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Category Archives "Bowen"

A calendar of seasons for my time and place

January 20, 2019 By Chris Corrigan Bowen, Featured, First Nations 2 Comments

It’s a beautiful day on the south coast of British Columbia.  A strong northwesterly breeze is pushing wind driven swell down the Strait of Georgia onto the southwestern shore of Bowen Island. There is snow on the mountain tops, but down here at sea level, it’s 7 degrees. The sun is shining and everything points to a clear evening to watch the lunar eclipse.

 
The rest of North America is locked into a cold freeze, and next week I’ll be tasting a bit of it with a two week trip to New Brunswick, Ohio and Ontario. This is the time of year people on the west coast write to their friends and relatives in the east and show pictures of the daffodils coming up.  It doesn’t feel like winter here anymore, and that’s not unusual for late January. Saying it’s winter until March 21 really has no bearing to what teh rest of the continent is going through. I’ve lived on this island for more than 17 years and I long ago decided that there needs to be a different way to talk about seasons here.


For various reason I identify much more with the Celtic calendar, which marks the year into six week blocks, like this:

  • February 1 – Imbolc (“In the belly of the ewes”) which is the first day of spring and the new year.
  • March 21 – Spring equinox 
  • May 1 – Bealtaine (“bright May Day”) marking the beginning of summer and the flourishing of life
  • June 21 – Summer solstice and mid-summer day
  • August 1 – Lughnasadh (“assembly to honour Lugh, the god of light”) which is the beginning of the fall harvest season
  • September 21 – Fall equinox
  • November 1 – Samhain (“the end of summer harvest”) which is really the beginning of winter and marked by commemorating ancestors and death.
  • December 21 – Winter solstice and mid-winter day.

These markers line up much more with the feeling of seasons on Bowen Island. We mark some of these days locally, with a May Day festival, and a huge community celebration on Hallowe’en as well as its solstice celebrations.  And it usually feels very much like winter is over by February 1.  


Of course there is an ancient calendar in this part of the world, which from time immemorial has been known as Skwxwú7mesh temíxw. Today I spent time going through the amazing Squamish-English dictionary, reading and thinking about the seasons.  The Squamish traditional calendar is focused on activities related to ceremonial and food gathering rhythms. It makes sense that the word for season is “tem” which means “the time of.” Instead of experiencing disconnection (like “it doesn’t feel like winter”), in Squamish the name of the season is based on what is happening on the land and sea, bound up in activities upon which the lives of human beings and communities depend.  The season changes when life says it changes.


Traditionally Squamish seasonal names therefore aren’t generally tied to moons or the length of days.  Looking at the names for seasons gives you an idea of where the attention of people is in any given time of year. The Squamish version of the European calendar uses names from seasons that roughly correspond to each  month. Squamish new year begins in February, when the frogs start singing again, which signifies the end of winter. Of course this happens much earlier in the year on Bowen Island than it does up in the Cheakamus, Elaho and Squamish River valleys. Here on Bowen Island (Nexwlélexwm in Squamish), the frogs will usually start singing during late February.


The calendar is such a clumsy way of describing the rhythms in this territory. It creates arbitrary names and times for what is happening. That clumsiness is the result of the colonization that separated people from the rhythms of the lands and waters and, if you know the way things happen in the territory, you can tell reading through these names how clumsy the fit is between the Squamish times and the calendar months: 

  • February – tem welhxs (time of the last snow, or when the frogs come to life)
  • March – tem slhawt’ (herring time)
  • April – tem tsá7tskay (time when the salmonberry shoots are collected)
  • May – tem yetwán (time when the salmonberries ripen)
  • June – tem kw’eskw’ás (warm time, also used as a word for “summer”)
  • July – tem ?w’élemexw (when the blackberries are ripe)
  • August – tem t’aka7 (time when the salad berries are ripe)
  • September – tem cháyilhen (salmon run time)
  • October – tem p’i7tway (time when the deer mate)
  • November – tem ekwáyanexw (fall time)
  • December – etl’im lhkaych’ (short days month)
  • January – mina lhkaych’ (small or child month)

So it makes sense to talk about seasons, especially on the south coast where lunar calendars are hard to use given how cloudy it is during much of the year.  There are may other seasons that didn’t make the cut for translation to the calendar, during which the primary activity of the people is described:

  • Tem mílha7 – “Winter dancing season,” when ceremonies take place in the longhouse.
  • Tem t’ixw – “Winter,” meaning the time to go down, possibly from the idea that people would go down into pit houses in this time of year, or come down into the low parts of the land.
  • Tem s7áynixw – “Time of the eulachon”, a small oily smelt that arrives in rivers in April, although these fish are almost completely extirpated from Squamish rivers now.  This happens for a short time right after herring season in late March and early April. 
  • Tem kwu7s – “Spring salmon harvest time” which begins in early summer.
  • Tem achcháwem – “Salmon spawning time,” from late August through to late November during which all the focus is on harvesting fish for the winter and spring. This is when the biggest runs of salmon come back to the territory, mainly chum and coho.  This is also the time of the heaviest rains and storms on the coast, which fill the rivers, enabling the fish to find there way back to their home streams.
  • Tem p’í7tway ta sxwi7shen – “Time when the deer are mating.”
  • Tem kwáxnis – “Time when the chum salmon run.”

So living on Bowen Island in a community of settlers anchored in the rhythms of the land and sea, and the cultural traditions of newcomers, I’d say we could develop a calendar of sorts that relates to the way the we live here.  We aren’t a big time ocean people, and are without a fishing fleet so our rhythms are much more dictated by what is happening in the forests around us. Inspired by the Squamish tradition of letting the frogs mark the new year, my first draft of such a calendar might look like this:

  • Forest music time – in which the frogs wake up and the dawn chorus of songbirds starts to sing.
  • New shoots time – when the skunk cabbage and salmon berry shoots begin to appear.
  • Blossoms time – first flowers on the berry bushes and the cherry and plum trees around the island.
  • Salmonberry time – Late May and into June, when the salmon berries ripen.  Time to order firewood.
  • Huckleberry time – Following the salmon berries, time of the first swims in the sea
  • Salal berry time – the heart of summer when the salal berries are at their ripest.
  • Blackberry time – August, when the blackberries are weighing down their bushes.
  • Storm season – lasts about two and a half months, from the end of September to the middle of December and begins after the tourists have left and during which we hunker down and celebrate Hallowe’en, Remembrance Day, Light up the Cove and the traditional Christmas season.  This time of year is dark and the predominant winds are the southeasterlies that bring rain and power outages. 
  • Winter – when the major wind storms are gone and we get snow at sea level and the Squamish winds are most dominant.  This usually lasts from December to the end of January.

Sitting by my fire, I’m totally enchanted by the poetry of our place and time here on our little rocky island.  

Note: the typeface on my blog does not render all the Skwxú7mesh characters correctly. In this post the underlined “k” and “x” characters are replaced with regular k and x’s. You can find the correct spellings for many of these words at this link.

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A beautiful reflection on the Art of Hosting on Bowen Island

June 20, 2018 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Being, Bowen, Facilitation, Featured, Learning One Comment

Bowen Island is where I live and work.  Since 2004 there has been an annual Art of Hosting learning event offered by a really solid team of my most deeply experienced and connected friends and colleagues.

Last year Scott Macklin came and made a beautiful video capturing the experience we craft here.  Enjoy it and if you would like to experience it for yourself, please join us this November.

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Pick up the unclaimed portion of joy

October 5, 2017 By Chris Corrigan Being, Bowen, Featured, Flow 9 Comments

Another two friends died yesterday. They were well known men in our community and both part of the hosting world on our little Bowen Island, integral to providing experiences for visitors that allow us to provide well hosted learning experiences for people here. They didn’t always do it loudly, but they left legacies that are so important to what we are able to do here.

It has been a really strange few months with 9 deaths of people I know to various degrees; from close friends to intimate strangers. Two from suicide, one from a heart attack, the rest from cancer. Several “before their time.”  It’s numbing. There are moments I’ve lost count of who has died since July.

I have been thinking lately – especially reflecting on the suicides – that perhaps my job might be to pick up the unclaimed portion of joy that my friends left in the world. It is a crazy world. There is suffering all around us and I understand the idea that “remaining normal in an insane world is insane.”  Yet I feel strongly how life moves in me and through my friendships, and communities. I feel immense gratitude for fleeting moments and I realize that I am at times a fierce practitioner of play. Whether I’m playing soccer with my son in our local recreational league, playing music with my daughter and friends, creating workshops, supporting my local soccer teams by singing with hundreds in support of our players – I feel the intense surge of life that comes with the portion of joy that is left to me to claim.

These days I sing for Kay and Dan, the two Shannons, Kieran and Chris, Matthew and the three others (wow, I just remembered one more.)  I sing and play for me, find sensemaking in a crazy world in the presence of connections with friends and strangers over the long cadence of lives intertwined or the fleeting moment of random encounters on the buses, sidewalks and trails.

Bernie de Koeven, a master practitioner of play, who himself is dying publically, shared this quote from a comment on his blog followed by his own reflection:

“Speaking of the very end, I recently read a modern classic, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. It explains culture (which I think includes play) as an outcome of this denial. In a sense then, we should not “be calm and carry on” to the very end, but arbitrarily, playfully, insistently dedicate ourselves to the never-ending. I think this is what many people mean by “love” and maybe what Bernie means by play.”

So we have on one side love and play; and on the other, the dead and dying; the somber and despairing. We mustn’t let ourselves get confused by any of these. Love and life, after all, are manifestations of each other. Love is the invitation to life. As is play. It’s all a matter of perspective, don’t you know. From this side, it’s all so obvious: love, play, life. Fear. Dread. Death.

You stand here. The rest there.

Feel the embrace.

So that’s where I am these days. I know the world is crazy right now. I know it’s hard to find the good in the news but you won’t find it there because the news asks you to be only a passive consumer of the world’s pain and joy. What we need to do is rise from our seats and participate in the world as fully as possible. Life is the ultimate infinite game. The joy we seek is located in the little interactions and small kindnesses initiated or received; in play.

My wish for all of us is that we can claim the portion of unclaimed joy that others have left for us, and especially those who rode who claimed more than their share of suffering and rode it to their their end. I know clearly what they want for us, those they loved and whom they left behind. It is to continue living.

I’m here, playing, hunting joy, embracing it when it comes. Not always finding it, but cultivating the eye that sees it in the small and subtle currents of living. And you’re there too, doing your thing, but now reading this and playing along, at least in this moment.

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Lughnasa under smoky skies

August 1, 2017 By Chris Corrigan Art of Harvesting, Bowen 2 Comments

Where I live, on a small island off the west coast of Canada, the traditional Celtic season markers make more sense for our community rhythms and the cycles of our landscape than the solar seasonal calendar, and I’m not as versed in the Skwxwu7mesh seasons well enough to relate to those.

Today is Lughnasa, the traditional commencement of the harvest season.  The province of British Columbia is burning in many places, and today the winds have brought us smoke from the interior to colour the sun pink in a grey and orange sky.

The produce in our local markets is showing tremendous diversity, as the brassicas and squashes and fruits that were planted in the spring join the early harvest of greens and peas. On the land and sea, salmon are returning, the deer have dropped their fawns, and already there are signs up for shares in pigs and turkey’s and sheep for the winter.

It’s also a time of harvest for me from a year that has seen much in the way of professional and personal growth. I am moving from a deep study of theory to a deeper informed approach to practice, wanting now to focus my professional craft on simplicity while beginning to think about how to share everything I’ve been learning over the past 8 years or so for the benefit of other practitioners, especially those who are starting out.  I am also looking deeply into my own life and where I am on this journey that has delivered 49 years of living and still confounds me.

There are some new learning offerings being planned for this year, including a session on using complexity for social change that I’m doing with Bronagh Gallagher here in Vancouver and over in Glasgow.  I’m also preparing an online course with my friends at Beehive Productions on Chaordic Design.  Add to that two Art of Hosting workshops in November: our 14th annual offering here on Bowen Island and one in Amsterdam with old friends.  These are all harvests for me.

 

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Principles for living reconciliation meaningfully

June 19, 2017 By Chris Corrigan Bowen, Conversation, Featured, First Nations 9 Comments

Detail from Richard Shorty’s work “Genesis 1:20-25” 

Wednesday is National Aboriginal Day and ten days later, Canada commemorates its 150th birthday. Since the centenary in 1967 and even since Canada 125 in 1992, the whole enterprise of Canada has become deeply informed by the need for reconciliation between indigenous people and communities, and settler people and communities.

We are all treaty people. Everyone in Canada who has citizenship is also a beneficiary to the treaties that were signed and made as a way of acknowledging and making binding, the relationship between settler communities and indigenous nations.  The ability to own private land, for example, is one way in which settlers benefit from treaties that were signed long ago, even if those treaties were made hundreds of years ago in other parts of the country. Canadian society depends on the ability of governments to provide access to land and resources, and that access flows directly from treaties. Not from conquering and taking. From legally binding agreements.  You are a treaty person.

The promise of Canada has never been properly delivered to indigenous communities. Over decades courts have declared this. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission declared this. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples declared this.  It is evident in data and research and popular culture.

The need for reconciliation is long overdue.

For thirty years I have worked in this space, and lately I have been working with a small set of principles, when settlers ask me about reconciliation.  Here they are:

  1. Reconciliation requires restitution. For reconciliation to be real it must be accompanied by restitution. Reconciliation efforts aimed at increasing awareness are fine, but they should have a direct and material benefit to indigenous people and communities,  When indigenous communities do well, we all do well.  Restitution can happen in all kinds of ways including the return of lands and property, but it also requires the honouring of the ongoing relationships embedded in the treaties in which mutual benefit was supposed to flow for the future.
  2. Reconciliation is unsettling.  My friend Michelle Nahanee talks about “emotional equity” which is one way of thinking about what it costs for indigenous people to interact in non-indigenous contexts. It is inherently unsettling. For non-indigenous people a true commitment to reconciliation means unsettling notions of what you take for granted. Just understanding how you are a treaty beneficiary is one way to suddenly become unsettled. And I have often said that the only job for settlers in reconciliation is to be unsettled. It is from that place that we can all meet and work on a different set of ideas than colonization.
  3. Settlers need to make the first move.  Still with the idea of emotional equity, it is important that settlers make the first move in a reconciliation initiative. Indigenous people cannot be expected to be the ones to make it easy for everyone to do reconciliation. Settlers must make the first moves, and must do so in all the vulnerability and fear that comes from making the first move.  Do something, do it badly, be open to learning and keep going.
  4. Reconciliation is a verb.  The right term is “reconciling” because we aren’t ever going to acheive a place wher ethe world is reconciled. It is an ongoing project. If the project of the last 150 years was about creating a Canada where there were once only dozens of nations, perhaps the project of the next 150 years should be about figuring out how to make a country possible that reconciles the interests, duties and obligations of it’s history and privilege with the results of the colonization that enabled that privilege. There is no certain answer, but I have faith that together we can create a place that is better than either of us can do separately.
  5. Its about relationship. The reason why Canada has to confront the horrible legacy of colonization is that Canadians entered into and then promptly forgot the nature of the relationships that were set in place by the laws and policies of 1763. In that year King George proclaimed that nations west of the Atlantic watershed needed to be dealt with as nations, and according to the rule of law. That proclamation, recognizing the importance of relationship over domination, became the basis for all Aboriginal law in Canada and is still to this day the standard upon which adherence to the rule of law is applied. All Canadians are born or move into a relationship with indigenous people and the relationship is direct, personal and beneficial.  Reconciliation needs to restore this sense of mutual dependancy and correct the balance.

I will be hosting conversations on reconciliation at Canada Day commemorations on (Nexwlelexwem) Bowen Island this year with my friend Pauline Le Bel, who is running a series of interesting events this year called “Knowing Our Place” about the relationship of Bowen Islanders to the Skwxwu7mesh Nation and to our At’lkitsem (Howe Sound). If you’re on Bowen, join us. If not, host your own and think about why reconciliation matters to you.

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