KREW KUTS: Shows of History - Part II
By Bernie Krewski
As the caption on the front page of this newspaper underlines, “without a voice, there is no echo.” A phrase well chosen!
“Echo” has deep roots - a legendary word, originating in Greek mythology. Nymphs were viewed as female representations of nature - maidens fused with spring waters that had healing powers. The parents of the nymph Echo felt she talked too much, drowning out the voices of others. They deprived her of all speech except for repeating the words of others, only leaving echoes – hence her name.
In these pages last week, I wrote about the origins and the development of museums and archives, and their echoes. For many people these facilities remain somewhat obscure, confined to the shadows of history – only of interest to tourists and historians.
My experience with them is quite different. They tell interesting stories.
PETER LOUGHEED
Buried in the back pages of the Hanna Herald on February 11, 1965, was this news item: “Grandson of Alberta Pioneer family, ‘Pete’ Lougheed Seeks Leadership of Alberta’s P.C.’s.”
Senator James Lougheed “came to Medicine Hat and Calgary in 1882 and married the daughter of the Chief Factor of the Hudson Bay Co. in this territory. For a quarter century, Senator Lougheed was the leader of the Conservative Party in Canada.”
A brief biography of Peter Lougheed follows - age 36, educated in Calgary, law graduate of the University of Alberta and a master’s in business administration (MBA) from Harvard University. Jeanne, his wife, is the daughter of Dr. L.M. Rogers of Camrose, and they have three children.
The many accomplishments of Peter Lougheed are well known and evident to this day.
Less familiar are shadows of his ancestral roots.
James Alexander Lougheed, the grandfather mentioned in the headline noted above, was born in Brampton, Ontario in 1854, of Scottish and Irish descent. The family moved to Toronto where James Lougheed studied law and subsequently moved to Calgary, knowing little about life on the prairies. There he met and married Isabella Clark Hardisty.
Isabella was one of nine children born to William Lucas Hardisty and Mary Anne Allen in 1861 at Fort Resolution in the NWT. The Hardisty family worked in the services of the Hudson’s Bay Company for generations. At age twenty-one, when her father died, Isabella moved to Calgary to live with her uncle, Richard Hardisty. Then a prominent businessman in the village of Calgary, he had previously been Chief Factor of Fort Edmonton.
By the early 1900s Mr. & Mrs. James Lougheed had established themselves as one of Calgary’s first “power couples” - a term we now use. At another time or place, this might have been a very ordinary story. But their circumstance had visible shadows - Isabella (nee Hardisty) was Métis as were both of her parents.
Doris Jeanne MacKinnon unravels its implications in her book, “The Premier and His Grandmother” (2023). Few people were aware of Peter Lougheed’s Indigenous ancestry when he was the premier of Alberta, she emphasizes, and that still applies today.
She makes these major points.
The Lougheed family fully accepted and embraced their indigenous ancestry but cautiously. Peter Lougheed was eight years old when his grandmother died. On several occasions during his political life, he publicly acknowledged his aboriginal roots.
MacKinnon explains why Métis people often constructed a public persona as if they were non-indigenous – it was a survival strategy, a method of avoiding severe discrimination. Few Albertans will know or remember that Métis People were not recognized as Aboriginal Peoples in Canada’s Constitution until 1982.
Not surprisingly, Isabella Lougheed, a prominent Calgarian, identified herself as French. Doris MacKinnon found no concrete evidence of her publicly acknowledging herself as indigenous (p. 97).
The pages of “The Premier and His Grandmother” also enlighten us on another aspect of the Lougheed family’s achievements. Isabella’s ancestors were leading members of the fur trading industry for more than a century. That was of great benefit to James Lougheed who had little knowledge about prevailing business practices on the prairies and its many intricate connections.
The Lougheed family history offers many lessons in the realities of those times.
RECORDS MANAGEMENT
I joined Alberta’s public service in 1974, near the end of Lougheed’s first term as premier. The influence of the premier’s education at Harvard was immediately evident. Management by objectives (MBO), defining organizational goals to achieve each objective, was being promoted everywhere, challenging the stodginess of 36 years of Social Credit governance.
A few months later, I took on a new position in the office of the Chief Deputy Minister of Social Services and Community Health. It was a time of intense transition – a change of ministers and deputy ministers, and the introduction of modern records management. That is, identifying, classifying, storing, securing, retrieving, tracking and destroying or permanently preserving records.
I was asked to search for a politically sensitive letter written by the outgoing minister. It involved entering a dusty storage basement with sparse lighting and cabinets containing bulging, poorly labelled files. File after file were scrutinized – no luck. Then a shocking discovery – a four-drawer cabinet with thin, clearly labelled files. It was obviously maintained by someone who was a perfectionist.
Because of previous knowledge, I quickly realized these files were the records of 2,822 young people with intellectual disabilities (once called “mentally retarded”) who were sterilized in an Alberta government sponsored program. The UFA government enacted the Sexual Sterilization Act in 1928. It continued and was expanded during the thirty-six years of Social Credit governance and finally repealed by the Lougheed government in 1972. Although the museum and archives had opened in 1967, these files were still being stored in unsuitable conditions eight years later.
What has constantly been historically significant about these files, the subject of many publicized lawsuits in the 1990s, are these factors. At least thirty states in the U.S. enacted similar legislation. Alberta was the only province in Canada to do so. Also, we now know that Hitler and his Nazi officials studied developments in the U.S. while establishing their own eugenics policies as scholar Robert J. Miller writes in “Nazi Germany’s Race Laws, The United States, and American Indians.”
Due to the public consequences of this tragic story, there is now a major research project led by Professor Robert Wilson at the University of Alberta entitled “The Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada.”
AMBROSE HOLOWACH (1914 – 1993)
As noted last week, Ambrose Holowach, Social Credit Cabinet Minister, was instrumental in constructing the Provincial Museum and Archives that opened in Edmonton in 1967.
In 1990, I had taken a suit to Expert Dry Cleaners in downtown Edmonton, then discovering it was a long-standing family-owned business of Ambrose Holowach’s family. The elderly man who served me when I went to pick up my suit, I discovered, was Mr. Holowach. I mentioned that I had been a volunteer for some time at the museum and archives but had been unable to find much information about him and his public life. During the next fifteen minutes he told me this story.
His parents had emigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, like mine, homesteaded east of Edmonton and then opened this drycleaning business. In 1930, when Ambrose was sixteen, accompanied by his slightly older brother Walter, he went to Vienna to continue his music education. For the next four years Ambrose’s interest was piano while Walter studied violin.
Mr. Holowach told me there was a small park near the music studio where he would take breaks and rest during rehearsals. One day, enjoying the sunshine with his eyes closed, he felt some movement at his feet. He looked down and noticed a small dog. Standing beside him was a short man with a stubble beard wearing a well-worn suit. He said (in German which Ambrose spoke), “ Do you like my puppy?”
Ambrose went on to tell me that he would often meet this man and converse with him during his years in Vienna. It was Sigmund Freud, the world-famous founder of psychoanalysis!