Matteo Polisi dives into the arms of The Swanguardians after scoring a goal for TSS Rovers in the Voyageurs Cup, April 19, 2023 . I am somewhere at the bottom of that pile. Photo by Maddy Mah Our friends Tuesday Ryan-Hart and Tim Merry interviewed Caitlin and me for their podcast From the Outside on the subject of community. It’s a really rich conversation. In the podcast, we cover a lot of ground including really understanding the act and practice of crossing boundaries and thresholds to enter a community. There is a cost to crossing a threshold, a requirement to …
Átl’ka7tsem, the fjord in which I live, in a photo I took in November 2014 The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is coming up in Canada. Every person in Canada lives in a place that, from time immemorial, has been occupied, used, loved, protected and cherished by an Indigenous culture. In Canadian law, settler governments and citizens have a special relationship with these Nations, and it has been thus since the Crown of Britain elbowed itself into the already fully occupied territories of North America. It was encoded into common law in 1763 through the Royal Proclamation and, subsequently, …
A photo of the navigation system on my flight back from Hawai’i Flying over the Pacific always conjures up the idea that I’m in a low earth orbit. It is a bizarre notion to climb into the sky and have the earth turn below you and then few hours later to drop one sixth of the world away. On long haul flights there is very much a feeling of relativity. We are together, a couple of hundred of us, in a tube in the sky. There is very little feeling of speed. There are no cues to tell you where …
Since 1947, and annually since 1960, the tribes of the west coast of Canada and southeast Alaska have sent basketball teams to Prince Rupert, BC, for the annual All-Native Basketball Tournament. It is a major cultural gathering of Coastal Nations and a celebration of community, culture, resilience and sport. All morning I’ve been watching the opening ceremonies broadcast on YouTube by CFNR. Have a watch. Guaranteed to make you smile. So much joy. And if you want to watch the games, CFNR is live streaming all the matches.
This coast is wet in the fall and winter. We get pummelled by atmospheric rivers that bring strong warm winds and days of rain from the south west. We get drizzled on by orographic rain. We get soaked by passing fronts. And the land drinks it up, the rivers swell and call the salmon back. If you don’t love rain, this is a very hard place to live from October through to March., when the light is dim and the air moist. Me, I’ve grown to love it. I love to be out in the rain, walking about, listening to …