Winnipeg, the Forks - 1872

Great Canadian Insight

Fork U at the Forks: Just like its Métis people, Canada has treated its poverty-bedeviled Indian people badly - even the UN says so - being most generous with naming places after them, like the Assiniboine River below right, but spending its big bucks elsewhere to promote more important and more politically powerful groups. In Canada, poor Aboriginal people, just are not kosher...

"Where is my museum?" asks Salteaux Chief Peguis, left and below, who for the first half of the nineteenth century promoted peaceful existence with the Hudson's Bay Company and the many white peoples who followed it into his tribe's territories. The answer - "Fork U, Chief!"

Below, the blue dot is the vantage point for all the scenes painted above.

The Location of Fork U - Chief Peguis' original tribal area is called The Forks because of the junction of the Assiniboine River with the mighty Red River, flowing in on the left from the US. Chief Peguis ceded land here to the original Selkirk settlers, among others, and till he died in 1864, was a tireless crusader for Indian rights against ruthless newcomers who sought to take advantage of his people all along the Red River Valley to Lake Winnipeg.

The promontory on the right, which was railway property for decades, is now, the prime real estate area in Winnipeg and is being redeveloped as the main tourist destination for the city.

Unfortunately, there is little there to see, beyond a huge Antique Mall which - surprise - has no antiques at all, because Winnipeg has no history of people with a salable material culture going back far enough...

But not for long.

Izzy Asper's daughter - Izzy was a member of one of the many immigrant groups who came into Winnipeg and made good as a newspaper magnate - has asked the Federal Government to give her 100 million plus to build the Izzy Asper Memorial Centre - which wags have dubbed it - on the site. It will probably feature a huge statue of Izzy in the foyer, arms extended - Pope like - to welcome the local Indian and Métis children to the Asper museum, that will feature historical truths sifted through his values, and the trials and tribulations of his family and his people, not theirs... (The Asper family will contribute to the memorial, as is to be expected, and other fellow tribesmen, like the Pollards and Tallmans - not to mention Stern, Silver, Goodman, Dorfman, Shankarow - are also donating to what they all obviously regard as a great heritage promotion opportunity for their people.)

Befuddled Aboriginals, once again, will probably wonder - where did we miss out when the moolah was handed out? Why didn't our community leaders get a gazzilion dollar museum to publicize our past and our cultural heroes? After all, weren't Chief Peguis and Louis Riel historic founders of the province of Manitoba; and wasn't Izzy only a new kid on the block, a paper boy who made good on his route? And alienated many an ethnic group - not to mention most Canadian journalists - with his celebrated - and widely publicized - ham-fisted editorial cleansing out of staff, from among his 200 publications, of writers who dared to stray from the strongly ethnocentric party line he enforced on his newspapers.

Enthused Larry Zolf (2003), "Asper was above anything else an unabashed Zionist and a proud Jew. He felt that Trudeau wasn't supportive enough of Israel and said so loud and clear. Today Izzy's National Post is the most strident pro-Israel newspaper in the country; Izzy's newspapers are careful not to tread on his toes on the subject of Israel... I miss him already..." Indeed, Izzy's primary passion made thousands of Canadian journalists who wanted to eat, or feed their families, walk in fear...

UPDATE In 2007 the new Conservative Government - a minority government desperately looking for rich friends in all the right places - gave Gail Asper the 100,000,000 dollars she had asked for, from the public purse. Then she asked for more. And got that as well, an additional $22,000,000 per year operating costs, from now till eternity. Her father would be pleased with the chutzpah of his daughter at her unprecedented achievement. In grateful thanks, to the taxpayers of Canada, who have funded her private dream in her father's memory, Gail has promised that the Board of Directors would not be disproportionately Jewish, as some have already projected, but be strictly representative of all ethnic groups of Canada, in direct proportion to their numbers in the population of the country as a whole. In 2008, Gail Asper's supporters managed to finagle her the Order of Canada, based on her public spirited campaign to build a memorial museum to her father, financed mostly from the public purse. Now that's chutzpah... all around. Sources say Gail Asper will shortly announce a competition for a huge bronze statue of her father to grace the entrance way to the Izzy Asper Museum. "After all," she is reported to have said, "it's only fitting. I did all this for him, and his unique view of what Canada should be about." See possible mock-up top.

Sorry Larry, but if the Halifax Explosion was the loudest in Canadian history then the biggest noise never heard in Canada was the thunderous silence in newspaper columns across the country when Izzy, one of Canada's top newspaper men, died, literally unsung; no journalist, on newspapers he didn't own, could bring him/herself to pen an obit to mourn his passing - with the sole exception of close personal friends and fellow tribesmen Larry Zolf and Edward Greenspon - probably because they could not in honesty, say stuff where the good outnumbered the bad which he could be said to have contributed to their craft, or the tone of civility in the country.

Could that also explain, why, while lots of fellow Jews have been announced as lead contributors to Izzy's daughter's campaign to pay for his memorial museum, no parallel rush in funding donations has been forthcoming from Canadian entrepreneurs of Indian, Métis, Inuit, Black, Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim backgrounds?

In fact, there were far, far more, laudatory and regretting columns lamenting the "passing" of John Honderich, when he was forced out as the Publisher of the Toronto Star the same year Izzy died. The thousands of Canadian journalists are well aware - they certainly write like it - that in a country where there are only two or three media companies - make that three guys who hire, and shrinking - that you can possibly find employment with, discretion is the better part of valour.

So it was really left up to Izzy's daughter and her family and friends, to resurrect him to the mythic stature he once held in his own mind and in their home. Now, if only they could figure out an angle to tap the public purse to pay for a hometown museum for this good ole boy...)

Watching it all, with practiced eye, Canada's Indians and Métis - extremely musical people - resign themselves, one again, to playing their traditional roles in Canadian society - second fiddle...

But then, hey, they're used to it; they've all been to Fork U, many times before...