[danikyvor]

I thought I would post this on here as I think it would encourage discussion, especially if some of you have read "The Unfinished Canadian" by Andrew Cohen. Originally posted on my blog:

November 11th, 2007
11/11/07 04:10 pm

It is a rare occasion when I cannot come up with a subject title.

Then again, it is a rare occasion when a book has left me full of thoughts and arguments such as this one that I am reading. I think it might very well be the best book that I have read this year and I am only halfway through it.

This past summer, in one of my "I-miss-Canadian-authors" phases, I was browsing Chapters online in the history section. I came across a new release that immediately grabbed my attention and I posted on LJ if anyone would be willing to pick it up for me. My friend Paige was kind enough to do this for me, and yesterday morning I received "The Unfinished Canadian" by Andrew Cohen in the post.

Basically it is a book about the Canadian Identity...or the lack thereof. So far I have read about the lack of history teachings all across Canada about Canadian history. I have read about the comparisons between Canadian identity, American, British and French identities. I have just finished reading about how the Liberal Govt had budgeted millions of dollars to get our museums back on track but pretty much the second the Conservative Govt came into power in 2006, that budget was scrapped. This angers me. And ashames me. It ashames me because having lived in the UK now for nearly 5 years, every day I am gobsmacked and in admiration of the history here and how it is embraced by the country and its people.

I'm still reading this book, but I just want to leave this excerpt with you, as it is stuck in my mind. It is from Chapter 3 - titled "The Unconscious Canadian":

One of the misapprehensions in Canada is that Canadians do not know much about their history because they are uninterested. Actually, that isn't so; when Canadians are given an opportunity to learn more about themselves, they embrace it. With enthusiasm. Mark Starowicz, one of Canada's most innovative broadcasters, recalled that when he and others began work in the 1990s on Canada: A Peoples History, they had modest expectations. It was the first television series on the history of Canada, he said, and the conventiona wisdom was that Canadians thought their history boring. So he was astonished when the thirty-two hour series aired in 2000-01 and became the most highly viewed documentary in the history of the CBC, with ratings rivalling the Olympics and the Stanley Cup playoffs. The two books based on the series became bestsellers, as did the video sets. "It seemed as if we had been prospecting in the fields of Canadian identity and memory when we unconsciously drilled into a pressure dome that blew us away with its intensity," he says.

There is a lesson here: if you offer, Canadians will accept. In other words, if the country were to teach its history, preserve its historic places, mark its anniversaries, remember its leaders, and create musuems and memorials, it would find a public. The challege isn't demand, it is supply. This isn't simply nostalgic or sentimentality; it is a deep desire, in a world that is changing, to understand some of the fundamentals about ourselves. In opening new museums or creating new monuments, we continue to write our biography every day. The alternative is a book of blank pages. We can choose that too, and we might. If the happiest nations are those with no history, as someone once said, the cheerful amnesia that now engulfs us could bring us a lifetime of contentment. But at what cost? ~

I am sure that as I get further into the book I will have more thoughts to hash out. But in the meantime, I highly recommend this book to everyone.