Deputy mayor Andrea Reimer was expected to present a motion at Tuesday’s city council meeting (after the Courier’s print deadline) asking staff to determine how Vancouver can move forward on the actions recommended by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report.
In my last column, I mentioned some of the ways we as Vancouverites can help ensure we open our hearts and minds to the truths in the TRC report. There is much responsibility we can take as everyday citizens to mend the wounds inflicted on Canadian society by the brutality of the residential school system, and there is much that a municipal government can do as well.
Reimer’s motion asks that the Vancouver School Board, Vancouver Police Department and Vancouver Public Library Board consider a similar review of the TRC recommendations. It seems off to me that the Vancouver Park Board has been excluded from this list. I think there are strong reasons the board ought to address reconciliation which begin right at the board’s founding.
The first act of Vancouver’s first city council in 1886 was to petition the federal government for the creation of Stanley Park. The striking of a park board to manage the 1,000 acre park came soon after. The board was created on the backs of the First Nations people who lived here for 3,000 years before the city was incorporated. Long a traditional harvesting and fishing area for the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam people, the peninsula’s designation as park land came with prohibitions on food and timber gathering and firmly ended anyone living on the land. The prohibition of food gathering on traditional harvesting sites served to weaken the First Nations people literally, as they lost access to important food resources, and legally, in terms of their land claims on the peninsula.
The TRC report describes the residential school system as a tool of cultural genocide, but residential schools were not the only tool at the government’s disposal. Blocking access to traditional food lands is another way colonial government policy chipped away at the survival of aboriginal culture.
For centuries, settler governments like ours have viewed park space management as an exercise in manicuring nature. This colonial concept of land stewardship — that the way to preserve nature is to keep humanity out of it — seems to me one of the root problems behind environmental destruction. It’s a self-defeating view of our relationship to nature that means, as a dangerous invasive species, we don’t have to try to find non-destructive ways to relate to our environment, and it ultimately harms us. It also runs contrary to aboriginal approaches to relating to nature in which food gathering and harvesting affirm a person’s relationship with nature.
In recent decades, dominant Canadian society and our lagging governments have begun to recognize how this disconnection from our food and nature hurts us all. Through school garden programs and student salad bars we are trying to find ways to teach our children a different relationship to food and nature. Last year, Seattle announced plans to create a food forest, a seemingly novel idea to create a park where food gathering is not only permitted but intended. In the same year, the park board launched a rewilding strategy to explore a different relationship to nature and opening a door to change. The door we must knock upon belongs to our local First Nations.
There is much to reconcile in the Vancouver Park Board origin story, and nearly 130 years of occupation of traditional territory to be addressed. Local First Nations successfully resisted the government’s attempts to break them. Through centuries of oppression and suppression, they have had the strength to endure and remain stewards of this land.
The park board could do much to reconcile with First Nations by asking for leadership in policy decisions related to land stewardship.
With more than 3,000 years of tenure here, local First Nations should not only be considered or consulted in land use decisions, but be asked to take leadership with a formal position at the park board and have true influence.
To continue to make decisions without tapping into indigenous perspective is to turn our backs on reconciliation. The stakes are high, for us and our planet.
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@trishkellyc
