Not long ago at a city council meeting, a sr. resident of our community stood before council during question period at the end of the meeting and pointed to us across the table exclaiming “shame!, shame!, shame!” In many years I’d never seen anything like that before. But I thought, he’s put his finger on something. There is shame here, and blame. Why? What is really happening?
Some of us feel it and recognize it. Do we understand it? Why is this coming up for us? Why can’t we get through it, get past it? What happened to the friendly, cooperative community we’ve always known ourselves to be?
There’s more emotional reaction going on than ever before too. Reaction to media articles about us, reaction to information about IW Powell, both pro and con, and it seems, the more information, the more reaction. There’s been reaction to a silly spontaneous but straight-from-the-heart outburst by a city councillor famous for such expression, and lots of reaction to each other over that too, both condemning and defensive. Blame is in the air, accusations of hate-speech, alienation between people who used to be friends, and on and on. Much of the reaction is emotional, but deeply felt, and coming from many people who don’t often raise their voices. Some of it is thought out, rationalized, justified, carefully written down.
All of it represents different sides of our situation. None of it represents our whole situation. Within our community we feel divided, taking sides, opposed to each other. How did we get here? Can we trace back far enough to answer this? Is there a way to do that without blaming each other and perpetuating division in our community?
A central question might lead us forward. What is our whole situation? Regardless of sides we are on, there is one whole. We are all here in it.
What is our whole situation? Is that too big a question to answer? Perhaps we can take a step in the direction by starting where we find ourselves now. Reaction based just on emotion subjects us to what stimulates the reaction. In other words, to some degree simply by reacting we lose control of ourselves to that thing. We become like leaves in the wind blown one way or another. Mostly we grasp that, so we try to take a thinking approach, find a rationale for the feelings. But if it leads only to opposition and division between us, as the old saying goes, divided, we are conquered. Controlled by way of our own beliefs underlying our reactions. It’s a dead end, or heading there. We must react on our terms and our thinking must go deeper to empower our action.
This means treading into dangerous territory, where we question beliefs we hold, that now divide us from each other. It can be our territory if we go into it with purpose, within the safety of the trust that can come of working together. Worthy initial purpose can well be simply to find our way past division. We can do this if we recognize working toward a successful future for us all is more important than the beliefs that led to the divisions, even when they are beliefs we feel define who we are. It then remains ours, in spite of how it feels to loosen our grip on positions we’ve taken, and who we think we are. No one else can do it for us, but if we don’t do it for ourselves, we do lose control of our own thinking, we become the leaves in the wind. We can only tread into the dangerous territory if we are willing to risk allowing our beliefs to change.
We can’t stay where we are. This is the only way forward. We must risk loss, not of our lives, but of beliefs, some related to identity, our very sense of who we are. We could find we are more than we think we are. But that might not feel good at first. We might feel someone is shaming us. We might feel shame.
Shame relates to identity, to the sense of who we are. Its central message is personal, that I am defective, something is wrong with me. But is that true? Deeply, we know it is not true, and that is confusing. Shame is rooted in beliefs and assumptions, things we have learned through our lives, some of which are not true.
Close to three years ago when the question of our name first emerged, a friend shared with me the deep sense that it questioned his culture, his sense of where he had come from, his ancestors, his heritage. Greif, tears appeared in his words. How deeply he felt that, and trusted me enough to tell me has stuck with me all this time. I believe he put words to what many people now feel. Our name, whatever it is, is the symbol of who we are. To question it questions who we are. Not much deeper a question could be asked.
To ask this question could evoke shame, or be taken as shaming. An obvious reason for that could be for the damage our indigenous friends suffered over the past century or more. That is a deep and painful realm of enquiry. All cultures carry deep trauma from the past. No one can do this work without facing ghosts. A name change could carry intent to compensate for that history, but it’s not that simple. A change for that reason does not answer the question of what from the past yet exists in our culture now.
It can be argued IW Powell was a good person in his time. He contributed to his community, and to early British Columbia. The question about the name of our city is not primarily about him or who he was. It is about the culture and society of which he was a part at that time, and what of it still exists today.
BC was a colonial community. Immigrants here moved into lands already occupied by indigenous peoples. As hard as it may be to grasp the impact then, and the sad subsequent history for the indigenous peoples, we are starting to understand. It takes time. It is painful. At that time, colonization mostly by European nations was occurring in many places in the world. It was based largely on extraction to feed and make wealthy some of the people in those European nations.
To defend the past without questioning it assumes that we are no more than products of it. That is no more useful than stopping at blame personally, and feeling shame for it. Defending the past locks our identity to it and implicitly justifies the results of that past, good or bad. Can we give ourselves the freedom to change beliefs and assumptions of the past and the practices they justify? This brings us back to the question, what is our situation now?
We live in a highly developed world now. It is a direct result and continuation of the world that existed in the 1880’s, but it’s not the same world. We face the results of exploitation of natural resources and peoples in these colonized places including our indigenous neighbours, results particularly since the Industrial revolution and fossil fuel use. We have magnificent advancements and applications of science and technology. And we have a spectrum of unexpected, unintended consequences, and cumulative externalized effects. We now face environmental crises, resource depletions, species extinctions, extreme weather effects, and social crises, now called poly-crisis. It is hard to miss this context of our current reality. We can not afford squabbling within our community.
We can no longer afford failure to cooperate, failure to work together toward a resilient future for us all. Can we see all we have to gain by working together, and supporting each other for economic reasons as well as environmental and social?
What tears our community apart must end. Can we work together to this end?
I would support changing our name, but for our reasons, to declare a new identity based on values and systems inclusive of our planet-home we depend on for survival let alone to thrive. We need to move past exploitation that lacks consideration of its effects our colonial ancestors simply took to be their right. We can now see that was short-sighted self-interest.
I believe it is our right and our destiny to thrive, as life has done for millions of years here. We are a part of this beautiful creation, independent separate individuals and communities, collectively responsible for ourselves and now with the power we have, for the Earth too. Successful civilizations of the past have known this. Any useful shame now is for the current poly-crisis humans have allowed to occur. How do we turn this around? How do we re-create systems that bring us back into balance with Earth’s ecology? By taking any issue that comes up between us and working on it together, and by eschewing what divides us; by being willing to change.
Might we change our name for our Tla’amin Nation neighbours too? Certainly, but not unless we own it and do it for our own reasons. Our reasons can be large and powerful. Our friends asked the question. It can’t be un-asked. It opened a Pandora’s box for us all. We have started, but we have more to do to find our true common interest. This is our work now.
Rob Southcott 