My neighbour Raghavendra Rao Karkala has a show up at The Hearth on Bowen these next couple of weeks that is a captivating look at the images of dissent in the world. Spanning movements from around the world and from the late 20th century right up to the present day, Raghu has captured images of dissent, many of them portraits of dissenters in action. It is an unusual show for Bowen Island, in that it is explicitly political. I’m sure folks will resonate with some of the dissenters and not others. Maybe none at all.
The show portrays named and unnamed people, and while the political leaning is undeniably progressive, the longing that these images portray transcends partisan politics and points us toward dignity and self-determination in the face of power that dehumanizes and uses its monopoly of force and violence to enforce arbitrary laws and create dehumanizing situations. I think Raghu’s perspective is captured best by a pair of images of anonymous women. One shows an Iranian woman clasping a lock of her hair which she has cut and is holding above her head in defiance of the Iranian state’s enforcement of hijab. The other shows a woman in a near similar pose wearing a hijab which originates from protests in India in favour of the right to wear a hijab. The issue is self-determination and choice.
Many of these images show the dissenter’s head or face and their arms. The arms are raised or outstretched, sometimes in a fist, sometimes pointing, sometimes open-palmed. They are reaching for, pointing at, or demanding something that lies just outside their grasp. A future, a right, a shred of the dignity that has been stripped from them. It is the hands I most identify with. They are an invitation to join in the struggle from wherever we are, to do whatever we can to fully support the right of human beings to determine their futures and choose lives of fulfillment and peace.
For a privileged community like ours, I think the show poses the question of whether we can reach out to those in the portraits and join them in their struggle and dissent against the brutal use of power that dispossesses and dehumanizes them. The answer is not an easy yes. Who are these folks? Who am I in relation to them? What is the real cost of my support for them? And, hey, are some of these images directed at me?
Raghu’s show runs until November 3.
The first time I ever experienced Open Space Technology was at the International Association of Public Participation Practitioners in Whistler, BC, Canada in 1995. It changed my life, to be hosted by a small team of beautiful facilitators who took a standard conference and opened space for the 400 of us to spend a day in deep practice, conversation, and community together.
The team was Anne Stadler, Angeles Arrien and Chris Carter. What an introduction to Open Space. I can still remember Anne lighting a candle and placing it at the centre of a huge concentric swirl of chairs. I figure I owe my path in life to the graciousness of Anne’s opening and invitation to Open Space. Over the past 28 years – for half of my life so far – that one experience has set me on my course, and I am forever grateful that I made the decision to go to that conference.
Anne died yesterday at age 92.
We have lost an Elder, a steward, a mentor, and a friend. Someone who always had our backs, someone who never wavered in her support of those who were dedicated to making the world a more humane, creative, and life-affirming world. She called this the “radiant network.” I feel so blessed to have walked a little on this journey alongside Anne’s wisdom, grace, and fierce support.
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.
After the wedding by Leanne Romak
My friend Leanne Romak – the person who designed this very website back in 2014 – has a show at The Hearth, the Bowen Island Arts Council gallery. Along with artist Sonya Iwasiuk, the two artists have a small but lovely show called “Reflections: Stories of Ukrainian -Canadian ancestors” on until October 23.
Leanne’s pieces in the show are painting based on photographs taken by her uncle the 1940s. She found them poking around in the attic of an abandoned farmhouse in Manitoba in the 2010s. She has created fine paintings from these photos that have a kind of softness that blurs the shapes and places them in a kind of always-time. These uncles standing around at a wedding drinking hommade vodka could be from anytime, and the flask they are drinking out of reminds one of a contemporary water bottle, perhaps used to smuggle the contraband into the wedding reception. This particular image is accompanied by a little story of how the alcohol was made, by distilling it from soaked grain or potatoes. Little stills were set up along the North Duck River near Cowan, Manitoba and from the fire tower there you could see “all the little fires by the river.”
Images of prairie ancestors attract me. My own family on my mother’s side were settlers in Saskatchewan, some farming around Lumsden and others building houses in Regina. Prairie history is full of the memories of settler communities, many of them Eastern European communities whose cultures burned like little fires across a landscape that – especially in the case of Ukrainians – reminded them of the steppes of home from which they were driven by invasion and oppression, or lured by promises of farmland and prosperity. The conditions they found in Canada were cold and isolating and in time very tight knit communities sprang up and the little fires of co-operative spirit created the conditions for these communities to survive many decades.
Leanne’s work in this show captures the little fires of social and family life and Sonya Iwasiuk’s focuses on the images of houses, simple, functional structures on an open landscape. These buildings portray stability and community. There is only one of her paintings in the show of a single house alone. All of the others are little clusters of homes some standing side by side, some inexplicably turned away from each other, some surrounded by little unfinished ghost houses, each facing its own direction, but each inextricably linked to others. Unique and yet inescapably connected, the houses in every painting are etched with barely readable text, like the whispers of stories almost forgotten, as if the plain and standard houses are nevertheless illuminated by memory and meaning.
Both collections in this show invite us to reflect on our own stories of ancestor and community, on what is stable and longer lasting, and what is ephemeral and slips from our grasp, only to be rediscovered and reawakened by chance encounter or stray snippet of story or image.
It’s a lovely show, and it opens with a party on Saturday. Well worth checking out if you are on Bowen in the next couple of weeks.