Happy new year!<\/p>\n
As Vanessa <\/span>mentioned<\/span><\/a>, the 24th edition of the RVF is almost here. We can\u2019t tell you what the RVF\u2019s 2022 theme is, but I can say that I am reading two books right now that fit right in with it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Lydia Campbell\u2019s <\/span>Sketches of Labrador Life<\/span><\/i><\/a> and<\/span> Elizabeth Goudie\u2019s <\/span>Woman of Labrador<\/span><\/i><\/a> are two memoirs that describe the lifeways and rich traditions of rural Labrador in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born almost a century apart on the same river system, both Lydia Campbell and Elizabeth Goudie lived off the land. Both women also wrote books that spoke about their experiences as women of Labrador, passed on local traditions, and had a long-time and profound impact on their communities.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Lydia Campbell was born in 1818 on the shore of Double Mer Inlet in Groswater Bay (<\/span>Kangerliorsoak in <\/span><\/i>Inuktitut; <\/span>Baie-St Louis in French<\/span><\/i>). Her English father taught her to read and write in English and her Inuit mother taught her to speak Inuktitut. Her mother also shared traditional stories she grew up with and her traditional knowledge about hunting, fishing, sealing, traditional medicines, and the preparation of country foods with Lydia. Lydia married young and moved to Rigolet (Inuktitut: <\/span>Tikig\u00e2ksuagusik<\/span><\/i>) where she lived on the land, hunting, trapping, gathering, fishing, and caring for her children. She also taught her children and grandchildren to write.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n At 75, Lydia wrote a series of vignettes about her life, the stories of her parents and other community members, as well as traditional Inuit and Innu narratives. These were published in 1894 and 1895 in the <\/span>Evening Herald<\/span><\/i>, a St John\u2019s newspaper. They were also gathered up and published as the book, <\/span>Sketches of Labrador Life<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Lydia Campell\u2019s great-grandniece, Elizabeth Goudie, was born in 1902 in Mud Lake (<\/span>Tikig\u00e2ksuagusik<\/span><\/i> in Inuktitut), a small settlement in central Labrador, on the shore of <\/span>Patshishetshuanau-shipu <\/span><\/i>(also known as the Churchill River). She received only four years of formal schooling, but reading was always a part of her life. In 1920 she married Jim Goudie, whose ancestors were French, Cree, and Scottish, and they had eight children together. For more than two decades, Elizabeth and Jim lived mostly off of the land, hunting, trapping, gardening, and gathering as their ancestors had. In the 1930s, when the bottom fell out of the fur trade economy, Labradorians who trapped and hunted for a living were at risk of starvation. Construction of the Goose Bay Air Base began in 1941, and by 1944 Elizabeth and Jim left their last trapper\u2019s cabin and moved to the newly-established Happy Valley-Goose Bay townsite for work. In 1963, after Jim\u2019s death, Elizabeth began to write her memoirs, which were published as Woman of Labrador in 1973. Elizabeth Goudie died in 1982 at Happy Valley-Goose Bay.<\/span><\/p>\n Here\u2019s an excerpt from Elizabeth\u2019s book that I particularly like:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI would like to see this writing of our life and the life of the Labrador trappers published. These people all knew each other and were always happy to get together … It was a good life, a very plain life. Just poor people \u2013 most of us were alike, but life didn\u2019t seem hard. We were honest with each other, and if you had two meals of meat and your neighbour had none you shared with him.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Catherine Fisher, blogger<\/em><\/p>\n Image:\u00a0Margaret (Campbell) Baikie, Daniel Campbell, and Lydia Campbell. Mulligan, c.1895. Flora Baikie collection. Image courtesy\u00a0Them Days<\/i>, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, NL<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6334,"parent":0,"template":"","categorie-de-nouvelle":[61],"class_list":["post-6332","nouvelles","type-nouvelles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","categorie-de-nouvelle-culture-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rvf.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/nouvelles\/6332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rvf.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/nouvelles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rvf.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/nouvelles"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rvf.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rvf.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rvf.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"categorie-de-nouvelle","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rvf.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categorie-de-nouvelle?post=6332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}