If it sounds like something out of another world, it’s only partly so. In 1968, there was a student strike contagion going around. French students almost removed the government of Charles de Gaulle in May and June. Campuses across the U.S. roiled with protests against the Vietnam War. It did not seem strange for undergraduates to wield power.

In Quebec, the fever was as high as anywhere. 15 of 23 Quebec CEGEPs were on strike at some point that year – Rendez-Vous ‘68, it was called.

McGill students responded late and partially to what was happening in Quebec. This pattern, like so much else involved in the 1968 PSA strike – the rhetoric of radical and moderate, the tactics, the narrative arc  – will seem familiar to anyone who lived through last year’s student protests. The resemblance is often uncanny.

We compiled a history of the 45-year-old strike from newspaper archives, interviews with faculty and students, and footage from a 1970 National Film Board documentary called Occupation. The result will – we hope – provide perspective on  the events of last year, and on where we stand as students today.

Daily front page, October 4. Political Science was far from the only student association pushing democratization.

Arnold August, 1968 chairman of the PSA: “The late 1960s was ingrained in the minds of millions of young people in the world. We got a lot of inspiration from the United States, as well as Mexico, with the [Olympic] Games, where you had two Afro-Americans who won the Olympics and when they were given their medals they had their hands up [in the Black Panther salute]. These were the things that inspired us. Paris. The United States, where you had these massive demonstrations in front of the Democratic Convention, where hundreds of people were arrested. We were definitely conscious that we were part of the movement. It was in our blood at that time.”

September 27, 1968: The Daily reports that students are dissatisfied and are demanding that the Political Science department be democratized. They are seeking a “critical and socially relevant approach to political science.”

Sam  , McGill Political Science professor (retired 2005): “We had something called the Tripartite Commission on the nature of the university [between 1967 and 1970] – divided between administrators, faculty, and students. The Commission met for months and months and months. And what emerged from that was a recognition that students had a right to participate in university life at an important level – at a policy-making, a decision-making level.”

October 1, 1968: The PSA issues a three-page manifesto in The Daily. The manifesto calls for “change in political orientation of the University to one that is explicitly critical of the status quo.” Student Council member Harry Edel says PSA should “adopt the strategy and tactics of labour unions in negotiating.”

The Daily logo, stylish as ever. The paper also faced the same charges of left-wing bias as it does today. Plus ca change.

October 11, 1968: Political Science students meet with faculty for the first time and faculty agree to consider a motion to at least “partially democratize the Political Science department.”  Professor John Shingler suggests that student representation on committees would only add to the present bureaucracy.

October 18, 1968: Thus far, according to August, discussions with the department have not progressed. In a 164-6 vote, the PSA rejects the proposals on student participation made by the faculty. Later that week, three students make the rounds of Political Science classes, criticizing the PSA as a Marxist minority. The Daily reports that “in virtually every class, [the three students] were coldly received and their interpretation challenged.”

Harold Waller, McGill Political Science professor: “The Daily then, and probably now, was very biased in one direction. With the exception of 1970, when Charlie Krauthammer [now a neoconservative columnist for the Washington Post and Fox News contributor] was the editor, then it was a very sensible newspaper. So The Daily had an axe to grind, and they were totally in   of the students’ position and totally against our position. And therefore I don’t think the reporting was objective.”

August: “I remember one article in La Presse and one article in the Gazette – [the mainstream media] barely looked at it. They pretty much ignored it. The fact that the main media virtually ignored, while The McGill Daily supported it – I think that’s fine, that’s perfectly normal.”

November 1, 1968 PSA and faculty meet in an open meeting in the Leacock building. August says, “by reorganizing the department, along functional lines, the faculty has maintained a façade of democracy while making most decisions in secret.”

Waller: “The PSA was organized and led by what I later understood to be Marxist radicals. One of them was Arnold August, who might have been the head of it. Arnold later became very active in the Communist Party of Canada, Marxist-Leninist, ran for parliament on that ticket.” [August ran for federal parliament as a member of the Marxist-Leninist party in 1979 and 1980; and then for the Quebec National Assembly on the same ticket in 1994.]

Noumoff: “[August] had this huge beard at the time. And people with huge beards were looked on at the time as somehow demonic. But it was also part of the uniform of the period.”

The PSA votes overwhelmingly to strike in what seems to be the Shatner Ballroom.

August: “In 1968, I was trying to find my way around politically. And then I read some passages by Marx, and then by Lenin, and then it clicked…At that time, 1968, I was not affiliated with any political party. There was a Students for Democratic Society at McGill – [Marxist political science lecturer] Stanley Gray was one of the leaders of it – I was part of that movement. We were basically left-wing people, for sure. We were against U.S. aggression all over the world – we supported Vietnam, we supported Cuba against the United States, we didn’t like the capitalist system. It wasn’t as sharp as one would have expected, but we were in favour of a new type of society that would be more appropriate for the vast majority of people.”

November 4, 1968: The Daily deems division between faculty and students “irreconcilable.” Chairman of the Political Science department J. R. Mallory says “hiring is a professional matter,” and that no students should be involved in the process.

November 7, 1968: The stalemate continues. Professors Waller, Breecher, Jackson, and Mallory form a commission on student grievances. August feels that the four were unlikely to be sympathetic to students.

Waller: “The essential demand was that students have parity in all aspects of department decision-making. Which meant everything from curriculum to tenure decisions to hiring and so forth. And here I was, a young assistant professor, who had no power, and now the students want to take away half of the power. So I wasn’t sympathetic to that at all.

“I just finished grad school myself – I didn’t think I should be making decisions at the grad school where I was. I thought that would have been quite…presumptuous on my part. And I thought it was presumptuous on the part of the students. I thought the job of shaping the curriculum and deciding on standards and deciding who to hire, or who to continue or give tenure to or promote, were basically professional decisions and should be made by professionals.”

Secretaries fled the 4th floor of Leacock – students took to answering phones with “Political Science, occupied. May I help you?”

November 11, 1968: The Daily reports that 20 per cent of the Political Science faculty would support student parity in many aspects of departmental government. The other 80 per cent could not be expected to support anything more than the one-third representation on the curriculum committee and one-fourth on the “Section” committee, which had already been granted. PSA says faculty are offering too little, too slowly.

Noumoff: “I was in support of them throughout the entire process. And the reason is, I simply believe it. Students are not just pampered, transitory members of the community. They have a stake in what goes on, in what is taught, in how it’s taught, in what the balance is in the department. Students are part of the community, and they should be respected as such, because, indeed, they have things to say which can be valuable.”

November 21, 1968: Faculty holds separate meeting to discuss their response to student demands. Students send all-dressed pizza to closed faculty meeting – faculty accepts alldressed pizza.  Still, faculty insists “no compromise,” stating that student demands represent “beyond what has been conceded in comparable universities. They represent a radical innovation.”

Student prank or Daily in-joke? It’s not clear.

Waller: “I didn’t think giving them half the power over decision-making was appropriate, and certainly not to that group of students, who had an agenda which I didn’t agree with on substance. Their agenda was to promote a left-wing view of political science…and I certainly did not subscribe to Marxism. I felt there was a place in the department for teaching about Marxism. For example, Stan Gray was doing that. But…I thought that the question of what you have on your reading list and what you should teach was a matter of your professional judgment, and it’s an invasion of academic freedom when someone, whether it’s students or departments or deans, tell you what and how to teach.”

November 24, 1968: In the face of the faculty’s refusal to compromise, PSA votes 319–179 to take direct action. 150 Political Science students occupy fourth floor of Leacock building after meeting. One secretary fled, apparently intimidated by the students: “Students are occupying the building. I can’t take any more calls,” she said. Female PSA members began answering the phone: “Political Sciences, occupied. May I help you?”

A suspected “right-wing militant” tried to enter the  fourth floor of Leacock later in the day; occupiers threatened to throw him down the stairs unless he left. “He left,” The Daily wrote. Three Montreal police officers also came to Leacock to manage an abortive bomb scare. A schedule of the day’s ad hoc seminars published in The Daily includes “Guerilla Warfare” at 10 a.m., followed by “The Correct Handling of Authoritarian Professors” at 11 a.m.

Harold Waller, who still teaches at McGill, tried to hold a class during the strike. Picketers broke it up after a bitter shouting match. 

August: “We made sure everything was clean, in terms of the washroom, in terms of the food, and everything like that; we took care of our own cleanliness.

We couldn’t leave the place because we didn’t want to give it up to the administration. So like any occupation, there are the normal difficulties of sleeping there. We had to have a basic, certain number of people who would hold the fort during the night. So we had to organize shifts for sleeping over. Organize food and coffee for people there. We would leave at 8 or 9 at night, so the shift that was sleeping over there would be from 8 to 9 to about 7 or 8 in the morning. So it was a long shift – it was rough…people sleeping on the floor. I don’t think futons existed at the time – I think we based ourselves on old-fashioned sleeping bags…. Me personally, I wouldn’t say I slept more than three or four hours a night.

I would say the prevailing mood was excitement. Because even though many of us, including myself, I wasn’t sure if [the strike] would actually work. When the strike vote was majority in favour, it was festive, because we sort of felt liberated…It was a very liberating feeling: here we are, going against the tide, bucking the status quo on a very important issue.”

Noumoff: “At the time there was a lot of bile and a lot of anger on the part of the students.”

Waller: “A number of my students came to me and they said, “look, we don’t support this action, and the PSA does not have the right to impose a shutdown of classes on us. If they want to stay home, that’s their business – we want to have a class, we want you to teach us.” There were about ten students in the class out of fifty or sixty or whatever.

So I was walking toward the classroom, and they were lined up behind me, following me. And we came to the door of the classroom. And there was a guy there from the PSA who was supposedly keeping people out. And I just kept walking. And he stepped back and I walked into the room and my students came after me. And we sat down in a circle, because it was not conducive to giving a lecture, and we started talking about American politics. And he ran back to strike headquarters. You know, “Waller’s teaching his class, we gotta do something.” So the whole crew comes charging down, they came barging into the classroom, with the [NFB] cameraman in tow, grinding away. They said “don’t you know that you’re not allowed to teach your class.” And I said “you can’t tell me not to teach my class. My students want to learn, I want to teach, that’s our business.” And then [PSA members] turned on the students, they put on the pressure, you know, “the collectivity has decided no classes, you can’t break the discipline of the collectivity.” Eventually they persuaded the students to leave. But they were putting very heavy pressure on them, which I would consider coercion. They harangued them, they browbeat them – I don’t think they used physical force, but there was an implicit threat of physical violence I would say. Eventually the students decided they weren’t going to turf it out.”

November 25, 1968: Faculty agree to cancel all classes. PSA gains support from other student groups and associations. Some anti-strike students try to attend class.

Students slept in sleeping bags on the floor of Leacock.

August: “You had two positions there. One was the students who wanted to go back to school. They said, “I want my education, I want to go to school, I want to take my class.” While the other side, including a person who voted against the strike, we all said the decision was made in a general assembly of the PSA – the PSA voted several times in favour of the strike, and that mandate has to be respected…Now, the individual students, the I-want-my-education types, in the spring 2012, as in the PSA strike 45 years ago…they were saying je, me, moi: me, myself, and I. It’s a very profound thing: whether you see society from the point of view of your own individual interests, or you see yourself as part of a society, as part of a movement that wants to improve the society. And that’s what hit me when I watched that movie 45 years later.”

November 27, 1968: Strike continues.

August: “[I said]: ‘No one’s gonna flunk: we’ll do our own papers, we’ll correct our own papers, our own exams.’ I was reacting to the faculty saying just before that, “If this thing goes on, you’re going to lose your session, and you’re going to lose everything.” When I said no one’s gonna flunk, if I remember correctly, there was a pretty strong round of applause. I think that was the main psychological, political obstacle that we overcame right at that moment, when we said, “No way, they’re not going to intimidate us into giving in.” That was the turning point.”

November 28, 1968: Professor John Shingler declares unequivocal support for the strike. “There comes a time,” he said, “when those who have substantial positions of authority in institutions yield only under pressure of political demands.”

August: “[Shingler] contacted us. He said, “Look, I agree with you, I’d like to explain my position at the PSA,” and we said sure. And that’s exactly what he did.”

Noumoff: “John Shingler had been president of the white South African union of students in South Africa. So he had been a student activist himself previously. He may have been tormented by it for a while, but I think he saw the historic writing was on the wall, and that it made sense to accommodate it.”

John Shingler, once anti-strike, dramatically announced his support for students at a PSA meeting on the fourth floor of Leacock. 

December 2, 1968: After three days without any negotiation, the occupation is one week old. The first round of student-faculty negotiations begin; they are filmed on CCTV for students to watch in the Adams auditorium. PSA demands one-third representation on departmental committees.

Harry Cowen, a student negotiator, calls the department “politically monolithic.”

“The arguments of the faculty are bankrupt and intellectually bankrupt,” said August. “Professor Nayar, your field is very important – political development – it encompasses a lot of people in the third world, and we know very well there are a lot of positions in the third world who are not of the orientation you have and the orientation you have in your reading list.”

Breecher denounced the students’ interrogation of professors’ political beliefs. “Those of us who have had the pleasure of living through the McCarthy era recall vividly the kind of television display in which individuals in universities were harangued but precisely for the opposite reason.”

August: “I asked the professors there, when we had that closed-circuit exchange, how come there’s no literature by Lenin in any of the books, when it could be interesting for students to hear what Lenin had to say about capitalism and imperialism. I was proud of myself when I saw that.”

Students watching PSA-faculty debate in what looks like the Adams auditorium. 

December 3, 1968: Round two of CCTV negotiations; faculty refuses to concede regarding hiring and firing. Breecher: “Is a first year medical student the equal of a doctor?” Cowen quotes T.S. Eliot and John Lennon.

Professor Nayar speaks against the idea of racially specific teachers for certain topics: “[Mr. Cowen] says if we’re going to talk about black power, we should get a black person to come talk to us. If somehow blood is necessary for the communication of ideas, if that is so, none of the people in our department, except perhaps for myself or Professor Mallory who teaches Canada, and I who teach Asian politics, would be qualified to teach here. Mr. Noumoff wouldn’t teach his East Asian group – you should get a Chinese to come and teach it that. Or if it goes further, with Mao’s philosophy, somebody from Hunan.”

Allan Stanovici (PSA exec): “We’re all pretty well white, middle-class people, all within a certain mould, we’re all individuals within this mould – it’s very free and egalitarian. But it’s all within a certain context: certain people will come from outside this mold and we see very quickly how quick the reaction forms, how quick the shell closes.”

August: “I would say that the professor who most antagonized the students was Breecher – Professor Breecher, Michael Breecher. He was quite arrogant and he was obviously trying to divide us. Harry Edel said he’s trying to divide us and we have to be careful.”

Left: Baldev Nayar, professor of Indian politics. Right: Arnold August, the Leninist PSA chairman. Nayar would become August’s Master’s supervisor. 

December 4, 1968: Students accept one third representation on curriculum and section committees, less than the parity they sought but a big improvement over the lack of representation they had before.

August: “[There] was jubilation, because it was rough, and everyone was wondering, how long can we keep it up? We played their bluff; we stuck to our position that we want to be on the committee. It’s quite possible that if we did not win it, the strike might have disintegrated. It’s quite possible.”

December 5, 1968: PSA votes to end strike after ten days – but not before it had made clear that its drive for parity is far from over. Strike officially ends at 2 p.m.

At the time, August said, “Victory for PSA. A turning point in the student movement at McGill.”

“Victory in that we weren’t totally defeated,” said Harry Edel.

August: “It wasn’t a celebratory party with beer or anything like that. It was handshakes, and hugging each other – “we won” and “classes are starting again.” It was relief that we won. If we wouldn’t have won, and been forced to go back to classes without that, it would have been very depressing. People were really tired – we hadn’t slept much, we had been occupying that place for a while. So we hugged, we were happy and all that, then people went home to try and recuperate physically.”

Noumoff: “It was a final vote within the Political Science faculty, with one vote against it, when it finally was resolved. And it was resolved primarily because one of the members of the department, who at that point was Associate Dean of the faculty, a man by the name of Saul Frankl – who was a labour negotiator – he came up with an argument that seemed to echo with many of the more conservative colleagues who didn’t want any change at all. Saul said, “Look, you know how bureaucracies work, and you know how systems work. We all know this as political scientists. Well, I can assure you, when we let the students in, they’ll get tired, they’ll get bureaucratized, they’ll be sucked in to the system, and they really won’t be too much of a threat.” And that seemed to work with what I would call the recalcitrant members of the department…While I didn’t welcome what Saul Frankl said, I believed he was right, as a lot of the history since then would demonstrate.”

Students vowed to keep fighting for parity as they accepted a compromise. In fact, student representation in Political Science remains largely unchanged from the settlement of 1968. 

Before they conceded, Harry Cowen delivered a speech to members of the PSA: “Once upon a time we would have been prepared to sit, like Estragon and Vladimir, on the cold moors of Leacock, waiting for Godot, listening in hope to the messenger who tells us that Godot will be coming not today, but tomorrow. But we are no Vladimir, we are no Estragon. We know that Godot never comes of his own accord, if at all.”

The post An oral history of the 1968 Political Science student strike appeared first on The McGill Daily.

This skepticism grew after the Minister of Higher Education Pierre Duchesne asked universities to retroactively cut $124 million from their budgets by April. McGill Principal Heather Munroe-Blum also said that the summit was a “farce,” and called the meeting “choreographed” in an interview with Le Devoir two weeks ago.

Last year during the student strike, the PQ showed solidarity with the movement and opposed the Parti libéral du Québec’s (PLQ) proposed tuition hike from $2,168 to $3,793 over the course of 2012 to 2017. The PQ won the provincial election on September 4, and immediately scrapped the proposed tuition hike and began planning the education summit.

On the second day of the summit, the PQ announced that they would be increasing tuition fees by 3 per cent annually, starting September 2013. According to Marois, this is the “most just” and “fairest” solution for society. The increase would amount to $65, although many media outlets have reported a $70 indexation. In fact, the $70 figure is an average of the increases over the next five years.

During the Summit discussions, demonstrators took to the streets both days to show their grievances with what is perceived to be the government’s empty gesture. Violent clashes between riot police and demonstrators ocurred both days, with the use of tear gas, pepper spray, and flash-bangs. Altogether, 14 demonstrators were arrested.

Day One

Inside the Summit, which was held at the Arsenal, a contemporary art gallery in Griffintown, civil society groups, student leaders, and representatives from professors’ unions and administrative bodies tackled the four aforementioned areas of discussion during the 12-and-a-half hour meeting.

Corine Trubiano, a student at the Collège de Maisonneuve who was at the protest, told The Daily in French that she did not feel the Summit represented the student population fairly.

“I’m here because I’m angry that the idea of free education is being excluded from the Summit. The ideas they are talking about have been pre-determined; I find that this isn’t including the entire population. ASSÉ and other student associations are not represented here today,” she said.

Over 1,500 protesters took to the streets to protest the two-day summit. The Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) declared the protest illegal before it started marching south from Cabot Square, where protesters gathered at 4:30 p.m. Riot police and police on bicycles flanked the march almost immediately, along with buses filled with more riot police.

The march snaked through residential streets in St. Henri before arriving at the Summit. SPVM and Sûreté du Québec (SQ) officers filled the parking lot in front of the Arsenal, blocking the entrance. A helicopter circled above, while peaceful protesters chanted anti-police slogans.

La Presse reported on Sunday that the SQ was present at the summit at the behest of Premier Pauline Marois and would be called on if the SPVM felt it needed reinforcements.

“The police presence is completely absurd here. We aren’t living in a police state. Their huge numbers are just increasing people’s anger. It’s brutal, and it’s creating a violent image for our society. That isn’t necessary,” Trubiano said in French.

According to SPVM spokesperson Jean-Bruno Latour, one person was arrested for armed assault after launching a projectile at police. Two people were fined – one for refusing to disperse, and another for putting stickers on a building.

While the SPVM had no information regarding the types of projectiles used, CTV speculated that the projectiles could have been snowballs and paint-filled ping pong balls.

Police chased protesters down to Place des Arts, where some were shoved aside from the Complexe Desjardins and held for a short time. At one point, police fired a sound bomb, also known as a flash-bang, to try to get protesters to scatter.

There were reports that an SPVM officer was injured by tear gas, but the SPVM did not comment on this by press time. Several journalists, including a Concordia University Television (CUTV) correspondent, were pepper sprayed.

The majority of protesters dispersed by around 7 p.m.; however, a group of around 100 protesters regrouped at Place Émilie-Gamelin and started another march east along Ste. Catherine. This protest was immediately declared illegal, and police announced over loudspeakers that everyone had to walk on the sidewalk, or would be “broken up.”

By around 7:15 p.m., this small protest scattered at Beaudry metro. Here, riot police took a break at a local fast-food restaurant and were met with jeers from onlookers.

Day Two

In a significantly larger protest organized by ASSÉ, 10,000 students rallied against the government’s plan to raise tuition annually and were met with rocks, teargas, and flash-bang grenades.

“The Summit was definitely a failure,” Jérémie Bédard-Wien, a spokesperson for ASSÉ ,told The Daily in French. “It failed to answer some of the questions that were raised during the Maple Spring and lacked any sort of depth.”

The demonstration was immediately declared illegal by the police. Approximately 3,000 protesters began to march despite warnings, as the crowd eventually grew to around 7,000.

Starting in Square Victoria, protesters marched peacefully past McGill University and up St. Laurent, before turning east on Pine. Fights flared after demonstrators proceeded down St. Denis and launched snowballs at lines of riot police. Police responded violently and clashes continued near Square Saint-Louis, where demonstrators fought back by linking their arms in a human chain and advancing on police lines. Heavy reinforcement from the SQ intervened to disperse the crowd.

Demonstrators from multiple groups were present, including McGill’s Art History and Communications Studies Graduate Students Association (AHCS GSA). AHCS GSA originally voted to boycott the summit in solidarity with ASSÉ. It was the only student association at McGill to do so.

The protest eventually dispersed, and 13 arrests were made.

3 per cent?

The numbers and words being used by the PQ are misleading. The proposed 3 per cent indexation that many media outlets have reported is linked to the hypothesis that disposable household income will increase by 3 per cent per year. This will lead to a $65 increase next year, but the increase for the following years would be greater. By September 2018, the yearly increase will be at $75, and the total increase in tuition fees will be close to $421.

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‘The Nabe’ is shorthand for the ‘Neighbourhood house,’ an after- school program and community resource center in Morristown, New Jersey. According to its website, the centre is dedicated to assist “working and impoverished families to maximize their educational, social, physical, and economic potential,” as well as to help immigrant families “transition into their communities.” It’s a somewhat odd place for me, a privileged white kid, to be joining a basketball league. As a girl, it’s even more strange to join a league of mostly boys.

Yet there I found myself, nervously chatting with Ronnie Dumas in the Nabe’s crumbling little gym. People may think of the Northeastern United States as more racially integrated or tolerant, but ethnicity still divides neighbourhoods like lines on a court. Therefore, “fiddy cent” lookalike Ronnie and I lived worlds apart. He lived in Morristown and I lived in Morris Plains. Little differentiates the two municipalities; they share grocery stories, a high school, and all the little neighbourly concerns of small town New Jersey. Although it’s only a few minutes’ drive from my house, Ronnie was most likely from “the Hollow,” or “the area around Martin Luther King Street,” or whatever Morristown neologism that allows us all to speak the unspeakable. To say, “where all the black and Spanish people live.” To note, “Spanish” in Morristown means Hispanic. Few residents know – or care – to recognize the difference.

By virtue of girls sprouting earlier than boys, I was a desirable team member and picked within the first round. We received our t-shirts. They were plain Fruit of the Loom cotton tees with our team name screen-printed on top.  I was unimpressed, to say the least. On my previous basketball team, in a Catholic girls’ league, we all had brand-new jerseys and matching shorts. They came assorted by size and wrapped in plastic bags. At the Nabe, t-shirts were pulled out from old cardboard boxes. While notions like racism and classism were not words my 11-year-old mind was familiar with, community basketball played a large part in teaching me about socio-economic and cultural difference. Unlike school, or church, or any other social venue in which I came to understand differences of class, race, and gender, it was only by playing basketball at the Nabe that I came to understand how these things intertwined. With my growing knowledge, I began to understand why we had t-shirts instead of shiny jerseys, or why we only had a couple of half-inflated balls at practices instead of a whole rack.

I would be lying if I said I thoroughly enjoyed playing at the Nabe. I remember tearful car rides after missing birthday parties or sleepovers because I had a game to play. Furthermore, I was only one of two females in a league of over sixty kids. It was something I reminded my mother of constantly. “I didn’t raise quitters,” she would say in response. And I’m glad she didn’t let me quit; not only did I learn the value of team loyalty, but also that there are certain spaces where difference hardly matters. At the Nabe, I was good. I was tall, and was told “you play good D, girl. You play good D” by my coach. On the court, my girlness or whiteness hardly mattered. I was cheered on all the same. I got to beat boys at a game they felt was their own. It was a lovely little gender transgression. Furthermore, the small size of the gym made parents’ cheers sound louder than the big gyms at St. Wherever.  Essentially, the Nabe had spirit in a way that the Catholic girls’ league didn’t.

I don’t want to suggest that sports aren’t heavily imbued with racial politics. Black boxer Joe Louis cared about more than just a title when he knocked out Max Schmelling. Most viewers’ relish at Jeremy Lin’s rare placement as an NBA player is based on more than just athletic skill. Racial politics were certainly at play at the Nabe too. The question that remains is: couldn’t sports at an early age be a place of better racial and class integration if leagues weren’t structured around separation? By the time sixth grade rolls around, little leagues disappear, and kids are separated into school teams by gender. Difference, like learning a second language, is best learned and accepted at an early age, and sports seems like the perfect venue. Inaccessibility and closed minds are what keep the game from being played.

The last I heard about Ronnie was that he was in prison, charged with second-degree robbery for assaulting a high school kid in Clifton and stealing his iPhone. My personal privilege has led me other places. As I finish writing this, I’m staring at endless rows of books: scholarly meditations and a sea of knowledge at my fingertips. A decade after our time at the Nabe, is Ronnie looking at a row of bars? Or maybe, during the one hour a day or a week, he is shooting some hoops on a tiny basketball court, in a neighbourhood unlike the one we once knew.

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Several hours later in Kahnawake, the Mohawk reserve just across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal, citizens will be hosting their own celebration. Dozens of pilgrims will empty out of their tour buses into the small St. Francis Xavier church. Those without seats will filter into the Kateri Tekakwitha School gym to watch the canonization ceremony, streamed from Rome. Some residents will don traditional Mohawk dress. Throughout the world, many will get down on their knees and pray.

Despite the flurry of excitement, some Kahnawake residents won’t be in attendance. Timmy Montour for example, will stay away, preferring a lazy Sunday breakfast. Tekakwitha’s canonization is, for him, “colonization. It’s a slap in the face.”

It’s a feeling that has reopened a centuries-old wound in this small Mohawk community. It is a wound that – despite the influx of pilgrims and tourism dollars and the Vatican’s blessing – stubbornly refuses to heal.

***

When a wave of smallpox swept across the northeast of this continent from 1661 to 1663, 4-year-old Kateri Tekakwitha was left scarred and orphaned from the virus. She was adopted by her uncle, and brought to Kahnawake in 1677, where she is buried. The conventional story of Tekakwitha’s life primarily concerns her devotion and her bouts of self-flagellation. Her myth is built on details about how she slept on a bed of thorns, or crept barefoot through the snow, lost in prayer. Like many stories about saints, she was said to have exuded the flowery “odour of sanctity” upon dying. In her last moments on earth, her scars disappeared, the story goes. She was only 24 years old.

According to Allan Greer, a professor of History at McGill and author of Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits, Tekakwitha’s life has to be seen as both “an actual human life and a literary creation.” The stories of Tekakwitha’s purity and devotion to the point of self-flagellation may be truthful, but often lack the socio-historical context they need. According to Greer’s book, about a dozen Kahnawake women lived similar lives alongside Tekakwitha. Their stories remain relatively untold, let alone recognized by the Vatican.

Most of what we know about Tekakwitha comes from the voluminous hagiography of her life, written by a Jesuit missionary, Claude Chauchetière.

The account provides a window into late 17th century life. Territorial wars and smallpox were both rampant, and a new European religion was on the march.

Chauchetière, a French Jesuit, was in the midst of his own spiritual crisis. It’s easy to imagine him, huddled at a candlelit desk, writing to his brother in deep despair about his loss of faith. Tekakwitha becomes his own saviour. While he promoted her healing powers while she was alive, it is the moment of her death that brought his revelation: “the climax and turning point” of his life, as Greer describes it. Thirty years later he commited her story to the page.

Chauchetière’s hagiography is the earliest example of the long literary tradition of documenting her life. Children’s books, the Catholic publishing industry, and even Leonard Cohen have all played a part in keeping Tekakwitha’s story alive.

For Greer, Chauchetière is just as remarkable as the saint herself. “My research was as much about the Jesuit as it was about her. He creates her. She is a literary creation of this guy, and no one ever talks about that,” Greer told me when we spoke in his office.

Working in Greer’s logic, Tekakwitha was mortal until proven (or written) holy. The miracles that have enabled her canonization all occurred years, even centuries, after her life. Now that the 120-year-long campaign for her sainthood has come to a successful end, it is the people of Kahnawake who will most closely feel the effects of Tekakwitha’s newfound divinity.

 ***

Claude Chauchetière was irrelevant for the Sunday faithful who attended her canonization. Pilgrims clamoured their way through the front doors of the small Kahnawake church, some stopping to snap a photo in front of Tekakwitha’s shrine. Across from St. Francis Xavier, young boys in traditional dress rushed to welcome guests at the neighbourhood school, and guided them to the gym. Projected on the screen was the video of St. Peter’s Basilica, with seven larger than life portraits hanging from its façade. Just like the crowd in Rome, headdresses and habits speckled the crowd.

Although the canonization in Rome was already over, the stream made the event feel live, especially so when young Jake Finkbonner – a young boy cured of his flesh-eating disease by Tekakwitha – received communion on the St. Peter’s steps. When the stream froze, or sputtered, a communal groan filled the gym. All eyes were glued, praying that they would not miss a single thing.

Many Canadian Aboriginals flew to Rome for the canonization, while other local residents simply attended the mass at St. Francis Xavier. Others enjoyed the Sunday like it was any other. Regan Jacobs, a former journalist and creator and owner of Mohawk TV, was one of them. In between reprimanding her kids in her native tongue, we spoke over pancakes in the small caféeshe owns.

Acknowledgement of the canonization, regardless of one’s political opinion, is a respectful gesture toward Kahnawake’s more Christian elders, Jacobs explained. “Acknowledgement can only go so far without crossing a line,” she said.

“Not only did [the church] steal our land, they basically tried to assimilate us. But we will still give people slight acknowledgement because that’s who we are as a people. We’re understanding and loving and at the end of the day we will always rise to an occasion.”

That sentiment echoed in the remarks of Timmy Montour, a Kahnawake man sitting at a nearby table. “Respect is the main thing. You have to respect the church and the people who care,” Montour said. Montour wasn’t shy, however, about expressing his extreme distrust of what he feels are encroachments on Mohawk tradition. He cited the church, particularly its dark history of residential schools, as “responsible for mostly all of the pains that have happened to our people.” Tekakwitha’s canonization was only working to pit community members against one another. “For me, even Kateri seems like a bit of a traitor,” Montour said.

  ***

[flickr id=”72157632010603901″]et, for Kahnawake’s Catholics in the St. Francis Xavier church, just a few blocks away from Jacobs’ cafe, the day was a wondrous exhibit of the community’s culture for the world to see, and a victory for those who have dedicated their lives to Tekakwitha’s recognition. While few would doubt the atrocities of the Church throughout history, should that negate any spiritual meaning derived from the canonization? Wouldn’t the influx of pilgrims buying prayer cards, lunches, coffees, and votive candles do the local economy some good?

Unlike Jacobs and Montour, Concordia student and part-time worker at a general store in town Vernon Goodleaf was optimistic about the potential for increased tourism. “She’s Mohawk, and I’m Mohawk, so I’m really proud of it. Sainthood is a prestigious thing, and a good thing all around for everybody. It’ll bring good tourism here because everyone will want to check it out.” Goodleaf hoped the increased tourism would spark an even greater interest in Kahnawake’s culture, to help get rid of “the stigma attached to the reservation.”

Whether explicitly or not, the legacy of the Oka Crisis haunted every conversation I had with Kahnawake residents. The “stigma” Goodleaf described is due to the 1990, an escalation of a land dispute between Mohawks in nearby Oka and the town’s government, who wanted to build a golf course on a traditional Mohawk burying ground. During the ten-week-long standoff between armed Mohawk militants and the Canadian military, the Mohawks of Kahnawake blockaded the Mercier Bridge in solidarity, stopping traffic between the island of Montreal and the South Shore. In the neighboring town of Châteauguay, residents responded to the crisis by burning an effigy of a Mohawk warrior.

“I was really young and I didn’t really understand anything about it. All I knew was that everything was blocked off and outside was the enemy. From then on it was just no French [language],” said Goodleaf. Goodleaf has recently changed his tune and sees fluency in French as a valuable tool.

Tekakwitha’s sainthood has opened a space for dialogue, and Kahnawake is talking to itself about the future of the community. In a column in the local paper The Eastern Door, Jessica Deer writes that increased tourism may benefit existing businesses, and even provide for new ones. Kahnawake, she writes, “will have to wait and see.” Another local reporter, Daniel J. Rowe, quotes a church volunteer who says that the canonization is bringing back tourists from the United States who have been missing in recent years.

The canonization is no Oka Crisis, but the increased presence of tourists does dredge up the pain of that summer. Not all business owners are as open to change, and the Calico Cottage Quilt and Gift Shop refuses to sell anything with Kateri Tekakwitha’s image, while others are banking on it.

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Unlike Pollock’s splashed canvases, theatre can be recreated authentically with each new production. Director Isaac Robinson certainly had this in mind when he constructed a more queer, more Montreal, version of Waiting for Godot at The Players’ Theatre this past weekend. While Robinson’s reinvention of Godot was imaginative, its incorporation into Beckett’s original text made for some alarming clashes between the visual presented, and the dialogue between the characters.

As theatre-goers trickled into the Players’ Theatre, Montreal -based music group Godspeed You! Black Emperor droned lightly in the background. Beckett’s original set, a simple dirt road with a tree, was replaced with a skeezy back alley. Ripped posters for vélo sales were glued on top of graffiti, outside the back entrance to the delivery room of “Godot’s bar.” Considering Godot premiered in 1953, shortly after the end of World War II, many have interpreted Beckett’s near-empty set as a signifier of a post-apocalyptic world. Brilliantly, Robinson reinvented this sense of emptiness through abundant moral bankruptcy, whether in tattered posters or the character’s personalities.

Most notably, the infamous duo Pozzo (Sebastian Biase) and Lucky (Martin Roy), the gluttonous master and sheepish slave, perfectly embodied the dynamic of dominance and submission. The narcissistic Pozzo enjoys a bucket of KFC and a 40 of beer as Lucky, dressed in black denim shorts and bondage leather straps, hungrily rolls his eyes. In what could be called the climax of the play, Lucky delivers his infamous speech, a three-minute tirade of useless, sputtering language. However, here the production beautifully deviates from the text, as Lucky performs the speech in French. If absurdity and disillusionment are the driving forces of Godot, Lucky’s speech succeeded in rattling the audience through miscommunication and shattering them with laughter.

However, the refusal to modernize, or Montrealize, protagonists Vladimir (Rachel Reskin) and Estragon (Martin Law) created more confusion than absurdity. Despite the modern-day aesthetic of the setting, Didi and Gogo’s outfits of bowler caps and patch-worked blazers appear to be from another era. Although they are both presented as men, Reskin wears a skirt. In one scene, where Beckett’s “Boy” (Matthew Steen) exits the bar, dressed as a busboy or bartender, their language is too formal for a back alley exchange. If Robinson went so far as to make Lucky francophone, why not change simple pronouns and phrases too?

The greatest example of discord between the production and Beckett’s text is the tree. The tree, the lone symbol of change or new life in the play, fixes prominently in the text. However, as the set only allowed for signs and graffiti, the tree remained a “Willow Tree” sign, its leaves replaced by a green scarf. Unfortunately, it was reduced to a piece of the background rather than being an entity unto itself.

While these few examples may have overwhelmed the view, the overall production, particularly Robinson’s adaptation of the play, couldn’t be more relevant today. Pollock and Beckett created meaning out of the meaninglessness of their era. Robinson’s choice to present these two characters with nothing to do and nowhere to go seems all too pertinent for students in 2012. We must wait, we must sit patiently, we must try to “pass the time” until the answer arrives – if it ever does. Yet don’t be dismayed, as Pozzo says, “The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors.”

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Sources on Twitter said that a third arrest was made, but that the protester was released.

The demonstration began at Parc Laurier at 1 p.m. and was declared illegal from the outset, according to the SPVM. The march eventually met another contingency of protesters at Parc Émilie-Gamelin around 2 p.m.

At the front of the procession, holding a banner, was newly formed group Amnistie Générale, followed by several other community and neighbourhood groups such as the Mile End Assemblée Populaire Autonome du Cartier and Mères en colère et solidaires.

McGill Philosophy Professor Alia Al-Saji was in attendance with her Mile End neighbourhood assembly.

While the demonstration’s Facebook event claimed a partly celebratory nature due to the repealed hike, Al-Saji said she felt that “part of the point is that a lot of what the students and the popular mobilization have been fighting is more than the hike. It’s about wider austerity measures and wider privatization of social services. It is also about a kind of form of democracy and a way of being heard….this manif is to say that democracy isn’t just about staying quiet, and voting, but it’s actually about having your voice heard and organizing at the local level.”

As the march worked its way westward on Ste. Catherine, the SPVM announced over a loudspeaker that the demonstration was illegal and that protesters needed to leave. Upon hearing the announcement, Amnistie Générale immediately disbanded.

Following the announcement, at approximately 2:45 p.m., about 15 other protesters staged a sit-in.

One of the leaders of Amnistie Générale, a student at Cégep Marie-Victorin who wished to remain anonymous, told The Daily that her organization was there to “do some manifestations for the general amnesty of everyone.”

The CEGEP student did not partake in the sit-in because they had “already been arrested four times.”

The sit-in continued until 3:30 p.m., when a squad of SPVM officers arrived to break it up. Moments after their arrival, police officers on bikes chased after one protester who was eventually arrested on University and charged with “mischief on a car.”

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Conceived during a side conversation at the Redpath reserves desk, and born one night in an apartment on Mont Royal, the Alternative University Project has matured into an eighty-plus person initiative, geared toward creating a communal learning environment. The classes are free, taught by anyone wishing to facilitate discussion, and range in topics from “Knitting” to “Studies in Post-Capitalist Futures.”

The project’s organic formation stems from a larger student geist. The strike of McGill non-academic workers’ union, the presence of riot police on McGill’s campus, Concordia’s cuts to student representation on the Board of Governors, and the Quebec students’ long-running protest against tuition hikes: said events have undeniably created a highly political, and frustrated, sentiment on our university campuses.

“[The project] has managed to keep a strong excitement, passion, and just joy for what we’re doing. I’m letting myself feel really angry about what isn’t going on. Something is fundamentally wrong with the current university system and we have created this because we want something else for ourselves,” said Galen Macdonald, a McGill Urban Systems student and one of the co-founders of the project.

Working under a consensus-based model of dialogue, creating the project was as much a lesson as the classes themselves. Anna Pringle, a McGill Cultural Studies student and project co-founder, felt that the creation of the project “was reflective of the learning process itself. We are constantly, creating, changing, reflecting, and transforming. It’s been chaotic, as the project is always in flux.”

With so many professors and students coming out of the woodwork to contribute, fluidity, adaptability, and optimism, as well as an understood level of respect amongst those involved, have fueled the initiative. As Matt May, a McGill Sociology student described, “the underlying factor is the level of respect we have for one another. We negotiate things amongst one another, we all understand we are working towards this together.”

Although it was a student idea, professors are an integral part of the group’s success. Cultural Studies professors such as Ara Osterweil, Alanna Thain, Derek Nystrom, and Ned Schantz are teaching courses on top of their own lectures, with others opting to do single lectures.

With classes being held in cafes, lofts, basements, and spaces in Concordia and McGill buildings, Montreal seems the perfect setting for such an initiative. McGill Cultural Studies student Tim Beeler noted, “Being at McGill, you can go to this school for four years and literally have the most superficial relationship with the community. A university doesn’t have to be a place with gates around it. It doesn’t have to be four years. You bring what you are as an individual. It just happens that we’re here and there is this exciting atmosphere.”

The ethos of this project is the free exchange of ideas. Free in creativity, free in self-expression, and free in cost. Macdonald encapsulated the project with a quote from George Bernard Shaw: “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

An idea a day keeps oppressive learning structures away.

More information about the Alternative University Project can be found at alternativeuniversityproject.tumblr.com.  

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Being the selfish twenty-year-old I am, I’ve always been quite content with this glossed-over version of Colizza family life, of brie in the fridge, of clean sheets. Before break, Mom made sure our creaky New Jersey house looked impeccable, taking the liberty to replace Radiohead posters with Grandma’s tulip paintings.

Yet this new, polished version of 3 Hillside Court felt like a museum of what our house once was. My mother, god bless her, had curated the perfect home in an attempt to not deal with the less-than-perfect present.

“I’m not good with change. I should have never even left Montreal. And now you’re all gone too,” she said sauteing mushrooms, too focused on her words to cry. My parents ended up in New Jersey, wide-eyed and in serious debt.

In typical Canadian fashion, they found Americans close-minded, bereft of good French fries, and self-interested. But with the help of family friends the Thoresons and the Maniscalcos, my parents managed – also in typical Canadian fashion – to make the best of it.

Originally New Yorkers, suburban New Jersey felt like a maze of social protocol for their families. So, along with my family, they wandered together through hockey games, Thanksgivings when they had no one else to spend them with, and parenting in the strip-malled pressure cooker of suburbia. With the help of one another, they adapted, and no one ever knew that we, all 12 of us, didn’t really belong. Parc-Ex, Brooklyn, and Queens only poured out with wine and laughter in our often- cluttered kitchen.

The kitchen was spotless and cold the morning I left to head back to school. Mr. Thoreson had tragically passed away a year earlier, and Mrs. Thoreson hasn’t smiled since. A day prior, the Maniscalcos had told my parents that they had already bought a new house, and were moving in the spring. My mother, much like our house, was creaking and crumbling. The structure that built our house was gone, and the weight of 17 years of memories rested solely on her shoulders.

My mother has taught me many wonderful lessons: to remember where you come from, to appreciate oneself, to saute mushrooms. Yet she never taught me how to accept change, mostly because she herself never has. Some lessons, however, are no longer theirs to teach you. New books, new classes, new friends, old heartbreaks. A new year.

The post My Mama always told me appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The story begins years earlier, with former journalist Pierre Lacerte, and his camera. Lacerte began in journalism writing articles about his world travels for the Montreal daily Le Devoir. He wrote for the other francophone dailies – La Presse and Le Journal de Montréal – and several magazines before retiring. In 2010, he was regarded highly enough to be named a judge for Canada’s National Magazine Awards.

When I sat down with Lacerte recently, he described to me the beginnings of another career. A resident of Hutchinson for 26 years, he has spent the last ten years or so attempting to right the wrongs he perceives in Outremont’s tightly knit Hasidic community. “Over the years I saw an increasing number of these people, and, from 2003, I realized there was something going on that was not appropriate,” Lacerte explained. “I saw that they were doing renovations on weekends, and at night. So I thought, ‘that’s strange,’ and I started taking pictures.”

Lacerte channeled his anger at the Hasidim into a blog (http://accommodementsoutremont.blogspot.com), painstakingly documenting all the “illegal” things his Hasidim neighbours do, photographing people, double-parked cars, and through the windows of synagogues. The writing on his blog is red hot with secularist fervor. “For more than half a century,” reads one post, written in French like the rest of the blog, “the Satmar sect has sacrificed thousands of children on the altar of religious ultraorthodoxy in Quebec.”

In 2007, Lacerte brought prominent Hasidic businessman Michael Rosenberg to the Outremont Council, asking that Rosenberg be kept off a local interfaith committee. Lacerte compiled a “dossier” of photos and documents purporting to show that Rosenberg had been making illegal renovations on a synagogue across the street from Lacerte’s house.

Rosenberg dismisses the charges to this day. They were “some stupid accusations,” he said over the phone. “I didn’t look into it deeply.”

As many in the area know, Rosenberg is a big deal amongst the local Hasidism. He is president of the enormous Rosedev real estate company. You do not mess with him. Lacerte found that out the hard way. Rosenberg sued him for defamation, demanding $375,000, and asked for a restraining order against Lacerte. (The restraining order was denied by a Quebec court in March, while the defamation suit is still pending.)

Soon, Lacerte became a known character around the neighborhood. When the Plateau-Mont-Royal council gave the go-ahead for the Gate David’s expansion in January, it came as no surprise that Lacerte led the charge to gather the signatures needed to spark a referendum.

“I think it’s purely anti-Semitic,” Rosenberg said by phone. “If you look at what Gate David wanted to do, it was not to increase its membership…but just to add some comforts, to modernize it, put some bathrooms on the ground floor for elderly people.”

“He’s just against every synagogue that exists in his neighbrouhood,” Rosenberg added.

Since the referendum period began, Lacerte has been written about in the mainstream Canadian press. Some of the accounts have portrayed him as an anti-Jewish crusader.

In one recent article, the National Post interviewed a local Hasidic woman who survived the Holocaust. She said Lacerte’s campaign against the synagogue felt “like sixty years ago,” and rolled up her sleeve to show the concentration camp number tattooed on her forearm.

However, the fanatical Pierre Lacerte depicted by the National Post – and by himself, on his blog – is nowhere to be found when I meet him at Le Figaro cafe on Hutchinson and Fairmont. He is well-spoken, calm, and has faultlessly good manners. He even smelled nice, like French cologne. When my tape recorder ran out of batteries, he pointed me to the nearest depanneur, and reassured me that he was in no rush, and would wait until I got back.

Lacerte insists that he is “not an anti-Semite.” He goes out of his way to emphasize this fact. He runs through the bullet points of his life and career: he speaks six languages and claims to have visited over 100 countries. He says that cultural difference has always interested him as a journalist. And he likes to emphasize that he has Jewish friends. In September, he wrote an article in Le Devoir about the Jewish Montreal painter Louis Muhlstock, a friend, who died ten years ago. He even “used to date an Israeli girl!” he says from across the table at Le Figaro, smiling.

His secularist ire isn’t targeted exclusively at Hasidism, either – Lacerte also harshly criticizes the “extremist Catholicist” brainwashing of his grandparents’ generation. “With the Revolution Tranquille”– or the Quiet Revolution, a period of intense secularization in Quebec during the 1960s – “we were able to get rid of that, and we certainly don’t want fundamentalism of any religion to rule the secular life – the life of the suburb, the life of the city, the life of the country.”

The reason he keeps up his fight against the Hasidim is “not because they are always coming in and out of the synagogue to pray, but that they do illegal things,” he says.

Indeed, when he’s not declaiming about altars and ultraorthodoxy, Lacerte speaks in the staid, grey language of municipal bylaws and zoning requirements. For him, Hutchinson is residential, and shouldn’t be bombarded with double-parked cars, or Hasidism loading onto loud Greyhound-sized buses headed for weekends in Brooklyn.

But if we are to accept Lacerte’s allegedly legalistic focus, the question remains as to why he has targeted the Hasidism with such vitriol. Many McGill students can attest to the illegally run loft parties in Mile End. Shady poker games are certainly held in bars and cafes behind closed doors. The construction currently lacerating Parc is easily more disruptive than Hasidic school buses. And, either way, aren’t these quaint illegalities and minor disturbances what make Mile End Mile End?

“The best solution is for him to move out,” says Tom Costaris*, who works in a store on Parc, and is married to my cousin. “It’s easier for one person to move than for 20,000 people to move.”

Costaris says the neighbourhood’s demographics settle the dispute in the Hasdim’s favour: “I don’t blame Lacerte. This guy is not anti-Semitic; that word is thrown around way too easily. He just feels they get away with everything without going through the proper channels, which they do. But I’m with the Hasidism, it’s their turf.”

A former resident of Parc-Extension, he concluded, “If you live in a Greek neighborhood and everyone is roasting their lambs in the backyard, you really can’t do much about it, either.”

Roasted lambs and illegal synagogue construction aside, Lacerte’s anti-expansion campaign was due in part to his belief that Outremont and Plateau Mont-Royal officials are corrupt, and work at the beck and call of Hasidic leaders. His blog, which often has a conspiratorial tone, offers detailed “proof” that Hasidic leaders (such as Rosenberg) are in cahoots with Outremont officials past and present. In one instance of Lacerte’s wit, Liberal politician Martin Cauchon became “Martin Kosher.”

“The Outremont government, the Plateau-Mont-Royal, the City of Montreal – all elected people are shutting their mouth, because if you touch these people, you’re considered anti-semitic,” Lacerte tells me.

He describes the Hasidim of Outremont as a flock of misled sheep, who don’t think, and barely vote, for themselves: “They are totally subjected to the leaders of their group. They don’t have the right to read newspapers except for their own, they’re not allowed to watch television. Their only source of information is from their leaders…They’re brainwashed. Poor people.”

In Lacerte’s telling, the memory of the Holocaust is used as a cudgel by Jewish leaders to keep the Hasidic community in constant trepidation. “It’s trauma. But, at the same time, how can you always live only with that and not try and break the cycle?” he said. “The leaders maintain their people with this Holocaust thing, and that everyone in the world always hated Jews since the Egyptians 2,000 years ago. Is that a way to live a life? It’s a good way to be afraid of everybody else, and to make sure that your people will stay inside the room and not get out.”

The notion that Hasidism lead trapped lives is something many Mile End-ers grapple with daily. My mother grew up around Jeanne Mance and Bernard, in a churchgoing Irish family. Her best friend was a Hasidic girl named Rebecca*, whose house my mother had to visit if she wanted to see her, as Rebecca was rarely allowed out of the house. By their early teens, they began to drift apart: my mother continued to do things associated with teenaged years, while Rebecca’s parents looked for potential husbands.

Just walking down the street, you see ample evidence of the cloistered Hasidic lifestyle. The long skirts and stockings that Hasidic women wear seem ludicrously unpractical, not to mention oppressive, on hot summer days. And the clusters in which Hasidim walk to synagogue, heads down, talking to no one else, reinforce the barriers between them and their non-Hasidic neighbours.

Still, as Plateau-Mont Royal residents mulled over the Gate David’s proposed expansion, many in the community rallied around the Hasidim. In a joint attempt to demystify the Hasidic lifestyle and gain local support for the proposed expansion, 37 year-old Mayer Feig opened Gate David to the public two weeks before the June 19 referendum. Despite pamphleting by Lacerte and others, nearly 200 neighbors attended the open house.

One of these neighbours, surprisingly, was another journalist with her own two cents to share. A feminist freelancer of Palestinian descent, Leila Marshy showed up to the open house and, along with her partner Kathryn Harvey and a small group of Hutchinson neighbors, decided to create a group that would soon be named the “Friends of Hutchinson Street.”

I got in touch with Marshy by email. She wrote that she entered the fray because “Pierre Lacerte and his gang were going door to door with their flyers or petitions. Not only did I not understand what the problem was, I just didn’t get involved. I ignored it completely – they just seemed like cranky fanatics. But a week and a half before the June 19 referendum I finally clued in to what was going on, and I just go so offended. I thought somebody has to stand up and it might as well be me.”

In response, Marshy handed out pro-expansion pamphlets. “The referendum was nothing less than a vindictive collective punishment,” she says. Marshy’s efforts did not come without a cost. After the referendum, she felt ostracized by the community, as a couple of her anti-expansion neighbors refused to speak with her and accused her of fomenting conflict and spreading lies.

Not surprisingly, Pierre Lacerte held similar grievances with Marshy. “She and Mayer Feig played on that [their Palestinian-Hasidic friendship] a lot. It’s a strong image,” he said, rolling his eyes.

Feeling like Marshy came out of the blue, Lacerte could not understand why “all of a sudden she decided to fight for them. It’s strange…it’s just strange.” In Lacerte’s mind, conspiracy shrouds Marshy and Feig’s relationship. Marshy explained that Lacerte accused her of being on Feig’s payroll. And the accusations only got weirder after that: “Then he was ‘accusing’ me of caring only because I was Jewish,” she wrote in her email to me, adding, “The very idea of being ‘accused’ of being Jewish is so offensive, as if being Jewish is such a bad thing.” Mayer Feig refused to comment, wanting nothing more to do with the “ill-intentioned” Pierre Lacerte.

With only a Facebook page and two organized activities to date, “Friends of Hutchison Street” has faltered since the referendum. But the acrimony of the referendum period has been given a second life online by the group’s Facebook page. The page, which briefly documents the events leading up the referendum and the need for “friendship and compassion,” has become a shooting gallery of snide remarks and long-winded postings. Lacerte himself posts frequently.

Although Marshy believes the page “is not a space for fighting or petty insults,” she has not been totally immune from the temptations of biting online commentary. In one post, she commented that a photo of Lacerte “captures his smugness perfectly.” Marshy also uploaded a photo of a Hasidic man holding a Quebec flag upside down, saying Lacerte had photoshopped the image to make the man look anti-Quebec. Lacerte shot back with a link to an article from La Presse, in which the photo was originally published. In short, the Facebook battle has dissolved into he-said-she-said inanity.

Despite the remaining tension between residents, Mile End has managed, like so many times before, to recuperate. Molly Tonken, a McGill U2 Arts student who shares a backyard with the Gate David synagogue, said she “loves the neighborhood so much…this may come off as strange, but the Hasidic community gives it character. Children are always outside playing, and there is a strong feeling of safety. It’s a refreshing sense of community.” Tonken’s genuine optimism may stem from her newness to the neighborhood, but perfectly embodies the sort of attitude Mile End and Outremont needs right now – a fresh, even naive, conception of what a neighborhood can be. It’s sad, in a way, that it has taken a newcomer to embrace the pluralism that the neighbourhood could stand for.

The underlying irony of the strife on Hutchison can be found, simply, in the name of Lacerte’s blog: “Accommodements Outremont”). After a summer of referendums, pamphlets, photos, and snide Facebook jabs, Outremont is no more accommodating than it was before. It is uncertain what the future holds for this neighborhood, as young people cruise in, restaurants turn over, and the Hasidic community continues to grow. But the most recent squabble on the “Friends of Hutchison Street” Facebook page may give us a clue:

Friends of Hutchinson Street/ Les Amis de la Rue Hutchinson: “The world population hit seven billion today, now, more than ever, we need to SHARE.”

Pierre Lacerte: “Share? Great idea. What are you planning to start with?”

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The product of those two days, spent recording in Beeler’s woodland house in New Hampshire is the Marches demo (Pt. 1). In an email interview with The Daily, Beeler explained how Isle of Pine “came at a time that I was feeling kind of distant from my songwriting and this really gave me a chance to make music that I was really excited about.” With his mother’s old four-track, “a handmade guitar, a tambourine, [and] a pill bottle,” Beeler’s minimalist setup proved successful.

Once back in New Hampshire for the summer, Beeler continued recording, which lead to his second release, Kettle States. “I would come home from work every day and track something.  Ignoring the obvious limitations of recording to tape, it was a pretty perfect situation – there’s something really organic about recording without too much technological interference.  You’re forced to simplify.  Everything takes on a sort or permanence (for a short while, at least) that a click-and-delete-able computer track doesn’t have… When you don’t have Logic or ProTools right in front of you, you’re sort of forced to embrace the tape hiss and ambient noise as part of the song.  It also roots things in a specific moment” Beeler reflected.

It was these organic, beautifully authentic recordings that lead Isle of Pine – with musical backing by a couple friends – to snag a spot in this year’s POP Montreal Music festival. However, music isn’t Beeler’s only talent. Some of his creative writing has also been published in a few of McGill’s campus media outlets including the McGill Daily and Steps Magazine. Beeler’s poetry is imbued with the same heart-felt honesty as his lyrics, although the two remain artistically separate: “Joni Mitchell once said something about how some artists need different outlets for different emotions.  Lyrics are, in a strange way, pretty separate from poetry for me… I’m almost always more satisfied if I write the words to really match the feeling of the song… Even if that results in a few songs where the lyrics are less than transcendent.  Some of them are just pop songs with heart.” And at the end of the day, what’s POP Montreal without a little heart?

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Reopened in October 2010, Plage Montenegro (formerly Miami, and still called Miami by regulars and older McGillians) is a small dive bar on St. Laurent just north of Roy Street. The choices are few, considering that Boreale Blonde and Rousse are the only beers on tap, but $15 pitchers and $5 pints are prices that are hard to beat. Not a beer drinker? Plage Montenegro is “the only place on St. Laurent you can get a shot of Jameson for $3,” boasted a waitress in an interview with The Daily.

The student appeal is obvious, but Plage Montenegro is by no means exclusively a student bar. The clientele range from middle-aged men arguing in the smoky back room to young Francophone locals playing pool. What separates Montenegro from similarly cheap bars like Biftek or Barfly is its timelessness. Once up the creaky, carpeted stairs, Montenegro feels like a safe-haven from the raucous St. Laurent, and, except for the new blue paint job, Montenegro remains the same Miami it was twenty years ago.

Yet before it became home to sloppy exchanges outside Korova and tragically broken high heels, St. Laurent was a neighborhood street and home to various European immigrant communities. You can catch glimpses of what it must have been like walking down the street fifty years ago, amidst the smell of Portuguese chicken emanating from chimneys and women wearing babushkas waiting for the 55 bus. We want to hear about their lives, assuming they know the true stories of the street. The same goes for the tale of Montenegro, and luckily, the original owner (who wishes to remain anonymous) is still around to tell you the truth, or at least some variation of it.

The old owner appears too clean cut for 2 a.m. at Montenegro. His blue shirt is pressed, as always, and his memory remains particularly acute, especially with regard to dates. “I opened the Dalmatian Restaurant on March 1, 1969,” he explained in a beer-filled interview with The Daily. “There used to be a red carpet, and red curtains, and over where those chairs are, was a kitchen!” It’s hard to picture, yet the Dalmatian Restaurant of the early 1970s was a major social hub for Croatian immigrants. “People came all the way from Toronto and Ottawa for Sunday dinner, even Serbs and Slovaks.” Fumbling through old photos, I glimpse this era of bowties and smiling families gathered around shish kebabs.

The specifics of the bar’s ownership through the years are hazy, and no one knows or is wishing to dispel exactly why Miami was closed and reborn as Montenegro. At one point, the past owner described that Miami was “so fucking dirty. There were more bikes and dogs in here than people.” This image too is hard to imagine, considering the beautifully-furnished photos in my hand. Yet,  St. Laurent is perfect evidence that things do change with time. The name changes from Dalmatian Restaurant to Miami, and Café de Poet to Blizzarts, seem emblematic of the street’s gentrification.

However, unlike other second floor spaces, such as Korova or Tokyo, Montenegro has maintained its…dignity, if you will. The question remains: how? And why? Unlike its neighbors, this precious little blue gem has somehow slipped under the radar. “Well, I think what people like is that it’s simple. It hasn’t changed. And a certain type of person comes here,” noted the waitress. Glancing around, no particular “type” struck my attention. Noticing my confusion, the waitress clarified, “Well, not a type. Just people who want to enjoy other people. People who just want to rela – those types of people.” By that point, the old owner had sunken down in his seat for a nap, and everything suddenly made sense.

The Dalmatian Restauraunt, Miami, Montenegro, and everything in between – this space has served as the closest thing to home for many people over the decades. For newly-immigrated Croatians, Dalmation Restaurant offered the taste of their long-lost cuisine. Every Sunday, people could revisit their distant pasts in familiar company. Like them, we are immigrants too, searching for our place within this strange city. It’s precisely the transient nature of Montenegro that enables it to remain itself. In its own way, it’s a small microcosm of Montreal. Economic and cultural shifts have defined both the city and this establishment. Its essence lies in its simultaneous adaptability despite being the same old place, a port in a storm.

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A Quebec native, Laliberté began his career as a street performer in Quebec City. A short stint in university only solidified Laliberté’s feelings that he belonged in the entertainment business. In 1984, he joined a rag-tag troupe of jugglers and fire-breathers in Baie Saint Paul. It was then that Laliberté convinced the Quebec government to fund a celebratory project for the 450th anniversary of Jacques Cartier’s arrival in Quebec, and the illustrious Cirque de Soleil was born. Now, 27 years later, Laliberte, according to Forbes, has a net worth of 1.5 billion and Cirque de Soleil has 22 shows spread out across the U.S., Europe, Africa, and Asia. This Canadian clown turned billionaire, however, had bigger dreams outside the of circus tent.

Originally inspired by Montreal’s Expo 67 and how one could “travel” from booth to booth to different countries, Guy Laliberte’s dreamt of going on a space mission to take photographs of different countries of the world from space. This $35 million dream took off in 2009 under the tagline of a “Poetic Social Mission.” The series of photographs –taken over an 11-day period in which he orbited earth 176 times going at 28,000 kilometres per hour – makeup Laliberte’s current exhibtion “GAIA,” outside of Place des Arts. Gaia, referring to the ancient Greek earth goddess, seems an appropriate name for the whimsical exhibit. Sounds of bongo drums and children lightly singing in different languages hum from speakers over the bright photos, whose immensity and coloration appear more like abstract paintings from a distance. A small booth surrounded by tourists grabbing at $68 hardcover books sells GAIA merchandise.  The photographs are grippingly beautiful, but can they really be worth the $35 million photoshoot?

All of the proceeds from GAIA, as the promotional posters state, will be given to Laliberte’s One Drop foundation. Throughout his career, Laliberte has supported organizations such as Oxfam, as well as other charities for the homeless. Most recently, his One Drop foundation develops “integrated, innovative projects with an international scope, in which water plays a central role…in generating positive, sustainable effects for local and foreign populations,” as their website states. Yet, without reading the captions, the photographs hardly evoke the sense of urgency that  should be felt regarding the world’s safe water supply.

It was with these questions in mind that I asked an employee of the exhibit about Laliberte’s purpose in his “Poetic Social Mission.”

“Well, people told him after the fact that [the photographs] were so good, so I think he decided afterwards to make ‘GAIA.” Recovering from the initial shock of her answer, I ventured to ask whether she thought such a trip was worth the money he had spent. “I don’t really know what to say,” she responded.

The GAIA employee raised an interesting point, considering that Lalibertés One Drop was founded only two years prior to his trip to space. The only logical conclusion I could come to was that One Drop served a convenient purpose in allowing Laliberte to guiltlessly travel to space. Besides the $35 million, the energy used to travel for 11 days was seriously detrimental to environmental sustainability. Flipping through the opening pages of Laliberté’s book only reinforced my ill feelings. In the book’s four to five page preface, Laliberté only touches on One Drop towards the end. The beginning statements are filled with colorful language describing Laliberté’s thoughts just before taking off. He writes, “Up there, I will be like a private explorer…I will be the artistic producer. I will be like a sponge, a child filled with wonder. I will be the eyes of my children.” Sensationalism is to be expected from the leader of the world’s largest performance circus, but feels out of place when addressing a project solely geared towards awareness of water issues.

Yet, critical reception to Laliberte’s trip seems remarkably positivite. Media outlets have praised it, and during a U2 concert, they skyped live with Laliberté during his journey. He was wearing a red clown nose and a graphic “Poetic Social Mission” tee.

I do not mean to completely denounce Guy Laliberte. I applaud his entrepreneurial achievements and philanthropy, but I cannot help but feel this trip to space had primarily selfish motives, and it can hardly have been an effective way to address the world’s water problems. GAIA, albeit beautiful, satisfies the onlookers’ environmental conscience more than it induces any real change.

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The teams are only given one hour to harvest vegetables from the Edible Campus Garden in front of Burnside Hall. With little more than salt-n-peppa, the teams will prepare a meal to be judged on taste, presentation, portion size, and creativity. Each restaurant is allowed to bring one ingredient that is exemplary of their menu’s signature style. As the saying goes, “simple is best,” especially when working towards greater sustainability.

Despite the competitive nature of Iron Chef, Santropol Roulant’s purpose is, and has always been, to nourish the local Montreal community and encourage eating locally and seasonally. All six contestants, including Lola Rosa Café, McCord Café, The Green Panther, Laloux Restaurant, École Hotelière Calixa Lavalée, and returning champion, Crudessence have  committed to raising $500 for Santropol Roulant’s Urban Agriculture Program. With these donations, Santropol Roulant will greater serve Montreal’s elderly with their “Meals on Wheels” initiative and launch several other greening projects.

So let the games begin! The competition will be followed by a corn boil and musical performance by Valody Klesmer Band. To wash down the whole experience? Beer will be on sale from the McAuslan Brewery.

The Iron Chef competition will be held this Thursday, September 1 outside Burnside Hall at 5:00 p.m.

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Rôtisserie Laurier BBQ was first opened by the LaPorte family in 1936 and existed for three generations before the last son closed the restaurant’s upstairs section and eventually sold the entire space. The Rôtisserie offered hearty roasted chicken, ribs, mashed potatoes, and mac-and-cheese dishes served on paper placemats, with crayons for the kids. As a family-style restaurant, it was central to Outremont’s primarily French and more recently Hasidic neighbourhood of Montreal. Marie Christine Couture, one of the Rôtisserie’s assistants, explained that the restaurant’s clientele had substantially decreased over the years. “Laurier BBQ once had 1,000 customers a day to currently about eighty people a day.” The turh of Couture’s comments was made hauntingly clear as I looked around and saw only a few old ladies scattered through the restaurant’s booths. It seems that the neighbourhood’s distaste for Ramsay’s takeover hasn’t been enough to bring people back to the famous home of their favourite childhood chicken and ribs.

The animosity surrounding Laurier BBQ’s scheduled closure is due in part to Gordon Ramsay himself. A reality TV show tyrant, Ramsay’s takeover is the 44 year-old’s 25th restaurant experiment. Despite his fame, Ramsay’s track record is full of restaurant closings, multi-million dollar bankruptcies, and bad reviews. As one of Portugalia’s Lopes brothers explained, “None of his restaurants make any money. He makes his money while he is there and then he boats!” Then there is also Ramsay’s notorious reputation for home-wrecking and wreaking emotional havoc on his contestants’ lives. Clearly, Ramsay represents a stark contrast to Laurier BBQ’s family-oriented atmosphere and staff of friendly older women.

The shutdown of this Montreal landmark may tell us more about the truths of neighbourhood gentrification than of Ramsay’s new flavour of the week. The Outremont and Mile End communities faced a similar loss earlier this year when diner Nouveau Palais was bought out, leading to an arguably detrimental change in both management and atmosphere. Throughout the past three decades, streets such as Laurier and Bernard have  become home to ritzy restaurants and shops, and with this has come an inevitable corporatization of the Montreal casse-croute. “Family-style” has been replaced by “fancy” in these parts as Laurier BBQ has started to compete with funky Asian fusion restaurants and classy cocktail bars.

This trends of corporatization and gentrification have deepened the meaning of the events at Laurier BBQ for those in the rotisserie business – whether Quebec-style, which Laurier BBQ is famous for, or Portuguese, like Portugalia. Through his daughter’s translation, Melissa Lopes father spoke to me in Portuguese about Ramsay’s takeover. Raising his spice-covered hands, he asked,  “Does he work for the government? I bet he works for the government!” More yelling in Portuguese ensued until Melissa finally explained what her father  meant: “Well, the government keeps complaining about pollution. We have been here since 1993 and all of a sudden all of us need new chimneys. Most Plateau people like the smell and the smoke. It’s part of the neighbourhood…and they are going to let this guy come in and open a restaurant?” Portugalia has further demonstrated their disdain by challenging Ramsay to a cook-off. They have yet to receive a reply.

Despite the chef’s infamous demeanor, the blame cannot solely be placed on Ramsay or the last   LaPorte on sons. Despite the vibrant history and delicious food these famous Montreal institutions still stand for, the loyal clientele has declined. This itself is a result of gentrification, as many of the BBQ’s clientele have moved during the neighborhood’s demographic shifts. However, this fact doesn’t make the heartbreak any easier. Let’s just hope Rôtisserie Laurier BBQ is the last of Ramsay’s Montreal takeovers.

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In an email, members of the gallery’s executive committee explained that, “The Fridge Door Gallery values the dedication and dependability of the loyal artists we have worked with over the years. When we were approached by Aquil Virani, who has been an active artist in the Fridge Door community for the last couple of years, we felt this would be a great way to show our gratitude to such a talented friend of the gallery. It was a brave proposition, but we thought that it would be a great idea.”

They further explained that “Mindfcuk” was an addition to their biannual shows and that the solo show did not detract from the exposure of other artists. “If anything, hosting an event like this demonstrates what sort of venues are available on campus for anyone interested in the visual arts… We are open to any artist that takes the initiative to start something innovative and Aquil happened to be the first,” they revealed. Upon asking Virani about the exhibit’s potential exclusivity, he replied that, “the Fridge Door Gallery is about supporting student artists by an unwritten mandate…I am dedicated, and I have no problem being confident about my commitment to visual art.”

Unlike previous Fridge Door shows, featuring a single artist enables a more cohesive theme and connection between the works. The Fridge Door coordinators explained, “It was really great to be able to host a show where the pieces worked so well together. This is one of the constant struggles we have with the FDG exhibitions – finding a common thread within the pieces in order to put together a cohesive show.”

As the title of the show suggests, “Mindfcuk’s” intention is were to visually trick the viewer, to screw with their head. On first walking into the gallery, two scrolls entitled Eyegasm block the way into the rest of the room. Virani’s brightly-coloured scrolls create a whimsical beginning, forcing the viewer into an interpretative mindset before they have even taken off their coat. In Virani’s words it “punches your mind right in the face.” He describes how at first, Eyegasm looks like a bunch of lines. Maybe an eye. At a step back, you realize that one design is an eye, or a mouth. The two are positioned in a triangular fashion that is repeatable both horizontally and diagonally. If you just tile it, it’s almost like wallpaper in a sense. It worked out really well and I noticed that there are certain features of the eye and the mouth that make them work well together.” His work plays with the assumptions one’s brain makes upon initial viewing and beckons for further contemplation. Eyes flow into mouths, two faces appear on one head, and shoulders become another figure’s neckline.

Eager to promote viewer engagement, Virani offered artist statements next to each piece, detailing his intentions and the tricks and treats each has to offer. The statements made the art accessible but seemed to give away his secrets. Shouldn’t a magician keep his magic to himself? Not according to Virani. He explained how he would rather “engage with the viewer and be extremely transparent and informative so that they can get the art work and really understand the depth and the story behind it, instead of having the viewer confused, unimpressed, disengaged, disinterested because they don’t know enough about it.”

People often find themselves  confused in modern art galleries as to what the works mean. Virani’s current show “Mindfcuk” offers a fresh sense of confusion by making the art extremely accessible, but tricks the mind through his forms and flowing figures. Think, “What does this mean” versus. “Is that what I think it is?”

Despite the fact that it is Fridge Door’s first solo show, “Mindfcuk” paves the way for Fridge Door to highlight other determined artists outside of their usual framework.

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