My friend Pauline Le Bel published the first in a series of articles in our local paper on our project to install a Squamish welcome figure here on Bowen Island. This article talks about the history of the project.
And here is the back story from our ever evolving prospectus.
An Invitation to all to Co-Create a Symbol of Reconciliation and Friendship
We are at the beginning of a community project to raise funds and support for the carving and installation of a Squamish Welcome Figure on Bowen Island/Nex?wlélex?wm. This project is a step toward deeper recognition of the Squamish People as the original stewards of this land, and an act of reconciliation and allyship that invites us all into a shared future grounded in respect and friendship.
Why a Welcome Figure?
Welcome Figures are carved by Squamish carvers to offer greeting, connection, and hospitality to all who arrive on Squamish territory. This proposed figure will:
- Recognize Squamish ownership and stewardship of Nex?wlélex?wm.
- Extend a visible, meaningful welcome to all who come to the island.
- Build upon past gestures such as the installation of the “Nex?wlélex?wm” place name at the ferry landing in 2020.
- Deepen cultural understanding and relationships between the Squamish Nation and Bowen Island residents.
- Be created in collaboration with a Squamish carver.
This project builds on the work of reconciliation and relationship building between residents of Bowen Island/Nex?wlélex?wm and our hosts, the S?wx?wú7mesh Úxwimixw (the Squamish Nation). Since before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, citizens on Bowen Island/Nex?wlélex?wm have worked with the Nation on initiatives to build knowledge, awareness and collaboration. In 2017, Pauline Le Bel, with the support of the Bowen Island Public Library and the Bowen Island Arts Council, initiated a reconciliation initiative called Knowing Our Place, to learn our true history with Indigenous People. The initiative brought Squamish Nation Elders and teachers to Bowen Island, and engaged many Islanders in learning about the Indigenous history of our place. In 2020, as part of Knowing Our Place, Elders from the Squamish Ocean Going Canoe Family came in ceremony to bless the sign at the ferry dock that welcomes people to Nex?wlélex?wm. At that ceremony the idea was born to create and install a Welcome Figure on Bowen Island, as a tangible mark of the relationship between the S?wx?wú7mesh Uxwimixw and the Nex?wlélex?wm Uxwimixw (the villagers of Bowen Island).
This project also builds on several of the Calls to Action in the Truth and Reconciliation Report and extends the spirit of those calls with a tangible, community-initiated project to recognize and affirm the Squamish Nation and its territory and to acknowledge our place within it.
There are several Squamish Nation welcome figures within S?wx?wú7mesh-ulh Temíxw (Squamish territory). You can read about some of them here:
The preferred location: the entrance to our new Community Centre
While the beach at Snug Cove was the original location — as suggested by Squamish Elder and Councillor, Alroy ‘Bucky’ Baker — the difficulty in acquiring a suitable large cedar log has made another location more viable. A smaller log has been acquired for a welcome figure as a house post welcoming islanders and visitors to the Centre and to our community.
If you want to help you can donate at our charitable Impact page and you’ll receive a tax receipt if you are Canadian.
I’m giving Current a spin. It is an RSS feed reader that is built differently. It treats RSS feeds as readable treats rather than emails to be answered and processed. It deliberately seeks to remove the stressful and addictive interfaces that drive social media and productivity software, and it offers a clean interface for the words written by my friends and those I admire and follow. This might be the best way to get into reading blogs again for those of you that don’t do it yet.
Small town libraries save the world. I live in a small town. I spend more time at the library than perhaps any other single place in this town. I use it as an office, a place to rest, a place to meet people, to learn about things, to learn how to swing dance or listen to my friends and neighbours sharing stories. So enjoy Nick Fuller Googins’ essay on small town libraries:
Another library book introduced me to Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, a maverick scientist-artist who travels the world, collects mutated insects downwind of nuclear reactors, then documents the deformities by painting slides. How fascinating! How bizarre! What could be the subject of a book itself ended up as a side-plot in my novel, set in San Luis Obispo (downwind of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant), and ready to derail Josie’s ant dissertation and academic career.
Would I have stumbled across these odd tidbits online, or through AI prompts? Possibly. Doing generative research online, however, is like dipping a glass into the Pacific in hopes of finding an “interesting” cup of water. How do you know when you have one? How does Google or Grok sift and deliver results, compared with a living, breathing human at Belfast’s Public Library? They can’t.
One reason that small-town library research works so well is because of its natural parameters. Rather than an ocean of information to click through, you get a small stack of books. A small stack of books is manageable. It’s focusing. In our era of seemingly limitless data, I for one thrive on these boundaries. By constraining my initial research like this, oddly enough, I was expanding my results.
Just today I stopped into my own small town library to set up a meeting with one of the staff members and another friend, and I walked out of there with “A Psalm for The Wild Built” which my friend Marysia described as “HopePunk” (a genre I was thrilled to know existed!) and I was sold, especially after three of the staff there recommended it and Becky Chambers’ work in general. This author is new to me, but a sweet novel under 200 pages recommended by great people ticks all the boxes for me.
My friend Peter Frinton, a long time Islander, and former Councillor, sent along an email the other week with his thoughts on the current Bowen Island Official Community Plan process. In it he included a link to an old landscape analysis by H.E. Hirvonen completed 50 years ago which the author described nine types of landscape and looked at the coastline and major watersheds of the Island. It makes for fascinating reading. Technical, well researched observations accompanied by informed opinions about the development and logging potential of different land types.
This document predates much of the explosive growth on our island that began in the 1990s and accelerated once we became a municipality in 1999. At that time, planning moved from the islands Trust to our own municipality and although we are still guided by the Islands Trust mandate and restrictions, it's fair to say that our development trajectory has mirrored much of the regional pressures and growth.
But you can't change what was put here in the first place. Tectonic forces, volcanic activity, glaciers, rain, wind, and tide shaped this island. We have to live within these constraints.
The view across the Salish Sea to Vancouver Island, on a calm and quiet New Year’s Day.
A beautiful, mild and glass-calm day to start the year. There was fog at the mouth of the Sound that lifted during the morning. We walked in a large loop around the Cape Roger Curtis lands, looping through the trails and the Conservancy lands, nature reserve, and the waterfront path. All told its about a 7 kilometre loop and it takes you through forest, down creeks, past waterfalls and along the cliff tops of Ni7cháy?ch Nex?wlélex?wm, the edge of the world, the edge of Squamish territory, the southern edge of Atl’ka’7tsem/Howe Sound. It’s my favourite place on Bowen, looking out over the wide open Strait of Georgia and the Salish Sea. From the bluffs one can see, on a clear day, the islands of Puget Sound to the south and the norther Gulf Islands of Texada and Lasquiti to the north. Across the Strait the Mountains of Vancouver Island rise, and nearly all of the northern Coast Salish territories are visible. It’s an amazing place.
Today we saw 23 species of birds, including a pair of marbled murrelets, several hooded mergansers, buffleheads, red necked grebes, and a few of the hundreds of surf scoters that spend the winter around our islands. This is going to be a big year of birdwatching, with planned trips to Costa Rica and France and several trips to eastern Canada on the docket for this year. I’m wondering if I can make it to 365 birds for the year so we’ll see.
Back at home, Spurs drew Brentford 0-0 in an insipid draw, but in the hockey world, my Maple Leafs came back twice from being two goals down to win an 11 goal thriller 6-5. Auston Matthews scored a hat trick. Hopefully this signals a change in form for one of my blue and white teams. The other one may need to do some business in the January transfer window to regain some dignity.
Light up the Cove celebrations earlier this month here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island.
It has been dark and rainy on Nexlelexwm/Bowen Island these past few weeks. The Pacific storms have rolled through with rain and wind from the southeasterlies which we call the Pineapple Express, an atmospheric river that brings warm temperatures and heavy rain. We’ve had the westerlies blow in their usually unpredictable ways, sometimes bringing rain and sometimes clearing, but this time toppling trees and kicking the power out for my neighbours on the west side of the island. And we have the frontal systems of low pressure travelling down from Alaska and sending cold fronts and waves of rain through our region. It has been dark and stormy and blustery. And I love it.
The darkness here around the winter solstice is the combination of low northern sunlight and thick cloud. When the day is over, it descends inky and thick over the island. If it isn’t storming, it gets deeply silent, with only the sounds of the sea lions in the bay reverberating along the shoreline. The darkness has an expectancy to it. The expectation of longer days, of warmth and dry spring days, and the knowledge that those days lie only a few weeks away around the beginning of February, spurs the expectation to life.
Here on Bowen there are many traditions that mark this time of year. Light up the Cove, on the first Saturday in December is celebration of the Christmas season. Thousands of lights doll up Snug Cove in almost random and beautifully gaudy ways. There is a parade of lanterns and lights and elves and Santa makes a visit, arriving at the Union Steam ship company to the delight of hundreds, this year in a golf cart. I sang Christmas carols along with a small diorama of wise men this year. Down in the Cove, local businesses set up little Christmas trees.
Following that there are craft fairs and book sales during the month, at Collins Hall, at the School, and al around the island. Artists open their studios, the Galleries all turn their walls over to local artists and artisans. This year Kingbaby Theatre mounted Mad Mabel’s Christmas for only the fourth time since 1999. It is a local story of a homeless woman who witnesses and enables the magic of the season through the transformation of the people around her. It’s a beautiful story about love and friendship and the beauty and awe of light in the darkness, made by our neighbours, featuring our neighbours.
Today, on the solstice itself, my friends Aubin and David van Berkel hosted a pagan solstice party during which participants dipped bread in apple wassail and threw it at the apple trees in their orchard to inspire the trees to return to life and produce their fruit again this year. Tonight I played with a little ensemble of Celtic musicians accompanying Tina Overbury in her production of Dagda’s Harp, her retelling of the story of the Tuatha De Danaan, the mythical Irish warriors. It is about how they recovered the stolen harp of their Dagda and in so doing restored the world to light and rhythm and music. It is a story delivered in a near sacred manner at sunset on the solstice.
Last night the Jewish community on Bowen celebrated the sixth night of Hanukkah with a lighting of the menorah candle in the Cove. 60 or 70 people took part. In the United Church today, on the last Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of Love, we felt the beginning of the release of darkness and the anticipation of the return of the sun and the birthing of the light into the world as Emmanuel, the God who takes form as a human. On Christmas Eve we will gather in the Little Red Church again to sing carols and hear the story of the birth of Jesus, an outsider and refugee, whose rumoured birth sent the dictator of his day into a paranoid frenzy that saw thousands rounded up and hundreds of children killed. We celebrated the thin thread of love that conquers all, that weaves itself through the very fabric of the universe. Unconquerable, unrestrained, unconditional. Soon it will be Christmas. Not yet, not for another four days, not until we can be sure the light is really coming back. These are the days of faith.
The time is pregnant with intense feelings and sentiments. The land and sea and atmosphere brings us to quiet and anticipation and reflection. We are invited indoors and encouraged to join together with others, friends new and old, sharing music and poetry and food and drink. Sharing stories about how this year seems darker than previous ones. We remember those we have lost, those who are struggling. Those who have fallen ill or who are recovering. We hold them in our hearts, bring them round our hearths.
And we wait. We wait in trust and faith and hope and love, prepared for the moments of joy that are coming, that are long anticipated, that are desperately needed. The solstice is a turning of time and attention.
From here, the light.