EVEN IF THE contemporary account of al-Umari is greatly exaggerated, the 1324 transit of the Malian emperor Mansa Musa’s vast entourage on a Mecca pilgrimage must have been an unforgettable sight. So rich was this King of Kings said to be that the amount of gold which his slaves dispensed to the onlookers of Cairo reduced the value of this metal within Egypt for a decade.
IN OUR AGE of traffic congestion and global terrorism, we’ve forgotten the time in which the prospect of travel by automobile or airplane summoned notions of luxury and elegance. The author Peter Pigott, who has produced a number of books on these and other modes of transport, rehearses in his “Royal Transport: An Inside Look at The History of British Royal Travel” the long and intimate relationship of British royalty to the Canadian made McLaughlin-Buick — one of which is soon to be auctioned in the United Kingdom.
MUCH HAS BEEN made this week of President Obama’s deference to the Bibles of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., on which he has sworn his oaths inaugurating a second presidential term. Cornel West, who has taken especial affront to Barack Obama’s exploitation of King’s “prophetic fire for a moment of presidential pageantry,” has for months now referred to the present Oval Office occupant as a Rockefeller Republican in blackface.
IN HIS 2004 NOVEL, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth imagines an alternative history issuing from the 1940 defeat of incumbent Franklin Delano Roosevelt by the isolationist and America First candidate, Charles Lindbergh. An instance of the genre uchronia, a compound literally meaning “no time,” The Plot Against America supplies in a US setting roughly what Camus’ La Peste did over a generation earlier in a fictional 1940s Algeria: a depiction of human rot inexorably overtaking a previously sane (one is tempted in this connection to say sanitary) society.
WHILE THE POLITICAL theatre of a possible meeting of some vague nature between the Prime Minister of Canada and the Assembly of First Nations strutted the national stage, I thought of a few lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 59:
THREE WEEKS AGO I attempted to put Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence into an environment of past events, and along the way to challenge critics on evidentiary grounds. That was then.
DAVE TUCCARO is arguably the most successful aboriginal business person in Canada. The founder, President, and CEO of Tuccaro Inc., he was born March 3, 1958 and is third eldest of eight siblings. He grew up in Fort Chipewyan, a small community in northeastern Alberta. Dave is a member of the Mikisew Cree Band. After graduating from high school, he started working in the oil sands industry. He was trained as a crane operator; however, it was not long before he was pursuing his fortunes as an entrepreneur. He joined the Neegan Development Corporation as General Manager in 1991, at a time the company was on the brink of financial ruin. He turned the company around and in 1993 took over, buying out the four Indian band owners. He has been nominated three times for the prestigious Entrepreneur of the Year Award, as well as for the National Aboriginal Achievement Award. In 1995, he won the Regional Aboriginal Recognition Award and was also honoured by his hometown of Fort Chipewyan as “Outstanding Business Person 1994.” He was instrumental in the setting up of the National Aboriginal Business Association and is the founding President. In 1995, David spearheaded the formation of the North-eastern Alberta Aboriginal Business Association and is the past president. Many similar associations, right across Canada, have been modeled on David’s conception.
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