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.
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.
The weather has been glorious this week on the west coast, warm and sunny with beautiful conditions for walking and bird watching. Since I knew we were travelling this year to Costa Rica, Texas, Europe and eastern Canada this year I decided to see if I could observe or hear 365 species of birds during the year. I’m off to a good start with 151 so far (104 of which we saw in Costa Rica) and the weather has brought about plumage changes in the gulls so it’s getting easier to pick out the Californias from the Glaucous-winged. Yesterday I added the year’s first Black Oystercatcher and Hutton’s vireo (heard but not seen).
This weekend the Men’s Six Nations has started and it is know as rugby’s greatest championship for good reason. France absolutely dismantled Ireland yesterday and I just watched Italy nick a famous victory at home over Scotland in a downpour. England hosts Wales now, and although I would love the Celts to recover some form, I doubt this will be a very close game. Still, rugby delivers fantastic surprises.
Thursday night I finally got to see Tanya Tagaq live at the Chan Centre at UBC, as part of the PuSh Arts Festival. She is one of the most powerful performers I’ve ever seen. She channels and works with power, rage, love, sensuality, joy and the raw, wet, glossy work of life. Her art has always had a @sit down and pay attention” quality to it. I can only listen to albums like “Retribution” maybe once a year, in a dedicated sitting. Her work this week – Split Tooth Saputjiji – contained elements of her “Inuit mythic realism” book Split Tooth and recent to-be-released album Saputjiji. Predictability there were a couple of walk outs but you don’t have to know much about Tagaq’s work to know that the throat singing is not offered as an ethnic curiosity but rather as the vehicle for her to draw the source power from life itself to put hair raising power behind “Fuck War.” She is amazing.