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The Current Transcript for June 6, 2023

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

[news clips]

FIRST MALE SPEAKER: A teenager in the United Kingdom is cancer free after undergoing…

FIRST FEMALE SPEAKER: Scientists say they're excited by the results.

SECOND MALE SPEAKER: The trial of a new drug for bowel cancer has stunned experts.

SECOND FEMALE SPEAKER: But for specialists, this is a remarkable moment in time.

MATT GALLOWAY: In 2016, then-Vice President Joe Biden launched what he called the cancer moonshot. The pledge was to end cancer as we know it and turn fatal cancers into treatable diseases. While a cure still seems like a long way off, there are remarkable advancements being made in tackling certain cancers in the lungs, pancreas and cervix. Signs of progress in the war against a terrible disease. That's coming up in an hour. Also this morning, his name is Dag Aabye. He is 82. He lives in a bus off the grid in the B.C. bush And he might well be the most interesting man you've never met.

SOUNDCLIP

DAG AABYE: I want to die alive, not in a bloody room. You have to be able to think by yourself and do something. Fill your day up.

MG: In 30 minutes, the quest to tell the hard to believe story of a guy who was the world's first extreme skier, appeared in a James Bond film, runs ultramarathons, and perhaps could teach us all about how to get the most out of our years. But we begin with the smoke in the skies across Canada. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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SMOKEY SKIES

Guests: Dr. Courtney Howard, Armel Castellan

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STEEVE BEAUPRE: Today, we woke up to a cloud of smoke. For your health, stay indoors. Close the window indoors. Avoid physical activities outdoor.

MG: That is Steeve Beaupre, the mayor of Sept Iles, Quebec, speaking yesterday. His community is one of many in this country waking up to hazy skylines and smoky air. The effects of wildfires are widespread. And Environment Canada has issued air quality and smog warnings in various parts of this country, most recently eastern Ontario and western Quebec. Aside from dulling the skies and making the moon turn red, the smoke can also cause health risks. And that is of concern to Dr. Courtney Howard. She is an ER physician who lives in Yellowknife and is vice chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance. Dr. Howard, good morning.

DR. COURTNEY HOWARD: Hi, good morning.

MG: Many people in this country are noticing, and I saw it this morning coming into work, that the light looks different, the colour of the moon looks different. Aside from that, as I say, what is in the air that is potentially harmful to breathe that is concerning you?

DR. COURTNEY HOWARD: It's certainly disquieting. In 2014, in Yellowknife, we had almost two and a half months of wildfire smoke off and on over the summer. So I well know that feeling of not being sure whether you should go outside, wondering what's happening to your children. So we actually afterwards did a study and we found that there was a full doubling of emergency department visits for asthma over the course of that time. And we did 30 community based interviews in partnership with the Yellowknife Dene First Nation and just ask people how it felt to live through the summer. And they said that they felt anxious and irritable. They felt disconnected from the land, from their normal activities. There was a bit of a loss of food security when it came to gathering food from the land and gardening. And it made people wonder if it's this bad now, what does it mean for our kids? And so we know that a lot of the respiratory impacts are mediated by the little tiny particles that’s called particulate matter 2.5, PM 2.5. And what that is is just teensy tiny little particles. It could be anything, but it has to be small enough to fit through a grid of 2.5 microns. And so the thing about these products of combustion is that it really is a toxic mixture of just whatever burned, and it depends on how hot it was when that burned. It depends on exactly what burned. And the smallest particles are actually tiny enough that they not only go down and irritate our smallest airways, but they can in fact cross over into our bloodstream. And so that leads to inflammatory cascades and we see increased asthma exacerbations, increased chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbations, increased rates of heart disease following acute exposures. And the difficult part is we actually don't really know what the long term effects of these acute severe exposures are for our health.

MG: Do we know at what level that can impact people? I mean, we were in Alberta a few weeks ago and the haze in Calgary in particular was so thick that you couldn't see the skyline. In many parts of this country right now, it's just the light, as I say, is different. There's a film that's in the air. Is that enough to create those impacts that you're describing?

DR. COURTNEY HOWARD: Unfortunately, there's no known safe level of exposure to particulate matter 2.5. So the World Health Organization draws various levels of recommendations. And it's been sort of sneaking down over the years because essentially, every study that comes out shows us that it's worse than we thought. So we have an extensive knowledge base on regular air pollution, so that tends to be the products of fossil fuel combustion. So traffic related air pollution, pollution related to coal fired plants.

MG: What people might call smog, for example.

DR. COURTNEY HOWARD: Yeah. So we know a lot about that. But because wildfire smoke has gotten so much worse so quickly, when I actually went to do the study in 2014, there was almost nothing in the literature base. Doctor Sarah Henderson at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control is a world leader and luckily, she had published some studies. So we went to see her in B.C. and she's continuing to do some of the really groundbreaking work. So we're at a point where we know it's not good. It's certainly very closely correlated in study after study with increased asthma exacerbations, increased pulmonary problems of various types. And she did a good study last year that reviewed the literature and showed an increase in cardiovascular. So heart related events. And other than that, we’re going based on from a long term perspective, studies on rhesus monkeys who were exposed as juveniles to wildfire smoke. They had problems with their lung function all through life. And so, you know, as a mom, during that summer, I had about a one-year-old and almost two-year-old. And I just remember we were inside so much. And, you know, is it right to keep your kids inside for almost the whole summer? So there were times when we went outside and, you know, just did our best. And one of my girls now has asthma and no one else in the family has asthma. So I do have moments where I wonder, you know, maybe I shouldn't have done that. So, you know, what I would recommend just given the absence of information is to really be cautious.

MG: What does that mean? I mean, again, there are people who will not be able to stay inside. Their employment requires them to be outside. And so there are other steps that they need to take. But broadly, what does being cautious mean in this moment?

DR. COURTNEY HOWARD: Sure. So the Health Canada's air Quality Health Index is a very good guideline. So what you could do is go on to their website, take a look at what their reported current levels and forecast levels are for your area and look at their list of who is particularly at risk. So seniors, pregnant people, infants and young children, people who work outdoors and people with pre-existing illnesses, health conditions such as cancer, diabetes, heart and lung conditions are at risk. And so what you do then is you check and see what the air quality health index is and also the forecast for your anticipated period outside. So say you have a work shift or say you are supposed to go play a soccer game or something and match that up with your level of risk. So it recommends a greater restriction on activity at a given level of air quality for people who are more at risk than for people who have less pre-existing health challenges. And so what that will mean for many people is, you know, if the smog is bad, if the air quality health index is up around nine or 10, everybody should be staying inside with the windows closed. And so what can really help is making sure that you close the windows as soon as the smoke is about to roll in. If you notice that the envelope of your building is still allowing a lot of smoke to seep in, get a HEPA filter. So get an air filter for the inside. And then if you do need to go outside, an N95 mask that's well-fitted to your face. So those are the sort of more beefier looking ones that you can actually press down and create a seal. And you know you've got a seal if when you go to breathe in, it kind of sucks into your face. So you can actually order those online for children. We found some that fit our kids. You might have to try a couple. And so that way, if you have an errand or you need to go outside for a little bit, you can decrease the amount of particulate matter that gets in by at least 90%.

MG: What are the adaptation strategies that you think we should be thinking about if this continues? We were again in Edmonton standing there. The smoke is in the sky speaking with the science writer Ed Struzik, and he was talking about how if this is going to be the way of the future, we need to think broadly as a society about what we're going to do with smoke in the air. What are you looking at?

DR. COURTNEY HOWARD: Right. So I was on the Disaster and emergency risk reduction table of the National Adaptation Strategy. And we did talk about wildfires, but we haven't so far in this iteration got recommendations around smoke, although I think we know that we need to put those forward. So the thing to know is that we are not at a new normal under every feasible emissions scenario. The Canada's Changing Climate report that was produced by Environment and Climate Change Canada a couple of years ago shows that we're going to continue to get warmer until at least mid-century. So that means it's going to statistically be worse in five years, in 10 years. And so that means that, you know, if you're asking yourself, should I make the investment in a HEPA filter, make the investment in the HEPA filter. I think that we need to have automatic community based triggers similar to what some communities are developing around heat for smoke. So for instance, I know that in Edmonton a couple of weeks ago, that actually happened. So they had some kind of a threshold where, you know, at after three days of an air quality health index over x value, all of the community recreation facilities are open for free so that everybody can go in and exercise there, see their community there and make sure that we're doing what we can to get through these smoky periods in a way that still allows us to be well from a physical and a mental health perspective. So we're going to need to put triggers in like that so that, you know, the decision making doesn't fall on an individual level basis to each mayor. We were lucky in Yellowknife in 2014 because our mayor did open up our community recreation facilities for free, and it made a huge difference. But it's sort of one of those things that it takes until halfway through the summer and you're like, oh gee, this isn't going away. And oh yeah, that is a good idea. And, you know, just taking it out of the hands of each decision maker, knowing that the funding's there to support it and doing things like that will really help. It may be that we need to develop regulations that are quite strict around work outside because, you know, we need to be supporting workers to be having healthy work conditions, particularly in the absence of better information about the long term health impacts.

MG: Just before I let you go, we are out of time, but this goes back to what you were saying earlier about two and a half months of smoke in Yellowknife and the anxiety that people felt. There is a mental impact to this as well. And it's not just what people are in the midst of right now, but you saying that it's only going to get worse. And I just wonder how you think we need to be cognisant of that.

DR. COURTNEY HOWARD: Well, something I loved from the study that we did was that the people who prepared the most, the people in our interviews who said, hey, we gathered up all of the boats and we line them up beside the lake so that we could have an alternative means of escape if the highway got blocked. We made sure that there were places for the kids to go play. We fire smarted our homes. They sat up straight in their chair. They looked proud. They looked empowered. And so what we could see from that is that preparation not only does good practically, but it feels good. And paired with that, we need to recognize that we're on a high emissions pathway. That means that a little child born now if we don't decrease our greenhouse gas emissions is going to experience a Canada that's six degrees Celsius warmer because we're warming at double the global rate by the time they're in their 60s. We don't think we can actually adapt in a healthy way to that. So all of our adaptation that really has to do with taking care of one another, taking care of community needs to be paired with a robust commitment to protecting those children by decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, putting a cap on oil and gas emissions, stopping funding the fossil fuel industry with our taxpayer dollars, and making sure that we meet our greenhouse gas emission targets. That is a gift that we can give to all these little kids. Right now for having to stay inside during the summer because of the smoke that they did not have a hand in creating.

MG: Dr. Howard, thank you very much.

DR. COURTNEY HOWARD: Thank you so much.

MG: Dr. Courtney Howard is an ER physician in Yellowknife and vice chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance. Armel Castellan is a warning preparedness meteorologist for Environment Canada and Climate Change Canada. Armel, good morning to you.

ARMEL CASTELLAN: Good morning, Matt.

MG: There's something like 420 fires burning nationwide as of this morning. Where is the smoke the worst right now?

ARMEL CASTELLAN: It's hard to say. There's so many places at this point, but certainly, kind of the southern half of Quebec where the fires are raging and that's pushing into Ontario at this point. So there's some very high values there as there are in northern Alberta and very southern parts of NWT. So it is quite a national scape in terms of how much smoke is around.

MG: There's a map that's online that people have been sharing, firesmoke.ca, which shows kind of a smoke forecast and shows where the smoke is moving. And I mean, aside from essentially Winnipeg later on today, it doesn't look like much of the country will be without smoke. How far can this travel?

ARMEL CASTELLAN: This can travel right across the northern hemisphere. In fact, every year, we see smoke coming over from Siberia in Russia and making its way to somewhere on the North American continent. You know, the smoke gets emitted and the force of those fires is so strong that it can go not only horizontally, of course, and affect people locally in a way or in that province, but also so high in the atmosphere that it gets kind of enveloped in the jet stream and starts moving in bigger distances very efficiently. And I can actually look at the weather map right now and I can see that we've sent a lot of this smoke over to Europe.

MG: That's incredible. Can you just explain a little bit more of why it would hang in the air for so long?

ARMEL CASTELLAN: Well, absolutely there is, I mean, there are big patterns, a big scale kind of that take up, you know, the better part of a continent. And when we get into a blocking pattern, which is usually the root cause of all of this anomalous heat, heat that we've essentially never seen before because as your previous guest mentioned, where our atmosphere, our world is now warmed up compared to what it was for our grandparents. And that blocking pattern is so strong that it's stagnant. It's not really moving. The jet stream is moving up and around those locations. And those locations can be, you know, the better part of the country. And currently, we are seeing that in the whole centre part of the country right now from Ontario or even Quebec all the way over to B.C. is essentially in a blocked ridge pattern. Some people have called it heat dome. There's lots of names for it at this point. And the air movement is very little. And so the smoke or the pollution or the pollen, whatever it is, usually sticks around and adds and concentrates day over day.

MG: And so part of this would be complicated because of the fact that fires continue to burn in some parts of the country. But are there weather systems that would help clear that air?

ARMEL CASTELLAN: Well, it's a very tricky proposition when you have such a strong precipitation deficit over sometimes, you know, not just weeks, but months, seasons, even years. Certainly, out here in the West, we're looking at multi-year precipitation deficit. And we've had our fair share of very strong wildfire concerns. You know, 2017, we sent Ontario all kinds of smoke that year. 2018 again, 2021. So it is over and over, we're seeing these kinds of evolutions of our forests and how they're burning. And we're looking at the desperate need for June, which is kind of that classic last gasp effort for the atmosphere to make some rain somewhere and at this point where it's essentially a little bit of a drop in a bucket because we need so much in order to get our forests to a healthy place where they aren't going to burn this dramatically, this strongly. You know, we've had a big hand in how forests burn over the last century and a half. And so we're not going to turn that around with a Hail Mary from mother nature giving us, you know, 10, 20 millimetres somewhere.

MG: Is what I'm seeing in the sky this morning kind of a look into the future, do you think?

ARMEL CASTELLAN: Well, yeah. And I think we're looking at, you know, the changes. You know, we look at the number of smoke hours, for instance. I just looked at Calgary this morning. We used to average 10, 11 hours per year at that airport. And then since the late 90s, we're up at over 100. And in some years, we're well over 400 hours of smoke registered, you know, by official observe at the airport in a given year. So we've multiplied that by 10 in just the last few couple of decades, really.

MG: So given that, and just in the last couple of minutes that we have, pick up on what Dr. Howard was talking about and how we should treat this from her perspective as a public health issue. What more do you want to see done to protect people, particularly vulnerable people who might live in vulnerable communities if this is going to continue?

ARMEL CASTELLAN: Well, it's not an if. It's it will continue. And I think we need to have society, you know, especially the vulnerable and those taking care of vulnerable people really understand that we have some tools, right? The air quality health index that your guest just spoke to is a great tool that gives you a sense of empowerment. It shows you what the smoke conditions will be currently and also for the next couple of days. And you can make some behavioural changes there. You know, it's also about planning further ahead and knowing that having a HEPA filter or even the poor man equivalent, which is just a box filter with a big fan filtering inside your house for a few hours. And those kinds of things for, you know, under $100 can make a big difference in your current living standard and also, you know, if you're going to be dealing with this for weeks at a time.

MG: Psychologically, though, it really does, when you see it in the air, it really does make you think differently about something that for some people might have been an abstract idea, right?

ARMEL CASTELLAN: Yeah, very much so. You know, when your street lights come on in the middle of the day because it's so dark, and we've seen that, you know, routinely here over the last few years, it's an apocalyptic feel. You know, the eco anxiety related to this, and I speak of it on a personal level, solastalgia is a term that I had never heard about until, you know, five years ago.

MG: And what does that mean?

ARMEL CASTELLAN: Well, it's an eco-anxiety around what it is that we've done and what it is that is happening around us. You know, if you're looking at it from myself, from a professional point of view, we know the trajectory that we're going on. We need to react to it. I mean, as we spoke about Dr. Sarah Henderson on this call just a moment ago, you know, we have collective PTSD when events start coming back, you know, when the heat, when the mercury starts looking like it's going to heat up, you know, we don't want to see another 800 people succumbing to that heat. And it's a very real emotion.

MG: Armel, thank you very much for this.

ARMEL CASTELLAN: My pleasure, Matt. Have a good day.

MG: Armel Castellan is a warning preparedness meteorologist for Environment and Climate Change Canada. That word he mentioned, solastalgia, which is evocative, to say the very least. Your thoughts on that are welcome. Email us, thecurrent@cbc.ca. You're CBC News is next. And then, appear in a James Bond film, live off the grid, run an ultramarathon, befriend a bear. You'd be lucky if you checked one of those boxes off of your list. We'll meet a man who's done that and more coming up in six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

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THE OUTSIDER BOOK

Guests: Brett Popplewell, Dag Aabye

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

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DAG AABYE: It's a fantastic place to live. It's like taking the submarine. I closed all the windows, so it's always dark. I can sleep there at noon. I can relax. Because I'm outside all day, I don't need any more light.

MG: Deep in the B.C. interior, there is a school bus parked away from any roads, hidden in the woods. And that bus is the home of a man named Dag Aabye. And living on the bus might just be the least interesting thing about him. His story is next.

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[walking in the woods]

DAG AABYE: When I walk into the forest, I'm going home. I know the bears and the bears know me. If a bear runs up and I know it, I just say, hey, it's me, and they'll come right down and they will swing from side to side. That means I'm accepted as their friend because the bears are very smart, very, very smart. But they are not killers. They are defenders of the food and they defend their young ones. But just because I got to be here every day, I have to be friends with them.

MG: At the age of 82, Dag Aabye spends most of his day outside clearing trails for running, chopping wood and on some days, as you heard, befriending bears. His life has been a long and winding one. Born in Nazi occupied Norway, he was one of the world's first extreme skiers, a Hollywood stuntman, a logger, and eventually an ultra-long distance competitive runner. Now, the journalist Brett Popplewell has taken on the task of chronicling Dag's life, no easy feat. Brett's book is called “Outsider: An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past”. And I spoke with Brett and Dag while they were in our studio in Kamloops, British Columbia.

SOUNDCLIP

MG: Brett, this is a hell of a story, as they say. What was it about this story that led you to believe that you should spend several years of your life trying to track Dag down, but also to try and to tell this story?

BRETT POPPLEWELL: I love that question. It's a question I've been trying to answer for myself for a long time as well. I first got to know of Dag more by sort of the legend of Dag that was repeated to me in 2015 by a friend of mine, a former colleague who had once run 125 kilometre foot race called the Canadian Death Race. And on that race, my friend had seen Dag in the flesh sort of climbing up a mountain, racing against people a quarter or, you know, a third of his age. And a few years later, that man told some of this story to me about who this sort of legendary foot racer was. And he had this wild back story that he lived in a school bus off the grid and that once upon a time, he had been the world's first extreme skier and he was in a James Bond movie. But then in meeting Dag, I was really taken in by the Waldon sort of aspect of his life that he lived off the grid. And so I asked him a simple question of is there anything in this world that you want? And he sort of object. And I expected him to respond with nothing. But instead, he said, I wish I had a photograph of my mother, my biological mother. And I was really taken by that because here is a man who in his 70s didn't know what his mother looked like. And I thought that was something that I thought I could help, you know, with using sort of my journalistic skills to try and track that down. So it became very much a mission for me. And that grew as I became friends with Dag. And I just couldn't stop.

MG: So how long did it take for you to actually track him down?

BRETT POPPLEWELL: To track him down took a few months. He has been described by others as the most elusive man in North America. I wouldn't call him that, but we were sort of planting messages at places where we knew he frequented and he has family. So we reached out to his daughter as well. And after a few months, our phone started to ring in Toronto. And it would be phone calls coming from payphones in the Okanagan, which was Dag reaching out, returning our calls.

MG: Dag, what did you make of when you heard that Brett was trying to track you down? What was your reaction?

DAG AABYE: Well, you know, I've been interviewed a lot and some of the interviews hasn't been good. So I was a little bit afraid of like what I'm doing now. But now I'm doing rather big guys like you. So I'm not worried anymore, I hope.

MG: Can you tell me a little bit about, we heard a little bit at the beginning of this interview of, you know, life in where you live right now. Tell me a bit about life in the bus. Describe just your day to day. What do you do? Where do you live? How would you describe home?

DAG AABYE: Okay. I live in the bus. And in the winter, I eat in the bus. No, no, sorry, I don't live there, I sleep there. But it's basically like a little submarine. But I labour outside all day. I labour till 4:30 in the morning. I have my two-hour run, then I come back, then I go and do firewood and then I go for a slow run. Then I have a big trailer I'm building. I've set myself up with work for the rest of my life even if I'm becoming 120. So I don't have to worry about when I wake in the morning what to do. When people tell me, oh, I wake up in the morning, but I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do today. I don't have that problem. And today, that’s the big problem with people. You have to go out and make it happen. A trailer doesn't build by itself. Wood doesn't be cut by itself. And a run has to be done by me. So I'm occupied all day probably more than the person in town.

MG: Dag, talk to me a little bit about running. I'm a runner. I do a lot of running, but, you know, nowhere near as much as you and not on those kind of trails. What do you get out of running as much as you do?

DAG AABYE: Well, running is, when I try to explain to people about running, I try to get them to know that, you know, it's not just your legs. No, it's your heart, lungs. So you breathe and you're breathing your heart and everything. I mean, I’ve never been sick and I don't plan on getting sick. And one thing that’s good about running, you can, I run down to town, then I do my shopping, take a cab up and I'm home again. And running keeps everything in motion. And there’s a thing, you know, aim high and stay there. And that's what I'm doing.

MG: How much are you running these days? How much are you running these days?

DAG AABYE: I have a moratorium on two hours a day. That means I never run less than two hours. So it's between two and six. Running is like dancing. Running trail is like dancing. It's a life itself. Yeah.

MG: Why do you live where you live? I mean, this is the subject in many ways of this book. There are a lot of different parts to it, but one is why you're there. Why is it that you chose to live out there?

DAG AABYE: Because it's away from people. I love people, but I don't want interference. So that's why I don't have a cell phone. I don't have anything. I don't have electricity and I don't have water. I get it all from the outside. Wood, I’ve got a great firewood stove, but you see in life everything getting crowded now. You go on some of the trails, the official trails, there are people with dogs. Yeah, it's overcrowded. So I created my own trail system where I have all the privacy in the world. Yeah. And that's important these days because privacy is what creates you as a person.

MG: One of the things you say in the book is that there's a limit to how long anybody should spend entirely alone. Are there points where you feel like you've been out by yourself too long?

DAG AABYE: No, but you need to socialize. But I know people that become hermits not only in the outside. No, even they become hermits in their own, you know, apartment in the city.

MG: Hmm.

DAG AABYE: They have their food brought to them. But you know yourself. When it's time to go to town, I have to go and get food. And I love going down, talking to people, getting the newspaper. I mean, it's become almost a religion getting the Globe in the morning on Saturday morning, you know, the weekend papers. And I'm very interested. But you see, when I run, you are in your own space and there is no interference. And there's a lot of beauty to see animals, you are getting better. I mean, I don't like to get to be called old because I don't think old and I don't feel old because I mean, in the old days, my father and mother, you know, that adopted me, they died at 79, 80, but they died because people told them to slow down. When my father was 50, people said, oh, you can't go in the bush by yourself. You can't do this. You have to, you know, you have to have a nap. And I'm 82 and I go as hard as I’ve ever done, yeah, because there is nobody there to tell me.

BRETT POPPLEWELL: And sort of looking back to and looking back to sort of the story of the bus, Dag had, he still has a family. Dag has children, was a family man going into the 90s and coming out of the 90s, found himself alone without a home and without the finances to get a home. And one of the parts of his story that I found really the most gripping was how the community, the ski community really in where he was located, where he had been the star, members of that community sort of came together to purchase the bus from a kid, a guy who was travelling across the country in this bus that originated in Quebec and that fellow was moving onwards to China to continue his travels. So some members of the community purchased the bus so that Dag would have a space to live. And for a time, the bus was parked in the parking lot of a ski resort until suddenly, the owners of the ski resort were like, you know, why is there a bus with a chimney puffing in the parking lot? And so members of the community, the Silver Star community, got together to drag that bus into its secluded space so that Dag could live the life that he lives now under some cedar trees completely off the grid. And I always viewed that as a real act of compassion and charity for the man who I have come to know now.

MG: But people did that in part because he was a huge deal. I mean, Nancy Green, legendary skier, named Dag the first extreme skier. I mean, from your perspective, Brett, I'll ask you first, just how big of a deal was he?

BRETT POPPLEWELL: I think he was a huge deal, especially in the Whistler community when it first began, when that mountain opened in 19, Dag, correct me if I’m wrong, 1965?

DAG AABYE: 66.

BRETT POPPLEWELL: 1966. So in 1966, Whistler opened and the owner of Whistler had a vision to make this mountain into the premier ski resort in North America. But it was not that. And, you know, it was competing against a lot of mountains in the United States in Olympic bids. And one of the ways that the mountain wanted to capture the imagination of the public was to have the best skier they could find on the planet to come and sort of plant their feet on this mountain and show what was here. And they found that in Dag, but they had to search for him. He was on a, you were on a, he was on a steamship sailing from Chile where he had been skiing and teaching. And he was going back to Europe to do the same thing in the Alps when all of a sudden, he got a telegram saying, you know, come to this mountain. So when he arrived here, he was like the skier who people, who the great skiers like the Jim McConkey and others looked at and said, wow, what this guy is doing is impressive. He was doing what is, you know, we consider extreme skiing now. But back then, people hadn't seen it before. And so a lot of people call him the father of Freeride and the father of sort of freestyle skiing. People weren't jumping out of helicopters and triggering avalanches back at the time that he was doing it. And now it's become sort of more normalized. And I think we sort of forget, you know, the pioneers who started this. So that's really the status that he had. And then Silver Star where he was skiing when he was in his 50s and 60s, he was just known for basically doing a downhill run on cross-country skis, like things that people wouldn't do or couldn't do. There's a run named after Dag at Silver Star that’s called, his name is, your name is Aabye, but everybody calls you Abbey because it's spelt like Abbey Road. So there's this run called Abbey Road. I consider myself a pretty good skier and I struggled to get down that thing. But I think that you can sort of rip down it with elegance pretty quickly.

MG: Dag, did you feel like the best skier on the planet back then?

DAG AABYE: What’s that?

MG: Did you feel like the best skier on the planet back then?

DAG AABYE: No. There is no best skier. You know, I’ve got a lot of heroes. And one thing about me is I'm way overrated, but I can't help what people say.

MG: Let me ask you about getting to know yourself. I mean, a huge part of this story of this book is the story of who you are before you became an extreme skier, before you became the man in the mountain. This is about your adoption. This is about your family in Norway. What did you know before you met Brett? What did you know about the circumstances around your birth?

DAG AABYE: I didn't really know anything before. Way late. Way late. And they found where my mother died. But my mother actually asked me if I was interested. But, you know, I grew up on a farm. There's a lot to do. There was no time to go looking for something in the past.

BRETT POPPLEWELL: Matt, when I first met Dag, I asked him what he understood of his parentage, and he understood that his mother was a Norwegian woman. He believed that she had died in a car accident in Sweden. He wasn't sure when. And what he understood of his father was that his father had been a German soldier. And he actually told me that he believed that his father had been a U-boat captain. And that sort of began a process for me of trying to see what I could find out about either of them.

MG: What were some of the suspicions there? Because, again, at that time in Norway, what was going on and what did you think perhaps was happening in his backstory?

BRETT POPPLEWELL: So I wasn't sure what, I wasn't sure the context of his birth. Initially, actually, I knew enough about the story of the singers of ABBA to know that one of them had been what was called a Lebensborn child. So a child who was born into this program that the Nazis had set up to meet SS officers with Norwegian women.

MG: To try to create sort of the purest of the pure.

BRETT POPPLEWELL: Yeah. And I asked Dag in that first meeting if he had any inkling or any suspicions that he might have been one of those children. And he said, I don't know, but it was a possibility. So I started down that road to try and see, because one thing that the Germans did is they documented, they documented all of this stuff. So I was trying to access to see if there was a file for him. And Dag did know what his birth name had been. And his name was Erik Hansen. And so I started to search that name to see what I could find. And I didn't find anything. What I could find simply were just like your standard sort of baptismal record. And then I could access his adoption papers, but it still didn't explain who his parents actually were. And it was very difficult for me to find any information about his father, about this man who he understood to be a German soldier. So I started by going into the German archives to try and search through, you know, the people, the names that I could find that traced back to Dag through the Luftwaffe, the German navy and the German military. And I found no hits. I found nothing. So it was like this perfect mystery for me. And I started to liaise with different Lebensborn children who told me their stories of how they had found out who they were. And so I started down that sort of process of trying to answer the questions. And I was curious if sort of some of that early history, that early, you know, early potentially childhood trauma of being born into the war not knowing exactly your origins, if that had some sort of an impact on sort of the man I came to know and respect and ultimately become really close friends with who is Dag in the present.

MG: Dag, what do you think not knowing a lot about your past, how did that influence who you are today?

DAG AABYE: You know, it actually didn't influence me because I'm always too busy to let things interfere with me. You go into the day and say, today, I'm going to work harder than tomorrow, and you don't think of an end game. You're going to fall off the cliff in life, but you keep living it because the terrible thing in life is to tell people to slow down. They put them in long term places, luxury places where they have fine dining, they play games in the pool and drive them into the mall. No, I want to die alive, not in a bloody room with a bunch of people that, you know, don't do anything. You have to be able to think by yourself and do something. Fill your day up. And I got my days filled up now to, you know, the end of time. End of time, that's a good one right in front of us.

MG: You go until you fall off the cliff.

DAG AABYE: Yeah. So you live fully.

MG: That's a great way. I think that's a great way to think about life.

DAG AABYE: Yeah, because I mean, people are wonderful in a sense, but they want to slow you down. And like they did with my parents, they said, oh no, you can't do that because you're 50. Because in that time, 50 was old. And some people went crazy because oh no, I'm 50. Now I'm finished. There is no finishing age. Age is for you to deliberate within yourself what you want to do. But you cannot do it sitting down. I hate sitting down. Well, I'm sitting down now. Your chair is pretty good, but yeah, I don't like sitting down. And I have a wonderful life. I have a wonderful life.

MG: Amazing. I think we could learn. We could all learn a lot from, I mean, in some ways, your approach to life. And there's that phrase of the most interesting man in the world. And it does feel like you have lived one of the most interesting lives in the world. I'd like to go for a run with you sometime, but I think you'd bury me. So I will appreciate your life from a distance, but it's a real pleasure to talk to you.

DAG AABYE: Matt, you come here, I run your way.

MG: It is an incredible story. Dag, it's really great to meet you. Thank you very much.

DAG AABYE: And, you know, thank you for not calling me old, so I really appreciate this. Thank you, Matt.

MG: Thank you very much. And Brett, it's a great story. Well done and thanks for talking to us.

BRETT POPPLEWELL: Thanks for your time and your interest, Matt. I really appreciate it.

MG: Dag Aabye is the man at the centre of Brett Popplewell’s new book, “Outsider: An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past”. Well, coming up next, a cancer diagnosis can come with a lot of fear and uncertainty, but rapidly evolving science is quelling some of those fears every day. In 90 seconds, the good news that we are learning about cancer. But just before your regional update, you heard my conversation with Dag Aabye and his life of adventure. Here's one more of his stories, this one about his time on the silver screen. I’m Matt Galloway. This is The Current. We're back in 90 seconds.

SOUNDCLIP

MG: You got the advice from Pierre Trudeau that you played a card game with Ursula Andress, that you were in the Ipcress File as a body double.

DAG AABYE: No, I wasn't in the Ipcress File. I was a stand in for Michael Caine.

MG: Okay. He had to get the details of that. You were in a James Bond film as well.

DAG AABYE: Yeah. Goldfinger.

MG: Goldfinger, not in Her Majesty's Secret.

DAG AABYE: Because Sean Connery died. And he was a great guy because he didn't show himself as an actor. He was people. He was a man. And Ursula Andress, I was a stand in for her co-actor and the other actor. And there was four of us in a movie called She. A terrible movie, but she was such a great person. We played card and she loved to read. And you know how I got my stuntman job? I went with a group of people in Green Park and they have some steps.

BRETT POPPLEWELL: This is in London.

MG: In London?

DAG AABYE: Yeah, in London. So I walked down. They were working as extras in the movie. So I walked down on my hands, which was one of my specials. And they said, can you do it some more? And I said, yeah. So they said, well, come with us. And I went in about 35 movies.

[Music: The James Bond theme]

CANCER GOOD NEWS

Guests: Dr. Roy Herbst, Charles Andrew Graeber

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current. Cancer and good news are rarely in the same sentence, but there have been promising developments of late. Lung cancer is a leading cause of death and cancer deaths around the world. More than 1.8 million people die from that disease each year. But there is new research giving doctors and patients some hope. A study shows that taking a pill once a day after surgery cuts the risk of dying from lung cancer almost in half for certain cancer patients. Dr. Roy Herbst is the lead author of the study, professor of medicine and deputy director of the Yale Cancer Centre. Dr. Herbst, good morning.

DR. ROY HERBST: Good morning. It’s great to be here.

MG: It's great to have you here. You described the results of this study as thrilling. Why did you use that word?

DR. ROY HERBST: Well, I've been working in the field a long time. And, you know, lung cancer is a very hard to treat disease and as you mentioned, the number one cause of cancer death. So to be seeing results like this where we can take a population of patients, identify them, treat them with the best surgery in what we call targeted therapy, and decrease their risk of death by 50%, even to me as someone who's been working on this, it's just phenomenal and it shows the progress we're making. So I gave a plenary talk here at this meeting in Chicago. I'm still here now. And it was just great to see the enthusiasm of all the oncologists and patients and caregivers that we're making progress in this disease.

MG: Unpack this study a little bit. What is the pill and who is it tested on?

DR. ROY HERBST: Right. So, you know, lung cancer, the reason it's been so difficult to treat is it's very heterogeneous. There are many different types of lung cancer. And one type of lung cancer that occurs in about 10 to 15% of patients in North America, by the way, this trial was done in Canada, is a factor called epidermal growth factor receptor, which can be abnormal and be the switch that turns lung cancer on in about 15% of these patients. So if we can identify these patients who have this type of lung cancer, and that's not an insignificant number, and they happen to be diagnosed early where the cancer can still be cut out and that we call stage one, two, three disease, we can now add to their treatment this pill that targets the growth of that switch to turn it off. So what's new about this study is we've taken the best of surgery and chemotherapy. We still use chemotherapy to try to treat people once they have this tumour removed. But then in this study of about 700 patients, half the patients got this new drug and the other half got a placebo. And, you know, meaning just an inert pill because we wanted to test did this improve the outcome of the survival? The trial was done over almost a decade and a few years ago, we reported that the pill kept the cancer from coming back. Now, that's a huge thing, you know, that you have your cancer removed. You worry will it recur? Will it come back in your liver and your brain? Many people worry about that. We already had shown that this pill was keeping the cancer from spreading or metastasizing. But now, everyone said, will it improve survival? Will people live longer? And what I showed here in a session probably with about 10,000 people in the room was that yes, it does. If you use this pill with five years of follow up, now is a 51% decrease in the risk of death. And again, this is a disease where wins have been few and far between. And this really sets a new paradigm because these drugs are what we call designer personalized therapies. And you can imagine we'll find other therapies for the other 85% as we continue to do research. So it's really a very nice result.

MG: And again, this is not something that would be applicable to all lung cancer patients, right, that they need to have this gene mutation. How common is that for people with lung cancer?

DR. ROY HERBST: Well, in North America, Canada and U.S., about 15%. If you go to Asia, it can be as high as 40%. But what it means is if you have lung cancer, you want to go to a place where they're going to look for this. They're going to profile your tumour and see if you have this abnormality. 15% is a reasonable number. There are other abnormalities that can perhaps in the future be treated in similar ways. We also have new immunotherapies for lung cancer. So what it really speaks to is get the profiling early, get patients in, get them screened so we can find lung cancer early. We can talk about that, but then find the best personalized treatment, the best treatment for that person at the right time. But, you know, this is one big step, but there will of course have to be other steps for other patients.

MG: Is there a possibility that this drug could work for those who do not have that gene mutation?

DR. ROY HERBST: No, that's one thing that is clear. You have to have this abnormality. And even in some patients who have it, there are subtleties that might make it more complex. You know, cancer knows how to get around all of our devices. And in fact, the cancers do become resistant. So my job's not done here. And by the way, this was done by a team from around the world. My job now and our group has to figure out when patients are resistant to either primary, you know, the drug doesn't work even though they have the abnormality, or if they become resistant while they're on the therapy, what are the next steps. And, you know, there are about 50,000 people here in Chicago at the ASCO meeting, the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting, and we're doing that. We're putting our heads together to figure that out.

MG: Why have breakthroughs, as you mentioned, you've been treating lung cancer for decades. Why have breakthroughs been so elusive in this? Part of that is the heterogeneity, as you mentioned, of this disease. But what else is going on?

DR. ROY HERBST: Well, you know, lung cancer has been terribly resistant to chemotherapy. You know, has some effect, but it's just had minimal effect. And I think really that the key was to try to find designer drugs, we had to understand the biology, what causes lung cancer to grow, what causes lung cancer to spread or metastasize. And that occurred, you know, with science in the 80s and then in the 90s, these targeted drugs first went into treatment. I’m at Yale now. I lead the program at Yale. But at the time, I was at M.D. Harrison in Houston. And we did these first trials with these drugs almost 20 years ago, but research takes time. We started using the first generation of drugs, and now we're in the third generation of these EGFR inhibitors. And now we know how to identify these patients with mutations. This next generation of drugs are much more potent. They have less side effects and they work in the brain. That's the big advance now. Even if we could treat the cancer, if we couldn't get to the tumour cells that went to the brain, that was a real cause of problems for patients. So this drug osimertinib does and the drug could be given for a long period of time. We know we treat it for three years in this study. So I think it's progress in pharmacology, it’s progress in diagnosis, it's progress in team science. I've never seen the world working as well together as a team, you know, the public private partnerships between industry and academia and the governmental agencies, our National Cancer Institute, your NCI, it's all coming together. And I would predict that we're going to see more of these types of advances quite soon because we're taking each patient, individualizing their care and we're getting the word out. And programs like this will help because I'm hoping that physicians will now see, wow, there’s overall survival data in these data, let's talk with patients about this treatment. But also, patients should ask their physicians, what about this new pill? Is this something that's applicable for me? And if it's not, what else do you have? Do you have a clinical trial? Do you have some way that I can try to do a little bit better? Because the problem with lung cancer, even if you find an early lung cancer, you or I have an accident and they find something in our lung and it's quite small, there still might be a 50% chance within five years that it comes back. So we have to do something more. We have to constantly raise the bar, do better in this disease. And the progress is real. When I started in this field, there were very few new drugs. This is 25, 30 years ago. And I can really see for myself patients doing better. And that's what makes this all worthwhile. And the whole meeting here in Chicago is we focussed on patient centred care. The director of our centre, Eric Weiner, who is the president of ASCO, is really focussed on the patient. Listen to the patient, find the best therapy for the patient. And I think we're doing this in lung cancer for sure.

MG: Has the stigma around lung cancer changed? One of the things that you would often hear from oncologists particularly focussed on lung cancer is that in past, there were fewer research dollars because there was a belief and a stigma associated with lung cancer that would impact patients and impact how people thought about the disease.

DR. ROY HERBST: There's still is a little bit, you know, smoking. You know, people smoke, but look, smoking is a problem in many diseases, heart disease and lung disease and other diseases as well. You know, about 20, 25% of lung cancers are now in non-smokers. And in fact, this mutation, this abnormality tends to occur more if people haven't smoked or have smoked very little or haven't smoked in many years. I think that stigma is changing. You know, I think, you know, look, we're working these days to help patients with all their problems. We're working on smoking cessation. We're working to help people with obesity, which is a risk factor for cancer. We're working on all of these factors. So I think the stigma still is there a little bit, but I think the community now knows. You know, some people just have smoked and they've stopped. There's so many former smokers now. We're working to develop these therapies for all different types of lung cancer.

MG: Just before I let you go, as you mentioned, you're at this cancer conference in Chicago presenting these findings. What is the overall mood when it comes to progress against cancer? There was, you know, the moon shots that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, announced many, many years ago has re-upped that. Is there the sense broadly that real progress is being made against these diseases?

DR. ROY HERBST: Oh, absolutely. You know, Monica Bertagnolli, the NCI director, was here. I've been coming to this meeting for 30 years, and I can tell you that the new science, the fact that people are doing science to understand this disease, but translating it into the clinic, it's happening at a faster pace than ever before. What we're seeing here is both ends of the spectrum. A study like mine is just showing that we've hit that endpoint and we’re at 50% decrease in death. But then there are so many early studies targeting other factors. So let's remember, this is for 15% of patients. We have to figure out what to do for the other 85%. Then there are new immunotherapies. There are new antibody drug concretes, new ways to sort of bring a laser into the tumour. There are new other pathways that are being discovered. And also, one thing I want to end with, we're figuring out how to get it to all patients. It does no good to have a new drug if someone who can't afford it, if someone who lives in a rural setting, if someone who has socioeconomic barriers to getting to the medical system can’t get the drugs. So there's so much more focus, which I am so thrilled to see, and diversity in getting these drugs out there because again, we want these drugs, the right drug at the right time for all patients.

MG: Dr. Herbst, thank you very much for this.

DR. ROY HERBST: A pleasure. Thank you for having me.

MG: Dr. Roy Herbst is a professor of medicine and deputy director of the Yale Cancer Centre and the lead author of a new study on osimertinib, a drug used to treat lung cancer. Charles Andrew Graeber is a medical journalist and author of the book “The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer”. Charles, good morning to you.

CHARLES ANDREW GRAEBER: Good morning.

MG: Do you share that incredible optimism that you just heard from Dr. Herbst broadly when it comes to what is happening in our understanding of treating and tackling cancer?

CHARLES ANDREW GRAEBER: Absolutely. You know, many of the scientists I spoke to for my book referred to this as a penicillin moment in our war against cancer. We were never going to cure cancer just by cutting it out or trying to treat it like a one size fits all problem, as a monster, trying to essentially radiate or poison it in some way, trying to essentially kill Godzilla without destroying Tokyo. We had to understand what cancer was, how to better identify the differences in the many different types of cancer and how to best target those. And we're finally doing that. And some of the breakthroughs we're seeing are the result of that.

MG: The doctor mentioned immunotherapy a couple of times, and obviously, you've written a book about this. Just briefly, remind us how immunotherapy works.

CHARLES ANDREW GRAEBER: Immunotherapy is what we count on to fight most diseases. It's essentially helping our natural immune system better recognize and target and kill disease. That's been effective in almost all diseases that we treat. You know, every vaccine is an immunotherapy. Actually, in fact, it was considered not possible with cancer because cancer was seen as somehow different than other diseases. Cancer was too similar to a normal body cell. And the great breakthrough there was that we recognized that in fact, our immune systems can recognize, target and kill cancer. But cancer has tricks that it employs to put the brakes on our immune system, to trick our immune system into thinking it's a normal body cell. And now that we recognize that, we can block some of those tricks, we're trying to recognize other tricks and we can better target the very individual mutations on an individual’s cancer, more personalized approach to cancer treatment and treat cancer like we do any other disease.

MG: And so we were talking earlier about lung cancer and the very stubborn progress against lung cancer that seems to in some patients have been cracked. Pancreatic cancer is another very stubborn disease, the third most deadly cancer in Canada after lung and colorectal cancer. There are researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York City that reported results of a study that's getting a lot of attention in tackling pancreatic cancer. How does that fit into the issue of immunotherapy?

CHARLES ANDREW GRAEBER: Yeah. Pancreatic cancer, there have been successes in immunotherapy, successes in targeting cancer with the immune system. But pancreatic cancer was not considered a good candidate for those because it's a more subtle cancer. It's about the mutations. Skin cancer has really obvious mutations, ugly mutations because of all the UV radiation and other toxins and exposures. And lung cancer, another one that has a lot of other mutations easier for the immune system to see. Pancreatic cancer was considered not to have so many mutations, it would be harder for the immune system to recognize and target. And so a success against pancreatic cancer really sent a signal that we were really onto something. And in this study, which was a phase one study, which is to say a study, a small study, 16 people just done really to assess whether the drug was safe enough to test further. But in that study, they were able to explain how it works, but they were able to arm the body's T cells with a vaccine to teach it what their personal cancer looked like, to make essentially millions of wanted posters through MRNA technology to tell the body's natural immune system what they should target, what that pancreatic cancer looked like. And in half of the patients, they responded to this early therapy. Again, it wasn't a test to see whether it worked. It was just to see if it was safe. But you don't ignore results, right? And in those half that did respond, their cancer, well, it didn't come back. And pancreatic cancer has a mortality rate of something around 88%. It's really been considered a sort of death sentence. And so this early trial, it sends a really hopeful signal. It's very, very promising for the future.

MG: And picks up on the promise of the MRNA technology that was used in the COVID fight. People talked about this at that moment that this was going to be used in future applications. And this seems to be, again, these are early days, but this seems to be evidence of that.

CHARLES ANDREW GRAEBER: That's right. This is actually done in part with the same group that developed one of those early MRNA technology vaccines against COVID, a group called Biontech. And together with Pfizer and Genentech, they were able to use that same technology to recognize the mutations on an individual's cancer. Again, one of the breakthroughs here has been the recognition that cancer's incredibly personal. Your cancer is going to be different than my cancer and recognizing exactly what makes your cancer unique, what it looks like, what the ugly little antigens that are unique to the cancers mutation have put on the outside of your cancer cells and recognizing what makes your immune system unique and what it’s best at, and putting those two things together to encode for basically wanted posters that you can then inject back into a patient and have the patient's own body create those wanted posters arming the killer cells in the body of the T cells, training them on that wanted poster, telling them exactly what the bad guy is to look for and then going after it. It's a breakthrough that developed a vaccine for COVID 19 in record time. Absolutely remarkable. And we're now seeing rapid turnarounds for cancer vaccines, which is very exciting because, again, if the future is going to be increasingly personalized medicines, medicines just for you, that will work for you and not for me, we're going to want to make those as quickly and ideally cheaply as possible.

MG: The doctor mentioned the importance of making sure, and cheaply is key here, making sure that everybody has access to this. We know that immunotherapy is incredibly expensive and it's out of reach for many patients and many people who would be in low income countries. How do we go about making sure that they have access to this?

CHARLES ANDREW GRAEBER: This is a great question. A breakthrough for a select few that can afford it is not a breakthrough in medicine, in public medicine. And these treatments right now, even with all the automation they were able to throw in, they brought it down from something like $350,000 U.S. for a single treatment to under 100,000, which is still way out of reach, obviously, for most people in most of the world. So what we're going to have to do is like we do with anything that we get better at is find better ways to mass produce this, perhaps even to recognize all the different varieties and possibilities that your cancer mutation might have and to start producing those on scale so that we can essentially make it a more automated process, a faster one.

MG: You have said that hype can be dangerous and false hope can be cruel. People will hear these sorts of stories because cancer is such a personal story to them and will look for hope and be worried that the hope is not going to be real, that the hope is going to be false. How do we go about ensuring that we don't overhype these sorts of stories?

CHARLES ANDREW GRAEBER: That's right. It’s really important. And in writing my book, I was really afraid that I would give too much hope. However, after five years of research on this, I found that this was something that patients needed to know about. If patients are better informed, if doctors are better informed, because this is so new that it wasn't taught to the previous generation of medical school students. It was in fact taught against. Immunotherapy was impossible. It was considered a crazy idea that didn't work and was a waste of time. So when patients are better informed and when doctors are informed, they're able to ask better questions and get better answers. And what we're seeing here is a genuinely new approach to how we treat cancer based on a fundamentally new understanding of really what cancer is, how the immune system works and how those two things work together. So this is really genuinely different. You know, hope should be to be cautious. These are early days. As Dr. Herbst mentioned, you know, any one of these treatments, they work for a specific subset of patients. And if you don't happen to be one of those patients, there may not be anything for you yet. But the headline really is that we've finally figured out how to cure cancer and we never knew how to do that before. We finally have a mutating, personalized, essentially natural approach using the strongest disease fighting tool we have, which is our own natural immune systems, and we're finally able to bring that into the fight. And we've never done that before in the history of modern medicine.

MG: It's exciting. I'm glad to talk to you about it, Charles. Thank you very much.

CHARLES ANDREW GRAEBER: Thank you.

MG: Charles Andrew Graeber is a medical journalist and author of the book “The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer”. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio and the CBC Listen app. My name is Matt Galloway. Want to take a moment for some words of congratulations to some members of this team and to Dennis Saddleman. Dennis Saddleman is a poet and a residential school survivor, and poetry is a huge part of his healing. Last summer, around the time of the pope's visit to Canada, Dennis shared one of his poems with us. That poem is called Once We Were Many. This weekend, The Current won gold at the Digital Publishing Awards For an animation of that poem. It is an incredibly moving thing. To hear the poem is one thing, to see it brought to a different form of life is something quite different. We'll send you to that link to have a look at that in just a moment, but these are the words at the heart of that animation. This is Dennis Saddleman and Once We Were Many.

SOUNDCLIP

DENNIS SADDLEMAN: Once we were many. We were taller than pride. Our courage was our armour. We went to the battlefield. We fought the residential school. We fought the federal government. We fought the churches. Many warriors fell. They were killing the Indian in the child. Many warriors could not speak their language. Many warriors had their identity taken away. Many warriors could not follow their ancestors’ ways. Once we were many. We were brave. We stood up for our children. We stood up for our grandchildren. We stood up for the unborn. We fought the residential school. We fought the federal government. We fought the churches. Many warriors fell. Darkness swallowed them. Alcohol killed them. Drugs took some. Once we were many. We were warriors. We were courageous. We were heroes. The residential school, the government, the churches, they tried to get rid of us. Once we were many. Do not forget those who are gone. Do not forget those who are still with us. We are warriors. We are survivors. Our perseverance, our resilience made us rise, made us tall as the mountains. Yes, Yes, once we were many.

MG: That's the poet Dennis Saddleman and Once We Were Many. You can watch the award winning animation of that poem on our website. Go to cbc.ca/thecurrent. And thank you to Dennis for sharing his words with us and trusting us with those words. That's The Current for this Tuesday. Q is up next on CBC Radio One. Inspired by Dennis Saddleman, we're going to leave you with some music. This is William Prince and a song called 7. I’m Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

[Song: “7” by William Prince]

Tuesday June 6, 2023 Episode Transcript

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