The Squamish welcome figure at Sw?aywi (Ambleside Beach) in West Vancouver
Once a month I fill in to lead worship at our little Bowen Island United Church. I love the chance to do so, because I get to sit with a piece of scripture and reflect on it. Over the years here I’ve shared a few of my sermons and today, the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, I’m sharing last Sunday’s sermon. The reading was suggested by the Lectionary, without reference to the September 30. But the reading lined up incredibly well and suggested important teachings for people of faith to stay with this long and faithful journey of reconciliation work in Canada.
Exodus 17:1-7
From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” But the people thirsted there for water, and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do for this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarrelled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
This week will see us commemorate the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. On Wednesday we will wear our orange shirts and remember the effects of residential schools and the targeted campaigns of cultural genocide that did so much harm in Canada, and which effects continue to linger. As a country that prides itself on the rule of law, we’ve made a big mess of how that law applies to Indigenous people, and while we generally come around to correcting these kinds of problems with respect to things like slavery, the right of women to vote, marriage equality and so on, Indigenous rights, including Aboriginal rights and title are a confusing mass of issues and quarrels from all sides that make it hard to sort out what’s happening.
You all know how important this issue is to me, and I’m always available to talk about it all, which we can do afterwards during coffee if you like. But this morning I’d like to talk about where we might collectively stand as a people of faith in the reconciliation journey and tie it back to this important scripture. This journey is hard and in society at the moment there is a a lot of complaint that maybe we’ve “gone too far with reconciliation.” Some are even saying that we should take active steps to erase Constitutionally protected rights like Aboriginal title once and for all.
This is not the first time in history that a people has grown tired and thirsty on the journey. In this morning’s reading from Exodus, the Israelites are in exactly this situation.
To refresh your memory, Moses received a commission from God, speaking through the burning bush to free the Israelites from the slavery in which they were held in Egypt. He led the people away from the Pharoah’s tyranny, across the Red Sea, and into the desert in Sinai, that little triangle of land in the far southern part of the modern day state of Israel. They will spend forty years there, wandering and waiting for the time when they can settle in the Promised Land.
Today, as always with me, we are going to read that as a spiritual story, a tale that charts the journey from a place of spiritual captivity to one of spiritual liberation. Such collective journeys are not easy, and they involve long periods of being in the wilderness, of enduring spiritual hardships, of losing faith in God and our leaders and each other and ourselves. They are also journeys where we become parched and starved of nourishment, and yet, every spiritual tradition encourages us to push on.
When the story begins, the people have been through all of that and a few weeks has passed and they are genuinely thirsty. They are struggling to survive in the heart and the bleached landscape, away from everything they knew. Some are even questioning whether it was the right move to leave a land of slavery to die here in this desert. So they take up a quarrel with Moses. It is not just a complaint. In the Hebrew text, the word that is used to describe a quarrel is more like “a legal dispute.” They are suing Moses for accountability.
Moses doesn’t know what to do — which is a humility I would love to see more in our leaders — and so he prays to God and God tells him to go ahead of the people and strike the rock on Mount Horeb, where God originally met him in the burning bush. God says “I will be there.” He takes some Elders with him, strikes the rock with his staff, and water flows from the land. And the people drink. And they named the place Massah and Meribah which means “quarrel”and “tested” to commemorate the event. Moses took Elders with him, because it was a legal dispute that the people had lodged, and so these Elders served as a kind of tribunal of witnesses, who could keep the events in perspective. Kind of like our modern day Courts.
So how does this story relate our own journey of reconciliation?
Canada’s legal traditions are derived from the Crown and going back to 1763, the order from the King was to reach agreements with the Nations that already existed here before settlers moved into their lands. To that end, the Crown entered into honourable treaties with First Nations. Over time the Crown made these deals and then forgot about their obligations, which is why so many Treaty Nations continue to quarrel with the Crown for the government to fulfill their obligations. First Nations cultures are almost universally relational, and when treaties of friendship and collaboration are made, they are always taken seriously to be enduring contracts that bind people’s fates together.
By the time the Crown got to British Columbia, they mostly just stopped making treaties, and started settling and taking over the lands. This is why we call these territories “unceded.” First Nations have always been here governing themselves and others on these lands and waters, they have never given them up, and they continue to exert their own jurisdiction and governance over these lands, waiting patiently for the settler governments to come to the table and make agreements. And at every turn First Nations have offered the promise of liberation for all of us if we get the relationship right.
Reconciliation means to figure out together how to live on this land, with honesty, dignity and honour, sin a way that unlocks the potential of all of us. No one is asked to leave. Instead we are asked to journey out of our comfort and enter into a process that invites us to find a new promised land together, where the land and sea can be protected, where people’s needs are looked after and where relive together as co-habitants of these beautiful territories.
So I see in us a journey towards freedom from our own small thinking and spiritual impoverishment. A possibility that we might find a new relationship with the First Nations on whose territories we live that takes us to a place where we can so far only imagine. I believe that commission of Jesus Christ obligates us to love our neighbour as ourselves and that in Canada, that is expressed by a personal commitment to deep and lasting reconciliation of the Crown’s obligations and power and Indigenous obligations and power. Reconciliation is not merely territorial acknowledgements and orange shirts. It is long lasting relationship building across our minds, hearts, laws and hands that recognize whose land we are on and builds a world that is prophetic and possible only if we work together.
Some say “we’ve gone too far with reconciliation.” Perhaps what they are really saying is that they are thirsty for something meaningful. But we have only just begun. And when the going gets hard and tiring, the people take up quarrels and complaints. It’s the oldest story of all, as evidenced by this tale. That’s fine. But friends, this has been my life’s work and I’m happy to report that I think I have visited the rock that lies ahead of us and I have witnessed the prophets striking the ground and seen the water that flows. First Nations, right here in BC, rising to their own power and jurisdiction, are doing things that feed us in ways that would have never been possible ion we had continued the policies of colonization and cultural genocide.
So where are these places of flowing water that comes from true reconciliation? Here are just four.
Just this past month the Great Bear Sea initiative was recognized for outstanding leadership where along BC’s north and central coast, 17 First Nations have worked with Canada and BC to create one of the world’s largest Indigenous-led marine conservation initiatives. More than $300 million is being invested in Indigenous stewardship, conservation and sustainable coastal economies. The people who have cared for those waters for thousands of years are exercising greater authority in caring for them now—and everyone benefits from healthier oceans, fisheries and coastal communities.
In Vancouver, the Squamish Nation is building Sen?á?w on its own reserve land near the Burrard Bridge: eventually about 6,000 homes, most available to anyone. At the same time, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations have become some of the largest land developers in the region, building thousands more homes on returned lands. In the middle of a housing crisis, Indigenous nations aren’t simply asking for a place in Vancouver, they are literally helping build the Vancouver of the future. They are answering the call for housing affordability by building it.
There are older initiatives too. On the Sunshine Coast, the shíshálh Nation has been part of regional health care for generations. In 1962, the Nation gifted more than eleven acres of their small own reserve lands for the hospital in Sechelt. Sixty years later, that hospital serves more than 30,000 Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents and the shíshálh Nation, back in 1986 became the first self-governing former Indian band in Canada. A strong Indigenous nation has helped create health infrastructure that serves everyone who shares that region.
And then there are issues that counter the panic that some are creating around private property rights and Aboriginal title. In 2024, BC formally recognized Haida Aboriginal title throughout Haida Gwaii something the Haida had fought to have recognized for generations. But recognizing Haida title didn’t mean telling everyone else to leave. The agreement protects existing private property and local government while creating a process through which the Haida Nation and BC work out how their respective jurisdictions coexist. That’s reconciliation becoming constitutional and practical: the truth about whose homeland this is can be acknowledged while everyone who lives there works out how to live there together. It is an agreement of possibility and inclusion, and everyone on Haida Gwaii is sharing in the struggle to make it all work.
The ocean. Homes. Health care. A shared homeland.
These aren’t promises about what reconciliation might someday accomplish. They are things already happening when Indigenous nations become stronger and relationships begin to change.
Here on Bowen Island, Pauline Le Bel and I are helping to mark this work with a welcome figure that will stand outside the Community Centre. It is a grandmother. And she welcomes us in, to to our place of community governance and culture as the house of what Squamish Elder Dennis Joseph called the Nexwlelexwm Uxwimixw, a village of people living in Squamish lands, on Bowen Island. The Nation has leant it’s support to this initiative and will be helping us with teh ceremony when she is installed there and the community has been donating funds, because this is the initiative of islanders, putting a tangible mark on the land, remembering that reconciliation is a long journey watch over by the grandmothers who keep their eyes on the possibilities we cannot see yet and welcome them in.
We are allowed to be thirsty and to quarrel and test this idea of reconciliation. But we are invited also to trust: to trust God, to trust each other, and to trust in the long journey of reconciliation. We need only strike the ground to find the water that flows.
Some good recent reads which didn’t make it into full blog posts:
Peter Levine offers a close reading of Wendell Berry’s poem, September 2: “If his leaves are his writings, I do not think they will soon dissolve.”
A beautiful Guardian article about slime moulds and the people who study them: “So confounding were they that Carl Linnaeus, who spent his life taxonomising life, lumped them into a genus called “chaos”.”
“We are fixing up the record” says Jungurrayi Simms Otto in this short and beautiful documentary. He is summarizes the work of a collaboration between the English artist Patrick Waterhouse and a slew of Warlpiri artists as they revise historical records of the British colonial occupation of the Warlpiri homelands .
Who doesn’t like some deeply evidence based takedowns of terrible research or policy? Here’s a couple from Dougald Lamont. One on a “racist and sexist” report from the MacDonald-Laurier Institute on the productivity cost of DEI policies in Canadian universities and another that dismantles the case for Alberta separatism because, well, its based on fever dreams. That one got a follow up.
Issues of Aboriginal rights and title are important in British Columbia, and actually have been since 1851. Political mischief has turned these issues of fundamental justice and law into a political football. As Canadian citizens we have to understand the LAW of the situation not just the politics. Aaron Pete, another voice I dont always agree with, has a good piece on this today.
Through my library I subscribe to The Paris Review, one of the world’s premier literary magazines. The first story in this issue is called Bubble by Angie Sijun Lou and I highly recommend it. A story of a Spokane high school student who is sent to her father’s home village to China. A beautifully crafter coming of age story for introverts. Lots of her writing is also available on her website.
Flags flying on the waterfront at Shearwater BC. There are two standard Canada flags and two of Curtis Wilson’s 2005 Indigenous Canada flag
I spent yesterday, Canada Day, with my friend Pauline Le Bel inside the common room at our municipal hall. The room was filled with the “Canada Day Re-Imagined” part of the program. Michael Yahgulaanas‘ recent works were on display, there was a full collection of posters of the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and we were there to solicit donations for the Welcome Figure Project that we are championing.
I appreciate how Canada Day is celebrated on our island. It is a celebration and invites a thoughtful reflection on what it means to live in this country. National holidays don’t need to be excuses for blind nationalism, but they don’t need to be blindly critical of the nation either. They need to be complicated and nuanced reflections on where we live, what we love about it and a celebration of the ways we can make it better, by building community, advancing justice, and listening to the varieties of experience that surround us.
In last week’s Undercurrent (vol. 52, no. 26), our excellent local newspaper, one of our renowned local poets, Jude Neale, offered a Canada Day poem that, in a quiet way, names some of this. I’m sharing it here with appreciation:
Canada Day on Bowen Island
By Jude Neal
On Nexwlélexwm, morning arrives by ferry.
The ramp lowers with a groan of metal,
and Bowen Island opens itself to the day,
green and salt-bright, waiting.
Children spill onto the dock
with paper flags in their hands,
red and white flickering like small flames
against the blue harbour air.
Their laughter rises first,
light as gulls,
carried over the water
and caught in the cedar branches.
Strawberries come next,
stacked in cardboard trays,
ripe and shining,
little summer lanterns
held carefully between two hands.
Along the shoreline, the day gathers colour.
Coffee steam curls above paper cups.
Dogs nose the grass and shake seawater from their coats.
Voices drift between picnic blankets,
folding chairs, coolers, bicycles,
the soft shade of trees.
Families settle on the grass.
Friends wave from across the field.
Someone makes room at a table.
Someone pours lemonade.
Someone laughs and calls a neighbour over.
And Canada appears, quietly.
Not only in the anthem,
not only in speeches or flags,
but in the ordinary grace
of people making space for one another.
In a shared plate of berries.
In a hand offered onthe dock.
In stories carried here
from prairie towns, northern rivers,
Atlantic kitchens, Pacific rain,
and all the long roads between.
It is there in many voices,
many histories,
many ways of belonging.
It is there in courage.
In care.
In the work of welcome.
In the hope that a country.
can keep learning how to hold its people well.
Above this small island,
the summer sky opens wide.
Far beyond it, the north remembers its green fire,
aurora ribbons loosening across the dark.
The prairies breathe gold.
The mountains keep their snow.
The Atlantic throws light against stone.
And here, on Bowen,
the sea folds all of it into one shining afternoon.
A child pauses at the harbour's edge.
Her flag flutters softly in the breeze,
a red maple leaf against summer green.
For one still moment,
the island seems to hold its breath.
The ferry waits.
The water glimmers.
The cedars stand tall.
And through this small bright scene,
the whole country seems to shine.
Thanks Jude.
When the US government took down its climate science site a group of scientists put all the material back online at Climate.us
Dave Snowden has been at his favourite knowledge management conference and offers blog posts with many reflections that caught my eye on intergenerational management cultures (older workers attend to contexts; younger workers to rules), the inability to preserve implicit knowledge through compression, the fundamental question of what is lost between wisdom, knowledge and information, and the journey of the experiences practitioner who has won wisdom through wading through the maze of transactional work.
Alice Jing Shan was there too!
It is always helpful to see how the long arc of history often bends towards justice. The fight to protect west coast ecosystems and Indigenous rights and title has spanned my entire life and I will tell anyone who will listen that Clayoquot Sound and Haida Gwaii (and the north coast of BC) are some of the best examples of what can happen when First Nations assert their rights authority and recover the ability to properly govern their territories.
On the advice of several people I have been reading Vanessa Machado d’Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity and I have reached the end of “The Most Important Chapter” which outlines the seven key tools that d’Oliveira invites the reader to use as they navigate the text. The seventh tool is an invitation to a kind of lectio divina (my framing) on a text called “Co-Sensing with Radical Tenderness.” I invite you to visit that link, read the text and follow the exercise there, which is different from the one in the book.
As I am working my way through each of the seven tools, I am reminded of the various lessons I have learned in my life especially working in a with Indigenous communities. These are lessons that throw my own position in the world into uncertainty and knock me off centre constantly. I can find how each of these seven tools has come into my life in different ways in the voices of different people who have schooled me, often publicly, in ways that were humbling. D’Oliveira says that this book is written for people in a situation of low intensity struggle, where we have choices about how to benefit from, respond to, and perpetrate the violence of modernity. That’s a useful perspective, and a better term than ‘privilege’ which implies that all is well in a person’s life. Low intensity struggle is a thing, but it’s useful to see it in context. The pedagogy of “learning this from a book” is itself firmly rooted in modernity.
The book is not a simple exercise. It is uncomfortable to read, and even through I wrestle with paradoxes and entanglements all the time, it still places me in a slightly uneasy position, an unsettled position, as it were. And it is remarkable in being able to hold me there, suspended in being unsettled, which I have always said is exactly the place where settlers need to be in order for a post-colonial world to ever have a chance at life.
For reference, the seven tools are:
- Mastery AND depth education: about different ways of knowing and having wisdom and intelligence
- Wording and worlding the world: about how we use stories
- The bus within us: about the different voices we carry inside us
- Low- and high-intensity struggle: understanding what choices we have, especially important for folks in lo-intensity struggle to understand.
- Generative disillusionment AND excited capacities: yeah, it’s falling apart. So now what? (Dave Pollard’s writing has helped me to understand this from my perspective.)
- Co-sensing with radical tenderness: see above.
I don’t know where this book is going. Parts of it don’t make sense to me. Some of it seems performative, some of it seems like the real wisdom is hidden from view, probably because I don’t have the eyes for it. I think this is the intention of the book. It does not bring comfort, it does not make sense. It is directed at me NOT as a teaching guidebook per se, but as a lesson in what I will never know as much as it is a set of invitations about what I can learn. It reminds me very much of the hula ceremonies we were in 16 years ago on Hawai’i as I was walking in an immensely tense interface between Americans and Hawaiians and we were confronting these very same questions about modernity and what it would take to work from a platform of reverence.
We didn’t get that quite right, either.