An Open Letter to Lawren Harris

Professor William Starling, Itinerant Avian Scholar
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

September 4, 2018

Dear Lawren Harris,

ABOVE all else, above ALL else. I will come back to this thought, but first allow me to introduce myself as I am sure you do not remember me from that brief encounter back in 1931 in Toronto, on Elm Street near Yonge, you, emerging surrounded by praising acolytes, having just spoken at the Arts & Letters Club on your ideas of “The” north and whiteness, while I had just vacated a humble space at the Yonge Street Mission and was preparing to return to my new home, further west, in Hamilton. We confronted each other on the sidewalk, in front of that imposing red stone building, at the base of the stairs, as more men spilled out through the oak doors, satisfied and confident in their privileges, thinking themselves radical visionaries as they believed they were  challenging the colonial powers of Britain with their speeches about this land and this nature being distinct from that of the Motherland, yet failing to see that they were simply perpetuating tired modern myths of identity imbedded in the soil. You bumped into me but reacted as if I had collided with you. You seemed appalled by my presence, as if you existed Above ALL else. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Call me Professor William Starling. I was born around 1876 in Glasgow, Scotland, in the east end neighbourhood of Dalmarnock, a working-class area of mainly cotton mills on the north side of the River Clyde across from the hulking steel mills and shipyards. While still very young, I was trapped while enjoying an outing on Glasgow Green near the People’s Palace Museum and then, along with about eighty other European starlings (Sturnus Vulgaris of the order Passeriformes, the family Sturnidae), I was caged and shipped out, on a vessel recently launched at Greenock, across the North Atlantic to New York City where my tiny flock took up residence in Central Park.

Over my unusually long tenure in this world as an itinerant scholar, I have pieced together the strange narrative of my species’ introduction to the Americas by Eugene Schieffelin, the eccentric President of the New York Acclimatization Society, an extremely wealthy heir to a pharmaceutical company who was also a Shakespeare fanatic. In the 1880s, he set out to introduce to Central Park all of the songbirds that appeared in the Bard’s plays who were not indigenous to the United States! We starlings are mentioned only once in Henry IV (part 1), an obscure and rarely produced 1590s play in which Shakespeare noted our mimicking ability and has Hotspur contemplate driving King Henry insane by a trained starling, “Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but ‘Mortimer.’” (I suggest you look it up as I don’t really have time to explain this in detail.)

We are “Vulgar” as in “common” like most species from Dalmarnock, and being good Scots, we adapt well and have spread widely across the globe. Scots are, ultimately, the most successful of European colonizers as we were the soldiers, administrators, managers and labourers, educators and missionaries of the British Empire. This was largely because Scots were better educated than the English who had, nonetheless, successfully colonized Scotland in the 18th century. Within a very short time, following our small population’s introduction to Manhattan, starlings had spread all across North America. We now number in the hundreds of millions. We live in a wide range of habitats but, like humans, prefer urban areas in particular. Like seagulls, crows, coyotes, deer and raccoons (to name a few), we really do thrive in close proximity to your species.

You could say that I have taken adapting and living in proximity to humans to an extreme as I have evolved into a human’s body, vocabulary and, dare I say, intellect. In New York City, I took advantage of my proximity to the New York Public Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History, among other institutions, to educate myself. My title of Professor was earned and granted to me by an elderly scholar who frequented the gardens near the Central Park Zoo. That said, I must admit I have no official paperwork or institutional affiliation. I remain “itinerant” and free to pursue my interests unimpeded by traditional scholarly boundaries and the disciplinary limits of academia.

Around 1920, just after the close of The Great War, I was fortunate to meet a gentleman while looking at maps and plans for Olmsted and Vaux’s designs for Central Park in the public library. He was a skilled man of the factory, a tool and die maker by trade, who had worked his way up to foreman. He had come to New York at his own expense to witness Central Park and explore the spectacular growth of flora in that great artificial environment. His name was Thomas Allen Hunter and, like me, he had migrated from Glasgow to North America as a child, passing through New York on the way to Canada following a brief residency in the Buffalo area. He had settled in Hamilton, a city of heavy industry that had attracted flocks (pardon the pun) of Scots to live and work and who brought their culture and values. He said it was, “for good or ill,” a “remarkably Scottish place, an extension of Glasgow” where “entire streets from your old neighbourhood of Dalmarnock have literally packed up and moved! Such a murmuration* of Scots!” I decided to travel with him to Hamilton to see for myself, and so, following a few days of wandering around Manhattan together, we boarded a train headed north, following his original path of migration up the Hudson, then west at Albany to progress along the Mohawk Valley, crossing at Niagara Falls. We arrived in Hamilton in the evening at the still-extant grand rail station on James Street North. I remember the distinct smell of the harbour and the steel mills. I have remained in the city ever since.

For now, I will skip over the many details of my life in Hamilton as my biography is truly book-length, and I only wish to sketch some essential details here in order to give you a sense of who I am. I chose to stay in Hamilton because it felt very familiar – the industry, the remarkable greenery, the streams, waterfalls, bay and harbour, the arrival of a new university from Toronto, the extensive public library system and so many parks (the latter, all the work of that exceptional character, lawyer and politician Thomas McQuesten). I took up residence with Hunter on Rossalyn Avenue, near Cannon and Ottawa Streets, and in later years (following his passing) I relocated to the west end of the city on the border between Hamilton and Dundas, where I am pleased to say I remain a resident.

For decades, as the city grew and expanded, I remained private and discreet in my research, humble in my living arrangements, building my knowledge, only occasionally sharing what I’d learned during encounters with like-minded souls who meandered throughout the city into areas abandoned to nature, idled away their time in libraries and cemeteries, or collected fossils along the harbour shore near Willow Cove at the base of the Iroquois Bar. It was during one such outing (what I came to consider my “perambulations of inquiry”), and after being in Hamilton for many decades, that I first encountered a young man who turned out to be a distant relative of Thomas Allen Hunter. His name was Andrew Hunter (I believe you know him). At the time, he was a bit of a lost soul, a substitute janitor and maintenance man (and occasional steeplejack) working in schools in the north and east ends of the city. He lacked direction in life, but he held a unique understanding of the region.

Andrew and I first met by the tracks at the base of the escarpment near Gage Park and the Hamilton Brick Works. He said he’d been wandering randomly about the city since his childhood, walking and taking pictures, drawing, collecting things, breaking into buildings, searching for what, he couldn’t say. He was always searching, always repeating the same explanation: “I want to go home,” he’d mumble. Over several years, we would often walk around the city together, sharing our knowledge and discoveries, until around 1985, when he abruptly vanished. I didn’t see him again until 2005 when he suddenly reappeared, wandering about and taking photos in the old Hamilton Cemetery on York Street. He claimed to have been “Out West.” Slowly, we re-established our companionship, yet we never went out together as we once had, having both developed a preference for wandering alone. He encouraged me to go out into the world and share my knowledge, to be more public and engaged as he had tried to be (he was an artist and curator). And so, through his connections, suggestions and introductions, I adapted once again and became the gregarious figure you see today. I have travelled across Canada, back to the United States many times, to England and even home to Glasgow. I often venture out to meet the citizens of Hamilton and take regular excursions to Toronto.

On my travels I have learned much through the conversations I’ve had, the responses to lectures and walking tours I’ve given, and the various research collaborations I’ve undertaken. I have numerous mentors (including Alesha Solomon, a young Cree woman from Fort Albany on James Bay, and Eugenia Schieffelin, Eugene’s granddaughter). I have come to understand a great deal about the nature of my “being” in this world, about my place and presence, my responsibilities and accountabilities. I have come to better understand how I, as a settler, as an invasive species, have deeply altered the lives of those who were here before me and how I continue to impact the potentials of all who continue to arrive (many like me who are not here by choice). I am very conscious of being an extension of a colonial system that has altered life on this planet and how my plumage and sartorial choices conceal an intense whiteness. As I said, I am an invasive species, a fact I recently had clearly declared on my person by Mi’kmaq tattoo artist Tara Zep.

My scholarship is wide-ranging, however, I continue to focus on nature and parallels in cultural and social systems, inter-species relationships, failure and adaptation. I have reached a point in my life where I wish to share more, to frame my experiences and life as a narrative within the context of museums, schools, sites of public history, archives and art galleries, as these spaces are foundational to my evolution. They also echo my own status as an invasive species with deep colonial roots. How much time I have left here is a mystery to me, having lived far beyond the life expectancy for a common starling and in an unorthodox hybrid form, but I feel good physically and mentally and am confident that I still have time.

Enough about me: I wish to address your legacy, something my colleague Andrew attempted on various occasions only to be overwhelmed by the persistence and potency of your narrative of erasure, of an unwillingness in Canada to ultimately reject your myths of a Great White North. Andrew was always inspired by his childhood idol Joe Strummer (of the Clash and the Mescalaros) who also believed you could disrupt the system from within, a fallacy that damaged them both, Andrew literally staggering out of institutions heartbroken and depressed (I have tried to heal him). You see, there is a persistent belief that change can happen without really altering the fundamental wiring of institutions, that institutions can maintain their legacy while superficially incorporating critiques crafted by those they’ve damaged, to have their cake and eat it too (apologies for mixing metaphors). But like any species, you ultimately cannot change the very core of their being. A land mammal can evolve and adapt to water and become a whale, but it still has the same skeletal structure and must breathe air. And let’s not forget that the legacy of many adaptations over time is a flawed central structure harbouring disease and pain within, never mind what is above, considering what lies beneath, buried in the infrastructure.

Recently, while returning from Northern Ontario, passing through Algoma Country on the north shore of Lake Superior, near Caldwell and Pic Island where you began your slide into a fantasy North, I was struck by what was revealed in the deep rock cuts of Highway 17, made long after your rail journey through the area in the 1920s. What is explicit now would have been visible to you too if you’d only cared to look and reflect on it, but you were clearly blinded by your pale vision that would take you further north and west into obliviousness, into “pure” whiteness ABOVE ALL Else.

Past Nipigon heading east, the highway curves south and rises slowly along the base of a wall of deeply scarred rock, drilled and blasted, exposing layers of intense red and brown, heavy grey seeping rust, bleeding iron, pock-marked with sharp crystal clusters. High above, vertical shards are packed and tower above the pines and poplars. I wandered along the base on foot, collected fragments of this complex conglomeration of elements that constantly tumble down, piling them into my embrace, their sharp edges cut into my exposed forearms to reveal, in the hot sun and heat, patches of a virulent whiteness that has been aggressively spreading over my body like a cancer. As I age and continue to lose pigmentation, my human skin evolves to closer resemble the speckled plumage of my avian ancestors. From the cuts, blood oozed and trickled over these patches of white, turning from bright crimson to dried dark crust. The rocks I cradled had an intense beauty. How could you have been so oblivious to this rich complexity beneath your feet, Mr. Harris? How pale and lifeless your paintings feel in comparison, as you insisted on draining all life from these landscapes, and you headed beyond and above ALL else.

“It was, above all else, the whiteness of the whale that most appalled me.”

– Ishmael from Moby Dick or The Whale, by Herman Melville (1851)

When Andrew staggered emotionally drained and empty from that monolithic institution in Toronto where he had laboured, he had come to see it as a bureaucratic leviathan, surfaced and solidified, and that he had been spit back out, like his hero Joe Strummer post the Clash. “I lived with them,” Hunter told me, paraphrasing the poet Dadelson, “in the belly of the whale, and the whale spit me out on the farther shore.”

Imagine that Andrew and I are sitting atop the hill looking out to Pic Island, a train bends near the river below, along tracks you travelled. Andrew stares into the distance, across the flat waters of Lake Superior, the sky cloaked in smoke from innumerable fires. He is rocking, gently, “Our only country is this sparse shore where we’ve been thrown up…” He is rocking, rocking, rocking. “These words are constantly ringing in my head,” he says, “haunting me always. Above All Else.”

We are haunted, sir, by the legacies of colonial violence, legacies made physical, bearing weight, casting shadows, and we carry them, whether we like it or not, whether we wish to deny it or not. Your paintings, the work and words of your peers, the institutions that invest in and promote you, are burdened by it. Think of the statues of Queen Victoria and the likes of Sir John A. Macdonald people seek to justify and defend (the latter from Glasgow like me). In their continued presence, they conceal absence, declare an erasure and a void pleading to be filled, like the statue of the United Empire Loyalists on the courthouse steps in Hamilton, absent the slaves that so many UELs brought to Canada as possessions and were later financially compensated for when slavery was abolished in the British Empire. (Yes, Mr. Harris, there was chattel slavery here too, in Brantford where you come from, in Hamilton where I now live.)

That UEL statue was recently restored, and in front of it stands a freshly painted plaque, its language dated and deeply offensive, just myth-making masking the gross manipulation of history, literally cast in iron and resurrected. It states boldly that the United Empire Loyalists fought with the “Six Nation Indians” for “Crown, God and Country.” This is absurd, a lie. The Haudenosaunee of the Six Nations of the Grand River Confederacy were certainly not fighting for these UEL values; they (like Tecumseh and his Indigenous allies representing many Nations) fought for their sovereignty and sided with the lesser of the two colonial/evil powers. The Shawnee leader Tecumseh would die at the Battle of the Thames in 1813, his forces grossly outnumbered, trying desperately to halt the invading U.S. forces while the British fled the field. Nothing would change between the British and the United States when the war ended, only Indigenous peoples would lose the war of 1812. That conflict stands as the last time the colonizers saw Indigenous peoples as independent nations and valuable allies.

How is it possible that not only does this statue still exist here, in front of a Provincial Court House, but that it has actually been consciously restored? The whiteness of empire flows virulent through this city, the elites and gentry who were responsible for this weakly executed sculpture in the 1920s, around the time that I arrived, remain deeply imbedded here, clinging to power, holding the civic purse strings and controlling the boards of so-called “public” cultural institutions in Hamilton.

I will write you again Mr. Harris, but for now, I want to tell you about one other monument in Hamilton, with roots, like you, in Brantford, and that I can link back to Glasgow. It is a towering white stone memorial in the old Hamilton Cemetery that sprawls atop the Iroquois Bar, a glacial formation separating the harbour from Cootes Paradise, a place snaked over by the remains of earthen ramparts of the War of 1812. This grave marker is often adorned with tiny flags, little Stars and Stripes. It reaches high above all else in its vicinity and is a stone’s throw from the grave of your friend Sir Edmund Walker (former President of the Art Gallery of Toronto, now Ontario, and National Gallery of Canada). It is the grave of Colonel William Winer Cooke of the United States 7th Cavalry, Custer’s 7th Cavalry, thee Custer! Cooke died at Custer’s side at the Battle of the Greasy Grass (known to settlers as the Battle of the Little Bighorn), killed by warriors defending their homelands under the leadership of Crazy Horse and Chief Gall who were inspired by Sitting Bull’s visions of hundreds of horse and riders falling from the sky. Cooke was Custer’s adjutant; he had participated in numerous vicious campaigns against the people of the plains, including the Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho who gathered on the Little Bighorn on June 25-26, 1876. Cooke was known to his enemies and would be singled out for retribution, his flowing red hair and distinct scarlet mutton-chops peeled from his scalp and cheeks.

It is so strange to find Cooke here in Hamilton, originally buried by the Little Bighorn, then exhumed and reinterred here with and by his family who’d relocated from Brantford in his absence in the United States. He’d joined the United States Army to fight in the Civil War (where he met Custer) and subsequently joined Custer’s “family” of closest friends and relations to engage in the extermination of Indigenous peoples (this was their explicitly stated goal). They met a brutal end in June of 1876, but Sitting Bull knew that in spite of the fact that the Greasy Grass was a great victory, it was the beginning of the end. There would be retribution from 7th Cavalry and it came at Wounded Knee in 1890. No one should be honouring Cooke’s remains or memory here.

Not long after Wounded Knee, warriors who fought at the Greasy Grass would reenact the famous battle in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show. They would visit Glasgow in 1892, a few years after I left the city. There is a statue of Buffalo Bill memorializing their visit, in a park near my old Glasgow neighbourhood. There is even film footage of some of Sitting Bull’s warriors walking the high street of Dalmarnock in full regalia. I’m sorry I missed that.

I recently returned home to Glasgow for the first time, walked the streets of Dalmarnock, visited Buffalo Bill and strolled Glasgow Green. My colleague Dr. Rosalind Spooner took me to see the terra cotta fountain positioned in front of the People’s Palace Museum. Like the Albert Memorial in London I had visited a week earlier, the Glasgow fountain is a bold expression of Victoria’s vast British Empire. There are allegorical figures arranged on four sides beneath the Queen representing India, South Africa, Australia and Canada, the last defined by two figures (Mother Canada and a Voyageur) who embrace a wealth of resources, familiar flora and fauna (wheat, timber, beaver and moose).

That day, the sun shone, a cool wind blew, and a soft mist of spray drifted over me from the fountain. In the distance, the factory where carpets were woven for all of those CP railway hotels (Chateau Laurier and Frontenac, the Royal York and the Banff Springs, among others) lingered. Far beyond this, my old neighbourhood had been purged, the streets and houses erased, a lone cotton mill and a school remaining, waiting with a brand new police station for Brexit to be resolved and Scotland to know its future. Standing back on that spot where I’d been abducted over a century ago, near the fountain that had landed decades after my departure, I realized there was no going back, no home to return to. Here, in the belly of the whale I remain for now, Mr. Harris, and to paraphrase Dadelson as Andrew always does, On this sparse shore, where I’ve been thrown up.

Sincerely,

Professor William Starling

Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 2018

P.S. – Do you remember the words of the Mountain Crow Chief Plenty Coups (Alaxchiiaahush/Alaxchíia Ahú)? “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.” He had stopped abruptly while attempting to share his complete life story with the writer Frank Bird Linderman.[Note 2]  At the point in his life narrative when he was still a relatively young man, he declared his story to be finished. This last great Crow chief, who had been a scout with Custer, was clear that while he continued to exist on this earth, to live and breathe, life held no meaning after the buffalo were exterminated.

My only journey, Mr. Harris, is truly this journey in the belly of this whale, this monstrous thing you’ve nurtured, sir, and your privileged descendants and contemporary acolytes are desperate to maintain, has left so many without meaning, a place or space in this world. I encourage you and your followers to consider the following question posed by Jonathan Lear in his book on Plenty Coups titled Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, “How should one face the possibility that one’s culture might collapse?” [Note 3]

* A flock of Starlings is called a murmuration and the process by which our species, in massive flocks, stay together and move as a single undulating unit has long perplexed human scientists.

Bio

Professor William Starling was born in Glasgow, Scotland (circa 1880). He was relocated to New York City around 1888 and moved to Hamilton, Ontario in the 1920s. He is an itinerant avian scholar whose expertise is wide-ranging and includes evolution and adaptation, natural systems, inter-species relations, colonialism and cultures in conflict. Since the 1980s, he has been a close associate of the Hamilton-based artist, writer, curator, educator, and fellow invasive species, Andrew Hunter (born 1963), whose family emigrated to Canada from Glasgow, Scotland and Birmingham, England in the 1920s. Hunter has held curatorial positions across Canada (including at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Vancouver Art Gallery, Kamloops Art Gallery, and RENDER/University of Waterloo). Working independently, he has produced exhibitions, publications and writings in Canada, the United States, Europe and China. Together and independently, Starling and Hunter have lectured widely at colleges, universities and conferences internationally, most recently at the Glasgow School of Art, University of Glasgow, and Harvard University.

Notes

1. Herman Melville, Moby Dick or The Whale (New York, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851).
2. Frank Bird Linderman, American: The Life Story of a Great Indian, Plenty-coups, Chief of the Crows (New York, New York: John Day Company, 1930).
3. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016).

This article is published in issue 35.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue