of totem poles and other Native artifacts.
For me, the recent windstorm raised a lot of possibilities to talk about the displacement of Aboriginal people, and the possibilities for a more democratic ownership of the park. This was a time when the media was reporting a great deal about the types of histories that were unknown (I was asked to comment in the mainstream media several times, as were other academics). And members of the Squamish, Tsleil-Watuth, and Musqueum also seized this as an opportunity to speak of their claims to the land. To me, it seems that “reconstruction” offers a great number of possibilities: to think of what types of injustices our love for nature has allowed—thinking of Stanley Park as “unnatural”—offers more opportunities for social justice.
Neither Vancouver nor Stanley Park is going anywhere any time soon, but neither are Native folks. We have to embark upon a creative reconciliation that honestly engages with our past and current cultural constructions. And part of that package is the fact that there are still five unresolved and competing land claims covering much of what is now Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, plus a host of similar contentions and tensions throughout the region.
Vancouver is toying with new hybrid city and “global city” pretensions, and widely trumpets its multicultural sensibilities, but a democratic culture has to include people, not write them out. Reconciliations have to be a lot more than just putting Native stuff in museums, importing totems, or erecting historical markers—it’s about truly remembering what we stand on and also acknowledging whom we stand beside as an ethical choice.
There is every reason, including incredible prosperity, to think that Vancouver could develop a genuine reconciliation with its Native past that begins to give substance to democratic, inclusive claims. That will come a lot easier if we stop being so creepy about pretending that our parks are “nature” and get down to the business of building a good city.
The next day Kristos and I walk along the harbor to the White Tower, the symbol of Thessaloniki. It’s more dirty grey than white now but still has a stirring quality, sitting kind of regally at one end of the bay. When we get there it is closed, seemingly randomly. There is some kind of construction work going on around the tower, but what is up is not exactly clear. Kristos says they have been fixing it up for years now.
Later that night I said goodbye to Thessaloniki, half-drunk, rushing to the bus station in the middle of the night for a fourteen-hour ride back to Istanbul. It was actually really touching, with a whole carload of lads there to see me off, all crowding around, checking the ticket, hugging, buying food for the trip, making sure the driver kept an eye on me at the border. My hosts offered the obligatory invitations to please come back, but they didn’t really sound like they expected ever to see me there again. They don’t get a ton of visitors, and those that do come only want to look at the ruins. On the other hand, everyone seems to want to come to Vancouver. This is a young city, imagining that we have made something out of nothing, full of a naïveté that, combined with massive infusions of capital and pretty scenery, makes this an attractive place.
The world is constantly in transition, never faster than now, and what exists now is not what was here before. There is no possibility of “going back,” undoing wrongs, or returning Stanley Park to its “natural” state or anything like that. And that’s fine. We need to acknowledge that Vancouver is a city with a colonialist past and in making a commitment to make things right with indigenous inhabitants we can perhaps find a route to a creative reconciliation with the natural world as well. We have disrespected and misrepresented what was here before the city—Native culture and the natural world—and it is wholly possible that we can do both some justice. As Cease puts it:
I am very hopeful. Native or non-Native, we have to live with an open mind. That’s how we have survived colonialism over the past 150 years—we have had to come to terms with new realities.
We want peace but we can’t be expected to give anything more up. Reciprocity works if what you give, you get back. That’s how our people have operated for an eternity. Especially in hard times things come back to you and now it’s Vancouver’s turn to give back.
That seems foundational as the city moves forward: rooting our future in historical honesty. Vancouver needs to ditch its naïve pose that we are ahistorical—that we are making something out of nothing.
Let’s make peace with the fact that this is a city, it’s not “nature,” and build on that. I think places like Thessaloniki and Istanbul, which have unapologetic urban histories measured in centuries, can provide some working ideas about how a real, or even great, city emerges, here and elsewhere.
ISTANBUL, TURKEY PHOTO BY SELENA COUTURE
THE END OF LAWNS AS WE KNOW THEM
Istanbul, Turkey
Even before he won the Nobel Prize, Orhan Pamuk was the best internationally-known writer from Istanbul and famed for his work on the city. He has written a series of novels with a style that is so capable as to occasionally come off as clinical, almost cold in its technical fluidity. It is a tone he doesn’t entirely abandon in his memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, but it is obvious right away that his complex relationship with the city pushes him into a different kind of emotional territory.
Pamuk roots the book in Istanbul’s sense of huzun, a very particular kind of melancholy he perceives as infused and endemic to the city as a whole and all its inhabitants. More than just melancholy, huzun has a spiritual root appearing in the Koran as a mystical grief or emptiness about never being able to be close enough to, or do enough to honor, Allah. Even that description is inadequate:
To understand the central importance of huzun as a cultural concept conveying worldly failure, listlessness and spiritual suffering, it is not enough to grasp the history of the word and the honor we attach to it.…
The huzun of Istanbul is not just the mood evoked by its people and its poetry, it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only a spiritual state but a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negative.18
Pamuk points to a new tinge in modern Istanbul, an end-of-empire wistfulness, a collective realization that the city’s best days are behind it. The opulent palaces and mosques and museums and mansions that dominate the city’s architecture are constant reminders that it was once one of the greatest cities in the world, the center of empire, the home of wealth and power.
Gustave Flaubert, who visited Istanbul 102 years before my birth, was struck by the variety of life in its teeming streets; in one of his letters he predicted that in a century’s time it would be the capital of the world. The reverse came true: After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the world almost forgot that Istanbul existed. The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been before in its two-thousand-year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy. I’ve spent my life either battling with this melancholy or (like all Istanbullus ) making it my own.
I can’t imagine saying much that is less true of Vancouver right now. Every part of Pamuk’s description finds it’s opposite here in Vancouver: This is a young city of ebullient and energetic ascension, with all the attendant naïveté and optimism. This is a city with almost no urban past, and one that seems to believe that every day is going to be sunnier and more profitable than the next.
