Digging up activism on Quadra's shores

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      I sit on the edge of the world. It's my favourite spot, the rock of Quadra Island slipping into the Pacific Ocean. I look across at the familiar peaks of B.C.'s Coast Mountains. I've looked across at them since I was eight. Today I'm 25. This weekend the family cabin is full of friends–Sue, Mandeep, Dennis, Kym, Lorne, Carla, and D. Wong. On the beach this morning at low tide, I watched my friends turn into children as we collected oysters and dug for clams. I shared their reactions and felt the wonder of gathering this food from the land. It is so amazing when you think about it–amazing that we can collect food right from the mud on the beach. But besides the fact that this beach feeds us every time we come up here and that it holds an incredible wealth of biodiversity, I had never really thought too much else about this stretch of sand and shells. Last year I was told a story that profoundly shifted the way that I look at this land and how I see myself on it.

      In my ethnoecology class a guest speaker from the Qualicum First Nation, Chief Kim Recalma-Clutesi, told us the story of the clam gardens. Several years ago John Harper, a geomorphologist surveying for the government, flew over the beaches of Vancouver Island at a zero-level tide and noticed strange semicircles of bowling ball–sized rocks on the beaches. He couldn't tell whether they were natural or human-made. During the survey he saw hundreds of them up and down the coast of the Island. It took him nine years of searching for their cause to finally get in touch with Kwakxistala, Clan Chief Adam Dick, a Kwak'waka'wakw elder who knew exactly what they were: luxiways. The luxiways are the long-forgotten clam gardens, rock terraces that the Kwak'waka'wakw people built for optimum clam growth. After our government's efforts to denounce, assimilate, and forget the traditions of this country's original peoples, no one spoke of them. The beaches were left unused, but the rocks remained. Archaeological digs show that clams became a main food in the Broughton Archipelago about 2,000 years ago, suggesting that's when the technology for the clam plateaux began to expand on this coast.

      Having grown up in a household that was somewhat pessimistic about environmental issues, I had always thought that human presence automatically meant the extinction of natural resources. But this story of clam gardens painted a different picture. Not only did humans on the West Coast practise sustainable harvesting, but they actually practised sustainable aquaculture that supported high population densities around the north end of Vancouver Island. I had lived on the coast my whole life and never knew about these methods and traditions. For me, this discovery was incredible. I sat there in class, staring at photographs of the rocky beaches, totally absorbed, when suddenly it dawned on me that the beach that has sustained my family with clams for 17 years on Quadra Island was one of these clam gardens, a luxiway.

      Today as my friends dug clams I looked at the rock formation and couldn't believe I'd never seen it before. There is an obvious ledge of bowling ball–sized rocks that guards the sandbar stretching across the beach. It is evidence of the human use of this land for 2,000 years, and the fact that it still provides us with an abundance of clams tells a story of care, calculation, and sustainability. And suddenly, my identity in this scene has shifted: I am no longer just an individual who digs clams on the beach. Suddenly, by knowing that 2,000 years of hands and bellies and minds used and maintained this beach, I am part of a continuum–I now have the responsibility to pass it on to 2,000 more years of clam eaters.

      In the city, our connection to land, our sense of responsibility to our land and our community, and our sense of being part of a continuum in history, are invisible. We float as individuals living individual moments in history and time. We don't think about the fact that we're the ancestors of future generations. Mom dropped a profound statement on me the other day: "More and more I have this sense of being an ancestor”¦" I am an ancestor, too. Over food in downtown Toronto, poet and hip-hop artist K'Naan told me about ab tiris, a Somali term for the recitation of the names of one's father, father's father, and so on. He says he can recite his forefathers' names back 2,000 years. I can recite back two fathers. I try to fathom how his awareness of his ancestry affects his sense of who he is, what his role is in the continuum of his own history and the history of his people, and what he's here to do. Perhaps the closest understanding I can relate is my awareness, standing on the beach today, of being one in a long line of clam diggers using this beach for food.

      As I show one of my friends how to slice the muscle joining the shells of an oyster we collected, she asks, "Aren't we hurting them?" We're killing these animals to eat them. I give thanks as we do it. My mind automatically flashes back to my auntie Diane showing me how to clean and work on fish in Skidegate one summer when one of Chief Dempsey Collinson's boats full of salmon came in. She taught me that you have to give thanks as you cut the fish and that you can't think negative or disrespectful thoughts. It's almost ceremonial. That day I butchered many spring salmon and learned how to clean fish and give thanks. When we catch and kill our own food, or grow it, we clean it differently, eat it differently, digest it differently. I wonder how it nourishes our bodies differently.

      Here on Quadra everyone in our little posse is involved in the food-collecting and -preparing process this whole weekend, and I notice how quickly ceremony develops–candles are lit, wine is poured, and finally we all sit down together; toasts happen and suddenly taking care and time and enjoyment in celebrating these precious moments is the most important, human thing we could possibly be doing.

      This is so enjoyable! I wonder, Why don't we always sit together, eat together, give thanks together? This kind of event is not something only the wealthy, or the humble, can partake in. It is something innately human and natural to all of us.

      Since I was a little kid I've believed that I make a difference in the world, and that difference, I decided, had better be positive. I started by forming an environmental club with my friends, and we ended up speaking to world leaders at the UN, asking them to remember their children when they made their decisions about environment and development.

      Since then I've been to many more conferences, and my experiences have altered what I think can "change the world". I think about some of the ways I've pushed for change–marching in protest against the oppression of the IMF or in solidarity with the landless people's movement in Johannesburg, speaking my mind to the Hornby Island Community Centre and the Nike Corporation about the rights of youth and the inseparability of social and ecological perspectives, biking across Canada to remind people they shouldn't tolerate air pollution. I have encouraged young people–all people–to speak out about what they care about and what they know is wrong. And I often wonder, What is "radical"? Is it speaking to world politicians? Is it protesting the WTO or the FTAA? Is it starting a business with a triple bottom line of social, environmental, and corporate responsibility? Is it paying attention to the effects of our small actions? It is all of these things.

      But, beyond using my voice in the world, I also feel radical right here: sitting down to food I collected from the land and prepared with friends, in a world that most of the time pushes me to do the opposite. I look at my friends around me and see people who are often reminded of the sadness of the world's shrinking diversity, people who resent that each of us is complicit, though we never agreed to making an inherent contribution to ecological or social destruction. I see in us all people who crave emancipation from apathy, for something tangible to free us from cynicism, something to counter the guilt and sadness that come with being aware”¦

      So here we are at the table. In a media cacophony of desperate global statistics on ecological and cultural destruction, one of our most important, real tasks is to appreciate what we have, to never take it for granted, and to seek out the connections that ground us to the beautiful responsibilities that come with being human. We can sink roots down into the land; we can make a commitment to what belonging somewhere means. We can figure out what we believe in, and then we can stand up and speak out about those beliefs. We can recognize and reach towards the First Peoples who are still here, because our Canadian history and destiny are inextricably linked with theirs. Identifying our connections to each other, to the land, to our past, to our own selves and identity in this world, is one of the most important conversations we can have right now, as we ancestors decide what we want life to be about for the next 2,000 years.

      Our own ancestors come from around the planet, but tonight on Quadra Island we sit down to a clam feast on Kwak'waka'wakw territory. We give thanks for the oysters and the ancestors whose foresight feeds our bellies, and we will do our best to honour our role in the great continuum.

      From Notes From Canada's Young Activists: A Generation Stands Up for Change. © 2007, edited by Severn Cullis- ­ ­Suzuki, Kris Frederickson, Ahmed Kayssi, Cynthia Mackenzie. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Greystone Books, a division of Douglas & McIntyre.

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