May Day came and went, a day to celebrate both the beginning of Celtic summer, lighting the fires of Beltaine to burn away the previous year, and a day to remember the international struggled for workers rights.
My friend and neighbour here on Nexwlélexwm (Bowen Island) Meribeth Deen wrote a beautiful and thoughtful article about the bloody labour history of Vancouver Island and the story of Ginger Goodwin. (Meribeth is a beautiful writer, by the way and you should hire her for things.). Goodwin was an organizer of coal mine workers who was killed in the bush by a police officer in 1918, prompting Canada’s first General Strike.
The coal fields of British Columbia were the sites of some of Canada most fierce union activity largely because the men who owned the coal mines were, to put not too fine a point on it, complete bastards. I admit that the story of Ginger Goodwin was not familiar to me but certainly the names of Dunsmuir and Bowser are. Dunsmuir, because his name adorns a major street in downtown Vancouver, and Bowser, because there is a town named for him on Vancouver Island. But despite Bowser’s name, I never knew that he was a xenophobic racist who mass imprisoned migrant workers from eastern Europe, include Ukraine, because he considered them a threat to Canada while the First World War was raging 8000 kms away.
Last year when statues were being toppled and things renamed (like Ryerson University) one of the intellectually lazy objections to these actions was that we would forget history if these names were removed, that these people did incredible things, and they should be honoured. But reading Meribeth’s piece reminded me that in naming streets and places and statues after these folks what we are actually doing is forgetting history, erasing it. We wash it clean, assuming that everyone with a statue or a road or a town named after them was a good person. In fact, if with people of well known names, we have to deeply research the history of these people to really know them and, unsurprisingly for a country that was founded on genocide, the exploitation of workers and the ruthless pursuit of profit and wealth, these places are often named for people who more than likely pursued one of these strategies.
A key part of colonization is erasing the knowledge of what is here in favour of a more comfortable and familiar set of names. The parts of Ontario I grew up in were named by settlers from Ireland and Scotland and named for places that were meaningful for them. It reminded them of home. And it erased the Anishinaabe and Onkwehón:we names that were already on the landscape and that encoded a much deeper story of home and belonging.
Here in Skwxwúmesh-ulh Temíxw where i now live a famous example is the naming of a pair of distinct mountain peaks called “The Lions.” Towering over Vancouver, these twin peaks got named by settlers after the totemic animal of the British empire- the lion. The lion has been a feature of British heraldry for nearly 1000 years and so it was pretty much the ultimate naming. Boom. Lions. Putting the British in British Columbia; and because you can see these peaks from everywhere, you’ll never forget it.
But 1000 years is a mere blip in time when you consider that from time immemorial those two peaks have be called Ch’ich’iyúy and Elxwí?n and are the embodiment of two sisters who brought a fierce peace to the coast. From the Squamish Atlas:
Ch’ich’iyúy is one of two names used for the mountains known as The Lions. The other name is Elxwí?n. While the meaning of the name “Elxwí?n” is not known, “Ch’ich’iyúy” means “twins”. These mountains have the name for “twins” because they are said to be two Squamish sisters. There are different stories about these two sisters, but the most famous is a story about peace: When a girl becomes a woman, the Squamish tradition is to celebrate with a big feast. A great chief had two daughters that came of age in the same spring, and he prepared to host the biggest feast the Coast had ever seen, inviting all the neighbouring peoples to come for several days of eating, dancing, and celebration! A few days before the feast, the daughters went to their father to ask a favour – they asked if he would also invite a tribe from the north which the Squamish people had been at war with since ancient times. They wanted peace for their peoples, and all the peoples of the region. Their father agreed and the northern tribe came to the feast, welcoming in a new era of peace. When the Great Spirit saw what the two sisters had done, he decided to make them immortal by turning them into the two mountains, Ch’ich’iyúy, so that they could be a symbol of peace in the region forever
Story as told to Pauline Johnson and recorded in The Two Sisters.
Almost all of the historical and Indigenous place names in this territory refer to the physical characterists of a place, it’s traditional use or to events contained in an ancient story that encodes a teaching like this. There are no place names named for people, and on the contrary many people carry the names of places.
History is not an objective set of facts. It is a whole series of contested and different stories and experiences, and is as subject to the whims and dynamics of power as branding. marketing, and narrative manipulation today. When we choose to name a place, we bring a projection on to it. Perhaps Bowser didn’t know much about the town that was named after him. But what does it say about the people that DID name that town? What were they thinking? By encoding his name on the landscape, it reveals the intentions of settlers – much in the same way that the erection of Confederate statues long after the end of the Civil War were a message that Jim Crow laws were in effect in this place. The photo on this blog post is the inscription on a Confederate soldier statue that still stands in the town square of Denton, Texas, taken in 2019.
I have no trouble removing or changing the names of places or removing the statues of racists. I’m not totally in favour of naming things after individuals anyway. But if you feel that something is being lost by changing names, consider what was intended by the naming in the first place and ask yourself if it’s time for a different story.
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.
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.
It is a mild day here on the southwest coast of Canada. Last week we were touched every so lightly by the polar vortex that swung a little right on it’s southward adventure and managed to squeeze cold air with storm force winds out of our fjord. The windchill dropped to around -20 a few times, with 100 km/h outflow winds buffeting Howe Sound. That isn’t especially chilling by Canadian standards, but here on the west coast we live in house made to keep us dry, not necessarily keep us warm in the same way and so pipes freeze, wood stoves are over fired, and hydro bills go through the roof. Luckily we suffered none of the small disasters of cold weather in a temperate climate. But my friends and clients in Texas did.
Word this morning that one of them, Bertina Combes, passed away on February 19. during the height of the cold weather that crippled Texas. She died from complications of COVID-19 and in her passing the University of North Texas has lost a much beloved professor, academic leaders and fierce and kind fighter for racial equity and diversity. Bertina was a core member of our Participatory Leadership cohort. and was championing the use of deeply participatory methods to address diversity issues at UNT. And she was a terrific human being. I’ll really miss her. Tender.
Communities and organization pass thresholds all the time. Some are subtle and you find yourself in a new territory and new space without really knowing how you got there. And other times the markers are obvious and everything has changed. It certainly feels like that when a person is born or dies in your circle. We ritualize these thresholds, often with the intention of holding each other together as we cross through the thin space between two worlds. Whether it is the rituals of death and life, the transitions of power, the dissolutions of structure, or the sharp changes in a culture.
In the natural world, transitions between states and seasons are very gradual, but the more you pay attention, the more you notice sharp transitions. Here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island, we have just passed across a threshold. Today the dawn chorus of birds was loud and strong, led by Pacific Wrens, Spotted Towhees and Black-capped Chickadees, resident birds we see and hear everyday, but who have started their breeding songs. The light is returning faster and earlier and the migrants will begin returning as well. This is pretty typical for mid February, and we are increasingly unlikely to have anymore snow at sea level. Yesterday I spread compost on my garden beds and seeds of peas, kale, spinach, lettuce and – optimistically – beets, I sprouted indoors two weeks ago are growing steadily now and will be ready for planting out soon. I’ll tempt the frost a little in an effort to get at least two crops out of my beds this season, but in my bones it feels right to move. We have crossed a threshold and action is different.
When you live on an island like ours, Nex?wle?lex?xwm/Bowen Island there are rhythms that are like breathing. They come and go over time on cycles as short as an hour or as long as geological epochs.
Most mornings I begin my day on my covered porch, drinking a coffee, reading a meditation, spending some time in silence and contemplation. At this time of year the mornings are dark and, more often than not, wet. This morning we are in day four of what is called an atmospheric river, a massive steady plume of rain that extends from the Hawaiian Islands north-east to our coast. Such a pattern is like a long exhale of moisture, a plume of breath from the tropics that brings warm air and rain and sometimes fronts with gale force winds, which we call the Pineapple Express.
From my morning perch I can see the ferry coming and going, every hour or so, our connection to “the continent.” The early ferries – 6:20 and 7:30 – are commuter runs, with workers heading to the city on the earlier boat and high school students off to school on the later one. As the ferry approaches, the intensity of traffic on my road increases, and the closer we get to sailing time, the higher the speed of cars racing to make sure they don’t miss the boat, or to deliver a sleepy bus-missing teenager to the dock. There is a period of stillness and then the flow reverses and the labourers from the city who have made an early start travel in their work vans and pick-up trucks through the arteries and capillaries of our island road system. As the ferry leaves, things become still and quiet again.
It is very much like the tide that comes and goes twice a day, sometimes bringing as much as 3.5 meters of water to our shoreline, lifting the logs off the beach and floating them on the currents and eddies of Atl’ka7tsem/Howe Sound, the inlet in which we live. This time of year we are coming into our highest tides, and the beaches will be cleared of the boom logs and torrent debris that has cascaded off the mountains into the sea during the past few months of rain and erosion.
And there are the longer period rhythms here as well. The world breathes birds on to our island all in season. Right now there are the winter residents having their run of the place, and with a mild and possibly snowless winter at this altitude near sea level, the towhees, juncos, song sparrows, chickadees, nuthatches, and wrens are spoiled for choice. large flocks of siskins and kinglets swirl in the grey air and occasionally at night you can hear the calls of snow geese flying high above the coast line in search of their estuary winter feeding grounds south of here at the mouth of the Sto:lo/Fraser River.
Winter is short here, and the new year brings with it a month of rain and grey, with gradually brightening skies and then the first hints of spring weather in early February, in line with the Irish seasons more so than the Gregorian ones. But of course there is already a calendar here, the Squamish calendar,that relates to the seasons of food and harvest. The land never really rests in warm winters like this, with the forest extracting as much as it can from the dim light but the mycelial networks in the forest floor working overtime to breakdown nutrients and keep everything fed and flowing in the moist and nutrient rich humus. The forest itself breaths a rhythm of feed from the sky and the earth, continuously growing the giant trees for which our coast is known.
Everything is geared around natural rhythms here, and they care little for the smoothing out of human life brought about by a pandemic. Our community rhythms have become a faint signal in the past 10 months, the peaks and troughs of gatherings, festivals and commemorative events flattened into mere bumps and barely acknowledged remembrances. In this sense it feels very much like our village has been holding its breath, but I also have a small worry that with another year of lock down we will become severed from the rhythms of community life. It only means that we will have to create new ones, or resurrect the former ones in new forms. But it does remind one of how easy it is to break the fabric of community life and set people adrift with one another, a dynamic that was sued against the indigenous population here over generations, through the pandemics of smallpox and colonization, which ravaged community life and stole even the waiting breath.
And in my own life, a turn has been taken as my youngest child has moved out, into an apartment in the city where his 20 year old life is also on hold. He has a job and will start a new set of university classes online this winter, but being 20 and living in a city for the first time is supposed to be a time of socializing, living life fully and enjoying oneself, and that’s just not possible at the moment. Back on the island, Caitlin and I have become empty nesters, and have just spent a couple of weeks in quiet and still recalibration of our lives in a shared space that, after 23 years of parenting, is once again just the two of us. Another exhalation, a deeper one, and an intake of breath for what the next third of life will hold.
Happy New Year to you all. May you continue to breathe and find life in the rhythms of breath that surround you.