Our community’s name Powell is in question, and the question of whether to keep it or not tears some of us apart, and some of us from each other.    But, from a slightly older perspective perhaps we have already changed that name.   The change happened gradually over many years.  We lost elders, and with them, their memories and experience, people left and people came here, and we didn’t even notice it as it slowly gradually happened.   The names of Cranberry, Wildwood, Westview, and Townsite aren’t in question.  Only Powell is questioned.

I’m from Cranberry.  Yes, I was born in PR in the old hospital that sat near the dam.   It’s gone now.  It was torn down in the ‘90s and as the years go by fewer people even remember it.  Back then, during the years I grew up, we used to go down to Powell River because the Post Office was down there, and the big Overwaitee store was there.   It was the commercial centre for the region.   We had a smaller Overwaitee in Cranberry, a gas station, and many other stores too, but we didn’t have banks.  They were all in Powell River too.  Westview had a business street, Marine Ave., and by the time I was old enough to remember, the Marine Ave. business district may actually have been little bigger than Cranberry’s, but we seldom went there because everything we needed was either in Cranberry or in the Townsite, which was Powell River to us then. 

In 1961 the PR Plaza was built, and suddenly, Westview became the go-to place for shopping. It had a Hudson’s Bay, a Safeway supermarket, and a lot of other shops.  Called Crossroads now, it was big shopping-wise in the ‘60s compared to anything we’d had before.   Years later the Town Centre Mall came along and over those years Westview took over as the main shopping and population centre.   

The change of the name to Powell River for all the villages, from Westview to Wildwood happened in 1955.    I remember a years-long complaint in Cranberry that our Christmas lights were put up along Marine Ave. in Westview.  Some used the word stolen. They were paid for by Cranberry ratepayers.   They didn’t belong to Westview.  There were hard feelings about that for maybe 10 years, but gradually those subsided.   Change is slow.  We slowly got used to the name Powell River for the whole of the district, and it was officially called that for many years; the Corp. of the District of PR.  But many of us retained our pride in community that did not relate primarily to PR.  I’m aware of many residents of Wildwood who feel that way currently, and there are probably as many in Cranberry.   I’m not sure about Westview.  Back when Westview was first being developed, it was mostly Townsite, Wildwood and Cranberryites who were moving there.   Some of us stayed put, and some like me who left years ago and came back still feel that pride in our origins in the villages we’re actually from.

There is no question that the PR Co. made an international name for itself that peaked in the ‘60s when with ten paper machines it was the single largest pulp and paper producer in the world, and later, Kathaumixw made us internationally renowned in the choral world.   Our community has always been very rich culturally, with music and the Patricia Theatre since the 1920’s and more recently with art.  We are renowned in competitive sports, now celebrated in our own Sports Hall of Fame.  We are a gateway to one of probably three of the finest and most beautiful marine destinations in the world.  We are apparently one of the most climate change resilient places in the world.   We have abundant fresh water.   We are a very lucky community in many ways.   And we have been a networked community, connected by many layers of relationships with each other since before my memory.    The not always kind rumour mill has always been far outweighed by the kindness of the grapevine here.   Through it, many of us have been helped out by neighbours when we were in times of need, large and small. 

The question in my mind is, was the umbrella name of the district ever really at the root of our pride more than our cultural and village identities, especially for those who’ve been around here for a while.    I’m honestly not sure about suburban mall-ridden Westview with its phenomenal views where I live now, but I know Townsite people are proud of living in the Townsite.   I think there is still a subtle tension between Cranberry and Wildwood as there has been as far back as I can remember.  And these names are not in question.   They relate to places to which many of us feel attached, a feeling as deep as our roots go.   How deep do they go?  

A recent visit I made with relatives to Ireland, land of my ancestors, gave me opportunity to reconnect with those deep roots.  The Irish are indigenous in that land.   It felt very good to be there, like it feels to me to be here where I was born, where I live and where I hope to spend the rest of my life.    Yes, now I live in Westview, but I’m from Cranberry where my half Irish mother loved to garden and listen to opera at high volume on CBC, Sat. afternoon.   These are things that root us to this place we love.

So, what of this name, Powell, the umbrella name of our district?   Yes, there is pride connected to that name and that pride will not go away anytime soon, but the details will fade into history just as the memory of Cranberry’s Christmas lights being given to Marine Ave. has faded.   And the pride in who we are as a community and where we are planted will remain and grow through coming years because we deserve to be proud.    We have challenges and problems now and we will tackle them as we always have done, and we will have success because we work together as a community as we always have done for as long as any of us can remember.   That is our heritage.  That is part of our identity.   

Our umbrella name, Powell, is associated with some pretty terrible outcomes over the past century or more for our indigenous neighbours.   We can feel their grief, and honour that original ask, which was implicitly, can we help with it?    I am paraphrasing, and I’m ignoring certain ways that has been emphasized, and felt deeply here in my community.   Shame does no good, it simply confuses and confounds the way forward.   What is the way forward for us?   How do we proceed with the pride I feel, that I know is in our community heart?   How do we rejoin with our neighbours in this pride, both within our community here, and with our friends/neighbours of Tla’amin Nation?   How do we work together toward prosperity for us all? 

I think we can answer these questions.    Who are we really?   What would we call ourselves if not after a man who never lived here?    What name would suit us that represents who we are?    Can we as a community create it anew?   None of the names of the places we live are in question.  What used to be Powell River to me, isn’t any more.  It’s Townsite now.    I’m from Cranberry of Irish ancestry.    I’m deeply proud of that.   I will never let that go.   And I’m deeply grateful to live here.    Let us work together now to define who we are and name ourselves together to represent the great good together we know we are here.    

written on my mom’s birthday, June 9. RIP Eileen M Southcott, nee Moore  

We have been asked by the Tla’amin leadership to change the name of our town.  I. W. Powell was part of BC’s provincial govt. that was responsible for residential schools and indigenous cultural suppression.   

However, in response to this ask some of us are offended.  Is this hard to understand?  Our names symbolize our identity.  No one I know relates to IW Powell, and until recently had no idea what he and his govt. did 130 years ago.   We’re proud of our name, PR because we’re proud of our culture.

Isn’t that similar to Tla’amin, proud of their culture too, as it reawakens and is recreated, powerful and proud?      Maybe this question about our name is a gift, to help us recognize the pride we have.   

First, it’s a recognition that we, descendants of immigrants, despite historical confusion about what Canadian identity is, do have culture.   Here in our community, I see it in respect we have for each other, in working together, cooperating, volunteering, giving in many ways into community.  This is what I was raised with, and what I’ve seen ever since in this community.    We have many practices to support our culture.   They range from music and fine arts to sports, and love of our beautiful home in nature.   Those practices come from many national, ethnic and religious roots, most going back millennia.   They are like a quilt of beautiful pieces all woven together in a unique pattern in this community.     And they are from many places on the earth, but they’re all from places on the Earth. 

We all love this place.   We are all attached to it.   Many of us were born here, and if we were born somewhere else, how far away is that really?   We are all of the earth and we have that in common. 

We do recognize that terrible things were experienced by indigenous people here over the past few generations, the recent past.   Wounds are still fresh, painful, disabling.   That is easy to understand in heart, in spite of being hard to grasp in mind.     And, we are not the ones who set in motion what came to abuse and injure, even kill our indigenous neighbors’ recent ancestors. 

That was then.   This is now.   We can argue about it but we can’t change history.    There may even have been good intentions involved back then.    What stands is that terrible things occurred here, in our provincial community, where we live now.   

So, what now?   Feel guilty?  Feel shame?    What use is that?    Shame causes and perpetuates damage, division, and isolation.    We can’t change history, but we can do something about it.  We can change the future by changing things in the present.  It just has to be for the right reason.   Not for guilt and shame.  

Whatever can divide us will divide us.    I think of the past two years.   There was division between us over agreement or not with public policy that was created to respond to a collective health threat.   Like it or not, agree with it or not, despite flaws, it was the best government could do at the time for our whole provincial community.  That’s all we’ve got, our best.   And as time goes on, we can do better.  We can learn by looking back, judging what worked and what didn’t.    Some things from the past are just not good enough, and some things are a lot worse than not good enough.   History, and our individual stories are full of those things.  Some of our own stories are as buried as our knowledge of IW Powell and his government’s work was until just recently.  Some are as painful and as damaging.    

We have much in common with each other and with the people of Tla’amin.   Simply to change the name of our town because it hurts them isn’t good enough for many of us.    The question is stuck in our craw.    Voting it out of existence will not change the past.    All we can do is change something now.    But what might that be?    Can we see it as an opportunity, and take it?  Can we own this?     How do we make it our own? 

I return to the culture of this community to answer that question.    First, we refuse to let it divide us.   We seek anything we have in common within our own community relating to this question.    Doesn’t the pride in community that drives some to seek a referendum come from a place in us very close to where the drive for others to seek a name change, because the association is hurtful to our friends of Tla’amin, comes from?  Both motivations come from caring, pride, love of our culture.   Can we reconcile that?    Can we agree to refuse to let it divide us?   Can we be stronger than anything that challenges us?

Is this not the only way forward?  A friend recently referred to Socratic dialogue.    He said it was to listen so openly as “to see the soul of you”.    This goes back to deep roots of western culture.    Can we do that with each other?   Listen so deeply that we see the soul of each other and because that’s most important, find ways to compromise what we might think should or shouldn’t be done to answer this question?    It can’t be un-asked.  

This is how we make it our own, how we take possession of it, use the opportunity, and work it to serve a greater good for our culture, for all cultures.  It will likely require a little compromise on all sides.   Our culture needs a little healing.  It has some shameful roots.  We can do that now, but it must be our work, for us, and for our culture.    And hopefully the result would be good for our indigenous neighbours too.   We’re all here now.    Us with our patchwork quilt of culture and Tla’amin with what’s been here for millennia.  Can we all work together for our collective future?   

As well, our work on this question could be just a first step into a future that promises greater challenges than this one.   We already see them looming, environmentally, economically, socially.   

Is this but a first step to much more we can do together?      

MSM (mainstream media) and SM (social media) are apparently the dominant sources of info about everything currently, the truckers’ convoy to Ottawa included.    About that, we see assertions of extremist influences, white supremacy, unnamed foreign financial support, etc., etc.  This isn’t the stuff of conspiracy theories.   This is MSM, so we can trust it. 

We know who owns and controls MSM.    We understand how these media are broadly employed to influence and control society now.   We were educated in methods and subtleties by Edward Snowden, and then by the exposure of media manipulation during Brexit, and the Trump election.   Do we still simply accept and trust media’s view/spin about the convoy or anything else without question?  What’s actually true is somewhere within what’s being reported, but the viewpoint can make it look entirely like something else.  I first noticed this as a teenager in the 1960’s, fascinated by short wave radio, listening to news from different countries around the world.   The reports were about the same events, but the stories could be quite different from different national viewpoints.   It was surprising to me, shocking actually, but it taught me something.   Consider the viewpoint.      

Perhaps the question we should be asking is, how might the convoy’s current portrayal as pure evil be useful to the owners of media, before we write it off as being exactly what they tell us it is.   

And then, once our minds are cleared just a little, perhaps we could ask the question, what is this really about?  Why is the average truck driver in that convoy involved?  Is it a zombie apocalypse, or could it be a bizarre symptom of a much broader impulse amoung people to reject narratives spoon fed to us 24/7?  And if we can step back, and question them just a little, might that help us find our way to rise above our differences, and find values that work better for us all, for community, and for real change, so needed now?  That is apparently not going to come from MSM, or from the financial industry that owns it.   Might it not just come from us?    

I’ve been thinking about war, psychological war, waged on the world for a long time; benefiting some, not most, not the Earth.  Tactics commonly employed are delay, distraction & diversion, distortion; they all add up to deception. 

We live in times of deception, mostly from distraction.   

As an example, and not that Covid isn’t real, but it like so much else has been exploited to distract us from something we can’t afford to be distracted from, essentially the current central problem for humanity, our dependence on fossil fuel energy.  Currently, daily covid reports are normal.   How about daily climate calamity reports?    Reports on global heating, climate battles, measures of the now well-recognized existential threat not only to human survival, but to the survival of a much wider spectrum of life on Earth. 

This is part of a larger human problem, looming and progressive widespread resource depletion, of which petroleum is only the main one.   Essentially, we face one problem, depletions stemming from human consumption. 

This problem has an intractable nature.   It is that energy and resources have served us very well, and self-centred human nature does not want to let go of what it’s given us.  We’re all at least a little bit human.   We take more than our share, some of us a lot more; and we’ve multiplied according to availability of resources, pushing the limit of how they support us as a species.    For a few of us, it means opulent material wealth, for many, perhaps the dream of it, even just a nice place to live, and for many others, mere survival.   The consumption principle applies across the spectrum.  But we see how the lower (poverty, i.e., less consumptive) end of that spectrum is burgeoning.  That itself is alarming and distracting.  But, simply put, current problems of depletions and climate are but the effects of our human nature.  

We will not adequately address these effects until we address the underlying cause.   Humanity in its present state is likely incapable of doing that en masse.   Environmental catastrophes have helped us see change is needed.  How much more do we need to grasp the extent of essential change?

Consumption is the central issue.    It must decrease, and what we consume must change so that our consumption becomes a part of Earth’s ecology again.   This simple fact is beyond anyone who still believes in competition that separates us, the fundamental basis of our western market-based economic system.   Our understanding of economics must become ecological.    Until that happens, we will continue on the path we’re on, and as the old saying goes, “if you don’t change course, you’ll end up where you’re headed.”    It’s becoming easier and easier to see where we’re headed.   Not a happy destination.  

We must see past distractions like covid in the way it’s been used, and see why that has happened.  When we do, we can start seeing the way forward that isn’t as unhappy as the path we’re collectively on.  Is there any way for humanity but collectively on this small planet?  No, there isn’t.  This is where thinking globally comes in.   Increasingly obvious is that we are a species who must think collectively if we are to continue to thrive individually.   Can we do it?  

This is not original.   It is being thought and expressed by increasing numbers of people.    That gives me great hope because as there become enough of us who understand and make changes large and small, I believe we can do it.   We can make changes necessary to alter the course of humanity not only to survival, but to a world where we thrive.   How many times has that been said before?    Many.   Here we are again; we’ve done it before; we can do it again.     This time though, it’s never been as big, and it’s never really been for all.   Now it can be.   We can do it.