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.
I was reading a facebook thread today where someone posted about changing the name of British Columbia to something else, something indigenous. And one of the responses was “no. too much change, too fast.” And that got me thinking.
The process of changing the name of a place does indeed take awhile, but the act is instantaneous. One minute you are living in the Northwest territories, and the next minute you’re living in Nunavut. One minute you’re living in Upper Canada, and the next minute you’re living in Ontario. One minute you’re living in the colony of Newfoundland, and the next minute you’re living in Canada. One minute you’re living in the city of Scarborough, and the next minute you’re living in the city of Toronto.
And of course this happens all the time all over the world as countries change their names cities change their names and regions change their names. Bombay to Mumbai, northern Somalia to Somaliland, Cambodia to Kampuchea and back again, the USSR to the CIS to just Russia (and a bunch of other countries.)
It happens in our personal lives too. Many people change their names when they get married. Many people take new names when they change genders. People change their names for all kinds of reasons and we get used to using the new ones out of kindness and respect and because it is right to call people by their chosen names.
The point is that the changing of names is an instantaneous act and it rarely changes anything else instantaneously. We just keep living, making dinner, looking after our families, tending our gardens and going to work. So the objection to a new name is often rooted in some other kind of anxiety despite the fact that it happens all the time all around us. I don’t completely understand the emotional connection to the name “British Columbia.” I don’t really relate to events in Invermere or Atlin. Even folks outside B.C. call us all coastal hippies with warm winters when in fact the vast majority of the province is nothing like that. To me it’s just a label on a map, but of course I didn’t grow up here so I might be missing something. I certainly don’t feel a provincial patriotism or allegiance with people 700 km away just because we have the same kind of license plates. But I have been actively involved in working with changing the names of places including on my home island, Bowen Island, which has been known by at least three official names and several nicknames through its history.
For for the vast majority of its history, Bowen Island was (and still is) known as Nexwlelexwm because we live in Squamish territory and that’s the Squamish name for the island. When the Spanish visited here they briefly named it Apodaca, and that is still a name associated with one of our three mountains and one of our water taxis. A few weeks later, Captain George Vancouver changed the name to Bowen Island – named for one of his English friends who never saw this place – and it has been also known as that for the last 200 years or so. The island also has a few nicknames including The Rock and The Happy Isle. So it’s clear that names are not at all permanent in time and we all have multiple ways of referring to our place.
The question of renaming British Columbia, especially as we develop a deeper and deeper awareness of the traditional homelands in which we live, is an interesting prospect. But the land area known as British Columbia is somewhat arbitrary and doesn’t really conform to any of the traditional social or geological boundaries in this part of the world. British Columbia spans across more than 30 different indigenous languages, which are at least as diverse as the languages of Europe, or the languages of a similar size territory in Asia. In fact “British Columbia” is essentially the name of a mini continent populated by dozens of nations with distinct histories and cultures and names for their places.
For me I would be less interested in changing the name of the province, and much more interested in finding a way to acknowledge the names of the traditional territories in formal ways. For example it would be great if Canada Post would deliver mail to my address if it were sent like this:
In fact, you could probably send me mail this way if you included the local postal code. But the point is I actually feel a closer connection to Squamish territory – which encompasses the familiar islands, mountains, oceans and rivers of this place, than I do saying I live in British Columbia. This is the territory in which I live. It’s very different from the Syilx, and Nlaka’pamux territories the east of me which are full of desert and sagebrush, or the Saulteaux territories to the north east which are rolling hills and prairies. These landscapes are as different to where I live as the languages are to each other.
So perhaps it’s not too much change too fast to begin thinking about the places we live beyond a pro-forma territorial acknowledgment. Perhaps it’s time to deepen our connection and understanding to the territories in which we live and understand that our history here, no matter how recent, is bound up in the ancient history of the people who have lived on these lands from time immemorial, and that what happens here in the present day is the result of a shared history that has been made up of moment of both astonishing brilliance and horrific violence.
Perhaps indeed it is time to place the ancient names officially back on the maps and highways and mailing addresses so that we have a true sense of where we live and what it takes for us to continue to be here. It is one way we can begin to reverse the tide of genocide; restoring the names is critical to recognizing the continued existence of the peoples in whose lands we all reside.
I can barely say the word. I don’t use it much anymore. So much needs to be done before we can contemplate it. So much truth, so much restoration of lands and people and communities. But today I came across this poem by Anishinaabe (Wasauksing First Nation) poet Rebeka Tabobondung who is the founder of MUSKRAT Magazine. She published this in 2013 and I will let her say it, because at some deep level this is what I am always working towards:
Reconciliation
We are waking up to our history
from a forced slumber
We are breathing it into our lungs
so it will be a part of us again
It will make us angry at first
because we will see how much you
stole from us
and for how long you watched us suffer
we will see how you see us
and how when we copied your ways
we killed our own.
We will cry and cry and cry
because we can never be the same again
But we will go home to cry
and we will see ourselves in this huge mess
and we will gently whisper the circle back
and it will be old and it will be new.
Then we will breathe our history back to you
you will feel how strong and alive it is
and you will feel yourself become a part of it
And it will shock you at first
because it is too big to see all at once
and you won’t want to believe it
you will see how you see us
and all the disaster in your ways
how much we lost.
And you will cry and cry and cry
because we can never be the same again
but we will cry with you
and we will see ourselves in this huge mess
and we will gently whisper the circle back
and it will be old and it will be new.
The great shadow of North American history I think is that settlers know deep down that we don’t belong here. The idea of “settling” the west was predicated on the continent being cleansed of its original inhabitants. This happened in a number of ways. There was outright murder perpetuated by war, disease and neglect. There were treaties which ripped people from their territories and bound the loyalties of indigenous people to the Crown rather than their own laws. There was the residential school system which had as its goal the “education” and “civilization” of indigenous children such that they would no longer be indigenous, which resulted in hundreds of thousands being torn from their families and raised by many abusive and unwell priests, nuns, administrators, social workers, nurses, doctors, coaches and teachers.
It seems everywhere settlers ventured on this continent, they have left unsettled peoples, lands, animal populations and communities. The devastation of indigenous population over 500 years and including to the present day through the loss of lands, language, autonomy, self-governance, dignity, health and resources has been rightly called genocide, and documented as such in the last decades’ inquiries into residential school legacies and missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. There has been a deliberation erasure of peoples here, which made possible economies that have resulted in some of the monetarily richest people in human history living some of the most prosperous lives humans have ever lived.
And I think deep down, every knows that it was gained on the backs of genocide.
So that has some bearing on whether settlers can even feel at home here. And I think that unresolved cognitive dissonance – maybe deeper, maybe a soul dissonance – perpetuates inhumane level of violence towards people, land and community. On this continent the world’s mightiest military power has taken root, supported by the world’s mightiest economic engine and spread death and exploitation around the world. Here in Canada, the same week as 215 children were found deposited in a mass grave separated from their families, communities and even their names, we saw photos of a single 1000 year old spruce tree being carted away to make guitar tops. Songs will be sung through a tree which lived twice as long as colonization and which was weeks away from being protected forever by a provincial law prohibiting such logging.
The term “settler” is used to describe willing immigrants to this continent, because traditionally it was the word that our families all used when they were heading here to settle down. But it conveys a sense of serene calm, of finally arriving somewhere, of belonging.
It must be heard in the context of all the unsettling that has resulted from this. Even amongst settlers, the privilege extracted from this continent has been concentrated in the hands of very few (who even continue to become enriched during the biggest public health crises in a century) resulted in this unsettling being pushed through the class ranks rendering people housing insecure, unhealthy, burnt out and poor.
35 years ago I stood in the summer night around a fire in Sudbury participating in a process to make an apology from the United Church of Canada to indigenous peoples, a powerful and important gesture that indigenous people like Alberta Billy, Art Napoleon, Murray Whetung and Stan McKay asked for. And we wrestled for hours over the wording of that apology because in the room where we were deliberating were residential school survivors, teachers, administrators. The whole system was there. And the concern in the room was sparing the feeling for those that had “good intentions.” And so the debate went back and forth and in the end I don’t think we spared their feelings, but I do think we must have hedged on the final wording just a touch, because the Moderator – Rev Bob Smith – delivered the apology to the Elders and we waited and waited and finally the Elders announced that they were appreciative of the apology but they did not accept it. They wanted to see what would happen next.
At the time, I thought this was a brilliant response and a generous one. It was an invitation to join in relationship and do something meaningful together, because the proof is in the actions and the only future that can begin to redeem the past is in mutually beneficial reciprocal relationships, which now must first consist of a MASSIVE transfer of wealth and land back to First Nations. It is what indigenous people have been saying since the very beginning: hey, let’s do something cool together. And at every turn everything has been stolen.
That night changed my life. It made me unsettled. And I think that is the only job of settlers: become and remain unsettled. If the news of this past week has unsettled you, good. Perhaps that will enable you to finally be in relationship with all of the people who have been unsettled by the history of colonization on this continent. Get unsettled, be in relationship. If you have land, think about how you can give it back. If you have cash, donate. LIsten to what indigenous people are saying. They are inviting us all into a better world, but we need to let go of the idea that settler colonialism is a viable path to that world. It is not.
There are people among you right now who properly belong to this place. No matter how closely connected you feel to where you live, not matter how long your family has been “in these parts” there are people here whose history goes back to the time before your ancestors even thought about farming. Listen to their voices. Follow their lead. Be unsettled and be led.
Xwexwesélken is the Squamish name for the mountain goat, a creature that lives on the high rocky cliffs of the coast mountains, picking its way across perilous and sheer vertical surfaces in search of food and protection. Mountain goat wool is a prized material in Squamish culture, used to weave blankets with immense spiritual and social significance.
In the last session of the Mi Tel’nexw leadership course, Chepxímiya Siyám (Chief Janice George) used the mountain goat as her metaphor for teaching about Squamish ways of doing. As a master weaver who has brought the weaving practice back to life in many Coast Salish communities, she wove her personal story with the deeper cultural story of Squamish ways of life, as goat wool is woven through weft and warp into a beautiful, powerful blanket. I heard two critical teachings in her presentation: doing things well comes down to being anchored in story and treating all work as ceremony.
Chepxímiya started her teaching with her own personal history of how she grew in the cultural knowledge, raised by her grandmother after her family died in a car accident, and working as an archeology researcher. Several times she talked about how “the culture saved my life.”
Chepxímiya was raised in the Squamish tradition of women’s leadership, leadership that is characterized by gentleness and deep knowledge of the rhythms and seasons of land, family, medicines, and food, so that the people may be cared for. In a culture where men were often sent to war, the women are knowledge keepers. A man might be killed in battle and all his knowledge dies with him. Women hold the deep knowledge of ceremony while men lead the work.
“To lead,” she said, “we have to believe in our ancestors, their teachings, and ourselves.” Who I am and what I am doing is deeply connected to my family, to our stories, and to my aspirations for my children and their children. This is the bigger context for any action, but it is so easy to make things short-term and succumb to immediate needs that don’t take the bigger picture into account. If one is disconnected from family, community, land, and history, then one is lacking the perspective needed to lead well.
One of Chepxímiya’s profound early learnings about this came in her research work when she discovered that the National Museum in Ottawa had two skeletons in its possession that were taken from Xway Xway, the village site in Stanley Park in Vancouver that is located near to where the totem poles stand today. In the early part of the 20th century, it was cleared and the residents relocated across the water to Xwmeltch’stn. In 1879 and again in 1928, two skeletons were disinterred and taken to the museum. Chepxímiya was a key part of the effort to bring these ancestors home in 2006. When the skeletons arrived in Vancouver, they were driven to the Park and brought to Xway Xway for one more visit before being taken away and buried in the cemetery. It was a profound moment, connecting ancestors, land, history, and ceremony.
This moment led Chepxímiya to learn more about her leadership and to accept her responsibility as a Siyám. She was invited to take a name and refused to do so until everyone in her family agreed that it was a good action, and there was no jealousy or conflict. The name she was given is from Senákw, the village on the south shore of False Creek that was the subject of nearly a century of litigation with the federal government and decades of discussions between Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh. Chepxím was one of the last people to live at Senákw before the villagers were moved against their will. In taking her name, Chepxímiya consulted Elders and leaders from Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh, and all were invited to witness in her naming ceremony. As Cheif Leonard George told her at the time “that’s a gutsy move you’re making” but when the final litigation was all settled and the Squamish regained the village site, the final court decision was released on her birthday.
As Chepxímiya says, when you walk softly and receive signs, you become susceptible to spirit. This is why ceremony as a model of “doing” is so profound.
Lessons from Squamish ceremony
The way in which Squamish ceremonies are conducted contains many lessons for leadership. Chepxímiya shared these lessons generously, and these are my reflections on her teachings.
Family, land, and teachings are all connected to action. Squamish ceremonies are conducted under strict protocols. These protocols include an intense period of preparation where one personally invites people to come, prepares to seat, feed, and gift every person who comes. There are people in the community who manage the feasts and conduct the ceremony with detailed knowledge of every person’s name, who their family is, which community they come from, how they are related to the family hosting the feast and where they are in their spiritual development. For a feast with hundreds of attendees, this is an immense amount of knowledge to carry, and making a mistake – such as pronouncing a name wrong, running out of food or seating a person in the wrong place – can be costly to the standing and status of the host family. Knowing the context is critical, to the finest detail, and finding the people who can lead in a respectful and generous way is essential to keeping the work relational.
(It is one of my great failings that I have a hard time remembering people’s names and faces, and I personally understand how hurtful it is to get this wrong. I spend a lot of time trying to remember and also humbly apologizing for my inability to connect faces and names.)
“The more you give away the richer you are.” Squamish culture is a reciprocal gift giving culture, and in giving away possessions, names, and power, one humbles oneself and open oneself to be able to receive from others. Those who hold on to their possessions and hoard them are unable to receive gifts from others. In my own spiritual practice, emptying is a key practice, to become open to receiving. To receive, first, you must give and that is a powerful leadership lesson.
Prepare seriously for important work. When leaders are appointed to lead in ceremony, they are blanketed with a mountain goat wool blanket to protect their heart and given a headband made of cedar to focus their mind so they can act purely, kindly, and with the purpose of the work in mind. Witnesses are appointed for any kind of important work and are given the job of reporting the story of what happened in as much detail as possible. In my own facilitation practice, these are the practices of hosting and harvesting. Preparation for hard work is essential, and perhaps this is an obvious teaching, but in a rushed world, when we can zoom from one meeting to another, it is critical to create time to prepare ourselves well to host and harvest important moments.
“The weaver’s job is to create a pure space for your people to stand on.” I have left the most profound teaching for last, as this speaks so powerfully to the work I have done for years trying to understand the role of space and containers in my facilitation and strategic leadership practice. The blankets that Chepxímiya weaves are both for the protection of the heart, but also to lay down on the floor of the longhouse so that people may stand on them as they are appointed to their witnessing roles or given their new names. The blanket creates a pure space, a container that is open to potential and clear of anything that holds back the person in fulfilling their duties, It is both a physical purity and a spiritual purity that is represented. The image of the leader as a facilitator and as a weaver is powerful; creating a lifegiving context for action; providing the conditions of material and relational capacity for a person to live out their purpose for their family and community and territory; to trust a person to act while keeping them connected to all that is important. This is really the gift of these teachings.
Mi tel’nexw is a powerful leadership journey. As a person who lives within Skwxwu7mesh Temix, this journey has given me some deep insight into what is HERE, into the traditions that are soaked into the land in which I live. It helps me better understand Squamish practice and tradition and gives me lenses for reflection on my own leadership the concepts that I teach others. You too can go on this journey, and the next course starts on November 3.
I lift my hands up to Skwetsímeltxw, Lloyd, Ta7táliya, Chepxímiya and Ta7táliya-men for this offering, for their generosity and their beautiful work. Chen kw’enmantumi!