Looking for a Canadian Symbol - Episode 62

On Canada Day, Susanne thinks she should make a bucket list to see all of the stereotypical symbols that are used to represent Canada in all kinds of artwork. She realizes many that she had not seen are from the far north of Canada.  

Luckily, she remembers that there is an out-of-place northern land marker not too far from her home in southwestern Ontario.  She and Manfred start out on a quest to find the roadside attraction.

As you can imagine, the journey is a winding one. Listen in, to find out what has happened to make this Canadian symbol a reality.

If you would like to receive my weekly Saturday morning email that contains my original stories, Canadian book recommendation, new barn quilt design and a recipe or cycling route (depending on the season), sign up here. 

Follow me on Facebook and Instagram

My website to join in our barn quilt painting experiences is www.crazy8barn.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to the Happy2Be Canadian podcast. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins, a writer who lives in rural southwestern Ontario, Canada. Each week I share an original, very short story that will have you laughing and reflecting on the simple moments of our lives. Now, on to today's episode.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

Happy to be Canadian, episode 62, Looking for a Canadian Symbol. This week I was listening to CBC Radio while driving in my car. They were interviewing a woman from Sault Ste. Marie who had been recognized for creating an award-winning fabric quilt in a competition called What Canada Means To Me. As an avid quilter, she wanted to enter the contest and asked her son in law, who had become a Canadian citizen what this country meant to him. He said it was the oath that he had to swear at his recent citizenship ceremony. The quilter eventually embroidered the words of that oath around the border of the project. But she wanted more, something visual. Her daughter found a drawing of a maple leaf that incorporated many of the stereotypical items the Canadians in all or just specific areas of the country would recognize as our in common talisman. I'm sure you can picture many of the symbols chosen to represent our country. I started to think about many of these items I had seen in real life. Many were things that we see often, depending on the season, like a toque, curling rock, ice skates, or snowshoes, maple syrup, donuts, poutine, and coffee, and Canadian geese and oil rigs, and canoes and a paddle. Others I have come across less often, like the CN Tower, a lighthouse, or moose mounties and mountains. Some I have only witnessed as fake renditions, like the six-inch tall black plastic totem pole that, as a kid, I bought as a souvenir somewhere. While I have never seen a real majestic totem pole, I treasured that cheap reproduction. During my teen years, I kept it in the top left drawer of my white French provincial dresser, occasionally running my fingers over the etchings and crevices that have been lined with white paint, likely somewhere in China. Then there are the Canadian symbols, mostly from the north, that I haven't seen yet. Polar bears, narwhal, dog sleds, and an Anookshuk. I thought it might be a good idea to make a bucket list to see them all. The next day was Canada Day. This year it was a midweek holiday that will cause us to mix up our days for a bit. An early summer heat wave was melting our enthusiasm for an outdoor activity. Let's go to my mom's and then go find the nookshook in Dunwich, I suggested to Manfred. While he's always ready for a quest, he looked quizzical. It's the monument to John Kenneth Galbreth, and I've never seen it, I explained. That's not surprising. It's not your average roadside attraction in southwestern Ontario. It is located on Thompson Line, a gravel road that runs from eastern Chatham Kent border through the municipalities of West Elgin and Dunwood to the village of Iona Station, so named because the railroad cut through the countryside north of the village of Iona. Maybe it was the trains heading other places that led Galbreth to believe that there was something more when he left the family farm in the late 1920s to attend the Ontario Agriculture College in Guelph, that at the time was under the wing of the University of Toronto. While today's college looks much different than one Galbraith attended, the main Morton Lodge having been demolished and replaced by the grandiose Johnson Tower just after his graduating year of 1931. Even today, Galbreth is listed on the University of Guelph's webpage among poets, actors, and businessmen as noteworthy alumni. Traveling down that gravel road on Canada Day, you could see why Galbreth might want to steady ways to make agriculture more profitable. This year a wet spring led to a late planting for many of the clay fields. Corn, which in other loamier fields is well past the knee high by the first of July height, is struggling at less than six inches high. The ground is that pinkish brown cement color of rock hard clay. You can only imagine how the farmers suffered in this difficult land when there was less technology and horsepower and fewer opportunities. The son of a father who was a farmer and a school teacher, Galbreth lost his mother, a homemaker and community activist when he was 14. After graduation in Guelph, Gilbreth received a scholarship of $60 a month that allowed him to further his studies in Berkeley, California. At that time, in the midst of the depression, when men were making an average of seventy seven dollars per month, Gilbreth, with the frugality he had learned on a Dunwich Clay farm, managed all right. After university, he never again lived at the Dunwich Farm. He traveled in the rarefied circles of Harvard University, where he was on the faculty for decades, and the White House where he advised presidents from Roosevelt to Johnson on economic matters. Once again, with the benefit of hindsight and being familiar with his start in life, it is understandable that he was a successful deputy director of the powerful Office of Price Administration that worked to avoid inflation and hoarding by U.S. citizens while it controlled prices, wages, and rents during wartime rationing. Gelbreth, on one of his visits home in the 1990s, visited the construction site of the library in nearby Dutton. He helped raise funds for the structure by donating his lecture fees to the cause. He said that the original library had been his window on the world as a boy. During his career, he wrote four dozen books and countless articles and academic submissions. The library was renamed in 2003 to the John Kenneth Galbreth Reference Library. That was the same year that the Inukshuk was unveiled to mark where Galbreth started his life's journey. The statue of stacked stones might be an uncommon recognition for someone who was not known to have traveled to or spent much time in the Canadian Arctic. The Inuk has been rooted in Inuit culture for centuries. Depending on how the stones are piled, they can signal danger or a cache of food or good hunting and fishing. They can point the way home and are considered to be helpers of the Inuit. The particular design of the outer place Inukshuk on Thompson Line resembles one where the lower stones form a window, where traditionally Inuit would align the next Inukshuk on the horizon. Most experienced hunters did not need these waypoints for navigation, but rather they were built by Inuit to attach their thoughts to distant and familiar places when they were far from home. This description starts making sense as to why the Anoksha was chosen to honor Galbreth in his home community. Depending on which side of the window you are looking through, you look over the fields that Galbreth held as he walked behind the horses. Or from the other side, you look towards the outside world where there were unlimited opportunities. Like the Anokchuk, John Kenneth Galbreth was a giant of a man, standing six foot nine inches tall. With his intelligence and vision, he stood out in most crowds, but never so much as when he was appointed U.S. Ambassador to India by President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s. At the time, the average height of men in India was 5'5. Until recently, Gilbert was the only person to have received both the Order of Canada and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. Geldworth was awarded the World War II Medal of Freedom in 1946 by Harry S. Truman, and then again in 2000 by President Bill Clinton. He was invested into the Order of Canada in 1997 for his contributions to science and public service. In 2025 and 2026, Michael J. Fox, the actor and Parkinson research activist, was the next Canadian-born person to receive both of those honors. In 2006, John Kenneth Galbreth died at the age of 97. Throughout his life, Galbreth received much recognition, but none, I believe, are as unique and fitting than the Anukeshuk on the side of the road beside the family farm, deep in southwestern Ontario's farming community.

SPEAKER_01 10:20

Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Happy to Be Canadian. If you would like to receive an email each Saturday morning that features new short stories and more, you can sign up on my website, www.crazy8barn.com. If you would like to meet me in person and discover another way that we tell our rural stories, please join me at a Barn Quilt Painting Workshop at our beautiful eight-sided barn in Palmyra, Ontario, along the North Shore of Lake Erie. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Crazy8 Barn. If you are an Apple Podcast listener and enjoyed this podcast, I would appreciate it if you could leave me a favorable review. And that lets Apple know that Happy to Be Canadian is a valuable podcast and it shares it with other potential listeners. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins, and I'm Happy to Be Canadian.