
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 with important things to do travel by plane between Vancouver to Victoria and a lot of the time what they are doing is time-critical. When the winter weather asserts its wild character on the best-laid and finest-tuned plans, faces grow red, legs start twitching and people grow anxious and angry. As flight after flight gets cancelled or further delayed, and the sense of helplessness grows, the atmosphere becomes bitter and frantic. I really feel for the counter staff here at Harbour Air, who are eternally patient and good hearted. They are cheerfully serving excellent espressos and capuccinos to lawyers and businessmen who don’t even look up from their Bluetooth enabled Blackberries while they desperately rebook their travel plans or apologize profusely to clients and bosses and give up altogether.
It makes matters workse that the Helijet is flying; Sikorskies are cruising up over the seaplane terminal every half hour on their way to Victoria. When one flies over, everyone here lifts their eyes wistfully skyward and curses their bad fortune at having booked on the seaplane rather than the helicopter.
And now comes news that my flight is cancelled and so I am going to hop a ferry to the Island and make a day of travelling. Ferries and buses it is.
[tags]harbour air[/tags]
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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 kicking yourself for not bringing your camera to photograph the hoarfrost glowing in the muted light and you pause to help a binner who has fallen off his bike on the frost, and watch people shrug at their bad luck as they wait fog bound at the seaplane terminal with the planes all tied up in the morning quiet pierced only by fog horns near and far and you get along to downtown and up into Perkins Coffee where the regulars are debating heating systems and the Canucks and the real estate market and you order a double espresso and a walnut biscotti and sit down to write, then it will take you 46 minutes.
Photo by ai.dan
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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 the Kwak’wak’wakw Sea, tending the resources, enhancing them where they could. In the past 150 years the Namgis people have been herded onto a reserve, had every single one of their food sources regulated by a foreign government that denied them citizenship for the first 100 of contact, even as it was busy distributing the ocean’s resources to others. Now the fishing industry is concentrated in very few hands, fish farms are wreacking havoc with the local wild seafood and there are less than half a dozen working boats in the community. Those that are left fish for the community, but simply eating salmon does not make you a salmon people. Without the experience of spending most of your waking hours on the water, handling the products of the ocean garden and tending to it, knowing in the heave and fall of the swell where your next meal is coming from, you are not an ocean people.
I heard another heartbreaking story today. Boats are so scare that an aunt who wanted to give her nephews a chance to get out on the water had to charter a whale watching boat from nearby Telegraph Cove at huge expense to herself simply to give the youth in her family a taste of an experience that is their birthright. And when the big day arrived, she was sick and couldn’t go and the trip was off, and the timing hasn’t worked for them to go since then. It must be akin to living indoors for months at a time, even as the weather outside is beautiful and everyone else is enjoying it. To say that some feel imprisoned is not overstating it.
Alert Bay is not a big community, and the Namgis people are not a people who are used to spending years at a time on land. Without being on the water working and gathering food there is a tremendous amount of stress built up here. When that stress combines with despondent feelings of failing one’s ancestors and the self-judgment that was taught so well at residential school, the combination sometimes leads to suicide. And without access to traditional food and traditional ways of harvesting food, an epidemic of diabetes has arisen. A large number of the community members are currently on a diet, similar to the low carbohydrate Atkins diet, but more built around traditional foods to see if it makes a difference in the diabetes rates. The early research is proving that it does, and so conversely it is proving that restricting the access of these people to their traditional food sources is akin to infecting them with diabetes.
If it sounds bad it is because the truth here is deep and painful and it rises close to the surface. But as with the upwellings in the channels of the Broughton what comes up is often nutrient rich as well. With the same passion that they tell stories about life now, they argue for solutions that are very much in line with what we know about the way the world is going. With the concentration of wealth in a few places, a global economy dependant on oil and the conversion of local places to branch plants for multinational corporations, the foundations of capitalist economies in the west are vulnerable to large scale and abrupt changes. As climate change accelerates, and the price of oil climbs as the resource becomes more and more scarce, the centralized economic systems of the western world risk collapse to more local, more self-sufficient regions. First Nations people, who have long been canaries in the coal mine with respect to control over resources, are now at the leading edge of this emergent future, calling for restoration of local control and responsibility to local communities. Over the past two days I heard passionate calls for broad decision making powers to be returned to the local communities, even if they are exercised in collaboration with government. I heard people describing the vast amounts of volunteer labour that local people put into sustaining ocean resources despite the fact that the exploitation of these resources are largely concentrated in the hands of a few distant owners. Despite that, Namgis and Oweekeno and Gilford Island peoples continue to look after their oceans and their resources, and to propose ways in which others might join them to sustain what is left for the benefit of those who need it most.
It has been a good road trip. The conversations in the gathering, framed and anticipated as hostile and angry, have instead been powerful and constructive. Through the simple act of listening, of hearing people’s concerns and voices and truly understanding where they are coming from, we created a small crack of daylight here. One staunch table-pounding advocate told me at the end of today that “I might be naive but I sense a little bit of hope.” That is exactly what we were trying to do, and now it is the responsibility of both the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the local communities to make good on the nuggets of possibility now emerging in public voices which, on bad days, are laced with toxic vitriol and bitter rhetoric.
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I can’t let this trip go by without commenting on the food. As we were gathered to talk about the natural food resources of the Kwa’kwak’wakw Sea, we were fed from these same resources. Yesterday it was clam chowder and smoked salmon salad sandwiches on homemade molasses bread. Today an incredible halibut soup topped with seaweed and flavoured with oolichan oil, one of the healthiest food products in the world. Oolichan smells incredibly bad and tastes like you would expect rotten fish to taste like. This because it IS rotten fish – a small oily smelt that is left to ferment and then processed into almost pure grease. It is brutal to eat raw, and is the definitive “acquired taste.” But it is also treated like gold here on the coast. Traditionally trails between First Nations that live on opposite sides of a watershed are called “grease trails.” Oolichan grease was and still is traded for west coast resources on Vancouver Island, or over the mountains on the mainland into the dry interior. Oolichan is the basis of intertribal relationships and protocols and in remembering these trails, and this little stinky fish, the relationships are also remembered. I once sat in the bighouse in Fort Rupert and listened to Kwagiulth and Ahousaht singers from opposite ends of the grease trail give their renditions of the songs that accompanied the trade. They were amazed that songs that hadn’t been sung in years were almost identical, leading to a great spontaneous celebration of unity and friendship during which we sang and danced and kept each other company around the fire that burned at the centre of the huge building. This food is more than just what is for supper. It is everything, the be all and end all. Without traditional food there are no traditional people and no traditional practices. If we are to retain our traditions we must retain our indigenous ways of relating to the land and using those relations to relate to one another, and then we can rediscover the hope that comes from stewarding our own lives.
[tags]namgis, alert bay, oolichan[/tags]
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Alert Bay, BC
Not a bad place to blog from eh? This is the kitchen counter I am sitting at in a wonderful house in Alert Bay overlooking the bay itself and looking up the channel towards Port McNeil. I am staying at a place called “Above the Bay,” owned by a lovely couple, Dave and Maureen who also have a spot right down on the water called “On the Beach.” This is going to turn into a shameless plug for their place, because the sun just set behind the Vancouver Island mountains and the beauty is astonishing and its not like Dave and Maureen had anything to with that, except the genius of the picture window in front of me is that they invite the whole bay to a part of the house. This place is great…two bedrooms, woodstoves, a nice open kitchen and a great deck which must rock in the summer with a big fat salmon on the barbeque after a day of whale watching. This is not the typical view in January, but if you are ever up here, this is the place to stay. And free wireless.
I left this morning on the 8:45 ferry from Port McNeil bound for the Namgis First Nation on Cormorant Island. The trip is 45 minutes down towards the mouth of the Broughton Archipelago, a massive tangle of islands that stretches from here down to Campbell River between Vancouver Island and mainland. I’m here to work with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans as they talk with First Nations from this area. On the ferry ride across I had a deep sense of the pattern of this place as I watched the cormorants and grebes, auks, seals and ducks scurry around beside the ferry. The pattern of here is that there are two worlds: the world of the surface where everything comes to rest, and the world of the deep where everyone goes to get nourished. Alert Bay and Namgis share Cormorant Island, and cormorants are birds that fly both above and below water.
People here rely on the ocean for their natural food. Several times today in the meeting, Namgis leaders and Elders talked about the ocean as their garden. There is a famous saying from this part of the world – when the tide is out the table is set. Clam beds, seaweed, salmon, and other creatures and plants formed the staple diet of these people and that natural diet is important today as diabetes and other nutrition related diseases ripple through First Nations. The pattern is calm at the surface, nourishment in the depths.
And so we had a good meeting today, beginning with that acknowledgement and extending into hearing what people were saying at their depths, what pain lay behind the calm exteriors. To have access to a traditional food source at your doorstep restricted by the effects of fish farms, government policy and commercial priorities is devastating, and these people, significant cultural and political forces here on the north Island, are tired of it. Hearing that opens things up though and we had some good conversations about collaboration despite it all. We ate clam chowder and salmon salad sandwiches, the local natural foods of this place and we looked into that private voice of possiblilty that lay behind the cynicism, but that nourishes hope.
So I’m definitely ensconced in here for the night, enjoying some quiet time, a pot of tea, some leftover salmon sandwiches and watching Venus grow brighter above the mountain in the darkening western sky. Travelling is sometimes weary, but this is one of those days when I count myself a lucky guy to get to do what I do.
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Port McNeil, BC
THis was an insane idea, but that is the nature of my travel schedule these days. It’s late – almost 2 in the morning – and I’m awake because I’m still a little buzzed from having driven this trip tonight. It’s bad enough to drive have the length of Vancouver Island, but crazier still to do it with a six hour flu and starting the whole trip at sundown.
For whatever reason this afternoon I developed a pounding headache in the middle of a little Open Space meeting I was facilitating for our learning community on Bowen Island. I got a little healing from my friend Roq and popped an advil before lining up for the 5:00pm ferry from Bowen to the mainland. On the ferry ride over, I could barely gape in awe at the colours of the sky because my stomach joined in the fun. It was most comfortable for me to stand leaning against the wall with my belly, in a state of half sleep.
Once I reached the other side, I turned around and lined up for the ferry to Vancouver Island, grabbed a shot of espresso from Blenz in Horseshoe Bay (meh) and then borded the 7pm boat to Nanaimo. On that trip whatever it was that was bundled up inside seemed to just dissipate, and I was clear and calm and quite concentrated actually. I did a little work on the ferry, resigned myself to a super of apples and oranges and had a cup of tea.
When we arrived in Nanaimo, I put Carmina Burana in the CD player, crancked it and headed up island. I was completely in flow and stayed alert for the whole 3.5 hours it took me to rocket through the mountains to Port McNeil. There was hardly anyone on the road at all – I passed probably less than 12 cars between Campbell River and Port, and I was lucky enough to see an elk meandering along the side of the road. Lucky too that he was on the OTHER side of the road. Halfway through the trip I switched disks and cranked my friend Moritz Behm’s CD called “Beauty” which is one of my all time favourite road CDs. It never leaves the road trip case.
I pulled in to the Black Bear Resort (it’s a motel on the edge of town, but comfy enough and the young woman at the counter stayed up past her 11:00 closing just for me, so yay to them for great service) at 12:30 feeling clear and refreshed, as if I had been meditating for the past 7 hours, and indeed I had. So under good conditions, even at night with patches of fog but a three quarters moon illuminating the snowy clearcuts, it’s 1:30 to Campbell River from Nanaimo and 1:50 to Port McNeil from there. And that’s good time, within the legal speed limit…mostly.
Later this morning, I’ll be up early to catch a ferry to Alert Bay, where more adventures await. Amazed though tonight at how solid everything is. Maybe that guy Roq was working more than just a little headache healing…
[tags] Vancouver Island, Port McNeil[/tags]