Thanks so much!

Gratitude for your support in my first year on Substack

The closing of another year brings me thoughts of a Christmas past. I want to thank all of you who have been reading these stories and giving me incredible feedback. I want to thank Catherine Checora for helping me get this thing out to you. I want to thank the Substack people for providing a platform for us freelancers looking for readers.

I am offering, at this time of year, my story of Christmas in Churchill, Manitoba, in 1969. As I was reviewing this story, I learned that one of the three Dene boys in the story (and in the song) has passed away this year. So, this story is dedicated to Ernie Bussidore and the people of Tadoule Lake.

But first of all, please enjoy this Christmas concert video of three songs that Catherine and I performed in Okotoks. The first song is about the Christmas story of the three boys.

With a beautiful hippie wife and two little flower children in tow, we took the Muskeg Special, a train full of stories, to Churchill, Manitoba in the fall of 1969. It was the quintessential late sixties adventure. A first-time teaching job, first real work team, first time north and first time away from home for our little family. What could go wrong?

Well . . . lots, but there was plenty of room for what could go right as well.

It started out in a beat-up cab. The first couple of weeks up there I had no money, so I drove taxi at night to pay some bills. As it turned out, it was like post graduate studies in the secret underbelly of a northern town. “Take me to Sharkey’s,” said the middle-aged wife sneaking out of the house with a case of beer under her arm — an early version of the “the real housewives of Churchill.” I was soon to learn that the town was a little Peyton Place fueled by cheap alcohol and long winter nights.

Churchill was a tough, hard living northern town with a long-time tyrannical school principal, and we were there with a mandate to replace him with some progressive, peace loving, freaky looking change making teachers. The outgoing principal wanted to beat the bad out of the kids from five cultural groups (Cree, Metis, Dene, Inuit and Caucasian) and we wanted to sing Kumbaya and get them holding hands.

It got intense! Perhaps I should not have spent my first few hours in my new school building with a set of wire cutters dismantling the infernal bell ringing system.

“We don’t need no stinkin’ bells.”

Or perhaps I could have cut my hair to a more teacher-type length. Or perhaps I should not have inhaled, even that one time, or played gutbucket blues in that downtown, smoke-filled bar.

There may have been a little rebelliousness on our part indeed, but the teaching itself would have blown your socks off. Violent, angry, poverty stricken, abused kids started to take a little notice.

I recall one noon hour when I noticed that my principal still had a classroom full of students during the usual lunch hour escape time.

No, not in detention.

For the first time in their school history, he had put a poor white kid, a Dene kid, an Inuit kid, a Cree/Metis kid and a middle class white kid into cross cultural dialogue groups. They were telling personal history stories about their grandfathers, and they did not want to go out for lunch and stop the rich conversations being carried out by fourteen-year-olds.

In another notorious incident, we had a saucy Inuit eighth grader with the temerity to write a thirty-page essay in which she wonderfully eviscerated the great Farley Mowat.

It seemed like every week there was another adventure, and not all in the school.

We did not have to teach much polar bear safety that first semester as, tragically in the last semester, a young Inuit student was killed by one near the school grounds. Northern towns don’t always need posters to learn things.

There was a crazy polar bear night when the men were home babysitting and our wives went out for a social evening. The women had to hold onto and follow two city blocks of rope line because they were heading out in a full whiteout blizzard. They had a good time. We stupid men stayed home and scared the crap out of each other. It happened thus: later that night, six of us witless guys went out onto this Englishman’s small back porch to watch the biggest polar bear ever. The bear was in all you can eat buffet mode on some garbage, maybe less than six yards (not back yards) away. Crazy English does not warn us and proceeds to set off a thunder flash. This instantly causes said bear to turn and charge the six big men on the small back porch . . .

I was the first of the six, fully adrenalin drenched dudes, to make it through the narrow doorway on my way to the first washroom. No one was eaten, but toilets were full.

One feature of the sixties was the open possibilities for career and adventure by heading up north. Many got a start in their field by getting on a train or in the case of future dulcet-toned news anchor Peter Mansbridge, hopping a plane from down south in Thompson, Manitoba.

We hung out with Peter and on a bored whiteout afternoon, decided to prank him in his new CBC job. He was announcing all the whiteout cancellations, Girl Guides, Ladies Auxiliary and such. We called and gave the desk an important announcement: the Churchill Metaphysical Society would not be meeting that night. We just loved his great baritone broadcasting this fiction out into the town.

I loved that we may have contributed to the integration of the local bar. Three of us teachers got a gig playing Creedence songs (I played the notoriously difficult washtub bass). It took a while, but we soon noticed that the bar floor of this particular establishment had a small raised section in the centre of the room. It was apparent that the white folks sat up there and the indigenous folks sat down there, around the edges. It was called The Racetrack, and it was about race all right. So, we valiantly went on strike for a few nights, brought our indigenous friends into the centre island, and started a fuss that ended with the bar finally renovating both the segregated floor and hopefully some attitudes by the next summer.

A bad night was a midnight ride into Dene Village where ninety per cent of the folks were in serious social breakdown. The ruination of a people started thanks to a thoughtless government policy of picking them up off the land and relocating them into Churchill next to a graveyard. It was a tragedy of epic proportions. That one particular night, as I dropped off the babysitters, one of them yelled ‘hit it” and I hit the gas. Then I noticed a kid with a rifle drawing a bead on me. The whole area was a contemporary history lesson in how we messed up.

A favorite night in Churchill, that I got to share, on CBC radio, with Peter Gzowski, was the night my principal and I got picked up in a truck at midnight by the chairman of the school board. He was an employee of the Rocket Research Range. We ended up on a late-night heist, breaking in through a Rocket Range roof vent and liberating a truck full of shelving. We had enough to fill a small room with books for the school’s first ever library.

Halloween was unique. We needed a parent on every corner of the town. Polar bears again. Real scary stuff not pretend scary.

Christmas was a blessing. We could not afford to take the Muskeg Special back south for Christmas, so we were destined to spend Christmas in Churchill and it felt a bit bleak. Then one day a gentleman offered us his trapper’s cabin for the Christmas week. We were both a bit nervous and a bit thrilled with the phrase “trapper’s cabin on the tundra.”

The four of us hiked into the cabin as a whiteout blizzard threatened. The shack was indeed that, no fancy lake cottage this. Rough built, iron stove, metal bunks and years of tobacco smoke, wood smoke, bacon grease and high hopes staining the walls. We packed in some basic food but no big bird.

Christmas morning, there was a knock on the door. Three of my favorite students from Dene Village, Joe Thorassie and the Bussidore boys, Geoff and Ernie, stood there grinning with rifles in one hand and a brace of snow-white ptarmigans in the other. Our little kids were thrilled with Christmas dinner fresh off the land. I have never forgotten the kindness of those boys and their simple but profound Christmas gift to their teacher.

Those boys would soon lead their people back to the land where their parents and grandparents had been taken from. Ernie became an important leader there, until his passing in 2024.

Then there was the night of the leaving when so many of the kids invited us down to the shore of Hudson Bay for a huge fire and song. We watched the sun go down around one in the morning and come back up around 3:30 in the morning. A magic time.

The Churchill story has an interesting postscript.

We were indeed a pretty naïve bunch of teachers and the ending wasn’t pretty. We figured all we had to do to earn our pay was to turn kids onto learning. Like I said we were a pretty naïve bunch.

The kids were coming alive. The parents, priests and school board members, not so much. They were certain that their children were being abducted by atheistic, communistic, whole grain weirdos.

Well, actually. . .

It got pretty nasty near the end and nearly all the staff resigned except for me and a guitar playing science teacher. We were then summarily dismissed for the heinous crimes of dress and deportment. Pretty accurate actually. We looked a bit off.

Then a wonderful thing happened: the kids went on strike. Young people, none any older than fourteen, walked out of school, set themselves down in the town hall and faced the imposing school board directly.

The chairman of the school board squared off against his own son, one of the strike leaders. He was not particularly a man of progressive thought and compassion as he threatened his boy with “we will straighten this out at home.”

I have often wondered what happened to that boy.

It was indeed the sixties, where even young kids felt it was a time for great hope and important to stand up for something.

I never really kept up with any of those students, but my sense was that they would struggle with most conventional definitions of success.

Then came a note: in 2010, I was doing some citizen engagement work in the small town of Olds, Alberta. One of the highlights for me was the unique local high school. It had earned the designation of being named a UNESCO school, and that year was hosting an international conference with delegates from UNESCO schools around the globe.

I was impressed.

Then I got an email asking if I was the former teacher from Churchill. I said indeed I was.

It was from Bev Ginn, one of those impudent little strikers who was now a leadership force behind the UNESCO project.

We had a lovely reunion and she told me some stories.

Not one of those students from those times graduated, however many of them succeeded in real life. Some, like her, went back to school. Some became leaders in the community like the three Dene Christmas wise guys.

Bev told me that although our ragtag group of teachers was not traditionally successful, she believes we made a difference in the lives of one small batch of kids scrambling out a life on the shores of Hudson Bay.

Send me packing once again, Churchill, if that is what it takes to get another Bev.

1969 . . . you had to be there.

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If you have been enjoying my stories, I have a small favor to ask. Please share this story with one or more people who might know me, or who might just enjoy these stories. This would be a great Christmas present for me!

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See you January with the story of a derelict hotel and two new features.