was granted the commission in May 2005. It took over two and a half years to complete these three “gateway” sculptures, and I have to say that this project was the most challenging of all projects I’ve done and encountered as a Coast Salish artist over the last three decades. I wanted to ensure that the end result would make my people proud. It’s something that I hope will always be recognized and appreciated for what it is: Coast Salish art. When my artwork is located in public spaces, it is my hope that the artwork will both reaffirm the Salish “footprint” upon the land, and most importantly, that it will speak to the viewer in a universal language.
These art pieces are a gift to our grandchildren, from my elder’s teachings and their ancestors that taught them. I am only the messenger and I did my best. I only hope that I did justice to the legacy of my ancestors. I wanted to honor them, and to create artwork which represented both traditional and contemporary Coast Salish art, reflecting our past and the living culture of our people.
Telling more honest stories about Stanley Park’s past also suggests something about what it might look like in the future. To get some ideas I went and talked to Cease Whyss who is a local artist, herbalist, and healer.
There was a village at Whai Whai which is now Lumberman’s Arch. That whole flatland area of the park was where people lived and people would take canoes back and forth from the village in North Van where I’m from, Eslahan, across from Crab Park. Now my mother lives at Homalchasin which is right across from Stanley Park. It’s really easy to see how easily our ancestors would travel back forth.
Many of my relatives lived at Coal Harbour and at Whai Whai and I feel that sense when I go to Stanley Park: I feel like I have had a centuries-old dialogue with the landscape there. My earliest memories as a child are of going to the park at Whai Whai and because my aunts and uncles knew it used to be a village site we’d have huge picnics there, practically every week, hanging out with all my cousins.
I think the visibility of our people there is really important. Every time I meet down there with young people or groups who want to learn about the plants, I always get out my drum and sing a song from a relative who lived there. No matter what other people are doing, I am going to stand there and drum. That’s my inherent right and they can deal with it. I’ve never had a complaint, but people really do stop. It’s a dialogue, an intervention in a public space, a tool. I have a great sense of pride in my ongoing dialogue with that space: it’s not a park to me, its part of my traditional territory
There’s Haida art all over the city, all kinds of Northwest Coast art, but very little Coast Salish art. Most people couldn’t tell you what Coast Salish art looks like, which is part of why we’ve done projects raising the visibility of Coast Salish people. We erected three stumps down near Science World—three stumps that represent the three amalgamated tribes: Musqueum, T’seilwatuth, and Squamish and each figure is bearing salmon, representing the people coming together.
We have to mark things. But we have to do a lot more than put a sign up and mark a spot. That’s a start. If we can put our language up, then I’m all about the signs. But I’m not willing to stop there. Signs point you in a direction. We all know that signs are a message telling us something. But the last thing you want to do is follow that sign and find nothing. It has to point to something real, to something happening.
I’d like to see a longhouse at Whai Whai. I’d love to see an interpretive dialogue going on there all the time. We’re tired of misconceptions of what we do. Our people don’t make totem poles—we make welcome figures. We’re starting to see a little bit of visibility, with Susan Point doing some work in the park, and that’s a great, positive step, but we need more. It’s hardly like we’re not willing to share—we have shared so much already.
There’s no reason why we can’t have space in the park and a presence there all the time. I’d like to see an actual reconstructed village in the park at the old site. I’d like us to set up a longhouse and an actual village that we used. I’m not talking about a tourist attraction, but something we actually use. And when the longhouse isn’t in use, people can come and visit and learn about our culture. It could enhance both our presence and our pride as protectors of the longhouse and the area. The historical markers tell people that we used to be there, but not why we were forced out, why we were made homeless, how we were all made homeless in our own land.
We need to restore Stanley Park, but not to what it was like before this windstorm—colonialism was the real windstorm, and really it hasn’t stopped blowing. We are all going to be sharing that park; it’s a space that everybody loves no matter how long your families have been here. We’re willing to steward that place back to what it once was, what it was meant to be. It has always been a vision of ours.
Like history, constructions of nature are always cultural questions, and all too often Natives just get folded into “nature”: one more piece of the landscape to be moved around and reconstructed as “we” see fit. We want authentic experiences, but only in very certain, specific, and secure ways that keep our engagement with the natural world very controlled and limited. We then develop a relationship with that rendition, sometimes even a deep one, and recast it as tear-jerking, quasi-ecological virtue, or deep aesthetic appreciation of totems or trees.
For Vancouver—or any city—to recast itself ecologically, it has to have an honest narrative about its place. That can’t happen until we stop with the faux-spiritual renditions of nature and recognize that we have changed the landscape permanently. We have constructed this place and the responsibility is ours to make it right.
When Vancouverites speak effusively and very publicly about “healing the park,” when there are multi-million-dollar fundraising campaigns plastered across the region promising to return the park to its “full glory,” when a storm of journalists report on the “devastation” in the park, they are very explicitly not interested in talking about indigenous folks, and not much nature, either. What they really want is the park in an edifying, useful, and accessible state, a place to “improve” people in.
We want “nature” but not all messy and troublesome. We trim the treetops, we build roads and seawalls and pathways and restaurants—but want the “splendor” of “unspoiled” nature. We want rose gardens and swans and grand lawns but not too much native flora and fauna. No cougars and not too many fallen cedars.
We want the tourist-friendly multiculturalism of imported totem poles and decorative plaques, but definitely no Natives living there, and even more definitely no land claims.
The park is a manufactured space, with nothing particularly natural about it anymore. And that’s just fine, but people should be honest about the quasi-spiritual status they ascribe to it: they are deifying scenery at the expense of people who had an everyday living relationship with that place. As University of British Columbia sociology professor Renisa Mawani, who has written some great stuff about the park, put it:
Our understandings of the city and of Stanley Park are inextricably linked to one another. I think what is particularly interesting is how these identities have changed over time. The impetus for creating the park was to create an urban green space where citizens of the newly incorporated city could enjoy recreational activities while creating a distinct identity for what was to become a bustling port city. This, of course, required the removal of the Coast Salish. The imagining of Vancouver as a British Settler city was certainly accomplished through the forced removal of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Watuth. But these aspirations were also carried out through processes of emplacement—through the placement of monuments, buildings, recreational sites (cricket pitch), and gardens (rose garden, etc). In the 1920s, we see a changing vision of Vancouver, one which is trying to capitalize on aboriginality
