Canada: A week of joy is curtailed by bans on booze, erotic songs and Tim Hortons
O Canada, you giant beautiful land of Indigenous Peoples, Queen-loving immigrants and Québécois circuses. I love you more than you love hockey, more than you love poutine, more than you love to cover yourselves in maple syrup and dress up as Mounties, and lumberjacks. I was so excited about spending a week Armchair Travelling to you that I bought Moosehead Beer and maple-syrup glaze several months in advance. One of the most memorable nights of my life was spent drinking Canadian Club whisky with a real life Canadian, but the family have put strict limits on how much alcohol I can buy for each country and so that will have to remain a one off…
The week started, as all weeks should, with Bannock, an Indigenous bread I filled with maple glazed vegan bacon. In this week’s book Indian Horse, the main character is Ojibway and he cooks Bannock by squashing the dough on a stick and cooking it in a fire. It sounds incredible, but I was sadly not up to the challenge. Written by Richard Wagamese (no relation) the novel tells the story of one Obijway family’s desperate attempt to keep their children from being stolen and forces into residential schooling. Sadly they do not succeed and so Indian Horse’s (the titular character) life is set on a destructive path. There are moments of redemption through the Canadian miracle of ice-hockey, but the damage inflicted is deep. And it is also widely felt. As I was reading the book the news was filled with stories of the 751 unmarked graves of Indigenous children found at a residential school. A terrifying reminder that the true horror was often worse than Wagamese imagines.
This week’s first film A Colony looked at how Indigenous People fair in today’s Canadian schooling system. It’s a traditional coming of age story about a girl trying to understand and then toe the lines of teenage hierarchies and her relationship with Jimmy, an Abenaki boy who has no plans to change himself to fit in. Sadly it is unsurprising that it shows that racism and prejudice still haunt the schooling system today.
There are many Indigenous-made films out there, but it is hard to find how to stream them and so for our second film we plumped for Iqaluit a film about a man who lives part of the year in an Inuit community whilst his wife remains in Quebec. When her husband dies in mysterious circumstances, she travels to collect his belongings and discovers that he had a child with an Inuit girl. It is a slow and depressing tale, but still makes me want to head to North Canada if ever the world reopens.
So far then, the week was as fascinating as I had hoped, and it just got better when I worked out how to make poutine. At least I think I did! It seems to be cheesy chips covered in gravy. If I have mis-understood something, let me know!
Canada is 4,000% larger than the United Kingdom and so of course there is more to their cuisine than cheesy chips, there is also Tim Hortons (or Timmies to its friends). So loved is this institution there even a band devoted to them. I headed to their Birmingham branch with some excitement… but I came home crushed. Canada may have mastered the maple-glazed doughnut, but it should leave the fast food to someone else. It was cold, dry, tasteless and not to be repeated.
But whilst I say tata to Timmies, I say YES to maple syrup on my new favourite vegan pancake recipe and YES to this week’s playlist even though one of my children has forbidden me from the “far too sexual” song “Often” by the Weeknd.
So the week draws to a close even though I have yet to try a Caesar cocktail, but Cape Verde is calling and I must be on my way.
