Intertidal Polyphonies
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Portside Park Video 7
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Video on Portside Park of small waves hitting the rocky sand shore on the left side. Trees and Canada Place are visible in the background, towards which a helicopter flies and lands. Duration: 0:40
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Portside Park Video 8
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Video of harbour cranes and a shipping area across the water in Portside Park. Duration: 0:48
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Promontory 3
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A blue boat on the river. Trees and buildings in the background.
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Promontory 4
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River and skyscrapers around the Promontory and Fullerton Bay Hotel.
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Rita Wong Interview 1
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Rita Wong discusses her activist work as a water guardian and how her beliefs in reciprocity and interconnections between humans and land resources inform her activism. She speaks about the motivations behind her involvement with water preservation., Rita Wong: My name is Rita Wong, and on a good day I’m a water guardian.
0:05
Joanne Leow: I think one of the first things is I want to ask about undercurrent, to talk about the kind of work that you’re doing, not just with the text but then in the world at large. When you started writing undercurrent and that larger project, thinking about downstream, thinking about water, what was that first moment—like maybe that moment of inspiration, or maybe it was an accumulation of things—like what started out this project?
0:28
Rita Wong: Well, there’s many entry points, but one key one for me would be that back in 2007, Dorothy Christian and Denise Nadeau organized a gathering called Protect our Sacred Waters, and the vision of that gathering was to bring people together from all four directions, and people of different cultures and faith groups and whatnot together for the sake of water. And at that time I was actually living south of the border in Florida and I wasn’t able to go to that gathering, but I forwarded it to my friends, particularly in the Chinese and Asian community, and they didn’t show up (laughs). So, it was very sad. And so I felt this responsibility to take up that call in a longer, more in-depth way, and that’s sort of the genesis of the work around water, I would say.
1:24
Joanne Leow: Yeah. So really, it was born of an idea of a kind of…
Rita Wong: It was a call and response.
Joanne Leow: Yeah, call and response. Kind of, also—what really strikes me about your work in the book, but also your work in the world, is that you’re really thinking of practical ways in which you can think of solidarity. And that seems to be a word—I mean, just talk a little bit more of what you think that means in relation to the water and the land, like what is that word, solidarity, what does it come to mean?
1:50
Rita Wong: Oddly enough, because water is not a very solid thing in some ways, but I think for me it’s based on the sense of interdependency and interrelatedness. There’s a famous saying or—I think it’s Lilla Watson, Aboriginal activist, who said, you know, “if you’ve come here to help me or to save me, then you’re wasting your time, but if you’ve come here to work with me because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let’s work together.” So, I think for me, that’s what solidarity is, right? It’s that understanding that my wellbeing depends on your wellbeing, and that we all rely on the health of the water and the land. Whether we understand that or not is another matter, but I do believe that that’s a basis of the need to work together.
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Rita Wong Interview 2
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Rita Wong explains that she hopes to foster empathy and generate cultural change through her poetry., Joanne Leow: When you’re writing the poems, or you’ve been doing a project that has many channels for public outreach…there are the poems, but there’s a book as well for younger people, what are you trying to—what do you hope to achieve with the writing itself, with the text?
0:13
Rita Wong: I think a bunch of different things. One is, I’ve always been a writer and a reader for as long as I can recall, and I think I’ve gained a lot from reading, and so if I can share something and give back—I see my writing as a process of reciprocity, generally. And then, with regards to the water project per se, this sounds kind of audacious, but what I’m really hoping for is a cultural transformation. [Laughs]
Joanne Leow: No, that’s great.
Rita Wong: I would like to see a shift in our values and a shift in our priorities that puts land—our relationship with the land and the water front and center, instead of being always this resource that we use or that we take for granted or that we exploit. I think there’s a lot of learning that we can do from listening to Indigenous perspectives around relationship to land and water, and the importance of reciprocity. So, I think that, sort of, the small goal, or the small tactics, lead, hopefully, to a larger transformation. I don’t know that I’ll get to live to see that, but that’s certainly what I would hope for.
1:28
Joanne Leow: Maybe one more question about undercurrent itself before I want to turn to talk about the very important work that you’re doing, especially with the Site C Dam. When I was reading the book in particular, there were all these—what was really conscious of was the fact that you were in that book, front and center in some ways, in the sense that your voice was really clear. There are some books of poetry that are about the environment that seem very detached from it, they seem kind of more far away, but here, I’m always conscious of my body, your body, the reader’s body, in that space with that water…the many meanings of the word “undercurrent,” even. So, if you would just like to maybe talk a little bit more about that, like where do you see bodies, really, in relation to the kind of landscapes, the kind of ecologies that you’re writing about?
2:15
Rita Wong: I think on a very practical level, when you live in a watershed, you become part of that watershed. And I don’t just mean that metaphorically, I mean that literally. So, if you were drinking the water from the Bow River in Calgary, you’re part of that watershed whether you understand that or not. Yes, we’ve treated the water so that we don’t get sick or whatever, but that doesn’t mean that the water isn’t still from the land and still of the land. And so, just to remember that we’re part of that watershed as opposed to separate from it, I think is part of how I think about bodies. And so, the body, as it’s sort of formulated under late capitalism, is this individual consumer, consumerist unit, right, that’s somehow separate from everything around it, but really, it’s not. And if you follow the trail of water into your body and out of your body, and throughout the ecosphere and the water cycle, the hydrological cycle, you would see that your existence very much depends on and is part of these larger cycles or patterns or rhythms. And so, I think there’s something that you can do as individuals to just pay attention to that and to be aware of that. So, I think, for example, contemplative practices, meditative practices, being aware of the body, those are important places to start in terms of decolonizing the body, in terms of asserting agency over your own body. And I think there’s something important about autonomy of the self that isn’t just about you…your own power, like when I think about autonomy, I don’t think about somebody like Donald Trump or whatever, I think about how each of us is born with gifts or passions, and if we’re lucky in our life we get to fulfill those, whatever it is that we’re born with and whatever it is that we might want for own journey. And when we’re able to fulfill that for ourselves, my hope, and what I’ve seen at times, is that you’re more able to serve other people as well, like the larger collective good. So, I see those things as interconnected and interdependent, not as mutually exclusive.
4:44
Joanne Leow: It’s really interesting because, I mean, you were talking about those capitalist discourses of body in space, in ecology, and so often the narrative has been one of purity and contamination, really, it’s just like, “I need to keep my own separate—like my being separate. I need to eat particular things or drink particular things or behave in particular ways in order to keep myself pure,” and what you’re saying—well firstly, that’s impossible, right.
5:08
Rita Wong: Yeah. We’re all contaminated, (laughing) increasingly so, whether we like it or not. And I don’t see the contamination as only a negative thing, I see it also in terms of, as I said, interdependency.
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Rita Wong Interview 3
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Rita Wong talks about the relationships between bodies and land and her uncertainty regarding the term 'activist.' She also discusses the importance of naming as a way of generating empathy and education, specifically as this relates to the Site C Dam / the Peace River Dam., Joanne Leow: What is that relation between the artistic and aesthetic work that you do, and the activist work that you do, and is there a clear line, or maybe, like you said, these things are kind of interdependent on each other, and one informs the other?
0:12
Rita Wong: I don’t know that the lines are that clear for me, but I, I wanted to backtrack a little bit to something that the poet and scientist Sandra Steingraber wrote in one of her books, which was about how the sort of pollution that happens manifests itself not just in our bodies, as cancers or as illnesses, but it also manifests outside of our bodies in pollution. And so, again, that connection between the inside and the outside is a lot more urgent than people sometimes realize or think about. And so, when I think about activism, being out there, and say the creative work, which people tend to think as being in here somewhere, right, like it’s—I’m somebody who needs a lot of private time and quiet time and all of that, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a social person, or not in the world in various ways. And, I don’t know, I see them flowing in and out of each other, I don’t always draw a clear line between them, but I would say that the—I don’t, you know, one of my mentors, Claire Harris, wonderful poet, lived in Calgary for most of her life, she edited my first book of poetry, monkeypuzzle, and her advice to me was “don’t let them call you an activist, because as soon as you do that, somehow you’re off in the margins, you’re being out there, and really what you’re doing is what anybody should be doing.” So, I always kind of hear her warning in the back of my head, and I’m a little bit cautious of people being activist figures. That said, I think you do what you need to do, and in this kind of world that we live in, that often gets framed as activism, and at the end of the day I don’t really care if it is or isn’t, my question is what needs to get done and how do we get it done together.
2:01
Joanne Leow: And specifically your work fighting against the Site C Dam…
2:07
Rita Wong: But also for the Peace River.
Joanne Leow: For the Peace River, true, so not anti, but for.
2:10
Rita Wong: The other thing that’s interesting, rhetorically, is the way the framing of that dam has happened, the naming of it depersonalizes it, dehumanizes it, abstracts it, you know, all of that, but if you actually go up and spend time on the Peace River you see how incredibly beautiful it is. You taste the food that’s grown on the riverbanks, like, it is an incredible and a very precious place, it is, it’s truly a sacred place. It’s named after a peace treaty between the Queen and the Danezaa peoples, and it’s the site of many sacred burial sites, cultural sites, gathering sites, medicines, hunting, gathering, migration for moose and elk, and there’s just a lot that happens in that space that gets obliterated when you just sort of reduce it to “Site C” or something. So, so I think, part of the challenge—because this is a river that’s had two previous dams built on it, and most of us in BC, if we’re using electricity we’re relying on the electricity from the previous dams, and so we owe this debt of reciprocity to ensure that there aren’t further sacrifice zones on the Peace River. There was way too much devastation that happened, people who were traumatized, people who were displaced, homes violently destroyed through the previous dams. It’s got to be very clear that the dams are very destructive. They’re not clean, and there’s a huge debt that I and every other person who uses electricity in this province owes to that valley. That dam has been stopped twice before historically, and this is the third time, they’re trying to ram it down the Indigenous peoples’ throats. And it is basically cultural genocide, it is environmental racism, and it is just abominable that this could happen in this day and age when we’re supposedly striving for reconciliation.
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Rita Wong Interview 4
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Rita Wong discusses the disconnect between electricity consumption and generation in BC, specifically how Vancouver and other Southern populations receive electricity at the expense of Northern Indigenous communities.She lambastes the provincial government's lack of educating non-indigenous populations about the environmental consequences of prior dams and the proposed Site C / Peace River Dam. However, Wong does acknowledge the city of Vancouver's efforts to generate electricity and other resources locally., Joanne Leow: What is that relation between the artistic and aesthetic work that you do, and the activist work that you do, and is there a clear line, or maybe, like you said, these things are kind of interdependent on each other, and one informs the other?
0:12
Rita Wong: I don’t know that the lines are that clear for me, but I, I wanted to backtrack a little bit to something that the poet and scientist Sandra Steingraber wrote in one of her books, which was about how the sort of pollution that happens manifests itself not just in our bodies, as cancers or as illnesses, but it also manifests outside of our bodies in pollution. And so, again, that connection between the inside and the outside is a lot more urgent than people sometimes realize or think about. And so, when I think about activism, being out there, and say the creative work, which people tend to think as being in here somewhere, right, like it’s—I’m somebody who needs a lot of private time and quiet time and all of that, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a social person, or not in the world in various ways. And, I don’t know, I see them flowing in and out of each other, I don’t always draw a clear line between them, but I would say that the—I don’t, you know, one of my mentors, Claire Harris, wonderful poet, lived in Calgary for most of her life, she edited my first book of poetry, monkeypuzzle, and her advice to me was “don’t let them call you an activist, because as soon as you do that, somehow you’re off in the margins, you’re being out there, and really what you’re doing is what anybody should be doing.” So, I always kind of hear her warning in the back of my head, and I’m a little bit cautious of people being activist figures. That said, I think you do what you need to do, and in this kind of world that we live in, that often gets framed as activism, and at the end of the day I don’t really care if it is or isn’t, my question is what needs to get done and how do we get it done together.
2:01
Joanne Leow: And specifically your work fighting against the Site C Dam…
2:07
Rita Wong: But also for the Peace River.
Joanne Leow: For the Peace River, true, so not anti, but for.
2:10
Rita Wong: The other thing that’s interesting, rhetorically, is the way the framing of that dam has happened, the naming of it depersonalizes it, dehumanizes it, abstracts it, you know, all of that, but if you actually go up and spend time on the Peace River you see how incredibly beautiful it is. You taste the food that’s grown on the riverbanks, like, it is an incredible and a very precious place, it is, it’s truly a sacred place. It’s named after a peace treaty between the Queen and the Danezaa peoples, and it’s the site of many sacred burial sites, cultural sites, gathering sites, medicines, hunting, gathering, migration for moose and elk, and there’s just a lot that happens in that space that gets obliterated when you just sort of reduce it to “Site C” or something. So, so I think, part of the challenge—because this is a river that’s had two previous dams built on it, and most of us in BC, if we’re using electricity we’re relying on the electricity from the previous dams, and so we owe this debt of reciprocity to ensure that there aren’t further sacrifice zones on the Peace River. There was way too much devastation that happened, people who were traumatized, people who were displaced, homes violently destroyed through the previous dams. It’s got to be very clear that the dams are very destructive. They’re not clean, and there’s a huge debt that I and every other person who uses electricity in this province owes to that valley. That dam has been stopped twice before historically, and this is the third time, they’re trying to ram it down the Indigenous peoples’ throats. And it is basically cultural genocide, it is environmental racism, and it is just abominable that this could happen in this day and age when we’re supposedly striving for reconciliation.
End of Clip 4:06
Clip 4
Joanne Leow: I think one of the last questions that I have is thinking of the very…kind of the disconnect, then, what you’re saying as well, between those of us who live in the province, but also specifically live in Vancouver, which is this hyper-concentration of this use of electricity, this use of resources, construction and everything else, right. When you were thinking through about how to connect these two spaces, the site with the Peace River and the site of the city itself, what are you thinking of? How is it possible to build that kind of connection and that awareness?
0:38
Rita Wong: Yeah, it’s hard, it is very hard. I think people in the south, in the urban centers really need to understand how much we depend on the north; how much we depend on rural areas for our lifestyles. So when I’m talking about electricity, it may sound kind of abstract, but if you think about those transmission wires, if you think about where that electricity comes from, who’s paid the cost disproportionally for the use of that electricity, we’re all implicated in that. It’s not pretty, it can be quite emotionally painful to deal with it, but I think the first thing we need to do is reduce our use of electricity to the degree that we can, and to also think about how we generate things locally as opposed to relying on sacrifice zones. I think that when the dam was stopped before, people got kind of relaxed or whatever, but there was a real need, and there continues to be a need, to—I don’t know if brand is the right word—but for people to understand the value of what’s up there, and for the naming, the framing, the narrative of that to put the Peace first. So I’ve been actually actively trying to stop using the term “Site C” as much, and trying to emphasize—one thing that came out of the accountability summit was one of the participants, she’s been going all over twitter calling it the Peace River Dam instead of the Site C Dam so that people begin to get a sense of where it is…
2:03
Joanne Leow: What’s being dammed.
Rita Wong: …what’s being dammed, what is being lost if this is allowed to happen. Yeah, the violation of Indigenous rights, the economics that don’t make sense, the environmental devastation. There’s[sic] so many ways to come at this narrative, and it seems to me it’s difficult to have one simple narrative that everybody can understand. I’ve mixed feelings about it, but I think that strategically that’s perhaps what we need to do is focus more on the Peace and what’s at stake up there.
2:35
Joanne Leow: It almost seems there are these difficult and challenging geographical and spatial traversals that need to occur. It’s almost—people need to go and see it.
2:45
Rita Wong: Or at least listen to the voices of the people from that place, like Helen Knott, an amazing poet, has this wonderful blog, has, you know, done her video poem to Justin Trudeau. There’s lots of work that’s been done and is being done, so that’s important. But to think about this space as this violent colonial space that has to come to terms with the damage that it’s done, and to think about how to move forward doing less damage and moving forward in a good way, I think for all its rhetoric the city has tried to increase the local energy generation through, say, reclaiming heat from waste water, for instance. There’s a lot more that could be done around solar, for instance, or wind, locally that would generate local economies and not require these sacrifice zones that are just untenable. Because I think the other piece of it is that people don’t understand that the Peace River flows east into the Athabasca, then the Slave, then the Mackenzie, and up into the Arctic Ocean. So, it is part of a—it’s the headwater for a very crucial watershed that goes all the way up to the Arctic, and the downstream nations have all—many of them have come out against the dam. Up in northern Alberta the Chipewyan—the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, the Mikisew Cree, they’ve all been…like, if you go up and ask the Elders there what’s devastated them, they’ll say the tar sands, but they will also say the WAC Bennett Dam. It just wrecked their hunting, it wrecked the cycles that the land already had for time immemorial.
4:34
Joanne Leow: Much larger scale.
Rita Wong: Yes, exactly. And so if we had some ecological literacy about that, if we had a government that actually gave a shit about cumulative impacts, you would know that. At the end of the day, the Peace flows into the Athabasca Delta, and the Athabasca Delta…the Peace-Athabasca Delta Park, that’s a UNESCO-recognized World Heritage Site, so it’s not just we want to save the Peace for BC, which I think we do, or that we just want to save it for what John Horgan, our premier, said, “a handful of people up in the Peace”—which was horrible, and I just was appalled that he would try to do that sort of divide-and-conquer tactic in this day and age—but whether we’re just talking about the people of BC, or we’re talking about the people of Canada or people of the world, we need that watershed intact as much as possible.
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