The Icelandic connection - 01.06.2010, Qupperneq 30

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ICELANDIC CONNECTION
Vol. 63 #1
tioned, “my Canada” is rural Manitoba
and my farm and small town where I
grew up. MacGregor noted that at one
time about 80% of the population of
Canada was rural and 20% urban, but
now those numbers have switched. One
passage reads, “. . . the traditional farm,
and its psychological hold on an entire
province, is not something that’s easily
abandoned. ‘The mistake an economist
makes,’ says MacKinnon (former
Saskatchewan finance minister) who now
teaches history at the University of
Saskatchewan), ‘is to look at the pie and
then say agriculture is just not that big of
a slice. But it’s a big part of the psychol-
ogy.’” This interested me, as I grew up on
a farm, and am very proud of it as are
many of my friends, but the reality is that
I had move to the city to get an education,
maybe to get a job. And I wonder how
much of that country attitude, pride, and
lifestyle (the psychology) comes into
cities with us—why is it that the
country/rural psychology has such a
strong hold. I think MacGregor is right
when, in many parts of his book, he
points out that Canada is a very sentimen-
tal nation. We tend to hold on a lot to
memories and things that may not be very
valuable or useful, but because they mean
something special to us. MacGregor
writes, “I think, that we are not yet total-
ly alienated from physical earth, and let
us only pray that we do not become so.”
MacGregor told a story of a son and
his dad running a small family farm and
discussed a person’s connections to the
land. The pair were having a hard time
making a living, and it is a question of
what keep people going on, when it
would be easier to cash it all in and get a
job that delivers a steady paycheque and
less worry and hard work?
Roger Epp, a Saskatchewan native
and Alberta political scientist student,
was quoted in the Regina Leader-Post:
“what if you are rural people rooted four
generations deep in prairie soil and you
are attached to that place in ways that
don’t make sense in the current economy,
which tells you to get mobile and find a
job? How do you articulate that and how
do you defend it?”
This is something I’ve struggled with
before. How do you define or explain
your attachment to farming and the land.
Very few people grew up like me, tracing
pictures in the dust on the panorama win-
dow on the inside of a combine, searching
for hours for kittens in scratchy straw
bales, getting yelled at for playing in the
flax bins and tracking it into the house,
falling face first into barnyard puddles, or
enjoying simple picnic lunches on pokey
canola stubble. Even my friends who
lived in town just don’t have the same
feelings I have for rural life. You really
can’t explain to people who didn’t grow
up doing it. There is something for doing
everything with your own two hands,
some kind of empowering feeling. You
are tough and proud of it. You work hard
all day, by whatever the weather allows
you to do, and at the end of the day you
are tired, sore, sweaty, hungry, but happy
and content. I just can’t explain, but I
wish I could.
I took a creative writing course two
years ago, and a few times I tried to pen
something that portrayed the love and
connection a farm kid has to the land, but
I would just get frustrated because my
words were just never enough. And with
so much of the Canadian population liv-
ing in urban centres, there are less and
less people to understand me. I guess the
same way I don’t understand the pull of
those bright city lights that seem to draw
in and keep so many. All I know is that