Hamilton North End activist Shawn Selway’s fight
Stop living in the past, you hippie!"
Shawn Selway - author, playwright, industrial mechanic, and lion of North End activism - is read this Twitter jab, posted in the wake of his arrest at an anti-pipeline protest downtown.
He laughs heartily.
What does he think of it?
It might be ironic," he says of the crackback, and laughs again.
Or, there is this school of thought out there, that people don't need to have responsibility anymore; you just look after yourself and that's it. This has become more and more broadly sanctioned."
He joined a recent demonstration where activists painted Bay Street with a pink-lettered message in support of the Wet'suwet'en people in B.C.
It is one in a lifetime of causes for Selway, that have included issues such as Indigenous reconciliation, heritage preservation, gentrification and affordable housing in Hamilton.
Another he's been fighting lately is his own: the 73-year-old has Stage 4 cancer.
And yet there was Selway, leaving the police station on King William Street on Nov. 21; coat, hat, gloves and phone confiscated by a detective, wearing polyester blue booties he was issued, in lieu of shoes they also took.
He had been kept in a holding cell for nearly four hours, he said, charged with mischief under $5,000. He was unable to attend his first court date Dec. 16, because he had a chemotherapy treatment. His next court appearance is Jan. 27.
For all the protests he's attended over the years, it was his first arrest.
We were all like, was that on your bucket list, Shawn?" said Zoe Branigan-Pipe.
Zoe is his stepdaughter. In a tweet paying tribute to him, she called Selway her father. She said that's because he has been exactly that for more than four decades.
He brought me up as his own daughter ... It's not just his activism, he puts himself out there for everybody. If you need help, if it's family, or the community, he's the first to respond. We are all so proud of him."
Through one lens it was simply a man punished for defacing a street.
Through another, there are layers, to the issue and the man.
I found (the arrest and jailing) a bit punitive," he said. And the reason, I believe, is that from high to low, we resist the idea of reconciliation, concretely through the restoration of land and resources. Otherwise why be so heavy-handed about something so mild?"
He expounds at length on the cause.
It's up to all of us to demonstrate that we wish reconciliation to occur, and not sit at home reading about dead children and feeling humiliated by our governments' refusal to address these wrongs."
As a kid he pretended to hunt with bows and arrows in the forest, and assumed natives were a vanished people."
His voice breaks with emotion relating the memory, and he apologizes. Might be the effect of the chemo, he said.
He was diagnosed with colon cancer about five years ago. He had treatments, was cleared of cancer, but last year learned tumours had returned and spread to his lung.
I have a very supportive wife (Sheri) and daughters (Patricia and Zoe), so I'm a very well-looked after guy. I recognize that, and am happy to accept that. The only difficulty I have now is trying to figure out if I can finish a number of projects I'm working on, before my demise. It depends on the balance of energy. It's impossible to foretell."
He has been a renaissance man of activism, toting the signs but also doing the reading, writing, and exploration of the soul.
Along with Sheri, who has also been engaged in social and community issues for many years, he was recently presented an award as North Ender of the Year.
Zoe said she grew up in a house where the last sounds she would hear before drifting off to sleep at night, was the clack-clack-clack of Selway writing on his typewriter or computer downstairs.
It goes deep with him," she said. He firmly believes in justice and social justice issues. We are lucky we have had him."
He grew up in Dundas, where his father, Bernard, who served and was wounded in the Second World War, was a pharmacist. His stepmother, Gerda, was a nurse.
Gerda ultimately inspired him to write his book, Nobody Will Harm You Here: Mass Medical Evacuation from the Eastern Arctic 1950-1965," about the 1,200 Inuit who were transported to the Sanatorium on the west Mountain for tuberculosis treatment. Gerda cared for children at the facility.
Selway took English at McMaster University, but then, breaking it down, as is his way, discovered that religion offered much of the source material for the classics in literature, so he also majored in religious studies.
Christianity, Confucianism, Islam, they are all forms of organizing social life," he said. That has always stayed with me. Most of us don't know where our culture comes from, the roots of it. It helps to contextualize things."
His practical streak motivated him to learn a trade - I wanted to write and to be married and have a family" - so he trained at Stelco as a millwright. He worked repairing and restoring industrial equipment in Hamilton and beyond, in places like New Brunswick and Mexico.
But there is a big difference between restoring machines and fixing the world.
When you take a machine apart and put it back together, your problem is solvable," he said. You end up tired, but it's very satisfying."
He is well aware that the broader problems, the struggle he has long felt in his bones, will outlast him.
No, they won't be solved by me, and I hesitate to say we are at the whim of larger forces," he said. But when we see what we think we can do, then we ought to do that. And press and press and press, so that things happen sooner. People only have one life. The time is crucial."
Jon Wells is a feature writer at The Spectator. jwells@thespec.com