Pop 89: Lasting Influences

By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com

I write this after wishing my pal Avril a happy birthday. I’m at my desk overlooking a storm coming up from Montana. She’s on a movie set in Toronto. Her birthday gives me pause to reflect on how long we’ve known each other and how we met. We worked at the University of Victoria cinema, selling tickets, then running to the door to take them, then slipping into the dark theatre to sink into the foreign and second-run films of the day. We parted ways for a while - she moved East, and I moved all over the country. But we both carried with us a love of story and language, character and plot. And while she worked her way up in the film industry, I worked my out, writing and performing stories based on characters in history, mythology, and literature.

More than forty years later and Avril’s part of a team that won an Oscar for set design, and I’ve won a few little awards for writing and am working on a novel, this one based on, what I now realize, is the greatest character in every Canadian story: The Land.

Not everyone in this country is aware of the influence of land in our lives, but there are two groups who never, ever forgot. Ironically, they are often pitted against each other, despite their deep and ineffable spiritual understanding of the Earth beneath their feet: Indigenous and farmers and ranchers.  

I’m not here to write about the reasons for well-founded mistrust or greedy agri-business. We all know the land was “ceded” by the tribes who never had a word for “cede” or “own” or “property” to begin with. They assumed what was happening was an agreement to “share” what could never be “owned.” The Cree writer, lawyer and trapper Harold Johnson said it best when he wrote in his last book, “The Power of Story”: “I do not say the land belongs to us because to do so would be to buy into the fiction of property. I belong to the land. I am the land. I am this place.”

“New and Naked Land” by Ronald Rees, an immigrant to Saskatchewan in the ‘60s, wrote eloquently of land. In his book about the meaning of “home,” he reminds us that the word “nostalgia” comes from the Greek “nostos,” meaning “to return,” and “algos,” meaning “to suffer.” He believed it is possible that “people absorb topographical influences from the moment of birth and that separation from them could be perilous.” I wager there is not an Indigenous person nor a rancher or farmer who would disagree with this statement, even if they might not phrase it as Rees did.

In my business, it’s essential that I consider what phrases I use to describe feelings. Repeated phrases wear grooves, leave lasting impressions. Negative thoughts and expressions nudge me into making snap judgements and thoughtless assumptions and even heartlessly dismissing the concerns of others.

One of the biggest indicators of influence lies in the words we use. Often we inherit our parent’s fears and prejudices, but those inheritances can go back generations, and the only evidence we have is the language we use. “The unspoken experiences that live in us appear in our quirky language,” writes Mark Wolynn, author of “It Didn’t Start With You.” Wolynn looks at the links between language and emotions stored in the body. “Ask yourself what words you use over and over when you’re in an emotional state,” he says, and you’ve hit on your “core language.” Like it or not, it influences your behaviour. He gives an example of a young patient who said she wanted to “vaporize” to disappear from the world. On her worst days, she replaced “vaporize” with “incinerate.” Eventually, she revealed to Wolynn that both her grandparents’ families died at Auschwitz. She had inherited a language of trauma from her ancestors and made it her own.

I reread Wolynn’s book a couple of times in an effort to understand the degree to which so many of our biases started on some far branch of the family tree. I started paying attention to the earworms making the most noise in my head, and they all smacked of distrust, suspicion and defiance. I realized that I regularly flip the mental bird at most “experts” and “influencers” with internalized phrases like: “don’t tell me how to live my life” and “that’s ridiculous.” Thankfully, words of wonder and infinite possibility are starting to take up more space in my brain. Now I also think: “I never thought of it like that,” or “How did you come to that conclusion?” Or “Food for thought.”

I am a product of my family and my “core language.” But I am also a product of the times. We all absorb whatever is happening not only in our homes but in our community, our world, our generation. Without realizing it, especially as newborns, we are influenced and, to an extent, formed, yes, by the worries and beliefs of our parents, but also by our surrounding culture. Which is why I like to research significant events in a single life alongside those happening in the world at the time.

And so, at the risk of revealing my pal’s age, here’s some of what was shaking and shaping the and influencing the world the year she was born: The Russians launched the first spacecraft to leave the Earth’s orbit. Swiss men voted against voting rights for women. Sleeping Beauty was released. Jimi Hendrix got kicked off the stage for playing too wild. Barbie doll made her debut. Dalai Lama fled China. Montreal won the Stanley Cup for the fourth time. Mary Leaky discovered a very old human skull. And, of course, many Canadian homes learned about all of these things through the addition of television in our homes.

Words, stories, the land - they influence us, body and soul. Some we lose, others will last.