On Don Cherry's Citizenship in the Six String Nation

Why I’m revoking Don Cherry’s citizenship in the Six String Nation. The Six String Nation project was conceived in the divisive atmosphere of the lead up to the 1995 Quebec Referendum on sovereignty. Referenda are necessarily divisive. They take complex problems and cast them as simple choices, usually just between Yes or No. The media took its cues accordingly and the whole debate was framed as blue vs. red, Quebec vs. Ottawa, French vs. English. Even the responses of the rest of Canadians whom the referendum made mere bystanders could only be funnelled into the polarities of “Don’t Go” and “Good Riddance”. But how was that referendum supposed to account for the voices of indigenous people in Quebec, or francophones outside of Quebec or any of the thousands of other perspectives there are on what it is to be Canadian? Well, of course it wasn’t meant to. So the Six String Nation project was meant to invite those conversations by putting diverse histories and perspectives from different communities and cultures and characters into one object - a guitar - the very essence of which is to create harmony out of internal tensions. It would exist not only as an object that illustrated that complex truth but also as a living instrument through which those who played it and those who heard it could articulate those perspectives in their own way in their own place and time. Given my experience shepherding the project around the country and beyond, I can say that it has succeeded in doing just that in however small a way. We now find ourselves in an atmosphere that is arguably more divisive than it was in 1995. Global problems and tensions infuse national and even local issues and there are plenty of politicians and others willing to exploit those tensions to threaten to divide us again. Some of these people wield actual political and industrial power, some are cynical influencers and some are grandiose hockey commentators. I played hockey as a kid - house league, never really competitively. But my dad took me to Leaf games at Maple Leaf Gardens and, like many Canadians, I was glued to every game of the 1972 Canada-Soviet Summit Series. I had absorbed the orthodoxy that hockey was part of the Canadian soul. But I lost interest in the game when kids in my league who were on no track to the NHL nevertheless wanted to emulate their hockey heroes by fighting on the ice. I lost interest in watching it around the same time. At its best, hockey was a game of speed and elegance - almost 1 of 4 balletic precision. Fights just slowed things down with a particularly dull kind of brutality. This was just a few years before the advent of Coach’s Corner and Don Cherry’s Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Hockey. So, of course I knew who Don Cherry was but I rarely watched Hockey Night In Canada and his opinion about the game I’d lost interest in never really mattered to me. But I knew that he was a colourful character - literally and figuratively - and appreciated that people who did still care about the game tuned in to hear his bombastic pronouncements and then argued about them the next day. So when we decided to include soft materials in the Six String Nation project by adorning the case and strap, I reached out to Don Cherry. I never dealt with Don, of course, but I had a very lovely series of email exchanges and phone calls with his daughter, Cindy. Naturally, I wanted something emblematic of Don and what else could that be but a swatch of fabric from one of his flamboyant jackets or perhaps one of his absurdly high shirt collars and that’s what I thought we might get. We went back and forth for quite a while until finally Cindy said, “Dad says he can’t bear the thought of anyone cutting one of his jackets, would you accept a pair of pants?” I thought then it was one of the most shallow and narcissistic things I’d ever heard but she seemed possibly exasperated by the exercise herself and, whatever, fine - and she sent me a pair of black on grey check trousers - positively funereal by Cherry standards - with the words “DON CHERRY” imprinted faintly in the SIZE field on the tailor’s tag inside the waistband. Al Williams and Trudy Graham of Calton Cases in Calgary cut the pants down to a size that would fit into the case, while recreating the recognizable shape of pants, and sewed them into the lid. I didn’t always point out the pants as part of my presentation about the project but often after going through some of the extraordinarily moving elements of the guitar itself, I’d put up a slide and point out the various pieces of material adorning the case: part of Karen Kain’s Bluebird tutu from her 1973 medal winning performance at the international ballet competition in Moscow donated by the National Ballet of Canada, Pierre Berton’s bowtie donated by his children and Don Cherry’s pants. Kain’s tutu always drew a murmur of respect, Berton’s bowtie a sentimental “awwwww” and Cherry’s pants a laugh. It was a good punchline after some pretty heavy storytelling that preceded it. And that seemed about right to me. I saw Don Cherry as a kind of clown and the fact that his pants were now the size of kids’ shorts just added to the joke. Privately, when people came up to look at the guitar and case after a presentation, if people said they didn’t care much for Don Cherry I would sympathize and if people wondered why we had a pair of grey trousers rather than a gaudy jacket I’d tell them the story but I confess I didn’t really think too much about Don Cherry’s place in the project. 2 of 4 Cherry’s comments on November 9th, 2017 could have been just more blather from a blowhard that I didn’t pay any attention to but for the news it made. And listening not only to the thoughts of people that I respect, like Jesse Wente, but also to the voices of Cherry supporters in which was made plain a kind of oblivious and casual racism and excuse-making, I realized it was time to stop making excuses myself. History is written by the victors. If we are wise and thoughtful and if we hope to advance as a nation (or as a species for that matter) we need to pull apart those histories and look at them in full light. Invariably we will find that heroes and monsters are not always so clearly defined. The Six String Nation guitar was meant to be a warts-and-all conversation starter about Canadian heritage and identity. And so the back and sides of the guitar made from wood from the Convent of the Grey Nuns in St. Boniface, Manitoba, where Louis Riel went to school and which now houses relics of him as the St. Boniface Museum, adjoins pieces of the office sideboard of his nemesis, Sir John A. MacDonald. In their midst sits ammolite from the Blood Tribe of southwestern Alberta - a people whom MacDonald sought to exterminate from the path of his nation-building railway. And the people who helped build that railway - the Chinese immigrants who were denied their families and subject to a head tax - contributed part of a gate to Fan Tan Alley in Victoria, Canada’s first Chinatown, now a twee tourist destination but once the site of relentless police raids scooping up lonely, desperate, overworked, despised men who turned to gambling and opium for some relief. Canadians are taught that the Underground Railway is proof of our abhorrence of slavery but the tops of the bridge pins of the guitar are dotted with ground slate from a makeshift chapel in St. Armand, Quebec built by slaves maintained in Canada by loyalists from Vermont, proof that there was slavery in Canada, perhaps not as policy but definitely in practice. In this same spirit of embracing difficult truths in the project, I wondered if maybe I should keep Don Cherry’s pants in the case and reposition them from punchline to teachable moment. I’m suspicious of the idea of “cancel culture”. Then I thought, what if I outlined them or partially covered them or somehow decorated them using materials from Canadian veterans of differing backgrounds formed into colourful poppies. Could that be powerful - to make Don Cherry’s uncharacteristically drab wardrobe into a mere ground for the figure of the real character and real colour of Canada? But then something else occurred to me: 3 of 4 When that “left wing kook”, David Suzuki, introduced me to Guujjaaw and the people of Haida Gwaii he helped start an extraordinary conversation that lead to an extraordinary contribution. It took 18 months of dialogue - both with me and internally in the community on Haida Gwaii - for the Council of the Haida Nation and the carver and hereditary chief Leo Gagnon and the elder Frank Collison and people in the community to agree to cut into the fallen body and spirit of Kiidk’yaas, the legendary Golden Spruce, and let us turn part of it into the top of a guitar. Even then it was controversial among different clans on the island and it stuns me endlessly that a people who have every right NOT to want to participate in a project about Canada, decided that they would make this absolutely defining contribution to its story.

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