1639, and Marie de l'Incarnation (28 October 1599–30 April 1672), accompanied by two sisters and the patroness of their Ursuline order in what was then called Nouvelle France, disembarked at Quebec City; and I find myself deeply torn as to whether to include her in this page or not, precisely because she was an evangelical Catholic who went to Canada to convert the “ignorant heathens” to the greater stupidity of her religion; her abandonment of the venture as a failure when the indigenous girls from the native tribes around Quebec simply refused to be “assimilated”, is her first redeeming virtue.
And then there are the 277 letters that have been preserved, most of them with her son Claude (an Ursuline nun with a son? now there’s another interesting side of her), and the autobiography that she wrote, “Relation de 1654”, which are of immense importance to anyone studying early Canadian history and wanting to understand why the “First Nations” in Canada are respected as themselves, and fully integrated, as themselves, into Canadian society, while “Red Indians” south of the border live on reservations and have no rights under the laws of the Land of Freedom – everwhere, that is, except in Louisiana, which of course is French-America, and where the only Ursuline Convent in America can still be visited, in Nouvelle Orléans, I mean New Orleans. The Ursuline Constitution, and the educational methodologies, introduced by Marie de l’Incarnation for the benefit of the French settlers rather than the now-left-alone indigenes, are two of the many keys.
*
Amber pages
Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck, inherited genetic material from his parents today in 1744
Herman Melville, author of "Bartleby" as well as the first truly encyclopaedic novel, "Moby Dick", (I only say "as well as" because the latter is the one that people vaguely, sort of, know about, or at least have heard of, though probably not read, and definitely not realised its importance; but in terms of the development of Nihilism as a philosophy, and its position as an essence of Existentialism, upon both of which today's thinking in the western world depends, "Bartleby" is actually an even more, a far, far more important book), born today (though he probably would have preferred not to) in 1819.
George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh, today in 1971. I have also noted the Concerts for Band Aid and Live Aid on July 13, but they could not have happened without this, so this is where I will, eventually, write about the shame of western governments crippling Third World economies in order to obtain our own wealth, and the tuppence worth of guilt-money which is all our pop-stars are able to give back... and all hail them for doing even that much.
Swiss Confederation founded... today in 1291. Another angle on the same shame named above: tax havens...
Slavery abolished in Jamaica, today in 1838. I shall try to compile a list of all the dates of abolition, in all the lands and states where slavery existed, and put them all together on a single page. The trouble is - and see my World Hourglass for far too many examples of this - for every land in which slavery has been abolished, two more have come up like hydra-heads to replace them (Ivory Coast, Virgin Islands, Viet Nam, Bangladesh, Northern Mariana Islands...), but because we are rightly ashamed to call it slavery, we have found conscience-appeasing euphemisms, "out-source workers" being the most favoured.
And today in 1790, the first US census was taken, not including "native tribes" as far as I am aware. 3,929,214 people in 17 states. I have absolutely no interest in this statistic per se, but it might be an interesting number to use on some other occasion. An increase from less than 4 million people 200 years ago to just over 325 million at the end of 2017. Staggering!
The cartoon at the top of the page is actually, truly, genuine. My photograph, circa 2010. Outside the Martin Luther King museum in Atlanta, Georgia, there is a row of old slave houses, kept for the historic interest and known as "Freedom Avenue". The traffic sign was added somewhat later, I imagine for the convenience rather than with conscious irony. It is unclear whether the sign is for cars, and is insisting on miles per hour, or perhaps for freedom-seekers, and is insisting on paces per century.
You
can find David Prashker at:
Copyright
© 2018 David Prashker
All
rights reserved
The
Argaman Press
No comments:
Post a Comment