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Help us create and install a Squamish welcome figure on Bowen Island

February 20, 2026 By Bowen, First Nations, Uncategorized No Comments

My friend Pauline Le Bel published the first in a series of articles in our local paper on our project to install a Squamish welcome figure here on Bowen Island. This article talks about the history of the project.

And here is the back story from our ever evolving prospectus.

An Invitation to all to Co-Create a Symbol of Reconciliation and Friendship

We are at the beginning of a community project to raise funds and support for the carving and installation of a Squamish Welcome Figure on Bowen Island/Nex?wlélex?wm. This project is a step toward deeper recognition of the Squamish People as the original stewards of this land, and an act of reconciliation and allyship that invites us all into a shared future grounded in respect and friendship.

Why a Welcome Figure?
Welcome Figures are carved by Squamish carvers to offer greeting, connection, and hospitality to all who arrive on Squamish territory. This proposed figure will:

  • Recognize Squamish ownership and stewardship of Nex?wlélex?wm.
  • Extend a visible, meaningful welcome to all who come to the island.
  • Build upon past gestures such as the installation of the “Nex?wlélex?wm” place name at the ferry landing in 2020.
  • Deepen cultural understanding and relationships between the Squamish Nation and Bowen Island residents.
  • Be created in collaboration with a Squamish carver.

This project builds on the work of reconciliation and relationship building between residents of Bowen Island/Nex?wlélex?wm and our hosts, the S?wx?wú7mesh Úxwimixw (the Squamish Nation). Since before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, citizens on Bowen Island/Nex?wlélex?wm have worked with the Nation on initiatives to build knowledge, awareness and collaboration. In 2017, Pauline Le Bel, with the support of the Bowen Island Public Library and the Bowen Island Arts Council, initiated a reconciliation initiative called Knowing Our Place, to learn our true history with Indigenous People. The initiative brought Squamish Nation Elders and teachers to Bowen Island, and engaged many Islanders in learning about the Indigenous history of our place. In 2020, as part of Knowing Our Place, Elders from the Squamish Ocean Going Canoe Family came in ceremony to bless the sign at the ferry dock that welcomes people to Nex?wlélex?wm. At that ceremony the idea was born to create and install a Welcome Figure on Bowen Island, as a tangible mark of the relationship between the S?wx?wú7mesh Uxwimixw and the Nex?wlélex?wm Uxwimixw (the villagers of Bowen Island).

This project also builds on several of the Calls to Action in the Truth and Reconciliation Report and extends the spirit of those calls with a tangible, community-initiated project to recognize and affirm the Squamish Nation and its territory and to acknowledge our place within it.  

There are several Squamish Nation welcome figures within S?wx?wú7mesh-ulh Temíxw (Squamish territory).  You can read about some of them here:

The preferred location: the entrance to our new Community Centre

While the beach at Snug Cove was the original location — as suggested by Squamish Elder and Councillor, Alroy ‘Bucky’ Baker —  the difficulty in acquiring a suitable large cedar log has made another location more viable. A smaller log has been acquired for a welcome figure as a house post welcoming islanders and visitors to the Centre and to our community.

If you want to help you can donate at our charitable Impact page and you’ll receive a tax receipt if you are Canadian.

How to find good things

February 20, 2026 By Being, Bowen, Culture No Comments

I’m giving Current a spin. It is an RSS feed reader that is built differently. It treats RSS feeds as readable treats rather than emails to be answered and processed. It deliberately seeks to remove the stressful and addictive interfaces that drive social media and productivity software, and it offers a clean interface for the words written by my friends and those I admire and follow. This might be the best way to get into reading blogs again for those of you that don’t do it yet.

Small town libraries save the world. I live in a small town. I spend more time at the library than perhaps any other single place in this town. I use it as an office, a place to rest, a place to meet people, to learn about things, to learn how to swing dance or listen to my friends and neighbours sharing stories. So enjoy Nick Fuller Googins’ essay on small town libraries:

Another library book introduced me to Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, a maverick scientist-artist who travels the world, collects mutated insects downwind of nuclear reactors, then documents the deformities by painting slides. How fascinating! How bizarre! What could be the subject of a book itself ended up as a side-plot in my novel, set in San Luis Obispo (downwind of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant), and ready to derail Josie’s ant dissertation and academic career.

Would I have stumbled across these odd tidbits online, or through AI prompts? Possibly. Doing generative research online, however, is like dipping a glass into the Pacific in hopes of finding an “interesting” cup of water. How do you know when you have one? How does Google or Grok sift and deliver results, compared with a living, breathing human at Belfast’s Public Library? They can’t.

One reason that small-town library research works so well is because of its natural parameters. Rather than an ocean of information to click through, you get a small stack of books. A small stack of books is manageable. It’s focusing. In our era of seemingly limitless data, I for one thrive on these boundaries. By constraining my initial research like this, oddly enough, I was expanding my results.

Just today I stopped into my own small town library to set up a meeting with one of the staff members and another friend, and I walked out of there with “A Psalm for The Wild Built” which my friend Marysia described as “HopePunk” (a genre I was thrilled to know existed!) and I was sold, especially after three of the staff there recommended it and Becky Chambers’ work in general. This author is new to me, but a sweet novel under 200 pages recommended by great people ticks all the boxes for me.

Tenor of the times

February 19, 2026 By Music No Comments

As a tenor in two choirs, I do find this article: “How to solve the tenor shortage” to be funny, but perhaps also true. At any rate, it’s a fanciful speculation with some excellent turns of phrase, published in The Economist of all places.

Ideally the stock of tenor singers would be larger, not merely allocated more efficiently. It would help in the long run if schools made singing more of a priority, especially among teenagers. Many boys stop singing after their voices break, not only because they struggle with a new instrument but also because they are rudely thrown from singing the tune into singing harmony. In the short run, choirs that can afford it would do well to consult voice coaches. They might discover that some of the men who have assigned themselves to the bass section can sing tenor, as can some of the women who sit with the altos. Tenor voices are like gold, and not only because they are rare and valuable. They need to be dug out of people and worked on.

Everyone should remember that choirs do not demand singers who sound like Mr Bocelli. An ordinary tenor in a chorus is seldom if ever called upon to reach a high b, or to sing with anything approaching his power. Of course, a tenor might briefly imagine that he or she sounds just like an Italian opera star, when hitting a tricky entrance correctly and when—miracle of miracles—the rest of the section gets it right, too. It is not the world’s most harmful fantasy

Heartbreak.

February 19, 2026 By Uncategorized One Comment

Hearts break on the Olympic hockey rink.

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Good leaders cultivate disagreement

February 18, 2026 By Art of Hosting, Collaboration, Community, Conversation, Democracy, Facilitation, Featured No Comments

A braided river delta in Alaska, image courtesy of NOAA

Not as the be-all and end-all of their organizations and teams, but a good leader will hold a container in the workplace in which disagreement is productive, generative and honouring of different perspectives. The best leaders will also hold coherence.

I’ve often said that organizations need to be a bit like rivers, in that there is a coherent direction of flow but many back eddies. If you think about the way a large river travels through an estuary, it creates side channels and cuts of corners and bends while still channeling across the land. Life lives in these eddies and its even possible to productively travel in the opposite direction from the river flow efficiently using these back eddies. Organizationally speaking, sometimes you need to retreat from a well established course of action, and having disagreement and dissent within the organization can sometimes show you the path back to another way of doing things.

Peter Levine and Dayna L. Cunningham have a link-rich piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review today that discusses this, and its implications for civil society beyond just organizational or movement-based settings. The final paragraphs are good:

Leaders must attend to two related responsibilities. Internally, they must protect and encourage voice by clarifying decision rules, distinguishing disagreement from disloyalty, and building routines that prevent conflict from hardening into factionalism. Externally, they must establish clear guardrails for responding to dissenting public voices, including those from activists, shareholders, elected officials, and the media. When organizations become the object of public disagreement, the question is not whether pressure will arise, but whether their principles are strong enough to guide their response.

Clear commitments, embedded in durable practices and governance structures, help prevent reactive shifts driven by momentary outrage or market fluctuation. They allow organizations to absorb criticism, weigh competing claims, and respond without abandoning core values. In doing so, institutions do more than manage disagreement; they demonstrate how pluralistic societies can remain steady amid strain.

Organizations that invest in the structures and norms that make disagreement constructive—both internally and in response to external scrutiny—help sustain the civic habits on which democratic life depends. In an era of polarized public discourse, institutions that learn to govern both expression and response become quiet stabilizers of the democratic order.

If we cannot practice disagreement in places where we also have an incentive to collaborate together, we will be hard pressed to do it in the looser fields of community and broader society. And that enables those who would like us divided to use disagreement to generate separation.