BCAA Travel Blog

Are we chasing the storm or is the storm chasing us? As we drive northward through the Okanagan Valley it is difficult to tell. Angry clouds are swirling overhead and rain is hammering the windshield in intermittent bursts. Up ahead the sky looks positively menacing. Leonard is at the wheel and we have our road tunes playing on the stereo. I’m riding shotgun, listening to Leonard talk about his Métis childhood growing up in the bush in northern Alberta and his former military service in the Canadian Army. He now gives courses in weapons training and says he has a surprise hiding under his bed for anyone who breaks into his house during the night. As usual, we are behind schedule and so there is not much time to stop and admire the landscape. Motoring past Vernon, the late afternoon sun begins to break through the churning blackness and I stick my lens out the window.

About 8:00 p.m. we arrive at our destination—Talking Rock Resort and Quaaout Lodge, located on the shores of Little Shuswap Lake, near Chase. Opened in 1992, the 72-room luxury resort and conference centre is a development of the Little Shuswap Indian Band. Last year, the band added an 18-hole championship golf course to the local list of attractions, which include trail rides, a sweat lodge, teepees and canoeing. It’s an attractive resort, with a lot of First Nations’ art integrated into the layout. Even the signs marking the individual holes on the golf course are marked with pictographs.  

At dinner, we meet Felix Arnouse, chief of the Little Shuswap Indian Band, who recently returned from a trip to the remote highlands of New Guinea. The adventure provided for an interesting cultural exchange. “They were quite curious about us,” he admits. “They said they had never seen a North American Indian before. Except in John Wayne movies.” Before being allowed to enter villages, his group had to be officially welcomed by tribal committee. “Sometimes we had to wait a few hours,” says Arnouse, which sounds like an even more rubbery extension of Indian time. 

While devouring my steak, I learn more about one of my travelling companions–Shi Long Yang, the senior reporter from Xinhua News. The official press agency of the government of the People’s Republic of China, Xinhua is a massive organization, employing more than 10,000 people–as compared to about 1,300 for Reuters. Xinhua has 107 bureaus worldwide which both collect information on other countries and dispense information about China in seven languages. It also maintains 31 bureaus in China–one for each province plus a military bureau.

The Xinhua press agency was started in November 1931 as the Red China News Agency, but changed to its current name in 1937. Acording to Reporters Without Borders, an independent organization that monitors freedom of the world’s media, Xinhua’s journalists are hand-picked and indoctrinated to produce media reports that give the official point of view of the Chinese Communist Party. Reporters Without Borders accuses Xinhua of being “the world’s biggest propaganda agency.”

I ask Shi Long about censorship in the Chinese media, but he claims that things are loosening up. “There are more than 8,000 newspapers and magazines in China,” he says. “The government can’t censor everything. It’s too difficult.” He also notes that the media in China is becoming increasingly competitive and are beginning to adopt Western methods to increase their popularity and win readership. Is this propaganda? Who knows?

From their base in Ottawa, he and his wife Zoe, another reporter for the news agency, cover all of Canada, reporting on business, culture, entertainment, tourism and politics. “Although not so much on politics. Because Canadian politics is not so interesting,” he says. Shi Long is writing a feature about our B.C. trip, entitled In the Heartland of Canadian Aboriginals. It’s not the sort of title you would ever see in a Canadian magazine, but maybe it sounds different in Manadarin.

In truth, neither Shi Long or his wife appear to know very much about the subject. Yesterday, Zoe said to me, “At university we were taught that there are four different types of people in the world–the yellow race, the white race, the brown race and the black race. Where do these people fit in?” she asked, gesturing across the table at Leonard.

“I’m not familiar with that theory,” I tell her. “At one time they called them the red people. But it’s not a term that used anymore.”

“The red people?” she repeats, frowning in bafflement.

After dinner, I go outside and walk down to the beach. Everything is soaking wet. The storm passed through earlier and the air has turned soft and fragrant. Across Little Shuswap Lake I can see an electrical storm flickering on the horizon. I watch the lightning dance in the darkness for awhile, then head back to my room.

(To be continued …)

Photo Credits: Kerry Banks

Filed under: Writing from the road