Introduction

Few words were tossed around more often yet understood less precisely in the Long Sixties than counterculture. It was something to be lived, not to be defined. Even asking for a meaning made you akin to the square who dared to inquire of trumpet master Louis Armstrong “What is jazz?” Armstrong scoffed: “If you have to ask, you’ll never know”¹ Hip folks got it; straights never would.

Protected by the shield of several decades’ distance from the 1960s and 1970s, historians have recently dared to venture into the battlefield of culture and counterculture and come up with a description that, to no one’s surprise, confirms the comprehensive nature of the two concepts. The venerable British chronicler of the twentieth century Arthur Marwick defines culture as “the network or totality of attitudes, values and practices of a particular group of human beings.”² In other words, just about everything we think and do. Looking closely at counterculture, Judith I. McKenzie characterizes it as “a deliberate attempt to live according to norms that are different from, and to some extent contradictory to, those institutionally enforced by society.”³ To paraphrase, culture is everything; counterculture is a challenge to everything. Although it was an expression of the early 1950s, Marlon Brando’s growling response in The Wild One to the question of what he was rebelling against said it all for sixties radicals: “Waddya got?”⁴ The abundant signs in Western society of militarism, inequality, sexism, racism, environmental destruction, and stultifying conformity provided plenty of targets for youthful activists’ rage. Rock musicians, who were the most acclaimed poets of the age, echoed the theme. Thus the aggressive US war on Vietnam and its visceral racial divides would provoke The Guess Who to snarl, in “American Woman,” that “I don’t need your war machines. I don’t need your ghetto scenes.”⁵ A generalized fear that, as a manifesto from one commune in rural British Columbia put it, “Time is rapidly running out for Mother Earth,” led the Animals to call out “We gotta get out of this place! If it’s the last thing we ever do” and Barry McGuire to intone about society being on “the eve of destruction.”⁶

If the counterculture was comprehensive, it also never lost its focus on politics. Indeed, politics and culture were one. Nothing showed that more bluntly than the aggressive guitar licks that catapulted Mick Jagger’s raw voice—“Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet”—into the Rolling Stones’ anthem to the worldwide rebellions of 1968, “Street Fighting Man.”⁷ This was decidedly not Roy Rogers and Dale Evans intoning “Happy trails to you. . . .” But it was not only music that was political. Everything was—all culture, art, sex, relationships, education, even football. The standard line used by one leftist Canadian football fan to lord it over another was “Our Americans beat your Americans,” combining in a phrase both fan loyalty and a politically conscious contempt for yet another sign of Canada’s subordination to its southern neighbour.

The progressive movements in the 1960s and 1970s held up every issue to be examined in the light of political values. They asked how a person should live consciously, conscientiously, and, as Mario Savio would declare on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, free “from the operation of the machine.” His famous command would resonate with many: “You’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!”⁸ True, only a minority of people fully acted on Savio’s advice, but millions more made public expressions of their dissenting values by adopting one or several of the myriad options that counterculture provided them.

One common factor in the spread of countercultural forms across so many Western countries was the presence of the significant baby boomer population, which Alberta had in abundance. But in the 1960s, the province was marked by a singular feature that spurred the development of a cultural form of rebellion. Ironically, it was the stolid Social Credit government headed by Ernest Manning. The running joke in the province—or at least in its cities—was that nobody ever admitted to voting for Social Credit, yet the party handily won every election until 1971. Manning was respected but not loved. The straitlaced Christianity that made him an incorruptible politician also made him the public face of a puritanical government that many Albertans resented. This was evident, for example, in the grumbling over the government’s 1963–64 banning or censorship of the films Irma la Douce and Tom Jones, based on their allegedly libidinous themes.⁹ Not for nothing was Manning popularly known as Uncle Ernie. The countercultural trend of the late 1960s let Albertans vote Social Credit but also convince the world that they never did, with evidence for the latter being their far-out bell-bottoms. For the adventurous among them, bell-bottoms would lead to long hair, beads, marijuana, and rock festivals. Within a remarkably short time, a Beatles-look hairstyle that in 1965 would get a man harassed on Calgary streets was being adopted by enough freaks to make it safe. And so for other cultural forms of rebellion. While subversive political action was relatively rare in the province, more than a few Albertans took up one aspect or another of the alternative cultural flowering of the era, even if it was as modest as women who might once have strictly kept to wearing dresses and skirts in public now deciding that pantsuits were perfectly proper.

This was the moment of the birth of an environmental movement worldwide, and, like millions of others, Albertans were stirred by the sentiment. A rare and vocal few, like the far-sighted Andy Russell, took up the cause years before it was widely adopted. The environmentalism of the later sixties would add anti-capitalism to Russell’s compassion for nature, weaving in political and countercultural strands. The new ecological thinking demanded that society live, reconfigure its economy, and embrace humanity and nature in a fundamentally different way. This new regard for the fate of the earth required a cultural revolution, a break with established ways of thinking and acting. Albertans were not slow to take up the task. Indeed, Alberta established a pioneering Ecology Corps in 1971 and that same year also created the first provincial department of the environment—events that activists like Russell and Edmonton’s Save Tomorrow, Oppose Pollution, as well as the mildly reformist post-Manning Social Credit administration of 1969–71, could take credit for.¹⁰

Environmentalism and the counterculture also led more than a few Albertans to a growing respect for Indigenous peoples, whose way of life and outlook on the world had previously been dismissed as backward and doomed. Aboriginal traditions began to acquire a new respect from people who felt a rising distrust of the aggressive modernity that had prevailed since the dawn of the capitalist era. One of the Albertans to act on this new interest in Indigenous peoples was an unlikely radical, businessman-turned-book publisher Mel Hurtig. He had begun his career in the early 1950s managing his uncle’s fur business in Edmonton but in 1956 took up selling books and then, beginning in 1967, publishing them.¹¹ His press was a rarity in Canada, just one of three trade book publishers outside of Toronto in the 1960s. Hurtig was both a nationalist and an iconoclast. One of his first successes was to publish, in 1969, Harold Cardinal’s The Unjust Society: The Tragedy of Canada’s Indians, a stirring condemnation of the Canadian government’s “thinly disguised programme of extermination through assimilation.”¹²

Labelled “The Alberta Bad Boy” by Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Hurtig was not alone in being a homegrown firebrand. As the contributions to this section make clear, Albertans were perfectly capable of bucking the cultural and environmental conservatism of their province. As Jennifer Salahub and PearlAnn Reichwein document, visual artists Marion Nicoll and Sid Marty were both raised in Alberta and were wrapped in the same cultural swaddling clothes as their cohorts. Yet each was already at least embryonically dissident before brief experiences in larger cosmopolitan centres struck sparks in what was already oppositional tinder. Tom Radford was also a child of the province, moved to document the resistance of Indigenous people in Northern Alberta to the devastation of their livelihood and homes caused by modernist megaprojects outside the province.

Albertans who had grown up elsewhere quickly sank roots into their adopted soil. Louise Swift had been weaned on union and civic activism in British Columbia’s Kootenay region. Transplanted to Edmonton as a young woman, she made common cause with other women who were aghast at global environmental depredations such as radioactivity from nuclear weapons testing, the first of many steps along her lifelong path of environmental and peace engagement. And as Jan Olson and PearlAnn Reichwein show, Americans fleeing militarism south of the 49th parallel had seen battles against the destruction that went under the guise of urban progress. In Edmonton, they donned their civic activist capes to take on the northern manifestation of it.

Yet, like the broader movement, the environmental counterculture of grassroots Albertans such as Sid Marty, Andy Russell, Frank Ladouceur, and Ian Tyson would remain a minority trend in a province where the oil industry’s already-mighty influence only grew after the accession to power of a Conservative government in 1971. As George Melnyk notes in his magisterial history of Alberta literature, the “dissenting voices” who for a decade had given a “new edge” to writing about Alberta’s environment, culture, and politics were not able to ascend to a prominent place in the popular imagination. Instead, writing that “glorified Alberta’s past and its natural environment”—which, Melnyk argues, sprang from “the need for mythology”—would reclaim the greatest attention.¹³ Still, a countervailing mythology persevered, nurturing the many-splendoured cultural flowers that continue to bloom alongside the province’s wild rose.

Larry Hannant