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What’s in a name (change?)

June 8, 2021 By Bowen, Featured, First Nations 3 Comments

I was reading a facebook thread today where someone posted about changing the name of British Columbia to something else, something indigenous. And one of the responses was “no. too much change, too fast.” And that got me thinking.

The process of changing the name of a place does indeed take awhile, but the act is instantaneous. One minute you are living in the Northwest territories, and the next minute you’re living in Nunavut. One minute you’re living in Upper Canada, and the next minute you’re living in Ontario. One minute you’re living in the colony of Newfoundland, and the next minute you’re living in Canada. One minute you’re living in the city of Scarborough, and the next minute you’re living in the city of Toronto.

And of course this happens all the time all over the world as countries change their names cities change their names and regions change their names. Bombay to Mumbai, northern Somalia to Somaliland, Cambodia to Kampuchea and back again, the USSR to the CIS to just Russia (and a bunch of other countries.)

It happens in our personal lives too. Many people change their names when they get married. Many people take new names when they change genders. People change their names for all kinds of reasons and we get used to using the new ones out of kindness and respect and because it is right to call people by their chosen names.

The point is that the changing of names is an instantaneous act and it rarely changes anything else instantaneously. We just keep living, making dinner, looking after our families, tending our gardens and going to work. So the objection to a new name is often rooted in some other kind of anxiety despite the fact that it happens all the time all around us. I don’t completely understand the emotional connection to the name “British Columbia.” I don’t really relate to events in Invermere or Atlin. Even folks outside B.C. call us all coastal hippies with warm winters when in fact the vast majority of the province is nothing like that. To me it’s just a label on a map, but of course I didn’t grow up here so I might be missing something. I certainly don’t feel a provincial patriotism or allegiance with people 700 km away just because we have the same kind of license plates. But I have been actively involved in working with changing the names of places including on my home island, Bowen Island, which has been known by at least three official names and several nicknames through its history.

For for the vast majority of its history, Bowen Island was (and still is) known as Nexwlelexwm because we live in Squamish territory and that’s the Squamish name for the island. When the Spanish visited here they briefly named it Apodaca, and that is still a name associated with one of our three mountains and one of our water taxis. A few weeks later, Captain George Vancouver changed the name to Bowen Island – named for one of his English friends who never saw this place – and it has been also known as that for the last 200 years or so. The island also has a few nicknames including The Rock and The Happy Isle. So it’s clear that names are not at all permanent in time and we all have multiple ways of referring to our place.

The question of renaming British Columbia, especially as we develop a deeper and deeper awareness of the traditional homelands in which we live, is an interesting prospect. But the land area known as British Columbia is somewhat arbitrary and doesn’t really conform to any of the traditional social or geological boundaries in this part of the world. British Columbia spans across more than 30 different indigenous languages, which are at least as diverse as the languages of Europe, or the languages of a similar size territory in Asia. In fact “British Columbia” is essentially the name of a mini continent populated by dozens of nations with distinct histories and cultures and names for their places.

For me I would be less interested in changing the name of the province, and much more interested in finding a way to acknowledge the names of the traditional territories in formal ways. For example it would be great if Canada Post would deliver mail to my address if it were sent like this:

In fact, you could probably send me mail this way if you included the local postal code. But the point is I actually feel a closer connection to Squamish territory – which encompasses the familiar islands, mountains, oceans and rivers of this place, than I do saying I live in British Columbia. This is the territory in which I live. It’s very different from the Syilx, and Nlaka’pamux territories the east of me which are full of desert and sagebrush, or the Saulteaux territories to the north east which are rolling hills and prairies. These landscapes are as different to where I live as the languages are to each other.

So perhaps it’s not too much change too fast to begin thinking about the places we live beyond a pro-forma territorial acknowledgment. Perhaps it’s time to deepen our connection and understanding to the territories in which we live and understand that our history here, no matter how recent, is bound up in the ancient history of the people who have lived on these lands from time immemorial, and that what happens here in the present day is the result of a shared history that has been made up of moment of both astonishing brilliance and horrific violence.

Perhaps indeed it is time to place the ancient names officially back on the maps and highways and mailing addresses so that we have a true sense of where we live and what it takes for us to continue to be here. It is one way we can begin to reverse the tide of genocide; restoring the names is critical to recognizing the continued existence of the peoples in whose lands we all reside.

Trust in life itself

June 4, 2021 By Being, Culture, Emergence, Featured, Invitation, Uncategorized 2 Comments

I think this quote really captures my own social justice practice and my own spiritual practice. Ilia Delio is perhaps what we would call an evolutionary theologian and what she says here about “becoming something that is not yet known” says volumes to me:

By evolution, I mean simply that change is integral to life. We are becoming something that is not yet known. To live in evolution is to let go of structures that prevent convergence and deepening of consciousness and assume new structures that are consonant with creativity, inspiration, and development.

Evolution requires trust in the process of life itself. There is a power at the heart of life that is divine and lovable. In a sense we are challenged to lean into life’s changing patterns and attend to the new patterns that are emerging in our midst. To live in openness to the future is to live with a sense of creativity and participation, to use our gifts for the sake of the whole by sharing them with others.

— Ilia Delio, The Hours of the Universe: Reflections on God, Science, and the Human Journey (Orbis Books: 2021), 220–221, 223–225.

It is hard to stay open to possibility when we are confronting a choice between the familiar and the new. I have always imagined that a world that addresses climate change, one that properly restores dignity and equality and essential relationships to land and sea and between peoples is one that will deliver a better world than the one we have now. But power and familiarity breed intransigence and unless we can truly let go of what we know and fall forward into the theoretically innumerable realities that are better than this one, we remain trapped in these patterns of behaviour in these ways of relating, in these ways of making a living.

We need moments of disturbance to move into new realities, and the more we refuse to accept the painful truths of the status quo, the less chance we have of actually making something better.

We are emerging from 2020, a year that was terrible in so many ways and one in which we saw many stories of governments mobilized to retool systems to create universal programs of health and economic care; stories of mitigated climate impacts and the support for local economies; stories of massive logistical challenges solved; stories of racial equity and justice being foregrounded and new conversations and actions around changing the coercive structures of power that perpetuate injustice.

We have evidence that we can quickly make massive changes that take us into that “becoming” but we remain trapped in the fear that doing so will cause loss and harm to people (let’s be honest, people who look like me) that benefit from the status quo. It might do, but the status quo is such that we are at a moment in history when we have enough wealth to mitigate those losses and usher people into a better world. There will be contraction. We can manage. Some of us have no idea how much resilience we actually have, because we’ve never been tested.

We can’t know what we are becoming, but we have enough evidence to know that the path we have been on and the vector on which we are travelling is heading towards a world where our gifts are increasingly discarded and our regard for life diminished. Perhaps at some point the fear of the immediate reality will outweigh the fear of choosing something different. I wish it weren’t so, that we have to be motivated by fear over love. And we need not hope for this future – it is the hope that kills – but rather we simply need to act now and trust in one another differently, listen to the voices that are at the margins of our world, at the ecotones between the thriving systems of life and the social clearcuts in which we are immersed. Those voices are bringing us the new patterns, the challenges, and the invitations. Hear them, amplify them, exchange gifts, follow them and let’s journey away from this hellscape.

Recon —

June 3, 2021 By Featured, First Nations, Poetry 5 Comments

215 orange and red ribbons hang at Bowen Island United Church

I can barely say the word. I don’t use it much anymore. So much needs to be done before we can contemplate it. So much truth, so much restoration of lands and people and communities. But today I came across this poem by Anishinaabe (Wasauksing First Nation) poet Rebeka Tabobondung who is the founder of MUSKRAT Magazine. She published this in 2013 and I will let her say it, because at some deep level this is what I am always working towards:

Reconciliation

We are waking up to our history
from a forced slumber
We are breathing it into our lungs
so it will be a part of us again
It will make us angry at first
because we will see how much you
stole from us
and for how long you watched us suffer
we will see how you see us
and how when we copied your ways
we killed our own.

We will cry and cry and cry
because we can never be the same again
But we will go home to cry
and we will see ourselves in this huge mess
and we will gently whisper the circle back
and it will be old and it will be new.

Then we will breathe our history back to you
you will feel how strong and alive it is
and you will feel yourself become a part of it
And it will shock you at first
because it is too big to see all at once
and you won’t want to believe it
you will see how you see us
and all the disaster in your ways
how much we lost.

And you will cry and cry and cry
because we can never be the same again
but we will cry with you
and we will see ourselves in this huge mess
and we will gently whisper the circle back
and it will be old and it will be new.

Colonization and the shadow of belonging

June 1, 2021 By Featured, First Nations 9 Comments

The great shadow of North American history I think is that settlers know deep down that we don’t belong here. The idea of “settling” the west was predicated on the continent being cleansed of its original inhabitants. This happened in a number of ways. There was outright murder perpetuated by war, disease and neglect. There were treaties which ripped people from their territories and bound the loyalties of indigenous people to the Crown rather than their own laws. There was the residential school system which had as its goal the “education” and “civilization” of indigenous children such that they would no longer be indigenous, which resulted in hundreds of thousands being torn from their families and raised by many abusive and unwell priests, nuns, administrators, social workers, nurses, doctors, coaches and teachers.

It seems everywhere settlers ventured on this continent, they have left unsettled peoples, lands, animal populations and communities. The devastation of indigenous population over 500 years and including to the present day through the loss of lands, language, autonomy, self-governance, dignity, health and resources has been rightly called genocide, and documented as such in the last decades’ inquiries into residential school legacies and missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. There has been a deliberation erasure of peoples here, which made possible economies that have resulted in some of the monetarily richest people in human history living some of the most prosperous lives humans have ever lived.

And I think deep down, every knows that it was gained on the backs of genocide.

So that has some bearing on whether settlers can even feel at home here. And I think that unresolved cognitive dissonance – maybe deeper, maybe a soul dissonance – perpetuates inhumane level of violence towards people, land and community. On this continent the world’s mightiest military power has taken root, supported by the world’s mightiest economic engine and spread death and exploitation around the world. Here in Canada, the same week as 215 children were found deposited in a mass grave separated from their families, communities and even their names, we saw photos of a single 1000 year old spruce tree being carted away to make guitar tops. Songs will be sung through a tree which lived twice as long as colonization and which was weeks away from being protected forever by a provincial law prohibiting such logging.

The term “settler” is used to describe willing immigrants to this continent, because traditionally it was the word that our families all used when they were heading here to settle down. But it conveys a sense of serene calm, of finally arriving somewhere, of belonging.

It must be heard in the context of all the unsettling that has resulted from this. Even amongst settlers, the privilege extracted from this continent has been concentrated in the hands of very few (who even continue to become enriched during the biggest public health crises in a century) resulted in this unsettling being pushed through the class ranks rendering people housing insecure, unhealthy, burnt out and poor.

35 years ago I stood in the summer night around a fire in Sudbury participating in a process to make an apology from the United Church of Canada to indigenous peoples, a powerful and important gesture that indigenous people like Alberta Billy, Art Napoleon, Murray Whetung and Stan McKay asked for. And we wrestled for hours over the wording of that apology because in the room where we were deliberating were residential school survivors, teachers, administrators. The whole system was there. And the concern in the room was sparing the feeling for those that had “good intentions.” And so the debate went back and forth and in the end I don’t think we spared their feelings, but I do think we must have hedged on the final wording just a touch, because the Moderator – Rev Bob Smith – delivered the apology to the Elders and we waited and waited and finally the Elders announced that they were appreciative of the apology but they did not accept it. They wanted to see what would happen next.

At the time, I thought this was a brilliant response and a generous one. It was an invitation to join in relationship and do something meaningful together, because the proof is in the actions and the only future that can begin to redeem the past is in mutually beneficial reciprocal relationships, which now must first consist of a MASSIVE transfer of wealth and land back to First Nations. It is what indigenous people have been saying since the very beginning: hey, let’s do something cool together. And at every turn everything has been stolen.

That night changed my life. It made me unsettled. And I think that is the only job of settlers: become and remain unsettled. If the news of this past week has unsettled you, good. Perhaps that will enable you to finally be in relationship with all of the people who have been unsettled by the history of colonization on this continent. Get unsettled, be in relationship. If you have land, think about how you can give it back. If you have cash, donate. LIsten to what indigenous people are saying. They are inviting us all into a better world, but we need to let go of the idea that settler colonialism is a viable path to that world. It is not.

There are people among you right now who properly belong to this place. No matter how closely connected you feel to where you live, not matter how long your family has been “in these parts” there are people here whose history goes back to the time before your ancestors even thought about farming. Listen to their voices. Follow their lead. Be unsettled and be led.

Coming back home in time

May 31, 2021 By Being, Bowen 5 Comments

It’s funny to start noticing the cycles and patterns that return here over a year. I’ve lived on this island for 20 years now and this is the first time I have spent an entire year (15 months now, and counting) without traveling outside of the bioregion. And as everyone has noiticed, time has taken on a ndifferent ndimension during the pandemic, but perhpas what is really happening is that we are just getting more comfortable with the way time actually is.

This morning I was cruising through my garden, sending slugs to their doom and cropping a few lettuce and spinach leaves for my lunch and I heard a great mass of bees swarming a California lilac plant that we have. The sound was really deeply familiar as they were all at that same plant last year for about two weeks. Hearing the sound again was like being greeted by an old friend. Something familiar. Same as the Blackheaded Grosbeaks that are waking me up every morning with their beautiful piercing calls and the lushness of my salad garden, delivering full bowls of goodness for lunch and dinner every night. I had the thought “I’ve been here before. THis is a feeling of home in time.”

Despite my close intimacy to rhythms of the land here, I think this is the first time I have really felt time as an actual circle, which returns to the same place. It has the effect of drawing out my experience of life. Slowing it down, not disrupting it like it does when I travel away from this place. Over this past year I haven’t had the sense of getting older, as if there is a line or a path you travel. Rather I have a sense of being different, but in the same repeated moments and places.