Slack tide in the Salish Sea.
These are the Olympic Mountains across the waters of the Juan de Fuca Strait, the body of water that links in inland parts of the Salish Sea to the open Pacific Ocean. So much water flows through this passage twice a day with the ebb and flow of the tides, that the Strait takes on the quality of a slow river, flowing in two directions, in and out, two great long breaths a day, taking in cold North Pacific water, and exhaling the fresh water from the mountains and snowpacks of the Coast and Cascade Mountains, and the silty flow of the Fraser River – Sto:lo, as it is known on the coast.
AS a result of this flow there is tremendous life in this region. Many times a day freighters come and go through the Strait, heading to the ports of Vancouver and Seattle, or the mills at Squamish and Duke Point or Port Angeles. They carry the atoms of capitalism: coal and cars and plastic toys and oil and clothing and computer parts and everything we take for granted to live the lives we live here. They also carry the military power of the US nuclear submarine fleet and the Pacific Command of the Canadian navy based in Victoria. From time to time one sees sinister ships like the Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyers, which frankly just creep me out. These are nuclear weapons of mass destruction, cruising lithely through the serene waters. All around this landscape are the scars of clear cutting, new and old, and not an hour from where I am is the Fairy Creek watershed and the the old growth, Indigenous stands of the Carmanah and Walbran forests. Like everything around here, it is a context of mixed and conflicted feelings, activities and histories.
The ocean here is rich and complex and full of life below. Yesterday we watched a pod of five orcas, including a couple of babies and a huge male, frolicking in the slack water. They were breaching and spy hopping and tail lobbing and fin slapping. The young ones were learning hunting techniques while the adults milled around. There are salmon and anchovies and seals and octopuses and all manner of living creatures in the rich near shore kelp beds and in the deep marine canyons and reefs. Walking along the cliff tops here I’m reminded of the Jogasaki Coast on the Izu penisula in Japan, where local fishers steward the forests and have placed signs along the trails to let you know you are walking through a “fish attracting forest.” This is true on the coast here, as at least 30% of the nitrogen in the forest ecosystem come from marine sources, from fish carcasses that litter the salmon streams after spawning and are carried by bears and birds throughout the woods, where they feed the trees that maintain the streams that bring the salmon home to spawn. This is the most ancient cycle of life here on the coast.
I am in T’Sou-ke Te’mekw, and evidence of the ancient and historic use of the land and ocean is all around for those that have eyes to see. Yesterday, walking above the beaches of East Sooke Regional Park, I could hear people down below us on the beaches harvesting mussels. On the trail was a sign indicating that miners had once used the land here for iron, even though there was little evidence of that. But literally below my feet, very near that sign, on a flat spot above the beach near a creek of fresh water was a midden of shells, clearly indicating that the two on the beach were far from the first people to harvest shellfish here. It had all the hallmarks of a historic village site; different signs, different stories.
BC lifted the in-province travel restrictions on Tuesday and it feels good to stretch out and leave home for a few days. While I have loved the global travel of the before-times, I’m lucky enough to live in an incredible natural and cultural landscape here, amongst the ancient Nations of the Salish Sea archipelago, that I really don’t have far to go to actually be in another country. One could simply stay in one place and visit ever deeper into the natural and social history of these places, and perhaps we should. It is important to know our place in all of its complicated and complex realities, to let the emotions and thoughts flow in and out like the tides, bringing new nutrients and new life upwelling from the deeps with the currents and the change of the times.
Just a little story about how I lost my assumptions about mask culture.
Here in Vancouver, over the past twenty years, it used to be very common to see people from Asia, specifically China, Japan, and Korea, wearing masks out in public. I have to admit that for a long time I felt it was kind of arrogant like you were wearing a mask because you didn’t want to contract something from me. To the naked eye, it didn’t look like folks were vulnerable. It looked like healthy, mostly young people were wearing masks to send a signal that somehow it wasn’t safe to be around me.
Last year, however, I was in Japan, and one day, crossing the street in Shinagawa, I saw tons of people wearing masks and I turned to my Japanese friend and straight out asked her “what’s the deal with everyone wearing masks?”
And she matter of factly replied “of course…because they are feeling a little bit sick and they don’t want anyone else to get infected.”
This realization hit me so hard that I may have actually stopped in my tracks, halfway across the street, on one of the busiest pedestrian crossings in Tokyo, upsetting the flow of pedestrians moving out from the busy Shinagawa station and causing a bit of grumbling from the folks behind me.
I was simultaneously overcome with gratitude, admiration, and shame. That was the beginning of my education in how key consideration for other people is as a rule in Japan. In general, folks there try to respect each other’s space, not to make noises too loud, to talk on their phones while on a train, to wait in traffic when there is a delay, or patiently line up for a ticket booth or a train. In a culture like that, of course wearing a mask is about consideration for other people.
These days I am wearing a mask when I am in my local village or in the city, and because of this particular epiphany, I find that when doing so I am a lot more conscious of my neighbours and the strangers around me. I wear a mask, because I might be infected with COVID-19 and be asymptomatic, and the kinder thing to do is to try and keep my breath to myself as much as possible.
Now I get why people are a bit put off wearing masks. I understand why people reason that “I’m not vulnerable, I probably won’t catch it, and anyway, the masks don’t protect you…” I get that because we live in a culture that prizes our individuality over consideration for others. We rationalize our behaviour based on our personal good first. And often that’s all the planning we do. The results of this behaviour are evident in things like climate change, or the inability to address the opioid crises, poverty or homelessness with radical solutions. The vast majority of people look at their own circumstances and believe that they are not connected to these problems, or that somehow they are immune to them.
In our culture, it takes an epiphany to change one’s view. It seems that one has to get sick, or become homeless or addicted before suddenly things become problems. We often hear stories of people who suddenly find themselves in dire straits complaining about the levels of service at hospitals for example, while for years they never paid attention as health care budgets were slashed to pieces.
One of the biggest lessons I took away from last year’s trip to Japan was about this culture of consideration, and it’s interdependance between the individual and the group (and yes knowing full well there are exceptions to the rule.) One of the things I am taking away from this pandemic is the same. There is no way out of this through an assertion of the individual over the health of the group. That is not how public health works. We must learn that our collective health is bound up in individual choices that we make and that our individual health and overall wellbeing is directly dependant upon the health and wellbeing of the group, and especially the most vulnerable in the group.
That is the lesson this pandemic is teaching us. Whether we learn this or not will very much determine how this thing will play out and what happens next in our world.
I’m on my way to Europe for a week, cobbling together the first leg of a 26 day trip that will take me to The Hague, Hamburg, Manitoulin Island, Thornbury Ontario, and New York City.
On this leg I’m flying with Jet Airways, an Indian carrier that is in the throes of financial troubles at the moment, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. At any rate, this flight from Toronto to Delhi stops in Amsterdam and so it is full of a mix of travellers of all ages and every ethnicity you can imagine. There are people wearing visible symbols of at least four religions. There is a baby in the row in front of me and a serene half blind nonagenarian Indian woman wearing a Ferrari t-shirt and surrounded by four generations of her family who are doting on her and caring for her.
I never really watch movies on long flights, preferring to read and sleep to music or long rambling podcasts that remind me of being a child, falling asleep to the radio, fading wakefulness snatching at half-heard phrases in the dim glow of the radio dial. On overnight flights like this I like to grab a north facing window seat to pass the time looking for meteors (saw two) or the faintest hints of the northern lights.
I do however keep the live map on, feeding another fascination from childhood – geography. I have an incurable attraction to maps of all kinds.
On the interactive map on this flight comes a small disclaimer: “Physical Features Map Only. No Political Borders Depicted.” Given the kind of airline this is and the huge diversity of its passengers I can see why they do this. There are no national borders depicted, only state boundaries, provincial boundaries and, inexplicably, the Welsh and Scottish borders with England.
The map has roads, cities, mountains and water labelled. Truthfully, to understand earth, this is all you need. Cities are the most enduring human features on earth and the roads that connect us are also ancient, both can be thousands of years old. The political lines are the most arbitrary feature – practically drawn in pencil in historic terms – and yet are the ones that inflame the most passion. I’ve had a long standing aversion to nationalism born from my experiences as a temporary immigrant in Thatcher’s Britain where British nationalism was trumpeted by the National Front and parroted by some of the boys at my school who made sure to add that to the arsenal of insults and physical abuses that were unleashed upon me from time to time.
So something about this small message gives me peace, even though I understand the reason for it. Those national boundaries are not necessary in order to understand where you are on earth. They are as ephemeral as the very idea of nationhood, and are nothing up against the mountain ranges, cities, rivers, lakes, and oceans upon which the lines are childishly drawn.
I’ve been enjoying reading Adam Nicolson’s book “Sea Room” about the Shiant Islands in the Hebrides. The history of the small group of islands that he owns obsesses him. He charts the archaeology and natural history of the islands, and the book is filled with the characters who are the real owners of the place – the crofters and shepherds that work the land as tenants witinn the strange Scottish systems of private land ownership.
Nicolson expresses some astonishment at the amount of activity that has taken place on the Shiants over history because they are considered so remote now. It doesn’t escape him that this might be by design
When I was on Iona last month I was also struck by how somewhere so remote was at one time the focus of a mass pilgrimage. In the 15th century thousands of people travelled every year to visit the relics held at the Abbey there.
When you look at a map of the Hebrides, you can see that these islands are beyond the ends of the world, connected as it is these days by roads. To get to Iona from Glasgow involves two ferries and when you’re finally there, you’re much closer to Ireland than to Glasgow. But Ireland is away across the sea. You can’t get there from here.
Yet, it wasn’t always that way. When the traditional cultures and communities of the Hebrides were strong, families rowed and sailed through the islands for work and trade and spiritual reasons. For a culture based on the sea, places like Iona are at the very centre of the world. The abbey at Iona was as important and accessible to worshippers as St. Paul’s in London, or The Vatican.
During the period of most recent colonization, since the late 1700s, Hebridean culture ended up on the margins of the world. Travellers like Samual Johnson visited and wrote patronizing books about the lives of the people huddled together in large communal blackhouses, shared with their animals, surviving on meagre soils, livestock and fish. The colonizers paint a picture of Hebridean communities that need saving.
This same strategy – of decentering a culture and a world – happened on the west coast of Canada too. Place like Bella Bella, Kitkatla and Wuikinuxv all which are considered remote now. They are inaccessible by car, and can only be reached by water or air. But the Heitlsuk, Tsimshian and Wuikinuxv peoples are canoeing cultures. Traversing the waters of the central coast was never a big deal. Bella Bella sits right in the middle of the BC Coast, a place of strategic importance between many different cultures. Until Europeans showed up and began building roads and cities elsewhere, these communities were the heart of the 9000 year history of human occupation on the coast. Almost overnight they went from places of immense importance to places of massive inconvenience. People were moved, villages relocated, children stolen and housed in residential schools so that the colonial governments could “care for” their wards.
The result of course has been a massive seismic upturning of culture and power. That is being resisted today with increasing vigour, and on the central coast in particular, it is becoming obvious that the indigenous governments are the ones best equipped to manage resources, develop economies and protect marine and territorial ecosystems. This ultimately benefits everyone who lives in these territories, both indigenous and non-indigenous.
The decentering of entire cultures is a core tactic of colonization. People that never needed help are suddenly cast as poor, disconnected and in need of aid for their very survival. What is needed instead is a recentering of the world on their communities and ways of life. Governance, ownership and leadership should lie with the people who best understand the land and seas. When that happens, the results are better for everyone. This is what reconciliation can be.
Just about to leave Montreal this morning for Toronto and north to Thornbury, Ontario to visit family. I was here for the conference of the Canadian Evaluation Society, where I participated on a panel on innovative dialogue methods (and yes I noted the irony in my remarks) and later led a World Cafe where I presented some of the sense-making processes I’ve been working on. I was here on the recommendation of Junita Brown who has been in some good conversations with evaluators around the use of the World Cafe for evaluation purposes. Originally Amy Lenzo and I were scheduled to host a cafe here that was much more ambitious: a plenary cafe with the participants to explore the learning field of the conference. Through various machinations that was cut back to a panel presentation and a very small world cafe at the end of the day with 16 people. The conference was one of those highly scripted and tightly controlled affairs that I hardly ever go to.
The session before us was a case competition where student teams were responding to a mock RFP from Canada World Youth to evaluate an Aboriginal Youth leadership Program. Not a single team had an Aboriginal person on it, and every single presentation was basically the same: full of fundamental flaws about what constitutes success (“Did the youth return to their communities”) or what constitutes a cultural lens (“We are using a medicine wheel to understand various parts of the program). One group of fresh faced non-Aboriginal students even had the temerity to suggest that they were applying a decolonizing strategy. Their major exposure to indigenous communities was through a single book on decolonizing methodology and some internet searches about medicine wheels. It was shocking actually, because these were the students that made the finals of this competition. They looked like fresh versions of the kinds of evaluation firms that show up in First Nations certain they know what’s going on.
To make matters worse, the case competition organizer had a time mix up with the conference planner meaning that our panel started 30 minutes late which gave me very little time to present. As I as doing a a cafe directly afterwards I ceded most of my time to my panel colleagues Christine Loignon, Karoline Truchon who did a very interesting presentation on their use of PhotoVoice. It was clear to me at the conference that the practitioners among us had a better grasp of complexity theory, power and non-linear sense-making than any of the professional evaluators I met.
I presented most of the work that I have been documenting here over the last few months, and later led a small group through a cafe where we engaged in the creation of a sensemaking framework and used a pen and paper signification framework.
By far the better experience for me was hanging out with friends and colleagues. On the first night I arrived I had dinner and drinks with my friends from Percolab: Paul Messer, Samatha Slade and Elizabeth Hunt. We ate fish and chips, drank beer and whisky and caught up. On Sunday I met Jon Husband for lunch on the grass at McGill with his delightful godson and then joined the Percolab folks for a visit to the new co-operative ECTO co-working space on Mount Royal in the Plateau, followed by a barbeque with family and friends.
And Last night, after my presentations a great evening with Juan Carlos Londono and Lisa Gravel. We had dinner at Lola Rosa and spent hours going over the new French translation of the GroupWorks Pattern Language Deck. This was a brilliant time. I learned a bunch of new French words and most fun of all we discussed deeper etymology, nuance and the limitations and benefits of our respective languages in trying to convey some of the more esoteric practices of hosting groups. The new deck has some beautiful reframing and some names for patterns that need some work. But it’s exciting to see this translation and I always love diving into the language.
I really do like Montreal a lot and in the past number of years come to love it more as I have lost my inhibition about speaking French. the more French I speak, the more French I learn and the more the heart of the city opens up. Many English Canadians have the idea that Montreal is a cold hearted city to English speakers, but I find that isn’t true at all. Just offer what you can in French and people open up. And if you’re lucky enough to sit down with lovers of words like the friends I have, your learning explodes.
Off for a couple of days to visit family and then home to Bowen Island for a series of small local facilitation gigs, all of which will tell me something deeper about my home place.