Victor Reece spreads Raven’s wings and soars above the land. Photo by Dan Davidson

There are lessons in these stories

by Dan Davidson

Tsimpshian carver, mask maker, storyteller, and mask dancer Victor Reece was at the Dawson Community Library on a Saturday afternoon in early August to share some of his stories and his art with library patrons.

A quiet voiced storyteller, Reece had no trouble holding his audience while he told the story of how Raven freed the sun for the people. Raven is the trickster character of the Tsimpshian people, a capricious shape-shifter who loves a good trick but is also very helpful to humans. In this story he goes to great lengths to steal the sun from a great chief who has it stored away in a box.

Reece has been known in Dawson for a couple of years through the work of former Berton House writer in residence Andrea Spalding, whose children’s book, Solomon’s Tree, made use of a mask carved by Reece. In addition he and his son were the life models for the characters in the story about a boy who learns to honour a tree and the circle of life.

Student Librarian Shaughnessy Sturdy read the book to the children and then Victor produced the mask which is the centerpiece of the story.

He also showed off the masks which he uses to tell the raven story when he does it from a stage, and demonstrated the use of some of the various types of knives which he uses in his carving.

Reece concluded the afternoon with a teaching story which was told to him by his grandmother. His grandmother always taught and instructed with stories.

“She didn’t say it to us like ‘When you go outside, you be careful. Don’t be touching anything that you don’t know.’ Instead she would tell us a story.”

In the story, two children were born with deformities - his hand like a knife and her cheek like a stone - that caused the other children to make fun of them and set them apart. Yet one day when the other children were playing on the beach it was the abilities of the brother and sister that saved the others from floating off into the sky on a big feather. They all fell down safely into a big hill of children.

“And if you go to where I was raised you can see that hill ... and in certain light you can see the children still standing there.

“That’s how my grandma taught us to be safe and also to respect each other.”

Victor Reece and his wife, Sharon Jinkerson-Brass have been artists in residence at Macaulay House through the program offered by the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture. While in Dawson, Reece is working on a project called ‘Matriarchs of the Earth’ with local dancer Michelle Olson.

Enoch Kent is a singer who really means it

by Dan Davidson

The morning after the night before 72 year old Enoch Kent is perhaps just a little slow getting a move on for this interview. He’s got a scrape on his nose where he had a small argument with a bush sometime around 5 that morning, and he can’t find his good glasses, but he’s ready to stand on the back steps of Berton House and talk

“Should I give ye the Charles Atlas pose?” says Kent in the Berton House living room. Photo by Dan Davidson

until I run out of tape and beyond once he gets going.

And going. There are more tangents than you’ll find in a geometry text when you start talking to Enoch Kent. At one point he looks at me slyly and mutters, “I dunno what the hell yer gonnae do with all this.”

The Scots burr comes out when he’s full of mischief, though he’s been in Canada since the 1960s. Never does it get quite as thick as he lays it on when doing “Uncle Angus” in the Money Mart ad, but the roll of his “R’s” when he sings does make you wonder why his tongue doesn’t cramp.

Kent is a folk singer and songwriter. He says he plays the guitar just to back up his own voice, and decries the modern trend (as he calls it) for extended solos with no words. Folks singing is about words and about causes, whether it’s true love, lust and loathing (the title of his latest album) or about “us versus them” as this son of a British Communist likes to put it.

He’d be more of a socialist by modern standards, because “the Russians mucked it up something dreadful” but that doesn’t take away his sense of being one of the working classes, and he says that anyone who works for someone else for wages and doesn’t think he or she is working class is just not facing reality.

So while Kent’s been in music since his days in Scotland with the Reivers, and then again in London as a member of first the Exiles and then the Singers’ Club (or Critics’ Club), he’s always had a day job. He’s as ready to talk about his years as a clerk, as a teacher (unqualified - meaning he had no degree), or as an advertising designer, as he is about his music, but the music, combined with his 47 years of marriage to his wife, Pat, is the constant in his life.

It’s constant, he says, because it’s grounded in a sense of who he is, and what the purpose of the music is. It’s not just to make music because he’s good at it. It’s to make people think. He says he’s worried about the young musicians he’s been seeing around him all weekend at the Dawson City Music Festival. They play beautifully and sing up a storm, but he’s not convinced that many of them have a driving reason to do it beyond the desire to perform.

But then, he’s not sure about older performers either. Asked by DCMF alumnus Nancy White to participate in a tribute concert to Leonard Cohen, Kent declined as politely as he could, but privately, he says, he just couldn’t relate to the man’s music.

The poets, he says, have got love all wrong. They dress it up in flowers and hide it in fancy words, and it all has nothing to do with the reality of the common folk.

He says he doesn’t want to tell people what to do in his songs. Not that he won’t sing the old union organizing pieces - thinks they’re great stuff - but they’re not him. He wants people to take a second look at things, and maybe change their minds, but that’s up to them.

This is not quite the same strategy that won him his wife. Her parents had sent her to Canada to get her away from this scruffy working class kid, so he spent the time she was gone writing her letter after letter, and wooing her parents.

“So by the time she comes back from Canada, she’s mine.”

It was she who suggested the move to Canada in 1966, after he’d been in London for ten years. He suggested Australia, but she won.

His devotion showed in the grief that silenced him for a time after their only child died not longer after its birth. He remembers what jarred him out of that.

“I’m in a mall in Yorkdale and this fat guy comes up to me and says, ‘Are you Enoch Kent?’ I says, ‘Yeah, I am’. He says, ‘How come you’re no’ singing.’ ‘I don’t really feel like singing right now.’

“ ‘Well,’ says the guy, ‘I run a folk club. Yer singin’ in two weeks.’”

That was Tam Kearney, a fellow expatriate Scot, who runs a place called Fiddler’s Green. Before too long he was doing more singing and bit of travelling too.

A similar prod got him back into a recording studio after 36 years when Lawrence Stevenson talked him into making the recordings that eventually turned into his first CD, “I’m a Working Chap”.

They had to try it twice. The first time they worked in a featureless CBC studio that Kent felt would be best suited as a torture chamber for political prisoners. He hated the results and was ready to give it up then, but Stevenson’s partner, Tim Harrison, came up with an alternative.

“Tim said, ‘Would you like to record at my place?’ I said, ‘Where’s your place?’ and he said, ‘At my house.’ So I recorded at his house. It was wonderful. The best place to sing is in somebody else’s kitchen.”

Well, that’s where he started, singing along with his father’s concertina in the family home. That and an epiphany when he was attending a concert at the Highlander’s Institute when he was 18, set him on the musical highway. Put it together with finding Ewan MacColl’s collection of folk songs and an abiding interest in causes and you’re got a travelling singer with a few more miles in him yet.

French Gulch photo by Kevin Hastings

Uffish Thoughts: Reflections on the Media by Firelight

by Dan Davidson

My wife's cousin called from St. Thomas, Ontario, on the evening of July 19. We had stayed the night at her home just over a month earlier and she keeps an eye on the media for mention of Dawson City. She was surprised when I answered the phone so cheerfully. Did that mean that things were not really as bad as they seemed to be on the TV news?

Well . . . yes.

Hers was not the first call. That one had come from our daughter in Toronto a few days before, a combination of “Happy Birthday” to her mother and “are you all right?” for the rest of it.

That call was followed the next day by one from Joey and Dolina Hollingsworth, the show biz couple who ran the shows at the Palace Grand and Gerties a few years ago. They’d caught the National that night and phoned us immediately to check up on everyone they knew.

Not long after that a former public librarian now living north of Toronto was on the phone, concerned for our welfare.

Aside from that, there were e-mails that week from the former director of the Dawson City Music Festival, a former Anglican priest, and an elderly couple from Vancouver.

There would probably have been more contacts, but by then I’d sent out a blanket e-mail to every one of our regular correspondents after it became clear that national coverage of our situation was, to paraphrase Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated.

After all, if people who used to live here, and had been through several fire seasons in the past, were concerned after the press and electronic media got done with us, what would the rest of our mailing list be thinking?

Some of the panic could be blamed on high impact headlines and media teasers, those little jolts that get you to stay tuned until after the commercials.

“Yukon is a tinderbox tonight” was one of the memorable lines. On the night in question it wasn’t entirely false, but since the story and the images were about Dawson, it left the impression that the town was just waiting for a spark, and that wasn’t the case. A good deal of the coverage on the National and Newsworld, by a reporter who stayed here for the worst of the smoke, wasn’t too bad if you heard it all, but the headlines were killers.

We also have to lay some blame on careless readers and viewers, who don’t seem to read or view the entire story, watch with half an eye, listen with half an ear, read inattentively, or without thought.

On one day a pretty good story in the Globe and Mail was accompanied by a full colour wall of flame illustration. Reading the caption revealed that this fire was a controlled aerial ignition back-burn. I wonder how many people just looked at the pretty picture.

Our worst press wasn’t actually professional press through. The rumour mill worked overtime on this one. The acting editor at the Star called me on a Sunday afternoon to ask how the evacuation was going. He’d been told this at a ball park by a Whitehorse contractor who had a work crew here who had said that the town was under an evacuation notice.

There WERE two separate evacuation notices for the Goldfields complex, with different time frames depending on the urgency. They were in effect for several weeks, but even then most of the miners stayed put or just came out for fresher air.

In developing contingency plans to deal with the situation, our Emergency Measures Organization naturally dealt with scenarios and guidelines for asking the town’s Trustee to declare an evacuation if the need should arise.

But it didn’t.

Still, how many travellers beat a hasty retreat and inflated their Klondike adventure by talking about the flames licking at their heels? They would have seen flames near the highway at Flat Creek and would have been piloted through the smoke. That would make the factual foundation for a pretty good adventure tale.

- Sure, Dawson is burning. Stay away.

- I just left there and it’s awful.

- It’s too dangerous to be there. We left.

Travellers coming north were told the same thing by workers at camp grounds, by flag people on the highways, by lodge owners and fellow travellers from here to Fort Saint John, as far as I have heard, and no doubt farther afield.

Exciting times? A bit of a trial? You bet. But we’ve been here before and we’ll be here again, though we have to hope it won’t be for a few years.