Greatest Indie Canadians

Recently I got to playing around with a graphic of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games and a picture of artist/writer Douglas Coupland. I was compositing the two and came up with the image at left, which I really quite like. I started thinking about what makes Doug Coupland one of my favourite Canadians, and who else would make that list.

In 2004, as you may remember, the CBC commissioned a survey asking Canadians to nominate their own “Top 10 Greatest Canadians.” It was quite a challenge but the people were up to the task. I still remember that program. there were media/sport celebrities like Don Cherry and the environmentalist David Suzuki. There were pioneers in politics and science/medicine like Tommy Douglas and Frederick Banting. It was quite an impressive list. Perhaps the only person I thought was  ”sure thing” was Pierre Trudeau. For any of his faults, he was a thinker and an enigmatic leader who came to power at the same time that Canada was blossoming on the world stage.

If we think of the dramatic decade that was the 1960s, and the amazing moments like a man on the moon and the Vietnam war, Trudeau was a leader for amazing times. He was, as the expression goes (especially for new young alpha male leaders in areas like extreme sport), a “Rock Star.” He also championed, along with the Liberal party, the rights of minorities and helped usher in the modern age of Canada as global human-rights benefactor and multicultural country (particularly through UN peacekeeping missions and landmark moments like the acceptance of the “boat people” – the tide of hundreds of thousands of refugees who fled Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war, rejected elsewhere but accepted first by Canada).

This stuff is really important, especially as we regard cities as the future habitat of most of humanity, and we begin to understand how things like climate change will play a role in forcing large groups of people to seek new lands in the 21st century. Canada can lead in progressive humanitarian areas, even as we fail or struggle to lead on the global environmental stage. But back to my list of “Great Indie Canadians.”

I thought up that title because I don’t feel the need to challenge the present CBC list which is found at http://www.cbc.ca/greatest/top_ten/. My “Indie” group, as you might have guessed, are not heroes of the nation in science or politics, and might be recognizable more to those who grew up in the 1970s and 80s, the children of the Baby boomers, and as Douglas Coupland calls them, “Generation X.”

My heroes include Doug Coupland, who has written books like “Generation X”, “Micro Serfs,” and “Shampoo Planet,” and authored a couple of photo-based books called “Souvenir of Canada” (Parts 1 and 2). I suggest you check out the books, but also rent or buy the DVD version. Watching Coupland mount his art exhibit of Canadian “souvenirs” in a condemned suburban family house in Vancouver he calls “Canada House” is remarkable. Included are dramatizations of Coupland’s youth: first jobs, traveling across Canada by car and other coming of age anecdotes, a terrific narration of his travails through university and his twenties, and an in-depth look at the identity of one of Canada’s most interesting and self-deprecating author/celebrities.

As a teacher and an artist, I feel great pride and admiration for this example of new-school multimedia work and encourage any and all to seek it out. If you like the old National film Board “educational” films you’ll enjoy some of the archival footage that is also used throughout the DVD. Doug is very Canadian and sits somewhere right at the top of my list. Who else makes my list? Well, in no particular order, here are a loose group of my Canadian heroes.

(My) Greatest (Indie) Canadians:

Douglas Coupland (writer), Marshall McLuhan (thinker/writer), Sloan (the rock group), Wendel Clark (vs. Marty McSorely), Atom Egoyan and Bruce McDonald (film directors), The Tragically Hip, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Rush (Musicians), Maestro (Fresh Wes, the rapper) and Frank Arthur Calder (First Aboriginal Canadian elected to a Legislature in Canada).

Please feel free to contribute your own list! Looking forward to your comments!

(Related) From the Toronto Star:
“Designed by Canadian artist/author Douglas Coupland and landscape architects Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg, an 8-acre park in downtown Toronto was unveiled today, featuring unique public art, water features and a jogging track dedicated to Terry Fox. Narration by Christopher Hume. Video by Bernard Weil. (September 9, 2009)” – This video shows some iconic images/people from “Douglas Coupland’s Canada”
http://www.thestar.com/videozone/693351