Mirroring histories and losses

Picked during a meeting of Women Elders in Action (WE*ACT), the defunct organization to which I belonged, to attend a video presentation on the Alberta Tar (Oil) Sands development, I had acquiesced but added that I didn’t know how to find Coast Salish territory, where it would be held.

Amused, my co-members laughed, and said the ground underneath the-then 411 Seniors Centre on Dunsmuir Street and miles beyond, in fact, spans unceded Coast Salish land—acknowledged as such only on June 26, 2014, by Vancouver City Council in the presence of Coast Salish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations chiefs whose people have lived here for thousands of years; Canada has 634 First Nations.

If I hadn’t been curious about a marker of piled-up stones that rise at the southeast corner of a pear-shaped park a few miles off our street, which we circle going to St. Anthony’s Parish, I could have missed a deeper link with Coast Salish descendants, the Musqueam people; some thousands of years ago, the park flourished as their village, evidenced by “skeletal remains, artifacts, stone and wooden tools, artwork and shells.”

While I focused my childlike wonder on the 2010 Vancouver Olympics’ mascot, the Inukshuk, (actually a stone figure of a man, inuk in Inuit language, to assure anyone lost that “someone passed this way” as explained by a Yukon coordinator), I couldn’t belie the fire of protests from the Olympics Resistance Network, which soon burned in me, too, against “…destruction of the land, commodification of Native art and culture, and the creation of long-term poverty once the few token jobs are gone,” as expressed by Lil’wat Elder, Seislom.

With the protesters, I had mourned the death of indigenous rights activist Elder Harriet Nahanee of the Pacheenaht Nation on southeast Vancouver Island, “a week after she was released from prison for protesting the destruction of Eagleridge Bluffs, an area considered unique in biodiversity; the bluffs were being cleared out for the Olympics related expansion of the Sea-to-Sky highway, which connects Vancouver to Whistler,” as The Dominion paper reported.

Unbidden, hence, though I had realized later it couldn’t but happen, at the Alberta Tar Sands Development video presentation, after watching the swirling disturbance of boreal forests, and toxic by-products snaking into the Athabasca River, with dark smoke spewing out, thus, posing the slowdeath of precious living things, I had leaped in a tight embrace, sobbing with Cease Wyss, T’uy’tanat, a Skwxww’umesh ethnobotanist, media artist, educator, and food-security activist.

“I know,” she whispered as in inaudible outbursts, I expressed grief over the loss of much of the Philippine environment also, though it seems too far gone that “…we cannot even mourn this deeply anymore.” That mournful moment still puzzles me.

But the recent historic release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) report on the residential school system with 94 “Calls to Action” to “redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation,” stunned me.

I have heard of, but not enough to really understand, this “cultural genocide,” as is now labeled, that involved the state’s with the Catholic Church’s forcible taking of children, as young as three-year olds, from their families and housed in Indian residential schools to get “cleaned out” of their native language, culture and practices from the1880s to 1996, when the last of such schools closed.

An “…overwhelming evidence of widespread neglect, starvation, extensive physical and sexual abuse, and many student deaths related to these crimes,” from testimonies as reported in The Globe and Mail, must have struck me. But the loss of identity, the effects of which have been evident since among First Nations youth, starkly mirrors in me an unintended, though as insidious, robbing of heritage, human dignity and rights among the lost and poverty-ridden Filipinos, including some indigenous tribes.

How, when, and by whom, though, might be fathoms deep by now, to bring these to light.