Look around. Look beneath your feet. You're standing on stolen land. Hard truth.
If you don't like the system or want things to be different than they are, there are groups working on it. Join them and add your energy and your voice. You will find community, hope and new adventures. 100 Women | 100 Oceans has the potential to be such a group.
In that spirit, I am an uninvited settler on traditional, ancestral and unceded aboriginal territory - post-contact name: Nelson, BC. This area, the lands, traditional ecological knowledge, languages, intellectual property, living cultures embedded in this place (though often erased or obfuscated) and belonging to its original inhabitants - then and now - are irreplaceable.
The fact that "..., pithouse depressions [exist] in the Rosemont area of Nelson [near where I live] indicate that year-round settlements of Sinixt people lived there once" (sinixt.com). The Sinixt of course are still here. This then makes my presence something I had not intended: an occupation. Now, I know this and many more historical facts and for me, there can be no turning back.
These then are the traditional lands of First Nations: the Sinixt (Lakes), as well as the Ktunaxa, Syilx (Okanagan), and the Secwepemc (Shuswap). As such, in acknowledgement of the debt and imbalance resulting from settler colonial practices including residential schools and systematic policies leading to genocide and a legacy of intergenerational trauma, I take my share of responsibility for redress.
Concrete ways to implement the 94 Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (trc-calls-to-action.pdf) is a powerful begining. This will be applied wherever possible personally and with regard to this social arts project too. For that reason, at the very least, a portion of the proceeds of this project must be shared in a good way with the First Nation (s) who call this place home.
I acknowledge then, my teachers, the importance of the indigenous paradigm, the ancestors (indigenous to this place as well as my own from overseas).
I acknowledge the present generation - their healing, their brilliance and the spirit of revitalization for which there is such powerful momentum.
I thank the stewards for the care of this place, the land, the air, the waters and all the beings who live here.
Because of these hard truths, I can feel more deeply the significance of the consideration and kindness I have experienced here from people who have ancestral ties to this storyscape.
