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Chapter 14 | Donna Cardinal (continued) I wonder if these functions of memory have any relevance for the creating and handing down of culture in smaller societies in a context of globalization. In Canada outside of Québec, I see the role of memory in building hope. From time to time, being smaller than the source of the global monoculture, we have needed to remind ourselves that we have taken action in the past to address our concerns and the results have been successful, even impressive. I think here of the gradual process by which we in Canada put in place a social safety net over a period of nearly a century, a social safety net that has served us well in Canada and received favourable reviews beyond Canada. As a smaller society, too, we have had to remind ourselves that not all that can be invented has been invented and that we have the capacity to imagine worlds other than those we now inhabit which are, after all, inventions of those who came before us. I think here of our failure, so far at least, to imagine (perhaps more a failure of will, but also of imagination) a just social order with First Nations and Metis and Inuit people in Canada. Memory functions, too, in our smaller society as a storehouse of policy ideas we have thought and tried, or not tried, in the past; ideas that may be more valid for us than those imported from other places. I struggled for an example here, but perhaps it is our early and sometimes misguided applications of multicultural policy. Well, I put out for discussion these ideas about memory and future possibilities, about creating inner and outer spaces for culture. It seems to me that at every level of meaning making, from the inner to the local to the societal and the global, there is a tremendous tension between homogeneity and diversity, between status quo and newness, between the powers of the king and those of the poet, as Walter Bruggemann (1978) would say. Based on my experiences with citizens groups, I am hopeful. My hope quotient is high! I see groups broadening the notion of cultural resources, and using cultural mapping processes and methods, to discover and articulate for themselves those characteristics of place that make it unique. I see them opening spaces, both internally and in the public sphere, in which to imagine and to enact what they have imagined. I see them capable of identifying for themselves what is not okay about the present, what they do not wish to hand down to their grandchildren. I see them imagining alternatives that are fully satisfying and on which they are prepared to take action individually and collectively. Being smaller groups within a larger community has not prevented either the imagining or the enacting. True, all groups wrestle with two difficult questions: what about those who aren’t here, and who are we to invent futures for our communities? But the futures they imagine pull them forward, releasing energy for the task. And their offerings as small groupings within the larger community constitute new offerings to that larger community. So might we, Canada outside of Quebec — or even Canada with Quebec — as a smaller society, make our contributions in the face of global cultural homogenization to hopeful, just, and more fully human futures. What are we doing when we do this? We are creating new political spaces: provisional, unsealed, dependent. We are shaping new worlds for ourselves and for future generations who will find in the culture we hand down the dissatisfactions which lead them to imagine their alternatives. We are, in the words of Walter Bruggemann, “transforming the world [and, I would add, ourselves] for the sake of humanness” (1978). references
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