Tag Archives: culture

Two name problems

1 Reply

One problem is the association of the name Powell with residential schools, and its history and trauma for indigenous people. This deserves recognition, & appreciation. The effects of that trauma are clearly present; including amoung others, mental health challenges & addictions.

The other problem; Powell represents identity for many people here. Questioning identity amounts to a personal threat for many who were unprepared for it. A natural reaction has been defensive and little has happened that hasn’t essentially only bolstered defensiveness. This needs recognition too, and appreciation.

Many people also want to do something about what is relatively new knowledge for many about what happened to indigenous people. Reconciliation? Change the name? This question has divided our community since we stopped doing anything about it since the last civic election in Oct. 2022.

Yes or no divides us.  The community we need now, to face increasing challenges, needs to work together to find our way forward. It doesn’t matter how slowly; we just need to do it together. Division is our real current challenge. We must deal with that within our Powell River community before we can ever reconcile with the people who first asked the name question.

The Tla’amin Nation is thriving now like never before. Strength and pride have surged culturally and acquisitions of mill lands and TFL39 promise future economic prosperity. Meanwhile, our city faces sagging revenues, increasing costs, and people suffering mental health challenges, addictions, and homelessness too. There is a lot for us to work on together.

These two “name” problems are not two sides of the same problem. We are basically two distinct peoples with very linked but different histories. Some of us, or our ancestors, migrated here so we have inherited a problem, and now it is ours. Opportunity to reconnect within our community is ours. Failing to do that these past few years has resulted in antagonism, and conflict between us, prejudice, racism, blame. This is painful at a community scale, and it has gone on too long. Let’s take a breath, step back from reacting and taking it personally, and get working together again, for the good of ourselves and our whole community.

This fall we will have opportunity in a civic election to choose new leadership. The choice is very clear. Will we choose those who make promises that focus on what we fear, and deliver continued division and misery? Or will we choose leadership committed to reconnection with each other in spite of our different views, in spite of our apparent divisions, willing to face whatever is ahead of us together, however hard that might be, together as one community.  I hope and pray we all care enough to vote with true hearts, and take the path back toward thriving together.

Let’s Listen & Talk, about identity and heritage

Leave a reply

A little over four years ago I met with a man I respect.   He wanted to talk about something that felt urgent and important.  It was hard to address, and deeply personal.  We sat in his truck beside the ocean. I listened.  

A short time before that, the question had been asked of city council while in a C3 meeting with the Tla’amin legislative council and the qRD Board, “will you consider changing the name of Powell River?  The name Powell has painful associations for indigenous people here.  It shook and divided our community.  But the question being articulated by this brave friend was “what of my identity and my heritage? I had no good answer.   His question stuck with me.    

Back to the City, a working group was formed, and meetings and public gatherings followed, and by the summer a year later that group produced a report with 11 recommendations.  It was a serious effort to address the name change question and underlying reasons it was asked.     What it didn’t represent was the question this man had asked, “what of my identity, my heritage?    Now, four years after both those questions were asked, one very public and one not public at all, something has become clear to me. 

The name change question devolved into a simple binary; yes or no, and most of us aligned with one side or the other.   For three years there’s been division in our community.  Some want a poll to democratically decide.   Doing that now would confirm division.  It would belie that we are one community, that we all have our community’s best interests at heart and all love being here.  My friend’s question points to a way through.  What is my identity?  What is my heritage?

The answer to that question is as varied as we are.  We are from many places in the world, with many backgrounds.  We bring diverse, rich heritages and identities.  This community is world renowned for culture, athletics, and natural beauty.   We are rich in these things.   Can we unite in pride and celebration for this wealth we all happily share here?   Yes, we can!   We can remember who we are, remember we are one community.   We can grieve losses together, personal and community-wide.  We can celebrate all the good we have together.   However, we have work to do now to remember that.  There is no way around it. 

We have to start somewhere.  Council and the City have been unable to restart us; this is work for community.  If we acknowledge & celebrate everyone’s identity and heritage, maybe then we can consider our name.  

Let’s meet in the Cran Hall Tues. Oct. 28 at 7 pm to talk and to listen.    

Who are we?  By what name shall we be known? 

2 Replies

Close to three years ago Tla’amin Nation asked the city of Powell River to consider changing our name.   Their reasons seem clear and simple; policies IW Powell was involved with in his time almost a century and a half ago, subsequently had very damaging consequences for Tla’amin and other first nations peoples.  

Since that request, we had community meetings, a working group, and a little action, but much reaction.  There are now those who demand an opinion poll to democratically determine the will of the people.  Does democracy offer best process to serve us in our circumstance?   Currently, it is thought that advocates of a poll by secret ballot generally oppose changing our city’s name.   There are those who advocate for the opposite, simply to change the name, and get on with it already.   But is it that simple? 

Our condition is a pretty divided community, which seems sadly familiar in this day and age.    

The gut reactions are about identity.   Naming defines the named.  Many of us have great pride in this community named after IW Powell.   There is much to be proud of, much to celebrate.   The list is long. We are proud to be from PR and feel deeply connected to this place.    

I doubt anyone in the Powell River community now would willingly allow to be set in motion the kind of suffering Tla’amin people experienced over the past century.     Simply the thought of losing my son during his growing up years here is beyond imagination for me.  This was a wonderful place and community in which to grow up.   But children being displaced has happened many times through history.   My English ancestors put priveleged children into boarding schools.  Then and now, these places teach tools for success in western society.  We now see that success from an indigenous perspective was very different.  

It is apparent that value of indigenous culture was not understood nor appreciated in the 19th century by our ancestors in western society.   It was a time of remarkable opportunity to exploit, across a whole world, and European nations competed at full bore to this end.  Limits to what could be taken were only defined by burgeoning resource-based power; energy and technology fueling its progress, and who had most.   Why wouldn’t people living in simple nature, and location-based indigenous communities want this advantage?  It is easy to understand how this question had an obvious answer 140 years ago.     

Our world is now suffering consequences of that era of development.   Resource depletion as a result of exploitation is now measurable.   Effects of energy use threaten us in diverse ways, occasionally now destroying towns and cities by flood and fire.    Understanding ecology, how we are living parts of interdependent living systems is gaining popularity as we ponder our survivability amid what is now being called poly-crisis.    Questioning is going on.    Is what we assumed to be good, now bad?   How do we even answer a question like that?   Is it possible that indigenous cultures that suffered from western expansion have some answers for western culture’s challenges now?  Apparently, yes.   It is a confusing time.  

Back to our name;

Does Powell define who we are?  IW Powell seems to have been an upstanding contributor to the early development of this province.   He was apparently an intelligent accomplished man, a contributor to early BC.  He very likely was doing his best in his world, the reality of his time.   Much has been written defending him.   Does defending him serve us now, in the realities of our time?   Or, are we actually defending values, heritage, and culture we have defined for as long as we can remember by using his name, never having questioned that?    Instead of questioning him, should we be questioning the policies of his time, and what occurred because of them?    If so, this leads to many more questions revolving around crises we now recognize.     

On one hand IW Powell is defended, perhaps for reasons not primarily emerging from him as a person; on the other, he could be scapegoated by attaching to him and his name blame for the evils suffered by our indigenous neighbours.   Could we just change the name and thereby exonerate ourselves from responsibility for those evils?     Scapegoating is an old human practice.   It allows avoidance of personal responsibility by placing blame on someone else and destroying them.   Then fundamentally, we, personally don’t have to change.   But clearly, change is required now to amend practices we now recognize have been destructive more broadly than just to indigenous peoples.     Perhaps the question of our name goes far deeper than just to the implications for indigenous peoples.       

Getting back to the evil experienced by indigenous peoples here over the past century and a half, does that make us, descendants of the culture of IW Powell’s time, inheritors of the evil that happened?  I think it does, in spite of all the good we associate with our name and with our community.    Here lies a dilemma.  How do we reconcile the good we know of our culture with evil now associated with the name Powell?    Multigenerational experience of my family extending back into my own European heritage suggests to me that deep roots of dysfunction exist that takes work to sort out, in my case years of work.    I don’t expect it ever to end, and I could have achieved little if anything by myself.  We need each other in a journey like this, of discovery, healing, re-creation.    

How do we define who we are?    How would we define and name ourselves if it was our question, if this question hadn’t been first asked by our neighbours?  The question is before us now.   What can we do with it?  Can we possess it and use it for our own good?    That’s the point to me.   What can we do with it without feeling we are being dictated to by someone else? 

Many think the question about a name change is about reconciliation.   Perhaps it is.   To reconcile means to accept, to restore harmony, congruity.       I think reconciliation first needs to happen within ourselves.   Who are we?   

When we start figuring that out maybe then we can take an obvious opportunity here where two communities can sit down together and see what reconciliation means, between us, together.  

Assumptions of what we believed true are breaking down.    Much of what we’ve identified with to define who we are is in question; our very identities are in question.    It is uncomfortable.   But amid all this I see brilliant opportunity to bring forward the gold, the value from all cultures and create something new, something that works for us all.