You Have Been Referred

My life in applied anthropology

Michael Robinson

You Have Been Referred

My life in applied anthropology

Michael Robinson

YOU HAVE BEEN REFERRED: My Life in Applied Anthropology

Copyright © Michael Robinson, 2021

Publication: July 2021

Published in Canada by Bayeux Arts Digital - Traditional Publishing 2403, 510 6th Avenue, S.E. Calgary, Canada T2G 1L7

www.bayeux.com

Cover design by Lumina Datamatics Book design by Lumina Datamatics Cover photograph by Lynn Webster

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: You have been referred : my life in applied anthropology / Michael Robinson. Names: Robinson, Mike, 1951- author. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2021019006X | Canadiana (ebook) 20210190078 | ISBN 9781988440705 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781988440712 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Robinson, Mike, 1951- | LCSH: Anthropologists—Canada— Biography. | LCSH: Anthropology—Canada. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC GN21.R63 A3 2021 | DDC 301.092—dc23

The ongoing publishing activities of Bayeux Arts Digital - Traditional Publishing under its varied imprints are supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Alberta, Alberta Multimedia Development Fund, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

Printed in Canada

Table of Contents

Foreword vii Dedication xi Section 1: Awakening to the Spirituality and the Possibility of a Cross-Cultural Career 1 1. My Blackfoot Dream 2 2. A Trip on the Uchuck 11

West Coast Survival 23

“He Won You; You Have to Go and Sit on His Knee!” 40

Burial Cave 51

Ray’s Cousin Elmer 54

Cook the Captain! 58

Crossing Cumshewa Inlet to Skedans 66

Kunga House Logbook 77 Section 2: Reconciling the Spiritual and the Materialistic 83 10. On Being Idealistic in the Oil Patch 84 11. “Back Then You Didn’t Need a Job, Just a Trapline” 90

Planning the Mackenzie Valley Gas Pipeline Through the Sahtu Lands of the Dene 111 13. The 1985 PolarGas Christmas Party in Toronto 131

Table of Contents

Section 3: Synthesizing Values and Work in Non-Governmental Organizations 135 14. Starting ‘Real Work’ up North 136 15. Joan Moves to Fort McPherson 142 16. Danny Murphy’s Island 147 17. “This Is Mike, He’s Our Consultant” 155 18. “You Have Been Referred” 159 19. Gwich’in Economic Development Theory 164 20. Kittygazuit Summer 166 21. Sami Potatoes 179 22. A Walk Through Lovozero with Larisa 198 23. Sami Cultural Days 205 24. Mapping the Kola Peninsula 209 25. I’m Dreaming of a Sami Christmas 217 26. Book Launch at Gorbachev’s Moscow Office 220 27. A Ski-doo Ride with the Chocolates 223 28. Boating Down the Athabasca River with Fred MacDonald Sr. 228 29. Camping on the Twin Sisters Plateau 233 30. “Would you consider becoming CEO of the Glenbow Museum?” 239 31. To Manchester with the Nitsitapiisinni Exhibition 244 32. Ray and Terry Come to Calgary 249 33. An Election in Alberta 257 34. Making the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art Sustainable 262 35. Saying Goodbye to Dad 268 Afterword 270 Selected Bibliography 274

Foreword

I began writing these stories in 2008 after I had run as a Liberal in the Alberta provincial election and, predictably, had lost. It wasn’t a trouncing, but after knocking on 8,000 doors and giving it my all, in a constituency in which my wife and I had raised our family, I ended up about twelve-hundred votes short of victory. Prior to running I had resigned my position as CEO of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, in part, because I thought I would win and, in part, because I thought that if I lost, the reigning Conservative dynasty would take it out on my employer. In defeat, I thought it would be better to start again and to look at new opportunities.

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t done this before in my thirty years of working in Alberta with various oil-patch businesses, at the University of Calgary and occasionally as a self-employed consultant. It is important to understand the economic context of my mobility – between 1978 and 2008 Alberta was awash in oil-patch cash, experiencing the last great boom of the carbon economy. The public hadn’t yet registered the climate crisis and, while economic diversification and the need for a healthy Heritage Fund were a growing part of political discussion, they were effectively marginal topics in a much grander scheme of affluence.

Before I hit the re-employment trail once again, I decided to take a few months off and to write a career memoir. I was exercising some significant privilege: my wife was now a partner in a national architectural practice; my children were at university; and I had a few paid board and consulting assignments to tide me over. As it turned out, when I began to write, my mind obsessed on dredging up stories, starting in the final years of high school and ending with

Foreword

my experiences at the Glenbow Museum some 40 years later. Looking back, it was as if these stories had lives of their own and insisted on being told. Try as I might, they refused to blend seamlessly into the theme of my career, but each one contributed to the preparation for it, or the conduct of some aspect of my work.

And then I was offered a challenging new position as CEO of Vancouver’s fledgling Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art. All of a sudden, pressing job realities intruded on my writing and I downed tools to focus on my new tasks. It wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, twelve years later, that I resumed writing, making the best use of social distancing and the new tranches of free time. Immediately I saw a need for two new chapters, one on my Alberta election experience and the other on my start-up labours at the Bill Reid Gallery. My wife, children and a nephew advised me to write a foreword that explained how the book was structured and why it might be of interest to Millennials and other non-Boomers. There was a uniform concern that a career memoir by a non-famous, ex-CEO would nose dive in any marketplace. They counselled that the book should offer readers more than anecdotes about me. I was also amusingly advised that a tome about my “excellence in the field of greatness” would not pass muster. So, I endeavoured to meet their challenges.

When I ask myself, what do all these stories have in common or what holds them together? I see that at a very basic level, they all involve people who know and love their place on earth. Most of the subjects of these stories are themselves good storytellers. All of the characters are, in fact, characters – they exhibit moral strength, commitment to sometimes impossible ideals, and they often manifest eccentricity. Many are charismatic. They all have a strong bond with the natural world, and most of them are skilled resource harvesters. Several of them dream about their connection to the land. While not all of them have met face to face, I know them all and think they would enjoy each other’s company. Many are now dead. Strangely, their collective spirit is still very strong. Let me just say, that what they stood for in life continues in other ways and in other people

As the world pursues its fast-paced switch to urbanism and as climate change opens the Northwest Passage for the second decade

in a row, these characters all ask us to think about our collective roots as land-based hunters and gatherers. As a species we did not evolve from a bricks-and-mortar environment, nor did we originate in agrarian societies. Those aspects of our collective journey on earth are like a skiff of fresh snow on a glacier of evolutionary ice. In our genes and our experience we still owe more to burial caves than to urban cemeteries, more to the trapline and the bush economy than to office towers and the stock market, and more to the coho and sockeye salmon than to muffins and chai lattes.

If the characters in this book leave us with anything, it is the need to venerate the land and the water by staying close and telling stories that tie us to where we came from. This earth truly is our home, and we celebrate its soul by narrating stories about its role in our lives. The best stories combine humour with spirituality, love with strength, and friendship with duty. Many will be told at bedtime to young hearts and minds just forming their connection to the land and all its creatures. Looking back at those people who influenced my career, there are a number of very strong women, like my wife Lynn Webster, Joan Ryan, Terry Williams, Dorthea Calverley, Nina Afanas’eva and really all the Sami leadership, but men dominate the corporate stories and many NGO stories as well. I think this reflects the corporate leadership of my era and the structure of many notfor-profit boards too. Nevertheless, the influence of the key women in my life has been profound.

At a very personal level, I can group these stories as short reveals about my career influences. With the exception of the first one, My Blackfoot Dream, to which I gave pride of place because of its singular power over me, all the rest are told basically in chronological order. But there is a deeper structure as well. A close reading indicates that my strongest career influences were not school teachers or university professors; rather they were my mother and father, family values, and friends who lived their values in their work. Many are Indigenous people who embody their cultural values implicitly in their lives. Paradoxically, my first decade of employment in Calgary was characterized by corporate values, often (although not always) at odds with my prior experience and my core beliefs. It wasn’t until

I arrived at the University of Calgary’s Arctic Institute of North America that my true instincts were allowed to guide my development – and that of others. Structurally, this book is the development of a career-values thesis; its deployment in a corporate-culture, or antithesis; and its synthesis and blossoming in non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Following this lead, the book is divided into three sections that correspond with my thesis, antithesis, and synthesis experiences at work.

What I take from this analysis is the understanding that I am best suited to those institutions of civil society, NGOs. At their best they combine environmental sensibilities, effectiveness in cross-cultural work settings, a participatory-action approach to problem solving, and a quality that I simply think of as human decency. NGOs also require endless fundraising to keep them afloat, a characteristic that can drain the most energetic of enthusiasts. Clearly NGOs lack the economic efficiency of corporations, but they can learn from them, and the ones I have run modelled aspects of their operations on corporate models. In this way they demonstrate another worthy aspect of NGOs – their ability to hybridize. My Métis pals call this quality Metisism – the combination of the best of two possible ways of knowing the world.

One cannot conclude a foreword written in May, 2020, without a link to COVID-19 and the pandemic’s impact on our common future. I believe these stories contribute to our new reality by spot-lighting simpler, kinder ways of living and being in the world. Collectively they affirm the main theme of the Russian Sami reindeer herders’ (see Chapter 22) origin myth, Myandash: “What is good for the reindeer, is good for the Sami.” Their message for the rest of us is plain: it is time to move away from destructive carbon-combustion energy and brutal technologies and to embrace sustainable lifestyles that permit a healthy diversity of species. We humans need to learn to share the earth once again.

I hope this brief introduction to what follows has caught your interest! Giving these stories life has certainly caught mine. I am glad to see them on paper embarking on new lives of their own.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my mother and father: Frances (‘Frankie to family and friends) Robinson combined a lifelong interest in fine arts and entrepreneurship in a career spanning teaching at the University of British Columbia, (UBC) and starting and operating the Frankie Robinson Oriental Gallery (Frog). Dr. Geoffrey Robinson, who for forty years practised medicine as a pediatrician and was for thirty-five years a professor of medicine at UBC.

Mom was born in the Rocky Mountains, in Revelstoke, British Columbia, and grew up in small towns like Vernon and Williams Lake where her father worked as an engineer for the provincial department of highways. She combined an analytical and esthetic view of life and early on developed an appreciation for the work of Canada’s Group of Seven, especially Lawren Harris, and for Emily Carr’s evocative paintings of Indigenous villages and rainforest landscapes. Very much in this tradition, she took me as a young boy to paint in Vancouver’s Stanley Park with her friend, Bess Harris (Lawren Harris’ spouse). Mom also took me on summer painting trips to the Sechelt Indian Reserve on the Sunshine Coast and the surrounding beaches where she worked on portraits of children and sketches of waterfront architecture. I look back on those years now with a strong appreciation for her innovative maternal contributions to my developing cross-cultural awareness, and my own esthetic sensibilities.

Dad, born in Burnaby, B.C., was also an innovator. He was the father of diagnostic centres, care-by-parent and day-care surgery concepts and, above all, a writer in peer reviewed journals of pediatric practice. He dedicated his life to the welfare of sick children,

Dedication

and especially sick kids from far-away, small communities who had to travel to places like Vancouver for treatment. The diagnosticcentre concept was especially helpful for families from far-flung parts whose children had multiple handicaps because they provided ‘one-stop shopping’ with medical assessment, diagnosis and treatment all under one roof.

When I was an adolescent struggling with career decisions he took me on trips to remote communities like Yuquot (Friendly Cove) on Nootka Island off Vancouver Island’s west coast; to Riske Creek, Anaham and Anahim, then Bella Coola on the crazy and unpredictable Chilcotin road; and Prince George, Vanderhoof, Terrace, Hazelton, and Prince Rupert in the mid-north of the province to promote his new children’s hospital diagnostic centre concept with local doctors and nurses. I now suspect his ulterior motive was to interest me in medicine. I loved those trips, and admired Dad’s vision for health care, but what really caught my eye was the diversity of Aboriginal cultures in B.C., and the way they were struggling with change. Sure there were sick children getting substandard care, but there were also whole communities of healthy folk who were living in a world characterized by the paternalism of church and government, subtle and overt racism, and a complex array of choices about their future. Sitting in the car next to Dad as he drove along the dusty gravel roads, I began to think about a career helping communities confront change on their own terms. I didn’t know the words yet, but I was becoming an applied anthropologist.

Thirty-five years later as Dad was wrestling with Lewy body disease, a progressive form of dementia, which robbed him of rational thought and made his life with Mom very difficult, he sat next to me at a family Christmas party as I opened his gift. Somehow he had gone shopping and found and wrapped a present. He had scribbled three words on a little card: “Write more. Dad.” I opened the parcel carefully. Inside were five, lined writing pads.