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 put something down before we take up the shared identity of community. That act is almost always accompanied by rituals and ceremonies that help to mark the liminal space through which we move when we change from what we are on the outside to what we become when we step inside.
These boundaries are important because there is no community without boundary crossing. Peter Block writes really well about this in “Community: The Structure of Belonging” and I refer to his work in the podcast. He talks about practices for entering and leaving containers, including creating barriers to participation that balance inclusion with commitment and also the practices of leaving a container. He suggests that when people leave a meeting, they let everyone know why they are leaving. Such an act is a kindness as it shows a concern for clarity in the space.
A couple of weeks ago I was reminded how important that practice is. I was having a lovely long coffee with my friend Bob Turner who is a former mayor of Bowen Island and has lived on our island since 1989. We were both sharing our experience as long-time islanders that we don’t recognize so many people anymore and nor are we recognized by as many people as used to. In the times we have lived on the island, the community’s population has turned over many times. In fact, we have probably experienced 50% turnover in the last five years alone. We are both open to change. Having devoted ourselves to living long-term in this community, we have seen it go through phases, epochs, and generational shifts. And while that’s fine there is a lingering sense of something – sadness? nostalgia? grief? – that is hard to put a finger on. And I think we named it
I was telling Bob that I was recently working with the Squamish Nation and their Language and Culture Department and I was very struck by how the Squamish people who work in that department are motivated in their work by the deep family histories they come from, rooted in the villages of the Squamish Nation. There is growth and change in those communities, but there are powerful rituals for acknowledging the losses of people.
Bowen Island is a settler community meaning that, other than a very small handful of descendents from original settler families, most people have only lived here for a maximum of two or three generations. People come and go, with very little tying them to the place. Squamish Nation people can’t do that. Your village is the source of your history and it spans back hundreds of generations out of remembered time. When someone is born or comes home or dies, there are important ceremonies that recognize that connection to the past. You might be given a name that was held by an ancestor or receive songs and responsibilities that are rooted to place. You are inextricably tied to the community
It’s just not like that on Bowen Island. Notably, while Bob and I were trying to put our finger on the melancholy feeling we were having, we decided that it came down to the fact that so many of the people we knew here and had close relationships with have just slipped away into other lives in other places. We don’t really hear from them anymore. They certainly don;t form the background of relationships and conversations that make up community. And unlike those who have died, there was no ceremony to acknowledge their passing out of our community. You just wake up one morning (or one post-pandemic year) and realize that person you played soccer with, or sang with or used to see on your regular walk is just no longer there. You don’t know why they left or where they went. There is just an absence and then a small space where they used to be that closes ever smaller until a person who was an unforgettable part of your life is suddenly “What’s his name, the guy with the brown dog that drove that old work van.”
There are boundaries we cross to join community and I wish for the boundaries to cross to leave it. When folks are leaving Bowen I love it when they tell me. I get to honour them, thank them, share some stories with them and then send them on their way. It gives all of us closure. It always a little sad when folks who have been a part of my life take off for their new chapters, but the ritual of saying goodbye makes it so much easier. Otherwise, we just imagine the slow trickle of voices flowing away into silence and nostalgia.
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, through treaties and later in the Canadian Constitution.
Despite a couple of centuries of focused efforts to eradicate Indigenous cultures across Canada, we still retain the obligations and responsibilities of that special relationship. Settler governments have always been hungry for the lands and resources of this place and have often acted in immoral and illegal ways in the pursuit of those resources. Even the Supreme Court of Canada has, over decades, chastised and reined in the rapacious appetite of colonizing governments to remind Canada that it is bound to the agreements it has made and to enforce Canada’s own laws on its governments.
Despite that set of obligations and responsibilities, all of which invite Canada and Indigenous Nations and people into ongoing and permanent relationships, Canada and the Provinces and the former Colonies of Britain long pursued policies like the banning of the potlatch, the prohibition of legal action regarding land claims, and residential schools and worse, through deliberate acts of genocide, like the preventable 1862 spread of smallpox across the entire coast which decimated the Indigenous Nations of coastal British Columbia.
These events aren’t news. This history is well documented, and that paradox that Canada has on the one hand, relied on this relationship to sustain its jurisdictional claims on the continent and on the other has sought to destroy the partners with whom it has a relationship in different ways.
Resetting the relationship happens on a variety of levels and ways, and one of the best ways for non-Indigenous people to do that is to take the time to deepen and appreciate the place where you live and the culture that has been nurtured in that place for thousands and thousands of years. It is, as my friend Pauline and I discovered, about Knowing Our Place.
The place i live in is called Skwxwú7mesh Temíxw. I live on an island whose historical name is Nexwlélexwm, above a bay called Kwilákm, in an inlet called Átl’ka7tsem. The names of these places are difficult for English speakers to say, but easy enough to learn, but they are beautiful sounds, guttural and rhythmic and when you hear them spoken by Skwxwú7mesh speakers they are musical. They contain meaning and relationship to other words, to other times, to stories.
It can be hard to learn about your place because Indigenous knowledge is tricky to share. There is knowledge that is held only by specific families and that is proprietary, there is knowledge that relates to legal claims in which large amounts of money are at stake. There are places that are deeply sacred to the culture and need to be protected for cultural practices to continue on the land. On top of all that, Elders, and staff in these Nations are often overwhelmed with requests for information, and they often don’t even have the capacity to respond to the needs of their own communities. Cultural and language revitalization takes time and attention and effort.
The Indigenous government of this land where I live, Skwxwú7mesh Úxwmixw, along with the knowledge keepers in the Nation are deeply focused on recovering from the systematic efforts of the Canadian government. But they have also shared some remarkable resources publically to increase knowledge and awareness of the history, culture and language of the territory and the people. If you live in this territory, perhaps this week is a good time to soak in these resources and learn more about where you live.
An atlas created by Chief Ian Campbell that contains links to many stories about the territory.
A project developed by Kwi Awt Stélmexw (now the Sníchim Foundation) to locate Squamish place names along with some pronunciation guides and a bit of history.
A set of videos of Squamish language terms and expressions from the Nation’s Language and Cultural Affairs Department.
A foundation set up to support the revitalization of the Squamish language. I am a regular donor to this foundation, and this is a good way to support effective efforts to revitalize the language. The Foundation has had a powerful effect in bringing along dozens more speakers at higher levels of fluency through it’s immersion programs and resources. Every time we are asked to do a territorial acknowledgement in this territory we donate a portion of our fees to this work. This is a good and tangible way to donate if you are participating in this year’s “One Day’s Pay” initiative, which advocates providing material benefit to Nations to put meaningful action to intentions for reconciliation.
I hope as September 30 approaches that you take the time to learn about and support the efforts to repair relationships and grow strong partnerships with the Nations in whose lands you reside.
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 you are, especially at night and especially over the Pacific Ocean. Each moment is much like the others until you make landfall and suddenly land rises out of the sea.
The term “raising islands” comes to me though the art of Polynesian navigation. This past week I immersed myself in Sam Low’s book Hawaiki Rising which documents the first six or seven years of the Polynesian Voyaging Society who built a double-hulled sailing canoe called Hokule’a and, under the guidance of a Micronesian navigator called Mau Pilliag, sailed it from Hawai’i to Tahiti.
On the return voyage the navigation was taken over by Nainoa Thompson, and the book recounts two successful and one tragic voyages under his guidance between 1976-80
Polynesian navigation combines a deep and intense attentiveness to every possible source of information available to the navigator. This includes, principally, stars, swells, clouds and light. Getting from one island to another over 2400 miles of open ocean requires a navigator to be present and attentive for the entire voyage. You must know where you have come from in order for your present position to make and sense and in order for accurate decisions to be taken about your course. This means mostly staying awake for almost the entire trip of a month or more with only brief sleeps allowed
When land comes into sight it is said that the navigator has “raised it out of the sea. “ when your whole life takes place inside a small container for a month with nothing but open sea all around, there must develop a very intense sensation of being essentially stationary and instead turning the world below you.
I’m having that same feeling tonight, returning home. Noting that we are 24 minutes from landing and still out of sight of the west coast of Vancouver Island. If you were a Tshshaht navigator perched on an island in Barkley Sound for the night, in a few minutes you might catch our lights rising up over the dark western horizon. And although we will have started our descent, you might not hear us over the surf crashing on the reefs as we skim about 10,000 meters overhead landing in Vancouver which still lies 250 kilometres to the east. It is a journey that would take a week or more in a Tseshaht canoe. But now that we have raised Vancouver Island, we’ll be on the ground before you know it.
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 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.