Eight Memories for Eighty Years: #81 Attending Rebecca’s Law Classes

I acknowledge a place of privilege in this last memory. Unearned privilege on many levels. Because I was in Victoria, living at Rebecca and Steve’s home for an extended period of time, I was both in a place and had the time to sit in courses she was teaching.

Mapping My Way Home: A Gitsan History
Author: Neil J. Sterritt

I have done this not just once, but three times.

I took a course about Legal Theory and the Gitxsan People.

Next I sat with young lawyers listening to her lectures on Law, Film and the North.

Finally, I typed notes as she taught her Business Associations course.

Because she structures that course so that she can use court documents from LaRue, it was surreal to listen to the story of that land holding company as it made it way from a fledgling operation to a going concern. Thirteen lively shareholders. One waiting to be bought out. Not a bad record. And a good way to teach the The Companies Act.

 Regina vs. Kikkik
... a story about the North and relocation
that every Canadian woman should know ...

The first two classes, the films about the North, and the stories of the Gitxsan occurred with the participants sitting in a circle, not the usual class formation. I am always uncomfortable in a circle. 

My personal life feel so exposed in a circle, though I don’t know why.

Why does having a table or desk in front of me feel safer?

The circle is only a check in, usually, before the class begins, a place for questions or healing, really, not for exposure.

BizAzz (the name her colleague Martha O'Brien invented for for the Business Associations Class) required group work – every group creating its own business structure.

... Farley Mowat's book which first
recorded the story of Kikkik...

The final exam had two options: one was to be creative, make an object or have a project, and then accompany the object with text as to why and how they produced that product, and eventually, telling what that has to do with the BizAzz Course. The mark was about the telling of the creation, not the object itself. A heady project. Twice the exam results have been displayed in a museum-like setting for which Rebecca might include another link here. She is not the only of her colleagues to have such a creative final. [note from Rebecca... here is a link to a report on curating projects!]

So there you have it. Though I tried to write 80 Memories –I kept it down to 81.

Still I have not told about an embarrassment of riches by way of getting on a ship and travelling around the world. That would be memory #82. This gift was brought to me on a platter, Wyona with a phone call saying she done all of the pre-planning. Just sign up now. So I have seen the Mediterranean, Egypt, the Suez Canada, India, China, Japan, Russia, and around the tip of South America , beginning in Argentina and coming up the west coast of Chile and through the Panama. If there has been a port in North Europe, my siblings and I have stopped at it.

It wouldn’t be right to gather memories without having a category called Best Friends: grade school friends -- Lorna Hughes, Adrene Paul, Barbara Rawsthorne, Marilyn Gilson, Valerie MacKay, Joanne Rabidou. My high school friends who taught me to study: Else Moller and Barbara Price. My Institute and college friends: Judy Hamilton, Carolyn, – the women I lived with in Edmonton. There would be a category of my friends at the University of Calgary library. When I went to invite them to my retirement party, I found there were hundreds of them for me to put on the list of invitees – all with a place in my heart.

I would want to mention the women and men from every women’s studies classes I ever took. This may have been where I really learned to open my heart and my home to others– I didn’t care if they brought their tea, coffee and wine. They didn’t care if everything was mismatched and that my teen-age children would pass in and out of the house during the party. One young Mormon girl, also in my WMST class, suspected that with all my dishes, utensils, drinking glasses, bowls, pots and pans, I might not have something to open wine with, so she tucked that in her purse, brought it along, and saved the day.

tear off some bread
dip it in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, or not

I am pulling memories out of my mind left and right. One day the whole class came over to my house Friday night. I had plenty of spaghetti, and probably 5 large loaves of new white bread. We ate the spaghetti and tore the bread into chunks, dipping it in olive oil and balsamic vinegar and we wiled away the evening hours. At 11:30 pm a woman asked if she could make a phone call. I thought she was calling for a ride home, but I heard her say to her friend, “Sorry, I can’t make it to your party as planned. It is not possible for me to get away from this one.”

Such satisfying memories

My job now is to find a way to write about the joy of being in my 8th decade of life. How I negotiate the COVID crisis of 2020 will be part of that story. Thank you, dear readers, for joining me in treasured memories from the past.’’

Arta