Small Things Forgotten

And sometimes amidst the zorgleflutzes, church bulletins from 1962, styrofoam meat trays, and endless jars of preserved crabapples, you find magical things. My grandmother saved some seemingly random things, but she also saved reams of family pictures and letters. This is the story of something she saved carefully for years and the story that it, in turn, tells.

By the time I knew her, my grandmother was already an old woman. She had come from Ontario at the age of 10 to a province that wouldn’t even officially be a province for a few more months. She grew up near Wynyard among people who had come from all over the world to the promise of a new land and new beginnings. The work was hard, sometimes backbreaking, but there were opportunities for fun and socializing too. My grandmother learned to dance from her brother-in-law, who had learned as part of his officer cadet training at a German military academy. Groups of young people from the area would get together at community events to dance and socialize; my grandmother loved to dance and was part of this group of friends.

Hector Hibberd

Hector Hibberd was one of her friends. From St. Mary Bourne, Hampshire, he had come to Canada in around 1911, one of the innumerable young British men who chose to try their luck in Canada. Maybe Hector had kept in contact with Gifford Longman, another St. Mary Bourne-ite, who had gone to Wynyard with an older brother as a 15 year old. In any case, he came to the Canadian West, learned to farm, and danced with the local girls.

When what we now call World War I started, a huge number of those young British men joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force, partly out of patriotic fervour and duty, and partly for the chance of a trip back home. And the war would be over in a few months anyway. By March of 1916, Hector and Giff likely understood what they were getting themselves into when they volunteered for the 214th (Saskatchewan) Overseas Battalion of the C.E.F.

Most of the regiments and battalions produced Christmas cards for their members to send to friends and family. During his first Christmas as a C.E.F. member, Hector sent cards to at least one member of his Wynyard group of friends - my grandmother.

Hector's Christmas card - now housed at the Saskatchewan Archives

By September 1918, he was serving with the 3rd Battalion of the Canadian Machine Gun Corps in France. The circumstances of death report says that he was making some adjustments to his gun when an enemy shell made a direct hit on the shelter he was in. The war would be over less than two months later.

His friend Giff survived. Perhaps he’d made the (re)acquaintance of Hector’s sister during the war, or maybe they’d met when Giff undoubtedly paid a condolence call on Hector’s parents. The two young people married after the war’s end and made their way to Saskatchewan.

From my grandmother’s circle of friends, at least two young men (one Hector; one her fiancé) left for the other side of the world and never came back. This pattern was repeated in countless circles, families, villages, and towns all over the country and world. The people remaining were left to mourn, pick up their lives, and, if they could, dance again.

Curation, Fetishization, and Packrattery

I come from a family of packrats. The message of “Don’t throw that out; it might come in handy some day!” is so ingrained in me that I have to consciously stop and think about whether, realistically, I will ever need that particular thing, and under what circumstances that need might possibly arise. Growing up, I could come home and announce, “ I need a zorgleflutz for school on Thursday”, and my dad would disappear into the basement. After some rummaging and occasional crashing noises, he would emerge, vintage model zorgleflutz in hand. I thought this was normal. 

This is not my parents' basement, but it is remarkably similar

My parents were not hoarders – they just had a lot of stuff. They had subscriptions to a number of magazines, and of course you wouldn’t throw those out (especially in the days before recycling). My mom taught for a number of years, and had novels and supplies which had been in her classroom. My dad, an inveterate builder and tinkerer, had every hand tool, nail, screw, and fastener that he might need for any job, from minor household repairs to the manufacture of a space-worthy vehicle. (Okay, the last thing was an exaggeration. But there was an asphalt temperature gauge which had been recalibrated to measure normal outside temperatures. And Ken did find a package of 40 year old road flares in a basement cupboard. Ignition was always an option.).

I had/have older parents than most people my age; both of them had lived through the Depression, which I think had the effect of taking a normally practical and frugal nature and pushing into the next level of waste-not. My dad, as a city-dweller, may not have been as affected. My mom, although a young child during that period, lived on a farm on the prairies. So, yes, you kept that whatever it was, because you really might not be able to get or afford another. Even if you never needed it again, your neighbour might. And you could just shove it into one of the outbuildings if you didn’t want it in the house. Substitute ‘basement’ for ‘outbuildings’ and you pretty much have the house I grew up in.

And then there were the family heirlooms and mementos. These are mainly from my mom’s side of the family, and almost solely from her mother’s family. Everyone else (her father, my dad’s parents) immigrated to Canada and had to deal with the associated luggage capacity limits. I find what people choose to keep and pass on to others as heirlooms really fascinating. And this isn’t a new thing. There are loads of archaeological examples of anachronistic items, often pottery, some obviously having been repaired multiple times, being found at sites. In these cases, the traditional call of the archaeologist (“It’s ritual!”) is sometimes heard. However, these deliberately curated items (yes, same term as used for museum collections) tend to be found in household, rather than in formal ritual settings. The general conclusion is that these things were the ancient equivalent of the good china or the ancestral portraits.

As to what was designated for curation and why….the short answer is that no one knows. Not all heirlooms are valuable or expensive. Value tends to be in the eye of the beholder and not necessarily obvious to anyone else. It may not even be consciously obvious to the beholder. I realized this recently as I repaired, for about the 10^th time, a small vase depicting a Chinese zodiac animal (not my zodiac animal, either) that I probably paid about $5 for 15 years ago at Folkfest. I like the pattern of the glaze, the tiger painted on it is cute, and it’s the perfect size to hold my peacock feather….is it really worth all the repair jobs? Apparently.

Fetishized?

Some researchers refer to an object’s designation as something worth keeping and passing down, and its subsequent elevation in status as ‘fetishization’ (archaeologists do love ritual references). A thing that might have been a common object, used every day, becomes almost an object of worship or veneration. Some people who study this sort of thing suggest that it is because that thing represents a past event or individual whose memory people are trying to hold onto. Others believe that the object is seen as somehow imbued with the essence of the person who originally selected or owned the object. Passing the object on to others is often a matter of deciding who would be best able to appreciate the object’s significance, and therefore the best curator.

I saw this played out in my own family many times. “When I’m gone, make sure Toots doesn’t get the (insert object here)!” This was from my maternal grandmother, the last remaining of nine children, with only one child of her own, but many nieces and nephews. I didn’t know much about Toots (a niece), except that apparently she was not at all trustworthy in terms of properly looking after great-grandmother’s bone-handled knives.

Ironically, my grandmother outlived anyone who might possibly have claimed any family heirlooms. So, everything went to live at my parents’ house. In the basement, of course.

Falling in Holes

So…umm…hi! How have you been doing these last few months? Good? Glad to hear it.

Life-wise, I’ve been doing well; blog-wise, I seem to have fallen into a hole and disappeared. Falling into a hole usually means that something (or several somethings) is taking up my time, energy, and thoughts about interesting writing. In this case, it was actually a few holes in a row.

The first hole was, ironically enough, all about how to dig a hole – or field school, as it’s properly known. This is either a compulsory or highly recommended class (depending on which degree is being sought) for an archaeology major, and is held at Wanuskewin Heritage Park. Today, Wanuskewin is a National Historic Site and major tourist attraction, but the park’s environs have been a special place for Aboriginal people for at least 6000 years.

The site is often referred to as a ‘terrestrial island’ - a unique landscape that is different from everything surrounding it. You can understand this a bit when you enter the park – you’ve been driving through Saskatoon, then through a bit of typical central Saskatchewan prairie landscape. After you park at the visitors’ centre and continue the journey on foot, you descend into a valley with a curving stream running through it. Grasslands and forest intersect in the valley, with vegetation common to each environment existing side by side. Even today, there is great diversity in the types and numbers of birds and small mammals found in the park; archaeological evidence suggests that there were even more species in the past. 

Opimihow Creek - our dig site is just beyond the bridge.

Basically, the valley had everything that people needed. Food, water, shelter from the unending wind – and they came back, year after year, for thousands of years. In the particular site we were excavating, tools dating to around 4500 years ago have been found; in other places, there are even older artifacts. There are at least 19 individual sites in the park, dating to before European contact, and at least two buffalo jumps. One of which, the Queen of England almost slipped off. But that’s my professor’s story, and one for another time.

In Old World archaeology, the terms sacred or ritual landscapes are often used to refer to sites which appear to have had continued spiritual significance to the people living nearby, perhaps lasting thousands of years through cultural and religious changes. In the UK, one can see examples of this in the sites of Avebury/Stonehenge, Maes Howe, Newgrange, and the circles and barrows of Bodmin Moor. Those are the big, obvious ones, but there are also loads of examples of the Norman or medieval cathedral being built close to or on top of a Saxon church, which was built on an earlier Christian chapel, which was built on a Roman shrine, which had been placed near an Iron Age sacred spring……

In Canada, the best examples of this type of thing seem to be in the cairns and Medicine Wheels built by the ancestors of the Aboriginal people. There is at least one of the latter features at Wanuskewin, leading some to argue that the area may have had lasting spiritual significance, in addition to its many advantages as a campsite.

The specific site we were at was a habitation site. People lived there, built fires, knapped and repaired tools, processed meat, and created a bit of jewelry. We found evidence of all of these activities during our 6 week dig. As for my unit (1m x 1m square)…. how did I phrase it in my report? The artifacts and fragments found in the unit provided further evidence for activities that were known to have been taking place elsewhere in the site. Something like that, anyway. What I really wanted to say was that when the people living at the site decided to sweep the tents, my unit seemed to be where they dumped out their dustpans.

They would have used the big dustpan for this.