Graduation Address

“Encaenia Address” (18 May 2006): 1-4. (UA Case 67)

Your Honour, Mr. Minister, Mr. Chancellor, Members of the Board of Governors, Mr. President, fellow graduates and honoured guests

It is not only a great honour and privilege to be here today - but also a great and unexpected pleasure. Not quite fifty years ago, it was in July, I arrived in Fredericton to study with Dr. A.G. Bailey for my M.A. The day before I had disembarked at Montreal from the “Empress of Britain” out of Liverpool. We had taken 4 days in thick fog to cross the Atlantic, arriving off the coast of Labrador in the evening: the fog suddenly lifted and there were the great cliffs of Labrador with the sun setting in the blue sky flecked with clouds: clouds like those scrolled by the great Renaissance Painters. It took another three days to reach Montreal and then an overnight train to Fredericton Junction. Ship and train stamped my mind with the space of Canada in a way that has been part of me ever since.

In the same way, the year I spent working for my M.A. with Dr. Bailey marked my ideas about the study of history: his own work as scholar, in particular The Conflict of European and Eastern Algonkian Cultures, taught me a great deal about understanding those whose experiences were utterly different from my own. His art as a poet, especially his poems in Miramichi Lightening, showed me how to temper imagination with realities. I had arrived in New Brunswick knowing nothing about the history and culture of the Acadians. As I worked on my thesis on “Acadian historiography” I began to appreciate not only a community that I had never known but also something about the emotional passion of those who struggled to maintain that community against a not particularly sympathetic majority. When I left Fredericton in the fall of 1957 to teach at the College Maillet, Université Saint Louis, I carried with me some idea of the tension between individuals and their societies, between the societies and the circumstances of their environment as well between societies and the broader world.

Edmundston and Madawaska at the end of the nineteen – fifties were experiencing the end of the way of life, one deeply rooted in institutional Catholicism. It was still a time when churches were full on Sundays, when the organist at the Cathedral wrote new music for the High Mass at Christmas and Easter, where there was a thriving community effort to bring music, theatre and the latest films to town. It was also a time when entertainment centred upon family and friends, and families themselves were still large. Coming on the heels of a year in Fredericton, where the culture, - economic, political, and social- was overwhelmingly Anglophone, Madawaska County brought me to an intensely rural world of Francophone interests. Yet by the years-end I realised that Fred Cogswell’s poem on New Brunswick, especially the last verse, applied to both the upper and lower St. John, to both Acadian and Loyalist.

“Not soft the soil where we took root together; “he wrote,
It grew not giants but the stunted strong.
Toughened by suns and bleak wintry weather
To grow up slow and to endure for long;
We have no gained to any breadth or length,
And all our beauty is our stubborn strength.”

It took a large part of the rest of my life, as I attempted to understand the Acadian historical experience, to realized that Fred Cogswell’s poem was just half the truth about New Brunswick. I found the other half brought together for me in many writings, both English and French but above all in the poetry of Herménégilde Chiasson. There is first of all, in his poetry, as in that of the earlier 19th century New Brunswick poets such as Bliss Carman, the celebration of the sheer beauty of the province. Coming from the light-polluted streets of Ottawa, when Chiasson writes of the night sky:

Les étoiles d’or...
Ah les belles étoiles commes des points lumineux
Pour clouer le ciel sur les piliers de la nuit…

[The golden stars/ the beautiful stars, luminous points to nail the sky to the pillars of the night] I remember again the skies of winter, lit by the Northern Lights I saw in St. Basile, au fond de la Baie, and in Sackville. People talk of British Columbia and its dominating landscapes but the haunting forest, lands and seascapes of New Brunswick hold me with a deeper thrall.

In the same way, New Brunswick, for Acadian, Loyalist, or migrants like myself, for Mi’kmaq as well as Malecite, [ ] means a land that works to build a society that develops, however slowly, something profoundly human. No one could argue that climate and environment demand that people shape their endeavours in accordance with the reality of untamed forces. Above all, I think climate moulds New Brunswickans,making them a people with a profound knowledge of human fragility, treasuring the individual in spite of and because of the pressures that surround them. Listen to one more short verse by Herménégilde Chiasson which to me conveys what I mean:

Regards sur la baie gelée
Image monochrome et inéffable.
Présence de vide et de l’ouverture totale.
Le seul paysage qui vaille la peine.
Qui parle de soi.

/Look at the frozen bay/ a silent etching/space and total openness/ the only country worthy of toil/It speaks of you.

May those of you who listen to me today discover throughout your lives, as I have throughout mine, the richness of this Province and its people.