A Life in Esperanto with Wally du Temple

Wally du Temple spoke with us from Vancouver Island, British Columbia (B.C.), where he’s lived most of his life. He grew up in the temperate rainforests of the Saanich Peninsula, where he attended McTavish Road Elementary School, a one-room schoolhouse with no indoor plumbing. Wally struggled to read, and his first teacher (who didn’t know about dyslexia), made Wally stand and read in front of the class. At least, she did until 8-year-old Wally locked her in the outhouse.

After Wally got expelled from the third grade, his parents hired Margaret Wardle, an English immigrant, to homeschool him. He spent every day at Margaret’s house, overlooking the Strait of Georgia. She taught Wally to read and told him that he wasn’t the problem: English is the problem! Margaret told Wally about Esperanto, a language that — unlike English — spells words the way they sound. 70 years and an English degree later, Wally (or Ŭali) still thinks phonetic spelling is a good idea.

In 1959, Wally left home to attend the University of British Columbia, where he studied English, anthropology, and history. At University, he met Powell Janulus, a linguist, who taught him Esperanto. In 1963, Wally graduated with an English degree and no job prospects. He found an advertisement for social workers in northern B.C. Although Wally had no social work experience, he had studied the Tahltan people, whose traditional territory encompasses much of northwestern B.C. Wally applied, and the government, lacking any more qualified applicants, hired him.

The government assigned Wally a 1300 km unpaved stretch of the Alaska Highway, from Fort St. John to the Yukon. He worked year-round out of his truck and carried both emergency supplies and a gun to assist health care workers and the police. As a social worker, Wally witnessed the Sixties Scoop¹ firsthand. In Lower Post, Wally met a Tahltan mother, who lost her baby. The police arrested her. Wally tried to defend her, but his supervisor forced him to sign papers that took her remaining two children away from her. Wally wrote critical reports, which his supervisor refused  to submit. So Wally sent his reports to the Vancouver Sun, which published them.

This is the book that tells the story of the Welfare Rebellon of Wally du Temple and Bridget Moran in BC, Canada.

Wally was fired. When the premier, William Bennett, disclaimed Wally’s reports, a group of social workers, led by Bridget Moran, wrote an open letter to the premier that confirmed Wally’s accounts.² Wally’s reports led to changes. For starters, the B.C. Government opened a new social work office in Fort Nelson and hired three social workers to support the area that Wally covered alone. In 2018, Wally published Dream Catcher and Reconciliation, a memoir to help people understand the ignorance and racism that led to the Sixties Scoop, and which continue to oppress indigenous peoples today.

After the B.C. government fired Wally, he bought a 45-foot-long riverboat with his brother Barry. Together, they started Sub-Arctic Navigation, a tourism company in Fort Nelson B.C. They advertised in magazines, like Field and Stream, and took American tourists on 3-week-long river boat safaris from Fort Nelson down the Fort Nelson River to the Liard, South Nahanni, and MacKenzie, all the way to Fort Providence, Northwest Territories.

Wally formed a company called SubArktic Navigation Co and took folks on river boat safaris

Eventually, Wally left the river behind to become an English teacher. He went to the Ontario College of Education in Toronto to get a teaching certificate. After graduating, he taught in Bells Corner, Ottawa, where he volunteered in the Esperanto office and advertised in the Heroldo de Esperanto for female penpals. In 1969, Wally traveled to Europe to meet some of his penpals. Behind the iron curtain, in Czechoslovakia, he met the woman he would eventually marry — Olga Valentova.

In 1972, Olga defected from the Soviet Union to join Wally in Canada. Together, they made a plan, which they communicated in Esperanto, avoiding detection by Soviet spies. Olga, a cartographer, applied for — and received — permission to attend a cartography conference in London. In London, she went to the Canadian embassy, where she picked up a plane ticket that Wally had sent. She flew to Victoria, B.C., where Wally had organized the Pacific Conference of Esperanto. They married on Esperanto Day – July 26, 1972.³

Olga and Wally at their wedding

When Soviet officials discovered Olga’s defection, they threatened to take away her father’s pension and demote her brother. Wally and Olga decided to return to Czechoslovakia to protect Olga’s family. Back in Czechoslovakia, Wally and Olga spent months visiting government officials, seeking permission to leave. Eventually, Olga’s father – who bravely supported the Czech partisans in WWII – managed to call in a favour, and Wally and Olga returned to Canada.

Shortly after their return, Wally’s father died. Wally and Olga moved to the Saanich Peninsula to help Wally’s mother run the family business, the Ardmore Golf Course. Wally and Olga soon had two children, Hana and Evan. At the time, Olga spoke Czech and Esperanto, but not English, so Wally and Olga raised their kids in Esperanto.

In the ensuing years, Wally became a leader within the Esperanto movement. He founded both the Victoria Esperanto Club and the Northwest Regional Esperanto Conference, and organized the World Esperanto Congress in Vancouver. He served as president, treasurer, and editor of the Canadian Esperanto Association. In B.C., he got the provincial government to accept Esperanto as a distance education elective for secondary students, after which he toured Canada in a camper van, giving interviews about Esperanto for secondary schools. He helped found the Esperanto Rotary Club of Brazil. He served on the board of the Esperantic Studies Foundation (ESF), and after the Schultz bequest became treasurer. As treasurer, he changed how ESF manages its investments to save the Foundation money, allowing the ESF to support more people and projects. After he retired, Wally edited La Kanada Verkaro, an anthology of Canadian writing.

Despite Wally’s best efforts, Esperanto has yet to achieve the “final victory.” Although Wally feels disappointed that society hasn’t done more to support Esperanto — for instance, the World Esperanto Congress in Vancouver barely received any media coverage – Wally’s life story shows how Esperanto can shape a life in profound and meaningful ways. Moreover, Wally has had a positive impact on many others peoples’ lives. For instance, in our interview both Mark Fettes and Derek Roff thanked Wally for organizing the World Esperanto Congress in Vancouver, where (despite the lack of media coverage!) they made many lifelong friends.

When asked what, if any, message he would like to share with the Esperanto community, Wally reflected that Ludwig Zamenhof created Esperanto almost a hundred years before Apollo 8 photographed the Earth from space, yet somehow Zamenhof gave us the same perspective. From space, the Earth is whole; we can’t see any of the borders that divide us. Esperanto helps us transcend both language barriers and national borders to connect with one another as human beings. According to Wally, the perspective that Esperanto gives us makes all Esperantists world leaders.

1. During the 1960s, the Canadian government took thousands of indigenous children away from their families and communities, and adopted them out to white families.
2. In 1992, Bridget Moran published A Little Rebellion, a book about their fight for welfare reform.
3. At the time, any foreign national who married a Canadian citizen, received landed immigrant status in Canada.