Early Radicalization and Meeting Brewster

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It was the summer of ’65 when we came to Canada. We married in ’64, went to England, spent time in Europe and came back to run that Cuba student exchange out of the basement somewhere, an old Presbyterian church in Toronto, near the old mental health centre. It was an SCM project. The Cubans had a little problem getting here but that’s what got us back here.

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I don’t remember exactly who was at St. Calixte [for the Fall Training Institute – SUPA] . But around the time we started the Christian Left (we were so modest to call it!), there was some kind of western leftwing ferment that brought amazing people. It seemed everybody was either from Winnipeg or Ohio!! We were part of that.

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Joan Newman (Kuyek) blames me for getting her political. Which I think is really hilarious. But you see, I had gone to Edinburgh from Newfoundland, because my parents were terrified that I’d get married and settle down in Newfoundland, without having been anywhere else. And while there, one of the first things I did was I joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). So I wrote to my parents – that’s what one did in those days – and said, “I have joined the CND!” And they wrote back and said, “Well, about time!” “OK” But in the meantime, my father decided to give up his practice and they moved to Ottawa so I came back to finish my degree at Carleton. And of course the first thing I did was organize the CUCND [Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) at Carlton.

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Women Starting Saying “Enough”

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After having been to one meeting in the States, I got home and did a gender analysis, and realized that if had it happened in Canada, at least half, if not more, of the elders would have been women! Right? You know them all … Kay MacPherson, Muriel Duckworth, Ursella Franklin, I mean, I run out of names. And by the same token there would have been a lot more women involved at the student end of it as well. Now remember, this was when … what’s his name was saying that the role for women in the movement was prone … the black SNCC leader. So you know, it was really interesting, that in Canada if you look at who are the movers and shakers here, it was people like Linda Seese and Joan Kuyak, right. I never thought of myself as a leader. I saw myself as a person who ran the gestetner! But around that point in time, women were starting to say “enough”.

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There were all these mostly guys at these meetings, who would speak for a long time and dominate discussion and carry on these convoluted debates. The question was, how do you shut people up. And at some point what happened was the women just said “The hell with it. We’ll talk to each other”. And that was very radical because women were just assumed to not have a whole lot to say. At that point I was having babies. And getting involved in natural childbirth, from a feminist perspective as a point of power-shift, so that was ’67. Jamie came in ’66 and I think of the whole process that Bonnie and I went through. I remember we started a daycare centre on the 17th floor of Rochdale College which incidentally moved and eventually the day nurseries’ people said you can’t have it there! “The fire ladders don’t reach up that high. And you can’t take kids down the stairs.” It later moved into the Anglican Church down just behind Rochdale, right at the corner.

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Early LAWG Days and Working at LAWG

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We had a spare bedroom in our house on Belsize Drive, Toronto and so we set Judy Skinner up there. And then I got pregnant again and we realized that that wasn’t going to work. When we moved into a larger house and John Huot came and lived with us. That was later on. Before that I had been at that little tiny apartment on Millwood Road, and then we moved to Belsize Drive, a house, where Judy stayed in our upstairs bedroom.

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There were various, different threads and different people who linked, on the one hand, into the peace movement, and on the other hand, into the political ferment that was going on in Latin America, one way or the other, and that came together in the idea that, if we were going to do something … and I’m not even sure it was necessarily, … I don’t think the original idea was “let’s do something about foreign policy” Because we’d already been doing the community organizing, so “let’s do something that has to do with policy” and because of the experience that people had had, it sort of, because of the context where it seemed like such an easy sitting duck, that’s what we did!

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Then there was the meeting at Westport. I’ve got pictures. Bonnie and I were there with Chris and Jamie who had been born, I think they’d been born that summer. I think that was in the fall. I don’t think they were toddling yet.

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It’s interesting to think that, in fact, LAWG was basically a political project of a bunch of Christians, self-consciously. So no wonder, when I got there [LAWG] in ’86, the funding was coming from the nuns! That’s when I came back from the farm and Brewster needed to write, and so I had to find a way of making money and I heard somewhere that LAWG was looking for somebody to do fundraising and administration. I remember going to the interview – I think it was at Don Cockburn’s house because Nick’s bike was on the porch and it scared the living daylights out of me because I think the seat came up to my chin! Oh dear!

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I can’t remember how long I was with LAWG but I think it couldn’t have been more than two or three years. It became difficult because I didn’t speak Spanish. I hadn’t been to the region and so I was basically performing a support role, and although I think the collective was extremely generous in the way in which I was included, I started feeling not implicated in the way I wanted to be. And other opportunities were coming up because Brewster’s book, From hand to Mouth, was published in ’89. I worked on that at NC Press. I worked there for a couple of years and at the same time I was doing other work against violence against women, and then, it must have been 1990, I took the job of coordinator of the Assaulted Women’s Helpline and worked there almost five years.

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“Muchos Sombreros”

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The interesting thing about those earlier years was how we managed. There were no such things as laptops in those days. You think, “Well, how did we support ourselves?”  We didn’t need much. So much was by hook and by crook. We called ourselves “Muchos Sombreros” because every time there were meetings, LAWG people would show up with a different organizational hat on. We used to giggle and laugh about LAWG appearing to be a bigger organization than it really was with its “muchos sombreros!”

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What enabled us to come back from Nova Scotia was my parents dying and leaving us some money, so we could walk away from the farm with enough money to buy a house here, which didn’t cost what it would have cost today. And basically, you know, keeping ourselves in the rather modest manner to which we’ve become accustomed over the years. So I basically worked full-time for Food Secure Canada, pro-bono.

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Today’s Work Lacks a Theory of Change

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And I worry about the work now, as every mother does about their teenage children, when they’re off on their own and they’re not quite sure who they’re getting their money from and who they’re seeing on the side!! I worry because the sources of funds now are so compromised. It’s like the kind of thing we were talking about earlier, when we had friends in certain places and you could hive a little money off here and there. That’s not what’s happening now. There are some foundations and so on and we know people, but they have their own agendas, and a lot of the people who sit on their boards are dyed-in-the-steel-wool capitalist! And they have a very clear agenda. And we’re “interesting” but “If you’re not going to get engaged in the dominant system you aren’t going to make change.!” Well, that’s not our theory of change. I worry that the theory of change is getting warped!

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So I wonder, where are there parallels, in terms of where ARE there people who have pockets of money, or who have access to pockets of money, who might have a memory of being radical in their youth, and who might be getting upset about what’s going on because, you don’t have to be leftwing to see how serious the situation is. So much of what happens is very much funding-driven, and lacks a theory of change.

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Our theory of change? I vividly remember Pete Warrian sitting in my living room saying, “Ten years, tops! We’ll have a revolution in ten years, tops!” Looking back now at where things are in the States, one has to wonder about integration as a political goal. There doesn’t appear to have been a revolution in the process. It appears to have been an integration of a bunch of people, by no means all of them, so very class-wise, but a lot of people into the middle class who happen to be black. Well, whoop de do! I don’t know if SNCC had an anti-capitalist analysis. I don’t remember that. So in some sense I think SUPA had a more radical analysis than SDS or SNCC did, but of course being Canadians we never saw that! And there was always the romance and the glamour of the black movement, too. It was very glamorous. And the music. “We Shall Overcome” is still able to elicit tears when we sing it.

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Conjunctural Analysis, Hard Work and Solidarity

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One of the things that’s different now, is that I don’t hear anybody use the term “formation”, you know. I use “conjunctural analysis” but it’s almost funny. And yet, the discipline – a friend of ours grew up in the Communist Party – and what she misses about it, is the discipline. “You have to work! This stuff just isn’t fart’en around, guys! It’s hard work.” And we were never afraid of that and that was because we learned from the South. I see it today in MiningWatch, that same understanding. And we, in our cushioned little existences, then and now, had great difficulty connecting with it but that discourse was able to connect us and I think that’s the abiding legacy of LAWG more than anything else. So from that, anytime I would go to some meeting and they started talking about “solidarity” I knew exactly what they were talking about. “Oh yeah, yeah. Got it!”