Духоборческая община."Искра" > Январь-2007

Culture and Models for Peacemaking: Canada and Russia
 

A talk by Professor Alexander Vaschenko

Moscow State University

Given at Selkirk College, Canada 23 November 2006

As part of the Mir Centre for Peace Lecture Series
 

From the time in 1988 when he first came to the Kootenays as interpreter for the cultural tour: "East-West Passage: Soviet Writers in Canada", Professor Alexander Vaschenko has been a friend and supporter to many in our communities. Professor Vaschenko is a distinguished scholar in Russia, formerly at the Gorky Institute of World Literature, and now at Moscow State University. Over the last several years he has been collaborating with Canadian friends to establish a Canadian Literature and Culture section at Moscow State University. This autumn he received a grant from the Canadian Embassy in Moscow to travel to Canada to do research for his course on Canadian culture. After spending time in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver, Professor Vaschenko came to the Kootenays and asked immediately to see the Mir Centre for Peace, the Doukhobor communal home which is being transformed on the grounds of Selkirk College. In late November he gave the following talk to about 60 people at Selkirk College-an audience which included College president Marilyn Luscombe. The talk was characterized by Professor Vaschenko's sensitivity to cultural and historical issues, and his understanding of the complex paths - Russian, First Nation, Doukhobor, Buddhist-which may lead to cultures of peace.

I want to begin this lecture with a quotation from classic Russian literature:

"though hundreds of thousands had done their very best to disfigure the small piece of land on which they were crowded together, covering the ground with stones, scraping away every sprouting blade of grass, lopping off the branches of trees, driving away birds and beasts, fouling the air with smoke of coal and ore - still spring was spring, even in the town...

All were glad: the plants, the birds, the insects, and the children. But men, grown-up men and women, did not leave off cheating and tormenting themselves and each other. It was not this spring morning they thought sacred and important, not the beauty of God's world, given to benefit all creatures - a beauty which inclines the heart to peace, harmony, and love - but only their own devices forgetting the upper hand of each other."

These of course are the famous opening lines for the Tolstoys novel Resurrection. I have chosen them for my presentation because they clearly point to the problem that remains unsolved until today, more than a century since. To me, Russian and Canadian experiences in peacemaking models produce a subject worthy of deep cultural, moral and political significance and consideration.

After staying for two weeks in Canada during my present visit, I can bear witness to the fact that the idea of "peace" as a political concept is recurrent on the front pages of the newspapers; it remains the topic of important essays and anthologies, it is present on various dedications and plaques placed on historical monuments. This, together with the tradition of national politics, shows a serious Canadian preoccupation with peace and reveals what might be called a national concern for this issue. Closer observation shows that indeed Canadian peacemaking experience is multiple and many-dimensional, to the extent that it is beyond my ability to cover it entirely, and since I have to make choices I would like to concentrate on three cultural traditions each if which is self-contained, absorbing and attractive. Each belongs to a particular culture, and in each case peacemaking is understood as a conscious historical choice for a given society, ethnic group or community. The peacemaking effort proves to be a value pre-eminent above other matters, and in each case a Canadian character and identity is revealed.

Two models are represented by Canadian First Nations peoples; symbolically, one comes from the Eastern part of the country, and the other from British Columbia. Although in themselves unrelated they, in a sense, embrace all the National history that took place between, marking the beginning and the end of the national advance.

I have come to the Kootenays right after my visit to Brantford, Ontario, a place that before the coming of Europeans for a long time had been the domain of the Iroquois people. The Europeans had even mistaken the word for "village" and called the whole country "Kanata." Now, there is a little town not far away from Toronto which retains that name. Ethno-history tells us that even before the Iroquois of the Six Nations formed a Confederacy, there were attempts at peacemaking institutions among the people, such as the "Queen of Peace." But the main peacemaking reform came with the foundation of the Great League. It takes the people five days to tell the story now, and until recently it was regularly repeated and called "Laws of the Great Peace." To make this long and dramatic story short, one must simply say that once in the past the Iroquois came to a dismal point in their history: bloody vendetta was carried out among them, cannibalism and the threat of enemy attack were constant.

At that moment, (which tradition puts at around 1390) there appeared a Peacemaker who got the vision and the teaching for unity, but couldn't convey it to others. Finally it was revealed together with another important chief, Hiawatha, who managed to talk all of the six tribes into unity. After unity was established among the Iroquois, it was believed that the roots and the branches of this vine must spread all over the world. They called this organic unity the "White Roots of Peace". The key word for this oral document was Unity, and the ways of building to maintain it were meticulously outlined (one version of the Law contains 117 articles); the name the Iroquois gave to it can be translated as Great Peace, Great Law and Great White Pine. It was also likened to a house that ever expands, embracing other nations - if they would listen to it. The reforms definitively saved the Iroquois from self-destruction; what the Union meant for other nations - whether it was peace or forced submission-remains a subject of argument among the scholars. Whatever it meant, a new era was already beginning in North America: European powers were entering the stage, and each of them wanted the Iroquois to fight on their side: the French, the English and, later, the Americans. The splitting of the Iroquois Union was called the Broken Chain of Friendship, and those who fought during the American Revolution on the side of the British had to flee for Canada. The statue of chief Joseph Brant, who headed the refugees, has just been unveiled in Ottawa right by the War Memorial, and the destiny of those who stayed behind in the United States and those who became the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario, became different ever since.

The United States has never officially recognized that its own political Union was formed in any way as a response to the Iroquois model, although there is evidence that in part it was. The First Nations who fled into Canada brought with them the first peacemaking model into that country. It is also a matter of open question as to whether the Great Peace Union became the model for the United Nations organization.

Today, near Brantford, one way this peacemaking tradition has been kept is manifested in a symbolic traditional First Nations Village called Kanata, with a nearby park where the trees were planted in the shape of a turtle with a White Pine in the middle. The turtle stands for the world, the American continent, and Peace.

As I was trying to get re-acquainted with the activities going on at Selkirk College, I noticed Peace Studies as part of the curriculum. I thought it to be remarkable and very fitting for the area where it is positioned. I believe that the Iroquois experience may very well become part of whatever material falls into these studies as a truly native Canadian achievement.

A meeting place of traditions and cultures is always a place of transformation, and this truth is again brought to us through the Native teachings. And here I switch from the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, and from Ontario to British Columbia, where through an incredible and even inexplicable set of circumstance an exceptional Native Canadian woman-poet, Emily Pauline Johnson-who in fact comes from the Six Nations reserve and Brantford, Ontario-came to live out her last years in Vancouver, British Columbia. To me she is a very meaningful figure, her own life a meeting place of cultures (Anglo-Canadian and First Nations, east and west of the country). I remember that thirteen years back when I visited Canada, she was barely known, while now she has become "a Canadian icon."

Everybody in BC, and perhaps in Canada, knows about the majestic twin peaks that overlook the city of Vancouver, and which are commonly known as the "Lions". This name speaks of the British Imperial mentality, for it is connected to the Lions in Trafalgar Square, London, or perhaps directly with the Lions as a symbol of the Great British Empire. Pauline was able to unravel the real name for this landmark: the "two sisters". She told the story in her famous masterpiece, Legends of Vancouver. It is symbolic that the story is the opening one for the whole collection. As the Squamish Indians tell it, it is the story of a Peacemaking breakthrough.

If you remember, the story begins amidst a war waged by the two groups of tribes on the Pacific Coast. And the time came, when the great chief of the Southerners wanted to celebrate the coming of age of his two daughters. They were twins, and he promised, that to honour this occasion he would fulfill any of their wishes whatever they might be. Since he wanted it to be the greatest feast ever heard of, he would do anything, but even he was not prepared for the wish expressed by his twin daughters: they asked him to invite their greatest enemies, the Northern tribes for the feast and peaceful gathering. The chief, although reluctant, agreed, and this great occasion turned into an event of peacemaking that has never been broken since. Unity had descended upon the warring tribes of the coast, and this through the insight and wisdom of two young women. To commemorate the courage of the twin sisters, the Great Spirit took them up from their earthly lives and transformed them into the landmark mountains-the snow capped peaks above the city of Vancouver-which remain forever as symbols of peace on the west coast of Canada...

The story seems to be simple, but it is not. The former enemies sit dow^rn to share communal food, which is a ritual meal. We have the same motif in Russian storytelling, when Ivan, the tzar's son, encounters a terrible ogress called Baba Yaga, and stops her from eating him alive by telling her: "I am a stranger; first you must give me water, feed me and offer me a banya and then you may do what you want." Obviously, after these ritual actions are fulfilled, the hostile ogress is being transformed into a relative, a helper.

Secondly, I was always asking myself: why there should be twin sisters? Well, to me the answer is obvious: the characters stand for the two Peaks. However, it is an oversimplification. In the story, it seems, this doubleness is explained as the past and the future made one by the present event of peacemaking. The beautiful girls stand for the beautiful unity of the two externally opposing forces whose inner nature is, or must be, the same: they eventually become one. Also, it is not "two brothers" but "twin sisters" who bring peace, for among the First Nations the mothers of the clan make important decisions; it is the women who are responsible for life-giving and life-caring acts. This story, it seems, manifests another Native Canadian peacemaking idea, or even model.

   Let us step back in time and space and for the moment and come back to the Russian soil. Trouble has been the term for Russian reality since time immemorial. Because Russia always has been the great meeting place of the East and West, it has also been the source of tension and creativity; there has always been something dramatic in the Russian character, yet after looking deep into Russian history one hardly would ever call Russians an aggressive culture. Notwithstanding the turmoil, or even because of it, the Russian peacemaking tradition has acquired a folkish nature and goes way back into the past. Our oral stories bear witness that the values of peace were traditionally far more important than warfare, w^Thich usually took the form of defence. It is symbolic that the word for "peasant" in Russian etymologically is the same as the word "Christian": "krestianin"

In a well-known epic story coming from the Novgorod area, the warrior-prince Volga is being defeated by the earth-tiller Mikula, who in his bag carries around the whole gravity-force of Mother Earth. In the Russian folk tradition peace is more powerful, more rooted in the earth, than the aggressive force of the war.

A lot of peacemaking has found its way into the so-called "Russian idea," which developed gradually-through the ages and was finally formulated by the end of the nineteenth century. The twin peaks of Russian life - philosophy and humanity-Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy - have stated its principles, made them the teaching of

Russian culture. As he pondered over the phenomenon of Pushkin, Dostoevsky said that the Russian message to the world was the one of unity' and love; it is manifested in a "world-responsiveness" that exists in order to give a brotherly embrace to the West in an authentically Christian unity.

   The leading idea that runs through the whole of the Tolstoy's life-quest is represented in the image of the "green stick" which one has to look for because in it the final fraternity and unity and mutual happiness of humanity is contained, (editor's note: as a child Tolstoy believed a green stick was hidden in the forest of Yasnaya Polyana where he was born. He looked for this green stick throughout his life, and now is buried in the woods near where that search began}. Tolstoy understood war as both madness and crime, which is driven by the egotistic strife for power and wealth, and is self-destructive and poisonous for society. In his epic novel War and Peace he touched upon many sides of the problem. The main idea that stitches together all that is taking place in the book, containing more than half a thousand characters, is the story of how the whole of the world (mir) moves toward peace. The Russian word "mir" is to be understood in a multiple way in the novel: mir as the earthly place as opposed to heaven; mir as a community, or the world; mir as harmony, or as an opposite of war. According to Tolstoy, it is historically inevitable that the whole of humanity is driven eventually towards unity and peace. Putting it against the contemporary political language of our own times, it was the only way toward "globalization" that Tolstoy would approve.

At the very same time that Tolstoy was exploring the moral possibilities of world brotherhood and peace, in two far away Georgian villages the people whom the world would know as Doukhobors made it clear to themselves and to the rest of the world that from now on they would abandon all kinds of violence and destruction and start upon the burdensome yet pure road of peace. The only fighting that they were to stand for was the fighting for spirituality. As it seems to me, it is no chance or coincidence that the Doukhobors have sprung up from the Russian soil; yet it is perhaps no historical chance either that they had to part with the Russian milieu and look for peace elsewhere. In

the English-Canadian context they sometimes refer to the Doukhobor experience as a "Utopia," translated from Latin as "a place that does not exist." This is why the term is incorrect when applied to the Doukhobors. The American philosopher H.D. Thoreau whom Tolstoy sympathized with said that the true philosopher is not the one who came out with a nice new idea, and he is not the one who has founded a school of thought, but the one who dares to live according to his principles. And this has been true in the Doukhobor case: with their principles of toil and peaceful life. Just as the "Two Sisters" weave and stitch together into a new fabric the old Russian and new Canadian desires, the Doukhobors as a community have stitched together through

the centuries a significant portion of Canadian history and geography as the country was emerging "from one sea to another."

So I think it to be more than a coincidence, more than just natural circumstances, that specific models for peacemaking have converged on Canadian soil. By now, one can say that these are recognized as national values. The stories tell us that the models for peacemaking involve a dialogue, or, to put it in the vernacular of Six Nations people: "a meeting of Good Minds." It seems there is something in the Canadian mentality that is evolved from principals of Parliamentary debate, or the council of Elders, or the will of the community that tells us that the dialogue can be extended beyond local experience. As one of your Canadian minds puts it, "we have recognized from the start that there are two state languages, and never have tried to make them into one or ignore that fact."

To me, there exists a list of similarities between the Doukhobors' and the First Nations' peacemaking experiences. Like the Six Nations, in their foundation story there was a public act of destruction of arms for good; and there was a necessity to seek refuge in order to maintain peace. The set of values within both groups rests within a communal way of life and a respect for all life-forms and environmental harmony. Their language and their beliefs become a matter of survival through the centuries of turmoil and have proved to be effective. The same goes for relationships to the land.

(Editor's note: here Professor Vaschenko interjects with a narrative from his visit to the Penticton First Nations Reserve a few days earlier.)

As I passed through Penticton, I had a brief reunion with an exceptional person of the Okanagan Indian Band, the writer and educator, Jeanette Armstrong. She said the matter of land claims that appears to be the issue everywhere, is essentially a false one, for it makes one think in terms of material possession. The deepest issue of the relationship of a human being towards the land is not a political but a spiritual one. She said: "The land has a demand towards the people. It is a question of how we can respond to the land, how we can best care for it"

Russia in its contemporary state, with all its scope of spiritual power and resources in this world of global change, has to add to its old conflicts a set of new ones. Perhaps the Russian mission, indeed, is to give of itself to others (they say, that when they asked Catherine the Great, what kind of a country Russia is, she answered: "It is not a country. It is the Universe.")

In the States, the ideas of the First Nations Peacemaker were dimmed by the Protestant ethic and sometimes resemble now "Peace according to the Americans," or Pax Americana. The fact that in Canada the multiple principles of peacemaking are alive today and work to define the future is a remarkable fact and a promise.

All of the peacemaking models I have touched upon are part and parcel of the Canadian experience, and valuable to the contemporary world at large as never before, for it is still the world of fighting opposites that too easily abandons spirituality and harmony, and substitutes entertainment for art, mass culture for true culture, and forgets the world of brotherhood and sisterhood in a world where "nobody weeps because another weeps." (W. H. Auden).

So, Tolstoys questions, indirectly put before us in the opening lines of the novel Resurrection, remain a challenge for Canada as for the rest of humanity. Of course these mountains of the Kootenays and the whims of weather that sometimes make for difficulties in communicating with the outer world, may cause one to think that Castlegar is far "on the edge of the world." But the people who live and work for the sake of peace here demonstrate that in the contemporary world everything is of first rate significance, and every place is culturally central just as every human being is the centre of the universe. As I have come back after thirteen years, I see the proof that here in Castlegar, at the place of the confluence of two mighty rivers, at the ground of the meeting place of many cultures - the Anglo-Canadians, the First Nations and the Russian Doukhobors - the people have come towards the idea of how one can go forth, bringing together the values of past and future. I mean the making up of a special territory that magically contains the natural beauty of the land with the cherished history of the people and, like the Burning of Arms, it is a vital gesture to the rest of the world. I mean the Mir Centre for Peace, combining the essence of Doukhobor spirituality, the traditional roots of First Nations people, and the principals that all Canadians stand for. As your respected leader (USCC Executive Director) J.J. Verigin, put it a day ago in his remarks when we were at the Mir house: "I see it as a perfect physical tool to give the peacemaking message to the rest of the world, and all are welcome to take shelter here." You can feel the timelessness and the sacredness of the Mir site, and as I stand before the resurrected Doukhobor house, I see from here right through the mountains all the way down to Yasnaya Polyana, the "bright clearing" of old Tolstoys estate, and I believe that Tolstoy would be much content with the new peacemaking breakthrough and the new step toward peace-affirmation that is being born now, right before our eyes. As I have just yesterday read in one of the "ISKRA" issues - a thought coming from a Chinese philosopher - "One cannot say if hope exists or doesn't. It is like a distance between points; as more people go for it, the road is made."

And it is to this place of spiritual resurrection, confluence, and cultural meeting, and above all to the local people who make the road, that in an old traditional Russian way, I'd like to give my bow of deepest respect and love. (Here Professor Vaschenko rose and, before the audience, bowed his head deeply toward the ground; an act which Doukhobors will understand as the recognition of an essential humanity and goodness contained in each human soul).

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