Today@Dal

Diversity was the order of the day.

It would be difficult to find five more different people than the group that gathered together wearing gold Order of Nova Scotia medallions at the completion of the investiture ceremony at Province House on Wednesday.

There was the man who has been gathering rocks and fossils for nearly nine decades, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, the Mi’kmaq elder who overcame residential schooling, alcoholism and homelessness, along with the bioethics expert and the longtime puppet master.

Donald Reid of Joggins said the honour was beyond a dream.

“I was just a little boy with a pocketful of rocks,” Reid, 94, said. “I didn’t really know what I was doing.”

Now, almost everybody knows what Reid was doing when he gathered a lifetime collection of fossils from the cliffs near Joggins, a collection that now forms the heart of the Joggins Fossil Centre.

“People were calling them fossils, I didn’t know what they were,” said Reid, who left school as a kid to work in the coal mines and who had no formal paleontology training.

“I started picking them for the pattern that was on them and I kept doing it and doing it and after awhile, it got on my back and I couldn’t get rid of it. I had to keep going.”

Keeping going meant a collection of fossils that is the world’s most complete record or terrestrial life of the coal age, dating back 300 million years. Reid’s work earned him the name Keeper of the Cliffs and his efforts were instrumental in the Joggins Fossil Cliffs being designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Hardly ready to abandon his lifelong work, Reid was out a week ago looking for rocks and fossils.

The province will always hold a special place in the heart and science of Arthur McDonald, who was born in Sydney and educated at Sydney Academy and Dalhousie University.

“This is so significant to me because it is my home province,” said McDonald, co-recipient of the 2015 Nobel Physics Prize for his work in demonstrating that subatomic particles called neutrinos change identities, also known as “flavours.”

“Sydney and my education there and Dalhousie and my education there were significant to me in terms of my early development. My mother and sister live in Dartmouth and I get back here regularly and I still feel very much like a Nova Scotian so this is very personal for me.”

McDonald’s mother, Valerie, 94, attended the ceremony and “really had a good time,” he said.

McDonald, 73, who lives in Kingston, Ont., has supervised and mentored the research of more than 100 graduate students throughout his storied career and he led a team of international scientists as director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Collaboration in the work that led to the Nobel Prize.

“I was very fortunate to have many collaborators,” he said. “I was a director of a group of all together 273 authors on our papers, many of them students and post-doctorates. All of them were, in the first place, very satisfied that we had done a significant piece of science. But 13 years later receiving the Nobel Prize for that piece of science really makes it more significant to them and to me because we have such a respect for the way in which the Nobel committee selects pieces of science to award. It’s just perhaps the most respected award in the world.”

Douglas Knockwood of Indian brook called the Order of Nova Scotia the fulfillment of his life.

“I never thought about something like this until just lately, about how much work is really involved in having me here,” said Knockwood, 86, whose caring father removed him as a kid from a residential school and took him home to relearn his Mi’kmaq language and culture.

“There was always someone there to make sure that I was doing the right thing at the right time. If it wasn’t for those people, I wouldn’t be here. I take my hat off to the people who were involved in helping me to be what I am today.”

Knockwood had a stint in the Canadian Armed Forces, contracted tuberculosis and lost a lung. He survived homelessness and addiction before moving to New England to become a respected cook.

“I started out years ago working in the cooking field,” Knockwood said. “I had a very able trainer, his name was Dick Middleton. He was a head of a cooking course here in Halifax. He was one of the first ones who to actually give me a road map. I found something that I was able to accomplish. It gave me the tools that I was able to further my knowledge and education and I was able to return and help my people.”

Knockwood used spiritual Mi’kmaq teaching and leaned on personal experience to help others fight and overcome addiction across the country, particularly youth afflicted with drug and alcohol problems.

Francoise Baylis is a very accomplished academic but she found Wednesday’s ceremony “a little bit overwhelming.”

As the 50-minute ceremony wound down, Liz Rigney sang She’s Called Nova Scotia, by the late Order of Nova Scotia recipient Rita MacNeil.

“Even today, I felt myself crying when they were singing Rita MacNeil’s song about Nova Scotia,” said Baylis, a professor of medicine at Dalhousie and the Canadian research chair in biothetics and philosophy.

“It’s really special.”

Baylis was joined at the ceremony by her husband, her two children and her 90-year-old father, Richard, who came in from Montreal.

“All of my successes are due to my parents. My mother (Gloria) is not able to come, she has Alzheimer’s and my father is always by her side so for him to come today was a big commitment.”

Baylis, 55, said she was both humbled and impressed by the diversity of the five people invested Wednesday, bringing the Order of Nova Scotia honour list to 87.

“I had a chance to talk to each one and they are just such beautiful people. Everybody is just so humble and dismissive of their contributions and I already feel that I don’t even belong among this crowd.”

But Baylis does belong. Her work with those outside the medical profession has brought honour, understanding and respect to her field. At the heart of what she does is a belief that citizens belong in the discussions and decision-making about scientific advances that affect their lives.

“My work is kind of on the periphery in that I don’t have concrete things to point to that I have succeeded in but I think of my work in terms of a commitment to democracy, empowering people by giving them knowledge and making sure that they have both what I think of as science literacy and ethics literacy.”

Read full story (https://www.localxpress.ca/local-news/diverse-group-invested-into-order-of-nova-scotia-436764)