Penney Clark
University of British Columbia
This is the second in a series of interviews with Canadians who are influential in the way we view Canadian history, its role in the school curriculum, and how it is taught. The first interviewee was Dr. Peter Seixas, who discussed the establishment of the Center for the Study of Historical Consciousness in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia (Spring, 2001).
Mark Starowicz is a prominent defender of Canadian cultural sovereignty and the Executive Producer of the CBC series, Canada: A People's History. I think it is fair to predict that this series will soon have a prominent place in the teaching of Canadian history in secondary schools. I decided, therefore, to interview Mr. Starowicz about the series from his perspective.
Canada: A People's History is a huge success. Canadians are watching it. Accolades are pouring in. You and the CBC recently received the Pierre Berton Award for the series. It has been described as "one of the grandest events in the history of Canadian mass media" (Fulford, National Post, Jan. 16/01). A twofold question: How does it feel to be the executive producer of the most successful series in Canadian history? And has it succeeded beyond your wildest dreams?
Yes, totally. It is very satisfying. As a journalist you usually have a very perishable product. It was a surprise to learn that there is a tremendous hunger for Canadian history and for Canadian stories. It has been argued that people are voting with their feet, that people are not interested in Canadian history. It is an extraordinary anomaly, where Canadian history has as many viewers as hockey or the Olympics. We have learned some pleasantly surprising things about the Canadian viewer. The series has had 2, 000, 000 viewers per episode. We thought it would get about 500 000 viewers. This is across age groups because it involves families, which normally doesn't happen with television any more. This would suggest that a whole lot of verities, such as the one that Canadians find their history boring, are not true after all.
Plus, I think we can draw some conclusions. Certainly, there is a profound streak of wishing to maintain Canadian sovereignty. Our anecdotal database, based on some 2000 e-mails, generally indicates delighted surprise that we have a fairly epic history. One viewer referred to "walking in the footsteps of titans." Canadians have a desire to learn about an epic past. It is a thrill for viewers to find out that it is not the Americans alone who have the great stories such as revolution, civil war, and the taking of the west. I think Benedict Arnold attacking Quebec on New Year's Eve is a powerful yarn. For Canadian people to know about Lewis and Clark and not to know about David Thompson is extraordinary.
For years and years when people watched about Canadian history, the techniques used were limited, slow pans, etc. We spent quite a bit of money trying to give it a widescreen feel. People are tired of living in the shadow of the United States film industry. People were delighted that we weren't second rate. We used the international grammar of the film industry. That is the norm, the way you tell a story in the cinematic age.
You chose a narrative rather than an analytical approach. Why?
There is a reason we tell stories. A hush falls on a room when someone says, "Let me tell you a story," or "Let me give you an example." As Robert Fulford has said, we are hardwired to process and store our information in a chronological sequence of events, in other words, in narrative form. It's got something to do with sitting around the fire in the savanna and listening to stories.
In an interview with journalist, Charlotte Gray, you refer to huge gaps in the historical record, and make the comment that, "I can't get the phrase 'narrative cleansing' out of my mind" (Saturday Night, 7 October, 2000). Can you elaborate on this?
As I was reading through the research on the Seven Years' War, I discovered a story about fire ships being chained together and released into the St. Lawrence River to entangle themselves in British ships. John Knox, a lieutenant at the time, described "a necklace of volcanoes" coming towards the British fleet. I told Romeo Leblanc this story. I said, "How can I not know this?" He said, "I'm the Governor-General and I didn't know that."
The historians, with the exception of Pierre Berton, for whom I have a profound admiration, are not telling the stories. History is essentially an analytical, not a narrative discipline. Narrative historians are a controversial minority. We need good storytellers. It is striking how tremendous the stories are. You don't need to be an expert in television to bring the stories to life. It's like finding gold lying on the beach. No-one has picked it up before. This is crazy. I think of the Salaberry on the battlefield during the War of 1812. Grandsons of officers who fought at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham fought in the 1812 war. This was a mere 49 years after the Treaty of Paris. These are terrific stories. In Quebec, no-one knew the story of David Thompson. No one had read his book. They loved him in Quebec [after viewing his story]. It wasn't political. He was the greatest land geographer of all time, but he died in poverty. It's on the scale of Paul Bunyan. Lots of people in Quebec didn't know about Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia. They didn't know that there were rebels in Upper Canada at the same time as in Lower Canada. It isn't that we discovered things that historians didn't know about. Rather, the stories are not being told.
There were a number of historians who acted as consultants on the series. They represented a range of areas of interest and views about what history is and who makes it. Inevitably, their feedback would conflict at times. What was your bottom line, your vision, the point at which you said, "Beyond this I will no longer compromise?"
We tried to have a broad spectrum of historians; for instance, Jack Granatstein and Veronica Strong-Boag. You couldn't put them in the same elevator, never mind the same panel. The deal was that we would show them everything. They were in on the planning sessions. They read every draft and viewed the rough cuts of the film. We told them that we would take every comment that we could possibly use. However, in the end, we would make the final decision and they were free to criticize the series.
It was not intended to be a great business series, a science series, or an arts series. We made the decision that every episode had to advance the aboriginal story, follow French/English relations, the Canada/ United States dynamic, as well as include the labour, class, and gender, dynamics. The treatment of World War Two is fifty percent on the home front. Some topics were very interesting but didn't fit these objectives. We left out Port Royal because it was just a fur trading post, not a settlement. We were not telling a history of the fur trade, but a history of settlement.
We were always biased in favour of story. But some things had to be told even if they didn't tell a good story. It's hard to tell the story of the Confederation debates. We had a fight to include Joseph Howe because a quiet, unarmed fight for responsible government in Nova Scotia screws up the story. Even if it makes a better film not to have Joseph Howe, it was obvious we had to include him. However, we never really had any "drag it out, beyond this line we will not go," battle.
The series is called, "A People's History," implying a more grassroots approach than a more traditional political history might take. Historian, Jonathan Vance, has said, "it is suffused with the venerable great man theory, the notion that a few remarkable individuals shape the course of history" (National Post, 15 January, 2001). How do you see this as a "people's" history?
That is just rubbish. It is not the great man presentation. Eighty percent of the characters in the series, probably Vance himself has never heard of — farmers, Metis traders, orphans. It is a traditional history in that it follows the norms of current scholarship. It is historian, Donald Creighton's approach, modified by the last twenty-five years of effort by social historians. The series does not take the side of the social historians nor of the Granatsteins. It is not a revolutionary history. What we wanted to make revolutionary, the big secret, the most subversive thing, is that too few people out there know Canadian history. It is an 'emperor has no clothes' kind of thing. That's what I find revolutionary. We weren't trying to score points with an original new chronology. Our skills are to be storytellers.
Historians actually pretty much structured the story for us. They determined, for example, how many minutes would be spent on the Acadian expulsion. We had bar charts on the wall. The series really reflects the consensus of a vast number of historians. Each episode had its own specialists for that period. For instance, Desmond Morton was a consultant for the episode on World War One and Jack Granatstein for World War Two. Others were Ramsay Cook and Jay Castle on the Seven Years' War. Strong-Boag was an overall consultant. There was a regional representation of historians. Gene Allen was the senior historian in our unit of the CBC and director of research. There were about forty to fifty historians in total who were involved in one part of the series or another.
I think you took great pleasure in the inclusion of small details that you thought might come as a surprise to people; for example the fact that William McDougall, newly appointed Lieutenant-Governor of the Northwest Territories, brought his own custom-made toilet seat from Ontario.
Yes, we did take great pleasure in this. This is a traditional journalistic device. It is the style of modern magazine writing. Rather than state something abstract about the person being fastidious, it is better to give a concrete example. It is far more interesting. It is also very visual. People miss the point about films. They think when we say visual we mean only the picture. The picture is only the "cradle for the words." Rick Burns, Ken Burns' [maker of the PBS civil war series] brother, used that phrase. A well written script is essential because "visual" is usually attained in the writing.
There are certain omissions that one might not expect to find in a "people's history." For instance, Laura Secord is not mentioned during the segment on the War of 1812. That must have been a very deliberate omission. Why?
I raised that with the director. He said that she got herself into history by spending the rest of her life petitioning the governor for a pension. He preferred to go for less known stories. Also, he would have had to derail his trajectory in describing the Battle of Lundy's Lane, and thereby include Laura Secord. When you do one of these two hours you follow certain characters. To pick up a character like Laura Secord for two or three minutes would be bad documentary structure. We would have had to pick her up earlier and she would have to be representative of other things, such as status of women, farming, or something. That particular episode picks up the Bowmans, and picks up Butler's Rangers later, etc. The technique involves seeing the story through the same characters. That episode had dramatic structure. It followed dramatic arcs. We didn't want to have a gridlock of stories. It is exciting for the viewer when a character returns. You have the code built into you. Why do you think everyone finds it poignant when David Thompson died poor? Narrative doesn't means just telling a story, but telling a story according to standards that the human soul finds compelling, such as love and hate. It goes back to Aristotle. It is linked to the human spirit. That's why people weren't conflicted about the Plains of Abraham. You are watching it as a human story, rooting for the Acadian kid. The viewer is sympathetic to soldiers on both sides. The French title means an "everyman's history." Some thought 'People's History" had a Marxist tinge.
Robert Fulford, writing in the National Post, once said that it was "as if all those people lived through four centuries or so without once cracking a joke" (16 January, 2001). Fair comment?
Did he say that? Actually Robert has been very supportive of the series. He wrote in Toronto Life, an article that I think pretty much set the tone for other critics.
One of the major strengths I see in the series is the use of actors who are actually speaking the recorded words of the historical figures they are portraying. This must have taken a great deal of research. Can you speak about the decision to present information in this manner?
I knew it would work. It is a documentary series under the journalistic policy that every word has to have been said. If you are to have that Ripley's Believe it or Not effect, you have to be absolutely clean. You can't allow yourself any exaggeration. The series doesn't try to manipulate your emotions too much. This is part of the contradictory effect. The mind recoils and says that can't be true. The story seems larger than life, but the viewer knows that every single person lived. Every single word was written or spoken by them.
What kind of effect would you like Canada: A People's History to have on the teaching of Canadian history in high school classrooms?
Use of stories. I think people don't have a paradigm for Canadian history. Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, has given Australians their paradigm. The paradigm for Canadian history is that we are all refugees and involved in a society that has little tolerance for class and a society that is insistent on the same rules for everyone. Canada is renowned internationally for its tolerance. Ninety-five percent of us have the same story. People came here because of the tolerance of diversity and a desire to improve their lot. We are really the debris of war and famine, but I mean it in the best sense of the word. This is a unifying paradigm. As far as European and Asian settlement goes, it is a useful teaching tool. Once you find the common denominator of everyone in the class, you can engage them.
I think school textbooks are boring. I see textbooks because I help my daughters with their homework. There is no relation between the series and their homework. You can't blame the textbooks entirely. The grammar of this age is at least fifty percent visual. Movies are the principal distribution of fiction. We haven't succeeded in converting our intellectual assets to this intellectual grammar. It is the way people take in information now. Schools should take advantage of this.
I believe you emigrated with your parents from England to Argentina, then to Montreal when you were seven. Did you enjoy learning about Canadian history when you were in school?
Oh, God, yes.