Restorative justice is the promising pathway to restoring community, and my friend Sally Swarthout Wolf is in the final stages of finishing a book on the topic. This is a collection of stories from the field, and having had a first peek at the galleys, it is a promising illustrative collection to show and inspire what is possible when we put relationship at the heart of conflict resolution. Pre-order it now.
If you don’t live in Manitoba, PEI, British Columbia or Yukon, your provincial government has not yet enrolled in the national Pharmacare program and you are being left out of funding to support drugs and medications you are otherwise paying more for. All Canadians fund this program. All Canadians should have access to it, but it requires provincial governments to get on board. (Most of the provinces not yet enrolled are led by conservative and populist parties, who are not good on public health stuff, PEI being the refreshing exception).
My enduring curiosity about complexity and constraints extends every day to public policy realms. Looking through a complexity lens helps me to understand governance and how we might address public policy challenges (and why we get it wrong, so often). Brian Klass today has a really fascinating read on dictators, central bankers, decision-making and constraints.
My enduring curiosity also extends to the night sky, and I’m not the only one who looks up, obviously. What I didn’t know until now is that a species of endangered moth uses the Milky Way to guide its migration to a place it has never been before. They have been determined to be the first invertebrate discovered to use celestial navigation.
Growing little brain avatars by reversing time in skin cells to create the building blocks of neural networks sounds – possible? It’s being done right now at Stanford University. This is where complexity takes us, pure experimental research into living systems, and watching how self organization can enable researchers to discover new treatments for brain issues.
I love acts of local placemaking. Today, I caught up with a neighbour and asked how her daughter was doing. Here daughter, Tessa Goldie, a designer and animator, has a fun little line of T-shirts poking fun at some of the recent events of human/nature encounter on our little island: Bedtime Stories of Bowen Island. We are well endowed with local talents that do this sort of thing on Bowen, like Ron Woodall, who was a famous marketing executive in Vancouver before retiring to Bowen and becoming our local newspaper cartoonist. Every week we are treated to New Yorker level cartoons from this fella, and if you are a bit of a local, it’s likely that he’s done a portrait of you at some point, which he will religiously post on your birthday on our local Facebook page, with no comments. Mine is posted above. This kind of local placemaking serves as a beautiful reinforcing feedback loop of belonging.
There is something like the hunt for a deity in the way humans search for that one perfect thing in nature and seem to find it in a misapprehension of sceince. I’m no scientist, but I have long admired the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio. For mathematicians though, it must be frustrating to see people take work you know is clearly bounded and generally apply it to wildly inappropriate contexts.
Perhaps the deity is already here, and the prayers are tiny whispered pleas for approval.
Thirty-five years ago I awoke to this broadcast coming in over the CBC airwaves during the 8am news. Laurent Lavigne narrated the moment at which the Mohawks of Kanesatake were forced to defend their territory against the Surete de Quebec who were forcibly removing barricades that were set up to defend their lands. One police officer was killed (and the story of how his sister reconciled that death is interesting) and a summer of hatred, racism and resistence began. At Trent University we kept a fire going and raised supplies for the Mohawks who were besieged in the Kanesatake treatment centre. Across the country First Nations rallied in support of the Mohawks and the standoff itself and the defence of the land led directly to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and subsequent intergovernmental negotiation processes including the modern day treaty process in British Columbia.
The best record of the Kanesatake resistance is still Alanis Obamsawin’s film, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance which includes footage from inside the treatment centre where the Mohawk land defenders were trapped. You should watch it.
It was a summer that changed the history of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in Canada, and it changed my life. I later went to work for Terry Doxtator, one of the Oneida chiefs who served as intermediaries between the Army and the Mohawks. He and I actually watched the premiere of Obamsawin’s film together in 1993, the evening before a meeting of provincial Aboriginal Affairs ministers in Toronto. It was incredible watching the film and listening to Terry’s narration of the events from his perspective, and then going to meet with the ministers the next day and watch them still struggle to understand why Indigenous rights were an essential part the fabric of Canadian governance.
Summer is here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island. After some unsettled weather the annual summer high is doing its best to get established over the north east Pacific Ocean. That weather feature brings us long stretches of sunny, hot, and dry weather, usually starting in mid-July and going until mid-September with very little rain. It’s our drought season here on the edges of the temperate rainforest of the Pacific coast. We launched the kayak today, realizing that its a heavy beast and we’re probably going to need a little set of wheels to get it to and from the kayak rack by the beach where we store it.
Elon Musk wants to start a new political party. US politics is no longer amusing. I guarantee he will do none of the work required to create a democratic alternative. In starting his new party the richest man in the world said “When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste and graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy. Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.” The irony is at ridiculous levels, given Musk’s recent scraping of all kinds of the government data on its citizens and his own heavy reliance on government funding to keep his businesses solvent. Elon Musk is not likely to build a democratic alternative to the two parties of oligarchy in the US. When the biggest grifter of them all, who now knows your social security number, tells you you are getting your freedom back if only you will join his own charismatic movement, run in the opposite direction.
I got a new iPhone last week and set it up yesterday. It took all of 20 minutes of my phones sitting next to each other to transfer everything from my old phone to my new one with about five minutes of me tapping buttons and answering questions along the way. Once done, the new one looked exactly like the old. A very very nice user experience. No heavy lifting involved.
Not much going on today here on our little island. It’s a cool summer day, sunny and clear with a steady inflow wind. This evening we’ll probably head out for a paddle, but for now, here’s some music I’m enjoying this morning from my regular feed of music sites that feed me good stuff. If you’ve ever been in one of our Harvest Moon online courses, you’ll know that the music we play during the sessions is an important and curated part of the program. These are a few of the places I find that music.
- Samba Toure, a protégé of Ali Faraka Toure, has a profile of his career at World Music Central today. This might be the whole soundtrack for the weekend.
- Gillian Welch and David Rawlings released a beautiful album last year, and a couple of days ago they did a Tiny Desk Concert for NPR with four songs off the album. Gosh, Rawlings’ melodic lines are so very sweet on this whole record.
- Maria Popova posts a timely reflection on joy featuring a Nick Cave written after the death of his son.
- My favourite Canadian jazz guitarist, Reg Schwager, has just made all of his music available on Bandcamp for $63. I already have most of it, but his latest release there, In Between, features 8 original compositions in a classic jazz organ trio setting, with Michel Lambert on drums and Steve Amirault on organ. Beautifully produced to bring out the best of Reg’s tone and swing.