George Hewison

Doug Miller 00:00

To this country. Good morning, George Hewison in Bass Lake near Bobcaygeon, Ontario.

George Hewison 00:08

Yeah, hi everybody. It’s great to be here and to meet with fellow fighters for justice all over the world.

Doug Miller 00:18

Thanks for thanks for being part of this. We’re very happy to talk to you, George. I sent you the consent form. I’d just like you to verbally on live here now indicate that you’ve read it and you agree to what’s what what’s contained in it.

George Hewison 00:34

Yes, I’ve read it. I haven’t printed it out yet. I thought Brenda would be here last night, and I would pass it on to her, but I think my partner Sherry is going to be able to. We’ll just photograph it, and we can put it in the computer and send it that way. So I think we’re okay. But I consent to your use. I think I can trust you to not edit my what I say. Like some I’ve had that happen in the past.

Doug Miller 01:01

No problem, George. As I as I mentioned, this is a sort of a focus on the Canadian anti-apartheid activism and the people that were involved in it. You had a long and storied history in labour and the party and all. Could you just give us a brief background and to where you’re from and

Doug Miller 01:24

How did apartheid fit into your life?

George Hewison 01:29

Well, I grew up in a CCF family. My parents were founders of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in in Campbell River, little village at that time, a fishing and logging village, and it was. But the Cold War was just really cranking up McCarthyism, and when the raid happened on our union, and I say our union because it was the thing we, my father and others, had fought for years to build an industrial union. It came under siege, and was going to be smashed just like the seamen. So it was right in our kitchen that we fought out the you know everything was discussed around our table, and so always you have you’re making common cause with people. My parents left the CCF as a result of the leadership of the CCF going over to the, you know, the red baiters and the anti-communist hysteria, and they joined the Labor-Progressive Party at that point when everybody else was leaving. But it was over the question of solidarity, and of course you learn quickly.

The one thing that the communists did they had an internationalist outlook, and so I joined the Communist Party as a student at UBC. I was a teenager in 1961 at UBC, and became active there. And of course, then became an organizer in 1965. I was asked by the party to go north to Prince Rupert and become a union organizer. Mostly, our membership in the north were all indigenous. There was a number of nations up there, six or seven, and each one of them had a different culture history. So that was the beginning of my real education on communism and how it was actually-it was a system that had worked for 1000s of years, and so it reinforced my, you know, kind of the ideological thing that I started to learn it at university.

But it was the thing that identified, and of course, being in that environment, then to discuss you know all the implications, and I must confess, I didn’t understand Canada as a colonial power itself, as an apartheid statement state at the beginning. It was, and I don’t think most of the people in my industry, including members of the party, fully appreciated just the role that racism plays. We knew how it played out in terms of the corporations using our racial differences to divide and conquer, and it was different than, say, South Africa, because in South Africa the indigenous people are the majority, in Canada they were the minority, except in the north where I was. They tended to be at least equal, or perhaps even more. And so we had whole locals that were Indigenous-led, but we had to try to fight against the. You know, there was racist attitudes in the in a settler community, as I would put it. And so we had to always find the ways, the path to unity, and to overcome the differences as we’re trying to fight the corporations and fight the Canadian state to protect our industry, because it wasn’t just a fight over the price of our labour; it was also a fight to preserve our resource. And so to put most people in that struggle obviously were indigenous people. I mean, they kept these resources, and I don’t think we fully appreciated that as a union, to be frank. So anyway, to bring it forward,

Doug Miller 05:14

Did you see any? Okay, sorry

George Hewison 05:17

Well, to bring it forward, when I thought I was going to do this, I had to rush around try to scratch my memory as to what was really happening in my life and in the struggle. I went back to a conference in 1969, an international conference in Moscow, in which all the parties from all over the world got together, and you know synthesized what the strategic goals were.

And one of them obviously was there’s a speech there by John Marks, who was the general secretary of the South African Communist Party, and of course as Canadian communists we basically took our direction on solidarity from our comrades in in South Africa in the underground, and his speech is, it resonates with me today as to what they were up against, and he lays it out very clearly what you know what the underground was up to, whether it was SACTU or whether it was the ANC, and that whole the difficult conditions that they were in.

But it was also, a lot of the oxygen at that conference was taken up with Vietnam because they were also in a bloody war. There was things going on the Arab-Israeli conflict. There was the coup in Brazil that happened four or five years earlier. There was Haiti. There was uprisings in Haiti. There was, but South Africa, because it was a unique and very much like Canada, it was a logical thing for us to. And as I say, we had close relationship with our South African comrades, and we had delegations come from South Africa, and we’d have to spirit them around, and we had to deal with the first of all the interference by the federal government in the first place. We also had to deal with the internal difficulties inside the trade union movement, because the official trade union movement they were getting a lot of funding from the federal government, and so anything that we did at conventions or tried to move, we always had to deal with that reality. So I’ll maybe stop there. See if you have any questions there.

Doug Miller 07:30

Well, you’ve started to get to the nub of it there, and your life in the trade union and the party really is a is a union and unity, isn’t it?

George Hewison 07:43

It was. I probably would never have been. I was going to be a school teacher or a folk singer rather than a union organizer if I’d had my druthers. But because when you’re committed to something much bigger than yourself, that’s you know. Then you have to do what you have to do, and when the union asked me, and the party people in the industry asked me, because I was a commercial fisherman as well. You know, we need an organizer, so that’s what I became.

Gwen Schulman 08:13

George, which union were you with when you attended the conference in Moscow?

George Hewison 08:18

I didn’t attend the conference. That was our leaders. It was a leadership conference of 69 parties, or 80 parties, I guess it was.

Gwen Schulman

Okay.

George Hewison

All the party leaders. No, I was. I just read about it. So we, when they came back, they all digested. I have the book here. This one here. It’s a little big red thick book, and it’s got all the speeches of all of the leaders and John Marks’s speeches in there, and he they produced volumes of material and it was circulated all over the world. So that’s how we took our marching orders was from our South African comrades as to what they needed.

Gwen Schulman 08:58

Sorry, I missed what the name of the union was that you were with

George Hewison 09:02

United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union, and it was a complicated union. It was not like any ordinary trade union because we had petty producers in it, and we had to keep united. We had to have 10 day conventions to keep it united, and South Africa was part of always the resolutions because there are also educational opportunities to lift people’s consciousness. So we were always in the we were always on the left of the labour movement, and we always had. I mean, we were raided twice by the combines branch, saying that our bargaining was illegal. You know, I went to jail over one of the strikes we had, where we lost our treasury once, our officers were jailed, did a year in jail over one of the strikes because they kept saying our strikes were illegal, but we did anyway. But it was mainly because we had a different vision for the trade union movement of Canada than what. Was normal. There was a time when communists led 12 major unions in Canada, but the Cold War just decimated the left, and it was you know it was part of the Cold War, but also tried to anesthetize the trade unions, and so we had to fight. The they had all kinds of money to pass out to unions that behaved themselves, and of course, I think we saw that in the solidarity. The International Affairs Department of the Congress was loaded with, you know, pro-regime South African regime personnel. So we had to fight through that. We could win the resolutions by the rank with the delegates to convention, but the leadership would just sit on those resolutions, and that. So when we come up to the, it wasn’t just the government; it was also in it. They had influence right inside our movement,

Doug Miller 10:57

And much of the labour movement was dominated by large American unions, which were AFL-CIO and exactly

George Hewison 11:05

AFL-CIA, is what it was. You know, they determined the policies and they transplanted them into Canada. That started to change in the 70s when the public sector workers started to join and the international unions really put up a fight. They wanted to split the Canadian labour movement and the Communist Party. We were very small, but we were able to build alliances to save the Canadian Labour Congress because you have to have a vision of the future. And I think, to a large extent, it that strategy was important to maintain a united trade union movement and not allow it to be split between public sector and private sector.

Doug Miller 11:49

When you brought you brought people from South Africa, you said and –

George Hewison 11:52

Yeah, well they would there be the party would be you know there was a close relationship so somebody would say well you know for instance somebody would be coming, like say Zola Zembe. You remember, you know, he would come and it would come through the channels. This guy, you know, whoever they’re bringing in, you know, please see if you can find sympathetic ears, say the labour council in Vancouver or Prince Rupert or wherever they’re from, to make the maximum effort to make sure that we use this to raise support, so we’d have we’d pass be able to pass all the resolutions. We always had resolutions. I’m not sure we always succeeded in the early years because there was a lot of resistance. Our problem was once we get the resolution passed, we could the leadership would sit on it, and so we had to do, and that went for all of our solidarity work, whether it was the British miners or whatever. You know, we’d still have to do the spade work in terms of building until SACTU Solidarity came along, and then of course they that just accelerated the whole process of building.

Doug Miller 13:00

That was, that was about 1980 or so.

George Hewison 13:03

It was a much later period, but the groundwork had been laid, I think, and we were able to, you know, I mean, there’s just the question of justice was the first thing that people would trigger a worker, in terms of when you could say what was going on in South Africa? The but then the second question is international solidarity. That the struggle in South Africa is also the struggle of Canadian workers.

They’re not separate. So we came at it from kind of both ends. Some wanted to just focus on the justice issue, just good liberal guilt, but the thing that really made it more lasting was when they could see that Outspan oranges or you know Rothmans cigarettes was actually the same forces that were attacking Canadian workers. So when you have boycotts, so you build that, you build up that momentum, and as the Cold War receded, it was obviously more and more people were started to articulate. You know, it freed up the debate that we could have, and it changed the character of the labour movement. Frankly,

Doug Miller 14:17

Oh, in what way?

George Hewison 14:20

Well, it just became easier to, in for instance, in the mid ’70s, there was a massive crisis in world capitalism. Keynesian economics blew up, and yet Milton Friedman and his crew are going to take back everything that the working class had gained over the period from World War II to you know the mid 70s, we had a day of action here with a million workers on the streets in in Canada. The days of action, the October 14, 1976, against Trudeau’s wage and price controls, and yeah, and in British Columbia, I organized the first meetings of the Solidarity Coalition, which we had the majority of British Columbians on our side. We actually occupied the premier’s office, and it was this was the real first time they’d really challenged the labour movement. Actually, all the things they brought in 26 bills to do everything from tenants’ rights to everything human rights were all 26 bills to just strip us of all these things and so we led a huge resistance and that was initiated by the Communist Party. That was I was the vice president of the Labour Council in Vancouver, and we called the very first meetings and we ended up with 1000s of people in the streets at the end of it. And of course, it ended up with a retreat by the ruling class in British Columbia, who realized there was difficulties.

So the changing character of the labour movement came about as a result of changing circumstances. No longer was the economy just going onwards and upwards, and suddenly, capital in Canada and around the world decided we got to start taking back some of these things from the from the working class, and we end up with neoliberalism or austerity, and that changes the dynamic, so that not only are the people in South Africa fighting for their rights, or no longer people in Vietnam fighting for their rights, and in fact, the Vietnamese people won in 1975, but suddenly we’re under attack, and so even though we’re a tiny little left group, more and more people are joining the struggle, you know, in the 1000s. So it was a change, change character, I guess.

Doug Miller 16:44

Now you ended up at a the Berlin conference in 1984, the Festival of Protest Songs.

George Hewison 16:53

It was a political song festival that had been set up by a Canadian. Actually, he was living in. He was a folk singer by the name of Perry Friedman from Toronto, and when I was about 12 years old, he came and did a house concert in Campbell River, and I immediately scrapped my piano accordion and took up the guitar, and my brother-in-law introduced me to the music of Pete Seeger, and I realized this is what I’ve been waiting for. Paul Robeson was a great hero of my of our family because of not just his singing and his skill, but also because of his politics. And so all of these people inspired.

But anyway, the conference was in ’86. There was a there was a two or three of them, and it was called the Political Song Festival, and it had been started by Perry Friedman from Toronto, and he had been he’d moved to Berlin. I think he got married there, and so we all got an invitation. They had people, a group called Amandla, for instance, was performing there. A group from the so from Sweden. It’s a gumboot group called Amandla. There was people from Morocco, great musicians, and of course the headliner was Pete Seeger and Billy Bragg. So I was just I was a you know kind of a background, but I had my own concert. They had set up concerts for me everywhere, and I’d go into even so for a week. There was this the whole of Berlin, East Berlin, was turned over to these musicians, and just five days of concerts and music and in the streets and so on.

Doug Miller 18:39

We heard.

Gwen Schulman 18:40

Did you do any songwriting for it, or what were you what were you singing when you performing?

George Hewison 18:45

I would well, I had been of course the best tool I ever had as a union organizer was music, and I had to give that up as a full time thing and make it a part time. But it was my best tool walking into a group of strangers, whether it was a village somewhere up north, suddenly you have a lot of friends, and you might do a couple of cover tunes, and then you do a union tune, or you do something else. And one of the best song maybe I’ve ever written was done for this festival, and I should just tell you about it,

Gwen Schulman 19:23

Please.

George Hewison

Because I was when I was travelling over in Europe. The only international edition of the Globe and Mail was the only reading material I could find, and I read in there that this woman that had been one of my mentors on Haida Gwaii used to be called the Queen Charlotte Islands. Her name was Ethel Jones. That’s her English name. I don’t know what her Haida name was, but she was a survivor of the residential school at Port Alberni. She’d been taken away as a child, but she was the strongest person I think you’d ever want to see because. The Haida Nation is a matrilineal nation, and they trace their lineage through their, through their mother, the Longhouse, and her she was a from the Raven Clan, and her husband Peter was from the Eagle Clan, the two main clans in in Haida.

And I’d read that she had been arrested. She was a nanny or a grandmother in the Haida language. She had been arrested because she and some other elders from her from her village or from the whole Haida nation had been arrested. She was in her 80s by then. Had been arrested because they stood in front of the bulldozers and refused to allow them to log the last stand of virgin timber, 900-year-old spruce on Haida Gwaii. They were arrested, fingerprinted. Anyway, there was such an international outcry. They won, but they hadn’t won yet. But I was so angry and so frustrated.

I sat down and wrote a song called Ethel Jones about her doing this, and that was the hit for me at the Berlin Festival. Nelson Mandela was obviously that’s the focus of the entire concert, but for me, when I did my concert, I debuted this song called Ethel Jones, and it goes. You’ve taken to shutting down the road, Ethel Jones, stopping devastation to your home, Ethel Jones, in this ancient Haida land that spruce and cedar stands, and the raven and the eagle freely roamed, and the eagle and the raven freely roamed. And I wrote that, and I wrote the lyrics about her trajectory, and why she was such a powerful woman that everybody in her village of Masset always came to her, and despite the residential school, she had her spirit and her determination, and she led.

And when I went back there. I should just tell you, my wife brought me my 70th birthday present was to go back there after 35 years, and they’ve now won that struggle. They now have self-governance in the Haida Nation, all of Haida Gwaii. There’s not a tree cut now. There’s not a fish caught in their jurisdiction unless they have the permission of the Haida Nation, and that’s anyway.

Doug Miller 22:27

Well, that’s amazing, and then powerful expression at the end of your concert. You did have a small tribute to Mandela as well.

George Hewison 22:37

Yes, well, of course, and I’d done that song already, so I already had taught it to the audience. There was, I don’t know how many. There was a couple of 1000 people, I guess, in that audience, and they were singing. They were singing up a storm. More than half of them could speak English, so I didn’t even need a translator. I mean,

Gwen Schulman 22:53

What was the song? Sorry,

George Hewison 22:55

It was called, the one that I wrote. Well, I wrote the Mandela. I did a quick zipper song is what I call it-a zipper song where you could just fit in words and choruses, and people could sing them. And so I, at the in the guts of the concert, I introduced them to this song about Nelson Mandela, and it was the song was “Join Join Hands” with South Africa, and it was published in the festival news. There was I might still have copies of the, but every one of us had a special edition was circulated throughout Berlin for this concert, and that one was in there.

I don’t think Ethel Jones was because I don’t even think I had it written out yet. But when I had my press conference at the end of the concert, all the media, all they wanted to know about was who is this Ethel Jones, and so they wanted to know all about her. And unbeknownst to me, I get home and Ethel Jones was on a speaking tour across Canada. She came from all the way from BC, and she came to a fundraiser for the legal defence in Toronto, and she came up after the after her presentation. She, I went up to her and kind of greeted her because she had been a very powerful symbol to me in my youth. I said, George, what did you do to me? I’m getting all these letters in German from Germany, but she was just one amazing and a powerful, powerful speaker. We went to the Nisga’a Tribal Convention, where they never had women in the front row. They always the women always sat at the back. Not Ethel Jones. She was one of the guest speakers. They’d invited her, and she gave one of her marvellous speeches because everything is done orally. They have these long meetings where everything is in oral tradition, and she just she blew the doors off these old men at the head. Table, I’ll tell you. And the anyway, it was it was something to behold, and she was something to behold.

Doug Miller 25:07

Quite the experience, crazy man.

Gwen Schulman 25:10

Can we get just for get back just for a second? Yeah, sorry. No, no, no, no. It’s okay. This is all fantastic. Just to get back to the song, join hands with South Africa. So, if I understand correctly, that’s something you wrote for this music festival, yes,

George Hewison 25:22

I did. Yes, because I was trying to think of what would be appropriate, but I knew there would be all kinds of other people, and I wanted to get something that people. Because part of the thing about my kind of music is it’s participatory. I also have narrative music that I do, but it’s really important when you’re doing an hour and a half concert or something that you have a lot of participation. Labour music is built that way. It’s meant to be sung by the masses, and so that’s why I wrote that song that way. Like join hands with South Africa, and tomorrow they’ll be free. Join hands with Nelson Mandela, and tomorrow he’ll be free. Tomorrow we join hands all around the world, and tomorrow join hands with the ANC. You know, so on a zipper song. You just fit the words in, and you can make it say anything. You know, but the theme was always there. We’ve got to join hands.

Doug Miller 26:16

And –

Gwen Schulman 26:17

How did you feel performing it? What was your perception of the audience response to it?

George Hewison 26:24

Well, I think you got a sense of that by that little cassette that that young woman from Quebec, Sylvie Bayern, her name was, and I don’t know how she smuggled it in there, but she was she’s a separatist, but she said she sent me a letter with it saying, you know, you made me really proud to be a Canadian. So I could tell the audience was with me. I mean, you always know, you always worry about that when they’re and it’s they were from all over Europe. I mean, they came from Scandinavia. They were, you know, you know, and but they’d really all come to get see Pete Seeger, but they couldn’t all get tickets for Pete Seeger, so they had to come and settle for second or third best. You know that was, but they actually enjoyed themselves, so that’s the most important thing. They were part of the part of the spirit of the day.

Gwen Schulman

Fantastic.

Doug Miller 27:22

So, so then I was sort of thinking of the Communist Party because you also were General Secretary by some at some point, and I think it was just as the Gorbachev era occurred, and things started changing. And how did that affect the anti-apartheid movement? As you could see,

George Hewison 27:49

Well, there’s always two sides: the anti-apartheid movement. I mean, South Africa is no different than Canada. If you have a split in the anti-apartheid movement, it will find its reflection everywhere else in the world, and of course, the same thing was true in Canada. I thought our party’s approach was very sectarian towards, and it and the party at that point. I don’t think we’re we had a hub and spoke, and if the original ideas didn’t originate at the hub, whatever the, you know, and it had to be translated one way, a one way transmission line down to the spoke, whereas most of our political practice of most of us like came from BC, the spoke and the hub went two ways. You had to listen to the to the spokes, and it had to inform your decision at the hub, as opposed to which is what, in my opinion, what a true vanguard would be.

But my experience was, the damage had been done by the Cold War. There, there was a paranoia, and so we couldn’t take advantage of the new, you know, a lot of new people coming in and had new ideas, and you know, you have to fold that in. I mean, the women’s movement started after International Women’s Year in 1970, and we were way behind on the whole question of the struggle for and the struggle against racism. I mean, in my own industry, I mean, I think we really underestimated the racist undertone, and I think we still do. Frankly, I think we most Canadian workers still don’t understand that we’re a colonial power, and that’s part of the struggle of the left to do all of that. You know, I think it’s improving. I think we’ve got some opportunities, but the intersection between race, class, gender will is really important, and I had a I had a difficult time getting used to the some of the practices of the party, and I became leader. I think because I think people were wanting that, and I think. The Gorbachev phenomenon helped that, because really the Communist Party.

I was, you know, I was totally ill-equipped to be a leader. The story of my life, but I was propelled into that by virtue of the fact there was nobody else. The people that would have been there were pretty sectarian, and so, but it was part of history, and it’s, and then you know, so the, I won’t get into it now because that’s a whole different chapter, but I think it did affect our anti-apartheid work. Let’s just leave it there.

Doug Miller 30:38

Okay, sure enough, and well, listen. I don’t know, Gwen. Have you got any more questions?

Gwen Schulman 30:46

Yeah, I have a couple of other questions. A question that we ask people is, what do you recall of your thoughts and emotions when Nelson Mandela was freed?

George Hewison 31:00

My thoughts were absolutely. I was in shock. I was because the guy that I saw that went into Robben Island was a young man, vibrant, dark hair, and but the guy that came out was shriveled and old, and it just it, and I realized that a quarter century had gone by. It had gone by for all of us, but I’m sitting there, and I’m trying to get my head around that.

Doug Miller 31:30

Yeah, yeah.

Gwen Schulman 31:32

Another question: Do you recall your thoughts and reactions when Chris Hani was assassinated?

George Hewison 31:43

Yeah, I thought, oh, because he was, you know, there are no messiahs in this world, in my opinion. That’s why you organize and you build. But Chris Hani was the closest thing to having a sense of that that you had to do that, and so yeah, that was that was a real kicker. That was a real, you know, because I don’t think, you know, part of the job. Most of us that were joined the Communist Party, we were activists. We weren’t Marxist scholars. We weren’t ideologues. Me as leader, I’ve spent the last 25 years trying to do catch-up of stuff I should have learned before I became leader. Chris Hani never had that chance, and but I think the ruling class understood exactly what he was and the danger that he posed, and that’s why they had to, you know, they know they know where the landmines are for them, and I think some of the difficulties that are going on in South Africa now stem from the fact that it’s there. There is not clarity in terms of where does the movement go, and so you end up with the stuff that’s going on against immigrants right now. That you know, that just is-it’s a non-starter for me. It’s non-it’s a non-starter for every internationalist.

Doug Miller 33:10

Yeah, absolutely. Wow. Any sort of final thoughts, overview thoughts about anti-apartheid?

George Hewison 33:22

Well, I just want to pay tribute to Amandla, and I want to pay tribute to all the other groups that did fight so vigorously, not just in Canada but all around the world, and they did it despite some differences. The left really likes to fight itself instead of directing its fire at the main enemy. Sometimes we can’t even identify the main enemy. We can’t get to it, but I’d like to pay tribute to people that may even had disagreements within the anti-apartheid movement. But they were courageous enough to stand up. And work that you do, I think, is really important because if we don’t have a historical memory of what went before, we can’t situate ourselves in the present or thought of a future for humankind.

Gwen Schulman 34:08

I agree, and thank you very much. I have a couple more questions. Actually, I want to back up because we’re starting to wrap up before I was ready. So, two questions. I guess one is you’re one of the rare people we’ve interviewed who, during the movement, was up working well. Well, in your instance in Northern British Columbia, working with and within Indigenous communities, do you recall conversations with folks there about what was going on in South Africa?

George Hewison 34:43

Only at conventions because we’d have resolutions and people would speak and it was an educational opportunity. But you know you have to understand something at that time. Right up until Kamloops a few years ago, where they discovered those bodies, it wasn’t very – the level of trust to open yourselves up. We sent, I’ll give you an example. After the Cuban revolution, we sent a member of our union who was a delegate to convention. We thought, well, this would be a good experience to go to Cuba and see what’s going on there. And so we, and it was probably a terrible mistake because he came back and he went back to his village. And if you understand the way the colonial affairs works in Canada, the Department of Indian Affairs works here. It’s not dissimilar to South Africa. They ran that in a way that it’s probably the most important portfolio in the Canadian government, the Canadian state. Arthur Laing was the Minister of Indian Affairs, Indian and Northern Affairs. It’s a 10-storey building in Hull, and when you go there with a delegation, which I did when I first started organizing, the first floor is all Indigenous people, second floor. It’s about a half.

By the time you get to the top floor of the that building, it’s all white folks, and it’s all people trying to figure out how they can screw the indigenous people and how they can buy them off. And so, within every village, I mean, it was desperate. I mean, desperate situation in villages in terms of trying to get a few bucks because their own way of life had been destroyed, but to try and survive, and so, and within that, you had people there that were prepared to make compromises, and you understand compromise when there’s very little other alternative. We have that going on right now when we’re talking about pipelines. We have some people are grasping at straws and what appears to be a life jacket, and it turns out to be a cement buoy. But that’s happening all across the country.

But I’m happy to say now it’s changing, and it’s that’s the what’s exciting about another generation coming up. I mean, I tried to get Leonard Peltier when he came in. He came and saw us to get him to. He wanted we stay in Canada so he wouldn’t be extradited. There, you talk about Nelson Mandela being a political prisoner. There’s a guy that’s long-standing, and most of the indigenous people wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole, because they said you’re just going to bring retribution down on us like we’ve never had. So we finally had one of our, the wife of one of our members, who was well connected in Cape Mudge, the band there, and she adopted him into her family to try and make him a citizen of that nation and didn’t work. Warren Allmand still signed the extradition order. Biggest mistake of his life, he said, and he ended up doing what was it, three or four decades behind bars for something he didn’t commit. But it was to terrorize the indigenous people of the United States, and frankly, continue the terrorizing of the indigenous people in Canada.

Gwen Schulman 38:07

Okay, one last question is just the legacy of the movement. What do you think? We, what do you think the legacy of the anti-apartheid movement is, and what kind of legacy did it have for you personally? What kind of impact did it have for you personally, having participated in it?

George Hewison 38:27

It was part of it’s a thread in a fabric that it’s a whole cloth, and a victory there is a victory here, and to see it, it’s really important to remember that the apartheid scheme in South Africa was actually conceived in Canada with the reservation system, and we had scholars that actually have unearthed that over the years. I think we still have a job to do here, and the lessons there I think are important here in terms of moving forward, and some of us like now we’re seniors. I’m involved in Seniors for Climate Action now. I’m a coordinator for the Council of Canadians, but we need to draw out those lessons fully, and we shouldn’t be disheartened by what’s going on in South Africa right now, there was a legacy there of colonialism, and we don’t overcome these things overnight. And we need to be, but we have a we have a big job to do to save the, you know, save a whole number of species, save the people, and the indigenous people here in Canada right now. In my opinion, are leading the fight for the environment, that’s what’s exciting, and I think that raises the possibilities. Those lessons. So the anti-apartheid fight is our fight everywhere, and whether it’s in Gaza, or you know, you know Lebanon, or this morning I listen, I watched. A woman stopped at a checkpoint. She had delivered. They delivered a baby that died, a pregnant woman. I mean, that anyway.

Doug Miller 40:16

No, that’s a that’s a, that’s a, that’s really an upsetting.

George Hewison 40:20

That’s hard to swallow. Yeah.

Doug Miller 40:27

Thank you, George. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Gwen Schulman 40:30

Thank you so much for joining us. You’ve brought a lot of really interesting insights to this project. It’s hugely appreciated.

George Hewison 40:38

Yeah.

Doug Miller 40:39

Yes.

Gwen Schulman 40:40

Thank you,

Doug Miller 40:41

And we will continue our discussions for sure.

George Hewison 40:44

Yeah, well, we’ll have to get together, Doug. It’s been a while. By the way, I should tell you the other big project that I’ve kind of been sleeping at the switch is the Fred Rose project, because our history in Canada can’t be separated from what.