A Settler Child Celebrates the Legal Personhood of Pemadeshkodeyong/Rice Lake
WATER IS LIFE A Settler Child Celebrates the Legal Personhood of Pemadeshkodeyong/Rice Lake by Dorothy Lander A landmark announcement during
Sir Joseph and me, September 2024, Thinkers’ Lodge, Pugwash, Nova Scotia
In 2010, Dorothy and I were visiting our stepdaughter Cathy in Pugwash in Northern Nova Scotia, where she was living in the Sunset Community, a centre for people with disabilities. We came upon her pulling weeds outside the library and we ventured inside. My attention was at once caught by a photograph of a man I vaguely recognized. The librarian told me this was Sir Joseph Rotblat, a man held in high esteem here for his dedication to peace in the world. Hearing his name at once took me back fifty years to my very first lecture after entering Barts (St. Bartholomew’s) Hospital medical school in London University in 1960.
Professor Rotblat was a physicist of renown, but I had no idea back then just how renowned. All I knew was that this was my very first encounter with physics, because I had steadfastly avoided any brush with the sciences at high school. I had been admitted to Barts through an arts scholarship: perhaps the admissions committee were influenced by the Rede Lecture given the previous year by scientist and novelist CP Snow, entitled “The Two Cultures,” in which Lord Snow decried the split in western society between the sciences and the humanities.
I quickly realized I was unable to grasp a single wave or particle of the multi-arrowed formulae our professor was composing on the massive blackboard. All I knew was that I absolutely had to pass the exam if I was to move forward in my ambition to become a doctor. I resorted to copying down every single linear, cubic, or trigonometric (who knew?) equation from the chalk board, then pulling all-nighters to learn them by rote when the end-of-year exam rolled around.
Physics may have remained a closed book, but what Sir Joseph did instill in me was a lasting commitment to universal peace. I learned from our friendly librarian that Pugwash is known widely as “The Peace Village,” because of Sir Joseph’s leadership in the campaign for nuclear disarmament through the annual Pugwash Conferences he established in 1957 with Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. This highly distinguished group of scientists went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. Sir Joseph played a leading role in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, because he saw it as a deterrent to Germany to building an atomic bomb, but he left it as soon as he saw its immeasurable threat to humanity. He was the only scientist to leave the project on moral grounds.
In 1939, Joseph Rotblat caught a train from Warsaw, heading west to work on the cyclotron particle accelerator at Liverpool University in England. His wife Tola had just had an appendicectomy and planned to join him as soon as she recovered. How could they know that the train her husband caught would be the last to leave Warsaw before the Nazis invaded? Tola never made it out of Poland and was murdered in Belzec concentration camp; and Sir Joseph lived to be 97 years old but never fully recovered from her loss. He moved from Liverpool to London in 1949 to teach at Barts (St. Bartholomew’s) hospital medical school, eleven years before the fateful day I sat in the back row of the classroom for my very first lecture in physics.
Fast forward to today: Dorothy and I are still recovering from walking nineteen kilometres on the first day of Walking Together for Peace (https://walk4peace.ca/). We were part of a group of peace activists including P. V. Rajagopal from Gandhi Peace Foundation and the water protector “grassroots grandmother” Dorene Bernard, both of whom were formerly Chairs of Social Justice at St. Francis Xavier’s Coady Institute. Our departure point was the Peace Hall in Pugwash and our first stop Pugwash High School—the first school in Canada to declare itself a nuclear-free zone. Dorothy and I were the two oldest participants, fully aware that over 250 kilometres lay ahead for these dedicated walkers for peace. But we were inspired throughout our mere nineteen kilometres by Dorene Bernard’s testimony: “Every step a prayer for peace.”
The Peace Hall, Pugwash, Nova Scotia: Departure Point for Walking Together for Peace: www.walk4peace.ca
Beyond Chance: Dorothy’s Addendum
A constellation of co-incidences re-connected John Graham-Pole with his physics professor Joseph Rotblat. We had another purpose for visiting the Pugwash Public Library, where Dorothy’s stepdaughter Cathy was weeding. Cathy’s father Patrick Napier was a CBC Halifax broadcaster until his retirement to Antigonish in 1987. Early on in his CBC career, he interviewed Cyrus Eaton, the Canadian American philanthropist who funded the anti-nuclear weapons organization, known as the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs on his estate, now known as the Thinkers’ Lodge. Dorothy’s purpose in going into the library was to offer a photograph of that interview for their records.
The striped settee where Cyrus Eaton is sitting is still in the Thinkers’ Lodge and on a later visit to Pugwash, we took a picture of Patrick’s daughters Cathy and Susan in the same setting.
Joseph Rotblat’s name did not come up in Dorothy’s conversations with Patrick about this photo, but it is intriguing to think that he too crossed paths with the Nobel Laureate for Peace.
Also beyond chance, remember that John entered Barts Medical School on an arts scholarship in 1960, with an early commitment to marry the arts and science in medical education. Well, Cyrus Eaton clashed with the US scientists’ leadership when he presented his vision for the Pugwash Conferences, incorporating non-scientists and humanism. A critic of US foreign policy, he was urging the world’s scientists and scholars to push their governments towards peace and to end the arms race. He was distanced as a participant in the Conferences because he was seen as having a pro-Soviet stance.
Enter Anne Jones. Anne Kinder Jones helped Cyrus host the first International Conference of Scientists in July 1957. Her graciousness, humor, and attentiveness helped the nuclear scientists from around the world to relax, trust their colleagues, and open up. Anne married Cyrus later that year. Her creation of musical skits, her fun and competitive croquet games, and her personal charm delighted the conference participants for many years.
Anne Eaton contracted polio in 1945 and we can only imagine her as an early innovator in the arts-for-health movement at the Thinkers’ Lodge. This photo shows her playing croquet with the Russians in 1985.
Little did John know that in Pugwash—the Peace Village—he would learn about this early history of the arts-for-health movement, which became so central in his own life work.
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