Thrown into the world at one of the worst of times in 20^th C. America, six weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, I came of age in northern Ohio and benefitted immensely from a liberal education at, arguably, one of the best of times in that century.  I graduated from an all-round modern Euclid High School in 1959 and then majored in German and Spanish for a B.A. at Kent State University in 1965.  After that I studied historical Germanic and Indo-European linguistics at the University of Alberta for two years and TA’d as German instructor, followed by a return to Kent State where I taught German language and literature for two years.  I emigrated to Canada in August, 1969 and earned an M.A. in 1970 in general linguistics at the University of Toronto’s newly founded Centre for Linguistic Studies.  Still at U of T, I then completed the required Ph.D. courses, comprehensive exams and residency and began field work on Mi’kmaw, an Eastern Algonquian language, in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.  My intention was to explore the “hot” theory of generative semantics using Mi’kmaw as the data language which seemed a natural fit because of its holophrastic morphology.  In the spring of 1974 Peter Christmas, Director of the Micmac Association of Cultural Studies (MACS pooled funding from all the N.S. reserves), offered me the opportunity to spearhead the development of Mi’kmaw language resources. I accepted, and over the next five years under the auspices of MACS, Bernie Francis of Membertou Reserve (on the outskirts of Sydney) and I created a modern-day orthography for the language, which Bernie, by then a competent “linguistically-minded” native speaker, has subsequently championed tirelessly throughout much of Mi’kma’ki in eastern Canada.

Although I never did get back to the dissertation, this language-focussed education has stood me in good stead throughout the rest of my life.  During the 1980s, when free to do so, I immersed myself in paleontology, the natural sciences, continental philosophy, Frankfurt School critical theory, and eastern thought.  In the early 1990s, I married Helen Bastedo of Fort St. John, British Columbia. At the time, quite fortuitously, Northern Lights College was literally “desperately seeking” a linguistics instructor. The rest is history:  for the next eight years I was privileged to also teach philosophy, critical thinking, conversational German, as well as philosophy of education and ESL methodologies in Simon Fraser University’s teacher training program at NLC.  In 2000, shortly after adventuring in New Zealand and Australia for four months, Helen and I settled into Hope, B.C.  For the next 15 years I taught in the Communications Department of the University of the Fraser Valley.

These days my intellectual passions shuttle between marveling at the current findings of historical genomics and evolutionary phylogenetics, on the one hand, and, on the other, trying to think through the futures of humanity and this good Earth.

Amor fati!

Doug Smith

Hope, BC, May 2020