Alberta was a woman who changed my life. She was a residential school survivor and a member of the United Church of Canada and very respected We Wai Kai Elder from Cape Mudge on Quadra Island. In 1985 she told Bob Smith, then the Moderator of the United Church of Canada that the Church needed to apologize for the destruction of Indigenous culture and spirituality (watch this video). Bob took on the challenge and in 1986, at its biennial General Council in Sudbury, the Church brought forward the proposal to issue an apology. I was an 18 year old delegate to that meeting, representing Toronto Conference and I had one of the 600 or so votes in the room that day.
I remember impressions from that day: a room full of residential school survivors, residential school employees and adminstraors, and some church members who had never heard of these things at all, Indigenous Elders, ministers and congregation members like Tom LIttle and Murray Whetung and Art Solomon and Stan McKay were there. We wrestled over the wording, some wanting to spare the feelings of those who had preached the Gospel with “good intentions” and others who were so fired up by the crying need for justice and restitution that we lost patience with the decision wondering why it she be so hard to Apologize, when that simple act was all Alberta was asking us to do. In retrospect I remember it as one of the few meetings in Canadian history when a huge cross section of the people involved with the crimes of Residential Schools were in the room seeking a restorative pathway forward together. We were made up of victims, perpetrators, ignorant bystanders and everyone in between.
We came up with a short and meaningful Apology.
Long before my people journeyed to this land your people were here, and you received from your Elders an understanding of creation and of the Mystery that surrounds us all that was deep, and rich, and to be treasured.
We did not hear you when you shared your vision. In our zeal to tell you of the good news of Jesus Christ we were closed to the value of your spirituality.
We confused Western ways and culture with the depth and breadth and length and height of the gospel of Christ.
We imposed our civilization as a condition of accepting the gospel.
We tried to make you be like us and in so doing we helped to destroy the vision that made you what you were. As a result, you, and we, are poorer and the image of the Creator in us is twisted, blurred, and we are not what we are meant by God to be.
We ask you to forgive us and to walk together with us in the Spirit of Christ so that our peoples may be blessed and God’s creation healed.
And I remember that the Apology was not accepted and that was brilliant because it meant that we had to demonstrate action to make good on what we were seeking. If we wanted to be forgiven, we needed to work to undo the harm. For me this was a clear decision. I was about to enter my first year of university at Trent and I decided to major in Native Studies, as it was known then. It set my life path off in a way of trying to live up to the apology that I was a part of making, so that at some point in the future we might be personally and collectively worthy of forgiveness.
Now the United Church has done that in a number of way, but it has been 36 years and we have still not been forgiven and we may never be forgiven and to be honest that doesn’t bother me at all. An apology is not about seeking an outcome. It is about seeking a pathway forward together.
Years after that meeting in Sudbury, in 2007 Alberta Billy opened an Art of Hosting training we were doing on Quadra Island with folks from the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team (VIATT). There she welcomed me and Toke Moeller, David Stevenson, Kris Archie, Kyra Mason, Patricia Galaczy, Barb Walker, Carol Ann Hilton, and other Elders, child and family service workers and Indigenous leaders and families to her territory and her life’s work. And it was there that she learned about the four fold path of the Art of Hosting which she later used to plan some leadership work she was doing with Elders and leaders.
I never met Alberta Billy in Sudbury and I didn’t made the connection on Quadra Island that our lives had braided together in that way. But as I remember her today, I’m glad that something of the nourishment I harvested from the journey she sent me 21 years before on could find its way back to her that day.
My condolences to her family and all who loved and were touched by her life’s work.
This quote from Richard Rohr, is one of the core principles of the Center for Action and Contemplation.
Humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living.
It is also good complexity praxis, good leadership practice and good pedagogy.
I was on a coaching call this morning where this came up too, listening to a team I am working with describe the trap we often find ourselves in as consultants, tempted to provide the new things a group should be doing, often in the form of recommendations or lists of actions and projects to be managed. The idea is that we often try to get folks to learn and be different and then generate projects or plans that they can execute.
And that is not a good way to do it in emergent, complex and dynamic environments. If I want to learn to think differently I need to put myself in situations where the constraints afford me different possibilities to act differently. For example, I am currently learning to play jazz and I am currently without a teacher meaning that I am relying on lots of online resources to help guide me. The danger with this is that I can just learn how to play licks and lines and chord progressions or scale exercises based on what someone else is doing. This is not really making music, but rather making sounds. If I’m not careful all I will learn to do is ape teachers, master exercises or imitate recordings and that’s not why I want to learn jazz. I want to learn jazz to be able to express myself differently on guitar and for a myriad of other reasons that I play music.
Like any language, jazz has a grammar and a vocabulary. The grammar is the harmonic and melodic theory that underpins the style of music, some of which is shared with other musical forms and some of which is uniquely “jazz” in the same way that languages have different dialects which may even be mutually unintelligible amongst speakers of the same language. The vocabulary is made up of phrases and lines that one learns in context, much as you might hear a familiar word or phrase being spoken in a language you are learning. Using these phrases and lines, based in the common rules of grammar (or deliberately breaking them) requires, almost literally, speaking them out.
And the remarkable thing is that when I play this new material either against a backing track or, ideally, with another person, I learn to THINK differently about the music I am making. There is no amount of study of written notes and harmonic theory that will make me a jazz musician. Playing jazz is a way of thinking about music, expression, collaboration, culture, improvisation, order, tension, control and creativity. It must be lived into.
Or as I wrote down during my coaching call this morning, we grow through what we go through.
Teaching people to think differently is impossible without providing the affordances first for us to act differently.
One of son’s first solid foods was salmonberries, which start to ripen just now. When we first moved to this island in 2001 it was late June and the salmonberries were just finishing their run. He would pop them off the bushes as we walked by with him on my back. They are such an important plant on the coast, not only for their shoots, berries, and leaves, but also for the way they embody the mutuality and interdependence of forest and sea on this coast.
This is uch a gorgeous piece from Cúagilákv which will appear this year in The Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. It is well worth your time to read or listen to. There is so much to savour in this piece about the relationships between salmonberries, salmon, ancestors, family, and land. But this paragraph stands out for me:
All flourishing is mutual. Thriving salmon can be read, in context, to predict thriving salmonberries, and thriving salmonberries can be read, in context, to predict thriving salmon. One key to reading the patterns lies in the kind of intimate knowledge that comes through careful observation and the tenderness of ancestral stewardship practices.
That is beautiful. All flourishing is mutual. All abundance is mutual. If one is getting all the riches at the expense of others, there is no abundance and there is no flourishing. Reciprocity is life.
Congrats Cúagilákv!
I live in a small island which is a part of the Islands Trust, a level of governance that ensures that the unique character and ecosystems of our islands our protected and preserved on behalf of all British Columbians. I happen to like the Islands Trust and consider it a useful level of governance, not without its need to reform and change, but in general we live in a unique place and we need to unique form of stewardship.
Not everyone feels the way I do.
There is a tiny but extremely vocal group of anti-government fear mongers who go by different names and handles. Mostly they remain anonymous hiding behind titles like “Concerned Island Residents.” Their leaflets are transparent attempts to stoke outrage, promising that the rapacious appetite of the Island Trust is coming to eat all of your wealth,or that a tree policy “Is putting your home at risk of forest fire.” and that it’s an archaic and dysfunctional organization that is bloated and dictatorial. The usual libertarian talking points. Their communications are often handled by Bill Tielmann, a notorious freelance political muckraker who never seems to say no to lighting dumpsters on fire for pay.
Today in my mailbox I got a leaflet from the Gulf islands Coalitions (or the Southern Gulf Islands Coalition, or the Concerned Island Residents or the Southern Gulf Island Resident and Business Coalition, its hard to tell because every one of these groups is listed randomly throughout the leaflet as the contact or sponsor or organizer.) At any rate, the leaflet contained this pie chart used to show the results of a survey of 189 people.
Along with the fact that their listed social media handles are wrong and their email address is either misspelled, or they misspelled it when they signed up at gmail, makes me almost think that this is a parody.There’s not much more to say about this kind of thing. Every couple of months before the Islands Trust quarterly Council meeting, something like this gets mailed out and honestly, it leaves me wondering if they know anything about the issues they purport to be outraged about. They seem to be mostly interested in raising anger, pointing fingers, and endlessly whining about their right to have bigger houses, more docs, and lower taxes.
There are issues to discuss about how we are governed in the world, and how we need to change things – especially in fragile social and environmental contexts like the Gulf Islands. Climate change, the financialization of property and land, reconciliation, development and population growth pressures, increasing needs for social services in remote and small communities, food security and local economic sustainability are all issues that require us to constantly engage in meaningful and real policy issues.
We need a mature conversation about the policy implications of these issues and how to address these challenges. I know why anonymous groups send out these kinds of pamphlets. I know that they think they are coalescing a righteous movement towards a bright future.
But honestly? An elementary school child will tell you what is wrong with that chart. So, sheesh. Let’s stop this nonsense and have some proper, informed conversations about our common future.
You might not know that one of the things I have developed a deep passion for over the past 20 years or so is football. Soccer. Association football. Fütbol. It started when I lived in the UK as a kid and supported our local team Tottenham Hotspur. It waned a bit during the 1980s and 1990s when it was hard to watch games and no one in Canada really cared about the sport. But one of the great gifts of the internet was rekindling familiarity with the sport that I love.
I love it for so many reasons, not the least of which is that it is complexity practice embodied, that it is about community and belonging, that it is about accessibility and passion and love and activism and development. And you get to stand and sing with people in public, which is never a bad thing. It is a beautiful game and it truly is “life.” It is an expression of culture and place and time that embodies so much of the struggles that take place throughout society. And it has the capability to drive you into all kinds of emotional territory and gives us a chance to explore all of those topographies of being human.
So this past weekend was kind a distillation of all that and I just wanted to record it all for posterity to see what happens when 48 passes in life of a football supporter.
For me the weekend began on Friday night when TSS Rovers played two matches in the men’s and women’s divisions of League 1 BC. League 1 is a semi-professional tier in Canadian soccer and, on the men’s side, is the second tier. On the women’s side it is currently the highest level of women’s soccer as we don’t yet have a domestic professional league in Canada. We don’t have promotion or relegation in our soccer system at the moment, and so our teams exist so that we can develop players and move them into higher tiers of the professional game. They players get promoted not the teams.
TSS Rovers is a club I have been involved with since they fielded a team of all-Canadian men in the United Soccer League 2 which is the fourth tier of American soccer. We started a supporter group called The Swanguardians, which a radically inclusive group (anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic) inspired by similar groups in places like St. Pauli in Germany, and Detroit City FC in the USA. Over the pandemic years our support for the club developed into a few of us working with the club to create a supporters trust and this year we became the first club in Canada to offer up to 49% of it’s equity ownership to supporters. We have sold over 650 shares to 300 co-owners since December and our initial offer is still open.
One of the initiatives our Swanguardians supporter group has undertaken, is a a Prideraiser, which is an event done by North American supporters groups throughout Pride month. Pledge an amount per goal and every goal scored raises money for a charity. This year we are supporting Rainbow Refugee in Vancouver. The club is also raising money for its newly minted Foundation, to provide funds and scholarships to kids who want to play soccer and develop their game. We kicked off our Prideraiser campaign on Friday and our women’s team scored 7 goals right out of the gate. Subsequently they scored another 2 yesterday and the men’s team scored 3 yesterday to to bring our 48 hour total up to 12 goals with 8 matches left to play in June! Over $600 raised.
Saturday the Vancouver Whitecaps played at home and although I have been an active supporter of that team for 14 years, I gave up my season’s tickets over the way they have handled numerous sexual abuse scandals over the years. Until there is a leadership change there I won’t be attending live matches, but I still follow the team and have many many friends who are active in the various supporters groups. On Saturday the contracted security force at BC Place where the Whitecaps play, made a complete botchup of a situation and ended up ejecting one of my close friends who is the President and lead capo of the Southsiders on the basis of provably false accusations. BC Place security has been plagued with issues for many years now relating to general security theatre and under trained staff being given too much policing authority, and this event was a real nadir. Football and life collide in all the ways.
Yesterday I was excited to celebrate my birthday with my family by all going into Vancouver to watch our National Men’s Team play a World Cup preparation match against Panama. I started the day by watching Grimsby Town secure promotion to the English Football League (and there is a whole other story why that matters to me) and then went into the city to meet our kids and their partners for the game and a birthday dinner.
Our men’s team has been amazing in this World Cup qualifying cycle, ranked 38th in the world now after moving up from 119th. We won our Confederation qualification tournament and qualified for our first world cup since 1986. We have immense talent on the team right with the likes of Alphonso Davies, Jonathan David, Cyle Larin, Atiba Hutchinson, Stephen Eustaquio, and many others. This is our golden generation of men’s players, and they are finally starting to show their stuff on the world stage. I would argue they are beginning to reach to the levels that our women’s team have occupied over the past ten years!
Unfortunately our National Soccer Association has been dithering on negotiating a contract for them and after hoping for discussions to take place since March, the Canada Soccer Association finally met with them on June 2 and tabled an offer that was far below what the players considered fair. As a result the players refused to train and then at the last minute, without an acceptable contract in place for their service, refused to play the Panama friendly. There are a million nuances to this situation, but as always I back the players who have devoted their lives to this game and to representing Canada and growing the Canadian game. It is their bodies that do the work, their lifetime commitment that has secured history and while of course they are supported by lots of folks, ultimately in Canada we do a poor job of supporting our men’s and women’s teams. They have carried the country on their backs, have been willing to negotiate and did not deserve to be treated with so much disrespect.
There is lots you can read about this evolving situation (and its wider implications for our fledgling national professional men’s league), but it is one more example of how fütbol is life. And in life I almost always support the workers in these situations, and especially where health, safety and long term injury and disability are the price of playing for your country.
People often say that sports and life should be separate. That there is no room for politics in sports or that it doesn’t matter. But not only is that not true at all, but football in particular is a broad canvas on which the entirety of the human experience is painted. In the last 48 hours, I’ve been amazed to witness just how varied that canvas can be, and so, that’s probably worth recording here for posterity.