There is no really easy way to write this, so perhaps its just best to be polemical about it.
I am no longer going to be supporting cishet white men who are running for office. Basically guys that look like me. We’ve had our run, we have propagated genocide, mass destruction and murder, war, criminal economic inequality and the destruction of the life support systems of the planet we live on and now I think it is time to stop. Of course folks will “not all…” me on this, but just stop. Our role now is to support different people than us. Because what happens when we feel the MEREREST slipping away of power and influence is that we do ridiculous things like driving hundreds of trucks into the middle of Ottawa and demanding that the unelected Senate assist us in the overthrow of the government. Or worse. Much worse.
We do shit like this:
Just read the replies on that thread. I’m not going to tell you how bad it is.
Policy making matters. The people who make policy matter. Our job now is to use our power, money and influence to get behind different decision makers and support their election to office, or their appointment to the judiciary. because we need different decisions and we need to change the face and experience base of those making those decisions.
Three years ago the Canadian inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls concluded – quite rightly – that what has happened and continues to happen to Indigenous people in Canada constitutes genocide. And what continues to happen to women, non-binary, and trans folks is a good indicator of a country’s character and perspective. In Louisiana if this law goes through, any woman who terminates a pregnancy because it is ectopic and life threatening is a murderer. A women who has an unimplanted fertilized egg that flows out with her period is technically a murderer. And a judge that seeks to stay the charges is to be automatically impeached.
Let us stop being outraged and surprised at this continued pursuit of genocidal policies and fascist radical Christian extremism, for none of this is new. Let us instead change the game by changing the people with their hands of power. Make laws not blog posts.
May Day came and went, a day to celebrate both the beginning of Celtic summer, lighting the fires of Beltaine to burn away the previous year, and a day to remember the international struggled for workers rights.
My friend and neighbour here on Nexwlélexwm (Bowen Island) Meribeth Deen wrote a beautiful and thoughtful article about the bloody labour history of Vancouver Island and the story of Ginger Goodwin. (Meribeth is a beautiful writer, by the way and you should hire her for things.). Goodwin was an organizer of coal mine workers who was killed in the bush by a police officer in 1918, prompting Canada’s first General Strike.
The coal fields of British Columbia were the sites of some of Canada most fierce union activity largely because the men who owned the coal mines were, to put not too fine a point on it, complete bastards. I admit that the story of Ginger Goodwin was not familiar to me but certainly the names of Dunsmuir and Bowser are. Dunsmuir, because his name adorns a major street in downtown Vancouver, and Bowser, because there is a town named for him on Vancouver Island. But despite Bowser’s name, I never knew that he was a xenophobic racist who mass imprisoned migrant workers from eastern Europe, include Ukraine, because he considered them a threat to Canada while the First World War was raging 8000 kms away.
Last year when statues were being toppled and things renamed (like Ryerson University) one of the intellectually lazy objections to these actions was that we would forget history if these names were removed, that these people did incredible things, and they should be honoured. But reading Meribeth’s piece reminded me that in naming streets and places and statues after these folks what we are actually doing is forgetting history, erasing it. We wash it clean, assuming that everyone with a statue or a road or a town named after them was a good person. In fact, if with people of well known names, we have to deeply research the history of these people to really know them and, unsurprisingly for a country that was founded on genocide, the exploitation of workers and the ruthless pursuit of profit and wealth, these places are often named for people who more than likely pursued one of these strategies.
A key part of colonization is erasing the knowledge of what is here in favour of a more comfortable and familiar set of names. The parts of Ontario I grew up in were named by settlers from Ireland and Scotland and named for places that were meaningful for them. It reminded them of home. And it erased the Anishinaabe and Onkwehón:we names that were already on the landscape and that encoded a much deeper story of home and belonging.
Here in Skwxwúmesh-ulh Temíxw where i now live a famous example is the naming of a pair of distinct mountain peaks called “The Lions.” Towering over Vancouver, these twin peaks got named by settlers after the totemic animal of the British empire- the lion. The lion has been a feature of British heraldry for nearly 1000 years and so it was pretty much the ultimate naming. Boom. Lions. Putting the British in British Columbia; and because you can see these peaks from everywhere, you’ll never forget it.
But 1000 years is a mere blip in time when you consider that from time immemorial those two peaks have be called Ch’ich’iyúy and Elxwí?n and are the embodiment of two sisters who brought a fierce peace to the coast. From the Squamish Atlas:
Ch’ich’iyúy is one of two names used for the mountains known as The Lions. The other name is Elxwí?n. While the meaning of the name “Elxwí?n” is not known, “Ch’ich’iyúy” means “twins”. These mountains have the name for “twins” because they are said to be two Squamish sisters. There are different stories about these two sisters, but the most famous is a story about peace: When a girl becomes a woman, the Squamish tradition is to celebrate with a big feast. A great chief had two daughters that came of age in the same spring, and he prepared to host the biggest feast the Coast had ever seen, inviting all the neighbouring peoples to come for several days of eating, dancing, and celebration! A few days before the feast, the daughters went to their father to ask a favour – they asked if he would also invite a tribe from the north which the Squamish people had been at war with since ancient times. They wanted peace for their peoples, and all the peoples of the region. Their father agreed and the northern tribe came to the feast, welcoming in a new era of peace. When the Great Spirit saw what the two sisters had done, he decided to make them immortal by turning them into the two mountains, Ch’ich’iyúy, so that they could be a symbol of peace in the region forever
Story as told to Pauline Johnson and recorded in The Two Sisters.
Almost all of the historical and Indigenous place names in this territory refer to the physical characterists of a place, it’s traditional use or to events contained in an ancient story that encodes a teaching like this. There are no place names named for people, and on the contrary many people carry the names of places.
History is not an objective set of facts. It is a whole series of contested and different stories and experiences, and is as subject to the whims and dynamics of power as branding. marketing, and narrative manipulation today. When we choose to name a place, we bring a projection on to it. Perhaps Bowser didn’t know much about the town that was named after him. But what does it say about the people that DID name that town? What were they thinking? By encoding his name on the landscape, it reveals the intentions of settlers – much in the same way that the erection of Confederate statues long after the end of the Civil War were a message that Jim Crow laws were in effect in this place. The photo on this blog post is the inscription on a Confederate soldier statue that still stands in the town square of Denton, Texas, taken in 2019.
I have no trouble removing or changing the names of places or removing the statues of racists. I’m not totally in favour of naming things after individuals anyway. But if you feel that something is being lost by changing names, consider what was intended by the naming in the first place and ask yourself if it’s time for a different story.
Yesterday we were walking an incredible cliff top trail in East Sooke Park, in Scia’new territory on Vancouver Island. The Coast Trail there is rugged along the Juan de Fuca side of the park and although it is well travelled, there are sections across bare rock cliff top when the path is all but invisible. It requires a deeper kind of seeing to discern where the path is, especially if you follow what looks to be an obvious route which can take you to some dangerous places. As an experienced trail walker, I find myself in moments like this looking for evidence that I am NOT on the path. Is there broken foliage? Is the soil compressed and eroded by boots rather than hoofs or water? Are the roots underfoot rubbed clean of bark? Are there any trail markers about? When I find myself answering “no” to these questions I move slower, until the evidence is overwhelming, and I stop and track back to find out where I went wrong.
You can see why looking for evidence to DISPROVE your belief creates a safe to fail situation. If I find a single piece of evidence that confirms my belief that I am on the right track, and I follow it unquestioningly, the results become increasingly dangerous, and failure becomes unsafe.
A lot of my life and work is about paying attention to these weak signals. Whether it is making music with others, facilitating groups, helping organizations with strategy, playing and watching sports like soccer, rugby and hockey, it all comes down to paying attention in a way that challenges your beliefs.
The other day I offered a pithy comment on facebook to the question of “what is the difference between critical thinking and buying conspiracy theories?” and it really came down to this: critical thinkers look for evidence to disprove their beliefs and conspiracy theorists look for evidence to confirm their beliefs.
I think the latter is quite the norm in our current mainstream organizational cultures, even if it doesn’t lead to conspiracy theory. The pressure for accountability and getting it right leaves very little space to see what’s going wrong in the organization. The desire to build on what is working – while being an important part of the strategic toolkit – is not served without a critical look at the fact that we might be doing it wrong.
This is why sensemaking has become a critical part of my practice. And by sensemaking I mean collecting large numbers of small anecdotes about a situation and having large numbers of people look at them together. The idea is that with a diverse set of data points and a diverse number of perspectives, you get a truer picture of the actual culture of an organization, and you can act with more capacity to find multiple ways forward, including those which both challenge your assumptions about what is right and good now and those which discover what is better and better.
Recently in Canada we have been having a little debate about whether celebrating Canada Day on July 1 is appropriate given that fact that this month – National Indigenous Peoples Month, as it turns out – has been marked by a reckoning with the visible evidence of the genocide that has been committed here. While hundreds of thousands of people here are in mourning or grief, and are reliving the trauma that has travelled through their families as a result of the genocidal policies of residential school and the non-consensual adoption of children, many others are predictably coming out with a counter reaction that goes something like this “yeah, well let’s get over it. Canada is still the best country of the world to live in.”
And that makes sense for many people – like me – who live here and have a great life. But as I have been saying elsewhere on Twitter: don’t confuse you having a great life with this being a great country. There is nothing wrong with people having a great life. That is what we should want for all people. But Canada is not a place where that happens for everyone. The story is very different for lots of people who struggle to find contentment and acceptance inside this nation-state. Canada’s very existence is owed to broken treaties, environmental destruction, relational treachery, economic injustice, and genocide.
Paying attention to the weak signals is important here. If all you can see is how great your own life is, and you think we just need to keep doing whatever it is that we are doing that assures that continuity, then we are headed for a precipice. We are headed off an environmental cliff, into a quagmire of injustice and economic inequality that destabilizes everything you have in a catastrophic way.
Listening to First Nations – really paying attention to possibilities – is mutually beneficial to everyone. If one wants all lives to matter, then one has to ensure that every life matters, which means taking the lead from those whose lives have been considered dispensable in the project called “Canada.” And it’s not like they haven’t been out here for the past 250 years calling for a better way. It’s just that the mainstream, largely led by commercial interests who have hungered for and exploited natural resources that never belonged to them, have cheered on the idea that if Canada is good for me, it must be good period.
Let seeing be disbelieving. This country is not an inherently GOOD place. But it could be. It could be great. It could be safe, healthy, prosperous, balanced, creative and monumentally amazing. But it requires us to first question the limiting beliefs we have that it could never be better than this and second to pay attention to the weak signals that help guide us onto a path that takes us there.
It is far too early to celebrate Canada Day. We haven’t yet fulfilled the promise of the treaties and the vision with which indigenous Nations entered into relationships with Europeans oh so long ago, and that vision which is continually offered up to settlers through reciprocity and relationship. If there is anything to celebrate, perhaps it is the fact that we do have the resources to make this country work for all and we have the intelligence and creativity and willingness to do it, but you won’t find that in the Board rooms and the Parliamentary lobbies and the Cabinet offices and the global markets.
It is in the weak signals, the stories and small pathways of promise out there that are born in struggle and resilience and survival and generate connection, sustainability and the promise of well-being for all.
Slack tide in the Salish Sea.
These are the Olympic Mountains across the waters of the Juan de Fuca Strait, the body of water that links in inland parts of the Salish Sea to the open Pacific Ocean. So much water flows through this passage twice a day with the ebb and flow of the tides, that the Strait takes on the quality of a slow river, flowing in two directions, in and out, two great long breaths a day, taking in cold North Pacific water, and exhaling the fresh water from the mountains and snowpacks of the Coast and Cascade Mountains, and the silty flow of the Fraser River – Sto:lo, as it is known on the coast.
AS a result of this flow there is tremendous life in this region. Many times a day freighters come and go through the Strait, heading to the ports of Vancouver and Seattle, or the mills at Squamish and Duke Point or Port Angeles. They carry the atoms of capitalism: coal and cars and plastic toys and oil and clothing and computer parts and everything we take for granted to live the lives we live here. They also carry the military power of the US nuclear submarine fleet and the Pacific Command of the Canadian navy based in Victoria. From time to time one sees sinister ships like the Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyers, which frankly just creep me out. These are nuclear weapons of mass destruction, cruising lithely through the serene waters. All around this landscape are the scars of clear cutting, new and old, and not an hour from where I am is the Fairy Creek watershed and the the old growth, Indigenous stands of the Carmanah and Walbran forests. Like everything around here, it is a context of mixed and conflicted feelings, activities and histories.
The ocean here is rich and complex and full of life below. Yesterday we watched a pod of five orcas, including a couple of babies and a huge male, frolicking in the slack water. They were breaching and spy hopping and tail lobbing and fin slapping. The young ones were learning hunting techniques while the adults milled around. There are salmon and anchovies and seals and octopuses and all manner of living creatures in the rich near shore kelp beds and in the deep marine canyons and reefs. Walking along the cliff tops here I’m reminded of the Jogasaki Coast on the Izu penisula in Japan, where local fishers steward the forests and have placed signs along the trails to let you know you are walking through a “fish attracting forest.” This is true on the coast here, as at least 30% of the nitrogen in the forest ecosystem come from marine sources, from fish carcasses that litter the salmon streams after spawning and are carried by bears and birds throughout the woods, where they feed the trees that maintain the streams that bring the salmon home to spawn. This is the most ancient cycle of life here on the coast.
I am in T’Sou-ke Te’mekw, and evidence of the ancient and historic use of the land and ocean is all around for those that have eyes to see. Yesterday, walking above the beaches of East Sooke Regional Park, I could hear people down below us on the beaches harvesting mussels. On the trail was a sign indicating that miners had once used the land here for iron, even though there was little evidence of that. But literally below my feet, very near that sign, on a flat spot above the beach near a creek of fresh water was a midden of shells, clearly indicating that the two on the beach were far from the first people to harvest shellfish here. It had all the hallmarks of a historic village site; different signs, different stories.
BC lifted the in-province travel restrictions on Tuesday and it feels good to stretch out and leave home for a few days. While I have loved the global travel of the before-times, I’m lucky enough to live in an incredible natural and cultural landscape here, amongst the ancient Nations of the Salish Sea archipelago, that I really don’t have far to go to actually be in another country. One could simply stay in one place and visit ever deeper into the natural and social history of these places, and perhaps we should. It is important to know our place in all of its complicated and complex realities, to let the emotions and thoughts flow in and out like the tides, bringing new nutrients and new life upwelling from the deeps with the currents and the change of the times.
Image by Ken Favrholdt from this article he wrote on the history of the Kamloops Indian Residential School
This has not been an easy thing to confront about Canada’s history, that this country was founded upon acts of genocide against indigenous peoples. In 2015 the TRC was really the first official body to declare that Canada’s colonial policies amounted to cultural genocide, and four years later the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Children came out and finally said it:
…the information and testimonies collected by the National Inquiry provide serious
reasons to believe that Canada’s past and current policies, omissions, and actions towards First
Nations Peoples, Inuit and Métis amount to genocide…
Now, they knew this was going to be a controversial conslusion and so they provided a 46 page supplementary report (linked above) to outline the legal analysis for this statement, in line with what the UN Convention on Genocide says.
Yesterday, MP Leah Gazan (another of my political heroes) called for Parliament to unanimously recognize the residential school policy as “genocide” and predictably someone opposed it, in this case MP John Barlow. It should be said that the House passes motions, proposes laws, and approves reports on genocide recognition from time to time and many of these statements are brought by John Barlow’s Conservative colleagues. The House has condemned acts of genocide against Uyghurs and Turkic Muslims, Ukrainians, Crimean Tartars, Kurds and other minorities in Iran, Bosnians, Yezidis, Shia Muslims and Christians in Syria and others over the years. Not every motion passes.
So Leah Gazan rose yesterday to propose that the House condemn residential schools as genocidal and someone said no. This was newswirthy enough that Olivia Stefanovich from CBC News wrote an unhelpful article, and went in search of a couple of experts.
She found Frank Chalk who is indeed an expert in Genocide Studies. And to my surprise he said this:
Frank Chalk, a history professor and co-founder the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University, said he does not see evidence of criminal intent, which is required by the UN convention on genocide.
Instead, Chalk said, he sees evidence of criminal negligence in the attempt to strip Indigenous children of their languages and beliefs.
“All of those steps constitute part of what we call ethnocide — the attempt to destroy a group’s culture,” Chalk said.
Chalk also said the debate over genocide distracts from work the federal government should be doing to advance Indigenous rights.
“If we quibble endlessly over the legal definition of genocide and how it applies to the victims of the residential schools, we will distract ourselves from concrete measures that we need today,” Chalk said.
Which really is astonishing, because as a genocide scholar I would have expected him to have quoted from the legal analysis provided by the National Inquiry, which spent 46 pages outlining the case for genocide in line with this very Convention.
There was no criminal intent? I can think of several acts tied specifically to the residential school policy that would have been criminal according some even to the laws of the day if they had been enacted against white citizens:
- Taking children against their will from their families
- Physical and corporal punishment, sometimes to the point of death.
- Confining them against their will in the schools
- Preventing them from returning home safely
- Performing medical experiments on children without consent
- Forcing children to work in gardens and laundries and kitchens for no pay as indentured slaves.
And these were just the official policies. Then there was the abuse, neglect and outright murder of children that was done by individuals on a scale that makes it systemic.
The debate over genocide is CENTRAL to what the government needs to be doing to address indigenous rights. It is not a “distraction.” The litany of colonial policy, including residential schools, is now well known to have been a deliberate attempt to eliminate indigenous peoples to free up lands and resources for settlers and companies to exploit. Defining it as genocidal is central to the moral imperative for restoring indigenous lands, resources and communities. This was not a mere “ethnocide” as if that is somehow less horrific. Canada’s political and policy power is still firmly pointed in the direction of “we own it all and it would be easier if you would just stay over there while we exploit it.”
With all due respect to Dr. Chalk’s expertise in the field, he got this wrong. And I don’t think anyone wants to be on the wrong side of a “debate” about genocide.