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 …
Im just coming back from a meeting this weekend on Vancouver Island where Kelly Poirier and I were working with some specialized health care workers who were meeting with Indigenous families around creating a care model for their children. We had three families with us including six children, two of which were babies, a five month old and a seven month old. It has been a long time since I facilitated meetings with babies taking an active role in the proceedings. The children were included in this meeting as participants and they had as much to offer both the content …
“Many others have written their books solely from their reading of other books, so that many books exude the stuffy odour of libraries. By what does one judge a book? By its smell (and even more, as we shall see, by its cadence). Its smell: far too many books have the fusty odour of reading rooms or desks. Lightless rooms, poorly ventilated. The air circulates badly between the shelves and becomes saturated with the scent of mildew, the slow decomposition of paper, ink undergoing chemical change. The air is loaded with miasmas there. Other books breathe a livelier air; the …
It was in this day In 1992 that I started my first real job in an office, beginning work as a policy analyst at the National Association of Friendship Centres in Ottawa. I can remember that day vividly. It was a lovely warm morning in Ottawa and I even remember wearing a light purple collared shirt (it was the early 1990s) and carrying my lunch in a newly purchased MEC fabric briefcase that served me for many years. The NAFC was small at that time, just an Executive Director, Jerome Berthelette, a financial guy, Brian Stinson, our office manager Mel …
I live at the open end of a fjord called Átl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound, on the south coast of British Columbia. It is a broad mouthed inlet that narrows as you head 45 kilometers up towards Squamish. It is home to a small archipelago of islands and some small villages and towns. The inlet has been recovering from massive industrial abuse for most of the last 100 years, mostly from horrendas mining and logging practices, and now we have herring, sea lions, seals, whales, dolphins and porpoises and even more important sea life, like extremely rare glass sponge reefs and healthy plankton …