Grindstone Island: Quaker Peace Education Centre
“How can we, who advocate nonviolence, actually practise it in hostile, threatening situations?”
From 1963 to 1976, Canadian Friends Service Committee operated a Peace Education Centre on Grindstone Island, on Big Rideau Lake, south of Ottawa, which attempted to address this question.
In their initial statement of purpose, the Centre’s planning committee wrote:
"We believe that the securing of a just and lasting peace should be the concern of everyone. Such a tremendous task requires all the human and spiritual resources that we can muster. The Grindstone Island Peace Centre provides opportunities to develop such resources. Through retreats, training institutes and programs of peace education and action, the centre seeks to contribute to the quality of ideas and action, and to the growth of insight and skills required by peacemakers today."
One arm of the Peace Education Centre, known as the Grindstone Island Training Institute for Nonviolence, used realistically simulated conflict situations to explore how a civilian population could defend itself from tyranny, while maintaining the values of peace and non-violence.
The most famous exercise carried out at the Institute, known as the ‘Grindstone Experiment’ took place over 31 hours in August 1965. Fifty people in total participated in a socio-drama based on the premise that a right-wing government, backed by the US army, had occupied major portions of Canada in the wake of the secession of Quebec.
Following some preparative sessions, six ‘armed’ men arrived on the island and announced that the thirty-one ‘defenders’ were temporarily in custody. The defenders then had to respond, based on their own experience and a limited background in civilian defence theory. The central questions to be addressed were: how can pacifists maintain their beliefs in nonviolence under the threat of armed attack? And, can nonviolent civilian defence be applied against an imposed tyranny?
The organisers had expected that the exercise might go on for as long as three days. However, the experiment was ended abruptly after thirteen participants were “killed” while in custody.
Group discussions held afterwards revealed how acts that the ‘defenders’ had considered non-violent had been perceived as threatening by the occupying forces. Confused initial reactions – ranging from non-cooperation with the invaders’ imposed regime to minor acts of sabotage – led the invaders to mistrust later, more coherent action by the defenders. A manifesto produced by the defenders, intended to establish a peaceful, parallel community to that of the invaders, was interpreted as an insurrection that could not be tolerated, leading at last to a ‘shoot to kill’ policy as the ‘invaders’ sought to establish their authority.
The overriding conclusion reached by all participants was that, "anything that prevents communication cannot be called nonviolence."
Other programs held on the island included inter-faith seminars and annual conferences for diplomats. For seven years, Quaker-UNESCO Seminars were held, on issues such as the civil war in Biafra-Nigeria, India-Pakistan conflicts on Kashmir, the struggles against apartheid in South Africa, the movement for women's rights, tensions between East and West Germany, the isolation of China from the UN, the reform of UN voting patterns, and the threat of nuclear war between the US and the USSR.
In 1972, when a five-year test suspension of the death penalty in Canada ended, a working party was held on Grindstone Island to discuss the issues this raised for Quakers.
From 1976 onwards, when the island was sold to members of the Peace Movement, the Centre was owned and operated by the Grindstone Cooperative. Weekend workshops would take place throughout the summer covering peace, cooperative living, energy and the environment, tools for social change, and personal and community values. The Cooperative continued to operate until 1990.
As Murray Thompson, one of the founders of the Peace Education Centre wrote in “Unfinished Business: the Legacy of Grindstone Island”:
“If we had a million Grindstones in the world, and kept dumping people on them for ten days at a time, we'd know who was strong and who was weak, and that tenderness can be found in the most unlikely places.”
