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October 20, 2003 By Uncategorized

I’ve cross posted this from my Bowen Island Journal blog. The major concern around these parts of the southwest coast of Canada has been record rainfalls over the last few days. We had sun yesterday but it has started raining again and we are under another heavy rainfall warning. The flooding is serious up in Pemberton and Squamish. Eight hundred people have been evacuated from their homes and two people have died. I used to work a lot up in Pemberton when I was involved in Treaty negotiations there in the late 1990s. I know the mayor and several leaders in the surrounding First Nations. Flooding is nothing new to these folks, living in a flat valley that often backs up with ice or just bursts its banks when it runs too high. Many of the houses and farms in the Pemberton Meadows are built on raised berms to keep them out of the historic flood plain so hopefully the damage will be minimized by the good precautions they have taken. The biggest concern for many will be the seed potato stock that is stored in root cellars. Pemberton is one of the few blight-free places in Canada, which means that seed potatoes grown there are highly valued. Even though nearby Whistler drives a fair chunk of the local economy, agriculture and logging still make up a lot of the enterprise in the Valley. And seed potatoes are the cream of that crop.

At this point the communities of Pemberton, Mount Curry, Birken, D’arcy and N’Quatqua as well as the In-SHUCK-ch Nation communities of Skatin, Samahquam and Port Douglas are cut off from the rest of the world by washed out bridges, so the bigger concern for all involved is getting food and essentialls in to the Valley. Government says a temporary bridge should be in place over the washed out Rutherford Creek in a couple of days. I know they can all hang on, being flood veterans and pretty self-sufficient up that way.

So I’m sending out best wishes to my old friends and colleagues, Allan McEwan, Phil Perkins, Hugh Naylor and mayor Elanor Warner as well as the folks down the Lillooet River Valley in the In-SHUCK-ch Nation communities and up in D’Arcy and N’Quatqua.

I have been documenting this incredible rainfall on my other blog, Bowen Island Journal. Head over there to follow the story.

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October 19, 2003 By Uncategorized


Seher interessant – und sehr simple
by Mark-Steffan G�wecke

Mark-Steffen G�wecke is a German photographer who has created a series of Polaroids that include and transcend one another.

This is a really nice way to imagine Ken Wilber’s idea of evolution:

Holons emerge holoarchically. That is, as a series of increasing whole/parts. Organisms contain cells but not vice-versa; cells contain molecules but not vice-versa; molecules contain atoms but not vice-versa. And it is not vice-versa, at each stage, that constitutes unavoidable asymmetry and nested hierarchy (holoarchy). Each deeper or higher holon embraces its junior predecessors and then adds its new and more encompassing pattern or wholeness – the new code or canon or morphic field or agency that will define this as a whole and not merely as a heap…

— Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology and Spirituality p. 56

Link via Idle Type

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October 17, 2003 By Uncategorized

Sometimes you just need to read some Yeats:

The Stolen Child

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can
understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can
understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can
understand.

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can
understand.

Thanks, Penny.

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October 16, 2003 By Uncategorized

Tony Tross of abuddhas memes has moved from Whitehorse to America. Can the world’s end be far behind? Is it possible he read my post from two days ago and is embracing the other in order to create a trans-continental raising of consciousness? Synchronicity is alive and well and among us everywhere in the blogosphere it seems…

Best of luck to Tony in his new chosen land.

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October 15, 2003 By Uncategorized

The other day someone mentioned to me the story of the Dutch buying Manhattan for $24 worth of trade beads. I’m sure most people know the story. Here is just one of the many sites (and this one should know better) that perpetuate the myth.

The story IS a myth. For something closer to the truth, check out this site (which includes sources). It turns out that the original inhabitants of Manhattan were the Weckquaesgeeks who lived somewhere north of the Dutch colony. They were not especially happy about the Dutch living on Manhattan, but they lived far enough away that the Dutch were able to live peacefully there for a year or more. When things seemed to be getting a little nervous, the Dutch decided to head off a possible alliance between the Weckquaesgeeks and the neighbouring Canarsies who lived on Long Island, where present-day Brooklyn is now. So:

…the Dutch were happy to have bought Manhattan from the wrong tribe because they weren’t really buying Manhattan but the right to Manhattan in the eyes of other Europeans. In short, they were buying respectability – in their own eyes too…

The purchase also made allies of the Canarsies, who otherwise might have joined with the Weckquaesgeeks, the Indians who lived on Manhattan and owned most of it. The Netherlanders didn’t try to buy off the Weckquaesgeeks, a more difficult task since they knew, loved, and made their homes on Manhattan. Instead, they waited as a succession of inter-Indian wars, some instigated by the Dutch, and a series of epidemics weakened the Weckquaesgeeks. Then in the 1640s, with the aid of the Canarsies and other Native Americans on Long Island, the Dutch exterminated most of the Weckquaesgeeks.

I mention this story because there is a disturbing trend currently in British Columbia and Canada generally for not giving First Nations credit for being able to develop and run our own governments, economies and communities. From the federal government’s First Nations governance Act (pretty unpopular in Indian Country) to the provincial government’s recent referendum on treaty negotiations (see my own analysis), there is a pervasive mistrust in Canadian culture of the capabilities of First Nations people and communities. When I hear stories like the selling of Manhattan it reminds me that this sentiment is deeply embedded in the story of the “New World.”

So the next time you hear the myth of Manhattan, do us all a favour and give the Weckquaesgeeks some credit. The truth is always more complicated than it seems.