MEMOIR MOMENTS

By Bernie Krewski

What we learn from history is that there is no single component to events and stories that arise in the past. They usually contain many strands, some visible and some less so.

An example is my life as it was unfolding in the year 1965. I was then a graduate student studying history at the University of Alberta. The fact that I was there was not highly predictable.  

I am a first-generation Canadian, my illiterate father emigrating from the poverty-stricken area known as Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My mother, born in Canada to parents who migrated to Manitoba in 1899 from the same area in Europe, attended school to the sixth grade. They homesteaded near Oyen Alberta for sixteen years in the dryland district known as the Palliser Triangle, barely! What followed was my father’s employment as a railway maintenance man for the Canadian National Railways in Oyen and Alsask Saskatchewan while raising six children. Never owning a motor vehicle symbolizes a much larger story.

In 1980, quite by chance, I had the honour of meeting the now retired Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Abella when she was a Family Court judge in Toronto. Warm, humorous and personable, she is an outstanding Canadian. Born in a German Displaced Persons camp in  1946, she recently noted in a documentary film about her life that new immigrants rarely have established career plans and goals – they simply want to “do good.” That fits the circumstances of my own career aspirations.  

My high school education in Oyen in the 1950s, preceded the flourishing and more prosperous educational opportunities that occurred a few years later – as Doug Owram writes in “Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby Boom Generation” (1997). It provided the basics and not much more. Thus, the learning curve for me entering a large university, was steep and challenging, devoid of scholarships and financial support, like many others with similar backgrounds as mine.

While I happened to win the prize for European History when I graduated with a Bachelors’ degree, I thought it was a stroke of good look and nothing more. Summer employment to finance further studies was clearly essential so attending graduation ceremonies was no option.

My primary research interest in graduate studies was American History, influenced by a professor, an exceptional teacher, from whom I learned the art and value of questioning historical events, seeking new ways of explaining them.

Two events in 1965, however, fractured my studies. I was deeply tormented by American military intervention in Vietnam - later described in David M. Smith’s “Endless Holocaust: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire” (2023), and Robert J. McMahon’s scholarly paper, “Contested Memory: The Vietnam War and American Society, 1975-2001” As author Nikil Saval notes in an essay published this month, the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 1970s “was a matter of urgent concern in politics and scholarship alike.” It ended fifty years ago on April 30 this year.  

During this time of uncertainty, my greatly admired thesis advisor left to teach at the University of Oregon. His successor, an “old school” professor, navy veteran and recent arrival from the U.S., was less than helpful. His stay at the University of Alberta was brief (although his Wikipedia citation says he was teaching at the University of Saskatchewan!).

At that time, due to the lack of space at the university’s major library, I was one of three students given a place to study in a former two story, three-bedroom residence on campus. The other students were an Australian studying African History and a student from Taiwan studying Chinese History. Called the “History House,” the setting was ideal. Twenty-four access and solitude allowed me to study late into the night, hours after the library closed.

This was a phase in my learning when I cultivated the “Powers of Reading” – the title of a recent book by Peter Szendy.

In early July 1965 I had an unexpected visitor. He asked if I could help him revise a paper he was preparing for a course in American History, a subject about which his knowledge was limited.

This well-dressed man said he was working on his Ph.D. in the Faculty of Education and taking summer classes. He was employed full-time as the superintendent of a school district on the NWT/Alberta border. As well, his wife had recently given birth to a baby a few months before. In other words, he was dealing with “a lot on his plate.”

I was both puzzled and intimidated by his request. By no means was I a promising scholar like the core group of students studying Canadian, British and German history. As well, I carried uncomfortable memories from high school when the local school superintendent (Walter Worth, later Alberta Dept. Minister of Education) inspected our notebooks – mine were in disarray, especially compared to my female classmates – Joyce Kuich, Marna Corkish, Edna Furneaux, and Karen Hedman.

Nonetheless, I edited and suggested some revisions to his paper. To express his gratitude, he gave me two books. One is particularly notable: Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) is commonly regarded as the father of modern political philosophy – and especially how to exercise power.

This man, as readers may surmise, was Robert James Carney whose son Mark was born on March 16, 1965.

When Mark Carney entered the Liberal leadership race, early news reports raised questions about his father, the principal of a federal Indian day-school in the Northwest Territories. While acknowledging their deficiencies, Robert Carney also defended some of their benefits. That currently quickly draws much critical attention. Carney distanced himself from those comments, stating “I love my father, but I don’t share those views.” This story faded from the front pages as events in the leadership race and election campaign unfolded.

Apart from being associated with the residential school controversy, Robert Carney became well known in Alberta for other reasons. He ran for a seat in the NWT Legislature in September 1965 - the year I met him. He was subsequently appointed Chief of School Programs, NWT Dept. of Education. Moving to Edmonton in 1971, he became an Associate Professor, Faculty of Education. Other merits followed: Chair, Edmonton Catholic School Trustees; Advisor to Alberta Northern Development Group; Deputy Minister, Alberta Dept. of Education, Parks, and Wildlife; Deputy Regional Director, Federal Indian Affairs; Board Member, Misericordia Hospital; National Parole Board; University of Alberta Board of Governors.

Another historical strand occurred in September 1972 when Robert Carney, then executive director of the Alberta School Trustees Association, met with Walter Worth, the Deputy Minister of Education, who had just completed a report on the governance of schools.

In March 1991 Carney he was commissioned by twenty-five Catholic religious orders to investigate living conditions in residential schools. His interim report in the Edmonton Journal published on June 2 had this headline “Alarming Conditions Reported.” In a July progress report, he noted 15  of 240 former students interviewed had been raped by members of the clergy.

Robert James Carney died in Nanaimo BC December 9, 2009.