
It’s a snow day here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island. After a couple of weeks of clear warms weather, winter seems to have finally gotten around to giving us a little blast of snow and cold. we’re looking at a week or so of colder than normal temperatures on the back of these squally snow events we’ve been having for the past twelve hours.
After shovelling and salting the driveway, wrapping my water pump in a blanket and checking the heat tape on the pipes, I settled in to watch soccer and catch up on local news. It’s been 24 hours of utter chaos at the continental level, so I turned to The Undercurrent, our local newspaper to see what’s happening.
I realize that had missed this story: “New names chosen for Bowen beaches“:
A pair of Bowen beaches will be receiving new names in the coming months.
The two destinations set to change names are Crayola Beach in the Bluewater neighbourhood and Pebble Beach at Cape Roger Curtis. They’ll be known as Xéla7an and Smí7mant Áyalhkw respectively going forward, drawing their new names from the Squamish language. The initiative is a result of a Bowen Island Parks Plan recommendation for collaboration with Squamish Nation, and a means to clear up some practical issues with the current names…
Aaron Williams, a language specialist with Squamish Nation, provided the guidance for the new names. Joined by his mother and cousin, the three came to Bowen last fall and met with manager of environment and parks planning Carla Skuce to explore the beaches in question.
This is fantastic. It follows on the heels of a ceremony held in 2020 to officially add “Nexwlelxwm” to the island’s welcome gateway, and I’m thrilled that Aaron and Vanessa came over to do this work. The two names came to Aaron and Vanessa on their visits to the beaches.
The first beach they visited is at Cape Roger Curtis and is known as “Pebble Beach” which confuses it with “Pebbly Beach” located on the opposite side of the island.
“One of the main things we noticed at this beach is that there were lots of little pebbles, it was like somebody went in there and dumped tons and tons of tiny little pebbles, and you could tell they were all rounded from the ocean… that was a very huge indicator for this name,” said Williams as he presented the new names to council last month.
“It was very striking to see that… this indicated this beach was very untouched and unscathed from development, which was very beautiful to see,” added Williams. As a result he felt Smí7mant Áyalhkw – translated to ‘place of pebbles’ – appropriately reflected the setting of the beach, a “reference to the wonderful state and condition that the beach is in.”
My best shot at providing a useful pronunciation of this name is “SMEH-munt EYE-alk.” In Squamish the “7” is a glottal stop and the “lh” sound is pronounced like the “tl” in the word “Atlanta” except a bit softer. The k in “Áyalhkw” is actually underlined, by that character doesn’t show up in my typeface. It’s sounded deep in the throat and the the w indicates that you make the sound with rounded lips. But “SMEH-munt EYE-alk” is a good starting point!
Further north on Bowen’s west side the group visited Crayola Beach, occasionally known as Bluewater Beach. Aaron’s mother Vanessa noticed red markings left by water tides on rock banks and bluffs. This brought forward memories of petroglyphs, a form of communication where messages are created through a technique of marking rocks.
“It was something that really stood out to her, and reminded her of our old way of educating the future through the petroglyphs,” explained Aaron. This led to the name Xéla7an, which means ‘marked/coloured on the cheek/side’.
That name – actually spelt with an underlined X – could be pronounced HEL-ah-un. The “HEL” should be pronounced with a guttural sound like you’re saying “Chutzpah” in Yiddish.
It’s amazing to have these two new names for features on our island. Great work and much appreciation to our Council, Carla, and to Aaron and Vanessa.
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Interesting links that crossed my path this month. You can find these in real time at my Mastodon site, which is also mirrored on Bluesky.
- One of the most significant pieces of work I am currently doing is helping the Squamish Nation develop their Constitution by supporting large in-person and online community gatherings. It’s hard work and important work for the Nation, and I’m really happy to be a part of it. I get to work with the inimitable Amanda Fenton who supports the online work and Squamish Nation member Tyler Baker, who is my in person partner when we work at two different sites simultaneously.
- BC Child Poverty Rate Climbs as Income Inequality Grows: Policy Note. Child poverty is unacceptable, especially as we learned it can be nearly eliminated by a small universal basic income. The pandemic supports helped us to see something I will never be able to unsee: this challenge is possible to address, and quickly.
- The science and natural history of the fault zones of the west coast of North America. We live in a very active landscape.
- If you want to understand the complexities and nuances of life in British Columbia in 2024, this collection of books from The Tyee is a grand place to start.
- I met Lightning Bill Austin selling his art in the Pybus Market in Wenatchee, Washington this month. An absolute legend. Here’s his story.
- Contemporary Poets Respond (in Verse) to Taylor Swift: Perhaps the most inventive way to celebrate and honour Taylor Swift’s work and her impact on the world.
- This is the year-end summary of the highlights from EV Nautilus, a research vessel that explores and studies the geology and fauna of deep-water sea mounts. I love this channel because it is populated with scientists who show nothing but utter delight in seeing the creatures that they love. I’ve shared this link on my out of office responder this month.
- There’s No Place Like Home: Humanity and the Housing Crisis from CBC Ideas. Calling for housing to be a human right should not feel like the Quixotic quest that it appears to be. This is a fantastic lecture even if it leaves me deflated by the challenge.
- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The whole thing. Online and searchable.
- Dave Pollard writes a great piece on “What We Don’t Know.” The undermining of expertise by folks who think they can hold their weight with people who have devoted their lives to fields of study and practice is ridiculous and dangerous.
- The Cosmos Teems with Complex Organic Molecules.Reading Stuart Kauffman’s work (especially Reinventing the Sacred) will also make it clear how inevitable organic chemistry is and how easy it is for the processes of life to get started.
- Narrative jailbreaking for fun and profit! Matt Webb and a chatbot hallucinate together. (And I suspect the chatbot has discovered Matt’s blog!)
- Tangerine is my new favourite Christmas movie.
- There is a reason that we don’t do icebreakers in meetings. Check-ins, yes, but disconnected icebreakers? No. McSweeney’s gets it.
Happy New Year to all.
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Confirmed yet again that the way to build community, and indeed strengthen participatory and democratic societies is to do work together.
Peter Levine, who I feel like everyone should read, has a nice little blog post today that serves as a bit of a gateway to his own research and thoughts on this topic. Here’s his basic thesis:
People are more likely to trust institutions if they are involved in diverse, participatory groups, because such participation gives them a feeling of agency, teaches them that compromise is necessary (it’s not a sign that leaders are corrupt), and encourages them to share and critically assess information.
A few times this past year I have been in situations that have borne out this reality, for better or worse. For example working with folks in different places on the opioid crisis, for example, it is clear to me that folks can come together across all kinds of ideological differences if there is actual work in the centre to do. Grappling with the realities of governance, community building, the provision of services and policy making is edifying work. It’s hard, and requires relationship and commitment. Everyone has opinions about things, but rolling your sleeves up and getting to work is where relationships and therefore community is built.
It has been true for a while, but community engagement – the traditional “ask the people what they think” kind – is now clearly a dead end way to make things happen. Polling drives policy and as a result you get truly stupid decisions that don’t at all improve life for people but rather just keep the voters electing populists to power. Simplify problems, seed the population with simple platitudes and memes, convince them that “your guy” has the answers and then poll them on the results.
Trust in democratic institutions, a key theme of Peter’s work, is undermined by this approach to community. People don’t believe polls (except the analytics folks working for parties that shape narrative as keenly as marketers working with personalized market segmentations – see what I mean?) and people don;t believe in surveys either. A recent survey in my home community of 5000 people had 250 returns, to which a suspicious refrain of Facebook amongst folks with zero statsitics backgrounds was “That’s all? How can they make decisions based on such a paltry sample.”
The exercise of engagement is often window dressing. It can result in hundreds and hundreds of text answers on qualitative surveys that have no rhyme nor reason to them. Comments like “fix the potholes on Elm Street” don’t mean anything without context, even if a bunch of people say them. And worse still when you ask people how to make the neighbourhood safer, you will be stuck with all manner of opinion and regurgitated talking points fed to folks who know nothing about sociology, criminology, policing or urban design. The value of the content is nil. The value of the exercise is “we consulted with the community and decided to fix the pot holes on Elm Street as a way of solving the problem of community safety.” And so leaders do what they want.
Election success now is about saying you will do a thing, then doing something and successfully externalizing all the bits that didn’t work so you can take credit for the small thing you did. If people buy what you are selling, you will get re-elected. It’s easier just to say vacuous things like “Axe the Tax, Build the Homes and Bring it on Home” over and over and over and over again until people get so sick of you that they elect you to office just to shut you up. From there, you meet the realities of governing, and memes and slogans won;t get you through.
But there are ways out of this state of affairs. On the decision-making side I think we should be investing heavily in citizen assemblies, such as the one currently underway in Saanich and Victoria which is exploring how to merge two cities. These bodies, in which citizens are chosen at random and enter into a learning journey together to understand the issues at play and recommend courses of action. My friend and colleague Aftab Erfan has recently written about the results and potential of citizen assemblies to do proper engagement which honours democratic and participatory principles and generates meaningful accountability for elected leaders in using their power.
And, back to Peter Levine’s work, I believe there is a tremendous potential in the approach of shared work that he advocates above. Some of the most engaging work I have done has included Participatory Narrative Inquiry approaches, which help people gather, listen to and make sense of each other’s stories as they seek openings and affordances for taking action on complex topics. The process itself builds the social connectivity that builds the basis for collaboration and community. It complexities the work of building things like justice (which Peter has a lot to say on) and helps us to understand that there is no single authority that can deliver the perfect outcome in a society.
Democratic societies thrive where there are democratic institutions that help stabilize the conditions that create freedom and diversity of association, participation and contribution. We are entering a period of dire outlook for this kind of rich ecosystem of collaboration. Get out there and make things together with others.
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If you email me in the next couple of weeks you will get this reply:
Hi there.
You have caught me in a really busy travel time. It might take me a
while to get back to you, but I’ll do my best to do so within a couple
of days. Please forgive me if it takes longer!In the meantime, here’s my homemade no-knead bread recipe if you want
to give it a try.5 cups of white flour
1 cup of whole wheat flour
1 Tbs of instant yeast
2 Tbs salt
3 cups of water.Mix everything together in a large bowl until all the dry flour has
been incorporated.Let it rest for an hour, loosely covered, until it has doubled in size.
Take out a half to a third of the dough and shape it into a ball, and
place it onto a baking stone or a baking sheet and into an 450 degree F oven.Bake for 45 minutes or until the centre is at least 180 degrees F.
Put the rest of the dough in a sealed container in the fridge and
repeat when you run out of bread.Chris
I’m getting tired of algorithms and machines doing all the relational work. This is a way for me to share something beyond my travel logistics with you.
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This is a speculative post, with a bit of a hypothesis.
Where I live in British Columbia there is a provincial election campaign on. It is happening in the midst of a kind of permanent federal campaign that, although not officially begun, has been manufactured by the Conservative Party of Canada as they try to topple the Liberal Party minority government.
Political branding is all the rage at the moment, and I’ve been reflecting on an interesting pattern: parties on the right are largely unstable alliances that unite under a common banner for a while and then engage in cycles of ascendancy and self-destruction. Parties on the centre and left exhibit outward stability even as they drift to the right or left, depending on internal politics. I think this says something about how they choose to act when in government. Here’s some interesting history.
In BC, the right has just rebranded itself again. When I first moved here in 1994, the “party of free enterprise” as it was known was the BC Social Credit Party. It held power from 1952 to 1991 except for three years in the early 1970s when the Dave Barrett-led New Democratic Party formed government. The party folded after Bill Vander Zalm lost power and fell into a corruption scandal. The NDP held power under Mike Harcourt and then Glen Clark for two terms. When the party folded, many of the former Socred members invaded the BC Liberal Party which was, at the time a classical centre-left Liberal party, similar to the federal Liberals. They ousted the leader, Gordon Wilson, and became a broader party of the right, uniting conservatives, the centrists that had been scared away from Clark’s leftward tilt of the NDP, and a few right-wing populists. Under Gordon Campbell, they won the 2001 election and held power until 2017. During that time, they drifted further and further right under Christie Clark. In 2017 John Horgan, a relatively centrist premier, won the election for the NDP with the support of the Green Party. The centre mainly had abandoned the BC Liberals, and the party name became too associated with the federal Liberal Party. And so, they changed their name and became BC United.
That new name only lasted 16 months before the party’s financial backers decided they wanted to align with the BC Conservative Party probably mostly for the better branding. There had always been a BC Conservative Party, but it was always weak, mostly acting as the home to former political leaders who had just a bit too much right wing grievance for their own good. In 2020, seizing the upswing in popularity of the federal Conservatives, they changed their name to the Conservative Party of BC, which mirrored the Conservative Party of Canada, even though it is technically an independent party. In 2023 John Rustad became the latest of the high profile political exiles to find a home in the CPBC after he was kicked out of the BC Liberal Party for having ridiculous views on climate change among other weird ideas currently trendy on the populist right.
With BC United flailing in the polls and the federal Conservatives flourishing, the financial backers of the BC LIberals/United threw their support to the CPBC and the United leader Kevin Falcon, on the verge of a provincial election took the unprecedented action of essentially folding his party without talking to anyone. Although this seemed suicidal, it seems to have eliminated the possibility that the right will be split in this election, and suddenly, the NDP have a powerful – if weird – political opponent. The election will be close and God forbid we get another strange populist government here like Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario have experienced.
Populists make terrible governors, but they are really good at getting power. So, typically, the strategy of right-wing populism is to grab power using emotional appeals and scapegoats and then cede it to private interests or the market, selling off public assets, cutting the funding for public services until they no longer work, and then handing them to their backers for pennies on the dollar. Their governments, like their parties, tend to be short-lived and short-sighted. They hold power through appeals to emotions like fear and insecurity. When they collapse, they often regroup with a a trendy set of populist principles and a little dose of outrage so that they can get power again solely to keep it away from policy based parties. Robust government policy tends to restrict and regulate what the “free market” can do, so that’s the flash point. Elections are contested on that space.
The right wing, and especially the populist right wing, seems to live in this cycle of uniting a coalition under a new name, operating for a while and then flaming out because while outrage is helpful for winning elections, it is a corrosive force once in power. It always splinters and divides and the splitters often run off to other parties or form new ones. Alberta and Saskatchewan have both seen this (Conservative, Wild Rose, United Conservative Party in Alberta; Conservative to Saskatchewan Party to their east). In contrast on the left, parties tend to split when a leadership regime has been in power for a while. Folks may flee the party to alternatives on the left or the right, but the remarkable stability of parties like the Liberal Party of Canada and the New Democratic Party are a testament to the fact that in general party members see value in long term stability, even as they contest stark differences within the tent.
These new right-wing parties and brands were formed in the years after the old school federal Progressive Conservative Party split and the Reform Party became the powerful conservative voice of the West, before reuniting into the short lived and infamously named Conservative Reform Alliance Party (CRAP) and then becoming the Conservative Party of Canada. Stephen Harper, who was at one point the head of the right wing Canadian Taxpayers Federation and then a prominent voice in the Reform Party came to power as Canada’s first elected Conservative Prime Minister since Brian Mulroney. That party has drifted a long way right of the old Progressive Conservative Party and that enabled the federal LIberal Party of Canada (who bill themselves as the natural party of government) to come to power in 2015. Since Harper retired, a few leaders have come and gone but a relentless campaign against Justin Trudeau personally, aided by screech owls from the far right People’s Party of Canada, angry westerners, and folks driven out of their minds by the public health response to COVID has resulted in the federal Conservative Party riding high in the polls but sitting atop an incredibly volatile mix of competing and populist self-interests with very few policy oriented folks wielding much power. Anyone who values the role of government on the right is currently sitting with the federal LIberals. The current Conservative leader Pierre Pollievre is a long time conservative politician and strategist and he’s parlaying populism into a force to be reckoned with in Canada. He’s weird, as are many members of his party, but weird is doing well these days.
This is really what it comes down to, in my eyes. The new political spectrum is not right-left, but populism-policy. This polarity tends to mirror right-left, but not exclusively. In Canada there are folks on the right who think deeply about policy and wrestle with how conservative principles can address issues like climate change and the social good. However, their voices tend to be drowned out by the feverish outrage against immigrants, First Nations, and LGBTQ+ folks. Climate science deniers, COVID skeptics, isolationists and anti-woke culture warriors make up the loudest wings of the party now. The result is that we have political parties who have a real chance of forming power and will achieve that goal by punching down on people and promising that if elected, they will essentially cede the field of governance to the market or other players through tax cuts, austerity, and the elimination of regulations against harm and programs that provide robust public support for education, health and opportunity.
When a person running for the leader of a government tells you that they think that government is not a good thing, it’s useful to believe them. They will not treat it well, and in fact, the instability they create through incompetence or negligence often results in huge opportunities for private operators who are poised to bring the profit motive to public services, at the expense of the public good. If you want to see how a party will govern, look at it’s own history of dealing with dissent and unification. Canada’s right-wing is mercenary and opportunistic and, in the century anyway, has rarely governed with any immutable principle beyond the fact that chaos is good for bank accounts. The left tends to value stability and a long term role for government and seeks to hold folks together in difference even as they dissent. They usually lose power when they drift too far from the centre to bring the policy minded into the fold.
If we elect populists, we will enter a period of instability and, worse, vulnerability for those who are already being deeply scapegoated by messages designed to score wins. I’m not optimistic about what will happen in the next few years in Canada as my heart lies with people and parties that are committed to thoughtful policy responses to complex challenges. We shall see.