I will not tire of declaring that if we really want an effective end to violence we must remove the violence that lies at the root of all violence: structural violence, social injustice, exclusion of citizens from the management of the country, repression. All this is what constitutes the primal cause, from which the rest flows naturally.
Óscar Romero, The Violence of Love: The Pastoral Wisdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero, compiled and translated by James R. Brockman (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 200.
Canada is not irredeemable as an idea. As a country founded on nation-to-nation treaty relationships in which existing Indigenous governance exists alongside common law, it is indeed possible to create a place in the world in that transforms a colonial legacy into a relational future. Canada founded on a vision that was exclusionary at the outset, and yet, the bones are there for it to be a place that is structurally inclusive and equitable.
I don’t apologize for my idealism about what we are led to by the north star of a far off post-colonial world. It guides my view and decisions about justice and about responsibilities that we have as settlers in Canada. Canada is poised to be a leader in so many ways but it must address the deep structural roots of its violence in greed and exploitation, a root that is the basis of every colonial country in this hemisphere. We need to reconcile first with the reality that the country was founded on broken agreements, stolen lands and genocide. Beginning there illuminates the places where structural violence still finds it’s source.
These territories on which the idea of “Canada” has been founded are beautiful, rich, life giving places which colonization sees as resources to be exploited, stolen, depleted and sold with no regard for the legacy of those actions on the natural environments or the people for whom these places are deepest home. Our work, if we are to redeem Canada, s to heed to Romero’s call and dig deep into our mess to find a source of peace for the common good that flows from justice, equity and restoration of reciprocal relationships between the land and peoples that have paid the price for the benefits many are celebrating today.
Alberta was a woman who changed my life. She was a residential school survivor and a member of the United Church of Canada and very respected We Wai Kai Elder from Cape Mudge on Quadra Island. In 1985 she told Bob Smith, then the Moderator of the United Church of Canada that the Church needed to apologize for the destruction of Indigenous culture and spirituality (watch this video). Bob took on the challenge and in 1986, at its biennial General Council in Sudbury, the Church brought forward the proposal to issue an apology. I was an 18 year old delegate to that meeting, representing Toronto Conference and I had one of the 600 or so votes in the room that day.
I remember impressions from that day: a room full of residential school survivors, residential school employees and adminstraors, and some church members who had never heard of these things at all, Indigenous Elders, ministers and congregation members like Tom LIttle and Murray Whetung and Art Solomon and Stan McKay were there. We wrestled over the wording, some wanting to spare the feelings of those who had preached the Gospel with “good intentions” and others who were so fired up by the crying need for justice and restitution that we lost patience with the decision wondering why it she be so hard to Apologize, when that simple act was all Alberta was asking us to do. In retrospect I remember it as one of the few meetings in Canadian history when a huge cross section of the people involved with the crimes of Residential Schools were in the room seeking a restorative pathway forward together. We were made up of victims, perpetrators, ignorant bystanders and everyone in between.
We came up with a short and meaningful Apology.
Long before my people journeyed to this land your people were here, and you received from your Elders an understanding of creation and of the Mystery that surrounds us all that was deep, and rich, and to be treasured.
We did not hear you when you shared your vision. In our zeal to tell you of the good news of Jesus Christ we were closed to the value of your spirituality.
We confused Western ways and culture with the depth and breadth and length and height of the gospel of Christ.
We imposed our civilization as a condition of accepting the gospel.
We tried to make you be like us and in so doing we helped to destroy the vision that made you what you were. As a result, you, and we, are poorer and the image of the Creator in us is twisted, blurred, and we are not what we are meant by God to be.
We ask you to forgive us and to walk together with us in the Spirit of Christ so that our peoples may be blessed and God’s creation healed.
And I remember that the Apology was not accepted and that was brilliant because it meant that we had to demonstrate action to make good on what we were seeking. If we wanted to be forgiven, we needed to work to undo the harm. For me this was a clear decision. I was about to enter my first year of university at Trent and I decided to major in Native Studies, as it was known then. It set my life path off in a way of trying to live up to the apology that I was a part of making, so that at some point in the future we might be personally and collectively worthy of forgiveness.
Now the United Church has done that in a number of way, but it has been 36 years and we have still not been forgiven and we may never be forgiven and to be honest that doesn’t bother me at all. An apology is not about seeking an outcome. It is about seeking a pathway forward together.
Years after that meeting in Sudbury, in 2007 Alberta Billy opened an Art of Hosting training we were doing on Quadra Island with folks from the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team (VIATT). There she welcomed me and Toke Moeller, David Stevenson, Kris Archie, Kyra Mason, Patricia Galaczy, Barb Walker, Carol Ann Hilton, and other Elders, child and family service workers and Indigenous leaders and families to her territory and her life’s work. And it was there that she learned about the four fold path of the Art of Hosting which she later used to plan some leadership work she was doing with Elders and leaders.
I never met Alberta Billy in Sudbury and I didn’t made the connection on Quadra Island that our lives had braided together in that way. But as I remember her today, I’m glad that something of the nourishment I harvested from the journey she sent me 21 years before on could find its way back to her that day.
My condolences to her family and all who loved and were touched by her life’s work.
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 The Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. It is well worth your time to read or listen to. There is so much to savour in this piece about the relationships between salmonberries, salmon, ancestors, family, and land. But this paragraph stands out for me:
All flourishing is mutual. Thriving salmon can be read, in context, to predict thriving salmonberries, and thriving salmonberries can be read, in context, to predict thriving salmon. One key to reading the patterns lies in the kind of intimate knowledge that comes through careful observation and the tenderness of ancestral stewardship practices.
That is beautiful. All flourishing is mutual. All abundance is mutual. If one is getting all the riches at the expense of others, there is no abundance and there is no flourishing. Reciprocity is life.
Congrats Cúagilákv!
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 and the process while also demonstrating what it looks like when we build a system with children at the centre.
With the world increasingly full of people that are acting like babies, it’s a good time to pause and reflect on the lessons that actual babies bring to the game. Babies get a bad rap.
The clock doesn’t matter. Rhythm matters. When there are babies in the room, we learn to pay attention to natural rhythms. Babies that are constantly held and cared for are very quiet and happy. The two babies we had in the room with us loved being held by others and they were looked after by their older siblings and other participants in the meeting. This of course is common in Indigenous families and large families. The babies had a blanket in the middle of the room they could roll around on and their every need was looked after. If they needed holding, they were picked up. If they needed as nap they could cuddle up with someone. If they needed feeding, they were fed, if they started getting tired at the end of the day, we closed the meeting down. If they were late in the morning, then we started once everyone was present and settled. Babies do not obey a clock, but they do very well at reminding us of healthy rhythms. Watching Kelly facilitate an hour of reflective practice with a five month old baby curled up in her arms sound asleep was beautiful.
Put the children in the centre not around the edges. We had babies in the middle and we had smaller children who were offered many options for being present including going in and out of the room, being accompanied by different adults and contributing. But there was no child care offered for our meeting. The meeting was child care and the children had a place in it. We all took turns being with the children, and they were never out of sight or out of earshot.
Babies change the conversation. The meeting we were running was not full of conflict or high emotions but it was about tricky issues like cultural safety and non-Indigenous professionals meeting with Indigenous families and so there was some nervousness in the room as we were building the container and the relationships. But babies make excellent talking pieces and excellent centres for a dialogue circle and having them constantly in our space made the conversation about them all the time. Their presence helped ground and simplify the conversation and it ensured that we spent our time well so as not to tire them out.
Babies have something to offer. Find a way to include them. Babies offer lots of things to a meeting, including feedback and insight and a kind of checking of the ego. All of the children in te meeting were included in every conversation sometimes in small groups, sometimes in the larger group. They offered their own answers to the questions we were asking because the questions were simple enough that a five year old could contribute “What do you like about your worker?” is a question everyone can answer and the children will often find ways to add to an adult’s story or tell it in their own voice. Additionally the two smaller children we had in our meeting were both excellent singers and when offered the chance to do so, they shared songs with us to end our meetings or bless the food, which is a common practice in Indigenous meetings on the west coast with adults usually offering songs before eating. There is nothing better than a child who loves singing being invited to share their gift with others in services of a genuine need rather than a cute performance.
Babies will tell you what’s happening in the room. Babies are very sensitive to the energy of a group. I learned this years ago, that they will sometimes express the emotions that are in a room in more subtle ways before the audults become aware. If things get tense they will get squirmy or begin crying from worry. It’s a signal to take it easy and take a little break. The baby is the first one to become unregulated in a setting and usually the first one to become regulated again. Babies don’t carry a lot of stories about what is happening in the room, so I pay close attention to their sounds and movements and it gives me information especially in setting like this one where the primary purpose was building a relational field and sharing and making sense of stories.
The baby reveals the truth of the system. If you are developing a model of care centered on children, watch what is actually happening with the children in the room. They way they are included and respected and lifted up so they contribute tells you a lot about how ready the people are to bring a truly child centered approach to their work. I have seen systems where the babies and the children gave us warning signs in the room that much more work had to be done. This weekend though was very special.
“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 bracing air of outdoors, the wind of high mountains, even the icy gust of the high crags buffeting the body; or in the morning, the cool scented air of southern paths through the pines. These books breathe. They are not overloaded, saturated, with dead, vain erudition.”
— from A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros
I love writing born of direct experience, born of the insight of a moment, or generated from the passing inspiration of the glint of sunlight on the sea seen through an open window. I love writing that arises from the quiet encounter with spirit or the contemplation of a mind that finally slows down and stretches out. That is writing of authentic voice or even the super-voice that all writers know, the voice we chase for its clarity and ease. It sometimes takes a long pounding away at the keyboard or days of scribbled lines before that voice arises somewhere below consciousness. In that moment you become merely a vehicle for it, in service to something. Your word choice become less ham-fisted, the cadence of the words more natural, like a jazz musician, you become open, trading fours with the muse, offering a lick of style or form and being rewarded with an image or a connection that you could never see before.
I’m enjoying A Philosophy of Walking. It is a testament to obliquity in the arts and philosophy, about the way a walk frees the mind and opens the heart. Today I’m heading out on y first work trip since February 15 2020 and I’m appreciating the way my thinking slows down even as my body is in the stop and go rhythm of ferry travel. There is spaciousness, time to kill, time to read or write or just peer out at the sea and look for whales or sea lions. Travelling on the coast means moving at the speed of the ferry, and the best way to do that is to travel on foot, at a human pace, free of the frustrations of being confined to a car, presented with options at every turn; a crossword, a book, an album, a blog post, a nap.
Have a read this weekend of some cool things I’ve found on the web. I’ll see what ideas and thoughts bubble up from this little trip to Vancouver Island.
- The Limitations of “Performance.” With a great quote from Tim Galloway: “When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless.” We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.”
- Beyond the magic – growing our understanding of societal metamorphosis. An account of a radically open community development approach from Tunisia called Tamkeen. Lots in this piece to think about. Ht: Marcus Jenal, whose newsletter always delivers fantastic stuff.
- The Northern Ireland Assembly met, this time with simultaneous interpretation of the languages of English, Irish and Ulster Scots. More on these languages and dialects in Ulster on this beautiful video playlist from the Open University
- The Sultans of String record “The Power of the Land,” a poem by Duke Redbird set to some great music and visuals of some pretty impressive landscapes, including, at 1:36, a view of Nexlelexwem/Bowen Island and the south end of At’lka7tsem/Howe Sound, which I live.
- A discussion of Orthodox Christianity and theosis within the natural world, courtesy of Dave Pollard’s monthly link post.
- A fantastic list of mostly books on encountering silence in the Christian Contemplative tradition from Carl McColman’s blog.
- Aja Couchois Duncan and Kad Smith on the history and practice of Loving Accountability
Enjoy your weekend as we move towards midsummer. I heard my first Swainson’s Thrush today, which means the better part of the season has begun.