Adam Ruzzo is a Canadian singer, songwriter, adventurer, storyteller, amateur historian and guitarist who travels the highways, byways and waterways of this great land of ours drawing inspiration from what he sees and learns and creating wonderful music in reply. In many ways, Adam Ruzzo is like the vast majority of artists in Canada. While he has recorded and released several albums of music, he is not someone that you will find at the top of the commercial album sales charts, nor is Ruzzo headlining any nation-wide stadium tours. Instead, you are more than likely to find Ruzzo playing at a bandshell in a town park on Canada Day or in a small community theatre or in a school gymnasium on Music Monday or else, around a campfire on one of his guided adventure tours in the wilderness of Labrador or Algonquin Park or the high Arctic. There are a great many creative people out there who make music or paint pictures or write poetry, etc., not in the hope of commercial gain but because they have this burning desire to share their vision of their world with others in ways that bring them some measure of peace. For every Leonard Cohen or Gordon Lightfoot or Gord Downie our country manages to produce, we also manage to produce dozens of talented artists such as Adam Ruzzo, too. While the impact of their creative effort may end up only making a small ripple in our cultural waters, the combined efforts of numerous artists all producing art in the name of being passionately creative can create a sea of ripples that combine into a wave. Waves can carve paths through mountains. When Adam Ruzzo was asked about what motivates him to do what he does, he replied (and I’m paraphrasing him) that he believes that History and the Arts are important ways of remembering and honouring those who helped to create all that we see in Canada. The stories that we tell about ourselves and our communities helps to give us a sense of identity that is important in ways that often mean more than the financial balance on a commercial bottom line. Ruzzo believes, as I do, that the more we tell our stories, the more we come to understand who we are and how best to collectively move about in our world. Heritage matters. Language matters. History matters and so does art. We are the product of all of those things and, after all, don’t we matter, too?
In 2023, Adam Ruzzo recorded an album called The Waters That Bind. If you know anything at all about Canadian history then you understand the importance of water to how Indigenous and settler communities were formed and survived amid the harsh realities of the land. For that album, Ruzzo traveled around the northern route of the Great Lakes, up into the Arctic and down along the eastern seaboard. Along the way, he stopped to talk to those who lived by the water and to learn of their stories, their hopes, their dreams and their concerns about the world in which they lived. From those conversations came the material for a collection of songs that include today’s featured tune “Little Boats Sway”. This song came to be after Ruzzo had visited Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Lunebourg is on the southeastern side of the province, sitting as it does, beside the mighty Atlantic Ocean. Lunenbourg has a long and storied history of fishing and shipbuilding. One of the most iconic symbols of our country itself, the schooner Bluenose, was built in Lunenbourg. The original Bluenose schooner is long gone but its replacement, Bluenose II can often be found berthed in the harbour there.
However, like many coastal communities in Nova Scotia, Lunenbourg no longer has a thriving fishery nor are many ships being built there anymore. Instead, Lunenbourg’s economy is mainly fueled these days through tourism. This is where Adam Ruzzo’s song comes into play. In speaking with the locals, Ruzzo learned about their growing frustration with tourism and how little interest and respect most tourists show for the town of Lunenbourg, itself, when they visit. For many tourists, Lunenbourg is merely a pit stop for a photo op., a bathroom break and, perhaps, a meal in a local restaurant. It is a time for kids to get out of the car and stretch their legs. Not many tourists actually come to Lunenbourg to learn about the people who built the Bluenose or those involved in shipwrecks nearby or those who helped to maintain the fishery in the good old days of yore. In musical terms, “Little Boats Sway” is a lament. It is a song that stands as a cautionary tale of what happens to our identity when people stop hearing the stories of what exactly it is that makes us who we are. Instead of being home to a community where real people once did (and continue to do) great things, we are reduced to being mere pitstops on the highway of life.
If you are a faithful reader of this blog, you may recall a series of posts that I wrote a little over a year and half ago that chronicled the journey I took with my family took when we drove from Ontario to the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia to take our eldest daughter to university for the first time. That series of posts was a lament of a sort, too. On our drive I discovered to my chagrin that all of the music coming from all of the radio stations that we tuned into along the whole length of our route all seemed to be offering centralized programming from Toronto or from America. The same small playlist of songs was on repeat the whole entire stretch! I never once heard a fiddle tune or a song about the sea even one time. To my family, my crankiness about it was dismissed as being sour grapes or else, of being out of touch with what constitutes popular music these days. For me, however, my complaints were more about the loss of culture that I felt the closer we came to the sea. I grew up listening to the music of the highlands and of songs about the water. Where was that part of my life now that we were actually down by the sea? It was nowhere to be heard. That family trip was a stark reminder to me of the many perils of media concentration. The many voices that once were heard have ended up becoming reduced to a select few voices that people hear by the sea today. In time, those original voices disappear and are forgotten. In allowing that to happen, we allow our own identity to disappear, as well. Once we lose our sense of self, it is easy to lose our way completely in this world. That’s why performers such as Adam Ruzzo are important. We need to see our true selves reflected in the world around us in real time. That’s why museums and art galleries and local theatre playhouses are all important. It is why supporting local book publishers matters. It is why having artists visiting schools makes a difference. It is why having local media remains the most effective way to monitor and shape what happens in our communities in ways that best benefit the people who actually live there. It all matters. The Arts matter! History matters! Our stories of who we actually matter. We matter.
This past week, the government of Nova Scotia tabled a new budget for the year. In that budget, funding was slashed across the board for dozens and dozens of organizations that deal with promoting matters of heritage and culture. As a result, book publishers may have to shut down, many local museums have already announced that they are being forced to close their doors, scholarships for student artists have disappeared and on and on it goes. The Arts community in Nova Scotia and, by extension, the history and cultural communities across the province are reeling after seeing their budgetary grants (which provide a majority of their operational funding) reduced to almost nothing. It seems as though the government feels that the cost of investing in the cultural identity of the people of Nova Scotia no longer makes financial sense. Why spend taxpayers dollars for the upkeep of a tiny museum in a small village or town that is quickly becoming nothing more than a pitstop on the highway for the tourists whose dollars now truly seem to matter the most anyway? It doesn’t make sense, especially if you define success in your world by the corporate bottom line.
Homogenization, or the streamlining of services down to the most financially-efficient, seems like a possible goal that the government may have in mind. Again, that is fine if you are comfortable shopping in a Walmart store instead of shopping in the downtown district of where you are visiting and supporting what local merchants may have to offer. It is fine if you feel more comfortable eating in chain restaurants when travelling than you do by experiencing the local cuisine in a Mom and Pop diner or cafe in places like Lunenbourg, for example. Finally, homogenization or streamlining of services is fine if songs and books and movies and poetry only need to come from the top of their respective sales charts without needing to reflect local tastes at all. After all, tailoring products to meet individualized needs only serves to drive up the cost, right? Custom orders cost more than standard, one-size-fits-all orders tend to do. So, I guess the question becomes what kind of local world do you want to live in? Do you want one to live in a town with big box stores and strip malls filled with the same brand stores that can be found in virtually any town or city along the highway or do you value supporting local stores, owned by local citizens, that offer something that actually reflects where you call home?
In the world of finances, of which the recent Nova Scotia budget is based, delivering cost-effective services matters to those in charge. Their jobs, quite literally, depend upon putting promises of “tax cuts for all” into action. However, in the world of cultural identity, there is another term that is used when the myriad of voices and identities are forcibly reduced to a chosen few. That word is assimilation. One of the reasons that politicians tend to go after universities and museums and The Arts is that these are all sectors of our society that help us learn and grow but also, to remember what has happened in the past. When a government targets history and culture, as the NS government has, it targets the very institutions that help us remember why assimilation and homogenization can be so negative in a societal setting. Our very real local and national history has already shown us the worst case scenario in action. That was the Residential School System, brought into law by the government of Sir John A. MacDonald. Without going on a long history rant here, the policies of the MacDonald government saw Indigenous children forcibly removed from their homes and taken to live in boarding schools far from their home. Once at these schools, the children had their hair cut, their clothing exchanged for drab uniforms and then they were denied the ability to use their own, unique Indigenous language or to practice their own unique cultural traditions. The idea behind it all was to have these children lose their sense of Indigenous identity and become assimilated into the broader, white, European colonial population. After having only a few generations go through this process, Indigenous culture would have been a thing of the past, eventually to be forgotten altogether. Assimilation complete.
You may think that it is quite a dramatic jump going from closing a tiny museum in a small roadside village, to the horrors of the genocide that was the Residential School System but, it isn’t that great of an intellectual leap, really. All cases of cultural genocide began as simple acts of legislation in government buildings by politicians in countries filled with varieties of people from a variety of backgrounds, each with their own cultural identity. I’m not saying that the Premier of Nova Scotia will be setting up internment camps on the grounds of those former museums any time soon but, I am saying that systemic decisions by governments aimed at eliminating the culture and heritage of entire communities is how ordinary people begin to feel diminishment. It is how marginalized groups begin to lose their sense of self, leaving them vulnerable to neglect and abuse. One of the ways that we learn to value ourselves is by seeing ourselves reflected in the world around us. In order for that to happen, the world around us has to work for all of us, not just the streamlined few.
One only has to take even a cursory look across the border to be able to identify what happens when governments begin to pursue nationalistic policies that favour one specific cultural group over all others. I don’t want the closing of museums, smalltown theatres and local book publishers’offices because of formal government policies to start becoming normalized here. That is a slippery slope to begin going down. We, as the unique humans we are, matter. Our voices and stories need to be heard, not just those from the past but, also, those of today and in the future. The failure to value our heritage comes at a cost that I don’t wish to fathom. To illustrate this potential cost, I am closing with a short poem called “I Lost My Talk” by an Indigenous poet from Cape Breton named Rita Joe. “I Lost My Talk” is Rita Joe’s most famous poem and stands as one of the most important poems ever written in our nation’s history. It is a short and concise look at Rita Joe’s experiences in a residential school as she had her sense of cultural identity forcibly taken from her. Her poem shows the dramatic costs involved in having your voice silenced and stories thrown on the scrapheap of history.
I Lost My Talk by Rita Joe
I lost my talk
The talk you took away
When I was a little girl
At Schubenacadie School.
You snatched it away:
I speak like you
I think like you
I create like you
The scrambled ballad, about my word.
Two ways I say
Both ways I talk
Your way is more powerful.
So gently I offer my hand and ask
Let me find my talk
So I can teach you about me.
In an age when where we hear the voices of the Ed Sheerans and the Katy Perrys of the world all of the time on the radio, we also blossom as people when we hear the voices of the Adam Ruzzos and Rita Joes of the world, too. When I look at those four names, I value them all but I know for a fact which two have used their creative talent in ways that most reflect who I am as a Canadian, a Nova Scotian and as a Cape Bretoner. Although their commercial reach may be small, Adam Ruzzo and Rita Joe are the ones who best speak for me and whose words touch my heart and help to form a vision of who I actually am. There has to be some value in that, isn’t there?
The link to the video for the song “Little Boats Sway” by Adam Ruzzo can be found here.
The link to the official website for Adam Ruzzo can be found here.
The link to a news report that outlines all of the funding cuts recently proposed by the government of Nova Scotia can be found here. ***I strongly urge you to read all thirteen(!) pages of cuts to organizations in communities, large and small, all over the province. So much loss.
The link to the official website for poet Rita Joe can be found here and here.
The official link to the website for the National Centre For Truth and Reconciliation can be found here.
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