CHAPTER 2 - ARRIVAL

In late August 1973, the artist and filmmaker Barbara Hammer, her lover Terry Anderson and two 'brilliant 19-year olds' arrived on Hornby Island, part of the Gulf Island archipelago of the Salish Sea; and the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Pentlach and K'ómoks First Nation. 

While there, Barbara Hammer took three rolls of film. Her photographs are ecstatic first impressions of a place and the intuitions given to interacting with it for the first time – documents of a tormented love affair, of artistic process and experimentation, and of a unique land and shoreline. They are at once artistic, deeply intimate and touristic.

But who and what lives beyond the peripheries of Hammer's photographs? 

In this chapter of New Friend, we explore the anthropological, ecological, geological, socio-cultural, and lesbian history of Hornby Island, through its many stories of arrival. In particular, we learn the stories of other 2SLGBTQIA+ women who arrived on Hornby to become artists, raise children and take refuge. 

Listener discretion: This chapter of New Friend contains references to settler colonial violence and outdated terms relating to gender and sexuality. 

New Friend is a five-part radio documentary exploring the context behind a series of photographs taken by the artist and experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer. The photographs were taken over one weekend in August 1973, on Hornby Island Ja-Dai-Aich.

Thank you to all of those who shared their stories, memories, and voices for the purposes of this project.

In this chapter, you heard the following voices (in order of appearance):

• April Shopland
• John Cox
• Nancy Turner
• Scott Watson
• Albert Savoie
• Judith Lawrence
• Jan Bevan
• Annie Martin
• Persimmon Blackbridge
• Clair Cronia
• Bonita Wexler
• The rocks, plants, trees, wind, and water of Hornby Island Ja-Dai-Aich.
• In this chapter, you also heard excerpts from a 1972 interview with Albert Savoie by Joanne Humphrey.

Credits:

• Hosted by Bitsy Knox.
• Production, research, script and sound design by Bitsy Knox.
• Mixing and mastering by Robert Steenkamer. 
• New Friend was originally aired on Cashmere Radio Berlin and 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio.
• Cover image courtesy of The Estate of Barbara Hammer.
• New Friend is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Thank you to:

• The Estate of Barbara Hammer
• Hornby Island Community Archives
• Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
• Cashmere Radio, Berlin
• 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio
• KOW, Berlin
• Company Gallery, New York City
• Florrie Burke
• Louky Keijsers Koning 
• Martha Ross
• Derek Anderson
• Rebecca Dunne
• Emma Walter
• Emily Harrison
• All beings, human and more-than-human, of Hornby Island, Ja-Dai-Aich, and its surrounding waters—where I am a part-time, uninvited guest on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral land of the K'omoks First Nation, the Eitsen, Pentlach, Sasitla and Sahtloot peoples.

Go here to learn more about the work of Barbara Hammer, including upcoming screenings and events.

Bitsy Knox is an artist, editor, radio producer and writer. She grew up on the unceded and ancestral territory of hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver, Canada. She is based in Berlin, Germany. Follow her on Instagram here.

For more information, and to support independent community radio, visit Cashmere Radio and 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 1:16

Let's say we go back around seventy million years ago. The mountains were being pushed out. The western edge of the continent was roughly where it is today. The big difference is that the Gulf Islands were not there. And about a hundred kilometers out away from the shoreline, there was one of these subduction zones, which is a um a plate tectonic area where two plates are coming together. So it's an active place from a plate tectonic point of view. Um but there were no islands sticking up out the ocean. Um what we had instead, we had rivers draining off the west coast of uh the western lands of Canada coming into the ocean, roughly where they come now. They brought a whole mass of gravel, they bought a whole mass of sand, and they brought a whole mass of mud. And um different rivers carried different things because they had different energies. So in different places along the shoreline, you had gravel, you had gravelly beaches, you had sandy beaches, and then offshore um in the quieter areas you had a lot of mud. The sediment on the shoreline of the ocean gets into these canyons. The sand and the gravel and the mud. And when an earthquake occurs, it shakes everything up, and you get these um underwater flows of sediment flowing down the canyons from near the shoreline all the way offshore for tens or hundreds of kilometres. Hornby was where one of these underwater canyons existed 80 to 65 million years ago. When an earthquake occurred, let's say 68 million years ago, gravel that was on the shoreline, that was and the top of this canyon came falling came falling down the canyon and settled in the deeper water. And then maybe nothing happened then there for uh a thousand years or ten thousand years until another earthquake occurred. And this time there was sand that had been brought in by another river to the top of the canyon, and then a cloud of sand came falling down the canyon and settled out. But you can see how there's almost a couple of lenses of sediment, lenses of sedimentary rock, and you'll have a lens or a layer, a layer of sandstone, and then a layer of conglomerate, a layer of sandstone, a layer of conglomerate. And each one probably represents something that happened in a few hours or a few days, and then nothing happened for maybe a thousand years until the next layer of sand or gravel came down. Um look at it like um the pages of a book.

SPEAKER_02 6:41

Some of the stories that I know that talk about the history of the island came from my great aunt. Uh, she was born in 1900 in a traditional house in Colacks. Uh, and her mother, who I knew as Nock, was also still alive when I was born and and talked about uh about the people and the history. But uh one of my great aunt, I called her Bama. Uh one of Bama's stories was about how they came here probably in about 1906 or 7 to build a canoe and to gather food. And she used to come here to our uh home on Hornby fairly often, liked, enjoyed coming to Hornby and remembering times when she had come in the past. And she also talked about it as coming on a little holiday, but then she she'd get bored and have to file down a toothbrush to have a crochet hook. So she had something to keep herself busy, couldn't take too much holiday. Anyway, um, one of her stories was of coming as a child with my grandfather, her older brother Isaac, and her parents, and they camped somewhere in the neighborhood of what is now Hallowell Park. Uh, she talked about Ba Ashul, the one way up to the bluffs. Uh she talked about the can uh the cactus and watching where you walked and um she also looked at the petroglyphs and felt that those were, although in the 50s some odd years I've been coming regularly to Hornby, they have faded tremendously. She thought they were an indication of water, of potable, of usable water in the uh water source in the area, and probably something about the distance to that water source, at least the ones that that are on each side of whaling station bay. And but anyway, when she when they came and camped, and um her father and and brother worked on a canoe, a second canoe, took down a tree there and carved it, and she and her mother did a lot of work preparing and drying uh clams and oysters and fish, and then they headed back with two canoes back to Comox. Uh, but that kind of travel back and forth to the island had happened, I'm sure, for generations. I've also walked in the past with uh people who have backgrounds in ethnology and anthropology through the park and all of the sites there that um indicate midden and and places where the canoes could be pulled out. Uh as well, we have the camus, which was a a huge food source in numerous places on the island. But I I think that um certainly along the coastline of uh Hornby you'll find evidence that that people were here for thousands of years.

SPEAKER_06 10:28

Yes, the the whole Salem Sea is a is a fantastic, beautiful, biodiverse area with um so many different types of habitats. And for the First Nations, the Komaks, the Snunemuk, uh, Snunus, Cowitz and all the peoples of the Salem Sea area, many of them speaking languages that are related to each other, um, have found ways to name and use you know so many hundreds of different uh plants. One of the ecosystems that's particularly culturally important that um we see on many of this uh the areas around the Salish Sea, uh the karaoke, um camas, prairie, savannah ecosystem. And that one is uh is one that's been tended and cared for by First Nations for probably thousands of years, um, but using fire, using selective harvesting, uh scattering propigules, scattering the little bulbs and the seeds when they're ripening, and um and maintaining a balance between all the different species that that live there, including the animals, the deer, and so forth. These are really important habitats to this day, and they're really threatened because they're so pleasant and beautiful, but certainly as major components of a very important uh ecosystem that includes a lot of uh native grasses, grasslands, as well as a number of important shrubs like Saskatoonberry and Ocean Spray, and um and some of the other trees, even along the coast here, the coastal juniper, and to some extent Arbutus and Manzanita, um can I can't there's a whole suite of species that are part of this really special ecosystem, and and many of them are not doing very well because of climate change and because of development and just uh essentially distraction from all of our human activities. But they're all they all remain culturally important for first peoples. And there are actually many stories, there's some from the Comacs Nation about how people um how the ancestors spread some of those plants themselves to Middle Natch Island and other places in the Sales Sea. And there's evidence now that that's building to show that people were uh also instrumental in spreading and planting and propagating and transplanting um plants from one area to another. For the camas, the name ku slash is one of the uh Sanchasan names for camas bulbs, but that same word um transforms into the name for onions as you go up into the interior. So the name Kualawa means onion in the Slatlimuk language, Lilouet language. And Kualawa is the nodding onion, the uh the one with the beautiful pink bulbs that is uh also um petcooked, just like the camus is pet cooked. And then that same word goes up into Kuiliwa, into the Seilkur, Okanagan, and changes into another species of onion as you go east into into uh Sahatan and uh the Salish peoples in Montana. So that's just one example of how you can see uh how people's knowledge and their use of plants is transferred, it's exchanged, and then adapted to individual places and habitats.

SPEAKER_02 15:12

People had talked about whether there was village sites on the island or whether it was a coming and going. I know of place names and different sites on the island, but I would not be at all surprised if there were permanent village or at least winter village sites on the island. Uh one of the other things, and again, Gama had told me about the big ships that came prior to the you know, Captain Cook. And I'm a believer that Francis Drake was probably here long before, because our family stories say that, that long before those those explorers came, there was big birds that came with people on them, and that was probably Francis Drake. So I think as well as the si the diseases that happened, I think there were there were series of diseases that happened, even before the ones we we recognize now, where, you know, in some cases 95% of the people were eliminated by disease. Certainly in Comax um itself, if you look at the fish weires and the industrial nature of those things, there was a lot of people. That wasn't done for uh the 300 members that belong to the Comax First Nation now. That was industrial in scope. So it doesn't s you know, wouldn't surprise me that there were also uh village sites or permanent winter dwellings here uh on the island because I think there were a lot of people living in what's now the Comox Valley um prior to contact.

SPEAKER_03 17:17

And on Denman Island too.

SPEAKER_02 17:19

Oh, definitely. On Denman has recognized village sites. Uh even in 18 in the 1860s, those are recorded village sites. But I think there's many areas that you look at and you think, yeah, there were houses here. There are almost those platform land formations that to me would indicate there probably were buildings, but I think the people came together more through these waves of disease. And then, of course, the confinement of things like the Indian Act and the reserve system and all of those things limited people to where they could be and where they could go.

SPEAKER_07 18:26

They already's crystal clear when they came, either in 1864 or 1874. Say both things. But um both of them came from Comax. Both of uh George Ford and Mr. Maud arrived in Comox Valley in 1864 within months of the smallpox, which allowed the preemptions to take place. You could claim for what what is now called ground land, uh you could get a a certain acreage for nothing. There were obligations involved. Um you had to develop a land for a certain period of time as a farm or whatever, and then you would get titled to the land. It was called preemption. And one of the conditions of preemption was that the land had to be the couldn't be inhabited by First Nations people. The preemption law came in 1861, the epidemic which clears the land comes in 1862, and many people have filed for preemption in the Cox Valley and in Couch and Valley without any treaty, or these valleys are full of settlements, and then the small parts clears them. This is all this is too much of a quit setting for me. But having said that, preemption uh was initiated due to pressures from the South. Uh Washington like in 1860, there were 1860 there would have been at the most there would have been a thousand settlers in British Company background to combined. But in Washington State there's anything. So Washington State had a regime. You could claim land and get it for nothing. Same sort of system. So the Hudson's Bay Company, which was running all this, uh, decided, oh, we have to do the same thing, or we'll never get anybody. So George Ford married Mary.

SPEAKER_02 20:50

I have that. She was born somewhere around 1848 in Fort Rupert. And he was born in 1931 and passed away in 1899 in 91. And she passed away in Colicum. Uh a lot of those uh relationships started in Fort Rupert because that was coal mining. Right? And the ships were going in there, and so I would think that could be how she met Mr. Ford. Who would be through that connection? He certainly was one of those first settlers that came to the valley, I believe 1864, the grappler came.

SPEAKER_07 21:44

They're often thought to be the first settlers, these two families. But I looked in my research in 1863, I tripped over a story with uh another Indian outrage, and the story. Was that three guys, three men, don't know what the relationship between the two of them was. Three of them was, had had a preemption on Hornby. This story is from 1863. They built a house, one house for the three of them. Then they went to Comaw's to buy potato seed, and when they came back, their house was burdened. And they they thought, with what evidence is not disclosed in the newspaper story, that the local Indians had done this. So they went to Victoria and complained, and that's why there's a surreal newspaper. So they never returned, as far as I know. But they were the first, they built a place. And they're not part of the narrative, they're not part of the southern marathon. So the Fords, for whatever reason, um seemed to prosper. Um they ended up owning a lot of land. Obviously, they started at Fort Cove, and they even don't as far as Downs Point. They owned 1800 acres at one point. And the Mods, I think, were over by Tribune Bay, and I think they own a huge section too. But I think by the 1880s, people were arriving in their farm. I mean, between the Fords and the there's people like the civilized. But people who were, I guess, more rural were rural. They were into into uh farming and harvesting temper and stuff like that. So they were what do you call them rural industrialists? I don't they weren't hippies.

SPEAKER_00 23:49

Would you like to hear about how things the conditions were when we first started? Yes. About 1923 and four.

SPEAKER_04 23:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:58

This uh service that we ran to Courtney, that it was actually known as the cream boat, meaning that was the basic uh freight that we hauled was it were cans of cream, you see, that uh went out when the uh timber market got better. They started buying the type of timber that that we had here. It was a lower grade of timber on account of the strong winds we get. And until about 1940 or so, there was very little sale for this type of timber. But about that time the timber got scarce, they started buying, so it was uh easier for a person to make a living by stopping milking his cows and letting uh them or I should say turning going to beef and work in the login camps, and because it was an island and was sort of more or less isolated, they got isolation wages, as they called, in those days. Uh which was a little more than they would get if they were living near the login camps. And so they they really did quite well. However, farming went into a decline then and has never recuperated. Another thing we used to grow at that time was a lot of tomatoes. Horn Island is famous for its high-quality tomatoes. No one is growing them anymore.

SPEAKER_11 25:40

So your life really has always been connected with the season, has it?

SPEAKER_00 25:45

Quite a lot, yes. Well, I've done other work, but only for short times. I've worked in the logging camps. Of course, we were raised in the logging camp. But I would say that the biggest part of my life has been connected with the sea.

unknown 26:39

Which was which?

SPEAKER_03 26:40

Which is the Catholic side, which was the communist side?

SPEAKER_09 26:42

Oh, the Catholic side was the Savoys. The Communists were all the so-called progressives. Then Hillary and H.B. um had been involved in progressive politics in England and in Europe before they ever came here. And so they were seen as sort of, you know, dangerous radicals. And uh who else? Well there were a lot of odds and ends of people here, you know. There was a it there were quite a few eccentric people here.

SPEAKER_07 27:13

Like, I mean, and all the men, the men bought the land or took up, as they that's the term they use, took up land and farmed, and then they found women to marry them or not, as the case may be, and they had children, and you know, it's just it's really strange and uncanny how immediately, the minute there's a colony, there is uh coal, gold, trees, mining, and real estate. It's you know, it's that's the center of the of the enterprise. And nothing else matters. As I morta Cosmos wrote in his newspaper, the Victoria columnist, um as fast as we cut down the trees, the red man disappears. So the number industry was rapacious from that beginning, and it was big. Sold uh BC number to China, to Japan Japan, to California. I mean, with colonization came the resource extraction. Before that, the economy was was from the white perspective, it was the fur trade. The Hudson Spay Company had farms so that they could have uh food without importing it. But it didn't uh it didn't occur to anybody to start cutting down trees for export until there was a uh a colony. And they discovered coal around the same time and shortly after.

SPEAKER_10 29:15

So you can see by how close together these trees are, how fast they regrew after being cleared. The big stumps, of course, will tell you how far apart the original trees were, and often you can still see the notches in them from where the loggers put their springboards in to stand on to get far enough back to saw with the big old two-person saw to cut down those trees. But you know, left bare. It just came up. When we first came on the island, we would take a trail, haloging trail across the island, and it was just little fir trees along the side of the road, you know, maybe what 10-15 feet high, and in 50 years it's turned into this kind of skinny forest. The old trees could survive forest fires, partly because of the thick bark, and partly because they were widely spaced, so the forest didn't uh the fire didn't crown, didn't go up the trees. But this is a bit frightening. What happens when you clear cut?

SPEAKER_07 30:49

And I guess some of the people who I don't think the people who arrived in the 60s and 70s were totally hippies either, but they were they were more um cosmopolitan and more idealistic about how to how to uh make a new kind of society, a new kind of community. I think that um it wasn't just Hillary, it was other people, I mean the people who started the Shire. Uh to a lesser extent the people who started downsport and the people who started the Sysurgy all had these very um utopian ideas about what it would mean to have collectively held property over the island. And a lot of people came in the 70s as part of the back to the land movement, or even people I don't know how many, but uh Americans leave in a war situation. Anyway, uh so Horumby Island undergoes a transformation in the late 60s and early 70s to that's how the community hall is built, and all these cooperative things. It was even a barter system you could you could do without money for quite a while because you would trade skills or things you made or and that people were really trying to do that.

SPEAKER_03 32:23

Um and the community really did build the community what have you done in your life, or where where have you been? Not me. Well, here maybe you can tell me how did you how did you arrive here on Hornby?

SPEAKER_09 32:54

Oh well, that was thanks to the women's to the peace movement, to voice of women, which I belong to. And I think it's 1967. We had an annual meeting in Vancouver. One of the people at the meeting was Hilary Brown, who lived on Hornby, and who had lived here for since 1937. Well, I knew her her. We we all sort of knew each other because she used to come to Toronto every so often, too. And so after the meeting, she had invited me and a couple of other people, Moira Armour, and the other person was Kay McPherson. So Hillary invited us to come and visit her on Hornby, and we said, Oh, that sounds like a you know, it's a nice idea. I think we must have rented a car or something because we were following Hillary, and um I was driving and the other car with Kay and Moira in it, and we followed Hillary along the r the highway on the big island. We we took the ferry and all that stuff from Vancouver now. But anyway, I do remember driving off the ferry onto Hornby and thinking, oh yeah, this is where I'd like to be, yeah. And then that's I started coming out in the summer. And of course I worked in the winter time in uh in Toronto at the CBC as my cat.

SPEAKER_12 34:28

I'm Annie. Um, I'm an artist. I was born in Pittsburgh. Um, my parents were American, were American, um, and my dad was a philosophy student, and when I was two, he got an offer to teach at UV. He was still finishing his doctorate, and so we moved to Victoria. And then we moved to Hornby when I was six. My dad dropped third, left his teaching job, and uh we went like we were we were a wave a part of that wave of people who moved to Hornby to live on grid and you know we lived in a kind of a reclaimed barn and then we had this huge garden and we had goats and we didn't have electricity and we pumped our water and we tried to be self-sufficient. What year was that in the 19 I think it's 70? They weren't sort of psychedelic, you know, they were kind of more like stoic Pennsylvania Dutch. So they but their their attitude towards living on like farming gardening, it had like idealism to it, but it wasn't sort of like it's gonna be wonderful, we're gonna be so free. It's like no, it's we're gonna work really hard.

SPEAKER_03 35:48

You know, like did you consider yourself to be a radical at the time?

SPEAKER_09 35:55

Or were you Well I was because I was in the peace movement, no, I didn't consider myself to be a radical because of because I was a lesbian, we didn't talk about it. Did we? No, I don't think we ever did. And um there were very few of us in the voice of women. Moira and I were a couple, and there were a couple of other women in the women in the voice of women who had seemed to be have their eyes on other women, but not very many. And um that was it. We never discussed it. I mean the voice of women was this very sort of middle class, fairly well-off housewives.

SPEAKER_03 36:41

Hmm. Interesting.

SPEAKER_09 36:43

Mostly.

SPEAKER_03 36:44

And were you involved? You you said you weren't very involved in the lesbian movement.

SPEAKER_09 36:48

Well, I used to I used to bring friends here from Toronto. And we would be the only group of women on the island. I mean, but nobody paid any attention. I mean, you know, nobody was seemed bothered by the fact that we were a bunch of flaming lesbian radicals. Didn't seem to bother them at all.

SPEAKER_03 37:08

Did you find other lesbians on the island as well?

SPEAKER_09 37:11

A few. Um, well, I'm sure you know, I used to come and bring friends. Then uh who else was here? There weren't that many. There weren't that many living here. There were a few because again it's it lapped over into the arts community. So, you know, a lot of artists were gay or two, men and women.

SPEAKER_11 37:38

So my name is Persimen Blackbridge. I'm an artist. Um I first came to Hornby when I was I think eighteen. I identified as bisexual, but I it wasn't something that I was out about generally. My really close friends knew, um, but I didn't. I wasn't out. It was the 60s in Vancouver, and you know, I had not knowingly met another queer person at that point in my young life, and so it felt a bit fraught, and I moved to Hornby. Basically, I was living out on the West Coast, and um then they were making it into a park, and I had to move, and someone said, Oh, I know someone who lives on Hornby, go live on her farm. And you know, at that time you could do things like that, turn up at the farm of someone you've never met before and go, Oh, I'm a friend of Natalie's. And um, so I lived on Hornby for about a year and it was very miserable. Um and then I moved off of Hornby, and it was kind of it was kind of full of a lot of unhappy young adult feelings for me, and you know, just trying to find myself out on my own, and then we went through this whole big thing where um I had a breakdown, and it was like really miserable and awful when I was 19, and um what got me out of the breakdown was becoming a feminist, becoming an artist, coming out as bisexual, and that was you know, the year following my miserable year on Hornby, so it was like the break down breakthrough of what was going on in that awful year, and then following my art and also feeling like I'm not gonna meet any dikes here. Um I moved back to the city and I went to art school, and I had this whole life with different adventures, and but I moved back to Hornby. My girlfriend um was dealing with a lot of health problems, and she decided to quit her job, and she wanted to go somewhere where it wasn't as high pressured, and she could take care of her health without feeling like she wasn't living up to the ideal of being a tough butch dyke, and so she kind of put her finger on a map and landed on Hornby and decided she would go move to Hornby for a month and try to get better. And so I came to visit her there quite a bit, and you know, I kind of made a new connection with Hornby that wasn't that miserable teenage lost connection, but it was a grown-up connection and a figuring out my life memory connection.

SPEAKER_12 42:30

My first memories of of feeling different had to do with looking at myself in the mirror and thinking that I didn't look like a girl the way other girls did. Like that was and I don't think that that anyone else would have attested to that. I think to everyone around me, I looked like very much like a girl. But I felt different. And my my my earliest responses to that difference was horror. Like, oh no, I'm I'm in such trouble. I have to cover all of this. You know, I took leaving when I took leaving the island. It was when I um it really wasn't until like three years after I I graduated from high school. I went to Uvik for a year, I lived in Norway for a year, went to school there. I came back and I was out at Uvik, and I was kind of bummed because I really liked being in Europe and it felt really depressing to be back in Canada. I really, really want I was ready, I was poised to get out, really get out of even Victoria. It was too small. What I started to acknowledge about myself was that I didn't like the way being a straight woman. made me feel it didn't fit. I didn't know how to behave. Yeah, so it's almost as if my my initial queerness was a kind of a queerness of of mind. Like I need to be I need to be less defined than this. I can't I can't fit in this box. That was kind of going on kind of in a subliminal way. And then this woman who was in my German class she invited me for dinner. So she she had set this table, it was kind of like the coffee table, low table with candles and there was wine and and I you know we were sitting down to dinner and I thought this is really nice I'm really interested in this person. She seems really fascinating but I better just say to her you know I'm not gay and she kind of her jaw kind of dropped and she was like oh oh okay and we you know we went we went ahead and had the dinner but I could tell she was a little bit like crestfallen that because she was clearly a lesbian and she so she ended up telling me all about what it was like to be a lesbian in Victoria in 1982. And it was pretty awful she knew a few other lesbians and they called themselves the speed queens and they hung out at a laundromat and they were kind of punk rock. Her aesthetic was punk rock she had short hair that was dyed black and her her whole apartment was painted high gloss black the interior the walls I went home that night and I was having difficulty sleeping and I was like in my mind I was like what would it be like to be in bed with a woman and I was trying to picture it and I was trying to picture myself kind of getting into bed with a woman I kept trying to picture it and every time I would fall out of the bed because I think there've been so many you know throughout your life there's these kind of prohibitions right you can be very close with women you can be friends with them you can be you can play with them you can be naked with them you can as long as as long as you there's this kind of parallelness to it where it's not your your gaze is not your desire is not directed at them I guess that's then a little incrementally little bits of identifying I went back to Montreal and then that winter in Montreal I I had my first kind of affair like I slept with a woman and but when that happened I I went uh oh okay this is this is for real and I I wrote a letter to my mom like put it in the mail said I I think you should know this thing about me um I don't know if I said I was a lesbian I think I probably would would have used the word lesbian and um so you're not I said something like you're probably gonna be hearing more about women and that I'm interested in like my girlfriends as opposed to my boyfriends that's that's how things are gonna change. So when it shifted and I would I was bringing women home I wouldn't say it was comfortable I don't think they ever were very embracing of my my various girlfriends like at that time um my mom was very matter of fact about it. She said that's fine doesn't surprise me I understand she said don't write it on your t-shirt in other words just be you know be be on the kind of be on the down low like don't don't make a fuss about it my dad was heartbroken he he wept and he he was the one who said things like what did we do wrong which was interesting and my dad and I are really close now but we my mom never really thought with me about my queerness she sort of would say sometimes like you've chosen a hard life for yourself and things like that but my dad it took a lot longer because we had to work through all the feminist stuff like he you know not just the queer but like the the the version of of of feminism that comes along with being a lesbian or a queer woman my name is Dorothy Clare Cronia my father named me and uh um I was born and raised in north georgia old southern family I had a five four year old daughter at the time I'd gotten married divorced within a year had a friend had my first lover um who had lived in New York City she was from Georgia to my hometown but had um gone to New York City to go be a sound engineer and met this wild and crazy woman named Angela Palumbo and she invited me and she had a home in Guatemala on Lake of Tedalan and so she invited Casey and I down and I went in April of 83 to Guatemala with my four-year-old daughter um in Guatemala at the time was uh some of the worst it was horrific I was not so political in my little Georgia world I became very political while I was there it was villages went missing while I was there um and it was all U.S.

SPEAKER_05 49:51

backed all the all the army were all US uniforms everything was backed all the people I was involved with there Angela they were part of the resistance I left there at the end of the month um never to pay another U.S. tax I would not ever support that again I went back to Georgia resigned from my job bought a 1969 Westphalia van loaded up my daughter I'd met a number of people from the Gulf Islands and I took off in June June 1st of 83 my family had a fit didn't care just I had to go and plus two I was bombarded with you know racism the just the insidious racism of the South and so I ended up headed to San Francisco headed north and came up to Victoria and went to ended up going over to Lesquiti Island where I had an address of someone I had met there and never got in touch with them that they knew I was coming I just had an address and um and crazy you know it was a only a passenger ferry I wouldn't go on it for a couple of days um I just stayed in the parking lot Casey and I there was a big huge major drug bust on Leskee with you know the planes and boats coming up to the dock laden with you know marijuana and it was like oh my god where am I going? Which but I did go around the dock and pick up buds that they had left and tried them on my on my on my van. But I got the courage up to go to Lasquete and go on the walk on ferry and went to the little restaurant almost left to go back and then got a ride to the ended up talking to people and got a ride to John's house and there was a lot of the Guatemalan women that I'd been weaving with in Guatemala. The next weekend they had a backstrap weaving course it was taking place and a number of women from Hornby came over for it and they brought me back to Hornby and I got here probably on the 26th of August and that was that two days later my van blew up blew up blew up when van when Volkswagen vans blew up they throw a cylinder number three I put two engines in that van.

SPEAKER_08 52:39

I loved it so much it was my you know it got me out it saved my life it um I bought another one well I was living up in Haidagua and that was in 70 75 and then um I lived in South America for three and a half years and then coming back came back to Haida Gwai only for a little bit of time and then came down and was house sitting for some people in Vancouver and was visiting a friend in Merville and um was going back to Vancouver taking the ferry and there was this woman on the ferry who looked quite interesting but we didn't say anything to each other I remember what attracted me to her was she was wearing these long kind of weird socks and I thought oh yeah but I didn't say anything to her and then uh got into Vancouver and um it was the time I think it was 70 I don't remember 70 I went over to the house where the meeting was it had already started she didn't tell me the time and I knocked on the door and the woman who was on the ferry answered the door. How's that for coincidence? And then we had the meeting and then you know afterwards there were snacks and everybody's standing around talking so I went and talked to that woman and it turned out she lives on Hornby Island and uh she said well have you ever been to Hornby and I said no I'm just coming down from Queen Charlotte and no I have no idea where Hornby is or anything about it. She said well you should come for a visit so I came for a visit stayed we became lovers right away I mean we had such an electric connection and uh stayed for I can't remember stayed for two weeks and left and went back to Vancouver and I was in the middle of sort of breaking up with a really long-term relationship with this woman who we'd broken up several times and blah blah blah blah blah and um she was also house sitting the place I was and I said I met this woman from Hornby so I want to go check it out she said okay and I went to uh went back to Hornby after a little while and um ended up hanging out with that woman for I don't know a couple months two months whatever until I found out she actually had a lover who wrote me a really nasty letter saying she was gonna kill me and stuff and I thought oh yeah okay cool. Then I went back to Vancouver I went back up to Haidegui but realized that my time there was done came back to Vancouver and thought well whether or not anything was going to continue happening with this this woman I was into coming back to Hornby.

SPEAKER_05 55:53

And I did and I never left you know I just integrated into the community really well and um probably was going to go back through the pressure of my parents and my daughter's father to get back to Georgia. They had a big going-away party for me here and I was leaving the next morning and a guy was courting me and he came over that morning and said just follow me follow me just listen just don't say anything just follow me and we were in the van getting leaving and off we go to Downs Point right next to Judith's a tiny little cabin in the woods he had called and gotten permission for me to stay in it for $75 a month.

SPEAKER_03 56:46

So I stayed and also I had fallen I fell in love during that six weeks too with um uh a woman that I had that that I met there was a flew of lesbians here at the time and I had not come out in Georgia uh and not until I really got here not with my family or um I'd had a relationship but it was totally closeted and um and so it wasn't until I got here that I was free to come out and uh and so I did and I got involved with a woman who was actually pregnant by supposedly a sperm donor and so um fell madly in love and uh just dated with this woman and her uh new to be baby and um had and we we had a little aurora game and then the father came back in the picture and it wasn't just a sperm donor and it turned into another thing but we had three donors made by Bitsy Knox with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts the Barbara Hammer Estate and the Beinege Rare Book and Manuscript Library Yale University as well as 96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio and Kashmir Radio Berlin this chapter of New Friend contains a clip from an interview conducted by Joanne Humphrey with Albert Savoy in 1972. Thank you to all those who contributed their voices to this chapter of New Friend April Chopland, John Cox, Nancy Turner, Scott Watson, Jan Bevan, Priscilla Blackbridge, Judith Lawrence, Benita Wexler, Elaine Savoy, Claire Cronia, and Annie Martin and to the water, rocks, wind, sky, plants, and all living and non-living beings of Hornby Island, Jai Daiich, to whom I extend gratitude and respectfully acknowledge that these recordings were made on the unceded traditional and ancestral lands of the Ayajutham and Pentlash speaking peoples, the Komak's First Nation