On board the Victoria Clipper, Strait of Juan de Fuca I’m out in the middle of a big piece of water that seperates Vancouver Island from the Olympic Penisula. Historically this strait is significant. Many of the Europeans who arrived here in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries had a sense that this might be the Northwest Passage. It is the first big opening in the coast that you reach coming north from San Franciso Bay, and it seems to head roughly the right way. It didn’t take long for Europeans to discover that it is …
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\ Victoria, BC Sitting at a window seat at Moka House in the funkyhip Cook Street village district of Victoria. In a tourist town, little neighbourhoods like this are the ones that keep locals sane. I’m here partly because it appears that I am turning into more and more of a local around here. We did a good day of work today with the VIATT crew, cracking some solid communications questions and planning our Art of Hosting training for later next month. We are getting deep into a process of community linkage that will expand and solidify …
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Seaplane terminal, Vancouver harbour, BC Today is the beginning of a long road trip which will take me to several places in the next two weeks. Starting off this morning in Vancouver where I am fogbound, waiting for the cloud ceiling to lift so we can fly out to Victoria. The nature of the seaplane terminal in Vancouver harbour during a fog delay is reminiscent of what it must have felt like in the Chicago Bears dressing room yesterday as they felt their Superbowl chances slip away. Here it is the same. On the coast, important people …
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Nanaimo, BC If you arrive in Departure Bay on the 6:30 am ferry from Horseshoe Bay, and the fog is so thick that you can hardly see from ship to shore, and you walk along the waterfront, past the marinas and chandelries and seedy nautical-themed alehouses and you take a moment to admire the gleam of a freshly burnished screw on a small tug in dry dock and you say “good morning” to everyone you pass because it’s still early enough that we’re all neighbours, and you stop to admire a surfacing eider duck and you spend a few minutes …
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It’s really impossible to overstate the worry I heard in people’s voices today. In our meeting an Elder named Billy Bird spoke briefly before lunch and reminded the group just what had been lost – the salmon runs, the crab and prawns, the seaweed beds, the clam gardens. The Namgis people and their relatives on Gilford Island, Kingcombe Inlet and Oweekeno are ocean people. Their life is on the ocean and without access to the ocean the fear is that they are no longer a people at all. For thousands of years these people have lived in …