My favourite places to walk are along coastal paths, preferably along cliff tops or wild shorelines. On my home island we have very few places where one can take an extended stroll along such a place as most of the shoreline is privatized and even though in Casnada all shore up to the high water mark is public right of way, much of the Nex?wlélex?wm/Bowen Island coast line is steep and rocky and access to the intertidal zone is restricted.
But there is a glorious walk along the shoreline at Cape Roger Curtis and it is my favourite place on the island. For about a kilometer and a half, the trail winds along the shoreline, part of it even crossing a cantilevered boardwalk, pinned into a sliff side maybe 20 meters about the rocky shore below. From that trail, it is common to see marine mammals such as seals and sea lions, and I have spotted harbour porpoises, killer whales and even a humpback whale from the trail.
in living systems the most important and interesting zones are the ecotones, the place where two ecosystems meet. This tends to be where the most life is. Where the forest meets the sea is a rich area of nutrition and growth. And Cape Roger Curtis is doubly special and edgy becasue it is the point where Atl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound meets the Strait of Georgia which makes up the half of the main body of water that is the Salish Sea. It is here that currents swirl and meet, with the salty ocean water meeting the fresher water that flows from the glacier and streams that rise above our inlet. The coastla trail winds down the west side of the island, around the Cape and along the south shore, which in the Squamish language is called Ni7cháy?ch Nex?wlélex?wm, a name which captures the edges of the forest and the sea, which is also the edge of Squamish territory. From here on out is the big wide world.
Today that churning seas with its 4 meter tides is nurturing schools of anchovy and herring which have draw sea lions back for their annual feed. They have been hauling out in large number on one of the unused docks at the Cape over the past several years. At times there are as many as thirty around – especially when the Biggs Killer Whales are out hunting them – but today there where only four or five. Offshore there was a large raft of surf scoters, number 5-600, and gulls and cormorants were similarly hunting and diving into schools of these rich feed fish. In the nearby forest townsend warblers and song sparrows were calling, while in the skies above a battle was raging between a pair of ravens and an eagle. It appeared as if the eagle’s appetite had disrupted the ravens’ family plans and they were angry.
Much of my spiritual practice comes through a tradition of monastic and contemplative practice that was formed in places like this, on the edges of continents, on the edges of territories, on the ecotones between the known world and the mysterious beyond. It is a place where the heart is awakened and the senses sharpened, and the power of the natural world is so strong that it overwhelms the temporary intrusion of a human.
For Mother’s Day, have a read of Crawford Killian’s new piece in The Tyee about fungi and forests as he charts his learning about mushrooms, trees, and fungal networks through disbelief to reverent awe.
Our common mother is so much more than we can ever understand.
Read: Why fungi are more sophisticated than we can imagine thetyee.ca/Culture/2022/05/06/What-Do-You-Say-To-Thinking-Forest/
There are two musical offerings on Bowen Island tonight. At 7pm, The Ladies Madrigal Singers (“The Mads”) will be singing a program of choral arrangements of Irish songs and other pieces for spring including Deer Song, from the oratorio “Considering Matthew Shepard.” I’ll be joining the choir on Irish flute tonight, the first time I have played feadóg mhór with an ensemble in performance for literally years. The event is at Cates Hill Chapel, and tickets are $15 at the door.
The Mads are a Bowen Institution, a women’s ensemble that is the beloved project of my friend Lynn Williams who has led the group since she arrived on Bowen 20 or so years ago.
Also tonight from 6-9, the Bowen Island Pub features its monthly jazz night, with guitarists John Stiver and Steve Fisk, Steve Smith on bass and Canadian jazz legend Buff Allen on drums. Expect a set of standards and blues rendered by unbelievable talents. As an aspiring jazz guitarist I simply dream of being able to play at this level of mastery. I’ll probably sneak in after the Mads concert to catch their last set.
These kinds of evenings are really important in a little community like ours. These musicians are community members, friends, neighbours, people who might do some work for you or who you meet out and about. On an island like ours, where the last ferry comes home from the city at 10pm, if you want entertainment, you make it yourself. We are blessed to have incredible musicians here (we have three Juno winners living here who regularly perform). And we are blessed that they lend their talents to creating moments of togetherness that are essential in a world that relates increasingly through bytes, bits and outrage.
May Day came and went, a day to celebrate both the beginning of Celtic summer, lighting the fires of Beltaine to burn away the previous year, and a day to remember the international struggled for workers rights.
My friend and neighbour here on Nexwlélexwm (Bowen Island) Meribeth Deen wrote a beautiful and thoughtful article about the bloody labour history of Vancouver Island and the story of Ginger Goodwin. (Meribeth is a beautiful writer, by the way and you should hire her for things.). Goodwin was an organizer of coal mine workers who was killed in the bush by a police officer in 1918, prompting Canada’s first General Strike.
The coal fields of British Columbia were the sites of some of Canada most fierce union activity largely because the men who owned the coal mines were, to put not too fine a point on it, complete bastards. I admit that the story of Ginger Goodwin was not familiar to me but certainly the names of Dunsmuir and Bowser are. Dunsmuir, because his name adorns a major street in downtown Vancouver, and Bowser, because there is a town named for him on Vancouver Island. But despite Bowser’s name, I never knew that he was a xenophobic racist who mass imprisoned migrant workers from eastern Europe, include Ukraine, because he considered them a threat to Canada while the First World War was raging 8000 kms away.
Last year when statues were being toppled and things renamed (like Ryerson University) one of the intellectually lazy objections to these actions was that we would forget history if these names were removed, that these people did incredible things, and they should be honoured. But reading Meribeth’s piece reminded me that in naming streets and places and statues after these folks what we are actually doing is forgetting history, erasing it. We wash it clean, assuming that everyone with a statue or a road or a town named after them was a good person. In fact, if with people of well known names, we have to deeply research the history of these people to really know them and, unsurprisingly for a country that was founded on genocide, the exploitation of workers and the ruthless pursuit of profit and wealth, these places are often named for people who more than likely pursued one of these strategies.
A key part of colonization is erasing the knowledge of what is here in favour of a more comfortable and familiar set of names. The parts of Ontario I grew up in were named by settlers from Ireland and Scotland and named for places that were meaningful for them. It reminded them of home. And it erased the Anishinaabe and Onkwehón:we names that were already on the landscape and that encoded a much deeper story of home and belonging.
Here in Skwxwúmesh-ulh Temíxw where i now live a famous example is the naming of a pair of distinct mountain peaks called “The Lions.” Towering over Vancouver, these twin peaks got named by settlers after the totemic animal of the British empire- the lion. The lion has been a feature of British heraldry for nearly 1000 years and so it was pretty much the ultimate naming. Boom. Lions. Putting the British in British Columbia; and because you can see these peaks from everywhere, you’ll never forget it.
But 1000 years is a mere blip in time when you consider that from time immemorial those two peaks have be called Ch’ich’iyúy and Elxwí?n and are the embodiment of two sisters who brought a fierce peace to the coast. From the Squamish Atlas:
Ch’ich’iyúy is one of two names used for the mountains known as The Lions. The other name is Elxwí?n. While the meaning of the name “Elxwí?n” is not known, “Ch’ich’iyúy” means “twins”. These mountains have the name for “twins” because they are said to be two Squamish sisters. There are different stories about these two sisters, but the most famous is a story about peace: When a girl becomes a woman, the Squamish tradition is to celebrate with a big feast. A great chief had two daughters that came of age in the same spring, and he prepared to host the biggest feast the Coast had ever seen, inviting all the neighbouring peoples to come for several days of eating, dancing, and celebration! A few days before the feast, the daughters went to their father to ask a favour – they asked if he would also invite a tribe from the north which the Squamish people had been at war with since ancient times. They wanted peace for their peoples, and all the peoples of the region. Their father agreed and the northern tribe came to the feast, welcoming in a new era of peace. When the Great Spirit saw what the two sisters had done, he decided to make them immortal by turning them into the two mountains, Ch’ich’iyúy, so that they could be a symbol of peace in the region forever
Story as told to Pauline Johnson and recorded in The Two Sisters.
Almost all of the historical and Indigenous place names in this territory refer to the physical characterists of a place, it’s traditional use or to events contained in an ancient story that encodes a teaching like this. There are no place names named for people, and on the contrary many people carry the names of places.
History is not an objective set of facts. It is a whole series of contested and different stories and experiences, and is as subject to the whims and dynamics of power as branding. marketing, and narrative manipulation today. When we choose to name a place, we bring a projection on to it. Perhaps Bowser didn’t know much about the town that was named after him. But what does it say about the people that DID name that town? What were they thinking? By encoding his name on the landscape, it reveals the intentions of settlers – much in the same way that the erection of Confederate statues long after the end of the Civil War were a message that Jim Crow laws were in effect in this place. The photo on this blog post is the inscription on a Confederate soldier statue that still stands in the town square of Denton, Texas, taken in 2019.
I have no trouble removing or changing the names of places or removing the statues of racists. I’m not totally in favour of naming things after individuals anyway. But if you feel that something is being lost by changing names, consider what was intended by the naming in the first place and ask yourself if it’s time for a different story.
I was reading a facebook thread today where someone posted about changing the name of British Columbia to something else, something indigenous. And one of the responses was “no. too much change, too fast.” And that got me thinking.
The process of changing the name of a place does indeed take awhile, but the act is instantaneous. One minute you are living in the Northwest territories, and the next minute you’re living in Nunavut. One minute you’re living in Upper Canada, and the next minute you’re living in Ontario. One minute you’re living in the colony of Newfoundland, and the next minute you’re living in Canada. One minute you’re living in the city of Scarborough, and the next minute you’re living in the city of Toronto.
And of course this happens all the time all over the world as countries change their names cities change their names and regions change their names. Bombay to Mumbai, northern Somalia to Somaliland, Cambodia to Kampuchea and back again, the USSR to the CIS to just Russia (and a bunch of other countries.)
It happens in our personal lives too. Many people change their names when they get married. Many people take new names when they change genders. People change their names for all kinds of reasons and we get used to using the new ones out of kindness and respect and because it is right to call people by their chosen names.
The point is that the changing of names is an instantaneous act and it rarely changes anything else instantaneously. We just keep living, making dinner, looking after our families, tending our gardens and going to work. So the objection to a new name is often rooted in some other kind of anxiety despite the fact that it happens all the time all around us. I don’t completely understand the emotional connection to the name “British Columbia.” I don’t really relate to events in Invermere or Atlin. Even folks outside B.C. call us all coastal hippies with warm winters when in fact the vast majority of the province is nothing like that. To me it’s just a label on a map, but of course I didn’t grow up here so I might be missing something. I certainly don’t feel a provincial patriotism or allegiance with people 700 km away just because we have the same kind of license plates. But I have been actively involved in working with changing the names of places including on my home island, Bowen Island, which has been known by at least three official names and several nicknames through its history.
For for the vast majority of its history, Bowen Island was (and still is) known as Nexwlelexwm because we live in Squamish territory and that’s the Squamish name for the island. When the Spanish visited here they briefly named it Apodaca, and that is still a name associated with one of our three mountains and one of our water taxis. A few weeks later, Captain George Vancouver changed the name to Bowen Island – named for one of his English friends who never saw this place – and it has been also known as that for the last 200 years or so. The island also has a few nicknames including The Rock and The Happy Isle. So it’s clear that names are not at all permanent in time and we all have multiple ways of referring to our place.
The question of renaming British Columbia, especially as we develop a deeper and deeper awareness of the traditional homelands in which we live, is an interesting prospect. But the land area known as British Columbia is somewhat arbitrary and doesn’t really conform to any of the traditional social or geological boundaries in this part of the world. British Columbia spans across more than 30 different indigenous languages, which are at least as diverse as the languages of Europe, or the languages of a similar size territory in Asia. In fact “British Columbia” is essentially the name of a mini continent populated by dozens of nations with distinct histories and cultures and names for their places.
For me I would be less interested in changing the name of the province, and much more interested in finding a way to acknowledge the names of the traditional territories in formal ways. For example it would be great if Canada Post would deliver mail to my address if it were sent like this:
In fact, you could probably send me mail this way if you included the local postal code. But the point is I actually feel a closer connection to Squamish territory – which encompasses the familiar islands, mountains, oceans and rivers of this place, than I do saying I live in British Columbia. This is the territory in which I live. It’s very different from the Syilx, and Nlaka’pamux territories the east of me which are full of desert and sagebrush, or the Saulteaux territories to the north east which are rolling hills and prairies. These landscapes are as different to where I live as the languages are to each other.
So perhaps it’s not too much change too fast to begin thinking about the places we live beyond a pro-forma territorial acknowledgment. Perhaps it’s time to deepen our connection and understanding to the territories in which we live and understand that our history here, no matter how recent, is bound up in the ancient history of the people who have lived on these lands from time immemorial, and that what happens here in the present day is the result of a shared history that has been made up of moment of both astonishing brilliance and horrific violence.
Perhaps indeed it is time to place the ancient names officially back on the maps and highways and mailing addresses so that we have a true sense of where we live and what it takes for us to continue to be here. It is one way we can begin to reverse the tide of genocide; restoring the names is critical to recognizing the continued existence of the peoples in whose lands we all reside.