Rare Books and Stewardship Agreements in Toronto - 28 April 2023

the poster for the symposium

This week I made a mini whirlwind trip to Toronto (fly out Thursday, fly home Saturday) for a symposium called "Collections: Conflict & Collaboration". The timing was not great for me (in the middle of marking final exams), but the invitation to participate had come for the University of Toronto libraries folks (Loryl MacDonald, Grant Hurley and David Fernandez). 

There are two things to say about that.  First, libraries!?  Libraries people are the best!  Arta and Kelvin (aka 'mom and dad') pretty much raised the 8 of us kids inside the Calgary Public Libraries, and Arta spent her second career working at the U of Calgary library. So what else was there to say? An invitation from anyone in Libraries is the biggest honour ever. It didn't matter that the event was right in the middle of exam marking, and that time would be compressed.  Of course I would want to go!  

Carey, Heather and me, AND the library!

Second, one topic for conversation was the Witness Blanket!  If you haven't encountered the Witness Blanket before, follow the link above to get started.  In particular, the symposium would let us spend time with the Witness Blanket Stewardship Agreement.  

This is a ground-breaking example of collaborations across legal orders, and we teach about it at UVic Law every year.  

• Here is a link to my colour-coded and annotated copy of the Agreement. 
• To to read more about how we do that, check out this post on #ReconciliationSyllabus

Carey Newman (the Artist) and Heather Bidzinski (who was a crucial player in bringing the agreement into existence) had also been invited to speak. What?!   OK.  This was an opportunity NOT to be passed up!  The last time I saw Heather in person was during the actual Ceremony for the Witness Blanket in Kumugwe, the Ko'mox First Nation Bighouse. 

That ceremony was one of the most powerful moments of my life in law.  Amongst other things,  my mother Arta came with us to the ceremony, which made it even more meaningful (and conversations about the experience were part of the fabric of our family life in the years that followed).  Indeed, Arta wrote 4 different posts about the experience of being present at the ceremony on the "Larch Haven" family blog.  Each of those posts is a beautiful read, and opens up space for thinking about how the Blanket and the Agreement matter not only to signatories, but to all of us (plus, now that she is no longer with us, I love going to spend some time with her voice!)  Check them out:

https://larchhaven.blogspot.com/2019/10/a-news-release-about-oral-ceremony.html 

https://larchhaven.blogspot.com/2019/10/blog-post_21.html

https://larchhaven.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-witness-blanket-ceremony.html

https://larchhaven.blogspot.com/2019/10/gifting-and-feast.html

Here is where the symposium took place

I have to start with acknowledging the space of the library itself.  The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at U of T is just something  special.  Having not been there before, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I did arrive a bit early that morning.  OK.  Maybe "quite early" is more accurate.  I had been a bit uncertain I would find the place.  As I stood outside on the stairs outside the building looking up, the wonderful David Fernandez arrived, and seemed to recognize me from the promo photo.  He was the possessor of the sacred keys to the building (because I really was TOO early), and brought me into the library, and the space we would be meeting in.  And this is the view, taken from the 'back row' of the room (set up to accommodate a group of 20-25 people).  What?!  I was speechless.

What a place to sit and read an old book...

Loryl McDonald, the Director of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, then took me up to the stacks, so I could see the view not only from below, but also from above, standing at her favourite vantage point (after first checking to see that I didn't have vertigo).

400 year old mini books

Loryl also walked me past this little shelf, that is full of 'miniature books':  each of these stands something like 4-6 inches (is that 10-15cm?).   You can't tell from the photo that they are so short, since the book shelves here are also shorter to accommodate the smaller books.  What you CAN see if you zoom in are the publication dates: between the 1500s, and the 1700s.   These books are older than  Confederation!  I was dying to pull them off the shelf to flip through, but, not knowing the protocol, I resisted!  :-).   But I still absolutely loved standing beside the books, thinking about the past, and enjoying that very distinctive 'old book smell'! 

Loryl sending greetings to Susan!

Of course, as we started talking about archivists, we found connections including my wonderful friend Susan Hart, who has been part of our life in Victoria 'forever' (since Duncan and her son Peter have grown up together, meeting first in daycare when Duncan was 6 months old)!  It was fun making the selfie to send to Susan!  

Truly, the view and space are quite spectacular.  Being in the space, being surrounded by so many old books.... a bit like being in a room with the memory traces of so many ancestors from so many places and times.... a reaching out from the past into the present, aiming towards the future.  

Heather and Loryl enjoying the view

I did take a little bit of video footage, to see if that would capture the flavour of the feeling.  (here is the URL to the video

 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t10YJmIBUV8

I am aware that this is summary less of substance than of form, but both were wrapped up together pretty tightly.   

What a treat to be in a space with Carey and Heather, and to have them share with us their stories of both the Witness Blanket itself, but also of the three years of work to build the relationships and understandings that resulted in the Stewardship Agreement between Carey and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.  It is a fantastic model of different ways of collaborating on questions of memory, truth, shared futures and more.

I love the layers in these photos.  I enjoyed thinking about this picture, which captures Carey and Heather sitting at the front of the room in this amazing library in Toronto in 2023.  In the background is a video image capturing Carey and Heather signing the Stewardship Agreement in the Big House in Comox during ceremony in 2018, the fire burning in the background behind them.  I also like it that I caught a fragment of the  ILRU Indigenous Law 101 handout  in the lower left hand corner, pointing in the direction of future possibilities.  A reminder of the layers and time, memory and hope that surround us, reminders of the power of looking to past and present as we continue to collaborate in the making of shared futures. 

Christina, Grant, Desiree, Ben and me  

There is so much more to be said about what a feast for the mind it was to spend the day with those amazing libraries-archives-museums-collections people.  I learned much listening to Christina MacDonald, Désirée Rochat and Desmond Wong (with Ben Walsh facilitating). So many great questions about how the work of collecting might be done (and undone, and redone, and done differently). These are folks whose research work opened up the very best kind of questions.

What a day!