Podcasts

Kim Thúy [00:00:01] Welcome to Artifactuality, a new podcast series from the Canadian Museum of History that imagines what might go into a museum of the future. My name is Kim Thúy, and I’ll be your host on this series. 

[00:00:18] I’m a writer with a passion for storytelling and for history, not just the kind captured in textbooks, but in the voices of the people who actually lived it. And that’s what this podcast is all about.  

[00:00:35] Hear about Black hockey players who made their mark on the ice long before the NHL even existed.

Percy Paris [00:00:42] And for those of us of African descent, we look for heroes that look like us.

Kim Thúy [00:00:47] And find out what inspired one of the world’s most famous industrial designers to add a human touch to everything he makes.

Karim Rashid [00:00:58] And I loved plastic, and I loved soft things, and they just seemed so human to me.

Kim Thúy [00:01:05] We’ll explore how archaeology and Indigenous storytelling can work together to better understand the past.

Kent Ayoungman [00:01:14] Some will talk about it this way, and then another person will talk about it. When you put them all together, it’s the same story.

Kim Thúy [00:01:21] And Hearts of Freedom, a collection of oral histories from what was the largest refugee resettlement in Canada since World War II.

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:01:31] We had no information about what life would be like in Canada, except for the fact that it was cold.

Kim Thúy [00:01:38] And a feature interview with pop star, Mitsou. 

Mitsou Gélinas [00:01:42] So I knew quite young that I wanted to be a performer.  

Kim Thúy [00:01:47] She talks about being a groundbreaking female performer at a time when the music industry did not know what to do with a woman like her.  

[00:01:56] Fascinating people and their stories on Artifactuality, a podcast from the Canadian Museum of History. Download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 

Kim Thúy [00:00:02] Imagine a museum of the future … made up entirely of the stories we tell each other. Not the history that is captured in textbooks, but in the voices of the people who lived it. Which stories would resonate with you? Which ones do you think will last? And which will go on to shape how we live our lives, now and in the future? 

[00:00:31] Welcome to Artifactuality … a podcast series featuring remarkable stories generously shared with the Canadian Museum of History. I’m your host, Kim Thúy. 

[00:00:45] On this episode of Artifactuality: The Meaning of Mitsou.  

Mitsou [00:00:51] In Quebec, we have an expression which says, “We were not born to do little things.”  

[SFX: “BYE BYE MON COWBOY”] 

Kim Thúy [00:00:59] French-Canadian singer, Mitsou Gélinas, was only 17 years old when her breakout single Bye bye mon cowboy took the airwaves by storm in 1988. 

[SFX: “BYE BYE MON COWBOY”] 

[00:01:30] It is rare for a French song to top the charts in English Canada. But it was a perfect pop confection in the age of Madonna.  

Mitsou [00:01:40] I have to say that I’m pretty proud to say that I was one of the only French Quebecers who had a hit in the ROC, in the rest of Canada, as we would say it, with English Canadians. And one of the main things is that the song was so playful. It was very original. The sound was amazing. You know, there was a mix of pop with the guitar which made it very European, but at the same time, it was rock. And the lyrics. What’d you want me to tell you, you know? There’s “bye bye” and there’s “cowboy.” So every Canadian can understand those words, of course. 

Kim Thúy [00:02:27] In the video for the hit song, Mitsou wore blonde braids, a bolero hat, and a mini skirt — a very little mini skirt. It was playful and provocative and the video was seared into our pop cultural memory. It’s also one of Mitsou’s many iconic costumes, now in the Canadian Museum of History’s collection. The costumes don’t just preserve a moment in pop music history. They tell the story of what it was like to be young and female and in the public eye back then. And how a girl from Montréal became a global superstar … by pulling together a look she found in her own closet. 

Mitsou [00:03:14] I think I expressed a lot of independence and confidence because even though I was very young when I did that first song, I groomed it in my soul for all my life. And then right before doing the first pictures and the first video for Bye bye, we went into my closet and I got a jacket that I already had, that I loved — a black, short jacket. It was in fashion and style at the time. I had a bra, of course. Bustiers were in fashion as well, at the time. And I had a tiny, tiny skirt, which was almost like a belt, but every teenager, you know, would wear that. And the only thing that I bought for the look was the hat, at a hat store, Henri Henri on St. Catherine’s Street, right beside the Les Foufounes Électriques club. So it was the only expense I had for that look. If not, for the boots, I borrowed them from my mom, who kept a few clothes from the ‘60s. And she kept those boots, I don’t know why. But they were the coolest and there was nothing like that on the market at the time. ‘Cause they were not high heels. They were knee high but not high heels. Very ‘60s-like. And with, you know, the mix of all of these clothes, it was a perfect match. 

Kim Thúy [00:04:50] It’s not every teenager that can just reach into her own closet to find a perfectly formed pop music personality. But it helped that Mitsou Gélinas was raised in a free-thinking, theatrical environment — where performing ran in the family. 

Mitsou [00:05:08] My grandfather, Gratien Gélinas, was a famous playwright and an actor, then my father was an actor too. He passed away, unfortunately, in 2022. And my mom, at the time, had done cabaret dance as a young artist, and she became an artist manager at one point too. So I have to say that I was born in that type of environment. So I knew quite young that I wanted to be, you know, a performer, and I started writing my own songs when I was four and a half or five years old. So I felt like I was ripe and ready at 17, to do something. Of course, you’re never ready … I was not ready for everything that I had to live, but I’m pretty happy with what happened still. 

Kim Thúy [00:06:06] Even as a teenager, Mitsou had a very strong sense of who she was and what she wanted to say. And she didn’t have to look too far for inspiration — not just with her sound, but also with her look.  

Mitsou [00:06:25] In the ‘80s — 1980, that is — the only person, the only reference I had for design, was a very good friend of mine, a designer, whose name was Andy Thê-Anh. He was, like, maybe 17 and I was 15 or 16. And we worked together at Le Château, okay? So, our friendship started like that, but he was also a fashion student at Collège LaSalle. So, I asked him — before I released Bye bye — but I asked him to make a dress for me for my graduation. And then when I had a song and then an album to do, I thought of him to start creating looks for me. And so he did.  

Kim Thúy [00:07:14] Before becoming the head designer for some of Canada’s biggest retailers, like Laura and Reitmans, Andy Thê-Anh was just another Montréal teenager like Mitsou with vision and talent to burn. Andy helped create the iconic costume on the cover of El Mundo, the album featuring Bye bye mon cowboy. Mitsou’s red mini-dress is hemmed with yellow ribbon and the sleeves are three-quarter-length purple satin. The bodice is covered with colourful fruit, and the look is finished off with a bird perched on the top of her head.   

Mitsou [00:07:53] It was such a mishmash of every idea that we’ve had for the last few months. So I used to go on Mount Royal Street and buy some material. You know, the coolest and most colourful material. And Thierry Mugler was starting to be very successful, and so we were inspired by him. I wanted an extremely short dress, which I couldn’t even wear on stage or live because it was just so short. And I had bought at the Dollar Store tons of fruits and birds, fake birds, that we placed on the dress as well and in my hair. And I loved the mix of colour. Like, I think it’s Yves Saint Laurent that said red and pink work together. Well, to me, red, pink, purple and yellow worked really well together. And I think it still does. 

Kim Thúy [00:09:02] The album El Mundo, featuring that unforgettable single, was a massive hit — not just in Canada, but around the world. And Mitsou’s life would never be the same.  

Mitsou [00:09:17] Bye bye was such a hit. And it didn’t take long. I would say three weeks, my life had changed. Not completely, because I don’t think … You know, you stay the same. But at the same time, you know, my surroundings changed a lot. I had that vision, I knew that I wanted to be successful and make my mark. But I, I didn’t know it would be so quick. So the first time I heard the song, it was on C’est Quoi, the most famous radio station at the time. But then MusiquePlus, which was MuchMusic in French, took it on and then it wasn’t long before people knew my name. They didn’t know who I was. They didn’t know if I was French from France. Because the sound was pretty different from the other singers at the time. 

[00:10:13] And the video was quite special, too, because we shot it in Super 8. You know, the film had a lot of grain on it. It looked like a ’60s, you know, genre of video. I was very inspired by the Smiths’ video How Soon is Now?, which had the same type of feel to it. And it was quite easy to do that video. We just borrowed a photographer’s studio. A friend of ours blew up some immense balloons where we projected some cowboy images and had the band over, and that was pretty much it. And it cost $1,800 to make that video.  

[00:10:59] And then, a few months later, we were picked up by an international record company and they made us do, like, an English version of Bye bye. They had a remix done by Shep Pettibone, who remixed Madonna’s songs. And then they asked a famous movie and advertisement director — he was doing at the time, the Black Label Beer commercials, which were so edgy and cool — so they asked him to do the video in New York. So we did a magical video, which cost $100,000 instead of $1,800. And it never had the same type of success that the first video had, and the first version of the song had, so, which proves that sometimes people want, you know, the real thing. 

Kim Thúy [00:12:00] So what accounted for Bye bye mon cowboy’s success beyond the fact that the song was just so catchy? Mitsou has a few theories herself.  

Mitsou [00:12:13] There were not enough artists who represented my generation. There was the ‘70s, and the rockers, early ‘80s. Everything was so folk, traditional music, rock music, but I didn’t have, I couldn’t look up, apart from Jean Leloup, Paparazzi, maybe, a band from Québec City. 

[00:12:37] But I couldn’t look up to Quebec artists who sounded like what I was listening to at the time, which came from Europe or from the States. And I felt like I had to create something. That was kind of a mission that I had, and I think I did. I think I was able, you know, at the right time to reach out, and to create something that would be successful, and that would sound like us. 

[00:13:11] In Quebec, we have an expression which says we were not born to do little things, and I think that in Quebec, there is a force of creativity that we’ve proven over the years. But at the time Le Cirque du Soleil was just starting, and I had the chance of working close to them, because my sister was an acrobat in Le Cirque du Soleil in its earliest stages. 

[00:13:45] And Céline Dion was not the Céline that we know now, and our film industry was not what it is now. And our greatest directors, Jean-Marc Vallée and Denis Villeneuve were not known. We didn’t have anyone, any person who represented us internationally, almost. Like, Robert Lepage was just starting as well. But there was something happening at the time where people started believing that we could do something.  

Kim Thúy [00:14:24] After the roaring success of Bye bye mon cowboy came another hit single, Dis-moi, dis-moi, and a chance to push the envelope yet again with a new video.  

[SFX: “DIS-MOI, DIS-MOI”] 

Mitsou [00:14:36] We had decided to do a pretty, people would call it, like, a racy video. We used naked bodies as artworks. And to me, it’s my favorite video of my whole career. And it was well received in Quebec and not that well received in the rest of Canada. 

Kim Thúy [00:15:37] The video for Dis-moi, dis-moi hit number one on MusiquePlus, in Quebec, but was banned by MuchMusic in English Canada for showing male and female nudity. At the time Mitsou defended her video calling it quote “a museum of the human body,” and that the naked men represented Greek statues. The controversy only helped her career, giving her the chance to break through in the United States and to work with a new upcoming artist who was just starting to make waves of his own…. 

Mitsou [00:16:21] When I was discovered — quote-unquote — by Hollywood Records with Dis-moi, dis-moi, we produced an EP with Jimmy Harry who was a record producer in New York whose first hit was RuPaul’s Supermodel, which was so big in the early ‘90s.  

[00:16:44] So at one point we’re working together, Jimmy Harry and I, and he’s like, “Okay, so, uh, I’ve talked to RuPaul and he might have a song for you.” And I’m, like, “What?! This is impossible. I cannot believe it.” And so I received the song and I loved it the first time I heard it. And then I went back to New York to sing it. And, RuPaul was nice enough to come in studio with me and to be there while I was doing it. 

[00:17:16] And I remember that day. I was thinking, “Okay, so RuPaul is coming. What am I going to wear?” Because of course I thought that a drag queen was always a drag queen in real life. But RuPaul is a fantastic artist, very sensitive, who came to the studio not wanting to take the limelight, and he came with jeans, a t-shirt, and a baseball cap, and no makeup. And RuPaul was just the coolest person in the universe. And me having also that kind of persona where, you know, I was known for my costumes and my extravagance. When I saw RuPaul come in and be so simple about the way he would present himself, I thought, “Oh, can I do that? Yeah, maybe I could.” And it kind of changed the way that I would go about all these costumes and the mix between my public life and my private life. I don’t have to be as dressed up in my private life. It took a lot of pressure off me.  

Kim Thúy [00:18:41] But not for long. Mitsou’s time in Los Angeles was marked by big highs and big lows. She was signed by Hollywood Records, which spent a half million dollars producing her next album. She worked with songwriters who made hits for David Bowie and Whitney Houston. She took dance lessons from Paula Abdul’s teacher. But when it came time to release the album, the company’s marketing budget had drastically shrunk. It was more economical to actually shelve the album than it was to release it. Mitsou was devastated.  

Mitsou [00:19:22] And it was so painful. I was heartbroken for years, yeah. My confidence went down the drain. And I continued singing, continued having a few hits, but at the same time, life had changed. Music had changed too, because we were in the early ’90s and the grunge music was at its highest and I was no Nirvana, you know? I was no … I think that the kids who liked me when they were very young needed a change, you know, and had evolved. And I wasn’t able to do something that would connect as well.  

[00:20:12] So slowly but surely, my career started, you know, not going that well. And at one point I had to re-imagine my future because I was like, okay, you’ve done your last-chance Christmas album to make money. You’ve promoted things like car races — car races! Me, Mitsou, promoting, like, big truck races. I was doing things for money that were not in accord with the person I was. At one point I couldn’t pay my rent anymore after having been such a known figure in the industry.  

Kim Thúy [00:20:59] While her singing career stalled, her music career did not. With her then boyfriend, and now husband, Iohann Martin, she started a music studio called Dazmo, producing songs for commercials, TV series, and soundtracks. 

Mitsou [00:21:18] And I remember my grandmother, who was so proud. I loved her and she was so proud of me and being able to see me on TV. And, you know, she was used to seeing me every week on TV somewhere. Any appearance, there would always be something. And at one point she couldn’t see me anymore. And she was like, “So are you on welfare?” And I was like, “No, not really. You know, I’m starting this new company and we’ll see. But I think it’s going to work out.”  

[00:21:56] But at the same time, how can you know as an entrepreneur if things are going to work out? And nobody knows, you know. I don’t know what I’m going to be doing next. But I remember at the time, in the in-between time where I couldn’t pay my rent, I couldn’t pay my food, and I was, you know, at 25, 26 years old, going to eat at my mom’s because she had food and I didn’t. So the thing that saved me, I think, is that I’m a hard worker. I was used to working hard all the time, and I never, ever, ever, ever counted my hours. And I worked for seven days a week for years. And I still do.  

Kim Thúy [00:22:50] All that hard work really paid off because in the end, things for Mitsou more than worked out. She and her husband started up two more music ventures, a soundtrack and licensing company, to add to her CV, along with actress, magazine editor, and long-time radio host.  

Mitsou [00:23:13] Yeah, it’s funny, not [many] 24 or 25-year-olds have a second career. But it’s also weird to say that you were a has-been when you were 25, which I was, and thankfully I didn’t believe in it that much. I can say it took like eight years to get back on my feet and for people to say like, “Wow, you know, she’s done good for herself and she reinvented herself.” But there was a good time lapse where people didn’t know, not what I was up to, but if it was going to work out. I’m happy to be still here and to still be relevant in a way.  

Kim Thúy [00:23:55] More recently, Mitsou received an opportunity that brought her story full circle and introduced her talents to yet another generation of fans.  

Mitsou [00:24:06] So I have teenagers at home and, at one point, I decide to end my radio career after 21 years. And I get a phone call a few weeks before I announce to the public that I was leaving. And it’s Canada’s Drag Race, which calls me to ask if I would be nice enough to participate in one of the shows. And I’m, like, “Oh, my God, this is so cool,” because it’s such a cool mix where I can reunite with the extravagance. I can connect with someone who did well for himself. So I get home and I tell my kids that I got the proposal. And my kids started screaming ‘cause they didn’t realize that RuPaul had a connection with me … I would talk about it sometimes, but they would forget. 

[00:25:04] You know, I remember one day, Stella is in the kitchen and she’s singing Everybody Say Love. And I’m, like, “Oh, yeah, you’re singing Mommy’s song, and I’m so proud.” And she’s, like, “No. I’m singing RuPaul.” And I’m, like, “But do you know he gave that song to me?” And she’s, like, “No, it’s not true and I don’t believe you.” And I say, “Yeah, yeah. I was the first one to sing that song first, or that line,” ‘cause RuPaul used it in many ways over the years. So it’s just fun to see that you can be everyone’s idol but never your kids’. That’s why they won’t get my clothes.  

Kim Thúy [00:25:53] Even when others dismissed her as a superficial pop act, Mitsou knew what she was doing all along. Since the beginning of her career, she’s been challenging the old idea that a woman can’t be playful and taken seriously at the same time. Her sexy, clever costumes aren’t just fun to look at and reminisce over — they showcase a history of intimate collaboration between creative people. And they represent a career based on female resilience and constant reinvention.  

CREDITS: 

Kim Thúy: Thanks for listening to Artifactuality, a podcast of the Canadian Museum of History. I am Kim Thúy.  

Artifactuality is produced by Makwa Creative and Antica Productions. Tanya Talaga and Jordan Huffman are the Executive Producers at Makwa. Lisa Gabriele is the Producer, Andrea Varsany is the Associate Producer, and Sophie Dummett is the Researcher for Antica. Laura Regehr and Stuart Coxe are Executive Producers at Antica. Mixing and sound design by Alain Derbez. 

Jenny Ellison and Robyn Jeffrey of the Canadian Museum of History are the Executive Producers of this podcast.   

The interview with Mitsou was conducted by Jenny Ellison.  

Daniel Neill, Researcher, Sport and Leisure, is the Museum’s Podcast Coordinator.  

Check out historymuseum.ca for more stories, articles and exhibitions from the Museum. 

For more information on popular music in the Museum’s collection that includes Mitsou’s iconic costumes, check out the links in our show notes.  

Kim Thúy [00:00:02] Imagine a museum of the future … made up entirely of the stories we tell each other. Not the history that is captured in textbooks, but in the voices of the people who lived it. Which stories would resonate with you? Which ones do you think will last? And which will go on to shape how we live our lives, now and in the future? 

[00:00:31] Welcome to Artifactuality … a podcast series featuring remarkable stories generously shared with the Canadian Museum of History. I’m your host, Kim Thúy. 

[SFX: HOCKEY GAME] 

[00:00:47] On this episode of Artifactuality: Breaking Ice. 

Percy Paris [00:00:52] For those of us of African descent, we look for heroes that look like us.  

Kim Thúy [00:01:00] The sound of hockey is considered by many to be the sound of Canada itself … blades carving the ice, athletes slamming the boards, the cheering crowds… 

[00:01:18] And while the NHL is often the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about hockey, it is a league that has been dominated by white men. Willie O’Ree, the NHL’s first Black player, made history when he joined the Boston Bruins. But that didn’t happen until 1958. 

[00:01:44] Willie came from a long tradition of Black hockey players in Eastern Canada, the birthplace of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes. It was started in 1895, way before the NHL.  

[00:02:00] At its height. The CHLM consisted of more than 12 teams, scattered across the maritime provinces, with hundreds of players. Hockey rinks might not have explicitly stated “white players only,” but Black players rarely enjoyed prime ice time, so its seasons were short.  

[00:02:26] Nonetheless, the league created its own roster of stars: Henry “Braces” Franklyn, the goalie known for slamming his body down onto the ice to stop a puck; Eddie Martin, credited by some as a pioneer of the slap shot; Herbert W. Allison, Gus Adams, James E. Dixon…the list is long. 

[00:02:55] Then there was the legendary Frank Cooke who played for the Amherst Royals. His own story went mostly untold until his granddaughter, Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu, started doing some digging of her own. She’s the former Executive Director of CANSA, the Cumberland African Nova Scotian Association, and founder of COOKE SUMBU Consulting. Elizabeth spoke to the Museum about memories of her grandfather, and about life for Black people in Nova Scotia, then and now.  

Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu [00:03:31] My name is Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu, and I’m an eighth-generation African Nova Scotian. My family arrived here on the shores in 1783 with the other enslaved persons. And on the other side, my family came from Prince Edward Island, also arriving as enslaved persons. So there’s quite a history to our family and how we got here. And we’ve been able to trace a lot of that history.  

[00:04:01] My grandfather was, I guess, really well known in the community. He loved to dance. He loved to dress up. During the war years, he was in the Second World War. He was a drummer. So we do have pictures of him in front of his trucks and playing his drums in the Army and things like that, plus a portrait picture of him that I had found here in my home years ago. Someone had kind of tucked it away, but we found it. But we don’t have a lot of keepsakes from those days. 

Kim Thúy [00:04:33] Even though he was one of the stars of the Colored Hockey League, Frank Cooke was so modest, Elizabeth didn’t know about her grandfather’s achievements on the ice until much later in her life.  

Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu [00:04:46] Once the Colored Hockey League was brought to my attention, I reached out to my brother, who had been a hockey player, and he said that our grandfather never really talked about it. We knew that he had played, but to know what position or whether he liked it or didn’t like it, very little was said about that. So, to have heard stories other than the fact that my grandfather was very quick on his feet, very fast and liked to laugh and joke around … other than that, I have no knowledge of his skating abilities or his habits around hockey or what he actually thought about it.  

Kim Thúy [00:05:28] It’s important to note that the founders of the Colored Hockey League weren’t athletes or even players. Black Baptist church leaders and Black intellectuals created the league as a way to get more boys to attend Sunday Service. The promise of hockey games after church was irresistible, and the league became so popular it quickly branched out to the rest of the Maritime provinces.  

Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu [00:05:57] The league wasn’t just for Nova Scotia. There was a league in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI, and they would do the circuit and play against each other. And we did see newspaper clippings that talked about what a great and exciting game that was at an arena in Moncton, for example, and how entertaining the hockey players were during the intermission, where they would come out and do twirls and act like clowns and do things to entertain the crowd. So that was part of that whole hockey experience. Not only were they all Black, but they were performers.  

[00:06:35] So when we think about it today, when I think about it today, to come home and talk about the fact that we were part of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes, it was more of an undertone of, you know, racism at its best. Stay quiet in our corner and just make it happen. Because when we look back at the history here in our community, our hockey players were playing on the marshlands and playing on the hill and other flooded areas in town during the winter months. It wasn’t until 1903 that the Colored Hockey League Amherst Royals were allowed to play on an indoor arena, rink. 1903. Can you imagine? 

Kim Thúy [00:07:23] This was the kind of racism Black people in Nova Scotia dealt with on and off the ice.  

Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu [00:07:31] In our particular community we weren’t unique. We had places where we could go and could not go. You didn’t go to the restaurants. If you went to the theatre, there was a section where you usually had to sit. We had our own Black church. Our schools up here were not segregated, they were mixed. All during my parents’ era and prior to that, there were certain areas where you had to live. There were certain areas where you were buried. We have several graveyards here in our community where the Blacks were all buried at the back.  

Kim Thúy [00:08:05] And the reverberating effects of racism linger today in Nova Scotia, home to one of Canada’s oldest Black populations. 

Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu [00:08:15] Today in the community we live and in the province that we live in, they are working very hard to make changes. We’re starting to understand what “trauma-informed” means in our society when we’re talking about Black people and what we’ve been carrying all these years, and how it’s played out in our lives today and how we’re living.  

[00:08:37] You know, I grew up in a home where my family would tell us, “You keep your place,” you know, “don’t say anything rude to the white man. He’s been good to you.” You know, when you grow up like that and you’re polite to people now, but when you reach my age and you look back and you think, like, “what was that all about?” You can teach people to be respectful, but did you have to throw the race card in there? You know … so there’s a lot that we still have to do. Our community is quite divided on where they are.  

[00:09:06] But in terms of racism, whether they want to embrace the new movement with Black Lives Matter and unpack your white privilege, they … some of them are still uncertain whether they want to say certain words or not. So we struggle, we’re in a small community and um, you know, we have some Black leaders now which has made a real difference in our community. And it’s not all song and dance, like, we have other abilities. We have doctors, we have lawyers, we have dentists, we have people in this community who have risen above. 

[00:09:40] But racism is alive and well in Nova Scotia. We feel we’re distinct here. We came as a certain group of people at a certain time in history. And we’ve had to fight for everything we’ve had. People like to say, well, you know, get over it. It’s like you’re getting an education now. You’ve got this, you’ve got that. Well, we’d love to get over it, but until you can acknowledge the past and accept it, nobody’s saying you have to take the blame or hold the blame. But those are the things that we struggle with in our community to try to move forward. So, we’re making a few inroads and there’s many of us who are working very hard on the front lines and, we shall overcome.  

Kim Thúy [00:10:22] By the late 1930s, the league was no more … for many reasons, including the impact of the Depression and the Second World War. Elizabeth’s own grandfather, Frank Cooke, died in a veteran’s hospital in 1967 of tuberculosis, a recurrence of a disease he caught when he served in the First World War. But then came the ’70s, and a new generation of Black hockey players reemerges on the scene.  

Percy Paris [00:10:57] I got into sport because it was a natural progression from the time I was born. My father was quite an athlete, so it was only natural for his children — at least the male siblings of the family — to follow in his footsteps. 

Kim Thúy [00:11:18] This is Percy Paris. He’s an eighth-generation African Nova Scotian, and a prominent politician and activist. He was part of the first all-Black line in Canadian university hockey back in the ’70s. By then, the CHLM had long disbanded. Black kids were still playing hockey, but not in any kind of organized way. For Percy, the love of the game was ignited by the natural environment around him and family tradition. 

Percy Paris [00:11:54] So shortly after learning to walk, our father had us out playing catch and skating on the ponds. And the next step was to put on a pair of skates. Though it was as natural for us, because it was introduced early in our lives, to be to be competitive, to be athletic, and to participate. 

[00:12:20] My role model as a kid was and remained my father, who was a gifted athlete in his own right. And not only was he a gifted athlete, but he was a gentleman very well versed in language and was a great speaker, very active politically, very well respected in society, period. So he was my role model and I would say my hero. He made sure that we were all — and always — involved in sport. And back in those days, it was hockey in the winter and baseball in the summer. And even though hockey was an expensive game to play, one of the benefits I had is that I wasn’t the oldest, so I always had some second-hand equipment that was passed down through the ages. And I also had friends that were eager and keen to pass on hockey equipment.  

Kim Thúy [00:13:31] The age-old tradition of equipment swaps and hand-me-downs skates has allowed many players to participate in a sport that can sometimes be prohibitively expensive. And back then, Percy and his friends found clever ways to get as much ice time as possible.  

Percy Paris [00:13:50] The number one thing that happened in my life when it came to hockey was being a rink rat. So I became a rink rat. My older brother was a rink rat. There were other people in the area that were rink rats. That meant that you could get into the games for nothing. That you could get free ice time, that you could have scrimmages on the ice with the other rink rats. It meant so much that you could collect equipment that people would either leave behind or forget about. So, it opened up a whole new avenue for a lot of us when it came to playing hockey in the minor leagues. 

[00:14:35] If somebody tossed away a pair of gloves, the rink rats we had a locker that these gloves would go in and it was a community locker. So anybody that needed a pair of gloves for a hockey game would go in a locker, search for a pair. But you put them back afterwards because it was shared by all the rink rats. And some of the older rink rats would utilize that locker for other kids that they knew needed whatever the case may be. 

[00:15:04] There was a locker for skates. People would discard skates because now their sons are too big for them and they needed a bigger size. So instead of throwing them to the dump or in the trash, they would donate them to this community bin. So there were ways to work around it. 

[00:15:24] And watching a hockey game, if you were at a senior game and there was a huge competition, if one of the players broke a stick, the competition was who’s going to get that stick first? Because can that stick be repaired and can it be utilized somewhere else? So we had that going for us.  

[00:15:45] But also, I can’t eliminate the fact that back in the ’50s and the ’60s, is, we loved Pond Hockey. Pond Hockey was like … you had free range kids. You had all these kids on the pond and sometimes there would only be one puck. And so that’s where you learned the agility, and the stick handling, and you develop skills when you get all of these kids fighting over one puck. We would play “Keep Away.” And sometimes if there were enough kids, we’d have two, two teams and we played against one another. So Pond Hockey had a huge impact on the development of kids’ hockey back then. 

Kim Thúy [00:16:31] If Percy and his friends weren’t hanging around rinks or carving up ponds, they were gathering around radios, listening to games, or flipping through magazines for any news of their favourite players.  

Percy Paris [00:16:45] We grew up in a household where we looked at Sports Illustrated, we looked at the Hockey News. The Hockey News when I was a kid was the Bible of hockey in Canada. So we would religiously read the Hockey News. But what I would do is I would go through the line scores, who scored the goals and who got penalties, looking for names that I recognized, and the names that I recognized and that resonated with me, were the names of Willie O’Ree, Stan “Chook” Maxwell, Herb Carnegie, the Carnegie Brothers, and Danny McIntyre. So these were players that I would hear about mostly through my dad that were Black athletes that were just excellent hockey players. And as I later found out, great individuals. So that always piqued my interest. And I heard about these great things these individuals were doing on the ice.  

[00:17:53] And then on top of all of that, in Nova Scotia, there was a senior hockey league which had just fantastic hockey players, and there were a couple Black hockey players that played in that league. So there was always a desire because as a youth, when you look for heroes, and maybe without knowing it. And for those of us of African descent, we look for heroes that look like us. Who resembles Percy Paris? And it seemed only natural that these individuals I would be attracted to. And then to think that there’s a relationship there that ties us blood-wise. 

Kim Thúy [00:18:37] Turns out Percy is distantly related to the late great Stanley “Chook” Maxwell, one of the first Black hockey players out of Nova Scotia to turn pro. He inspired Percy’s own leap into the pros.  

Percy Paris [00:18:56] I played minor hockey in Windsor, Nova Scotia, and when I played minor hockey, there wasn’t the huge cost to play that there is today. There was a cost attached to it, but registration was free. And then I went on after Windsor, went to university in Halifax at St Mary’s, and I was fortunate enough to play with the St Mary’s Huskies varsity team. And that’s where Darrell Maxwell, Bob Dawson, and myself formed the first and only all-Black hockey line in intercollegiate history. 

Kim Thúy [00:19:36] However, Percy wasn’t handed that spot on the team.  

Percy Paris [00:19:40] I’d love to say they recruited me. When I didn’t make the team initially, I didn’t give up. I enrolled with the Junior Varsity Squad and I was playing senior hockey around the Halifax area while going to St Mary’s. And then I got the call to suit up for the Huskies and the call came from a very close friend of mine, somebody that I went to high school with, who was the goaltender on the hockey team. And I remember it well, he came looking for me and first he said, “I’ve been looking for you all day. They want you to suit up. They want you to play with the Huskies.” And I said, I think he was joking and pulling my leg. He said, “no.” He said, “this is serious. Go to the rink, get some equipment, and you’ll be at practices at such and such times.” And I was on the team. So it went from a very low to a high.  

Kim Thúy [00:20:40] His joy over making the hockey team, for being part of the first all-Black line, was soon dampened by the abuse he faced for the same achievement: for being first, for being great, and for being Black.  

Percy Paris [00:20:59] There’s always been racism in Nova Scotia. When I played minor hockey, racial slurs were commonplace. And that hasn’t changed even today. Even today, individuals of African descent are still subject to abuse on the ice. The atmosphere back in the … we had just gone through the ’60s. We had just entered into the ’70s. We just finished with the huge civil rights unrest in the United States, which had an impact on Canada. So the ’70s, things had calmed down a bit, but there was still that turbulence going on with respect to Black and white. So racism was alive and well. Blacks were at the low end of the economic scale, which meant that the cost of hockey was very prohibitive for the Black hockey players if your parents didn’t have that income coming in that would support you playing minor hockey. It was very detrimental not only just to your development, but to your participation.  

[00:22:11] So as time went on and the Blacks began to get more stable, things began to change. But it’s always cheaper. Basketball and hockey clash when it comes to the seasons that they’re played in, so it’s a lot cheaper for sons and daughters to play basketball than it is to play a sport such as hockey. So hockey over the years has built up this racial divide, has built up these systemic barriers that have traditionally kept Blacks from fulfilling their destinations when it came to the game of hockey.  

Kim Thúy [00:22:52] Percy’s own destiny on ice was interrupted when he got into a bad car accident while in university — one that meant he used a wheelchair for a time. Though the accident ended his climb up the hockey ladder, it didn’t end his love for the game. 

Percy Paris [00:23:11] So what I couldn’t do with my skates now was speed. I now developed better mental skills and better puck-handling skills and being in the right place at the right time. So it was a different game for me, but still enjoyable and still fun. So for years and years and years I played competitive gentlemen’s hockey. I say “gentlemen’s” and I say that somewhat with tongue in cheek. A lot of the games weren’t very gentlemanly. There were still racial slurs being directed my way. And on my team there were other Black hockey players. Sometimes we had as many as three. We were the brunt of racism. So even at that age, racism was still a factor.  

[00:24:06] This holy sanctuary called hockey was a white person sport. And if you’re Black, you should be out shooting hoops or doing something more dedicated to your race, to your ethnicity. And so, again, I think it’s because a lot of the players that were doing this because of their privilege in life, their white privilege in life, that “How dare you, as a Black male, come out here and try to play this game called hockey? It belongs to us and don’t try to invade it.”  

Kim Thúy [00:24:44] Like Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu, Percy acknowledges that things have improved for Black players, but more needs to be done to combat racism on and off the ice, and to acknowledge the contributions that players of colour have made to the game of hockey at every level.  

Percy Paris [00:25:04] There has been some change, but I reiterate there’s too many incidents of racism in sport that still go on today. Whether it be in the National Hockey League, whether it be in the minor pros, whether it be in junior, whether it be in the minor ranks. Too many cases of racism still happen. I think the National Hockey League has an obligation not only just morally, but it’s about correcting the wrongs of history. The National Hockey League should recognize the contributions of the Colored Hockey League. I think the National Hockey League could easily do this within the Hockey Hall of Fame. That’s an easy fix. I think if they started doing that, you would see other organizations do that as well. But I think it should start at the very, very top. And the top is the National Hockey League.  

[00:26:03] I remain a fan. I still enjoy sitting down and watching a good game of hockey. I was, for years, a season ticket holder for the local junior team. But again, I see some things in the sport. And as good as these individuals are, I still see room for improvement and how they could be better.  

[00:26:27] And what I find in Nova Scotia is when you start talking about racism, people get defensive. And when they get defensive, there’s no more communication because once you’re trying to defend what it is you said, or what it is you did, you’re not listening to the other side. You’re too busy trying to defend your own actions. So we’ve got a ways to go. Have we made some progress? Absolutely. But I wouldn’t want anyone to think that we’ve arrived. Even when you think we’ve arrived, you look and there’s still another step to go.  

[SFX: HOCKEY GAME] 

Kim Thúy [00:27:12] For players like Frank Cooke and Percy Paris and so many others, hockey is more than a game. It’s about building communities, fostering joy, and nourishing talent. But more needs to be done to break down barriers so the national sport can be enjoyed by anyone who loves hockey and wants to play.  

CREDITS: 

Kim Thúy [00:27:40] Thanks for listening to Artifactuality, a podcast of the Canadian Museum of History. I am Kim Thúy.  

Artifactuality is produced by Makwa Creative and Antica Productions. Tanya Talaga and Jordan Huffman are the Executive Producers at Makwa. Lisa Gabriele is the Producer, Andrea Varsany is the Associate Producer, and Sophie Dummett is the Researcher for Antica. Laura Reghr and Stuart Coxe are Executive Producers at Antica. Mixing and sound design by Alain Derbez.  

Jenny Ellison and Robyn Jeffrey of the Canadian Museum of History are the Executive Producers of this podcast.  

The interviews with Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu and Percy Paris were conducted by Rhonda C. George.  

Daniel Neill, Researcher, Sport and Leisure, is the Museum’s Podcast Coordinator.  

Check out historymuseum.ca for more stories, articles and exhibitions from the Museum. 

To see photos of Frank Cooke and Percy Paris, check out the links in our show notes.

Kim Thúy [00:00:02] Imagine a museum of the future … made up entirely of the stories we tell each other. Not the history that is captured in textbooks, but in the voices of the people who lived it. Which stories would resonate with you? Which ones do you think will last? And which will go on to shape how we live our lives, now and in the future? 

[00:00:31] Welcome to Artifactuality … a podcast series featuring remarkable stories generously shared with the Canadian Museum of History. I’m your host, Kim Thúy. 

[00:00:45] On this episode of Artifactuality: We Have Always Been Here.  

Kent Ayoungman [00:00:52] I always say, no matter where you go where it’s uncultivated or natural areas, you’re going to find evidence of our people there. And that’s where the importance of learning our stories, our origin stories, working with archaeologists, it kind of helped give an idea of how old our stories, our songs, and our ceremonies are. 

Kim Thúy [00:01:21] In the southwest corner of Alberta, there’s a special place called Wally’s Beach. 

Gabriel Yanicki [00:01:28] Oh, look at that. That’s a really interesting one.  

Kent Ayoungman [00:01:32] Another one.  

Kim Thúy [00:01:35] It’s a breathtaking spot, nestled where the prairies and the Rocky Mountains meet … in the heartland of the Blackfoot nations — the Siksika, Kainai and Piikani.

Kent Ayoungman [00:01:48] It’s a nice windy day.  

Gabriel Yanicki [00:01:50] A nice, windy day.  

Kent Ayoungman [00:01:54] Temperature about 26, 27 degrees.  

Gabriel Yanicki [00:01:58] It’s a beautiful day for September.  

Kim Thúy [00:02:02] The beach is former farmland, just across the St. Mary’s Reservoir from the reserve of the Kainai Nation. Seventy years ago, the St. Mary River was dammed, flooding farmland and reserve land alike. Now, periods of low water leave parts of the reservoir bed exposed to wind and waves. Erosion has revealed the footprints of woolly mammoths that once crossed mudflats here at the end of the last Ice Age. And other species too — like extinct forms of musk ox, camel, horse and bison — have all been identified from their bones. 

Gabriel Yanicki [00:02:47] We found 5- 6,000-year-old jackrabbit bones embedded in the caliche crust in places, so this here, good spot to look, because this should contain old material.  

Kent Ayoungman [00:03:00] And those square units that they excavate. Yep. This is what they kind of look at.  

Gabriel Yanicki [00:03:06] Exactly.  

Kim Thúy [00:03:08] This area was once the Ice-Free Corridor, which emerged as continental ice sheets over the Rocky Mountains and prairies began to melt. Stone tools scattered across the surface of Wally’s Beach tell a remarkable story from ancestral Blackfoot contact with Europeans a few short centuries ago, and butchered horse and camel bones that are more than 13,000 years old. The role of the Ice-Free Corridor in the human history of the Americas has long been debated by Western scientists. But for the Blackfoot Peoples of southern Alberta and Montana, there is no doubt: their stories, songs, and ceremonies teach that they have always been here. It was once rare for archaeologists to give equal consideration to Indigenous interpretations when piecing together the past… 

Gabriel Yanicki [00:04:08] It’s September 11th, 2022. I’m out at Wally’s Beach today…

Kim Thúy [00:04:15] But that’s all changing. 

Gabriel Yanicki [00:04:16] …and the reservoir level is about four meters higher than it needs to be for me to get out to the exposed parts of Wally’s Beach on the St. Mary Reservoir… 

Kim Thúy [00:04:29] Gabriel Yanicki is the curator of Western Archaeology at the Canadian Museum of History.

Gabriel Yanicki [00:04:36] …but today, the water level is covering pretty much the entire site, except for an island that stayed clear of the level of the reservoir this whole time, since the dam was built in the 1950s.  

Kim Thúy [00:04:51] Yanicki has been reaching out to Blackfoot Elders — recognizing that their philosophies and stories are essential to understanding the history of the land and its people. After all, the Blackfoot Peoples have inhabited the Northern plains — an area that includes parts of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Montana — since time immemorial. 

Gabriel Yanicki [00:05:17] You can see it’s, uh, quartzite, um, a quite dense rock that doesn’t explode when it’s heated up. 

Jerry Potts [00:05:23] It’s the same kind of rocks we use in our sweats still, eh? 

Gabriel Yanicki [00:05:27] Exactly. Yeah.  

Kim Thúy [00:05:29] That’s Piikani Elder Jerry Potts. He, along with his wife Velma Crowshoe and Siksika traditional knowledge expert Kent Ayoungman, recently met up with Yanicki at Wally’s Beach. They talked about the importance of this area from both an archaeological perspective and a traditional Blackfoot one.  

Jerry Potts [00:05:52] This is probably one of so many sites that haven’t even been discovered that all represent timelines, but yet it still goes back to the original inhabitants of the area like we were … we’re the host of the feast with the story that’s being told.  

Kim Thúy [00:06:15] Before, during and after a dig, archaeologists like Yanicki seek opportunities for collaboration with Indigenous Peoples. It’s part of an ongoing effort to decolonize the very process of archaeology itself. Elder Jerry Potts explains how this has helped reaffirm ancestral Blackfoot ties to the land, as established in oral histories… 

Jerry Potts [00:06:44] I think we’re at, at a time right now where, you know, archaeology has become so effective — like, even in BC, because it’s unceded land — and they’re, they’ve been very right on how they’ve used archaeology to determine their sites in Montana, the same thing, you know, these different tribes that have claimed areas. They’ve brought in archaeology and done archaeological digs that have proven they are Blackfoot sites. It’s just endless, what, where the mind can go with what’s there that hasn’t been discovered. 

Kim Thúy [00:07:24] Kent Ayoungman speaks about bringing the two knowledge traditions together. 

Kent Ayoungman [00:07:30] And that’s where the importance of learning our stories, our origin stories, right? Working with archaeologists to kind of help give an idea of how old our stories, our songs, and our ceremonies are.  

Kim Thúy [00:07:48] He explains their creation stories were not just passed down orally. They were depicted in detail on teepees and in Blackfoot art.  

Kent Ayoungman [00:07:59] That relationship, that kinship that our people have with animals, the birds, with all of creation, you know? Like our homes, we look at our homes. All the different drawings on our homes are teepee designs. They’re right from the climate, the stars, animals, people, earth, water, everything are on our homes. And right there, that just shows our connection to this vast place.  

Kim Thúy [00:08:28] That connection remained unbroken in spite of the fatal disruption by residential schools when entire generations were removed from this crucial storytelling chain.  

Kent Ayoungman [00:08:42] My mom, when she was a kid, before she got taken to residential school, her grandmother, [speaking in Blackfoot] her name was Mary Water Chief. In the wintertime they moved down to North Camp. I come from the west end of the reserve, and that’s where my grandfather, that’s where he farmed, the ranch. Wintertime, the people congregated down to a place called North Camp, and they lived with the old lady. She had a house down there, and my mom would say, “We always used to fight to sleep with the old lady because she would tell … [speaking in Blackfoot] she would tell the stories from the ancient times, that’s what the interpretation I’ll use, our, our stories, our ancient stories. And she always said, I remember her talk about two stories, [speaking in Blackfoot] and [speaking in Blackfoot]. [speaking in Blackfoot] is that Scarface story.  

[00:09:42] And then [speaking in Blackfoot] it’s a story about when these big animals brought these kids across a big water. How the old lady described it, was a woolly mammoth, it was a big, like, elephant, it had a trunk and tusks, and those kids got left and their people were on the other side of this big water. And they’re on the back of that, that animal, and they were picking the bugs off the fur, and that animal told them, “Well, for relieving me of those, those bugs were bothering me for a long time, I’ll do what you guys want want me to do.” “Well, we want to go to our, to our family on that side,” so that animal brought those kids across the water to their people. You know, it’s a big long story, but my mom grew up, before she was taken to the residential school, all that stuff was severed. But, you know, talking about this area and the relationship with the woolly mammoth and such, you know, it solidifies our stories, our ceremonies, our songs, our language. That’s what I was talking about.  

[00:10:42] That’s why I appreciate the relationships that I’ve built with archaeologists, anthropologists. It’s a neat relationship with the ceremonial people of the Blackfoot, eh? It’s neat to hear these stories from a lot of different people. Some will talk about it this way and then another person will talk about it. And there’s something that may have been missed by these people. When you put them all together, it’s the same story.  

Kim Thúy [00:11:13] It is the same story repeated time and time again by the Blackfoot Peoples and their ancestors, and that’s increasingly apparent to archaeologists. As for when this history began, that’s a question that preoccupies many Western scientists. But in Blackfoot storytelling and its worldview, the very concept of time is reckoned with differently. 

Dr. Leroy Little Bear [00:11:43] Very interesting, to talk about notions of time, because time is such an important referent in Western thought…  

Kim Thúy [00:11:57] This is Dr. Leroy Little Bear, the Vice Provost at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. He is also a renowned Kainai legal scholar and philosopher … and an expert at understanding the concept of time in Blackfoot culture.

Dr. Leroy Little Bear [00:12:16] …this is not to say that time is not important in Blackfoot, but a very different approach. The Western notion of time is really human created, when in reality there’s really no such thing. But, nevertheless, the notion in Western thought about time is a fairly linear notion, where you go from A to B to C to D on down the line. 

[00:12:58] Now, in Blackfoot thought, it’s really that notion of repetition and these things occurring, reoccurring and so on. So you start to have notions about circles and so on, because the repetition can easily complement the notion of rotation, et cetera. 

[00:13:25] And that is in Blackfoot we say [speaking in Blackfoot], meaning “now.” It’s the now. And then you can work forward and say, [speaking in Blackfoot], and that’s “tomorrow.” And then you can move from there and say [speaking in Blackfoot], which is “day after tomorrow.” And, if you want to put it that way, you can say [speaking in Blackfoot], “yesterday,” [speaking in Blackfoot], which is “the day before yesterday.” But then we don’t go beyond that at that level. We don’t go beyond that. 

[00:14:13] In very general terms, we might talk about [speaking in Blackfoot], in other words, “what’s going to be coming?” In other words, [inaudible] call it future [speaking in Blackfoot]. And we might talk about the past as — but that’s in very general terms — [speaking in Blackfoot], means “what has passed,” [speaking in Blackfoot]. And those words actually imply that there’s something still and you are going up and down the timeline, so to speak, rather than you being still and time going past you, in a Western notion, it implies that time is still and you’re going back and forth on the timeline. So [speaking in Blackfoot] is kind of going back and [speaking in Blackfoot] means kind of going forward.

[00:15:18] And when I say that we don’t go past the two days, two days forward or backwards. What it’s really doing is saying and combining all the notions of past, present and future in Western thought is just past the two-day period. It’s combined, and that’s what we would refer to as “just is.” It just is.  

[00:15:55] Beyond the two-day notion is everything. Past, present and future are amalgamated to be just is. One of the ramifications of it is that hey, that’s how I remember what my ancestors told me. See, in other words, their stories are never more than two days old. 

[00:16:26] They’re always two days fresh in my mind. And so it’s hard to think about it, especially for a judge in a court case trying to determine, you know, when did this happen? Five hundred years ago? One thousand years ago? And their question is usually, “How can you remember what happened 1,000 years ago, let alone 20,000 years ago?” Well, that’s because my ancestors are just two days away. Their stories are two days fresh in my mind, see?  

Gabriel Yanicki [00:17:08] So one question I have then is, is there a statute of limitations on how far back this repetition and the reckoning of time and the memory of events can go?  

Kim Thúy [00:17:22] Gabriel Yanicki again.  

Gabriel Yanicki [00:17:25] When we talk about sites like Wally’s Beach as an archaeologist, are Blackfoot stories potentially encapsulating that time period and further back? 

Dr. Leroy Little Bear [00:17:35] Well, the thing is, those are basically I would say reference points that we use in human thought, okay? So how do we go back? Well, we go back and we say, well, there was a time when there was just all those animals and then in the cosmic phasing, things did change and we appeared, but then we were just like little kids. New kids on the block with all these others, and we had to start seeing what kind of relational setups we could have with them, see? So that’s the reason why we have great respect for life and so on, you know? 

[00:18:32] And so, we start to appear on the scene. So talking about Wally’s Beach, hey, yeah … we would just say [speaking in Blackfoot] long time ago, which is in that realm of just is, see? And any stories that arise from there are part of the repetitive storytelling that occurs, and so on. So the buffalo as an example was a being, was a water being. We’d call it water buffalo, [speaking in Blackfoot] was water buffalo. It used to come out of the water and it would hunt anything it sees, including humans. And eventually in those stories was the humans and the buffalos finally decided to, uh … talk and have an agreement. “Hey … we don’t want you chasing and eating our people” and so on, and the buffalos agreed, “Okay. But if we’re going to do that, then the agreement … well then you give us half of your people and we’ll give you half of our people.” See? So they agreed to that. And so, that’s what has produced the buffalo out on the land, which was originally water, they were water beings. 

[00:20:11] And in our case, the humans kind of thought about it a little bit and they were a little bit reluctant about letting half of their people to go into the water, to give them to the buffalo. But, it so happened they were moving camp and going across a big river or lake or so, and they were going across. And it was during the winter and the water, the ice, broke, and half of them went into the water. And so de facto, the quid pro quo did occur. 

[00:20:56] So it’s part of that flux, part of that flux way of thinking, as opposed to more stagnant notion of … so … that’s how that notion, which might be going back to Wally’s Beach, hey, 20,000 years ago or so. Well, that’s how we remember it, because of the repetition of the stories and how we came into being, how buffalos came into being, and so on. 

Kim Thúy [00:21:31] So whether we’re talking about 20,000 years or two days ago, what has remained are the stories.  

[00:21:42] Near Fort Macleod, Alberta, there’s a place called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. It was named after the practice of driving herds of buffalo over a cliff to their deaths — a communal hunting technique perfected over millennia by Blackfoot ancestors. It’s also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There, Gabriel Yanicki and the Blackfoot Elders continued their conversation about the often-difficult relationship between researchers and Indigenous Peoples. 

Gabriel Yanicki [00:22:19] Thanks everyone. So the first question that I set aside here to go over is whether you all think that archaeologists have historically done a good job of seeking input from Blackfoot Peoples on research into their ancestral heritage.  

Jerry Potts [00:22:34] Well, I think archaeology — this is Jerry Potts — I know archaeology has been, I think, with … probably more recently, there’s been more outreach to Blackfeet people within their territory. We’re now in a position, we’re starting to understand and express who we are and, I think, archaeology’s given a good opportunity to put our cards on the table that represent who we are. 

Velma Crowshoe [00:23:07] I realize the importance of archaeology with listening to some of our Elders…  

Kim Thúy [00:23:16] This is Piikani Elder, Velma Crowshoe. 

Velma Crowshoe [00:23:18] …like my dad, for instance, the late Johnny [inaudible], and the stories that he used to tell and the songs that he used to sing, and how they relate to the land. And so I think it’s really important that we listen to our traditional knowledge. And we hear their stories and how we can put the archaeology to better our lives for the young people so they understand that we’ve been here for a long, long time. And the language too, the language is so important because there’s a lot of words in our language that you can’t even translate into English, you know? And I think it’s really important that we learn our creation stories so the young people can understand and to appreciate who we are and where we live.  

Kent Ayoungman [00:24:18] I don’t think archaeologists have historically done a good job on the work that goes behind the science of archaeology…  

Kim Thúy [00:24:29] This is Kent Ayoungman again. 

Kent Ayoungman [00:24:32] …My involvement was working with archaeologists, they based everything off theories. And what I get a kick out of is sometimes these theories get debunked and they all come together and start to try to figure something out on somebody else’s research going way back. I think within the last few decades, archaeologists have finally been reaching out to Indian people and the studies that they do. And this land bridge is a good example of that.  

Kim Thúy [00:25:05] The “land bridge” theory — which we mentioned earlier — is the idea that the first Ice Age humans arrived in North America from Asia by walking across a frozen path over the Bering Strait. Indigenous people have been widely skeptical about this theory, because they have no stories of living in such a place. 

Kent Ayoungman [00:25:29] I think archaeology, you know, it’s fairly new in North America. It’s been going on for a long time outside of North America. So they came into this place trying to figure out these people. And the way I look at it, you know, our people were once considered a dying race. And, you know, with all the different adverse impacts that our people have endured, our people lived in this place for a long time. And then that’s always explained through our stories. And I think that’s what we’re going to be talking about today, is our connection to this place and how the government really tried to sever … and they did a good job. They did a good job. I know in my community where I come from, Siksika, they did a good job on disconnecting our people to our ways of knowing and our ways of knowing ties us to this place. Everything, how things came to be, is explained, to how the old people told their stories to the grandchildren. And then as the grandchildren lived through their life, they start to learn more to these stories, which leads into our spiritual ways and that spiritual connection. Historically, I don’t, I didn’t think they were doing a good job, but the last few decades it’s been going a lot better than how it used to be done.  

Jacob Potts [00:27:02] I think that this whole thing with the archaeological thing is going to take these people’s modern-day thinking and take it out of that time frame and put it to another time frame instead of thinking this way back. You know, it’ll change that thinking…  

Kim Thúy [00:27:16] This is Jacob Potts, a Piikani ceremonialist. 

Jacob Potts [00:27:21] …Because a lot of modern-day people think, “Oh yeah, when we crossed over the land bridge” and all this other thing. And a lot of people come and say, “Look, that’s where we came from, Asia or Africa. on that side of the world.” And I think this ties us to us being here and like everyone else said here, it connects us to this land and all of our creation stories stemming from here. And a lot of people, especially in this day and age, have that thinking, “Oh yeah, well you guys were never always here, right?” And that’s what people are saying but they have almost no backing of that. And now this is just kind of reinforcing us always being here, coming from this land and us coming from here rather than, you know, coming from some other part of the world and, um, coming from north to south where, to my knowledge is … we, we were always here. 

Stan Knowlton [00:28:10] Well, as an archaeologist, that part of my life journey, I could say, has been very adversarial…

Kim Thúy [00:28:19] Stan Knowlton, also from the Piikani Nation, studied at the University of Lethbridge. He is a traditional knowledge expert. As a student he was taught by largely white professors what they thought was the history of his people. 

Stan Knowlton [00:28:38] …You know, professors had a hard time realizing that I was even in their class. They just couldn’t figure out how this Stone Age person, you know, still existed in the modern world. And then, you know, from that point to where we are now, I could see that we’ve come a long way. Some people, you know, just by getting up there and maintaining their stories and their culture and history, you know, have broken the ice for the future generations and they’ve opened up doors. And it’s up to the younger people now to be able to make use of those doors that have opened and to take those next steps that are necessary into making archaeology more compatible with traditional knowledge.  

Kim Thúy [00:29:31] And that change is happening, incorporating traditional knowledge into archaeological studies and practices. Kent Ayoungman experienced it himself with the University of Calgary field school. 

Kent Ayoungman [00:29:46] One year we started field season and one of the folks from U of C got up to talk as we were doing orientation and mentioned, you know, sometimes we forget as archaeologists the history that we’re digging, that we’re finding. We don’t realize that there’s people still living here. I like his comment when you were in your classes. Your professors couldn’t understand that there’s a Stone Age person sitting in there… 

Jerry Potts [00:30:18] It’s always been convenient to go and get people to say what you want them to say without consulting other groups, other knowledge holders… 

Kim Thúy [00:30:30] This is Elder Jerry Potts again.  

Jerry Potts [00:30:32] …and a lot of times we’ve been subjected to one person’s opinion. But archaeology overall has been, you know, there’s been a lot of systemic racism by government and local groups not giving any respect to the people that have always been here. Our stories of creation go back to always being in this territory, and we were never transplanted or brought here. And I think through science and archaeology and the folks that know to get the missing answers are now reaching out to knowledge holders and that kind of thing to get a better understanding of the past and, you know, of who we are. And our stories have never changed. They’re still the same…  

Kim Thúy [00:31:29] Especially when it comes to creation stories. Every culture seems to have one.  

Jerry Potts [00:31:35] …With Blackfoot, with our belief system, every being, every thing represents a life. Our stories of creation are connected to the sun and the moon. The earth is a living being, but it’s not Mother Earth. And this Turtle Island bullshit, too … it’s not Turtle Island, it’s Blackfoot territory, you know? And that’s how it is. And you get all these academics, “Oh, Turtle Island.” And they get their dream voice on, and that just… 

Gabriel Yanicki [00:32:10] That’s going to be my favourite part of the podcast.  

Jerry Potts [00:32:12] …And I’ll stand by it.  

Kent Ayoungman [00:32:18] I’ll second that.  

Jerry Potts [00:32:20] I’ll take the shit for it. But, but I think that’s the point. The point with that is every nation across this country, their belief system is tied to the geography and their territory that they’re from. You know, everything we have comes from the landscape around us. That’s our marker. And that’s who makes the Blackfeet who they are. It’s the territory, you know, our ceremonies, the songs that go with those ceremonies all come from animals. They come from when dogs could talk. When we were shown how to live with things. That’s where all this stuff comes and it’s all here.  

Kim Thúy [00:33:09] We’re back at Wally’s Beach, which took its name from a nearby recreational area, though exactly who it was named after is unclear. But like so many places, it bears the stamp of settler history without giving much thought to who has always been here. 

Gabriel Yanicki [00:33:28] And it’s one of the things I’m hoping to get underway with this. Bringing everyone together is like, what should the name of the site be? It’s not my place to name it, but I think it’s overdue for a better name.  

Kim Thúy [00:33:48] A better name, to match a better way of working together … where the stories about a place, and the people who live there, tell us as much as science ever can. So what comes next at sites like Wally’s Beach? Plans are taking shape to visit the site again — and to collaborate on a new dig — continuing the work of interpreting its history through multiple voices and different perspectives. 

CREDITS: 

Kim Thúy: Thanks for listening to Artifactuality, a podcast of the Canadian Museum of History. I am Kim Thúy.  

Artifactuality is produced by Makwa Creative and Antica Productions. Tanya Talaga and Jordan Huffman are the Executive Producers at Makwa. Lisa Gabriele is the Producer, Andrea Varsany is the Associate Producer, and Sophie Dummett is the Researcher for Antica. Laura Reghr and Stuart Coxe are Executive Producers at Antica. Mixing and sound design by Alain Derbez.  

Jenny Ellison and Robyn Jeffrey of the Canadian Museum of History are the Executive Producers of this podcast. 

The interviews with the Blackfoot Elders were conducted by Gabriel Yanicki, Curator, Western Archaeology.  

Daniel Neill, Researcher, Sport and Leisure, is the Museum’s Podcast Coordinator.  

Check out historymuseum.ca for more stories, articles and exhibitions from the Museum. 

For more information about Head-Smashed-in Buffalo Jump and Indigenous creation stories, check out the links in our show notes.

Kim Thúy [00:00:02] Imagine a museum of the future … made up entirely of the stories we tell each other. Not the history that is captured in textbooks, but in the voices of the people who lived it. Which stories would resonate with you? Which ones do you think will last? And which will go on to shape how we live our lives, now and in the future? 

[00:00:31] Welcome to Artifactuality … a podcast series featuring remarkable stories generously shared with the Canadian Museum of History. I’m your host, Kim Thúy. 

[00:00:45] On this episode of Artifactuality: Hearts of Freedom.

Xay Bounnapha [00:00:52] My mind was spinning because we were in a very risky business and my family’s life depends on us. Can we trust the smuggler? What if they inform the coast guard? We will be arrested and executed.  

Kim Thúy [00:01:14] The Vietnam War ended in 1975 with communist victories in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. But that was hardly the end of conflict in the region. What followed were a series of local wars, the reign of terror of the Khmer Rouge, harvest failures, terrible economic conditions, and the persecution of civilians. This pushed vast numbers of people to flee their homelands on dangerous, sometimes deadly, journeys. 

Judy Trinh [00:01:43] I don’t know how to swim, so my mother throws me overboard and hopes that my dad will find me. And then she jumps overboard with my sister. My mother used to have nightmares every night. Recurring nightmares of that scene of tossing me overboard. 

Kim Thúy [00:02:06] Xay Bounnapha and Judy Trinh came to Canada as refugees after the Vietnam War. These clips are just a few of the hundreds of stories collected for Hearts of Freedom, a multi-year community research project and travelling exhibition, which premiered at the Canadian Museum of History in February and is now travelling across Canada. Between 1975 and 1985, 100,000 refugees from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam arrived on Canadian soil, in what was the largest refugee resettlement in Canada since World War II. I was one of those refugees. My family fled Vietnam when I was a young girl. The first leg of our journey took us in a cramped and dirty boat to a refugee camp in Malaysia. I wrote about my experience in my autobiographical novel, Ru, which mean“lullaby” in Vietnamese and “a small stream” in French — the language I first learned when I came to Canada. Here’s an excerpt:  

[00:03:15] During our first nights as refugees in Malaysia, we slept right on the red earth, without a floor. The Red Cross had built refugee camps in the countries adjoining Vietnam to receive the boat people—those who had survived the sea journey. The others, those who had gone down during the crossing, had no names. They died anonymously. We were among those who had been lucky enough to wash up on dry land. We felt blessed to be among the two thousand refugees in a camp that was intended to hold two hundred. We built a cabin on piles in an out-of-the-way part of the camp, on the side of a hill. For weeks, twenty-five members of five families working together, in secret, felled some trees in the nearby woods, then planted them in the soft clay soil, attached them to six plywood panels to make a large floor, and covered the frame with a canvas of electric blue, plastic blue, toy blue. We had the good fortune to find enough burlap and nylon rice bags to surround the four sides of our cabin, as well as the three sides of our shared bathroom. Together, the two structures resembled a museum installation by a contemporary artist. At night, we slept pressed so close together that we were never cold, even without a blanket.  

[00:04:59] Given my own experience, I was looking forward to hearing about Hearts of Freedom. It’s a collection of oral histories from refugees who arrived in the ‘70s and ‘80s, along with Canadian officials, volunteers and sponsors. Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe is the lead curator. She’s an Associate Professor and Chair of Conflict Resolution Studies at the University of Winnipeg. She’s an expert on issues facing refugees and migrants. But she was also a refugee, born in Laos during the last years of the Vietnam War. Here she is, telling her story for the project.  

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:05:43] I think one of the first memories that I have of Laos is hearing all the airplanes fly over our town, hearing all the loud noises from the bombings. One day our parents said we had to quickly go down into the basement. And in the basement they had dug out a big hole. And so whenever we would hear bombings from the airplanes above us, then they would usher us into the hole and then they would put a cover on top of us to try and protect us from the bomb blasts. And I remember my older sister and I would ask our parents, “why are we in the hole in the dark?” Because we didn’t really understand. You know, we were just a few years old. 

Kim Thúy [00:06:24] Stephanie had just started kindergarten when her parents decided to leave Loas with their young family. 

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:06:30] I do remember the day that we left Laos, our parents wanted to make it look like we were still living at home. So my mom did laundry and then she hung out the clothes outside. Our cars were parked outside the house. We took a small boat, more like a canoe with an engine in the back, and we said we were going to go visit my grandparents. And they lived up the river from us.  

Kim Thúy [00:06:55] Stephanie’s parents hadn’t told anyone of their plan, not even her grandparents. In the early evening, they loaded their family into a boat to make their way across the Mekong River to Thailand. 

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:07:08] There were soldiers on both sides of the river. The Lao soldiers were told to shoot anyone trying to leave, and the Thai soldiers were told to shoot anyone trying to land, because they didn’t want any refugees there. So it was a very dangerous situation and my mom was pregnant with my brother. So I think she was like six months pregnant. And then there was my younger sister, who must have been two years old. And then my older sister and I. Parts of the Mekong River can be quite treacherous. There are big boulders that jut out of the river. So many boats have hit those rocks and boulders and people have drowned. And so we were very careful trying to get across without being seen by the soldiers. And then our boat hit a whirlpool. And that spun us around and around and around. And our boat kept filling up with water. 

[00:08:01] Of course, we were just little kids and we didn’t know how to swim. And that was a big worry for our parents. But somehow, miraculously, we got out of the whirlpool and we made it across to Thailand. And there was a family living right along the border there, along the river, and they saw us and they took us in because, otherwise, the soldiers would have found us and we would have been arrested. So they hid us for the night. And then the next morning we started walking at about 5 a.m. according to what my mum has told us. And we started walking to Bang Khung, Thailand, which is a soldiers’ camp where the Americans were stationed. My mum thought that we probably walked for about 12 hours. 

[00:08:55] My mum was very smart. She had sewn jewelry underneath her clothing, and because she was pregnant, you can’t really tell. And so she was able to sell a few pieces of jewelry. And we bought a piece of land in Thailand and I think they grew rice, bananas, corn, or whatever it is to help them make a living. And after about two years, the Lao government wanted the Thais to send the Lao people back. Otherwise, there was going to be a big conflict between the two countries and that’s when our parents decided, well maybe this isn’t a good idea to be in Thailand and maybe it’s better if we were to go to a refugee camp and apply to go to another country because we were no longer safe.  

Kim Thúy [00:09:43] They spent six months living in the refugee camp while they waited to be resettled in either Canada, the U.S., France or Australia.  

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:09:53] I don’t think, you know, they thought much about each of the different countries. They just wanted to leave the refugee camp. There was not enough food to eat. There was no running water, and so they wanted to leave as soon as possible. That’s why we decided to come to Canada, because it was the first plane that was coming to get us. We had no information about what life would be like in Canada, except for the fact that it was cold. 

Kim Thúy [00:10:17] Stephanie and her family arrived in Montréal in December 1979 with no winter clothing. After about two weeks, they were moved to a small rural community in southern Manitoba. But the remote town didn’t have a lot to offer the family… 

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:10:35] We were put in a two-room house with no running water, no electricity, no heat, except for a wood-burning stove. No washroom. And this was located in the church’s graveyard. And, of course, the kids were scared because now we’re living with the ghosts, in the cemetery. And the outhouse was right by the tombstones. 

Kim Thúy [00:11:00] And of course, no one in town spoke Lao, and no one in Stephanie’s family spoke English, so they communicated using a Thai-English dictionary. Eventually the family was able to move to a bigger town, where Stephanie’s mother could begin to take English classes. 

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:11:17] She met the teachers there, and they were Mennonites and they asked us about our story. And when my mum shared her story, then they said, “oh my goodness, this is terrible. How can we help you and support you?” They were amazing in terms of embracing our family and providing that emotional support that we so needed.  

Kim Thúy [00:11:43] I sat down with Stephanie to talk about Hearts of Freedom. 

[00:11:47] Stephanie, your story is incredible. What’s it like to hear yourself talk about it?  

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:11:53] Every time I hear myself tell the story, I always find something new. And I think about my own mother and the stories that she told us about our escape. And it really highlights the strength and courage that my mother had, but it also brings me back to some of those emotions and I can imagine what our family went through. And I think as children, we, you know, may not experience some of the events in the same way that our parents experience them, but there are definitely some vivid memories that I have of our escape.  

Kim Thúy [00:12:38] So what inspired Hearts of Freedom?  

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:12:41] It was something that was important to the Southeast Asian communities. They wanted to preserve their stories, their experiences of resettlement and settlement here in Canada. And they wanted to make sure that these personal histories are shared with other people and so many of the people that we interviewed. This was the first time that they had told their stories. So if people wanted to watch the full interview of a particular refugee, they can go on the website and hear their actual voices. We allowed them to speak in the language that they are most comfortable with: English, French, Vietnamese, Lao and Khmer.  

Kim Thúy [00:13:26] Why did you choose to include all three countries: Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia?  

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:13:32] I think it was important to include all three countries because as a result of the Vietnam War and the spillover of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos, and in 1975, all three countries fell to the communists. And so they experienced similar persecutions, economic changes, and reeducation camps. The Vietnam War is often referred to as the second Indochina War. And with that, Laos has the distinction of being the most heavily bombed country in the world per capita. I believe between 1964 and 1973, there were over 2.5 million tons of bombs that were dropped on Laos, and it’s the equivalent of one plane load of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. And as we know, in Cambodia, there is the killing fields and the infamous Khmer Rouge who killed around 2 million people. And so it was really important to include all three stories to provide a complete picture of what was going on in Southeast Asia during that time.  

Kim Thúy [00:14:53] Between 1979 and 1980, Canada took in more than 60,000 Southeast Asian refugees. To what do you attribute this generosity or this openness, I would say?  

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:15:08] Yeah, I think during that time, at the height of the Indochinese or the Southeast Asian refugee movements, there was a lot of international media coverage of what was going on in Southeast Asia. And so you heard and saw stories of innocent children and women being killed during that war. You saw images of the boat people, the Vietnamese who were in overcrowded, leaky boats in the South China Sea, and they were being attacked by pirates. And so these stories captured the world’s attention. And I think this led to Canadians and others around the world to respond. And also, there was that famous photo of Kim Phuc, who was a nine-year-old girl, and there were napalm bombs that were dropped in her town and that burned her skin. And so I think people were horrified by that. And also, I think in terms of Canadians, I think many of them recall their own experiences or their own family’s experiences of escape and fleeing from different wars in Europe, including World War II. And I know the Mennonites, for example, also recalled their family’s experiences of escaping the wars and persecution in Europe and Russia, and how they were able to be resettled and settled here in Canada. 

Kim Thúy [00:16:40] But then how have Canadian attitudes towards taking in refugees changed since then?  

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:16:46] Yeah, I think that’s a complicated question. I think that Canada still resettles refugees and we can see that in terms of the Syrian refugees and more recently Ukrainians. And it’s great that we’re bringing in Ukrainian refugees, but I think we can do more and bring in other refugees from other countries around the world.  

Kim Thúy [00:17:11] Would that be the purpose of this exhibition?  

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:17:14] Well, I think the purpose of the exhibition is really to tell the stories of Southeast Asian refugees and to preserve that history because it is so important and it’s an important part of Canada’s history. And the refugees who came through that movement have become very successful as Canadian citizens, and they are now contributing to Canada in various ways and contributing to the world as well. When you look at the resilience, the courage, the strength of the Southeast Asian refugees and how they were able to overcome all of these persecution, trauma and obstacles, and how they were able to make a life for themselves and their families here in Canada, and that many of them have come full circle. And so now you hear stories of former Southeast Asian refugees sponsoring refugees from Ethiopia, from Syria, from Afghanistan, and now they’re helping the Ukrainians. And so I think these are really important stories to tell. And also, this was an extraordinary time in Canadian history in terms of the collaboration and partnership that took place between Canadian governments, NGOs and ordinary Canadians. 

Kim Thúy [00:18:45] So if you could go back, what would you tell to that little girl in the refugee camp in Thailand all those years ago?  

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:18:52] I think I would tell that little girl, you are lucky you are going to Canada, to a place that is going to help you, a place that is going to provide you with opportunities and that you’re going to be able to make a good living and have a good life in Canada. But then I also think, you know, what would I tell the little girls in refugee camps around the world today? And I don’t know if these little girls are going to be as lucky as I was because many of them may not have an opportunity to come to Canada or to other countries. And many of them are living in refugee camps for many, many years. Some of them, you know, were born in the refugee camps. And this is the only thing that they know.  

[00:19:39] And when you look at resettlement, the different countries in the world resettle less than 1 percent of the number of refugees that have been identified under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees mandates. And so we resettle very few refugees. But there is such a great need when we look at the world today. There are 33 million refugees in the world and there are 103 million forcibly displaced people. And so it’s important for us, I think, as a community, as an international community, to do more.  

[00:20:18] Yeah and Kim, I would also like to ask you, what would you tell the little girl in the refugee camp in Malaysia?  

Kim Thúy [00:20:27] Like you, I don’t really know what I would tell that little girl, but I had a chance to go back to the Red Crescent Center in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and for a TV show. And because of the TV show, they have gathered all the ID cards that the Red Crescent had done for us. So there were 252,000 cards in that room. And I walked in and my body started to shake, you know, and because I couldn’t believe that we were that many. When you were in a camp, you only know the people who were in the camp with you. And then when you see the numbers, it just … it was mind blowing. And then I start looking for my name and then my family. And I couldn’t find my mother’s name. And in my mind, I was repeating to myself, I said, you know where your mom is, she’s in Montréal. She’s fine, she’s healthy, she’s happy. So why is it important to find this card? And I kept going through the cards and I couldn’t find her. And I started panicking and I started crying. And I became that little girl again, because I didn’t see my parents in the boat for the first day or two. And that fear came back, all of a sudden that you lose your parents, you lose your family. And I didn’t see my brothers either during those first, I think, 24, 36 hours on that boat. And to be in that room again and I just felt like I was just a drop in the ocean.  

[00:22:02] Whenever you feel helpless, remind yourself that a mosquito can change the life of a person. When you have a mosquito in your room at night and you try to sleep, it’s very disturbing. And that mosquito has inspired us to find ways to fight back, you know, like mosquito net sprays, incense, all kinds of things. So every time that I feel that I’m too small to change, to make any change, I think about that mosquito theory

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:22:37] Yeah, that’s a great analogy. Each of these stories are so unique and so powerful, and by listening to even one of these stories, hopefully this can help to create change.  

Kim Thúy [00:22:49] I think that your exhibition will help at least — I was going to say — one more girl, but I think it will be way more than one more girl. So thank you for your work.  

Stephanie Phetsamay Stobbe [00:22:59] Thank you for having me.  

Kim Thúy [00:23:03] Hearts of Freedom exhibition is the result of a partnership with Carleton University, Canadian Mennonite University, and the Canadian Immigration Historical Society — with advisors from the Canadian Museum of History and the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. If you want to hear all of the interviews, and see photos, research papers, and other materials, go to HeartsofFreedom.org. The exhibition is touring across Canada in 2023 and 2024.  

CREDITS: 

Kim Thúy: Thanks for listening to Artifactuality, a podcast of the Canadian Museum of History. I’m Kim Thúy.  

Artifactuality is produced by Makwa Creative and Antica Productions. Tanya Talaga and Jordan Huffman are the Executive Producers for Makwa. Lisa Gabriele is the Producer, Andrea Varsany is the Associate Producer, and Sophie Dummett is the Researcher for Antica. Laura Regehr and Stuart Coxe are Executive Producers at Antica. Mixing and sound design by Alain Derbez. 

Jenny Ellison and Robyn Jeffrey of the Canadian Museum of History are the Executive Producers of this podcast.  

Daniel Neill, Researcher, Sport and Leisure, is the Museum’s Podcast Coordinator.  

And for information on the Canadian Museum of History’s collection related to the Southeast Asian refugee movement, check out our show notes or go to historymuseum.ca. 

Kim Thúy [00:00:02] Imagine a museum of the future … made up entirely of the stories we tell each other. Not the history that is captured in textbooks, but in the voices of the people who lived it. Which stories would resonate with you? Which ones do you think will last? And which will go on to shape how we live our lives, now and in the future? 

[00:00:31] Welcome to Artifactuality … a podcast series featuring remarkable stories generously shared with the Canadian Museum of History. I’m your host, Kim Thúy. 

[00:00:45] On this episode of Artifactuality: The Prince of Plastic.  

Karim Rashid [00:00:53] Design is for everyday life. And design is, you know, these objects that are around us, if you’re going to put all this work and engineering, and all the tooling costs, and all the people involved, and two years to develop, why not be poetic, more beautiful, you know, function better, right?  

Kim Thúy [00:01:10] Karim Rashid has been called one of the most famous industrial designers in the world. Even if you’ve never heard of him, you’ve likely seen his work. You might even own a piece or two. One of his most iconic designs is a simple garbage can called the Garbo, that he made for the home decor store, Umbra, in 1996. The curved plastic container with oval cutouts for handles, and an opening wider than its bottom, practically invites your trash inside. It’s emblematic of Karim Rashid’s work … colourful, sensual, curvy, no rough edges … very functional and very beautiful. And his work runs the gamut from high art to everyday household objects. He loves working with synthetic rubber or silicone. And materials like santoprene and evoprene because he says they imitate the silkness of human skin. 

[00:02:22] But before we had his work — the physical objects he creates — there is the story of how the work came to be … the forces that shaped his aesthetic, and places where he developed his singular philosophy — that even the lowly garbage can deserves our attention… 

[00:02:48] Karim Rashid was born in Cairo, Egypt, as dense and bustling a city in 1960 as it is today. But his childhood took him around the world. After Cairo, the family moved to Rome, then eventually London, where the soft-spoken Karim did his early schooling. 

Karim Rashid [00:03:10] I remember England quite well. I did my kindergarten there, and I remember they used to beat my hand with a ruler because I was left-handed. So they made me write with my right. That’s one of the biggest memories. Which is good now because I’m ambidextrous now, which is great.  

Kim Thúy [00:03:28] After London and a short stop in Paris, the Rashids boarded the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner all the way to Montréal. Crossing the Atlantic with his family was one of Karim’s earliest and most formative memories.  

Karim Rashid [00:03:47] We took the ship and the ship was about 12 days, I think, and there was a drawing competition on the ship. This is why I remember the ship very, very well. And there was maybe 100 children on the ship, so we all had to draw. We had like, I think, a half an hour and I was sitting with my brother and all the kids. I remember this very vividly and I didn’t know what to draw. And so I thought I was going to draw a building, but it didn’t seem like the right context, I remember. And a lot of children were drawing like family and the ship itself and the sun and water. And I was very fascinated with the fact that we were going to a new country, right. And my parents somehow managed to take everything, all our belongings, and put them in a few crates and a few suitcases. So I was fascinated with this idea of this, like compression of storage and things.  

[00:04:38] So I drew luggage. That’s what I drew. I remember drawing the kind of vertical luggage opened with shirts stacked in it and shoes. And I won the competition. So that’s why I remember that period very, very well. For me, it was like, I’m so proud of the child, you know?  

Kim Thúy [00:04:53] The Rashids disembarked in Montréal at a time when the city and the country were coming into their own. And nothing signals Canada’s arrival on the world stage like Expo 67. This was a groundbreaking event, especially from a design perspective. Expo was the site of Habitat 67, the famous apartment complex — made up of squares stacked on top of each other — that was designed by the legendary architect Moshe Safdie. It still stands today. But it was at Expo that the seed planted on that ocean liner started to take root and blossom.  

Karim Rashid [00:05:51] I think it’s what made my brother and I go into design and architecture, and my father would take us almost every day. We went to Men’s World and Habitat and all. It’s fantastic. And I think it was one of the last really radical expos in the world, actually, and it was very important for Canada. That Expo, it really put Montréal on the global map.  

Kim Thúy [00:06:13] The family’s time in Montréal was short lived. Karim’s dad got a job designing sets at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, so the family settled in Toronto. Back then, the suburbs were still surrounded by forests and rivers.  

Karim Rashid [00:06:31] It was near Burnhamthorpe Road, I remember. And a new high school was being built and the roads were just dirt. They weren’t even paved yet and they were all just new little houses, you know. It was nice to move there because it wasn’t really suburbia in a way. It was the country because behind our house was a railway track and then just apple orchards. And then there was a huge forest nearby with the Mississauga River and we used to go over that river and fish and bike and hike and camp. 

Kim Thúy [00:07:01] There, in this idyllic environment, Karim’s father helped lay the groundwork for his aesthetic, giving him the sense that our own surroundings are things we can alter to perfectly suit our tastes.  

Karim Rashid [00:07:16] So we moved into this suburban home, but my father decided to break the wall down and cut a circle to walk through from one room to another with huge super graphics going on all the walls. Put up these really strange, interesting posters, like, flush on the walls, and there was a lot of colour, you know, turquoise chair, and he had this pink couch. So my father was very painterly and his work used a lot of colour, and he ended up making a workshop in the basement designing his own furniture.  

[00:07:46] I saw something poetic and very unique about my father. I mean, he would draw. We would do this thing Sunday mornings where we break up the family, we draw each other. So we would sit at the breakfast table. After breakfast, I would maybe draw my brother, and my brother would draw my sister, and my sister would draw my dad. You know, it’s very nice. We did things like that. But he never really forced us to be creative or go into creative professions. But I think the environment and just watching him behaviourally, it was inevitable in a way.  

[00:08:19] And I was also quite impressed by the objects we had in the home. And my father would buy really nice things, very few things, because again, we weren’t wealthy. But when he bought something it was really nice. And he bought me an orange Braun alarm clock radio. So beside my bed was this bright orange plastic radius, nice, clean, minimalist object. And I ended up loving that thing. And I loved plastic and I loved soft things, and I don’t even know where that came from. They just seemed so human to me. So they connected with my body and my mind. And it was a calming effect to have those kinds of objects in my environment. And I think some of the furniture my dad had had the same kind of thing.  

Kim Thúy [00:09:05] But when it came time to go to university, he applied to study architecture at Carleton. Because that’s what you studied back then, if design intrigued you. Luckily for him, there were no slots left, so they put him in their new industrial design stream … and, well, Karim Rashid’s fate was sealed.  

Karim Rashid [00:09:29] I think for any student, I mean, that’s kind of a very important time of your life, right? Because it’s all new social milieu with people from all over, and you’re away from your parents and you’re doing what you are passionate about, hopefully, you know. So they were great and Ottawa was a very beautiful place to study because it was a quiet town. So I kind of like that remoteness. And we used to, like, skate in the winter on the Ottawa River to school, things of that nature. I mean, the winters were a bit brutal, but I really loved that time. Yeah.  

Kim Thúy [00:10:02] After Carleton, everything changed. He did his post-graduate studies in Italy, living in a kind of a Hogwarts for designers on the Amalfi Coast.  

Karim Rashid [00:10:16] So we ended up living in this house where we were studying, and it was cantilevered kind of on a cliff and looking at the island of Sorrento and Capri. So it was an amazing place to spend … I spent, I think, eight months there for the fall, the whole winter. And at wintertime it’s very closed, you know, it’s very strange. It’s a bit haunted, you know. It’s like everything shuts down and everything because there’s no tourism. So it was kind of — it was a beautiful time to study.  

Kim Thúy [00:10:39] Living in that house in Italy, overlooking the sea, Karim was inspired by designers from all over the world. One from Japan, who designed watches for Seiko. A fashion designer from Denmark. This is where he learned to think about design in a global way.  

Karim Rashid [00:11:02] Products inevitably need to be global. So if you design a mobile phone and you’re going to have a million people holding it and interfacing it, you’ve got to think about all the users. But the language of it also has to be collectively accepted. It can’t be too colloquial or too culture specific. So that’s one thing I kind of learned in a certain sense about their language in general. And it was a certain, I guess, minimalism in a way. I don’t like that word very much, but a more reductive — nice things, beautiful things — but more reductive that I appreciated from Italian design.  

[00:11:37] The other part I learned was that a lot of them, a lot of the companies were determined to do something original. And I always believed in that sense of originality. And it was the opposite of the way I was even educated. 

Kim Thúy [00:11:48] After Italy, Karim taught at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design for a while, but was fired for his theoretical approach to teaching — which stressed the philosophical over the practical. He landed at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and when he wasn’t teaching, he began pounding the pavement in New York, looking for companies that wanted his designs.  

Karim Rashid [00:12:18] I thought, you know what? I have loved this notion for all my life, this democratic design. It goes back to the little orange clock I had and the things that were in our parents’ apartment because my parents didn’t have a lot of money, but they were buying nice things. I thought, that’s just what design is. Design is for everyday life, and design is these objects that are around us. If you’re going to put all this work and engineering and all the tooling costs and all the people involved and two years to develop, why not be poetic, more beautiful, you know, function better, right? So I was determined.  

[00:12:50] So I contacted 100 companies — and this is a true story — and I went to the New York Public Library at that time because you had to look in phone books to contact companies. You know, it was hell. I would come home after like eight hours there with maybe four phone numbers and I would call, you know, you just blindly call. And then I talked to a secretary and I have to get to someone and say, “Listen, I want to work for you. I want to do a project for you.” And I contacted Gillette, LazyBoy, Coca Cola, all the mass, mass companies, because I wanted to do the mass commodity. Brita, the filter company, which are a lot of those brands, were still huge. And then I contacted Umbra because I was going to Toronto to visit my family and I thought, you know, maybe they’ll work with me. And I met Paul Rowan, Les Mandelbaum, the owners, they were very nice and gave me a brief and the brief was to design some wastepaper baskets.  

Kim Thúy [00:13:43] In typical Karim fashion, he threw himself wholeheartedly into the task. He drew up hundreds of designs. Paul and Les at Umbra pared it down to three versions they liked and brought the drawings down to the famous Housewares Show in Chicago. Their big clients, like Bed Bath & Beyond and Staples, got a sneak peek at Karim’s early prototypes … including one he named the Garbo. 

Karim Rashid [00:14:14] We wanted to get feedback because the tooling to make a can like that, which a lot of people don’t know, is maybe $100,000. The can, Garbo, that I designed was basically vetoed by all the buyers. None of them bought … and Les Mandelbaum was sitting in the booth in Chicago. And he turned to me with, “You know, I don’t know. They just don’t. They think it’s too wild or too progressive or something.” And I’m like, “It’s just a garbage can, come on now. It’s like a big vase, it can be anything, right?” And this was smart, it was priced well, and the material was going to be right on. Everything was like really figured out. I made the handle so you wouldn’t touch the garbage with your hand. I made a round bottom inside so the coffee wouldn’t get caught in the, you know, or the liquids wouldn’t get caught. And then Les just turned to me and said, “You know what, I have confidence in that can. We’re going to do it anyway.” 

Kim Thúy [00:15:03] The launch of the Garbo can in 1996 was a game changer for Karim, for Umbra, and for Canadian design. It went on to sell over 2 million units in its first two years of production, and it remains one of the most popular pieces Umbra has ever sold. A Garbo is even in the design collection of the Canadian Museum of History, along with a smaller version nicknamed the Garbini.  

Karim Rashid [00:15:38] I remember being so proud, like walking to Bed Bath & Beyond and seeing the window of the garbage cans. Like “Woooow.” I felt like I finally did something, you know. Companies who have done radical things in this world, they do it on intuition, not on focus groups, marketing and all this. And I’m up against this perpetually with every company I work for. It’s interesting because what I was doing at the end of the day, I was getting known for making these banal objects that nobody cared about.  

[00:16:02] And I remember sitting on an airplane, and I think it was the first time I flew business and I don’t know where I was flying to. And the guy sitting beside me, he picked up that kind of emporium magazine, you know, looking at all the stuff. And we started chatting and he said, “What do you do?” And I said, “Oh, I’m an industrial designer.” And he goes, “What’s that?” “Well, I design products and things. And product design really.” He still didn’t kind of get it. So I said, “Oh, see that stuff in the magazine? We design things like that.” And he looked at it and he said, “Oh, really? Oh, wow, that’s very interesting. So what are you working on now?” And I said, “I’m working on a garbage can.” And the guy laughed for the next hour of the flight. And at that moment I thought, what am I doing? That’s what I’m doing. I’m designing these really banal things and I was so disappointed with this idea that these objects around us that people don’t even think are designed, you know, they just fell from the sky. Yet there’s people, a lot of work behind all this, you know. 

Kim Thúy [00:16:57] Since that plane ride, Karim has made it his life’s mission to educate people about what goes into designing everyday objects around us. And in recent years, that mission has included putting a greater focus on sustainability by working with more recyclable and disposable materials. 

Karim Rashid [00:17:22] We want to make the world better. Stuff should be better. And that’s been my agenda probably since I started my practice in New York. I think that I’m just a designer. I’m a philosopher too, maybe, but I’m a designer. I’m not an athlete or a Hollywood star. You know what I mean? So it’s hard for me to like imagine myself being looked up to like that…  

[00:17:44] I had a client here a couple of days ago and they were all nervous at the table, like, “I can’t believe we met you.” I don’t get that. I guess because inside me, I don’t think I’ve really changed that much. I think there’s something that — and this is very honest, and I’m not saying this just because you’re Canadian — there’s a certain humbleness, I think, with Canadians, you know, very down to earth. And I think because, really, I was brought up in Canada, at the end of the day, I feel Canadian. There’s a certain humbleness that doesn’t allow me to become this kind of arrogant, “Oh, aren’t I famous or aren’t I successful, aren’t I?” You know? I just keep enjoying and doing what I’m doing and the ups and downs of it. I want to see the world become this kind of free place.  

[00:18:24] And lastly, I’ll just say one more thing. The greatest thing that can happen in one’s life is that you are doing a job that you have passion for or you are in this world doing what you were meant to do in this world. There is a reason every one of us is on this earth. We have a meaning of some sort and we need to find it and it would be a beautiful world … to create a world where every one of us are doing what we were put on this earth to do.  

Kim Thúy [00:18:54] Karim Rashid’s incredible story shows how his history is woven into his life’s work, along with the ideals that guide his personal philosophy. Things like democracy and accessibility, functionality and inclusion, and a commitment to what he calls the rigorous beautification of our built environment. Perhaps these are the artifacts that will long endure.  

CREDITS: 

Kim Thúy [00:19:33] Thanks for listening to Artifactuality, a podcast of the Canadian Museum of History. I am Kim Thúy.  

Artifactuality is produced by Makwa Creative and Antica Productions. Tanya Talaga and Jordan Huffman are the Executive Producers at Makwa. Lisa Gabriele is the Producer, Andrea Varsany is the Associate Producer, and Sophie Dummett is the Researcher for Antica. Laura Reghr and Stuart Coxe are Executive Producers at Antica. Mixing and sound design by Alain Derbez.  

Jenny Ellison and Robyn Jeffrey of the Canadian Museum of History are the Executive Producers of this podcast.

The interview with Karim Rashid was conducted by Laura Sanchini, Curator of Craft, Design and Popular Culture.  

Daniel Neill, Researcher, Sport and Leisure, is the Museum’s Podcast Coordinator.  

Check out historymuseum.ca for more stories, articles and exhibitions from the Museum. 

For more information about Karim Rashid, the Garbo, and the Museum’s design collection, check out the links in our show notes.