The Power of Art to Tell a New Story

Well, I am taking a holiday this week.  I am staying home, which happens to be on Georgian Bay where people go for their holidays,  Since I am trying to do “holiday” kinds of things, my partner and I decided to take the 2 ½ hour boat tour on the Miss Midland.  This takes you from the Midland town docks, through Severn Sound, all the way around Beausoleil Island and back again.  We have done this trip in various segments in our own little boat and so it was nice to sit on the top deck and let Captain Steve pilot us through the many shoals and some of the 30,000 Islands.

Along the way, a prerecorded informational soundtrack was played.  This dealt with the names of various islands, the industries in some of the towns and some of the history of the area.  The script seemed dated as a few newer attractions were not mentioned but I’m not sure when it was written.  When the script dealt with the First Nation in the area and the Indigenous people who had lived here (and still do) for thousands of years before Etienne Brulee and Samuel de Champlain arrived four hundred years ago, the narrative was a bit sketchy.  Since I have been trying to learn the actual history of the area, some of the “information” was in my opinion, generated from within a colonial mindset.  Important facts were left out and some facts were told in a sanitized way that washed the European settlers clean of anything we might not approve of now.  It occurred to me that the script needed updating to reflect what we now know happened.  I am considering writing to the company that runs the tour to suggest this.  Thousands of tourists from around the world and from across Canada take this tour during the summer months and the misinformation is not helping the reconciliation movement.

The next day, my partner and I stopped at a local gas station and restaurant in Port Severn, just off of Hwy. 400.  We got our hamburgers and went to sit in the large dining area that was empty and quiet.  We have been there before and so I was surprised to see a new mural on the wall of the dining room.  We left our burgers and went to inspect it. 

New mural in Port Severn highway rest stop

On the left hand side, the artist, Tim Nijenhuis had depicted Samuel de Champlain arriving in the area and being greeted by Chief Aenon,the leader of the Wendat people,  who had lived in this territory for thousands of years. 

Detail of mural by Tim Nyenhues 2019  Port Severn ON.

This reminded me of the statue that was installed in nearby Penetanguishene in 2015 to commemorate this meeting in 1615. Sculptor Timothy P. Schmalz created the statue as an apology for the statue in Orillia from 1915 which has Champlain high above the fur trader and priest who are above the crouching Wendat men.

The Meeting statue by Timothy P. Schmalz in Penetanguishene, ON, 2015

Statue of Champlain on top, on left, a fur trader looking down on two Wendat men
 and on the right a priest holding up a crucifix above two Wendat men.  1915 in Orillia, ON.

You don't have to be an art historian to see that the narratives that these three pieces of art are telling, are quite different. I thought about the power of art and culture to share and propagate these narratives.  In the Penetanguishene statue, Schmalz has the two men holding a wampum belt to represent the agreement to share the land and not interfere with each other.  In the Orillia statue, Champlain is much larger than the other men and the statue has an obvious hierarchical structure.  But now, thousands of visitors will stop by and see this new mural in which Champlain looks a little confused while Aenon holds out a welcoming hand.  Or perhaps you might see a different narrative there.  I am only guessing.

To the right of the two men are depictions of the original Big Chute Marine Railway and Port Severn, where the restaurant is located.  Flying above them are four flags.  From left to right they are:  the Annishinaabe flag, the Haudenosaunee flag, the Metis flag and the Canadian flag to represent all the people who currently call this land home.

Anishinaabe flag on left and Haudenosaunee flag on right

Metis flag and Canadian flag

Visitors may have to use their phones to fact check what they are seeing.  I didn’t notice a plaque explaining the mural but there may have been one.   I saw one child posing between Champlain and Aenon to have his picture taken.  Now that's another interesting thing about murals.  People can kind of join in and take a selfie with Champlain and Aenon.  This is a new opportunity for people travelling up and down Hwy 400 between Barrie and Sudbury.

I know someone who loved the Orillia statue of Champlain when she was a little girl some sixty years ago.  She has fond memories of stroking the faces of the Wendat men and thinking them beautiful.  As a child she missed the fur trader, priest and especially Champlain who was high in the sky.  I wonder how children who are now posing between Champlain and Aenon will remember this mural.  Perhaps it will become iconic for them.  But it is telling a new story from our shared history and that new story will be the one they remember.

Artist Tim Nijenhuis' signature on the mural.

Grassroots Growth and a Round Dance

In early July, I attended the Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia, ON.  My partner and I had a booth in the not-for-profit area of the festival promoting the Moose Hide Campaign.  The story of this campaign is described beautifully on the website:

Paul Lacerte in centre with drum

On an early 2011 August morning, an Indigenous man named Paul Lacerte and his daughter Raven were hunting moose near the infamous Highway of Tears, a section of highway between Prince George and Prince Rupert, BC, where dozens of women have gone missing or been found murdered.  They had brought down a moose that would help feed the family for the winter and provide a moose hide for cultural purposes. As the daughter was skinning the moose her father started thinking…They were so near the highway that has brought so much sorrow to the communities along its endless miles, here with his young daughter who deserved a life free of violence…That’s when the idea sprang to life!  What if they used the moose hide to inspire men to become involved in the movement to end violence towards women and children?  Together with family and friends they cut up the moose hide into small squares and started the Moose Hide Campaign.(Moose Hide Campaign website)

Now, 8 years later, over a million Moose hide patches have been distributed in Canada and beyond.  The campaign has a new goal to distribute ten million patches.  My partner and I are helping in our small way to do that, to be part of this grassroots movement.  This allows us to have many conversations with men and women about the possibility of change.

As I sat at the booth, I began to wonder what a grassroots movement would look like if I tried to draw it.  I pictured a small patch of grass sending out runners underground that gave birth to blades of grass shooting up from the earth into the sky.  This would not be a linear drawing but more of a circle radiating out from the original roots.  And it would grow exponentially as well as more grass roots spread into more runners and more blades of grass.  And it would be tough to squelch.  If you have ever tried to grow a garden, you will know how grass is persistent and just pops up everywhere.  And then of course, there are grass seeds which are carried by the wind over great distances.  If they land in disturbed soil, they will take root and start spreading where they have arrived.  I thought about the Moose hide patches being mailed all over Canada and areas beyond and then being distributed in those areas.  I imagined the grass spreading and covering the land. 

After two days of working at the booth, we finally packed up the tent and table and sat down at the Main Stage to listen to the music and have some supper.  The second act that we listened to was a local band called Digging Roots.   David Newland describes them on the website as “a Juno-winning First Nations power couple Shoshona Kish and Raven Kanatakta [who] have built their sound on a unique musical marriage of unvarnished truth and unconditional love.”   You can check out their video For the Light here if you’d like to get a better sense of them. 

At the end of their Mariposa Festival  set, they invited the audience to join in a Round Dance.  You can learn more about Round Dances here:

   

One young woman started it and Shoshona invited everyone to join in.  People joined hands as the leader wove her way through the crowd.  The dance started really near to where I was sitting, so my partner and I jumped up and joined in at the end of the line which was only about ten people at that point.  As we moved through the audience other people jumped up to join in as well.  We didn’t make them wait until the end of the line though.  We simply dropped hands and made space for them.  The interesting thing was that as the line moved, at times I became too stretched between fast people in front of me and slow ones behind.  When I dropped hands to welcome other people into the circle, the pressure was eased.  Imagine that.  Adding more people to the circle takes the pressure off of the few.  The more people, the better.

Well, the circle grew larger and larger.  By the time I had made my way to the front of the stage, there were hundreds of people in the line ahead of me.  It felt so good to open the circle, to extend the generosity of space to people as we passed them by.  This dance is not about hierarchy.  There is space for all of us.  I noticed the joy on the faces of the dancers as the leader wound her way into a spiral and we faced other dancers.  In the video linked to above,  Adrian LaChance says, among other things, that the Round Dance is about healing through movement.  It certainly felt wonderful to join together with other festival goers in this dance over the lawn, over the grass, over the grassroots.   When the dance ended many of us extended our arms high into the air sending love from our hands to the band onstage.  This was the highlight of the weekend for me.

All weekend, I had explained to people that my partner and I were just taking our place in the circle of people working to end violence towards women and children.  I invited guests to the booth to be a part of the circle as well.  I had used the image of the circle to describe the grassroots, non-hierarchical model of the Moose Hide Campaign and now I had experienced the same thing physically.  The more people who joined in, the better.  There was less pressure on the individual as we all took our place. There was room for us all, we moved together and joy, not fear, not violence, was the result.  It seemed that as soon as a ceremony, a model was provided, we figured out how to make space, how to work collectively, almost like we had done this our whole lives.  Maybe it is in our DNA and the invitation released it.  I don't know for sure.  But, it felt like the new story that we are writing together, one in which there is space for all of us.

What the Water Taught Me

It finally feels as though summer is here.  On the Friday of the first summer long weekend, we woke up to cloudy skies, warm air and no wind.  After checking the weather forecast which predicted rain in the afternoon, we headed down to our dock to take the canoe out.  No wind makes it possible for us to venture out further into Severn Sound which is part of the eastern most section of Georgian Bay.

Happily aboard our 18 foot freighter canoe, we made our way with the help of our 2.5 hp motor into the bigger water until we reached Canary Island.  We said hello to the nesting Ospreys on the marine beacon tower and cut the motor.  Then we paddled through the channel in Canary Island.  The first thing I noticed was that I couldn’t see into the water.  The sun was at the exact height that caused the sky to be reflected in the water’s glassy surface.  When I looked down at the water, I saw sky, because of the angle of the light.  I knew that later in the day when the sun is lower, the angle makes it possible to see down into the water where there are rocks, plants, fish and a sandy bottom.  But those were now invisible to me. 

This made me think about how our point of view, or the angle we take when viewing something affects what we can see.  I thought about people who are busy creating an identity for themselves  who keep you looking at the bright shiny bits.  These identities feel like shields to me and I wonder what is beneath or behind the carefully constructed and energized images on the surface.  I know that there could come a time when they feel safer and the shields go down so that what lies below may become visible.  In this world of images, it takes some wisdom to realize that what is shown on the surface, may have nothing to do with what lies below.  It made me think of politics and how politicians want you to see the constructed image instead of what is really there.  The water and sky were teaching me.

A little further on, we came across the exoskeletons of dragonfly nymphs still clinging to bulrushes.  The nymphs crawl up the bulrushes and clamp on somehow and then the adult dragonfly emerges, dries its wings and flies away.  I pondered my own transition from mother and caregiver to older woman.  It seems that the old casing or trappings must be left behind in order to fly free.  That is just the way things work.

Looking down at the surface of the water again to see if the angle of light had changed, I noticed hundreds and hundreds of shadfly larvae casings floating in the water.   The shadfly or mayfly is also a metamorphic insect.  The adult females deposit from four hundred to three thousand eggs into the water.  The eggs sink and may not hatch for up to a year.  The nymphs that hatch go through a series of molts as they grow.  They may take up to several years before emerging from the water, leaving their exoskeletons behind and flying as immature adults who molt once more after a day or so into full adults.  The adult phase is purely about procreation and they live for a few short days, mating, laying eggs, never eating and then dying.  We noticed that there were many dead adult mayflies floating alongside the exoskeletons of the nymphs.  I thought about the millions of shadfly eggs lying on the lake bottom waiting for the conditions to be right so that the nymphs could hatch.  I thought about all the seeds we plant on a daily basis with our words and actions.  Who knows what grows from them?

Shadflies belong to the Order Ephemeroptera, clearly linked to the word ephemeral which was a medical term meaning to last only one day. Once again, I thought about perceptions.  We call these insects flies because that is the stage that we see.  In reality, they spend most of their lives as nymphs which are nearly impossible for us to see.  But there were the floating adults corpses and nymph casings on the surface of the water that looked like sky.  While down below, is where their lives are really lived.

A little farther on, we stopped to pick up some boards that had washed up on the rocks.  Lost from some human construction elsewhere on the lake, they had beached here.  We will use them to add to our dock.  I was holding the canoe steady as my partner loaded the wood and had time to look under the water.  Yes, the angle of light and the shadow of the canoe made this possible!  Lying on the lake bottom, I spied a bright white egg.  Fishing it up, we discovered that it was a map turtle egg that must have been washed out of a nest.  The turtles are up laying eggs on the shores these days.  We brought it home and will attempt to hatch it.  It is probably too late, but we will give it a chance.  Here was the beginning of the life cycle, visible to me because of its size and the angle of light. 

I spent last Sunday playing with my partner’s four-year-old grandson.  I spend hours sitting with my 92 year old father and less time talking on the phone to my adult children.  My friends are around retirement age.  Each stage of life requires special vision if the person is to be seen.  You can’t just look at the surface to know what is beneath.  Beneath the outside casing of all of them can be found wise, sensitive, creative souls.  The water is teaching me how to see, how to wait until the depths are visible, how to look beneath the surface.  Only then can the whole story be revealed. 

Wild Imagination

I recently read an article by Geneen Marie Haugen entitled Wild Imagination .

 She writes about how our minds are full of images and narratives that are streamed to us for the economic or political benefit of others.  “It’s challenging to pull away from the narratives that are being determined for us, and to engage, instead, directly with the wild Earth, or with the deep imagination,” she writes.  Haugen feels that spending time in nature, (the wilder, the better) will open up this imaginal world for us.  She sees this as a survival strategy.  “Cultivating the extraordinary human capacity to imagine alternate possibilities is, I believe, at least part of an essential navigation strategy for our times of multiple crises and ecological peril. “

A friend sent me the link to this on-line article via email.  There is a place for technology even when thinking about the wild.  And the article hit a resonant note for me.  I too feel the deep need to spend time in nature and away from technology and the constant feed of the narrative of scarcity, fear and doom.  I carefully watch, listen to and interact with nature, of which I am of course a part, to find clues and knowledge about how to navigate this uncertain future with all of life.

“We need images of alternatives to endless war and ecocide, we need images that guide us toward purposeful creation, toward human/Earth coherence and sacred intimacy,” writes Haugen.  We need images and we need stories.  We need signposts, breadcrumbs and guides.  I look for them everywhere I go.  It is like going out on a hike to look for wild strawberries.  You have to go out in the spring and look right on the ground in open areas.  You have to look for jagged edged tiny leaves that grow in three’s and small white flowers, or later, tiny bright red berries.  Then you have a chance of finding them.  If you look up in the trees, you might see the blossoms of apples, hawthorns, high bush cranberries and mountain ash, but you won’t see wild strawberries.  If you look under the water, you might see lily pads rising from the lake bottom or cattails growing towards the surface of the water or bull rushes but you won’t find strawberries. 

If you are looking for alternative images and stories, mainstream media is probably not the place you will find them.  You will see stories of wars and political soap opera sound bites.  You will see stories of division and crime.  But you won’t find…. wild strawberries or stories that are still imaginal.  Stories about people regenerating the earth, learning to work with each other and all of life to heal the damage done by an idea that turned out to be harmful.

If you only look in one place for wild strawberries, you might not find them for they grow where they grow and not where we want them. If you get all of your stories from facebook then they may all be the same story or they may not even be true.  It takes a little bit of work and searching to find stories of regeneration but then usually, this will be the beginning of a path of bread crumbs and more stories will emerge.

Tree Sisters has now planted 5 million trees in the tropics.  Women from around the world are finding ways to work together to grow, plant and finance these trees.  In an email I received, founder Claire DuBois writes, “We just passed 5,000,000 trees. Together. In a world of shocking news - this makes my heart sing. So many lives changed, endangered species protected, ecosystems being healed and regenerated. Thank you to every treesister and brother helping us do this work. You are the gold that makes the difference. We need hundreds of thousands more like you. Your love and dedication have helped to plant over 5 million trees across eight planting projects. Projects that repair landscapes and improve lives right across the tropics.”

According to an article (Can Planting Billions of Trees Save the Planet  by Patrick Barkham) in The Guardian, the United Nations in March of this year  announced a Decade of Ecosystem Restoration.  The UN has set a target to restore 350 million hectares which is an area larger than India, by 2030.

Many countries are pledging to plant millions of trees and there is talk of using drones to do this.  However, DuBois feels that the way forward is to build relationships between people and trees, thus reducing the threat of future deforestation.  Also, reforestation has to go hand in hand with poverty alleviation.  So, projects where people can earn money planting trees and also plant trees that will bring economic benefits are key.  Clare Dubois is quoted;  “We’re saying: ‘Let’s not wait for the government, we the people are the solution and can drive massive change.’ We’re talking about how we can move from rebellion to restoration.”

Imagine that.  Allow yourself to move into the imaginal world, have a wild imagination.  It may be easier to do this in a wild space where you can feel the strength of the trees above you and Earth below you and become aware of the deep relationships you have with all of nature.  Imagine all the things you can do to be restorative.  Imagine joining with others to do restorative work.  You are the new story.

Balancing Safety and Freedom

I have been paying close attention to small conflicts recently.  On one level, they may seem too small to even be worth standing one’s ground.  It is, after all, so much easier to go with the flow, succumb to other people’s wishes and to give ground.  But, I keep on thinking about the story of the frog that is in a pan of cold water on a stove and doesn’t notice that the water is warming up until it is too late.  That, and I am a Taurus and by nature rather stubborn.

As an older woman, I find that certain things just feel wrong to me.  As a younger woman, I was taught to keep things quiet and to not make a fuss.  However, as a child, my heroes were Zorro, Hawkeye and Robin Hood, people who stood up for what was right against the corruption that was part of the normal world.  They were edge dwellers who rescued the day, people who had to flaunt the status quo and often the law to do what was right.  As a younger woman, my heroes were Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela who were all imprisoned for standing up for the truth.  Women like Mother Teresa and Maya Angelou who lived their truth despite overwhelming odds also informed my consciousness.  So, I have always wrestled with my upbringing of being quiet with my belief in doing the right thing and standing up for those with less strength and privilege.  So perhaps it should come as no surprise that now as an older woman, I feel the need to dig my heels in when I see a small act that represents a larger worldview that I don’t subscribe to.

Here is an example of one of these conflicts.  My father is 92, confined to bed or a wheelchair and living in a nursing home.  He is not overweight, nor has he diabetes.  He has a hankering for hard candies to help with his dry mouth and to give him a sugar surge.  When he lived in a retirement residence, my brother and I kept a bowl of these candies on his dressing table and he enjoyed them immensely.  Since he has moved into a nursing home, this freedom has been often taken away from him by the nursing staff.  One of the reasons given is that he might choke.  He has had three swallow tests in the past six months and is not a choking hazard.  He cannot have candies visible in his room in case another resident wanders in and takes one.  That is sad but it is also the reality of communal living with people who may have dementia.   On one occasion I had left some candies in one of his drawers in an attempt to comply with the wishes of the staff and they spilled in the drawer.  A nurse took them all away and locked them up with the medications.  I had to stand her down to get them back.  I spoke with the assistant administrator later that week at the six-week case conference and convinced her that he should be allowed to have them in a drawer.  We agreed on the exact drawer in his bedside table.  The next week some staff member removed them each day and put them on a high shelf in the closet.  The staff have taken over his bedside table with their cleaning products.  So now I have been putting them in an empty drawer in his dresser that he can reach.  So far, so good.  It seems to be working.  But who knows why some staff members are so adamant that he shouldn’t have them where he can reach them.  They cite safety even though it doesn’t make sense.  Safety over freedom.  That is the mantra of such institutions.  Keeping the aged safe and avoiding law suites is more important than quality of life and freedom.  I would happily sign a waver that allowed him to have the candies if one exists.  It may still come to this.

Many days, I wonder why I persist in this little guerrilla war.  The assistant administrator says okay, but some of the staff that care for him have other ideas.  It is difficult to address this sensibly because it is done secretly.  And no one wants to poke the bear that is caring for their father.  And yet, I persist because this is very important to him.  It is the last treat that he can access on his own, the last little pleasure that could make a long boring day a little brighter, the last bit of freedom he has to make a choice.  So, I persist because I care about him and I value freedom in balance with safety, not as a casualty to safety.  It is a fundamental principle that I believe in.

Red-winged blackbirds chase away a crow. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/photocontest/detail/altered-images/intercept/

It is nesting season where I live and the birds are wonderful teachers about life.  The other day, I watched eight male red-winged blackbirds chasing a crow.  The male blackbirds are not monogamous.  They may have six females that are nesting at the base of cattails while they stand guard against any intruders, including other red-winged blackbirds.  But as soon as any bird they perceive as a predator comes by, the males band together and chase it off.  In the case of a crow, this is a good idea.  Crows eat eggs. The crow that I watched dodged and dived to escape the blackbirds but they kept the pressure on until the crow was well away from their families.  Another evening, I watched a male merlin dive bombing a turkey vulture.  Turkey vultures only eat carrion and so are no threat to the merlin’s nest, but the merlin was taking no chances.  He definitely was from the “the best defence is a good offense” school of thought.  The vulture didn’t alter its flight pattern one bit.  It is not built for out-flying a member of the falcon family and so it continued its peaceful soaring on thermals, seemingly oblivious to the crazed father.  Of course, the vulture is many times the size of a merlin but then the crow was much bigger than the blackbirds as well.  Crows though are expert dodgers and artful flyers so that crow used what it knew to escape.  The smaller blackbirds used the team approach to chase away a bigger threat.  The merlin used it’ speed and screechy voice.  And the turkey vulture just seemed to rise above all the conflict. 

On another front, my business partner and I have an office in Toronto in a renovated house.  We share the first floor and waiting area with a psychotherapy office.  We have been in that space on a major street in a good neighbourhood for the past twelve years with no problems.  However, the recent tenant that we share the floor with has decided that she is afraid of people coming into the space that she doesn’t know.  There is probably an interesting back story to this fear but she doesn’t talk to us so it is a mystery.  Somehow, she convinced the people managing the property to install a key pad entry system into our waiting room which would mean all clients would have to use a code to get in.  This was done without any consultation with us and was a rather nasty shock when we found out.  It seems ridiculous to us that our clients and potential clients would have to remember a code to get into our waiting room as well as totally unmanageable.  So, we presented a compromise position (in a letter to the psychotherapist) whereby we would prop the door open when we were working there during the day and she could have the key pad system at all other times.  She did not reply to our letter but sent it to the management people instead.  We received an email insisting that we comply with the new system and “adjust to the change”. 

First of all, there is no way our hundreds of clients could “adjust” to this change.  It would add stress to their lives and ours and would frankly download this one woman’s fear onto hundreds of people.  It seemed to be part of the current paradigm of fear, protection and separation that is being used by populist politicians to gain power.  In the name of “security”, we were to limit our own freedom to run a business and allow people to simply enter our waiting room.  It reminded me of the merlin attacking the harmless turkey vulture.   And so, we decided to pursue our idea of a compromise.  We replied to the management people with a long, thoughtful and hopefully convincing email.  We began with, “It is indeed unfortunate that we were not consulted before this decision was made.  However, it is not too late to arrive at a compromise position that is good for all of us.”  We debunked the “safety” argument, explained why this would create undue stress for our clients and implored in the spirit of cooperation to be allowed to proceed with our compromise position.  Later that day, we had a reply that the landlords thought this was fine.

It would have been easier to go along with the original plan and be angry about it, plan revenge and complain about our lack of power in the situation.  That is the paradigm that I grew up in.  But that is like eating rat poison and hoping the rat will die.  Instead we decided to use our agency, be polite and yet forceful about protecting our clients.  We spoke for them and we worked together to compose the email.  We offered to help the other therapist if she was ever frightened while we were there and the door was open.  In short, we worked in the paradigm of cooperation and community to create security instead of locked doors and separation. Perhaps, we were like the blackbirds, working together to deal with a real threat when it occurred.  It seemed to us, that by going along with the paradigm of fear that we were adding to it and making it stronger.  And that felt wrong.  Instead we tried to elicit the paradigm of cooperation and community and so far, that is how we are operating.  We didn’t actually expect to be listened to.  We are far too schooled in being quiet and in losing. 

These seem to be very tiny struggles but I think they hold larger truths.  In the paradigm of fear, security is found in separation, in locking things up and people out.  Sometimes this is a good idea, but often it is a solution with the side affect of reduced freedom, diminished community and less resources available when trouble occurs.  In the paradigm of cooperation and community, security can be found in joint endeavours and a diversity of solutions.  The collision of these paradigms is all around us and will be acted out in small and large ways.  It is a time when we can think about which paradigm we want to live in because it seems that we actually have the power to live and work in the paradigm we choose.  Some of these choices are made unconsciously but when we make them consciously, we may be surprised at the solutions and the stories we create.

Reclaiming Power and Place: Final Report of MMIWG National Inquiry

Canada’s National Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) Inquiry presented its final report this week at its Final Ceremony.   I was not able to watch the ceremony as it unfolded in Gatineau, but I watched it on youtube this weekend.  During the ceremony, Chief Commissioner Marion Buller referred to the findings of the Inquiry and the Calls for Justice as providing a New Vision of Canada.  Indeed, there was much about this Inquiry, its Final Report and the Final Ceremony that were different from how these things usually work.  

The nearly four hour ceremony which you can watch here included Indigenous ceremonies from First Nation, Metis and Inuit people.  Drumming, lighting of the Inuit Qulliq or lamp which symbolizes Inuit women’s strength, care and love, dancing, introducing the Eagle Staff and Drum, prayers and songs gave shape and sacredness to the proceedings.  The physical Final Report was blessed with Sacred objects, wrapped in red cloth and placed in a Cradleboard.  Two young people presented it to the Prime Minister as a sacred object, the collection of the truth telling of so many people. (you can view this part of the ceremony here.) 

The Calls for Justice were presented by the four commissioners, the Grandmothers Circle and the Family members of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women.  The voices were almost entirely those of Indigenous women.  This seemed to me to be a game changer.  How can we listen to those women speak their truth and not be affected?  The Commission used a strength-based approach to analyse their findings and the same approach was evident in presenting these findings.

Many of the Calls to Justice are for governmental changes that are long overdue.  But, Marion Buller made sure she highlighted things that Canadians can do as well.  She asked us to speak out against racism, sexism and misogyny, to hold governments to account and to decolonize ourselves by learning about Indigenous people and the true history of Canada.  This genocide will continue, she added, unless all Canadians find the strength, courage and vision to build a new decolonized relationship with each other based on respect and self determination. This new vision, this new story is, I believe, possible and necessary. 

After three years of work, the commissioners heard from 2386 people in the Truth Gathering Process.  1484 family members and survivors provided testimony.  819 individuals shared through artistic expression and 83 Experts, Knowledge Keepers and Officials provided testimony  There were 15 community hearings and 9 Knowledge Keeper, Expert and Institutional Hearings that took place across Canada.

Chief Commissioner Marion Buller referred to the findings of the Inquiry and the Calls for Justice as providing a New Vision of Canada.  According to the Executive Summary, “The National Inquiry’s guiding principle is that 'Our Women and Girls are Sacred.'"  This vision will help build the foundation upon which First Nations, Métis, and Inuit women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA (Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trangender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex and Asexual) people will reclaim their power and place.”

There are many ways to be a part of this new vision.  One possible way is to read at least the Executive Summary (121pp) of Reclaiming Power and Place which is available at no charge on-line here.   This is one way to honour all the courageous family members, survivors and others who had to relive such pain.  This may take, as Buller said, strength and courage.

During the Final Ceremony two videos were presented from the Grandmother’s Circle and the National Family Advisory Council.  You can watch them by going to the Final Ceremony.  If you scroll forward to 42:10 you can watch the Family Members speak and at 46:29 you can listen to the grandmothers.  The overarching message from all these women is that they are changemakers.  “Are you?” they ask. 

Don't Judge the Fern by the Fiddlehead

Despite the rain this Saturday, we went in search of a trillium experience.  We were not disappointed.  The rain, it turned out, was warm and the misty air created a sense of mystery as we followed the well worn trail through the mixed hardwood bush.  We walked past the dark green heart shaped leaves of Wild Ginger and the bluish green foliage of Blue Cohosh.  Past the Wild Leeks and Wild Garlic until we found them. Thousands of White Trilliums spread out beneath the trees as far as the eye could see.  We breathed them in like a tonic after a long winter.  They had returned, a little later than usual, but in full force.  Our hearts were filled and our spirits lifted by the sea of white and green.

We kept walking, taking in their beauty and finally paying attention to the other plants as well.  Just beside the path, I saw a little fern unfurling.  It wasn’t the fiddlehead of an ostrich fern and I had trouble identifying it in it’s infant stage.  It was probably a Sensitive Fern judging by the thick middle part of the frond.  It was kind of gangly and misshapen, not the lovely graceful shape of the adult fern.

This reminded my partner of the baby robins in the backyard.  They have indeed hatched and he has been taking pictures of their fuzzy , big beaked, closed eyed heads projecting out of the nest, waiting for regurgitated worms from their parents.  They look nothing like the adult robins who hatched them.

Baby Robin emerging from underneath its mother.

Well, this got me thinking of a video I had watched recently on a new economic idea of circular economics.  You can watch it here. In this two minute video clip, Economist Kate Raworth uses a piece of hose she found in her garden shed to explain how we can work with and within the cycles of the living world to create a circular regenerative economy.  So, check out the video.  If you can’t picture what this might look like when it is all fleshed out, then remember the little fern and the baby robin.  Imagine that this idea could become something concrete and beautiful and don’t judge the fern by the fiddlehead.