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.
Átl’ka7tsem, the fjord in which I live, in a photo I took in November 2014
The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is coming up in Canada.
Every person in Canada lives in a place that, from time immemorial, has been occupied, used, loved, protected and cherished by an Indigenous culture. In Canadian law, settler governments and citizens have a special relationship with these Nations, and it has been thus since the Crown of Britain elbowed itself into the already fully occupied territories of North America. It was encoded into common law in 1763 through the Royal Proclamation and, subsequently, through treaties and later in the Canadian Constitution.
Despite a couple of centuries of focused efforts to eradicate Indigenous cultures across Canada, we still retain the obligations and responsibilities of that special relationship. Settler governments have always been hungry for the lands and resources of this place and have often acted in immoral and illegal ways in the pursuit of those resources. Even the Supreme Court of Canada has, over decades, chastised and reined in the rapacious appetite of colonizing governments to remind Canada that it is bound to the agreements it has made and to enforce Canada’s own laws on its governments.
Despite that set of obligations and responsibilities, all of which invite Canada and Indigenous Nations and people into ongoing and permanent relationships, Canada and the Provinces and the former Colonies of Britain long pursued policies like the banning of the potlatch, the prohibition of legal action regarding land claims, and residential schools and worse, through deliberate acts of genocide, like the preventable 1862 spread of smallpox across the entire coast which decimated the Indigenous Nations of coastal British Columbia.
These events aren’t news. This history is well documented, and that paradox that Canada has on the one hand, relied on this relationship to sustain its jurisdictional claims on the continent and on the other has sought to destroy the partners with whom it has a relationship in different ways.
Resetting the relationship happens on a variety of levels and ways, and one of the best ways for non-Indigenous people to do that is to take the time to deepen and appreciate the place where you live and the culture that has been nurtured in that place for thousands and thousands of years. It is, as my friend Pauline and I discovered, about Knowing Our Place.
The place i live in is called Skwxwú7mesh Temíxw. I live on an island whose historical name is Nexwlélexwm, above a bay called Kwilákm, in an inlet called Átl’ka7tsem. The names of these places are difficult for English speakers to say, but easy enough to learn, but they are beautiful sounds, guttural and rhythmic and when you hear them spoken by Skwxwú7mesh speakers they are musical. They contain meaning and relationship to other words, to other times, to stories.
It can be hard to learn about your place because Indigenous knowledge is tricky to share. There is knowledge that is held only by specific families and that is proprietary, there is knowledge that relates to legal claims in which large amounts of money are at stake. There are places that are deeply sacred to the culture and need to be protected for cultural practices to continue on the land. On top of all that, Elders, and staff in these Nations are often overwhelmed with requests for information, and they often don’t even have the capacity to respond to the needs of their own communities. Cultural and language revitalization takes time and attention and effort.
The Indigenous government of this land where I live, Skwxwú7mesh Úxwmixw, along with the knowledge keepers in the Nation are deeply focused on recovering from the systematic efforts of the Canadian government. But they have also shared some remarkable resources publically to increase knowledge and awareness of the history, culture and language of the territory and the people. If you live in this territory, perhaps this week is a good time to soak in these resources and learn more about where you live.
An atlas created by Chief Ian Campbell that contains links to many stories about the territory.
A project developed by Kwi Awt Stélmexw (now the Sníchim Foundation) to locate Squamish place names along with some pronunciation guides and a bit of history.
A set of videos of Squamish language terms and expressions from the Nation’s Language and Cultural Affairs Department.
A foundation set up to support the revitalization of the Squamish language. I am a regular donor to this foundation, and this is a good way to support effective efforts to revitalize the language. The Foundation has had a powerful effect in bringing along dozens more speakers at higher levels of fluency through it’s immersion programs and resources. Every time we are asked to do a territorial acknowledgement in this territory we donate a portion of our fees to this work. This is a good and tangible way to donate if you are participating in this year’s “One Day’s Pay” initiative, which advocates providing material benefit to Nations to put meaningful action to intentions for reconciliation.
I hope as September 30 approaches that you take the time to learn about and support the efforts to repair relationships and grow strong partnerships with the Nations in whose lands you reside.
Last night we were treated to an incredible concert here on Bowen Island by Susie Ungerleider and Sarah Jane Scouten, two of Canada’s finest singer-songwriters, lyricists who simply and directly reach for the soul, remind you of things you have loved and lost, of times that have rolled on and of places that hold the heart no matter how they change. Sarah Jane is Bowen Island born and raised, brought up in a family and a community that soaked her in folk music, theatre and language. She lives in Scotland now and this is the first time she has been back to play in her own small town in about seven years. I warned her on Facebook that she would be facing a love bomb of appreciation when she took to the stage at the Tir na nOg Theatre, and she was.
Susie Ungerlieder is a long-time mainstay on the Canadian music scene, and she has come out from under the cover of “Oh Susanna” as if, after 35 years, her alter ego in the song “My Boyfriend” steps into bringing the soul.
These two are accomplished crafters of exquisite song. Simply chords, folk/country/Americana idiom, but distinctly west coast Last night in concert they traded songs back and forth, in a barely amplified setting, both offering only the sparsest of guitar accompaniment to their lyrics. The songs are simple but powerful and evocative. From Sarah Jane’s lament of a World War 1 mother’s labours to Susie’s conjuring of the landmarks and zeitgeist of 1980s Vancouver, back when it used to rain and Teenage Head played in dingy clubs in East Van and the Town Pump turned you away for not having ID. What delivers them are their voices, and for both, the intensity of being back on home soil, singing songs that resonate just that little bit deeper with an audience who knows their place and knows a little of what has formed these songs.
It was a really special evening, and I’m thankful that one of this Island’s prodigal daughters returned to us for a night with stories from her travels, and a curious and incisive eye for what makes us all tick.
Funeral urn by Charles LaFond.
My friend Charles LaFond is a potter. He is also a man who understands how to make space sacred, whether it is the space inside of which life unfolds or a space between two people deepening into friendship and ever-generative mutual blessing. He is also cheeky while being earnest, and his work plays constantly with the dance of the sacred and the profane. His funeral urns, for example, come with his own cookie recipe, and he encourages you to use them as cookie jars until you expire, after which your body, which by that time will be composed of the most amazing cookies, can be stored within.
Today I was in a local gallery here on Bowen Island talking to one our local artists, Kathleen Ainscough whose work explores liminality, and especially the space where the natural world encounters the built environment. We dove deep into the subject of containers. I brought up Charles because we discussed how containers impart meaning to the things they contain. This is true of both the physical world and the social world. Kathleen noted that we carry french fries in disposable containers, making our meal meaningless. It’s a different story if you were to eat those same french fries out of your own funeral urn!
The point here, of course, is that life is enriched by meaningful experiences, and those experiences can often be induced with the emergence of a powerful and thoughtful container and a set of practices that helps us move from one world to another. Even in the example of eating french fries, there is something different, if only marginally, in eating fish and chips from a container made from one’s own local newspaper, than it is eating one from a piece of waxed paper with a fake newspaper printed on it. The same meal becomes a little different, a little bit more meaningful.
Containers induce meaning. If we meet in disposable settings, the contents of those meetings are likely to be just as disposable. If we don’t have time to build a thoughtful social container at work, then we can’t expect thoughtful responses to important challenges. No, you cannot do the same quality of work in a one-hour meeting as you can in a four-hour meeting. The emergence of rich social containers does not happen in a short stand-up meeting. Similarly, if our conversations happen on meaning-depleted social media pages, they are likely to be thin on relationality and thoughtfulness. Many of us prefer the slower conversations that happen in places like this blog, or in physical life, than on the endlessly scrolling field of social media sites.
The container itself is intimately connected to the meaningfulness of what happens within. Even in the play of sacred and profane, it is about the attention we give to what surrounds things and experiences that builds the importance of what takes (its) place within.