pat Godfrey (who had played on Night Vision), with Terry Clarke on drums and Dido Morris on percussion. Terry was a “real” jazz drummer.
Joy Will Find a Way was an evolutionary step, a chipped groove in the rock wall of my psyche where I found a toehold toward a deeper spiritual understanding, political awareness, and musical achievement—things that would become more fully realized with my next album, In the Falling Dark.
We recorded In the Falling Dark at Eastern Sound in Toronto in the fall of 1976. It was my seventh studio album in as many years, and I was conscious of the project carrying some degree of import. Obviously, it was important to me. I felt as though my songwriting, and my understanding of people and the world around me, had evolved enough for me to feel okay about my work being important to others. In the Falling Dark contained several “firsts” in style and content that would carry over to current times.
One of these firsts came in the form of “witnessing” songs, a hint at the more outward-directed material that would come by the end of the decade. I was angry about the suffering wrought by colonialism upon Native peoples in Canada, assailed for hundreds of years by violence, displacement, disease, and discrimination. I was distressed that this ruin was visited on the continent’s original inhabitants primarily by people of my race, and I was appalled that it was so often done in the name of Jesus.
Went to the museum, red brother
Saw your ancient bloom cut, pressed and dried
A sign said wasn’t it clever what they used to do
But it never did say how they died
Hey hey hey
Hey hey hey
Went to Regina, red sister
Heard a cab driver say what he’d seen
“There’s a grand place to eat out on Number One
All white ladies if you know what I mean”
Hey hey hey
Hey hey hey
Went to a powwow, red brother
Felt the people’s love/joy flow around
It left me crying just thinking about it
How they used my saviour’s name to keep you down
Hey hey hey
Hey hey hey
“RED BROTHER RED SISTER,” 1976
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/25.
Native peoples remain largely hidden in the Americas, often living in enclaves of poverty on marginal lands called reserves in Canada and reservations in the United States. With a few exceptions, these were usually the least desirable lands at the time Native peoples were sent there—until oil or uranium or trees with newfound value were discovered, at which time another scheme would again remove people from their homes, or simply run them over.
When I was a kid in Ottawa, my peers and I barely knew that Indians existed, outside of Tonto and Chingachgook and all those western movie extras (almost always Anglos smeared with pigment) falling off their horses. Canada’s federal government, though, was well aware of aboriginal struggles. Ottawa began regulating Native existence soon after the nation’s birth, primarily through eleven treaties signed (often with an “X” by Native leaders, who didn’t understand English) between 1871 and 1921. Today the lives of Canada’s Native peoples are assigned to the office cubicles of the aptly titled Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada. Poverty remains critical, along with the diminishing health of the natural environment on which many far-flung communities depend. At the same time, Canada’s Native populations have fought, with increasing skill, for their rights, and today continue to achieve incremental gains.
Kitty and I came to know a few Native people during our journeys through the west. Among them was Shingoose (born Curtis Jonnie), an Ojibwe from the Roseau River First Nation who was taken from his birth family and turned over to Mennonite missionaries in Manitoba at the age of four. They were just doing him a favour, of course, lifting him out of the natural inferiority of his race. Shingoose sang in choirs and progressed to a life in professional music and media, but he remained committed to reversing some of the damage done by the wrenching of aboriginal children from their families and entire tribes from their traditional lands. I met Shingoose in the early seventies in Winnipeg. In 1975 I produced a record, an EP, of him performing his songs for a label established by the Native Council of Canada, Native Country. He also sings on my 1978 album Further Adventures Of.
Tom Jackson is a Cree from Saskatchewan who moved to Winnipeg when he was fourteen and soon dropped out of school. He became a highly honoured singer and actor (we are fellow Officers of the Order of Canada), but in his youth he’d run with some rough company in a motorcycle gang. In the mid-seventies he and I played a couple of times, along with other artists, at the medium-security Stony Mountain Institution in Manitoba, conveniently located not far from Winnipeg, the Canadian city with the highest proportion of aboriginal inhabitants (10 percent of the city’s population). I met an inmate there who happened to be one of Jackson’s acquaintances from the motorcycle days. Daryl was a black man who had killed someone in a bar fight. Jackson, like Shingoose, was, with brains and luck, able to pull himself out of poverty and disaffection to be in the vanguard of a general, gradual movement of his people toward self-respect and self-determination. Daryl and a fellow inmate, a young, skinny long-haired guy who was two years into a five-year sentence for dealing pot, became parts of a composite character that showed up in my song “Gavin’s Woodpile,” a lament for humanity’s failure to honour the freedom of personal space, for the necessity of the natural surroundings, and for the injustice of industrial encroachment on an already oppressed people.
In May 1970, about the same time that Kitty and I left on our “nonworking Canadian vacation,” the government of Ontario banned commercial fishing in the English-Wabigoon River system due to massive mercury contamination caused by the Canadian pulp industry. A caustic soda plant on this river system, north of Kenora, Ontario, had dumped tons of ethyl mercury into the once pristine water, disastrously impacting the ecosystem and the health of aboriginal people downstream. (Caustic soda is used to bleach wood pulp in manufacturing paper.)
Pulp was and remains one of the l
argest industries in Canada. For eight years, beginning in 1962, Dryden Chemicals Ltd. simply dumped its waste, including ten tons of mercury as well as other contaminants, into the vast river system. One hundred miles downstream the mercury reached the Grassy Narrows Reserve, home of the Asubpeeschoseewagong First Nation; after another hundred miles it hit the White Dog Reserve and the Wabaseemoong people. (And people reached the mercury as well, as they travelled great distances along the river to fish.) The contamination was devastating to these Ojibwe people. They relied on fish such as walleye, pike, large-mouth bass, and whitefish both for sustenance and as a source of income for the many Native fishing guides and commercial fishermen who lived in the region.
Kitty and I developed friendships in Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba, where I would play. Winnipeg is 150 miles from Kenora, Ontario, the town closest to the contamination. Kitty had an aunt and uncle who had a cottage there, where we stayed on occasion, often enough to feel some relationship to the area. One year, not long after playing a gig in Winnipeg at which I introduced “Gavin’s Woodpile” with a discussion of local mercury contamination, I got a letter from a white resident of Kenora who had been at the show. She asked if I had ever been to her town to see the “drunken Indians laying all around.” Had I heard about the “disgraceful Indian wife-beaters”? She even used the term “our Indians.” Indeed, you couldn’t help but notice people staggering, lying in the road, acting oddly, apparently drunk. Many Native communities have a problem with alcohol and other forms of substance abuse, but mercury poisoning produces symptoms similar to drunkenness. So what was really going on here? Did anyone care?
Much is known about the interaction of mercury and human tissue in Ontario, not because the government launched an immediate investigation—it did not—but because a team of Japanese scientists did. In 1975 four researchers from three Japanese universities arrived in Kenora to survey aboriginal health along the English River. The Japanese took an interest because the largest and most devastating case of mercury poisoning in history occurred in the coastal city of Minamata, Japan, where residents were plagued with similar but inexplicable neurological symptoms, including numbness and pain in limbs and around the mouth, vision and hearing impairment, ataxia (loss of muscular control), and an inability to walk properly, followed by mental impairment, limbs painfully twisting, convulsions and, finally, death. At least a hundred people died in Minamata as the result of mercury poisoning, and hundreds, possibly thousands, were sickened by it.
Like Canada’s Ojibwe people, residents of the Japanese town were fish eaters. Mercury was bioaccumulating in the seafood of Minamata Bay because that’s where the Chisso Chemical Corporation was manufacturing, among other products, acetaldehyde, which is used as a binder for paints, as a plasticizer for plastics, and in several other applications (including as a flavour enhancer for certain foods). Mercury sulfate was used to catalyze the chemical reaction needed to make acetaldehyde. The researchers who discovered the cause of the deaths estimated that Chisso released a whopping six hundred tons of mercury into Minamata Bay, an amount so copious that it later was found to be cost effective to mine the substance from the outfall and sell it on the open market. Because the mercury poisoning in Japan was a new, human-caused affliction, and endemic, it became known as Minamata disease.
According to Dr. Masazumi Harada, who led the Japanese team investigating mercury contamination in Canada, to this day the Canadian government will not use the term “Minamata disease” to describe what attacked the aboriginal peoples of northwestern Ontario. In 2010 Harada and his team returned to Kenora to follow up on his previous study, and in 2011 he released a new report that said, “[T]he impact [of mercury poisoning] on the health and socioeconomic life of the people throughout the area is immense. . . . Local people still eat a lot of fish.” The report also revealed that out of 160 people tested in 2010, 59 percent suffered symptoms of mercury poisoning. By 2010 all of the individuals who in 1975 tested above the government’s mercury safety guideline of fifty parts per million were dead. Today, of the ten tons of mercury dumped by Dryden into the English-Wabigoon River system, nearly five tons remain at the bottom of Clay Lake, which is near the former Dryden plant and upriver of the reserves.
Working out on Gavin’s woodpile
Safe within the harmony of kin
Visions begin to crowd my eyes
Like a meteor shower in the autumn skies
And the soil beneath me seems to moan
With a sound like the wind through a hollow bone
And my mind fills with figures like Lappish runes of power. . .
And log slams on rough-hewn log
And a voice from somewhere scolds a barking dog.
I remember a bleak-eyed prisoner
In the Stony Mountain life-suspension home
You drink and fight and damage someone
And they throw you away for some years of boredom
One year done and five more to go —
No job waiting so no parole
And over and over they tell you that you’re nothing. . .
and I toss another log on Gavin’s woodpile
and wonder at the lamp-warm window’s welcome smile.
I remember crackling embers
Coloured windows shining through the rain
Like the coloured slicks on the English River
Death in the marrow and death in the liver
And some government gambler with his mouth full of steak
Saying, “If you can’t eat the fish, fish in some other lake.
To watch a people die—it is no new thing.”
And the stack of wood grows higher and higher
And a helpless rage seems to set my brain on fire.
And everywhere the free space fills
Like a punctured diving suit and I’m
Paralyzed in the face of it all
Cursed with the curse of these modern times
Distant mountains, blue and liquid,
Luminous like a thickening of sky
Flash in my mind like a stairway to life —
A train whistle cuts through the scene like a knife
Three hawks wheel in a dazzling sky —
A slow-motion jet makes them look like a lie
And I’m left to conclude there’s no human answer near. . . .
But there’s a narrow path to a life to come
That explodes into sight with the power of the sun
A mist rises as the sun goes down
And the light that’s left forms a kind of crown
The earth is bread, the sun is wine
It’s a sign of a hope that’s ours for all time.
“GAVIN’S WOODPILE,” 1975
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/26.
The laments of “Gavin’s Woodpile” were real. The prisoner was real. The mercury poisoning was certainly real. The hawks eclipsed by a jet were real. The rapid transformation of the great Canadian west was real. And my anger was real. I think listeners got that. Writers began claiming that I was now a “protest singer,” despite the facts that “Gavin’s Woodpile” was the only song of its kind on the album, and that I’d put out a few politically oriented songs in the past (such as “Going Down Slow” and “Burn” and, to a lesser extent, “January in the Halifax Airport Lounge”). Nobody said anything about my being a protest singer when those songs came out. But it’s clear I was heading somewhere else on this album and on that song—clear enough for Ottawa journalist Christopher Cobb, in 1977, to note that “we may be witnessing a metamorphosis: Bruce Cockburn developing into an aggressive, hard-hitting protest singer. . . . He says his latest album, In the Falling Dark, is the start of a new direction, but doesn’t know where it will lead. It’s obvious, though, that ‘Gavin’s Woodpile,’ a song on that album, is a pretty good indication.” Interestingly, though, my very politically engaged brother Don found the song “politically offensive” because of the “no human answer ne
ar” part.
I’m lavishing ink on Canada’s mercury contamination because it’s a stark firsthand example of how industrial “progress” often impacts the world’s poor and powerless, something that, since the late 1970s and especially throughout the 1980s, I have spent a great deal of my life and artistic output witnessing and recounting. Mercury occupies a keystone position in my evolution as an artist-correspondent.
Over my lifetime economic and military actions by the world’s wealthy have come to dominate human life—all life. In Mozambique and Mali, Iraq, Afghanistan and Nepal, Honduras and Spain, Chile and Cambodia, Nicaragua, New Brunswick and South Dakota, I have seen and felt the human and environmental devastation that short-sighted economic structures, created by the world’s ruling classes, inflict primarily on the poor (though we are all in the crosshairs) and on the wild, God-given ecosystems of this beautiful blue-green planet. I have spoken with victims (or their next of kin) of the market’s march across the globe; I have seen the open pit mines, the gas flares, the endless clear-cuts; I have stepped gingerly through farmlands turned to minefields and hunkered down in an ancient Mesopotamian city transformed to a trillion-dollar free-fire zone. I have found myself facing cagey soldiers and trigger-happy paramilitary cops whose charge (whether or not they realized it) was largely to quash the calling-to-account of the rich by the poor.
As if a twisted message from Ouroboros (the serpent eating its own tail), we have reached a point in human cultural evolution where even the cataclysms wrought by corporations and their government-military proxies—and by nature itself, as it too becomes a sort of weapon under climate change—are treated as exploitable resources. Author and activist Naomi Klein has dubbed this business model “disaster capitalism.” Civil war? Sell guns to both sides. Earthquake in Haiti? Create shell organizations to siphon aid money. Exponential rise in lifestyle-generated diabetes? Develop and market new drugs. Climate change melting the Arctic? Open the Northwest Passage and drill for oil. The examples are legion.
Rumours of Glory Page 14