Daniel Francis

Reading the National Narrative

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August 5, 2016

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August 10 (next Wednesday) is the District of North Vancouver's 125th birthday. Celebrations will occur, among them a talk by yours truly at the District Hall at 2 p.m. I'll be showing slides from my new book, Where Mountains Meet the Sea: An Illustrated History of the District of North Vancouver.

There will be cake!

July 28, 2016

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The summer issue of Geist magazine is on the newsstands, containing my regular books column.

This time I am contemplating a new study of Samuel Hearne, his journal, the Bloody Falls Massacre and the always-tricky question of who gets to tell history. Despite having been discredited many times, Hearne's account of Bloody Falls seems...

July 19, 2016

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The author was no sooner home from hospital following knee surgery than he was called upon to rise up from his bed of pain and sign a few copies of the new book. Anything for the reading public.

Where Mountains Meet the Sea: an Illustrated History of the District of North Vancouver. Available at bookstores in the Lower Mainland and from your favourite ...

June 27, 2016

To quote the immortal words of cartoonist Aislin, "OK, everyone take a valium."

In the welter of reaction to last week's Brexit vote, what has struck me is the appalling tone-deafness of the losing side, aka "the elites." It is typical of losers to blame their defeat on the ignorance of the winners. If only "they" had known better -- if they hadn't been misled, or frightened, or just too damn stupid to see the truth -- "they" wouldn't have made the egregious mistake of voting against...

June 22, 2016

Should coastal British Columbia ever need an anthem, I'd suggest setting my pal Howard White's marvelous poem "Oolachon Grease" to music. It appears in his 1993 collection Ghost in the Gears.

I found it finally

in Bella Bella price $120/gal.

and it smelled like the cracks

between the deck planks of an old fish barge

if you can imagine spreading that

 on your bread -- quite enough to hurl...

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