Dry Falls, Washington, which is where the Missoula Flood waters poured over the rim of the Grand Coulee and created lakes from the plunge pools at the bottom of the cliffs.
It’s feeling familiar. After four years of mostly working from home and staying fairly close to my home place, I’m travelling more. The difference is that I’m doing it more with Caitlin, as we are working together with groups and organizations on longer-term projects that we are holding together with others. Much of our work together is around building deeper capacity in hosting and participatory leadership with larger institutional organizations such as universities, human services networks, unions, quasi-government organizations and the like. On top of that, we have been doing some Art of Hosting workshops in Vancouver and Manitoba and I have two more coming up in Ontario this fall.
Last week we were in Central Washington State working with a group called Thriving Together which helps build networks of health care providers for whole person health and health equity. This is the second year we have worked with a cohort of folks from that network. We met in Soap Lake, Washington, which in September is quiet. The kids are back in school, the tourists have all left and the town has very little buzz. Soap Lake, which is known as Smokiam (Healing Waters) in the local nxa?amx?ín language is a small, muddy, and very alkaline lake at the southern end of the Grand Coulee. The mud and waters are said to have healing properties and many visitors, especially from northern Europe and Israel, flock to the tow in the summer to partake.
The town itself is not affluent. Soap Lake does not have the water resources or the connection to the interstate to make it rival the towns in the rest of the county. Quincy, about a half hour to the south, is on the Columbia River and is a hub for big agriculture food processing and data centres, both of which use the river to power and cool their operations. Computing “in the cloud” is a misnomer. The cloud needs to rain, and the rain needs to be captured, and the water needs to be swirled around hundreds of thousands of computers that have a real live footprint on the ground. Cloud computing makes it sound so ephemeral. The reality is much more material.
To the north, in the town of Grand Coulee, also on the Columbia River, stands the great dam built during the 1930s to contribute to the two systems change points everyone needed to haul themselves out of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl: water and cheap electricity. In a country where almost every public service is privatized, the Bonneville Power Authority remains a public utility and sells the electricity generated by the dozen or more dams on the Columbia. These dams did their jobs, immortalized in song by Woody Guthrie, (he wrote these songs in less than a month, keeping in line with massive events that happen in a short period of time in these parts) who placed a limited and naive optimism in the people’s power and water, but they also flooded out dozens of Indigenous communities of the Colville Tribes and destroyed the Columbia River salmon runs. The landscape is stunning and captivating and has been radically changed by human hands.
Those human hands worked upon a foundation that was laid down by catastrophic flooding at the end of the ice age, when somewhere between 40 and 100 megafloods cascaded across central Washington, carving deep canyons from the volcanic basalt that had coated the bedrock millions of years before in thousands of feet of lava. the sheer scale of geological processes in this region are mind-blowing, and I found myself absorbed by YouTube videos of the Missoula Floods that carved out features on the land in as little as 48 hours as hundreds of meters of water flowed across the plains and carved the Columbia River gorge on its way to the sea.
Central Washington is no stranger to catastrophic shifts in fortune in the human time scale either. While Quincy and Wenatchee have done well, the further you get away from the Columbia, the harder it is to make a living. Agriculture held a lot of promise in Woody Guthrie’s time and irrigation canals crisscross the whole landscape. But like most industries, agriculture has been largely concentrated in a few hands, and automation has eliminated the jobs Guthrie was so optimistic about. While we were in Soap Lake, except for a single bottle of local wine, none of the food we ate was locally grown. If it was, it was only because it was part of a Sysco order that threw it together with Florida oranges, California lettuce, and bananas from God knows where. Someone is making a killing in agriculture, but it wasn’t the local folks I saw around me.
Instead, what Soap Lake had in spades was community, although it wasn’t obvious to the visiting eye. After spending a week there, we started to meet folks like Simon, the window washer who was sent by the drinkers at the local pub across the street to come and find out what we were up to. Or Nels Borg, who is the defacto golf pro at the Lava Links golf course, which has to be seen to be believed. Nels was in our workshop and is an undaunted community booster, even long championing the funding and construction of the world’s largest lava lamp, something which has very much remained the concept of a plan for 25 years. Like all small towns, Soap Lake has a long story for every “why?”
It’s political season in America and Grant County is a pretty conservative place in general. While there were plenty of Trump signs up (and a bunch of Harris/Walz signs, too), my experience working in the US during these times is that there is just too much work to do for the large-scale silliness to be top of mind for folks. When you are working with people who are caring for folks with addictions, childcare issues, educational challenges, and access to health care and housing, politics and policy are very real. We aren’t in weird arguments about people eating cats. We’re trying to meet the needs of vulnerable people and build public support and collaboration for health and well-being.
The work is real. Caring for veterans, fair housing policies, providing resources for neurodivergent middle schoolers, inclusive economic development, and peer-based support for people in recovery and active addiction. All of it is real and requires collaboration and multiple approaches to meeting needs. The participatory approaches and practices we are called to teach in these settings help set people up to lead in more open and participatory ways, even in a world where public conversations are coming apart and being subjected to lies, intimidation and ideology.
This group is really drawn to the methods we teach – Open Space, World Cafe, Circle, LImiting Beliefs Inquiry – and the theories and tools that help us think about creating participatory work and responses to really complex challenges that overwhelm people and systems. Sometimes, when the questions are just too big, the answer is – at least in the beginning – community. In our rush to do SOMETHING to respond to urgency, it is very easy to create situations that disempower and degrade connections. Organizations like Thriving Together play an important role in supporting the social infrastructure that builds community resilience. They can convene conversations that help diverse groups of people share knowledge and make sense of their conditions, leading to collaborations and resources. Without organizations like that and practices rooted in participatory work, agencies and organizations become siloed, disconnected and lonely.
Soap Lake is really no different from thousands of other communities around the United States and Canada and the rest of the world. It is a small town looking around for help and not necessarily finding it from higher levels of government or the corporate world that has extracted so much of its wealth and talent. It has to rely on its own resources to keep going, and remember what is essential about being a community: connecting, knowing each other, devoting a bit of time and energy to something a bit bigger than yourself because you know that when some are suffering, all are inhibited from full wellbeing.
I love working with groups like this. I admire their work and their undaunted commitment to solving absolutely diabolical problems. I learn so much about the imperative of participatory work from places like this, and I’m grateful for the reciprocal relationships of learning and change-making that we create together.
I’m back in Tlaoquiaht territory on the west coast of Vancouver Island. This is a place I once described as The Land of Tsawalk as it is the cradle of a philosophy and cosmology of interconnection and interdependence that has been refined by centuries of Nuu-chah-nulth philosophers, leaders and families. We’re here to do an Art of Hosting with the Clayoquot Biosphere Trust and 40 or so local leaders and organizers. This will be the fourth Art of Hosting I’ve done here and they are always different, responsive to the land and the ocean and the people and the way time works here. We will plan tomorrow and then we will allow things to happen, and it will be, as it always is, a rich and abundant experience.
On the way here, Caitlin and I listened to some podcasts. Two of these had moments that spoke to the place and the quality of time and landscape, and this is the real purpose of this post.
The first is. A Radiolab episode called “Small Potatoes” is about how observation and reflection can transform the most mundane of things in our daily experience. One segment of this episode featured a clip from Ian Chillag’s podcast Everything is Alive in which the philosopher Chioke l’Anson plays “a grain of sand” in conversation with Chillag. l’Anson brings an incredible perspective to this interview, including these gems:
CHIOKE:
Yeah, I mean, I think that if there’s one difference between them and I… Sorry, I’m just having
trouble with the pronouns, you know, we’re doing this interview and I’m a grain of sand.
IAN:
Yeah.
CHIOKE:
But that’s not really the way I would think of myself. I think normally I would just say, “We are sand.”
IAN:
OK.
CHIOKE:
So, you see that there’s the mass noun thing happening and it’s weird to talk to you because you
don’t have a mass noun thing. Or you don’t seem to have a mass noun arrangement. So, you say
yourself that you’re a person, right?
IAN:
Yeah, I would say I’m a person.
CHIOKE:
So, like why aren’t you a grain of person?
IAN:
Like why do I not consider myself as like a fraction of all of humanity?
CHIOKE:
Yeah, like that makes more sense. It just seems to me like if you recognise the degree to which you
owed your existence to other people you might also be nicer to other people.
Or then there is this meditation on time and change:
IAN:
Right. Do you know how old you are?
CHIOKE:
Not exactly, no. I think, it probably would amount to somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of
years. Like, I mean, I wasn’t always sand, right? Like there was a time when I was a boulder.
IAN:
Yeah, yeah.
CHIOKE:
Yeah. So, you know, like do you know about the myth of Sisyphus?
IAN:
Yeah
CHIOKE:
Yeah, that’s a funny one to me because Sisyphus is cursed to roll this boulder up the hill for eternity,
but really the boulder would eventually erode. I mean, a hundred thousand years or so. It would be
like a little pebble. Like, just stick it out, Sisyphus. You’ll be done in no time, you know?
IAN:
Eventually it’s just going to be sand.
CHIOKE:
Yeah, exactly. And in addition, the hill will also erode. And so, you know, Sisyphus after some time
would have a flat plain instead of a hill and maybe like a marble instead of a boulder.
IAN:
Yeah, so, yeah. So, he’s cursed for eternity, but really, he just needs to get through I don’t know
50,000 years or something.
CHIOKE:
Yeah, like he should really stick to it. And then that’ll show the Gods.
Amazing.
In another podcast we listened to, a To The Best Of Our Knowledge episode on deep time, Ann Strainchamps interviews geologist Marcia Bjorneru about changes to our earth and climate:
AS: Do you think the perspective of deep time can help with any of the existential fear and dread that comes with an awareness of climate change and global warming? Does being aware of the many long ages of the planet put climate change in perspective? Or make it more frightening?
MB: From a scientific point of view, I can say that Earth will be fine. The Earth will deal with the changes in climate that we’re causing and eventually, new ecosystems will emerge.
But the human part of me mourns what we’ve done and the rapidity with which old, well-established ecosystems and landscapes have been changed. And I worry for humanity, for what the next decades or century will bring as we cope with a new set of rules. That’s the scary thing to me. We’ve been able to understand the way the planet has worked through the Holocene, but now we’re changing the boundary conditions and parameters, and so many of the models we’ve developed aren’t going to be very relevant as we go further into the Anthropocene.
The past won’t necessarily be a key to the future. And there’s real sadness there. Our cultures have grown up with a certain version of Earth, and it’ll be radically different.
These insights seem to hit so much deeper out here in the Nuu-Chah-Nulth territories, where a deep sense of time and a deep connection with the ancient marine and forest ecosystems are responsible for thousands of years of occupation and well-being. Indeed, Bjorneru’s observation about the new boundary conditions of life on earth brings added importance to preserving intact large amounts of wild and ancient ecosystems. In 300,000 years as a species, humans have never lived in an environment that is as heavily degraded as it is now. We were nurtured in the complex life-giving cradles of the very ecosystems out of which we arose. We have changed those conditions of life, and who knows what effect it will have on our survival, the survival of millions of other species and the evolution of new forms of life on Earth.
Out here, on the edge of the world, the principles of tsawalk compel us to engage these questions. The perspective of deep time and deep interconnection lies all around us.
Part 1 is an introduction to this model.
In the first post on this model, I introduced the basic model. In this one, I want to explain the way I think about the lines and the spaces between them
The big moves
The “two loops” referred to in the model’s name refer to these two arcs that essentially represent the rise and fall of influence over time. In the original, as I encountered it, only the bottom arc had labels for four big movements of an emerging system. They were the original Name, Connect, Nourish and Illuminate, based on the movements named by Deborah Frieze and Meg Wheatley in a pamphlet called Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale, which described the Berkana Institute’s approach to social change. The system took on a different form in each of these locations on the map. Naming was what “pioneers” (later changed to “innovators”) did. Innovators are in the wild, tinkering with new forms of being and not necessarily doing it with others. Once they create a shared identity – a name, like “Regenerative Economics” or “New Heretics” or “Decolonizers” – it is easier to find each other, and they can begin to connect. Connecting happens in Networks, where individuals connect and share information, usually pursuing their own ends. But when folks find each other and decide to team up, what can begin to emerge is a shared purpose and Nourishing that centre that, in addition to doing individual work, creates a Community of Practice. Get some big wins, and it might be possible that your community of practice evolves into a System of Influence which can Illuminate possibilities and hold the power and resources to help people transition from the old to the new.
It is always tempting to stigmatize the legacy system as run by a bunch of stuck-in-the-mud-old-timers who resist change. But truthfully, those who manage and lead the legacy system can often feel the same about the self-styled social innovators who want to “tear down everything around them” but haven’t yet understood what they are doing or what it takes to maintain something and even institutionalize it. So much intergenerational rancour comes from this dynamic. Naming the phases of the legacy system was an attempt to give it some recognition and respect. After all, the emerging system, if all goes well, will turn into exactly this kind of system, and in due course, will be replaced again. So it’s useful to know what it takes to keep a system in place to provide stability over time.
As systems begin to thrive and become predominant systems of influence, they attract leaders whose job is to steward and protect these systems and ensure continuity and stability. Banking systems, energy systems, and social systems that require a continuity of care of people all need good stewards who actually do their job by resisting massive changes. But there comes a time when all systems have outlived their usefulness and will begin to crumble. In this time, there is a decision point when it becomes clear that death is inevitable, and in that time, the best thing to do is welcome death by hospicing the system and helping it to die well. That means ensuring that folks can easily transition to the new system and that things that won’t make it over the bridge can compost well and be used as nutrients for the parts of the new system that require resources to get established.
Globally, we are in such a time right now with energy systems and economic systems too. There are also changes to democracy that are happening as authoritarianism and populism begin to erode democratic institutions and former democracies start to collapse into oligarchies, warmongering pariah states, and populist regimes incapable of robust governance.
The small moves
The two loops are constantly interacting on different scales and in different ways. The lines matter on this map, and so do the spaces. This is less a linear description of what happens next and more a map that can describe and illuminate what is needed at different times. So as we look at the small moves on the map, think about them and where the other loop is. Realize that the “higher” a loop gets, the more it tends to ignore the positions below it, whether those are inevitable parts of its future or the moves of the other system. Influence gives you privilege. The legacy system is rarely aware of how it came to power, what it took to grow, and indeed at what cost. Likewise, the emerging loop seems always to be aware of what the legacy loop is up to, but rarely has the full picture, and very often, people in the Name and Connect spaces often actively try to dissociate themselves from the legacy system, even as they continue to depend on it for their food, money, energy, services and institutional power. The whole
And so a healthy system has folks in all these places all existing simultaneously and actively engaging with other parts of the system. When I have people map themselves onto this diagram, I often see situations where it’s all just innovators or stewards. This represents a risk to efforts because it means that the cluster of people I am working with are not in a relationship with the world around them. They are likely to experience some catastrophic failure because they just can’t see what else is happening.
At any rate, we started naming different points on the map over many years of teaching and working with this model. These points represent leadership moves that are often required in this moment. Here’s a brief description of each, starting on the legacy system. Think of these labels as places where you are more likely to have conversations and where certain skill sets will be really welcome.
The Legacy system
The Stewarding phase of the legacy system is where leaders have conversations and undertake actions aimed at structuring, stablizing and resourcing operations. This is where institutionalization occurs, systems, policies and processes get formalized, and scaling is locked in. Innovation can continue to happen, but organizations here are generally invested in fail-safe planning rather than safe-to-fail planning. Risk is managed. These activities require good traditional managers, and a lot of the work here is done by people who traditionally fall into the “expert” class in the complicated domain of Cynefin.
Once the legacy system hits a peak, uncertainty begins to accelerate. This is a sensitive time in the legacy system because the rise of experts can often cause leaders to believe that we are immune from the changes that more volatile organizations suffer from. There is a desire to believe that everything we have done in the past will continue to work. At this point, you will feel the current stirring below you as the emerging loop takes shape. If you are engaged in good strategic scanning, you will have the situational awareness to know that the context is changing so being able to plan and work in multiple futures is very useful here. If you are a fossil fuel company, by the 1990s, if you hadn’t begun the transition to becoming “an energy company,” you were probably placing yourself at a massive disadvantage. Unsurprisingly, scenario planning was developed in industries like oil or the military, where operational uncertainty was causing established ways of doing things – along with massive amounts of wealth and lives – to be put at risk.
As the legacy system’s influence begins to fade, a period of struggle begins. Realists can see the writing on the wall. Denialists refuse to accept the evidence. Power complicates the conversations. If those who control resources refuse to accept the changes occurring, the system will be starved of what it needs just as it collapses. Collapse of the old in service of the new is inevitable. We see this with churches over the past 1900 years of Christianity. Forms of the church have come and gone over centuries while the religion has endured. Christians still gather around roughly the same stories and philosophies, but the form is very different. I have seen churches close and squander their legacy because those controlling the resources refused to accept this change. Promising that anything can be made great again is a form of denialism. If what you are really stewarding is life, purpose, the provision of energy, governance or services, then you can still do this in different forms in ways that help the transition from one for to the new. Still, only those who hold power and resources can see the writing on the wall. Hosting shadow and fear, working with emotionally charged conflicts and exercising a graceful use of power are all key leadership moves in this stage. Without this, a legacy system will experience a painful death at best, or cause a civil war at worst.
When the inevitable is largely accepted, hospicing, harvesting and honouring the system’s death is a kind thing to do. It allows those served by the system to move as easily as possible into the new emerging system. The Hospice and Transition phases go hand in hand, as anyone who has witnessed a good death will know. In the energy world, Just Transition is all about this. It is about letting go of the old ways we have powered the planet and ensuring everyone can cross over into the new ways. The kinds of backlashes we see to alternatives to fossil fuels are a good indicator that we are not yet in a health transition zone. Politicians and large financial interests will continue to hold on to their beliefs even at the cost of the planet’s health or the prosperity of their citizens. Watching the premier of Alberta rail against electrification is a betrayal of her responsibility to use her province’s creative and financial resources to continue providing energy and jobs to the world. Lines like “heat pumps don’t work in an Alberta winter and EVs are useless rural vehicles” are not rationales for abandoning electrification. Instead, they represent a failure of imagination that serves only to protect fossil fuel capital interests. The Alberta workforce, trained as it is in the infrastructure of oil and gas, is well placed to transition to industrial-scale electricty production in the province. Refusing to seek opportunities because you disagree with the premise is a great way to get left behind.
A seamless transition from one system to another requires a tone of stuff to go right. At the simple level it looks like the transition those of us in our 50s and older made from typewriters to personal computers. As long as computers ran on punch cards or other interfaces, they would not be widely used by the public. Creating a user interface that looked like the one on my typewriter meant that the transition from typing to word processing was pretty seamless. I love that my keyboard still has a “return” key. I doubt many folks in their 20s know why it is called that!
Transition in social systems like health and education and child welfare is really tricky, because you need to provide a continuity of care from one form to another. In Canada, the rise of public health care would have been a massive transition and doctors, hospitals, government bodies, and all the institutional support in place in the 1960s would have been needed to support the continued quality of care for patients even as the funding and governance models in the system were being transitioned from private to public. I’ve seen how tricky this is in providing Indigenous education, health, and child and family services. The necessity for a change to decolonize these fields is always urgent, but the pace needs to move at the speed of the clients.
When a legacy system really does die, the best thing that can happen is for the resources of that system to be repurposed and reused by the emerging system. Watching the rail system in North America be ripped up after trucks and highways became the primary ways of moving cargo across the land was heartbreaking. We are now in desperate need of rail corridors both within cities and between them and that means a massive reinvestment in re-creating infrastructure that we already had. Grieving what is gone and creating choices for what comes next is a beautiful way to support transition. In my work with large Foundations, I can see this happening. Money made in previous generations is held in trust for what comes next. If governments refuse to provide the support for innovation and development, foundations may be able to.
The Emerging system
While the legacy system is the dominant way of doing things there is always innovation happening in its midst. Folks must steward the legacy system aware of where the seeds of change are happening around them. Developing sophisticated sensing practices and being in active connection with folks who are not a part of the legacy system helps to ride the journey of living and dying well. The Naming phase oif the new happens when those labouring away outside of the mainstream find each other. These are often folks who have left the legacy system “walked out” or people who have been “left out” because they were never included in the first place. Those folks are always hard at work developing energy solutions, health care, new forms of food production or cultural revitalization. It is a lonely place until you find others to work with. THis is the world of safe-to-fail work and building prototypes of the new system. The trajectory of this curve is down to begin with because there is far more failure and frustration involved in large-scale innovation than when the legacy system is investing in incremental improvements. There are very few resources available; beyond that, the legacy system will often try to crush you. You might even find the heads of fossil fuel companies leading global conversations on climate change. While such power does need to be a part of the solution, everyone knows that the way to suppress a coup is to seize control over the process.
Naming alone doesn’t generate the ideas that are needed. Good relational work helps to keep people together during the struggle. Building trust and tolerating difference with grace is really important here. Any of us involved in social movements will know what lateral violence comes from the narcissism of small differences as social movements splinter and split like a Monty Python skit.
As innovators find each other and loose connections are woven together, networks start to form. Networks are powerful ways for individuals to support their purposes. Held well, a network enables the sharing of information and ideas, but it doesn’t sustain a level of stability without a central purpose. So when networks are created and supported to create new systems, keeping it together is an important move. That involves finding ways to repurpose resources from the legacy system that are finding their way into innovation, and it also means supporting people who have experienced many failed efforts at change.
When networks mature, and a shared purpose appears, Communities of Practice are the first inklings of new stability as an emerging system coalesces into a System of Influence. Communities of practice require participation and management, meaning that nascent structures that sustain the energizing purpose at the centre of the work start to appear. As Mary Parker Follett wrote 100 years ago, “common purpose is the invisible leader,” and indeed, it is that that requires continual Nourishment.
Increasing structure and stability creates more influence for new ideas invites others, and attracts the investment needed to make the new stable enough to be a destination for the Transition. So as these structures begin to appear, trustworthiness, experience, and security help a system to become the System of Influence that Illuminates possibilities and the opath forward. By now, choices have collapsed. Once a new energy source has been determined, others will likely fall away. Electric vehicles for example, are not new at all. Still, the internal combustion engine dominated the car market in the early 20th century by the way systems of power and resourcing became stabilized creating the economy of scale needed for these machines to become the default engines of our time.
Once the transition happens, the new system stabilizes and becomes the legacy system for the next cycle and on it goes.
Next, I’ll chart a bit of the model’s provenance and how I came to it. Like most of the tools and maps I work with, these are co-created by communities of folks making sense of their work in the world.
Matteo Polisi dives into the arms of The Swanguardians after scoring a goal for TSS Rovers in the Voyageurs Cup, April 19, 2023 . I am somewhere at the bottom of that pile. Photo by Maddy Mah
Our friends Tuesday Ryan-Hart and Tim Merry interviewed Caitlin and me for their podcast From the Outside on the subject of community. It’s a really rich conversation.
In the podcast, we cover a lot of ground including really understanding the act and practice of crossing boundaries and thresholds to enter a community. There is a cost to crossing a threshold, a requirement to put something down before we take up the shared identity of community. That act is almost always accompanied by rituals and ceremonies that help to mark the liminal space through which we move when we change from what we are on the outside to what we become when we step inside.
These boundaries are important because there is no community without boundary crossing. Peter Block writes really well about this in “Community: The Structure of Belonging” and I refer to his work in the podcast. He talks about practices for entering and leaving containers, including creating barriers to participation that balance inclusion with commitment and also the practices of leaving a container. He suggests that when people leave a meeting, they let everyone know why they are leaving. Such an act is a kindness as it shows a concern for clarity in the space.
A couple of weeks ago I was reminded how important that practice is. I was having a lovely long coffee with my friend Bob Turner who is a former mayor of Bowen Island and has lived on our island since 1989. We were both sharing our experience as long-time islanders that we don’t recognize so many people anymore and nor are we recognized by as many people as used to. In the times we have lived on the island, the community’s population has turned over many times. In fact, we have probably experienced 50% turnover in the last five years alone. We are both open to change. Having devoted ourselves to living long-term in this community, we have seen it go through phases, epochs, and generational shifts. And while that’s fine there is a lingering sense of something – sadness? nostalgia? grief? – that is hard to put a finger on. And I think we named it
I was telling Bob that I was recently working with the Squamish Nation and their Language and Culture Department and I was very struck by how the Squamish people who work in that department are motivated in their work by the deep family histories they come from, rooted in the villages of the Squamish Nation. There is growth and change in those communities, but there are powerful rituals for acknowledging the losses of people.
Bowen Island is a settler community meaning that, other than a very small handful of descendents from original settler families, most people have only lived here for a maximum of two or three generations. People come and go, with very little tying them to the place. Squamish Nation people can’t do that. Your village is the source of your history and it spans back hundreds of generations out of remembered time. When someone is born or comes home or dies, there are important ceremonies that recognize that connection to the past. You might be given a name that was held by an ancestor or receive songs and responsibilities that are rooted to place. You are inextricably tied to the community
It’s just not like that on Bowen Island. Notably, while Bob and I were trying to put our finger on the melancholy feeling we were having, we decided that it came down to the fact that so many of the people we knew here and had close relationships with have just slipped away into other lives in other places. We don’t really hear from them anymore. They certainly don;t form the background of relationships and conversations that make up community. And unlike those who have died, there was no ceremony to acknowledge their passing out of our community. You just wake up one morning (or one post-pandemic year) and realize that person you played soccer with, or sang with or used to see on your regular walk is just no longer there. You don’t know why they left or where they went. There is just an absence and then a small space where they used to be that closes ever smaller until a person who was an unforgettable part of your life is suddenly “What’s his name, the guy with the brown dog that drove that old work van.”
There are boundaries we cross to join community and I wish for the boundaries to cross to leave it. When folks are leaving Bowen I love it when they tell me. I get to honour them, thank them, share some stories with them and then send them on their way. It gives all of us closure. It always a little sad when folks who have been a part of my life take off for their new chapters, but the ritual of saying goodbye makes it so much easier. Otherwise, we just imagine the slow trickle of voices flowing away into silence and nostalgia.
Átl’ka7tsem, the fjord in which I live, in a photo I took in November 2014
The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is coming up in Canada.
Every person in Canada lives in a place that, from time immemorial, has been occupied, used, loved, protected and cherished by an Indigenous culture. In Canadian law, settler governments and citizens have a special relationship with these Nations, and it has been thus since the Crown of Britain elbowed itself into the already fully occupied territories of North America. It was encoded into common law in 1763 through the Royal Proclamation and, subsequently, through treaties and later in the Canadian Constitution.
Despite a couple of centuries of focused efforts to eradicate Indigenous cultures across Canada, we still retain the obligations and responsibilities of that special relationship. Settler governments have always been hungry for the lands and resources of this place and have often acted in immoral and illegal ways in the pursuit of those resources. Even the Supreme Court of Canada has, over decades, chastised and reined in the rapacious appetite of colonizing governments to remind Canada that it is bound to the agreements it has made and to enforce Canada’s own laws on its governments.
Despite that set of obligations and responsibilities, all of which invite Canada and Indigenous Nations and people into ongoing and permanent relationships, Canada and the Provinces and the former Colonies of Britain long pursued policies like the banning of the potlatch, the prohibition of legal action regarding land claims, and residential schools and worse, through deliberate acts of genocide, like the preventable 1862 spread of smallpox across the entire coast which decimated the Indigenous Nations of coastal British Columbia.
These events aren’t news. This history is well documented, and that paradox that Canada has on the one hand, relied on this relationship to sustain its jurisdictional claims on the continent and on the other has sought to destroy the partners with whom it has a relationship in different ways.
Resetting the relationship happens on a variety of levels and ways, and one of the best ways for non-Indigenous people to do that is to take the time to deepen and appreciate the place where you live and the culture that has been nurtured in that place for thousands and thousands of years. It is, as my friend Pauline and I discovered, about Knowing Our Place.
The place i live in is called Skwxwú7mesh Temíxw. I live on an island whose historical name is Nexwlélexwm, above a bay called Kwilákm, in an inlet called Átl’ka7tsem. The names of these places are difficult for English speakers to say, but easy enough to learn, but they are beautiful sounds, guttural and rhythmic and when you hear them spoken by Skwxwú7mesh speakers they are musical. They contain meaning and relationship to other words, to other times, to stories.
It can be hard to learn about your place because Indigenous knowledge is tricky to share. There is knowledge that is held only by specific families and that is proprietary, there is knowledge that relates to legal claims in which large amounts of money are at stake. There are places that are deeply sacred to the culture and need to be protected for cultural practices to continue on the land. On top of all that, Elders, and staff in these Nations are often overwhelmed with requests for information, and they often don’t even have the capacity to respond to the needs of their own communities. Cultural and language revitalization takes time and attention and effort.
The Indigenous government of this land where I live, Skwxwú7mesh Úxwmixw, along with the knowledge keepers in the Nation are deeply focused on recovering from the systematic efforts of the Canadian government. But they have also shared some remarkable resources publically to increase knowledge and awareness of the history, culture and language of the territory and the people. If you live in this territory, perhaps this week is a good time to soak in these resources and learn more about where you live.
An atlas created by Chief Ian Campbell that contains links to many stories about the territory.
A project developed by Kwi Awt Stélmexw (now the Sníchim Foundation) to locate Squamish place names along with some pronunciation guides and a bit of history.
A set of videos of Squamish language terms and expressions from the Nation’s Language and Cultural Affairs Department.
A foundation set up to support the revitalization of the Squamish language. I am a regular donor to this foundation, and this is a good way to support effective efforts to revitalize the language. The Foundation has had a powerful effect in bringing along dozens more speakers at higher levels of fluency through it’s immersion programs and resources. Every time we are asked to do a territorial acknowledgement in this territory we donate a portion of our fees to this work. This is a good and tangible way to donate if you are participating in this year’s “One Day’s Pay” initiative, which advocates providing material benefit to Nations to put meaningful action to intentions for reconciliation.
I hope as September 30 approaches that you take the time to learn about and support the efforts to repair relationships and grow strong partnerships with the Nations in whose lands you reside.