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 it on the hood of my jacket, sitting by the sea and watching is dapple the surface.
This is a video of some Nuu Chah Nulth language speakers from Hesquiaht on the west coast of Vancouver Island on the north end of Clayoquot Sound. And not just any language speakers but Julia Lucas, Simon Lucas and Maggie Ignace. I first met Julia and Simon in 1989 on my first trip to the west coast when I visited their village for a week and got to spend time with them. They are revered Elders. Simon, who passed away in 2017, was a a lifelong champion for Nuu Chah Nulth fishing and political rights and Julia has been a knowledge keeper, educator and language teacher for decades. Maggie is one of the many Nuu Chah Nulth language learners who are building up their fluency thanks to videos like this and programs.
Largely inspired by a slow reading through this paper (“Over reliance on English hinders cognitive science“) I’ve been thinking a bit today about the Indigenous languages of this region and how they point at such different ways of looking at the world, while I sip team and watch the rain. While surfing and I stumbled upon this video today, noting that OF COURSE Nuu Chah Nulth has a word for “a person who walks around in any weather” and I was really touched to see Julia and Simon here.
It’s Giving Tuesday and if you are in Canada and looking for places to donate money, I encourage you to head over to a new website launched and hosted by The Circle on Philanthropy which connects Indigenous communities and funders, foundations and donors.
The new website is called The Feast House and it is a place where you can donate directly, abundantly and without restriction to Indigenous-led organizations and projects across the country. It also contains links to articles, podcasts and videos to hep you learn more about giving and philanthropy in an Indigenous context
Donating money to Indigenous-led work is the bare minimum next move in what The Circle calls “Active Reciprocity.” What has been known as “reconciliation”in Canada should be a set of practices that develop relationship, return resources to Indigenous community and enable Indigenous-led organizations, projects and Nations themselves to lead the work.
For many years now, I have given locally to organizations and Nations in whos territory I am working. Whenever I am paid to run a meeting and the responsibility to acknowledge Indigenous territories falls to me, I donate to a local cause that requires unrestricted funds to do it’s work. This means that I have to research and make a connection with local people and local change efforts and so that becomes a beautiful part of this responsibility.
The Feast House is a great resource to help you do this too. So as you ponder how to spend your Giving Tuesday and how to put active reciprocity in your personal commitment to reconciliation, spend some time there today.
An invitation to learn about transforming power.
Power.
What’s your reaction to the word? Do you love it? Does it make you shudder? Are you frightened by it or rather do you relish power, look for chances to acquire some and use it? Or maybe you’d rather talk about “influence” or “inspiration” because the word “power” seems toxic?
Have you been hurt by power? i have; my own and others. Power that exploits, power that lords it over us, power that extracts from us and drains us.
But I’ve also been lifted up and supported by power. Mentored, helped along, corrected, guided, enabled.
Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier and I have been talking about power in the context of lots of different pieces of work over the years including at the intersection of indigenous and settler systems of governance, policy and philanthropy. We’ve worked together with social service leaders, Indigenous families, Foundation leaders, churches, students of transformative systems change, folks interested in convening groups and making the world a better place. We’ve been in an active conversation about taking a view of power and it’s uses through a Nuu Chah Nulth lens.
Kelly, who is a member of the Tseshaht Nation is a deep student of her Nation’s culture and language, and in her work with Elders and communities over the past fifteen years, she has been thinking about power in a different way, by connecting it to its relational sources, grounded in family and community and lineage. When we are teaching together, Kelly uses the examples of four animals – the whale, the wolf, the eagle and the hummingbird – to explore four key aspects of cultivating and using power.
Stemming from a worldview that begins with an assumption that “everything is one” her learnings about power from a Nuu Chah Nulth lens invites us to look at how we use power to plumb honest Depth, strengthen collective Courage, create shared Vision and sustain one another to work with Joy.
With our friends Amy Lenzo and Rowen Simonsen at Beehive Productions we are ready to offer a series of four conversations about these ideas to those who work with power in group process and systems change. We know, working in participatory ways, that we can use and transform power to embed it in a relations system that shares leadership and lifts all of us, but it’s not always a simple matter to do so. So in this course we will explore relational power and its uses beginning with ideas Kelly has been putting together from her experience as a host and facilitator and leader in community and queried by my own experience working with power as a settler who is trying to lift more of these relational ways of doing things into the formal structures and systems in order to address the harms of colonization and promises of an alternative way of organizing and being actively reciprocal in the world.
If you are up for the conversation, we’d love to have you join us to explore how to transform our use of power. You might learn:
- How power shows upin group work and we might work with it differently
- How leadership is about creating shared contexts for action and actualization of both individual and collective work
- How working with power has the potential to transform relationships and create sustainability in social change and community.
And you might learn a bunch of other stuff besides! This course will place you in active learning with these ideas, and you will leave with a compendium and harvest of the teachings we all create together.
Want to join us? Learn more and register here.
For thousands of years, the island I live on has been called Nexwlélexwm. It has always been an important part of the Squamish Nation territory, and as it juts out out the moth of Howe Sound into the Strait of Georgia, it represents the edge of the world for Squamish people, beyond which are the relatives and strangers of the rest of the Nations of the Salish Sea and beyond. The southern shore of our island is called Ni7cháych Nexwlélexwm which means “the outer edge of Nexwlélexwm” and refers to that place where the dry cliffs and rocky points meet the sea. You can find a little more at the Squamish Atlas if you are interested in learning the historical names of places in this territory.
When I first came here in 2001 I read about the story of the how the deer were created here and last year in a conversation with two friends who are Squamish Nation councillors I heard that story again with a little teaching.
It goes like this. In Squamish history there is a period before memory in which everything was in flux and could change. This is called Sxwexwiyam. This was followed by a time of transformation to the land in it’s present state, called Xaay Xaays. In this time, four supernatural beings called Xaays travelled through out the territory fixing things in the form, changing people and animals into rocks and islands and creatures and in every place leaving a teaching. The territory is literally soaked in these stories and they provide guidance to the present day.
Upon arriving on Nexwlélexwm at a place called Kwemshenám, which is a reef that connects Finnesterre Island to Bowen Island in low tides, Xaays found a hunter. This hunter prided himself on being the fastest runner, the most accurate shot, just the very best hunter in the world. When the Transformers found him he was making a spearpoint and bragging about his abilities. He is said to have declared “I have heard there are people coming to change us and I aim to kill them.” Xaays were amused by his boasting and so they began to tease him and change him, by stretching out his legs and embedding two branches of Cceanspray in his head, and turning him into a deer. They chased him off and he WAS fast! But realizing that he would make good food for the people, they decided to slow him down by clapping his legs together and burying the spear point in his leg so that he could be caught and provide food for people. As he took off into the forest, his hoofs made a sound on the ground and so the place where this happened was named Kwemshenám, which means “stomping feet.”
My take on this story is that Xaays took a man who thought he was above everybody else and transformed him to become something that provides nourishment for all. When I see deer around on our island – and they are literally EVERYWHERE – I am always reminded of this story. I think often about how the best of what we have here should be shared with others to nourish them too. Many who have visited our island in workshops with us have heard this story and invitation to become changed by being here, and many people do have that experience.
When I was on the Economic Development Committee we engaged in a branding exercise for our municipal government and to my secret delight the primary icon that was chosen to represent our island community was the deer. I’d like to think that is stands for a community in which we can find ways to transform the smallness of our individual egos in service of nourishing the greater whole. Can we take what we have, as individuals, as families, and as a community, and share it? In a world and a region that is swelling with people who need more access to natural beauty, places of awe, and transformation for our individual and collective mental health, how can we best use what we have to help serve that need?
… i search for a form of reconciliation ecology … inventing, establishing and maintaining a new habitat designed for a diversity of living, working and playing … a place which possesses anima meaning breath, spirit and soul … at first, in the leaving, i imagined a radical break … on arrival have learned to accept a certain amount of conservation of the past needs preservation … perhaps even restoration … the challenge is to generate a creative coexistence between the old and new territories … to comprehend the mysteries of place a cultivation of morals & purpose are required … i consciously accept the self-organizing complexity of this odyssey …
… i once dreamed of a place for a vibrant exchange of active creation and researching ingenuity … my formative experiences in Wroclaw & Vienna helped grow roots in my beloved prairie … the dream was transformed in a beautiful way yet in time a restless disquiet emerged … even discontent & disconnect … rootlessly committed to this place accompanied with my dearest companion i wander the communities …
He is writing here on a reflection about moving to Korea. And his reflections prompted some reflections from me too, about what is essential to preserve, what we see, what choices we make.
Here in Canada there is an interesting phenomena of preserving “heritage” buildings for some level of posterity. It’s interesting to think about what “heritage” means, and whose heritage we are talking about. In the urban environment it usually refers to examples of historical architecture but, as is the case here in Vancouver, that is largely settler architecture from a certain time period, usually between 100 and 150 years ago. There is an underlying assumption that we should protect these buildings, which means really restricting their uses. There is an underlying assumption about what “heritage” means and whose heritage we are talking about.
Where I live, on a small island, there is a heritage group that works to protect structures and the character of the place dating back to the period of the early 1900-1960s. This is a period folks call “the Union SteamShip Company era” in which the Union SteamShip Company not only serviced the island, but owned a resort and delivered hundreds of tourists and cottagers on the summer to what was known as “The Happy Isle.” There are a few structures and an orchard preserved from that time including our magnificent library building and a number of cottages that were used by families and later by a vibrant community of hippies and squatters in the 1960 and 70’s before they were all finally evicted in the 1980s. Following the end of the USSC era, the island fell very quiet and was just a bit too far away for a regular commuter community. A few hundred people were left, working hard to preserve the school and the post office. Many of them were formerly residents of the now abandoned cottages and they were the ones that seeded what has become the most recent era of Bowen Island history that began with a concerted effort to save the island from rapacious growth and then bring in essential services and finally incorporate as a municipality, which happened in 1999.
How does heritage act as a mirror? What image does it return to me when I gaze into it? What parts of it are relevant to my life today?
There are no permanent Squamish villages here today, but there are some unmarked and unprotected architectural sites on the island. A few descendants of some of the original settler families still live here, but for most of us our “heritage” is really an experience of gazing into a past we were never a part of. It’s not a mirror of my personal history but it is a reminder of the layers of history upon which I am living and from which I derive my life. I have only been here 21 years. What I have done is lived atop the infrastructure and history that has preceded me in this place and that includes the outright theft of the land from the original owners who were sustained completely by this land and sea for more than 10,000 years, and the establishment and building of infrastructure by settlers to eek out a living which feels now like it may actually become too much for us to afford, being a small population of 4200 living in a serviced community that is about the same area as Vancouver, with pipes and systems that were haywired together 50 years ago.
So as a settler, it’s important to me that we acknowledge the historical Squamish presence and continued contested ownership of this island. They have never sold it, ceded it, given it away, lost it in a war or otherwise allowed another people to claim it. In that sense, the history of squatting here is pretty interesting!
In places I have travelled to and lived in like the UK and Estonia, heritage of the everyday is about the continued use of a place. In the UK as a kid I lived in a 400 year old cottage (pictured above) that had been added to and renovated at least four times, including the complete incorporation of the hayloft on the adjacent barn in the 1970s as a master bedroom. The structure just grew along the lot adding indoor bathrooms, a few extra bedrooms, a modern kitchen and a garden. In other places, like Estonia, where the medieval city in Tallinn is intact at 800 years old, every building is used and changed. Coffee shops punch holes through walls to expand their space, the apothecary still exists, but with modern technology in place, and the medieval feast hall is an overpriced tourist restaurant that operates within the bones of the old structure with up to date kitchen equipment.
Conservation is a question of morals and ethics. Here in Squamish territory, I think the restoration of Howe Sound’s natural environment is a powerful statement that shows that we have a choice in what we declare “heritage” and worth of conservation. There is a contested view that says that Howe Sound was an industrial area and should remain so, by building an LNG plant or a gravel quarry at the mouth of a critical salmon stream, for example. And there are those of us who feel like not everything should be preserved. The mine at Britannia Beach almost completely destroyed the ecosystems of this place and it took decades of citizen action with occasional government support (and complete neglect by the companies that were just allowed to pollute take the profits and leave) to restore healthy marine ecosystems here.
Conservation and preservation is first and foremost, as Raymon says, “is to generate a creative coexistence between the old and new territories … to comprehend the mysteries of place a cultivation of morals & purpose are required …” We have to answer questions about whether preserving is about stability of structure or continuation of use and by whom ein what way. These questions never leave us, and the choices we make reflect how we see who we are and who we will become, based on the history we choose to preserve or transform.