Other "Arts Stuff" in Yellowknife (first installment)

Besides organizing "Trashformation" (see previous post), The Aurora Arts Society also hosted a number of other events, one of them a "Members' Show" open to the public during this past week at The Prince of Wales Museum.

The museum, by the way, is itself beautiful building in a gorgeous location on Frame Lake in the city's centre:

The walkway above (rest assured, both walkway and building are straight in real life), with flags from all of NT's communities, separates Frame Lake on the left from the unnamed small stretch of water that reaches to the Visitors Centre. It's the small but also very pretty building centered in the picture (Explorer Hotel in the background):

Aurora Arts Society members produce a variety of beautiful pieces, as this small selection of images shows (the first painting, by the way, a poignant reminder of the north's rapidly melting ice):

 

We "fibre friends" all had something in the show as well: the following show (in order) Janet's hand-dyed silk scarves, Donna's quilts, Pat's felting, and my purses:

And Donna won Viewer's Choice with her quilt! deservedly so, we all agreed - subject matter, composition, hand-dyed cottons, and the precision with which she executes her pieces result in great beauty. "Lone Pine," I persist in calling it, although she has another name for it. For one, the tree is a spruce...

"Trashformation 2012"

For some years now the Aurora Arts Society has organized a "Trashformation" category for its annual late-September Arts Week. To qualify, entries are to be at least 80% recycled materials; of course it's common knowledge, although not stated in the rules, that materials found in The Dump count higher on the recycling scale than others. Other approbated sources include the thrift store run by the Salvation Army, and somewhat below that, garage sales. A challenge - I've always liked a challenge! though my materials did not come from The Dump, at least not this year. But they were recycled!

To start, I took a bed sheet of lovely cotton sateen that had, unfortunately, worn a hole some years ago already:

Next I added some other parts: a dress that had gotten too small and out of style, a man's Thai silk shirt given to me with the buttons ruthlessly ripped off, an old silk shirt of my own that had acquired indelible pen marks over the years:

Buttons - what to do for buttons? I checked the buttons I had bought at an auction in Calgary some years ago...

My inspiration was the scene in Gone with the Wind in which Scarlett O'Hara, after the Civil War has taken just about everything from her, looks about for an outfit in which to charm Rhett Butler ... and her eyes fall on the living room drapes, green print as I recall. My Trashformation piece is therefore fittingly called:

"Scarlett's Pride" (front and back views)
 

The entries - all 21 of them - were rather amazing. Without doing justice to the pieces, my pictures give a decent impression of the inventiveness of my fellow Yellowknifers. Samples: a bicycle, a political piece mocking Harper's theatrical trips north to shake hands and do little positive for northerners, a mannequin turned garden piece through tiling...

My friend Karen Gelderman - yes, Rosalie's sister, the Rosalie who drove up here with me - did an altered book of memorabilia her grandmother had kept of her granddaughter, including a "Calvinette" badge (my goodness, does that bring back memories of a life left far, far behind):

 

Along with the Trashformation show was also a members' show - more on that in the next blog entry.

Of course I'm already thinking about next year's Trashformation - more trips to The Dump, perhaps?

Giant Mine Remediation Project

Today I took a break from fibre-arts (a "Trashformation" project - more on that another time) to attend a few hours of the week-long public hearings being held about the Giant Mine Remediation Plan.

The Giant Mine - where to start about this giant headache? I can see it from my balcony - it's just outside of Yellowknife, at the beginning of the Ingraham Trail, and it can't be missed. Canadians with longer memories and a history of watching the news will recall that during a strike there in 1993 an explosion killed nine strikebreakers and replacement workers. Yep - that's the one. Read more at Giant Mine.

Well - mining companies have come and gone, the last one in receivership, and have left behind the second largest federal contaminated site in Canada. We're not talking small potatoes here, folks: 237,000 tonnes of arsenic stored underground, numerous tailings ponds on 2,300 acres of essentially contaminated land, and 500,000 cubic metres of arsenic contaminated water treated each season (the helpful brochure says that's about 200 Olympic-sized swimming pools).

Water - what water? Well, the water first in Baker Creek which flows through the site, then in Back Bay to which Baker Creek flows, finally in Yellowknife Bay, and eventually, of course, in Great Slave Lake and the Mackenzie River.

Remediation is a long, slow, complicated, highly political - and possibly somewhat scientifically impossible - project. For certain, restoration as such is impossible. Remediation can be done, and that's the focus of the inquiry: how much remediation, and at what cost? Remediation to industry or to residential standard? Remediation to (technically harmless) waste land or to useable land? These are Canadian tax dollars at work: to mediate, monitor, and maintain the Giant Mine site, $150 million have been spent to date, $480 million will have to be spent for further essential remediation, and future maintenance will cost $1.9 million a year - forever.

Remediation is a joint project between AANDC (pronounced AndC - the federal ministry of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada), and the GNWT (the Government of the Northwest Territories) - these two bodies are known collectively as "the developers." Of course "the developers" rely on an army of outside consultants, for example from Toronto, for the actual plan. The Department of Oceans and Fisheries needs to be involved as well, because a major question is whether the water quality is such that fish in any of the waters mentioned above are fit for human consumption. But they can't decide about the fish themselves - that's the purview of Health Canada. And Health Canada, much to the visible annoyance of inquiry participants, did not show for the inquiry (they were reportedly "occupied elsewhere").

Putting "the developer" on the hot seat were various stakeholders - the Yellowknife Dene First Nation, the North Slave Métis Alliance, the City of Yellowknife, and others whom I didn't hear in the few hours I attended. Final decision rests with the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board. There were two interpreters in a glass booth in the back for one of the NTs nine official Aboriginal languages (I didn't catch which one). 

It would seem that when several levels of government get involved in a complex project, passing the decision buck is one of the strategies. For example, when one of "the developers" mentioned that the fish in Back Bay contain between .25 and .50 as much arsenic as food one normally obtains in grocery stores (who knew that we buy a certain amount of arsenic as part of our groceries?), he was quickly rapped over the knuckles by a review board member: he was not a Health Canada official, and only Health Canada could make pronouncements on fish safety. Health Canada was notable by its absence. "The developers" quickly retracted any statement about fish.

Fish is not an abstract problem, even to me, for I buy Great Slave inconnu fillets at the local COOP. For aboriginal people who depend on fish as part of their diet, it's an immediate problem, with life at stake. 

It's a huge issue, without question. Reportedly - again the helpful brochure - the gold taken out of the mine would be worth about $3.5 billion today. The question might be raised: is this worth it? Well, ok - that's in part a rhetorical question. How much of that 3.5 billion made its way into Canadian tax coffers? My guess would be: not enough to cover the remediation, likely not by a long shot.

I left when one of "the developers" gave a power-point presentation with excruciatingly obfuscatory managerial goobledy-gook delivered in a deadly monotone - just couldn't spend my valuable time listening to that. Still, I learned a lot in a short time. And what I learned wasn't exactly pretty.

That's part of what makes the north so interesting - arsenic in the water isn't someone else's remote issue, it's in the mine I can see from my window, impacting the fish I buy at COOP, thinning the ice that supports the ice-road my sister drives to Dettah, affecting the drinking water of the cute grade-school students at the Dettah school. Us all, in other words.

 

Niven Lake Trail

This Monday past I took advantage of the glorious weather to walk the Niven Lake Trail, a relatively short hike starting just across the downtown from where I live. Beautiful!

Niven Lake is a small "city lake" in that it lies between downtown and the new suburb of Niven, still in the process of being carved out of the rock.

The lake was once the city's sewage lagoon - possibly why it is currently so nutrient-rich and supportive of the kind of greenery that in turn supports a good food chain for wildlife.

A boardwalk at the end closest to the city hives off a small piece of water - one picture below is taken from the boardwalk and shows the Explorer Hotel (on the edge of downtown), the other shows the boardwalk itself (and there's my shadow! told you it was sunny...).

There are signs that say: "Hike with a friend" - which I considered briefly. If one has no immediate hiking friends, then it's either stay home or think broadly - and so I chose to think broadly, considering any hiker on this short trail "a friend." I met a few people - a young man walking the trail in his flip-flops! - but on the whole the trail is so close to development that it's all quite safe.

The trail's terrain varies - through flats such as the one above, over a bridge over wetlands; there's regular gravel but also some scrambling over 2.7 billion-year-old rock, some of the oldest on the planet. Occasionally one has to look ahead for the marker, such as the wooden structure on the top of rocks in the last picture.

And, finally, a not-particularly-good picture of the building where I live, just to provide some sense of distances - it's the tallest one in the frame.

Aurora Chorealis

Choir - the first practice of the Aurora Chorealis this evening, 7 to 9:30, all business though lots of fun in the business. Aurora Chorealis is the non-auditioned community choir of the Yellowknife Choral Society, "the parent" group of about 60 to 70 voices - out of it is distilled the Yellowknife Chamber Choir. For youngsters there is the Fireweed Children's Chorus and the Yellowknife Boy's Choir. The Yellowknife Choral Society has an excellent website with lots of information and pictures of past performances: Yellowknife Choral Society.

I haven't been in a choir since my very early 20s, but from what I experienced this evening, this is going to be an excellent experience. Everyone is there to sing - no idle chit-chat or lack of attention to the two directors, Margot Nightengale and Carmen Braden. And many of the members know how to sing - while the music challenges, enough of the group "gets" it sufficiently quickly that a good sound emerges after just a few runs through a section of a piece, sometimes already on the first try.

Weekly practices are held in Calvary Community Church, a 15 minute walk from my building, on the other end of downtown. Some of the altos (turns out I'm an alto 1, with a higher range than I expected) live quite near me, so starting next week I'll be able to participate in some car pooling. Still, I like the walk there and hope to do it even in the winter.

Another fun activity. When you sing, you really don't think of anything else. Stay tuned for concert information - Remembrance Day and Christmas!

The Yellowknife Dump

The Yellowknife Dump

A rite of passage for living in Yellowknife surely has to include a trip to The Dump. That's why we (fibre friends) were properly horrified to hear that Donna had never been, in her twelve years in Yellowknife. "How about this Saturday?" I said. She doesn't have a car, so that's some excuse - but still. She was game, and so we went. Saturday afternoons, around 3:00 p.m., is reportedly a good time to go, since everyone who has had a garage sale that day brings what didn't sell.

The YK Dump is somewhat legendary for those of us who come from larger urban centres with very strictly controlled waste disposal. Last year in Calgary there was the "Slave Lake Toy Scandal" - employees of a certain company had raised money to buy toys for the fire-ravaged Alberta town, and through a mix-up said toys never reached their destination. Instead, they ended up being dumped, brand new in unopened packages. An alert Calgarian who happened to be there noticed, asked if he could salvage some of them - but the answer was "NO": once an item is brought to the dump, it becomes sacrosanct as waste, regardless of its condition or usefulness. Such would never happen in Yellowknife.

The Dump is approached in the usual manner: a line of vehicles, mostly pickups bringing things, waiting to be let through the gate.

The approach is not without whimsy - Jiminy Cricket in the flowers, a bouquet on the stop sign:

After that, it's all "dump business," no effort to disguise or prettify. North American waste - perhaps waste anywhere in the world, except that we do significantly more than our share of it - isn't pretty. I think Yellowknife is honest to let people see the extent of what we throw away, and how ugly is the accumulation. And yet... there's a certain order, and some beauty in that order; and there's a certain thrill in salvaging a find and repurposing it for something useful. 

If you want to just see what's there, as we were doing on this glorious Saturday afternoon, you tell the person in the booth: "just going shopping." You get waved through without further ado. On the immediate left is "the paint exchange" - cans get brought and taken, sometimes multiple times. Our friend Stefan is redoing his small Old Town house. "What colour are you painting it?" we asked. "That's under negotiation," he said, glancing at Sue. That negotiation isn't just the usual one between two people, but also includes what's available at The Dump. The paint for my loon came from here... Below some folks bringing, or taking - who knows?

Next to the paint are the appliances - again, a lot of bringing, but apparently some taking can be done as well.

 

Used antifreeze...

Turn the corner and on your right is the pile for used pallets and other wood... Yellowknife seems to have more pallets per capita than your average Canadian city, although that's my surmise rather than my known fact. If a person could think of a product to make with pallets, some serious money could be made!

In the pile were some of those glass blocks (which on closer inspection turned out to be plastic), as well as an intriguing fence-like affair with hinges that Donna and I thought hard about before deciding that no, we really didn't know what to do with it. Here she is standing with the chipper behind her - it seems that at least some of the pallets get chipped (but what about the nails? must be quite the chipper...). 

Across from the pallet pile there are tires, lots and lots and lots and lots of tires.

Where there are that many tires, can cars - vehicles generally - be far behind?

But the real fun of going to The Dump lies in exploring the area set aside for salvaging. People bring stuff to the three "cells" set aside for that purpose, and others - Donna and I - see what there is to be found. Some finds are legendary - a new Pfaff sewing machine still in its box - but there is also a lot of unsalvageable debris. Still, while we were there one person dropped off a dining room table with four chairs, for example; the set disappeared within minutes. In the second picture, Donna is about to tread carefully, in the third someone's found a perfectly good sled...

At the dump you can also access one of Yellowknife's municipal compost bins:

There's a place where paper is compacted:

Finally, somewhat unique to Yellowknife (and, no doubt, other Northern communities) are oil tanks, the kind that are used to store the oil needed to heat houses.But take a look at what someone did with one of them! (second picture). An admirable "Trashformation," one of the entry categories for the late-September Arts Week.

Well - on this trip I myself found a rack to hold my spools of thread, and I picked up some paint ("Picnic Day," a lovely green) for the dresser I got from Donna BEFORE she brought it to The Dump, as she had intended. Certainly I'm getting into the spirit!