By Barry Stagg
July 1999
I was watching the History Channel the other day. No doubt as part of its commitment to "Canadian content" this channel was showing some old National Film Board documentaries. One of these was a particularly poignant film put together by the Memorial University Extension Service. A long time extension worker, George Billard, was involved in interviewing a number of families who had been moved from the Ferolle and Bar'd Harbour communities on the Northern Peninsula up to Port au Choix.
The old black and white footage presented the familiar scenes well known to Newfoundlanders who lived through the resettlement debacle of the mid and late 1960's. Families were seen having their homes uprooted by bulldozers and towed to the shore and floated down to the new "collection community" where all was to be bright and shiny for ever more. The tragedy of this mournful program is well known. Families were uprooted from perfectly adequate small fishing villages with a promise of a few dollars and a bright future. What they found all too often was a life of public assistance and despair.
What really struck me about this television show was the absolute contrast between the film itself and the commercials that I saw as this hour long presentation unfolded. One commercial in particular stood out. This advertisement used a representation of the Woodstock music festival which happened in upstate New York in 1969. It showed an attractive young woman in hedonistic abandon, if not outright ecstacy, shaking her hair and everything else to the rhythms of psychedelic music and in the general direction of the television camera. What a contrast. While the happy-go-lucky and carefree flower children of the well-to-do regions of mainland Canada and the United States were cavorting in a farmer's field in Woodstock, New York in 1969, poor people from one of the nethermost regions of North America were being shuffled around like third world refugees. There could not be a greater discrepancy in lifestyle and opportunity anywhere else in either of these two countries.
Now, thirty years later, the Woodstock generation revels in the prosperity of the glamorous modernity of the Information Age. Prosperity has followed these favoured children to the point where the whole world seems to want to emulate them. Of course, the devotees of the now middle-aged products of Woodstock include the same people who were shuffled around Northern Newfoundland in 1969. Nothing seems to change.
It should not be forgotten that in 1969 the Newfoundland government was moving its poorest people helter skelter throughout the province in the name of some bureaucratically created righteousness. In the same vein, the people who scorn the rural industries, such as seal hunting, are the same people who giddily danced away the 1960's in blissful ignorance of both their own good fortune and the misfortune of others living on the edge of the wealthy society that calls itself North America.
At this point Newfoundlanders in general, but particularly expatriate Newfoundlanders living in the well-off sections of mainland North America, should recognize these stark contrasts of thirty years ago and soberly contemplate that the ignorance of 1969 still exists.