some catastrophic upheavals through the centuries. From the falls of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires to the forced re-locations of Muslims to Turkey in 1923 and the Jews to Auschwitz in WWII, the city has seen a long stream of bloodshed.
Can one shape an account of this city’s past which manages to reconcile the continuities in its shape and fabric with the radical discontinuities—the deportations, evictions, forced resettlements, and genocide—which it has also experienced? Nearly a century ago, a local historian attempted this: at a time when Salonica’s ultimate fate was uncertain, the city struck him as a “museum of idioms, of disparate cultures and religions.” Since then what he called its “hybrid spirit” has been severely battered by two world wars and everything they brought with them. I think it worth trying again.6
It strikes me that that is exactly the project Vancouver needs to undertake: to collectively describe its past in a way that does not laminate or soft-sell genocide, but effects a creative reconciliation with the collection of stories that make up the city’s history, especially the substantially ignored indigenous history of this place. Once we learn to acknowledge and speak about this territory’s roots and memory, maybe we will be able to shape a hybrid urban identity in a place where those “radical discontinuities” have been vastly more prevalent than any continuities.
Maybe the best historian of British Columbia is the geographer Cole Harris, who wrote in The Resettlement of British Columbia:
[This is] an immigrant society [that] has hardly come to terms with where it is in the world, this Pacific corner of North America that just over 200 years ago no outsiders knew anything about, and that since has become a crossroad of colonialism and the modern world. Brought into outside focus so recently and then changed so rapidly, it is not an easy place to know.
In these circumstances, immigrant British Columbians fall back on simple categories of knowing and the exclusions they entail. They assume that British Columbia was wilderness and that they are the bearers of civilization. Living within this imaginative geography, they associate colonialism with other places and other lives—a racially segregated South Africa, Joseph Conrad’s fear-ridden Congo—where they can easily condemn its brutalities, yet are largely oblivious to its effects here. They turn the Fraser Canyon into a gold rush trail, a place where rugged land and sturdy miners met; a gondola gives them scenery and a touch of “gold pan Pete.” The equation is simple and powerful, but leaves out thousands of human years and lives. The Fraser Canyon was not empty when miners arrived; it had as dense an early-contact, non-agricultural population as anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. The ancestors of these people had been there for thousands of years.7
Vancouver’s official and vernacular disinterest in its past has a whole different tone than Salonica’s: Likely a colonialist requisite, there is some kind of quasi-psychological reflex to rewrite the memory of a place and deny that there was ever anything else of real importance here. Vancouver wants to relentlessly look forward, ignoring what was once here even while the ancestors of conquest are still all around us.
What city isn’t built on slaughter? Even though ours is so recent, there has to be a way to speak of fractured continuities, constant change, and an emerging city. In a lot of ways, Vancouver’s signature naïve energy and headlong optimism is attractive. It’s energizing to live in a place that believes that its best days are ahead of it, and I certainly feel and revel in that. But without reconciling with the real history of this place and developing a genuine understanding of what we are building on—and who we are standing beside—that optimism and energy is going to be facile and hollow.
I’m not interested in a sentimental approach to all of this. All culture involves forgetting and suppression, and sometimes (maybe even often) it is an excellent idea. It is a good thing, for instance, that the Confederate flag is not flying from the state house in Georgia. The issue is: who is remembering what, in what ways, and why? If we are going to build a real city, we have to get our ideas about our place—both within history and the natural world—clarified. Right now, the dominant narratives about both are pretty weird.
These dislocations were particularly naked in conversations that took place after a powerful windstorm ripped through the city and tore the shit out of Stanley Park in December 2006. There was massive damage to the park: the wind virtually clear-cutting huge swaths, knocking down thousands of trees, caving in long sections of the seawall, and setting off landslides.
The damage really was remarkable and humbling, but the outrage was equally colossal. Vancouver’s genteel public was horrified that the “crown jewel of the city,” our “heart and soul” could be so tarnished. A keen lament for the park echoed throughout the media, bathed in dismay that “Mother Nature” could be so capricious and unfair. Massive funds were immediately established; schools groups and volunteers scrambled over themselves to help clean up. It was estimated that $9 million was needed for “first-level restoration,” and solemn promises were made to restore the park to its “original” state.
But of course neither the Vancouver nor the touristic public has any interest at all in seeing the park in its “original” state, and much less interest in its state of indigenous habitation. What is being “restored” is a simulacrum of a natural state, a clean and tidy version of “nature” that doesn’t include fallen-down trees, collapsed roadways, reduced access, messy windstorms, or any lack of bathrooms or cappuccino stands.
Cleanup will take at least a year, according to head grounds-keeper Dennis Dooley, who is leading the crew clearing the roads and trails through the park. The trails that crisscross the park are impassable.
About 20 percent of the park’s trees were wiped out, Dooley said, damage that will take “generations” to heal.
“For the first couple of days the staff were devastated; a lot of them were just walking around with tears in their eyes,” he said.8
I’m sure that’s all true, and the deep feelings people have for the trees and the park in general are kind of touching, but there’s something profoundly obnoxious about claiming the park will take “generations to heal.” The suggestion that anyone has any interest in the park returning to anything like its “natural state” (whatever that might be) is absurd: Stanley Park is as much a construction as the concrete and glass buildings downtown.
In the fall of 2008, the Vancouver Museum opened a terrific exhibit exploring our paradoxical notions of the park called The Unnatural History of Stanley Park. I was impressed (in no small part because its sentiments echoed much of my previous writing) and talked to its curator, Joan Seidl.
When I arrived at the Vancouver Museum in 1992, there was a proposal on the table to do an exhibit called Stanley Park: A Love Affair. I did not want to do that exhibit. Of course we love Stanley Park; who would dispute that? But I am more interested in exploring the degree to which the park has been shaped by people. We’ve had our hands all over that park. We expound lovely rhetoric about the park as primeval and ancient, but meanwhile we are tap-tapping away, fixing nature—pruning a tree here, planting others there. I think that nature is in the cultural realm—I don’t know how we can have a relationship with all that stuff out there that isn’t cultural—even the word “nature” is cultural. I would like people to think about the meaning of nature in general, but especially what it means for an urban park like Stanley Park in a city like Vancouver.
We need to acknowledge that what we are managing is a largely human construction. Language like “the restoration of Stanley Park” seems to purposefully obscure the long history of human residence and park-making on the peninsula. Stanley Park would not necessarily be improved by “cleaning it up” and certainly not by tidying nature’s mess, but also not by eliminating
