Page 25 – Mechanical Sympathy

Riding In the Desert On an Iron Horse with No Name… for reals this time

I’ve been through the desert on a lousy rental car with no name,
now I’ll do it properly on two wheels!

I landed a free trip to Arizona a couple of years ago for an educational conference. I’d never been to the desert before, it was a great trip but the cunning plan to rent a bike fell apart when I discovered they don’t rent over the Easter weekend when I was flying in.

Ever since driving a lousy Nissan rental car through the Superstition Mountains, I’ve wanted to go back and do it properly on two wheels. My time has come!

We’re doing a family trip to Arizona over the Christmas break. Opportunity never knocks twice, except when it does, like this time.

Eaglerider’s selections look all of a kind,
a kind that doesn’t really grab me.

Eaglerider has a huge selection of bikes, but AZ Ride has exceptional customer ratings. I’ll end up looking into both and seeing which grabs me.

AZ has the Indian Scout, which tickles a fancy (riding in the desert with an Indian Scout, c’mon!), along with the ZG1400 Concours, which I’m curious about for obvious reasons.

Eaglerider has a lot of Harleys and a smattering of other very heavy offerings from other manufacturers. In other locations they offer Triumphs but not in Phoenix. Scraping floor boards doesn’t make me think of spirited riding, it makes me think of a poorly designed motorcycle. Lugging a massive hunk of iron that can’t corner around the desert doesn’t strike me as a good time.

Looking at what’s on offer, and taking into account the customer ratings on Google, I think I’ll be giving AZride a go. They’re both up the right end of Phoenix to get to easily, so location isn’t a factor. I’ll be aiming at a Concours if my son wants to come with or the Scout if I’m solo, then it’s off into the Superstition Mountains for a day… or is it?

309kms/192 miles, with that many bends should make for a good day of riding

The road to Roosevelt is something else. I skipped it in the Nissan rental car, but on two wheels it might be reason enough to live in Phoenix. It’s about 80kms of serious switchbacks through breathtaking high desert, except it’s a dirt road! All my day dreaming about riding switchbacks of smooth Arizona tarmac aren’t happening unless I go the long way around and stay on paved roads.

Once up on the plateau I’ll make a point of stopping at the Tonto National Monument, which is a magical place. The ride back down the other side offers a couple of nice stops, but also some tedium. If that road to Roosevelt is as magical as it looks, I might just come back that way.

How do you say no to a road like that? AZride has a BMW 800GS Adventure, but a ride like this would be the perfect time to try the new Triumph Tiger Explorer – alas, no one rents it. I’ve been eyeing the 800XCx as well as the new Explorer, but no one rents ’em. There is a Triumph dealer in Scottsdale. Think I could convince them to let me have a 300km test ride along that crazy road?

***

In a more perfect world I’d rent bikes I’m curious about owning. A short list would include:

The new Triumph Bonneville with the Scrambler package (favourite classic) – It’d also look awesome in the desert!

A Kawasaki Z1000 (favourite naked bike), though Kawi just came out with a Z800, which I’d also like to have a go on – but I’d be trapped on pavement.

The Kawasaki H2 (because it’s bonkers) – but not so good on a dirt road in the high desert…

The Ariel Ace (because it’s sooo pretty) – but I suspect it lacks off road chops.

I’m in a conundrum now. I really want to ride out of Apache Junction on the Apache Trail, but the bikes I want to ride are all pavement specialists while the adventure bikes I’d want to rent aren’t available to ride.

Meanwhile Triumph cruelly taunts me with their lovely new machines.

Damn it!

FOLLOW UP

Instead of turning left before Globe,
head on towards Show Low. The
roads be magic there!

All is not lost. If we’re on pavement for the ride there is a nice triangle that’ll make for a fine high-desert ride. The road north out of Globe into the higher mountains looks like a corker too. I don’t think I’ll be suffering too much if I can’t ride the Apache Trail. Either of those would be a blast on a big Connie.

Now to find a day when the weather is cooperating and see if I can make this happen.

Midnight Thoughts

What we have here is a Yamaha XS1100 ‘Midnight Special’. It looks like it needs some love and is for sale for $500 along with some extra parts. The flash from the phone makes this ’70s bike look pretty disco!

The XS1100 is a late ’70s/early ’80s ‘super’ bike. From what I’ve read it’s Yamaha’s Vincent Black Shadow. You’re spoiled for choice as far as customization goes with the XS1100. It’s a big, air cooled engine with the old fashioned dual rear shocks. It begs to be café racered a bit.

As a tear down/rebuild, this makes a pretty good basis for a winter project. It would be my first air cooled bike, as well as my first tear down/rebuild.

The Clymer manual is readily available (I’m finding Haynes manuals lacking in covering many motorcycles). This could be a winter sanity thing.

Recognizing Your Own Accomplishments

I’ve written a number of negative end-of-year reflections on this absurd year of teaching and not shared them because swimming in those waters is poisonous. I’m glad I was able to write and reflect them out of me though. They’re hanging in the blogger draft space and I might just let them loose one day in the future when the idiocy of this past year is a distant memory. I think it’s important to critically assess everything that went wrong in this human disaster in the hopes that it won’t happen again.

On Friday I attended a webinar put on by a group of professional creatives that focused on recognizing your own accomplishments. This group formed to look at ways of maintaining creative output for a living. This isn’t something most people have to worry about since their jobs are quite prescribed. For too many teachers their teaching is prescribed but I’ve never been a fan of that approach. For me teaching is a creative, never-rote activity and talking to professional musicians and visual artists helps me find the capacity to teach in the ever-evolving way that I want to.

I struggle with public acknowledgement of accomplishments. I don’t do what I do for accolades and I prefer to step out of the way and let students take the limelight. As long as I’m able to find the resources we need to be successful then I couldn’t care less about acknowledgement, except acknowledgement is frequently a mechanism that has brought us the resources we need to succeed so dismissing it out of hand isn’t sensible.

In listening to the artists in this webinar talk about their wins, I still struggled with the idea that this just sounds like tooting your own horn. Creative output, for me at least, always comes with a healthy dose of humility. Having crushed any rose-coloured glasses I’m able to get on with the difficult job of creation without any delusions, but this isn’t very marketable and marketing kept cropping up in discussion. Does creativity have to include suffering? Can you be clear eyed about your creativity or is being creative inherently delusional?

The other side to this harshness in terms of metacognitively accepting and being able to speak productively about accomplishments is that not being able to recognize your accomplishments can hurt you psychologically and ultimately make you uncreative and unproductive. If you fall into a depression over abuse or unfairness then you won’t be able to do what you do. Striking a balance with recognition of accomplishments is both a personal mental health and a being a functional creative issue.

From any rational point of view I should be viewing this past year as a towering success in my career. My students fought their way to two places in the national finals of the CyberTitan Canadian National Student Cybersecurity Competition and both overcame all sorts of adversity in order to produce our best results ever. Being top ten twice out of over 150 teams should be something we acknowledge positively.

Over in Skills Ontario we did backflips to keep student competitors engaged and although we had one competition drop out, the others performed exceptionally well. We’d only ever won medals in IT & Networking previously but we didn’t just keep our string of IT medals going for a fifth consecutive year, we also won our first provincial medals in electronics, coding and GIS as well. That too deserves positive reflection that encourages future attempts.

Meanwhile, from a classroom teaching perspective, we managed to retain very high engagement rates in this rudderless year of hybrid simultaneous face to face and remote or fully remote learning. Even in the final quadmester our fully-remote (again) and exhausted game-development students produced fantastic examples of what digitally fluent Ontario high school students are capable of. We also punched through to new heights in terms of student achievement while also saving those that were drowning in the sea of systemic failure. I couldn’t see that though because what we were doing was only ever a fraction of what we normally do in a school year.

As a teacher I suddenly found myself being put up for awards and winning them. NCWIT not only awarded two of our graduating women in technology their provincial award but also acknowledged me as a 2021 educator of the year for supporting girls in technology and engineering. Then my board gave me an Everyday Hero Award and OTIP let me know I was an honourable mention in their provincial teacher award. These are the hardest for me to talk about because my reflex is to step back and let students take the accolades, but the support of parents and students in writing those applications means the world to me so ignoring them is neither appropriate nor appreciative.

I’ve been unable to give these things the positive reflection they deserve because of the cruel year we’ve just been dragged through. Next year doesn’t look much better with the same sabotaging political mismanagement in an education system paralyzed by our own political failures, but if I let the good things fade into the malaise from all these elements beyond my control then I’m lost.

I’ve put down several extra jobs this summer in order to find my mojo again. I can’t go back into the classroom having lost all hope in the credibility of our education system. If I can get my feet under me again I can stand up and fight for what matters for another year.

When the education system fell apart around me and work became frustration piled on frustration I found a creative outlet to release myself through. Starting last fall I was up at 4am every morning when work anxiety wasn’t letting me sleep writing and I’m now 160,000+ words into a novel that I never thought I’d find the time to write.

I’m energized by teaching because it lets me pour my efforts into something that is difficult, important and credible, ideally while being surrounded by people doing the same meaningful work without pretense. With credibility circling the drain this year and pretense the new normal, I needed to do something real that wouldn’t take anything other than my best effort.

I prefer to put my energy into something I believe in and that appreciates and respects that commitment. When I couldn’t find that at school I did what I could to help and refocused my energy on this creative writing project that had no room for pretense. Should anyone ever read the book I think they will find the frustrations of the last year written into it large. France’s collapse in 1940 against the German Blitzkrieg has many parallels with Ontario’s approach to COVID19 in the past year.

Dusty World is going on hiatus for the summer and I’m going to focus on finishing the novel. Now that I’ve gotten this negativity out of me I don’t need to carry it any more and I’m putting down teaching at least until the ECOO Conference in August because even in a year when I’ve lost faith in education I still can’t help but go above and beyond and start my school year weeks early in hopes of making it better for everyone.

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Ergo-cycling: Concours 14 vs Tiger 955i for 6’3″ Me

Cycle-Ergo, the motorcycle ergonomics simulator, is a great online resource for getting a sense of what you’ll look like and how you’ll fit on a bike. Unlike cars, your options with bikes aren’t as easy as sliding your seat back or adjusting the steering wheel. To make ergonomic changes on a motorbike you need to change hardware and make physical changes to make it fit.

The other day I was out on my trusty 2003 Triumph Tiger 955i. I came off a Kawasaki Concours 10 to the Tiger and while the Connie was comfortable, it made my knees ache on long rides. The first time I sat on the Tiger it felt like a bike built by people the same shape and size as me because it is. I can go for hours without putting a foot down without a cramp on the Triumph. This got me thinking about the differences between the big Kawasaki that sits next to the Tiger in the garage these days.

Cycle-Ergo gives me a quick way to check out the differences. Forward lean is much more pronounced on the Concours 14 (12° vs an almost vertical 4° on the Tiger). Knee angle is the same and my knees aren’t bothering me on the Connie but hip angle is 6° tighter on the Kawasaki which explains the cramps I was feeling after today.

I sold a Honda Fireblade to bring the 1400GTR in and that bike had an extreme ‘sports’ riding position which was basically like doing a push-up on the bike (you lay on it) – it ain’t easy on the wrists. There are advantages to this aggressive riding position. When you want to get down to business in corners a forward lean gives you a more intimate relationship with the front end, which is why sports focused bikes tend to sit a rider the way they do. If I lived somewhere where roads were dancing with the landscape instead of cutting straight lines across it I’d have happily kept the Fireblade but in tedious Southwestern Ontario it didn’t make much sense.

Today I did a 200km loop on the Kawasaki and the constant lean does make it tiresome on the arrow straight roads around here (I have to ride 40 minutes to find 10 minutes of curves). In the twisties the Concours is much more composed that the tall, skinnier (and ADV) tired and leany Tiger. The Concours is a 50+ kg heavier bike but you can see in the animation that it holds its weight much lower than the Tiger. In the bends today the Connie was fine but the Ontario-tedium I have to deal with most of the time has me thinking about ways to ease that lean.

There are solutions to this in the form of ‘bar risers’ which are blocks of machined metal that you slip in under the handlebars to bring them taller and closer to you so you’re not stooped. For me the lean also means I’m putting a lot of weight on my, um, man-parts, which end up pressed up against the tank in the lean.

I had a look around at bar-risers. There are number of people who put them together including some cheaper Chinese options but I ended up going with Murph’s Kits C14 bar risers. Murph is well known in the Concours Owners Group and has been producing Concours specific parts for decades. His risers aren’t quite as tall as some of the others and look to solve the problem without over-solving it by giving too-tall handlebars that spoil the lines and the purpose of the bike.

The biggest ergo-thing I did on the Tiger was getting a Corbin seat for it which makes it a long distance weapon. I’ll eventually do the same thing for the Connie but I think I can make do with the stock seat this year and then do the Corbin over the winter. That doesn’t stop me from mucking around with the Corbin seat simulator though:

By next spring I’ll have a C14 that fits, but it isn’t as easy as sliding the seat back in a car. In the meantime we’ve got the Lobo Loco Comical Rally coming up at the end of the month. That requires a minimum of 400kms travelled in 12 hours and will need more than that if we’re going to be competitive. I’m hoping my bar risers will be installed and I’ll bring the good ole Airhawk out of semi-retirement to keep me limber over a long day in the saddle.

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Parts on Order Makes me Stop & Consider

Over the Easter long weekend I’ve rebuilt four carbs and put them back together again. Unfortunately they won’t go back on nicely thanks to two decade old rubber boots, so they’re on order. It’s nice to have a forced day off.

If you’re ever rebuilding carbs on a ZG1000, and the airbox on it is more than ten years old, it’s a good idea to get some airbox ducts (that connect the airbox to the carbs). Supple, soft rubber is important when connecting these up. I tried for a frustrating couple of hours to get them to join properly. This is especially difficult when the inner boots are rock hard, even when warmed up. Steve suggests new carb boots to cut down on swearing, he ain’t kidding:

Sixty bucks and should be here by
Wednesday.

I contacted my local dealer and they can have boots here by Wednesday. They’re charging less than they are going for on ebay or online retailers. Score one for my local. Sixty bucks means less swearing and an easy install. Wayne, the Yoda-like parts guy at Two Wheel, says you’re lucky to get two decades out of a set as they harden over time and eventually split.

With the weather going sideways again, there won’t be much of a chance to ride any time soon. Hopefully this means I can get this odyssey finished and the bike back on the road by the time the weather clears again.

The airbox ducts/boots that need replacing – the old ones are not only beaten up, but they’ve gone hard.
Even putting heat on them doesn’t soften them up. Note the flat spots up by the airbox that show you which
way to turn the boots.

Heating up the airbox boots – but they’re too old!

A big empty where the airbox and carbs usually go

This ordeal has me rethinking things. My wife suggested I unload everything except the old XS1100 and buy a regular motorbike that is more dependable. When I started riding I got a dependable bike that just needed some cosmetic work. It was so dependable it was tedious. Since then I’ve gone back in time and enjoyed the world of carburetion and two decade old rubber, perhaps a bit more than I wanted to.

I genuinely enjoy mechanics, but never when there is a time demand on it. I’ve already missed three riding opportunities because of the stuttering Concours, and this irks me. The idea of wiping the slate clean and moving forward appeals. I started riding late and moving through a number of bikes seems like a way to catch up on my lack of experience. Maybe it is time to put sentiment down and move on. I didn’t start riding to watch the few lovely days we have in a too-short riding season pass me by.

A Tiger? In my garage?

The little Yamaha and the KLX are gone now, netting me about $3000. As it happens, a 2003 Triumph Tiger is available just over an hour away for about that much. Come the end of the week I might be able to say, “a tiger? In my garage? Must have escaped from a zoo!”

Lobo Loco Comical Rally: July 2021

It doesn’t matter where you live, this one is a start anywhere, finish anywhere timed rally on Friday, July 23, Saturday, July 24th or Sunday, July 25th. You need to cover at minimum of 400kms to be considered a finisher but otherwise it’s an open event.

https://wolfe35.wixsite.com/lobolocorallies/blank

Comical Mini Rally

Motorcycle Scavenger Hunt

Friday, July 23rd to Sunday, July 25th, 2021

(Any 12 hour period)

Our Mini Rallies give riders the chance to get involved in Scavenger Hunt events without having to travel to the start lines. You can start these ANYWHERE; we’ve had riders from all over the world do them each time! You can also choose when to start your 12 hour ride clock, so you can adjust the event around your own work schedule and the local weather.

This event will have you looking for the Super Hero themed locations…

along with other Villainous twists & turns that Lobo Loco Rallies likes to throw your way!

12 Hour Rally – Starts ANYWHERE

Note: You will need to ride a minimum of 400km

in order to be considered a Finisher.

Only $30 per bike!

Here’s the Facebook page: https://fb.me/e/1a7Io8CY6

If you’re looking for a reason to put some miles on your bike and see places you wouldn’t usually go during a strange summer where the rules of travel aren’t very clear, do this! You’ve still got a week to sign up.

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Overlanding

I came across Overland Journal in Indigo that other day and the combination of reasonable price ($12CAD) and very high quality (it compared favourably with magazine-book combos asking $25+) had me picking it up. It isn’t motorcycle specific but does include off road and adventure bikes along with pretty much any vehicle you might go off the beaten path with.

I usually do that kind of off-roading with completely inappropriate vehicles. In the early noughties my wife and I beat a rented Toyota Camry to within an inch of its life on the the logging roads in the interior of Vancouver Island. Another time we were in a rented Citroen mini-van in Iceland watching arctic foxes run across the empty landscape. In both cases we got deep into the wilderness in rental 2wd vehicles, but then we got a Jeep Wrangler as a rental car last year and it started giving me ideas.

I put myself through university working as a service manager for Quaker State’s Q-Lube and whenever a Jeep came in you needed an umbrella when you walked under it for all the fluids leaking down on you. That negative experience put me off the brand for years but last year we got a Wrangler as an insurance rental after and accident and it changed my perception.

It was a 2019 Jeep Wrangler four dour with about 20k kilometres on the clock and it was tight! Everything worked and felt quality and it did something that no car has done for me in the past decade; it felt like an event driving it.

Since bikes set in I’ve fallen out of love with cars (trucks, whatever), but the Jeep made driving feel special again. Performance cars seem kind of pointless when I have two bikes in the garage that are faster than anything but apex million-dollar plus super-cars, but the Jeep came at it from another angle. The big tires made it a challenge to manage on pavement and the big V6 in this one was a stark contrast to the sub-two-litre mileage focused appliances I’ve been driving but maybe that’s what made it feel special.

There was a point where we could have taken the other car (a Mazda2) down to Toronto but took the Jeep instead and it made the whole experience less like a long, difficult winter drive and more like an event. Being higher up off the road meant I wasn’t looking through other people’s road spray all the time and if I wasn’t heavy on the gas the thing was getting mid-high-twenties mpg.

Another time we were out in it and my brother-in-law (a former Jeep owner) and our sons went out for a ride and I shifted it into 4wd and drove right over the snow mound in the Canadian Tire parking lot, much to everyone in the car’s amazement. This was a ten-foot plus high mound of snow and the Jeep went right over it – with road tires on! Deeply impressed with the vehicle’s capabilities and character is where I was when we handed it back after our car got returned.

I also used it to take a thousand plus pound of ewaste to recycling from work and the heavy duty suspension and utility of the thing made this an easy job when the little hatchback would have been blowing shocks and wallowing under the weight. Having a vehicle that takes on larger utility tasks makes sense when you do a lot of it.

I’m getting to the age now where things seem strangely expensive. My first car cost me $400 and took me a hundred thousand kilometres. A Honda Civic hatchback I had in the early noughties took me over a quarter of a million kilometres for less than seven grand. The only new car I’ve ever purchased (that Mazda2 that has been flawless for over 120k over ten years of ownership) cost me $17k new, all in. My wife’s Buick Encore cost an eye-watering forty-grand back in 2016 new and I’m not interested in double car payments so won’t be looking until we finally pay that one off (which seems like it’s taking forever with our strange new world of 7-9 year finance schemes). When that debt finally gets cleared I’ll be looking at a Jeep Wrangler.

From an ‘overlander’ point of view, a dependable long distance vehicle capable of going off the beaten path means my wife and I can do what we’ve always done, but more so. In the pre-covid times we drove from Ontario to the West Coast in 2018:

In 2019 we took the same tiny Buick Encore to the East Coast of Canada, but the vehicle we drove limited our ability to go off the beaten path (or even off pavement). What a Jeep would do is enable us to do the things we defer to (in rental cars) in something designed for that kind of nonsense.

This has me encouraging my lovely wife to join us at SMART Adventures this year to learn some off road driving in a side-by-side while we dirt bike. Which brings the overlanding vehicle back to bikes again. You can go deep in a Jeep but you can get places on a dirt bike that you can’t in any other way. The Jeep would be a fantastic platform for all manner of biking shenanigans.

Whether it’s taking a dirt bike to a trail or a trials bike to an event, the Jeep would be capable of doing it efficiently. With some canny rear mounted racks it wouldn’t even require a trailer.

The cost-no-object green option would be to pick up a KTM Freeride and an Jeep Wrangler 4xe and then work out how to charge the bike from the hybrid Jeep’s electrical system.

Overland Journal has a lot of advertisers who specialize in making vehicles long distance ready, including many that specialize in prepping Jeeps for the long haul. A Wrangler 4xe with a roof mounted camping option, KTM on the back and the ability to go self-contained into the wilderness for days at a time would make for a thrilling combination.

KTM’s Freeride electric off roader gives you 90 minutes of charge, weighs less than 250lbs and (with the battery pack removed) would be barely noticeable on the back of the Jeep. With some canny wiring the bike could charge while on the hybrid Jeep.

The Jeep Wrangler 4xe is the most powerful Wrangler yet, has astonishing mileage and would also offer some interesting electrical generation options when off the beaten track.

The bike and the fanciest Wrangler would cost less than a base model BMW mid-sized SUV, so it isn’t even crazy expensive (well it is, but that’s just because I’m old – everything’s expensive!).

KTM and Jeep should join up on this. Two legendary off-road manufacturers combining to create a futuristic zero emissions expedition!

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Overlanding

Whether it’s taking a dirt bike to a trail or a trials bike to an event, the Jeep would be capable of doing it efficiently. With some canny rear mounted racks it wouldn’t even require a trailer.

The cost-no-object green option would be to pick up a KTM Freeride and an Jeep Wrangler 4xe and then work out how to charge the bike from the hybrid Jeep’s electrical system.

The Jeep Wrangler 4xe is the most powerful Wrangler yet, has astonishing mileage and would also offer some interesting electrical generation options when off the beaten track.

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To The End of the Road North in Ontario & Quebec

Ontario has hundreds of miles of ocean coast line but being Ontario there is no way to ride there. Quebec hasn’t been so lackadaisical in connecting its northern communities by road. If I cut out of Ontario just east of New Liskeard I could then make use of Quebec’s better northern infrastructure and actually ride to the coast of James Bay almost to the point where it opens out into Hudson’s Bay:

I’m not the first one on an adventure bike to want to ride to the end of the road north in Eastern Canada:

…though apparently only (new) BMW riders make the trek. Bet my old Tiger could do it.

It’s remote but the vast majority of the 1600+ kms north are on paved roads. North of Hotel Matagami (just over half way up) services get thin. It looks like there are road side truck-stop type accommodations on the James Bay Road but most of what’s on offer is camp grounds and sparsely spaced gas stations. Sounds like a perfect adventure bike thing to do!

Lots of good advice for riding motorbikes in the remote north around James Bay can be found on the James Bay Road website. The challenge here isn’t twisty roads and nights in the bar, it’s the extreme isolation of the far north. You need to be able to keep your machine moving or it will end expensively, or worse. Getting a tow out would cost thousands. Worst case would be getting stuck without any means of getting out, then it could quickly get dangerous.

For people who have only ever travelled between other people this’ll be hard to wrap their heads around. On a ride like this you’d find yourself hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest people and even further away from infrastructure that could help you. Self-sufficiency would be central to a successful run up to James Bay.

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Hiding History Behind Politics

History isn’t just an informational subject, it’s also very much about critical media literacy. Trying to get a clear view of history through what’s left to us is nearly impossible because human beings will immediately want to spin it for their own benefit. These prejudices come from the people at the time, the people who decided what survives and the people in charge now. This propagandist approach has a great deal of power when applied to the study of national history because it produces dangerous byproducts, like patriotism based on national myths that systemically exclude whole swaths of our society.

This is the cover of Flashback Canada, the history book they handed me to teach a grade 8 class during my teaching practicum in Peel in 2003. I wasn’t a Canadian citizen when this piece of propaganda was handed to me and I was told, as an agent of the system, to indoctrinate the class (most of whom were also new Canadians) with this violently untrue rendition of Canadian Federation.

I can’t find the full illustration from inside the book (it’s a two page spread!) but I recall it had indigenous groups in traditional garb, unaccompanied women and many BIPOC characters fictionally back-written into the narrative of a multi-cultural Canadian history that never happened. Teaching this “we’ve always been multi-cultural” myth of Canada made me very uncomfortable so instead of teaching the text I found some other historical images of Confederation done close to the time and then the students and I looked at the differences between the textbook’s rendition and other historical documents. As you might have guessed, Canadian Confederation in 1867 was a lot of white dudes (because they were the only people considered as people under the law – no one else could vote or politically mattered):

How did this play with a lively, very multi-cultural class of grade 8s in 2003? Code-switching wasn’t a common term back then but many of the BIPOC students talked about how stuff like this makes them doubt their own experiences with racism in Canada. This made my older, white Canadian supervising teacher uncomfortable. These days I’m sure she would be on board with the current ‘woke’ white settler types who want to make make a lot of noise in this moment that will quickly fade to leave us with our lousy status quo again. Dwelling in the discomfort by prompting discussion and then making systemic change as a result is a way to move beyond our reflexive need to retain a status quo built on lies.

I’ve talked about historical prejudice before on Dusty World but the events currently happening in Canada are bubbling it all to the surface again, though I don’t understand why anyone is so surprised by them. These children disappeared in plain sight and reports of the nastiness of religious residential schools aren’t new. Choosing to be surprised by them now feels like political spin. Part of that latest push is to cancel Canada Day but this politically divisive move only shames anyone who disagrees while amplifying the voices of those who want to leverage this disaster for their own political ends.

I’ve heard (smart, historically aware) people advocate for cancelling Canada Day because aboriginal families are mourning the recent discovery of thousands of children’s graves from the Canadian religious residential school genocide, but the only people reeling from this ‘discovery’ are politicized left-wing Canadians who have now decided to (loudly) acknowledge this hiding-in-plain-sight colonial history. I doubt native families are ‘stunned’ by these ‘findings’ as they’ve been living them for generations. This ‘white surprise’ must seem disingenuous.

I’m left wondering if children’s history text books are still as multi-culturally white-washed as that one I was handed in 2003. My approach to that lesson caused friction with my (white, established-settler Canadian) teacher-mentor. Teaching rote curriculum out of prejudiced texts works much like taking down statues and cancelling holidays: it’s an effective way to revise historical fact to suit the current political narrative which is itself a nasty piece of work.

In the next two centuries the selfish decisions made by current generations around rampant overpopulation, wasteful consumption of resources and pollution of our limited ecosystem will make any previous genocides look tame, yet we’re quick to burn anything historical that doesn’t meet our myopic ethics. That well-travelled, carbon spewing first-worlders who hop into their 4×4 SUVs wearing sweatshop made clothing are so loudly self righteous is another example of temporal prejudice, but then you don’t see a lot of humility or self-awareness in history.

It’s easy to criticize previous generations without making any attempt to contextualize their decisions in the time that they were made. This temporal prejudice is every bit as corrosive as racial or gender prejudice. Mass consumers waving social justice flags while making decisions that will kill billions in the future are just as blind to their own contextual short-comings. Wouldn’t it be something if everyone tried to overcome the pomp and circumstance of history with humility, honesty and fairness?

Cancelling holidays that are guaranteed for you but not for others at the rough end of the socio-economic spectrum reeks of privilege, while taking down statues and renaming things is more about rewriting history to make it less uncomfortable than it is about making any genuine systemic change. What we should be doing is legally deconstructing confederation and taking the colonial prejudices out of Canada’s political structure. First past the post British electoral systems prop up old prejudices and should be dismantled but won’t because party ‘representatives’ that could make the changes won’t because the status quo is what handed them power.

The nastiness of Canadian colonial history isn’t easy to stomach but throwing a cancellation blanket over it isn’t going to solve anything; we need to dwell in this discomfort if it’s ever to prompt real systemic change. Politically driven divisive ideas like cancelling national holidays and renaming everything to make it less offensive is more likely to support the status quo than change it. We’ll never overcome historically prejudiced propaganda by spinning more of it. Real change has to happen at the legal level or we’ll just keep spinning lies to maintain this poisonous politically charged status quo.

RESOURCES

https://blogs.umass.edu/linguist/secret-path-residential-schools-reconciliation/

“Come learn about indigenous people’s history that you probably weren’t taught in school…”

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/first-nations-right-to-vote-granted-50-years-ago-1.899354

First nations Canadians didn’t get the vote until 1960! Canada’s concept of representative democracy has always been flawed and yet it’s treated as sacred – which is how you ensure that status quo continues. These days the old white guys in charge casually dismiss the Charter of Rights whenever it suits them.

https://www.cbc.ca/kidscbc2/the-feed/why-it-took-so-long-for-women-to-get-to-vote-in-canada

“…in September 1917, the Wartime Elections Act was passed in Canada. It granted the vote to women in the military and women who had male relatives fighting in World War I, but it also stripped away voting rights from many Canadians who immigrated from ‘enemy’ countries.”

https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/chinese-canadians-get-the-vote-in-1947

Asian Canadians didn’t get to vote in Canada until after WW2!

https://humanrights.ca/story/the-chaotic-story-of-the-right-to-vote-in-canada

“The story of the right to vote in Canada is the story of a centuries‐long struggle to extend democratic rights to all citizens. It’s a chaotic tale that includes rebellions and riots, as well as protests, and visits to the Supreme Court of Canada.”

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/confederation

“Indigenous peoples were not invited to or represented at the Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences. This despite the fact they had established what they believed to be bilateral (nation-to-nation) relationships and commitments with the Crown through historic treaties. (See also: Treaties with Indigenous Peoples in Canada; Royal Proclamation of 1763.) The Fathers of Confederation, however, held dismissive, paternalistic views of Indigenous peoples. As a result, Canada’s first peoples were excluded from formal discussions about unifying the country.”

You won’t find anyone on the Canadian Encyclopedia page who isn’t an old white dude because they are the ones that confederated Canada, specifically while denying anyone who wasn’t from their background any participation. Re-writing history to ignore what actually happened isn’t a great way of learning from those mistakes.

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Comical Mini Rally

Motorcycle Scavenger Hunt

Friday, July 23rd to Sunday, July 25th, 2021

(Any 12 hour period)

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RESOURCES