The weather here on MacKenzie Beach near Tofino is unusually summery. THe families that were running around over the Thanksgiving weekend are gone now and only a few remain behind. We began our learning village with a circle gathered around a fire on the beach, maybe 20 of us, sharing Indian Candy (half smoked salmon) dried berries and tea, telling the stories of our names and why we responded to the invitation to join a week of learning together. We don’t have young ones here, but the oldest is 82 and we have folks from Denmark, Zimbabwe, the United …
“Tell everyone you know: “My happiness depends on me, so you’re off the hook.” And then demonstrate it. Be happy, no matter what they’re doing. Practice feeling good, no matter what. And before you know it, you will not give anyone else responsibility for the way you feel – and then, you’ll love them all. Because the only reason you don’t love them, is because you’re using them as your excuse to not feel good.” – Esther Abraham-Hicks via whiskey river. Heading to Hahopa today. Hahopa is an idea. It is a place of the heart and the …
Here we are On September 22 in Vancouver. Tens of thousands of people walking in the rain across the Georgia Street viaduct, down one side and up the other. My family and I stood in the rain very near the front of the walk that morning listening speakers talk about what we doing there. Chief Robert Joseph, who we all call “Bobby Joe” had a dream and here we were living it. As a longtime voice of the victims of residential schools and then a champion of reconciliation, Bobby Joe had glimpsed a possibility: that if enough Canadians could come …
For something like 100 years, generation after generation of indigenous children in Canada were rounded up at age five and taken away from their families and communities and placed in residential schools, where they were taught English, taught western values and Christianized. This was commonly a brutal experience, full of physical abuse, exploitation, sexual abuse and the express purpose of eliminating the Indian in the child. Some of the abuse took the forms of rape, sexual molestation, physical beatings, deprivation of food or warmth, children being forced to work in kitchens or laundries or on farms or in stores for …
Over the past 15 years First Nations artists in Canada have taken to hip hop as a powerful storytelling method. First Nations hip hop is an incredible blend of traditional art forms, evocative imagery and raw and real exerpience relayed with a beat. It’s as if hip hop was built for indigenous expression – being story based, status informed, poetic and underscored with a heartbeat. I have a bunch of friends in this field including Skeena Reece, Jerrilynn Webster, Manik1derful, Rachel Oki, Wasaskwun Wuttunee and others. Beat Nation was an exhibition of indigenous hip hop artists that closed in …