It’s November now, the snow is finally calling the mountains. The salmon are back on Bowen. And the Northern Super League is drawing its inaugural year of professional Canadian women’s soccer to a close. Our local team, the Vancouver Rise today secured a spot in the playoff final with a penalty shootout win after the two leg semi-final against Ottawa Rapid went to extra time. Holly Ward, a bright young forward who has seemed snakebitten for much of the season scored the equalizer in the 84th minute and penalities decided it.
I’m pleased for our former Rovers supporters’ player of the year, Kirstin Tynen, who is the backup keeper for the Rise. She’s only played once this year, but got a point in a wild 3-3 draw. On the losing side, Desiree Scott, a Canadian national team LEGEND played her last game today and former Rover Stella Downing sees her scintillating rookie season come to an end.
Toronto and Montreal are battling it out tomorrow for the second spot in the final. Whatever happens, a former TSS Rover will lift the cup next weekend. Watching these women finally get their chance to play pro at home is what this league is all about.
I’m returning to Bowen Island after a week in Ottawa working and visiting friends and the old haunts we occupied back in 91-94 when we lived there. Some things are the same, like The Manx pub which opened the same week we arrived right at the end of our block. Or good old Octopus Books, now in the Glebe where I bought Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s latest book The Theory of Water. Of course much in Ottawa has changed since the early 90s, and it is fun to find new places like The Rowan where, among other things, we ate a plate of salt-roasted carrots that had been grilled. It was one of the finest things I have ever tasted.
Being back in Ottawa also brought me to a state of mind that was a little bit slower. We lived there long before smart phones and social media had been invented. I spent many days in Ottawa writing poems, reading journals and lingering over words. I served a short stint as an associate editor of ARC magazine, so I always associate Ottawa with its literary scene.
During this trip, I travelled with the latest issue of Poetry and a couple of poems stand out.
Try. Elegy at Middle River by Courtney Kampa which threw me to the ground.
Or how about this one from Rigoberto Gonzales called The Luna Moth Has No Mouth which is both astonishing and true.
Gonzales, by the way, won the Ruth Lilly Poetry prize and in his reflections on his craft published in the October edition of Poetry, he remembers a line he wrote years ago which someone quoted on Twitter: “what is a kiss? The sound loneliness makes when it dies.” That is some lovely.
Poles and buildings at the Haida Heritage Centre at Kay ‘Llnagaay
In the midst of alarm and manufactured paranoia about the recent Cowichan Tribes case confirming their Aboriginal title to some lands in Richmond, I offer two things to help folks see this decision in it’s historical context and it’s promise for the future.
The first is this: the CBC published a useful background article on the history of these lands and the Cowichan’s relationship to them and it’s worth reading this to understand that this is neither a new issue or a particularly novel issue. The Crown obligated itself to negotiate in good faith with First Nations back in 1763 and in 1998 Aboriginal title was confirmed as existing in law in Canada. The current state of affairs is just one more stage in the long road towards reconciling the reality that both the Crown and First Nations have interests in land that are accommodated in the Constitution. We just need to work them out together.
And to that end, I came across this quote from Squamish chief Joe Mathias from back in 1987. He was attending the First Ministers conferences that followed the partition of Canada’s Constitution in 1981. The federal government committed to a series of conferences with Indigenous leaders and provincial and territorial premiers to figure out what section 35 of the new constitution was really about. That section confirmed that “The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.”
There was a fantastic pair of documentaries made about these conferences that are available at the National Film Board of Canada, called “Dancing Around the Table.” In one of those, Joe Mathias says this:
“What’s going to happen if they reach an agreement with the Aboriginal people, is we put something in the earth that’s never been there before: a relationship. Between a Nation of Indian people and European people. That’s the whole point of creation – a planting of the seed. Putting something on the earth that wasn’t there before. so that in modern contemporary Canada, we have put something on the earth that was not there before.”
Back when Joe Mathias said that, in about 1987 or so, I was in the first year of my undergraduate degree in Native Studies at Trent University. This was the kind of thing we heard all the time about the relationship that was being shaped in the Federal-Provincial First Ministers Conferences on Aboriginal Constitutional Matters (link is to one set of proceedings) and the desires that Indigenous peoples and Nations held for the future of Canada when something new, novel, just and creative could happen here. The documentary shows the intransigence, disrespect and outright hostility that many of the federal and provincial leaders held for First Nations, Inuit and Metis people, but that was nothing new for the Indigenous leaders in the room. Since the very beginning of relations between newcomers and Indigenous populations these were the kinds of people and attitudes that they encountered. Every effort to reach agreements was predicated, from the Indigenous side, on this idea of relationally, co-creation and opportunity. And it seems from the government side of the treaty (and often unilaterally) table the idea was to dispose of Indigenous interests quickly, conveniently and forever.
This is the reason why First Nations keep going to court on these issues and the reason why the keep winning. And even when folks like the Cowichan Tribes or the Haida Nations say “WE ARE NOT INTERESTED IN PRIVATE LAND HELD BY INDIVIDUALS” many people choose not to hear that. I think that comes from a deep shadow of colonization. The folks stirring up the hate see these relationships as a zero-sum game, becasue that is what the colonial mindset has been: “It is either our land or it’s their land.” But that has never been the case on the Indigenous side of the table, except perhaps were things were so framed by a zero-sum game that people had to find to keep what is theirs before inviting a future relationship. Private land title sits on top of provincial land and federal land. This is why you cannot do whatever you want on your own private land. You need permits to cut trees or store toxic waste. You have to abide by local by-laws about septic fields and water runoff. You cannot take your land out of Canada and give it to the United States or Denmark or Kenya. Land title and jurisdiction is not “either this or that.” Aboriginal title is NOT the same as fee simple or provincial or federal title. They can all co-exist.
So with all of the rhetoric (much of which is just plain incorrect legal interpretation bordering on deliberate misinformation) I encourage us all to understand what reconciliation has always been. It has ALWAYS been about planting a new seed together, of using the potential of relationship in Canada to do something remarkable and world-leading and showing humanity what will happen when we place what Joe Mathias would have known as “chenchénstway” – lifting each other up – at the centre of possibility, collaboration, development and relationship. This is the untapped potential of pursuing pathways towards reconciliation. It is hard work but it is SO beautifully rewarding for everyone. I plead with my fellow settler Canadians to deeply understand what reconciliation really means, to hold the potential for a world which no one can see alone, and to approach the conversations and deliberations around this work with the same generosity of spirit and vision that Joe Mathias and hundreds of other Indigenous leaders have always had. It’s an invitation. Let’s say yes.
Happy 23rd blog-iversary to Ton Zjjlstra’s blog. He is one of the originals, and a person I still read daily:
My blog has always been a way of sharing things that stood out for me, responding to what others shared, and especially enjoy the type of conversation that creates (thanks to all of you who engage).
Mine too, although in the dark social media years, it became a bit dormant as I posted on Facebook and twitter, where the engagement was much higher and often more interesting. But not any more. The cost of those platforms was too high, because the speed of interaction eroded my attention too badly. I’m in recovery from those platforms, and part of that means taking back this space. The empty carbs of social media engagement have been replaced by the delicious savouring of much more infrequent but much more thoughtful connection.
Speaking of which, it seem that since June I’ve been in a pattern that has established itself as a practice. My posts generally fall into two types of categories now. There are the longer essays that relate in some way to my professional life. If you’ve subscribed by email to this blog, or follow me on LinkedIn those are the ones you will see. You might get a few a month.
The other kind of post is the old school blog post, like this one, very much in the vein of Ton’s quote above. These are things I have noticed that I think you might enjoy too (or not), and these notes become my little memory palace. They are literally about anything. In a way my blog has become my searchable “morning pages” for writing and getting things out of my head before my day starts. I’ m not sure every reader of this blog has an early-21st century idea of what these meandering thoughts are, but essentially they are annotated links. A “web log” if you will. If you subscribe to my blog through RSS, or stumble upon it through a search or a link posted to Mastodon or Bluesky, you get these ones as well. Enjoy the typos, poor grammar, half-thoughts, broken links and strange questions!
We can engage on those platforms, but I’m happy if you have something to contribute to the conversation here, where the whole world will see it and can engage instead of just those who are members of the various walled gardens and exclusive clubs that are the social media apps.
PS. I had my own 23rd blog-iversary of Parking Lot (the actual name of this blog) on September 6.
Some important and dire warnings about the way the current federal government is going about its business making policy on artificial intelligence. Or perhaps, more accurately, how it is letting AI make policy on artificial intelligence and other things.
One of the dangers of using AI for public policy can be seen in this article, published in Slugger O Toole, a blog on Northern Ireland issues. The author uses a context-free ChatGPT definition of reconciliation and then asks the question “how are we to practice the vague, abstract notion of reconciliation?” It sent alarm bells ringing in my head. Here is the response I wrote:
You’ve lost me at using a ChatGPT definition of reconciliation. Defining reconciliation is as much a part of reconciliation as enacting practices and structural reforms to sustain it. The context of reconciliation matters tremendously. In South Africa it was a crucial decision to take as a majority population finally assumed power once the state became democratic. The potential for terrible violence was present and the way the majority took power mattered, hence the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Here in Canada reconciliation is a socio-historical imperative, to transcend centuries of colonial policy that have been called genocidal by the government’s own inquiries. But it is also a legal concept in which Aboriginal rights and title, which are recognized in Canadian law, need to be reconciled with the Crown’s rights and title and interest in lands. If you will excuse my directness, using a ChatGPT definition of reconciliation in the context of real, meaningful and very specific needs is not only lazy writing, but potentially dangerous and destabilizing public policy. Reconciliation is not a goal, it is a direction of travel and, perhaps, an evaluation criteria in which future generations can say: “they took actions which reconciled us.” It requires deep sensitivity to the dynamics of the present, and a commitment to that ongoing direction in the context of the unique affordances of time and opportunity which people might pursue together.
Seems to me that the essence of democratic deliberation is to work out what we can do together given the current state of play. I’m sure AI has it’s usefulness in deliberative practice in democracies, but our federal government’s blind pursuit of it as an engine for economic growth and Hughie Beag’s uncritical use of it to set a public policy agenda that ignores the reality of the society in which he is embedded show to of the dangers from succumbing to it’s seduction.