CBC North

Yesterday…

I’m sitting in the living room waiting for Eleanor Wachtel to interview Margaret Atwood on the radio, because it’s been advertised on CBC for the past hour. I’m wondering if it’s the same show I heard two months ago, Atwood being deadpan and caustic as usual, the interview trying to make her sound cuddly and failing completely. Then it’s the five o’clock news, all good (well, all bad, actually, but let’s not dwell on that for now), and then all of a sudden, the CBC is broadcasting what sounds like a record being played backwards. I think (and this indicates what a hopeless old luddite I am) “hey I wonder how long it takes before they realize they put the Atwood reel in backwards.” Then I pause, realizing it’s quasi-impossible to play digital backwards. And then my idiocy truly dawns on me: I’m listening to a local call-in show in Gwich’in (one of the First Nations communities up here--I only figure out which language by looking it up on the CBC website). Now I’ve been listening for twenty minutes; all I’ve understood is “New Year”, “Old Crow” (which is a town near here), and the fact that every now and then the host, whose name is Mabel English, says “Thank you” and plays a segment of Celtic music. Listening to Gwich’in is a lot more interesting than the parliamentary analysis show that was on this morning (which says a lot for political commentary in this country)…