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 19^th 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.