Dear, Reader, From this point on, you will notice that two narrative voices emerge. One voice will share linear and structural pathways in my experience of learning how to navigate growing towards allyship; the second voice arises from a deeper place, a place where symbol, metaphor and archetype guide the way, into the inner landscape where transformation takes place. In my belief systems, we need both ways to wake up and invest in a collective future of care in ComeUNITY.
This writing series was meant to take just a few months to churn out. That’s how a typical grant cycle works: apply by the deadline, do the work by a deadline, report back by a deadline. DEAD-line?! It’s a lot of pressure. The work I did turned into multiple years.
Through a covid-era grant from BC Arts Council, two Indigenous mentors formally entered my life, to generously assist the process of understanding Indigenous relations as an individual, but also from my position as an arts organizer. In addition to conversations and time on the land with them, my focus of study included works by Indigenous scholars and artists. I immersed myself in the voices that have become a counter-narrative to what I grew up understanding. Writing and revising this series of explorations needed all that input, and crucially, significant lived experiences in my community to ground and expand the concepts. Not something to be rushed through.
My mentors both took me to the Water. Helen Sandy of T’exelc (Williams Lake First Nation), especially, traveled with me to two important river sites in our region, Nagwentled (Farwell Canyon, pictured below left, where Helen and I spent the day taking photographs) and Setétkwe (Fraser River) at Xats’ull. I have always been drawn to rivers, growing up next to an enormous channel of the St. Lawrence in Montreal, knowns as Kaniatarowanenneh, or the "big waterway” to the Kanien’kehá:ka. I am also named after a river, Venta Upe, that runs in Lithuania and Latvia, spilling into the Baltic Sea. Rivers serve as deeply symbolic and physically important channels of information, food, transport and healing.
One of Water’s teachings involves cycles. Helen and I watch the water rush to the great ocean, only to return as precipitation to mountain tops and down again, round and round, for time immemorial. Processes in our own lives follow cyclical pathways, too, and on this particular journey learning about Truth and understanding Reconciliation, I return often to the River for guidance and revisit themes again and again to make sure I am offering something of value here.
I really found my voice to write about Reconciliation after significant political and racialized incidents affected the community of Williams Lake. The courage to write on a subject that deeply affects us in this part of Secwepemcúl’ecw became stronger than the fear of being labeled an imposter or ignorant settler. Because let’s be honest. White people have caused so much harm and taken up so much collective ‘space’. What follows is a quote from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard’s Rehearsals For Living, a book of incredible letters they wrote to each other linking Indigenous and Black resistance in solidarity. It summarizes a major ‘fear’ many of us have in regards to putting this kind of writing or care-in-action out to the world. On page 256, Leanne writes to Robyn, “In each new crisis, white people will be surprised, as if they just heard of MMIWG (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls) in 2019 and police violence ending Black life in summer 2020. The liberal ones will be enraged, as if their lives are built upon Black and Indigenous suffering… They will take our organizing and our work and make it their own, watering it down, washing it in white, so that our radical imaginings become window dressings on the status quo of this world… The system will remain intact and at the end of every event they will ask us where we see hope.”
Acute self-awareness tells me that the description above could apply to this whole writing process in which I am reflecting out to the reader the multiple Indigenous sources I have met with, studied and listened to. I have to know that this very thing is problematic, AND discover a means to communicate the urgent need for change that is required because we have let capitalist and colonial systems degrade our ecosystems and communities to the extent we are seeing. This urge to act and counter-act destructive systems must also be examined through an anti-racist lens, so that I do not create harm through a white-saviour menatlity and complex. Indigenous, Black and Other People of the Global Majority have resisted, continue to resist, and are in no need of me; AND, as an individual who strives for human rights, for justice and sustainability, I must raise my voice, consistently show up, and act.
I’ve tried to ground this is the ways I’ve written to you thus far: acknowledgment, consent, self-study, ongoing learning and unlearning. I face the fear, I write, and understand that there are consequences when I make mistakes. Courage came after I took the time to build relationships with Indigenous community members, including my mentors. It took actuating theory into practice. Remember, I am a fellow learner in this work. I have gained some direct experience in this area, then made a commitment to share of my experiences engaging with this kind of action with you, the reader. It’s complicated, and it’s necessary.
In the years leading up to this project, a question kept speaking, steeping, asking for attention. It asked, what is truly being asked of me if I am going to live in right relationship as a settler in Secwepemcúl’ecw?
The question infers an acknowledgment that we are not the original inhabitants, and the ways in which the settlement here unfolded were harmful to the First Nations. With this is mind (and body and heart), how, exactly, do we go about finding answers to transform the relationship to this territory and its stewards?
Are We Listening?
Embodied learning and being on the land and with the river brings my mentor’s teachings alive. The practice here is to listen: really actively surrender, drop in, and let my biases go. The Secwepemc have fished for salmon here since time immemorial.
I sit with an elder in late summer, on the rocks above the rushing Fraser River - Setétkwe, of incredible importance to the Secwepemc, which translates to ‘The People’. The elder shares her love of the water with me, séwllkwe, a word which sounds like quenching thirst, the life giving force taking care of us, and who brings salmon home. This elder is a guide taking me to physical and spiritual teachings of her Secwepemc territory and beliefs, and today we sit at Xats’ull, a little way north of Williams Lake.
The river has just opened for the fishing season, soon dipnetters will come to these rocks, and fill up the ancient fish-pits with their salmon sustenance. The elder isn’t that nimble anymore but insists on making her way to the edge of these stunning stepped rocks leading to the powerful water, to see the fish-pits, to witness the rushing waves and tell stories about the fishing, and beings that live here, like Sasquatch. I listen, as best as I can. I listen, to her voice, to the water, to the wind, and it creates an opening.
I am let into a space where worldviews are layered upon physical reality, like subtle structures in a space that fill the air and water with meaning. We all live within invisible structures called culture; we all hold beliefs which are unseen ideas that guide our actions. Sometimes it looks and sounds like the theory of Newtonian gravity; other times it is where spiritual beings that live within salmon, eagle and the trees reach out and inform the way you live. Like the mythic beings of my own ancient Lithuanian ancestry, the trees, rivers, and animals, they speak a simple truth: we are human beings in concert with Life as nature, and so many of us have forgotten to care for life giving forces. We have forgotten how to care for each other.
In my culture, the goddess of the earth, Žemyna, was always given thanks, sometimes in the form of drinks spilled upon her skin, or the last harvest’s bread buried in her belly so that more abundance would follow. Our ancient rites resemble the way the Salmon are honoured on the West Coast, by giving parts of their bodies back to the rivers or seas… the most simple of reciprocal relating.
A culture of reciprocity
Our connection to all that is needs to be nurtured and sustained
Moving from the shared space and interactions with Helen or Meeka towards crafting actions that make my ComeUNITY as positive as possible led to tangible steps like literature review, research, and showing up at events like Sacred Fires, city council meetings and Powwows. Have you been thinking about taking a step towards action that places the value on care and compassion as it relates to Indigenous rights and relationships? I hope you will take some time to share them with me, so I can learn from you.
Learn about one of the catalysts for local activism I took part in here in Williams Lake.
Xats’ull Heritage Village welcomes visitors, learn about it here.