Common Ground in a Liquid City. Matt Hern
There’s Haida art all over the city, all kinds of Northwest Coast art, but very little Coast Salish art. Most people couldn’t tell you what Coast Salish art looks like, which is part of why we’ve done projects raising the visibility of Coast Salish people. We erected three stumps down near Science World—three stumps that represent the three amalgamated tribes: Musqueum, T’seilwatuth, and Squamish and each figure is bearing salmon, representing the people coming together.
We have to mark things. But we have to do a lot more than put a sign up and mark a spot. That’s a start. If we can put our language up, then I’m all about the signs. But I’m not willing to stop there. Signs point you in a direction. We all know that signs are a message telling us something. But the last thing you want to do is follow that sign and find nothing. It has to point to something real, to something happening.
I’d like to see a longhouse at Whai Whai. I’d love to see an interpretive dialogue going on there all the time. We’re tired of misconceptions of what we do. Our people don’t make totem poles—we make welcome figures. We’re starting to see a little bit of visibility, with Susan Point doing some work in the park, and that’s a great, positive step, but we need more. It’s hardly like we’re not willing to share—we have shared so much already.
There’s no reason why we can’t have space in the park and a presence there all the time. I’d like to see an actual reconstructed village in the park at the old site. I’d like us to set up a longhouse and an actual village that we used. I’m not talking about a tourist attraction, but something we actually use. And when the longhouse isn’t in use, people can come and visit and learn about our culture. It could enhance both our presence and our pride as protectors of the longhouse and the area. The historical markers tell people that we used to be there, but not why we were forced out, why we were made homeless, how we were all made homeless in our own land.
We need to restore Stanley Park, but not to what it was like before this windstorm—colonialism was the real windstorm, and really it hasn’t stopped blowing. We are all going to be sharing that park; it’s a space that everybody loves no matter how long your families have been here. We’re willing to steward that place back to what it once was, what it was meant to be. It has always been a vision of ours.
Like history, constructions of nature are always cultural questions, and all too often Natives just get folded into “nature”: one more piece of the landscape to be moved around and reconstructed as “we” see fit. We want authentic experiences, but only in very certain, specific, and secure ways that keep our engagement with the natural world very controlled and limited. We then develop a relationship with that rendition, sometimes even a deep one, and recast it as tear-jerking, quasi-ecological virtue, or deep aesthetic appreciation of totems or trees.
For Vancouver—or any city—to recast itself ecologically, it has to have an honest narrative about its place. That can’t happen until we stop with the faux-spiritual renditions of nature and recognize that we have changed the landscape permanently. We have constructed this place and the responsibility is ours to make it right.
When Vancouverites speak effusively and very publicly about “healing the park,” when there are multi-million-dollar fundraising campaigns plastered across the region promising to return the park to its “full glory,” when a storm of journalists report on the “devastation” in the park, they are very explicitly not interested in talking about indigenous folks, and not much nature, either. What they really want is the park in an edifying, useful, and accessible state, a place to “improve” people in.
We want “nature” but not all messy and troublesome. We trim the treetops, we build roads and seawalls and pathways and restaurants—but want the “splendor” of “unspoiled” nature. We want rose gardens and swans and grand lawns but not too much native flora and fauna. No cougars and not too many fallen cedars.
We want the tourist-friendly multiculturalism of imported totem poles and decorative plaques, but definitely no Natives living there, and even more definitely no land claims.
The park is a manufactured space, with nothing particularly natural about it anymore. And that’s just fine, but people should be honest about the quasi-spiritual status they ascribe to it: they are deifying scenery at the expense of people who had an everyday living relationship with that place. As University of British Columbia sociology professor Renisa Mawani, who has written some great stuff about the park, put it:
Our understandings of the city and of Stanley Park are inextricably linked to one another. I think what is particularly interesting is how these identities have changed over time. The impetus for creating the park was to create an urban green space where citizens of the newly incorporated city could enjoy recreational activities while creating a distinct identity for what was to become a bustling port city. This, of course, required the removal of the Coast Salish. The imagining of Vancouver as a British Settler city was certainly accomplished through the forced removal of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Watuth. But these aspirations were also carried out through processes of emplacement—through the placement of monuments, buildings, recreational sites (cricket pitch), and gardens (rose garden, etc). In the 1920s, we see a changing vision of Vancouver, one which is trying to capitalize on aboriginality as an important “heritage” of the city, one that is materialized through the placement of totem poles and other Native artifacts.
For me, the recent windstorm raised a lot of possibilities to talk about the displacement of Aboriginal people, and the possibilities for a more democratic ownership of the park. This was a time when the media was reporting a great deal about the types of histories that were unknown (I was asked to comment in the mainstream media several times, as were other academics). And members of the Squamish, Tsleil-Watuth, and Musqueum also seized this as an opportunity to speak of their claims to the land. To me, it seems that “reconstruction” offers a great number of possibilities: to think of what types of injustices our love for nature has allowed—thinking of Stanley Park as “unnatural”—offers more opportunities for social justice.
Neither Vancouver nor Stanley Park is going anywhere any time soon, but neither are Native folks. We have to embark upon a creative reconciliation that honestly engages with our past and current cultural constructions. And part of that package is the fact that there are still five unresolved and competing land claims covering much of what is now Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, plus a host of similar contentions and tensions throughout the region.
Vancouver is toying with new hybrid city and “global city” pretensions, and widely trumpets its multicultural sensibilities, but a democratic culture has to include people, not write them out. Reconciliations have to be a lot more than just putting Native stuff in museums, importing totems, or erecting historical markers—it’s about truly remembering what we stand on and also acknowledging whom we stand beside as an ethical choice.
There is every reason, including incredible prosperity, to think that Vancouver could develop a genuine reconciliation with its Native past that begins to give substance to democratic, inclusive claims. That will come a lot easier if we stop being so creepy about pretending that our parks are “nature” and get down to the business of building a good city.
The next day Kristos and I walk along the harbor to the White Tower, the symbol of Thessaloniki. It’s more dirty grey than white now but still has a stirring quality, sitting kind of regally at one end of the bay. When we get there it is closed, seemingly randomly. There is some kind of construction work going on around the tower, but what is up is not exactly clear. Kristos says they have been fixing it up for years now.
Later that night I said goodbye to Thessaloniki, half-drunk, rushing to the bus station in the middle of the night for a fourteen-hour ride back to Istanbul. It was actually really touching, with a whole carload of lads there to see me off, all crowding around, checking the ticket, hugging, buying food for the trip, making sure the driver kept an eye on me at the border. My hosts offered the obligatory