Starting a new regular type of posting. These are a series of short notes and thoughts, too small to warrant a post, but looking for a home nonetheless, and possibly becoming more. I invite your curiosity on any of this…queries may set me to growing these little guys into something more substantial.
- Conversations that matter is the home for the world cafe Europe blog. Good reading there.
- Dave Pollard on the distinctions between dialogue and debate. Dave wrestles with his conscience on this one and comes up with a finer grain analysis as a result. Interesting as usual, and deeply in tune with some stuff I’ve been thinking about lately regarding politics and conversation.
- Sitting outside by the fire last night, I realized why the human eye can preserve its night vision when it is exposed to red light. The dying embers of the fire that were keeping me warm did not in the least affect my ability to peer into the forest at the passing deer, or to scan the heavens for globular clusters. That seems like a useful survival tactic. I wonder what the 21st century eye is able to see that will preserve our species?
- You have to read this to believe it. The Sock-A-Month knitting club gets shut down by a bank after the gnomes suspect a scam. You see? If I didn’t have a little notes category, where would I have blogged this?
- Music at the moment: One-named Canadian singers Feist and Issa (formerly Jane Sibbery, new album forthcoming). My ten year old daughter is listening to Avril on her iPod. My goodness, they grow up quickly. (Psst, Alex, I snuck some Zero 7 on there as well. She loves The Pageant of the Bizarre!)
I learned a new word this week: teechma. It’s the Nuu-Chah-Nulth word for heart, but it conveys a deep meaning when you hear an Elder in her village talking about why she thinks something will work, why she is hopeful about changing the system solely because we spoke about it from our hearts, our words coming from teechma.
I was with my mates Wally Samuel, Kris Archie and Kyra Mason this week in three isolated villages on the north west coast of Vancouver Island, Oclucje, Ehattesaht and Ka:’yu’k’t’h’. We were travelling there on behalf of VIATT to hear what these communities, so forgotten in many ways, have to say about the work we are doing to reclaim the decision making authority over Aboriginal children and families.
These communities lie far away from the mainly populated east side of Vancouver Island. To get to the west coast, you have to drive an hour or so over a graded logging road to the little town of Zeballos, perched at the head of Zeballos Inlet. Zeballos was a gold mining town almost a hundred years ago and there is a little fishing there now and mostly logging. In the summer, there are tourists who roll into town heading out for fishing charters or kayak trips. Zeballos itself is a funny town…everything there seems to be in a state of half renovation. The Zeballos Hotel, in which you can get a great meal (french fries being a speciality) has tables that are too high and banged together out of particle board, which makes you feel like a kid when you are tucking into your burger. It forces one to have something in common with the Ehattesaht kids who mill around IMing on the two computers in the corner. They even have half finished haircuts, which was amusing for my friend Kris who found kindred spirits! Across the lobby, the bar is a great place for a bottle of beer, still smoky and also half finished. Across the street is a general store run by a cranky Bulgarian who makes you test the batteries you buy from him before you leave the store. His shop is also half finished, and a half eaten jar of pickled sausage sits on the counter next to the cash register. And the batteries fail on you anyway, the moment you put them in your camera.
This is the end of the world – most regulations don’t apply in practice. Even when the RCMP strides in from across the street, nothing really changes and no one pretends that anything is otherwise.
From Zeballos, we headed out to the communities which lay around the town. Each of the three meetings was a little, different, each held in slightly different kinds of buildings, each with different people there. At Oclucje, a small Nuchatlaht village about 30 minutes from Zeballos, we met in a building that had been condemned. The guy fixing the floor was a Heiltsuk carver who stopped his banging away at the mold and took off to go work in his shop, returning a half hour later with a moon plaque for me. During the meeting, my mates Wally and Kyra and Kris talked to the Elders and I lay on the floor with the kids drawing on some flipchart paper. We drew pumpkins and snakes and men and women and they borrowed my fine Staedler pens and coloured in a “Welcome to the Hall” sign, the hall that was falling apart under our feet. When we asked them what we could bring for the meeting, they said “donuts,” and two dozen Tim Horton’s trucked all the way from Campbell River were consumed in short order. Once the sugar rush hit the kids they all streamed outside and I rejoined the meeting, listening to the tale of a seven year struggle to have one child returned to the community. The effort involved everyone, and the goal posts have changed all the time, so the job is still unfinished. This is what our work aims to change.
That night we drove back to Zeballos and held a meeting in the half-finished youth centre at Ehattesaht, which is on the other side of the inlet from the town. About three dozen people showed up, most of them kids initially, but after supper arrived – chili and spaghetti and ham and salad – more adults and some youth showed up. The kids kept running around, in an out of a door that led to the top of an unfinished second story staircase. I had paranoid visions of them plunging off the landing onto the gravel below, but it didn’t happen. One of the kids, Margaret, took my camera and shot all kinds of great pictures of her friends and cousins. It’s sweet to see the world through her eyes.
On the way home we passed a sign that warned us to watch out for children and wildlife. In the middle of the road was a deer skull, and a bike lay tipped in the ditch. There are great signs around Zeballos.
We lodged at the Mason Lodge, where I took my half-filled room reservation, letting myself into room number four only to find it already occupied by a suddenly nervous man. This was remedied by Kris and Kyra sharing a room and I took Kris’s room. Customer service is sort of a novelty in Zeballos. Hospitality means that the guests are free to self-organize their sleeping arrangements. It worked out just fine and breakfast in the morning was quite nice.
After breakfast we headed over to Fair Harbour to catch the water taxi to Ka:’yu’k’t’h’. Fair Harbour got battered by 11 hurricanes this winter. The worst of them, which actually had an eye, topped out at winds of 159 knots, strong enough to rip the top off one of the wharves and to pick up gravel and sandblast all the trucks in town right down to the bare metal. Wednesday though, the weather was beautiful, the water glassy calm and the wind just a zephyr.
The water taxi trucked us through some beautiful little islands and inlets and we got our first glimpse of the open Pacific Ocean. Wally’s mum was born here and although she died when he was three, he spent his summers in the area and he has a name from this territory, so it’s like a second home for him. We took a little detour to visit the old village site of the Ka:’yu’k’t’h’ people. One one side is the ancient village and the present day summer village, a broad beach with a grave yard at the top, on the lee side of a little island that backs onto some reefs and the open ocean. Across the water is the old reserve village with some houses still standing. The people left this community thirty years ago, moved because of fresh water needs to the present site which is actually on Vancouver Island proper, on the very northern tip of Kyuquot Sound.
After we noodled around the old village, we headed for the present day one and sat with Elders parents and hereditary and political leadership in a circle and talked about our work of putting children at the centre of the system of child and family services. On our more optimistic days, we call this work “practical decolonization” and judging from the response we get from the Elders especially, this label is my favourite. The Elders all week have been talking about the hope that they have taken from hearing about our work and hearing how it comes from our teechma, helping communities and agencies to be able to serve children and families without the provincial government making all the policy decisions. That’s what makes this stuff worthwhile to me and what drives me and my mates to a high level of accountability.
We are planning on visiting all 52 communities across Vancouver Island this year, including a batch more on the west coast around Clayoquot Sound. I’m looking forward to it.
If you have been following along with the story of threats against Kathy Sierra, this will likely be no news to you. But if you haven’t you can start by reading her blog post about this situation in which she was vilely and violently threatened by an anonymous blogger, the act and response to which launched a flurry of bad feelings everywhere.
Yesterday, Kathy and Chris Locke, one of the bloggers she had singled out held an actual conversation and the harvest is here is a dual set of Coordinated Statements on the whole affair. What is important to note is that they enjoyed the conversation with one another, they met, truly and openly as human beings who had a common purpose that overrode their stories about one another. And it seems like they discovered each other for the first time.
This sort of goes to show that, as lovely as the internet is for helping us have conversations, the conversations that really matter are the ones that are face to face (or mouth to ear, in this case, the next best thing). No amount of virtual back and forth can substitute for the genuine progress that can be made in two hours of storytelling. The internet helps us do this, but it is not a proxy for doing this. I applaud Kathy and Chris for their simple act of grace.
Christy Lee Engle has posted a beautiful pair of quotes on sacred conversation. There is so much goodness in it that i republish it here for your edification.:
Peggy Holman recently posted a beautiful article called “Evolution, Process and Conversation: A Foundation for Conscious Evolutionary Agency” to the Open Space listserv, originally written for the Evolutionary Life e-magazine.
In it, she wonders/suggests:
“Could it be that consciousness is the latest evolutionary innovation that, when applied to conversation, catalyzes a new form of social system, the conscious co-creative collective, the radiant network of deep community? I believe that conscious conversation is the path to what Thich Nhat Hanh imagined when he said: “It is possible that the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and lovingkindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation.” [Thich Nhat Hanh, “The Next Buddha May Be a Sangha” in Inquiring Mind, Vol 10, No.2, Spring 1994]
which reminds me of a teaching I read a couple of years ago — a similar co-evolutionary idea in a different costume:
“‘Messiah’ in the original Hebrew is understood by the Kabbalists, quite astoundingly, to mean ‘conversation’. Master Nachum of Chernobyl, mystic and philosopher, points out that the Hebrew word for messiah, Mashiach, can be understood as the Hebrew word Ma-siach — Messiah, meaning ‘from dialogue’ or ‘of conversation.’ [Me’or Enayim, Parashat Pinchas] His assertion radically implies that the Messiah is potentially present in every human conversation — every mutual act of voice-giving.
All conversation is sacred. The ability to have an honest face-to-face talk in whihch both sides are true to themselves, vulnerable and powerful at the same time, is messianic. Simply put, sacred conversation is the vessel that receives the light of Messiah.”
It’s really impossible to overstate the worry I heard in people’s voices today. In our meeting an Elder named Billy Bird spoke briefly before lunch and reminded the group just what had been lost – the salmon runs, the crab and prawns, the seaweed beds, the clam gardens. The Namgis people and their relatives on Gilford Island, Kingcombe Inlet and Oweekeno are ocean people. Their life is on the ocean and without access to the ocean the fear is that they are no longer a people at all.
For thousands of years these people have lived in the Kwak’wak’wakw Sea, tending the resources, enhancing them where they could. In the past 150 years the Namgis people have been herded onto a reserve, had every single one of their food sources regulated by a foreign government that denied them citizenship for the first 100 of contact, even as it was busy distributing the ocean’s resources to others. Now the fishing industry is concentrated in very few hands, fish farms are wreacking havoc with the local wild seafood and there are less than half a dozen working boats in the community. Those that are left fish for the community, but simply eating salmon does not make you a salmon people. Without the experience of spending most of your waking hours on the water, handling the products of the ocean garden and tending to it, knowing in the heave and fall of the swell where your next meal is coming from, you are not an ocean people.
I heard another heartbreaking story today. Boats are so scare that an aunt who wanted to give her nephews a chance to get out on the water had to charter a whale watching boat from nearby Telegraph Cove at huge expense to herself simply to give the youth in her family a taste of an experience that is their birthright. And when the big day arrived, she was sick and couldn’t go and the trip was off, and the timing hasn’t worked for them to go since then. It must be akin to living indoors for months at a time, even as the weather outside is beautiful and everyone else is enjoying it. To say that some feel imprisoned is not overstating it.
Alert Bay is not a big community, and the Namgis people are not a people who are used to spending years at a time on land. Without being on the water working and gathering food there is a tremendous amount of stress built up here. When that stress combines with despondent feelings of failing one’s ancestors and the self-judgment that was taught so well at residential school, the combination sometimes leads to suicide. And without access to traditional food and traditional ways of harvesting food, an epidemic of diabetes has arisen. A large number of the community members are currently on a diet, similar to the low carbohydrate Atkins diet, but more built around traditional foods to see if it makes a difference in the diabetes rates. The early research is proving that it does, and so conversely it is proving that restricting the access of these people to their traditional food sources is akin to infecting them with diabetes.
If it sounds bad it is because the truth here is deep and painful and it rises close to the surface. But as with the upwellings in the channels of the Broughton what comes up is often nutrient rich as well. With the same passion that they tell stories about life now, they argue for solutions that are very much in line with what we know about the way the world is going. With the concentration of wealth in a few places, a global economy dependant on oil and the conversion of local places to branch plants for multinational corporations, the foundations of capitalist economies in the west are vulnerable to large scale and abrupt changes. As climate change accelerates, and the price of oil climbs as the resource becomes more and more scarce, the centralized economic systems of the western world risk collapse to more local, more self-sufficient regions. First Nations people, who have long been canaries in the coal mine with respect to control over resources, are now at the leading edge of this emergent future, calling for restoration of local control and responsibility to local communities. Over the past two days I heard passionate calls for broad decision making powers to be returned to the local communities, even if they are exercised in collaboration with government. I heard people describing the vast amounts of volunteer labour that local people put into sustaining ocean resources despite the fact that the exploitation of these resources are largely concentrated in the hands of a few distant owners. Despite that, Namgis and Oweekeno and Gilford Island peoples continue to look after their oceans and their resources, and to propose ways in which others might join them to sustain what is left for the benefit of those who need it most.
It has been a good road trip. The conversations in the gathering, framed and anticipated as hostile and angry, have instead been powerful and constructive. Through the simple act of listening, of hearing people’s concerns and voices and truly understanding where they are coming from, we created a small crack of daylight here. One staunch table-pounding advocate told me at the end of today that “I might be naive but I sense a little bit of hope.” That is exactly what we were trying to do, and now it is the responsibility of both the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the local communities to make good on the nuggets of possibility now emerging in public voices which, on bad days, are laced with toxic vitriol and bitter rhetoric.
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I can’t let this trip go by without commenting on the food. As we were gathered to talk about the natural food resources of the Kwa’kwak’wakw Sea, we were fed from these same resources. Yesterday it was clam chowder and smoked salmon salad sandwiches on homemade molasses bread. Today an incredible halibut soup topped with seaweed and flavoured with oolichan oil, one of the healthiest food products in the world. Oolichan smells incredibly bad and tastes like you would expect rotten fish to taste like. This because it IS rotten fish – a small oily smelt that is left to ferment and then processed into almost pure grease. It is brutal to eat raw, and is the definitive “acquired taste.” But it is also treated like gold here on the coast. Traditionally trails between First Nations that live on opposite sides of a watershed are called “grease trails.” Oolichan grease was and still is traded for west coast resources on Vancouver Island, or over the mountains on the mainland into the dry interior. Oolichan is the basis of intertribal relationships and protocols and in remembering these trails, and this little stinky fish, the relationships are also remembered. I once sat in the bighouse in Fort Rupert and listened to Kwagiulth and Ahousaht singers from opposite ends of the grease trail give their renditions of the songs that accompanied the trade. They were amazed that songs that hadn’t been sung in years were almost identical, leading to a great spontaneous celebration of unity and friendship during which we sang and danced and kept each other company around the fire that burned at the centre of the huge building. This food is more than just what is for supper. It is everything, the be all and end all. Without traditional food there are no traditional people and no traditional practices. If we are to retain our traditions we must retain our indigenous ways of relating to the land and using those relations to relate to one another, and then we can rediscover the hope that comes from stewarding our own lives.
[tags]namgis, alert bay, oolichan[/tags]