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In this eight-episode series, host Ry Moran (founding Director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation) goes in depth on why the truths of Indigenous Peoples are so often suppressed and why we need truth before reconciliation.
Over course of this season, we visit with Survivors, Elders, Knowledge Keepers, academics, artists, and activists, exploring the opportunities and barriers for truth telling, and ways we can move forward together.
This podcast is presented by the Libraries and Archives of University of Victoria where host Ry Moran is the Associate University Librarian-Reconciliation. It is produced in the territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples.
Visit www.taapwaywin.ca for transcripts, shownotes and more information.
Ry Moran
Growing up, my childhood home in Greater Vancouver bordered a large green space. The woods were dense with trees and lush greenery and a rich mix of aquatic and animal life.
I spent a lot of time chasing frogs at a small pond close to my house. Beyond that pond stretched a seemingly endless network of old logging roads and trails through forests. Every puddle teemed with hundreds – if not thousands – of tadpoles.
Those hours alone in the woods felt magical to me, surrounded by what I perceived as an unending wilderness.
But all of that nature, all those creatures, are now gone.
They filled in my frog pond just before we moved to Vancouver Island, using it as a dumping ground for fill from the expanding suburban neighborhood. The oasis of my childhood was replaced with manicured green lawns, concrete, and wholly insufficient swing sets.
[music begins]
That pond is now marked solely by a drain cover in the middle of a large, grassy field.
I’ve walked that field a number of times since, reflecting on all the adventures I’d had in that space.
For those kids growing up in that same neighbourhood today, the ponds, tadpoles and trails of my childhood might as well have never existed. They don’t realize what’s missing from the world around them, their baseline of normal already so profoundly different than my own.
My experience is mirrored thousands of times over when looking at the magnitude of changes inflicted upon the west coast of Canada over the course of little more than 150 short years.
The creeping boarders of cities, farms, and roads have cut into the land. Archival photographs show us images of seemingly endless forests and massive basking sharks hanging from weigh scales. And my own great uncle used to tell me stories of rivers so full of fish they ran black from bank to bank.
As the vibrance and abundance is slowly drained out of the world around us, all these traces are constant reminders of what we have lost.
[theme music begins]
Evidence of the ghosts that surround us.
Evidence of our shared, shifting, baseline.
This episode we’re looking at the immense damage we have inflicted - on culture, on language, and on the environment, and the way this affects how we perceive the world around us.
We’re trying to understand the things that we’re actively losing, what we may not have realized is already gone, and how this loss at once challenges us to change, while at the same time demands we hold on to memories of what was.
We’re speaking with Mavis Underwood about the wider ramifications of environmental loss and destruction.
Mavis Underwood
- actually, representing infringement on a protected Aboriginal right. And it's an act of extinguishment to allow it to continue without some kind of intervention.
Ry Moran
To Alyssa Gehman about the massive mortality event that has been affecting sea stars all along the Pacific coast.
Alyssa Gehman
We're in a struggle to understand as much as we can, before we can't understand it.
Ry Moran
And hearing from Carey Newman about a project that challenges us to transformatively rethink our responsibilities to the land.
Carey Newman
I don't think that we have the luxury of, of sitting on the status quo anymore. Because we've steadily progressed towards the precipice of a climate disaster.
Ry Moran
My name is Ry Moran, this is Taapwaywin: talking about what we know and what we believe, a podcast from the territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples, and the libraries and archives of the University of Victoria.
[theme music plays out]
In this country, the dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands and the systematic exploitation of natural resources were central efforts of colonization.
Bison were reduced from peak populations of over 60 million to less than 1000 by the turn of the 20th century.2 Extensive over-harvesting, destruction of river habitat, and a warming climate have devastated salmon populations on the Pacific Coast. And centuries of deforestation has left Vancouver Island with only a few small patches of intact old growth forest remaining.
But widespread destruction of the land in this part of the world remains a very recent phenomenon. Colonial ideas rooted in notions of dominion over the land, animals, and waters came with settlement, and have unleashed a cycle of biological collapse on the coast never before seen. These lands were in pretty good shape not that long ago, while today they have been reduced to a shadow of their former richness.
And Indigenous peoples have always been on frontlines of land and water defense, leading the resistance to this destruction.
In order to better understand some of the perspectives that sustained life for millennia here in greater Victoria, I wanted to speak with Mavis Underwood.
Mavis Underwood
My name is Mavis Underwood. My traditional name is TIWENOMOT that comes to me from my mother's side. Her grandmother in Nanaimo was TIWENOMOT gave the name to my mother, and my mother let me use that name. And it's now carried by my daughter, and my granddaughter, and another grandniece. So it's an important name, it grounds where our family is from, it grounds a lot of the feminine side of our family, the female side, where we originate from. So, it's a very great honor for me to carry that name.
I'm from Tsawout First Nation on the Saanich Peninsula. We're part of WSANEC nation, and I've grown up there, in there all my life.
Ry Moran
Since time immemorial, the Tsawout First Nation have had close relationships with the land and sea and everything in them.
Mavis Underwood
That's my desire, is to really make sure that people understand, you know, the freedom we had, the independence we had, the way of life we had, it was a very treasured thing. It's very sacred, the relationship that we have with the environment, the gifts that have been provided by the environment.
When my family moved to Vancouver Island, I spent a lot of time on the beaches in an area now known as Cordova Bay. Long before this place was renamed after a Spanish naval Captain, these beaches were and continue to be central in Tsawout life.
Ry Moran
This makes me think of an experience that I've reflected on a lot, even as I walk on and off of that beach. And to me, the fundamental injustice, or the ignorance, I suppose, of our settler society is - is plainly obvious where you come down onto the beach, and there's a sign that says no shellfish harvesting, you know, PSP poisoning, so on and so forth. And it's along all those beaches there. And I mean, one, it's such a disservice to those animals themselves, you know, but two, that represents really, the destruction of an entire way of living right off that land right there. And I just, I always wonder, when I pass by that sign, whether or not people even see that or not, and whether or not they even put the connection together in the mind what that really is representing and what - what, essentially a loss even that - that represents -
Mavis Underwood
- actually, representing infringement on a protected Aboriginal right. And it's an act of extinguishment to allow it to continue without some kind of intervention. And that's what we're also trying to get government to understand, we're trying to get them to understand that untreated sewage, just for example, going into the waterway is a hostile act. It's an act of fettering a protected right, and harming the way of life, of people that are to now be protected under UNDRIP and even under the royal proclamation. It was to be protected. We were to be left alone.
Ry Moran
For Indigenous peoples globally, close relationships with the land are part of a peoples’ cultural heritage. The natural world is fundamentally connected to language, to culture, to history, governance, and spirituality.
Mavis Underwood
I really, I really hope that there's some solution for the land, because we do need to have a sense of belonging and restoration of your place because that's where your history is. And how can - we can't even speak our history a lot of times because there's no anchor for it. So, we have our language scholars working so hard to restore language, the language grows out of the land. It grows out of the history; it grows out of the saltwater. So, we need to, to be able to anchor that. So that is not something that people think what's only in the past, that it actually has a future as well.
Ry Moran
For Mavis, there is a direct and unquestioning link between the resurgence of Indigenous legal orders and responsibility to the land.
Mavis Underwood
Indigenous law is about responsibility for those gifts that you've been provided with. Most people know about salmon, and cedar, those have been our main gifts to begin, as people. So that cedar we know can be split, so that it can be turned into planks, it can build shelter, it can be kindled really quickly, it can be kindled by shading, so it can make you warm, it can help you in very important ways. And then the gift of salmon, there's been so much salmon for generations, and it's a gift, and that's what we've been taught, we take care of the salmon, and the salmon takes care of us. And so, it's a big concern for us, the impact on freshwater systems on saltwater systems. And, of course, just the taking up of so much land and development and industrialization, we have not been able to keep up to it and to protect that gift of salmon that's been given to us. So, we want to try to begin to try to reconcile that. And be responsible the way we were intended to be.
[music]
Ry Moran
Around the world, we are witnessing massive amounts of irreversible ecological destruction brought about through the intersecting impacts of colonization, capitalism, globalization, and human-induced climate change.
Some of these changes are plainly evident, while others are less visible, just outside of our line of sight.
Several years ago, I began hearing about a particularly alarming disease outbreak causing a massive die-off of sea stars along the Pacific coast from Mexico all the way to Alaska.
Alyssa Gehman
My name is Alyssa Gehman and I'm a PhD research scientist at the Hakai Institute, and I’m an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia.
Ry Moran
Beginning in 2013, scientists began noticing signs of disease in sea stars.
Alyssa Gehman
And what - what we saw was, lesions, so little white spots that grew, we saw a loss of what we call turgor pressure, which is essentially the body wall structure of a sea star. So they looked a little floppy. And then we saw them losing their limbs and fully melting away and dying. And we saw this at a scale that we've never seen before.
Ry Moran
Scientists estimate that at this point, we have lost nearly 6 billion sea stars in this outbreak.1
Ry Moran
So when we talk about massive mortality, I mean, the numbers that I've seen are staggering.
Alyssa Gehman
Yeah, so it depends on each of the species at/and each of the locations. But for example, the sunflower sea star, which is this magnificent, giant star that's used to be incredibly abundant. And - and found in almost every habitat, especially around the British Columbia coast. We lost globally 90.6% of them during this full outbreak. We're just at the point where we're trying to understand where they are, where they've survived and why they survived there.
Ry Moran
And we also live in a world where be at COP 24, or IPCC reports are coming out. And I mean, if we've heard it once, now, we've heard it, we've heard the alarm bell sounding for - for decades, I suppose. And all of a sudden, we find that it's not a concept anymore, that we're seeing, literally billions of species leave our waters in such an incredibly short period of time. I mean, for me, I was living on the coast 2009, I have my daughter, I moved to Winnipeg to work for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we're just starting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2009 2010, I have a son there. I find my way back to the coast. After doing TRC and NCTR, for about 11 years, I come back. And in that time, I'm not able to show my kids the super cool creatures that as you say, were mega abundant.
Alyssa Gehman
Absolutely. For me, I think I, part of why I'm a marine scientist is because sunflower stars are so cool. Like, I remember how cool they were to me when I was in high school, and able to go into the intertidal in a city and see them. That that's an experience that I had as a student, and it was a transformative, I remember that as a really specific event. And one of the things that has been, I guess, both upsetting and really, eye opening is you're right, they were incredibly abundant.
[music]
Ry Moran
We’re currently living through a period that is seeing an unprecedented loss in biodiversity around the world.
Experts from the intergovernmental scientific panel estimate that one million species are being threatened with extinction – many in the coming decades.1 The current biggest threat to global biodiversity is human exploitation and encroachment on habitats, followed by the increasingly devastating effects of climate change.
As UN secretary general Antonio Guterres has said, “with our bottomless appetite for unchecked and unequal economic growth, humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction.”2
These losses in biodiversity can have chain reactions that resonate through the environment, from collapsing ecosystems to threatening global food and water supplies and the long-term survival of human life on this planet.
In the case of the massive loss of sea stars, we’re already beginnings to see ripple effects of the die-off in habitats along the coast.
Ry Moran
What types of changes are we seeing develop now, within marine ecosystems that are starting to unfold by virtue of this massive, I guess, die off of these large sea stars?
Alyssa Gehman
It depends on the habitat we're looking at. But one up around Calvert Island, one of the things we've seen is that the loss of those large sunflower sea stars is related to the densities of their prey. So when we lose those large sea stars, we actually start to get a bunch of medium sized urchins. And then of course, the kelp forests that the urchins then consume.
So we knew that sunflower stars eat urchins, but we didn't know how much of an effect they had until after we saw their loss.
Ry Moran
For me, the horror of the massive loss in sea stars lies in the seemingly quiet disappearance of life from this planet. Most people are just not aware of the countless species already slipping into extinction. How can we mourn what we don’t even realize we are losing?
Alyssa Gehman
It was just very eye opening at that point to realize that we've lost so many of this animal, and there's a bunch of basic information we don't know. Including, and this is a sort of weird aside, but we know very little about what other parasites or diseases might exist in this animal. So in the loss of 90% of these hosts, we almost definitely lost a bunch of parasites that we never described. And that isn't easy to make people that sad about. Some of them are metazoans, some of them are animals, some of them might be worms, there might be a worm species that we never knew about that was associated with them. And that’s just an example of sort of kind of information that we're not going to be able to get back.
Ry Moran
Alyssa and several of her colleagues authored the assessment that classified the sunflower sea star as ‘critically endangered.’
Critically endangered being the step before extinction...
Alyssa Gehman
And in order to do that, we needed to put together all the information that we knew about this animal. And we quickly figured out that, despite their ubiquitousness, despite their being in all of our marine labs, we actually were missing a lot of really basic information.
Ry Moran
Everything from how fast the sunflower sea star grows to how long they live –
Alyssa Gehman
There's just like a whole bunch of information that we discovered that we didn't know, because they were so common, I think that it just didn't seem necessary to know.
Ry Moran
I've, I've experienced this, in my work on this reconciliation, journey around, for example, the intentional destruction of certain types of records related to the experiences of students instead of residential schools. And as we were exploring that, we were actually reminding the courts how final destruction is, because it prevents futures. It prevents re-emergence, it prevents all sorts of different kinds of things, it actually eliminates understanding. And this is also the thing that I find, you know, so troubling, when I think about, you know, what's happened with the sea stars is that, I mean, we just kind of took them for granted. And now, I mean, what barriers to understanding have we sort of collectively unleashed by virtue of this disappearance?
[music]
Alyssa Gehman
Yeah, I'm thinking of, well, we use the term ‘shifting baselines,’ as something that I am experiencing and working against in this system. But one thing that's really changed since this, I mean, we've had this huge loss, but we've also, even in places where we're still seeing them, we really don't see them on the edge and we're not seeing them in the tidal where somebody could just go down and look. And it's to the extent that where, unless you constantly remind yourself that they used to be there, you're, you're going to forget you're like, oh, they just don't live in this space. And that's even coming from somebody who grew up with them in that space, it's still hard to remember, it has to be a constant daily reminder, like, no, they were in this space, and something has changed.
[music plays out]
Ry Moran
The responsibility to remember that which is no longer present seems like a powerful antidote to the recurrence of harm. But is keeping the memory alive of what was enough?
How are the battles currently ranging over truth and disinformation, preservation and destruction, masking our collective understanding of the changes needed? And perhaps, even more ominously, shifting our grasp on reality itself?
Sean Holman
So I’m a modernist so I believe in the truth. I believe that the truth exists, even if it's difficult to find.
Ry Moran
Sean Holman is a professor of environmental journalism here at the University of Victoria.
Sean Holman
And I believe that there's value in seeking the truth, even if we might not be able to actually achieve it.
Ry Moran
Part of his research involves deconstructing the way misinformation has influenced both reporting and public understanding of the evolving climate crisis.
Sean Holman
So when I talk about information, what I'm really talking about is I'm talking about the truth, more than anything else. And the truth has been really important, right, for our society. And it was particularly important during the post war period, because we felt that if we could find the truth, then we can use that to make better decisions about the world around us, thereby exerting control over public and private institutions. And that if we knew the truth, then we could feel more certain about the world, we could better understand the past, we could better understand the present and we could better predict the future and anticipate the future.
What we're seeing right now is the breakdown of that understanding, the breakdown of the evidence equals action equation in this post truth society that we're now living in. We see people looking for other forms of certainty and control. We see them looking to authoritarianism. We see them looking to other extremist ideologies and theologies as a means of exerting control and certainty at a time when society and our environment are unwinding. So my research really stands at the intersection between Democratic collapse, environmental collapse, and uses of information during this particular moment that we're living through right now. And if the Truth can no longer be used as a means of exerting control and certainty at this time, what do we turn to? And how do we preserve the truth? How do we preserve democracy? How do we preserve an equitable and resilient society in the face of all of these threats that we're now facing?
Ry Moran
It’s alarming to think that information is no longer enough to motivate the people to take action. Because if not information, then what?
Ry Moran
Okay, so the future, we're steaming towards it. We've got significant environmental challenges, we've got still to figure out these big questions of the world, which are - how are we going to live together respectfully? How are we going to live respectfully with the land? I know you've got a lot of ideas about this.
Carey Newman
I do. And I don't even know that I necessarily think of it as a fundamental rejection of the status quo, as much as I think of it as questioning every aspect of it.
Ry Moran
Carey Newman is a Kwakwaka’wakw, Coast Salish, and settler artist, and the inaugural chair in Indigenous Art Practice here at the University of Victoria – who we heard from back in our episode about places.
Carey Newman
And all of those things that are going to, or continue to complicate, the present and the future - they're going to require some, some radical rethinks, right? I don't think that we have the luxury of, of sitting on the status quo anymore. Because we've steadily progressed towards the precipice of a climate disaster. We haven't figured out how to reduce the binaries in, in political opposition, or political ideologies. And, so, I think that means that we need to, to reset the way we think about how to address them, because if we only address the symptoms, then we're never addressing the underlying cause. You know, take a simple one - take clean water on reserves, or equal access to medical care, we could provide that right now, through the resources, but if we don't address why there's a disparity, then that disparity will rise again.
[music]
Ry Moran
Part of Carey’s artistic and cultural practice has been carving totem poles, a practice that First Nations along the Pacific Northwest Coast have been practicing since time immemorial.
The poles are often carved from old growth cedars, which are becoming more and more difficult to access.
Ry Moran
One of the big disparities that seems we have is just in our respect for the land, and I know, you're thinking about your own relationship with old growth forests, I guess.
Carey Newman
I am. That kind of came, I think a little bit out of teaching here, and talking with students about aligning your concept with your material choice, and your technical execution. And then working on my own projects, and looking down and seeing that I was carving an old growth tree, and recognizing that there was something that was out of alignment between that practice, and the 17 year old version of me that was standing in the Carmanah Valley protesting the cutting down of old growth trees, back in the 90s. And sort of realizing that if I want others to change, I have to change myself.
[music]
So I started thinking, like I decided at that time, that the work - the pole I was working on would be my, quote, 'last totem.' And it didn't mean that I would never carve another totem, I meant that I was going to rethink the way that I do it. And that I wouldn't carve any more totems from old growth, for commercial purpose. I would still do it for my community, I would still do it for a cultural reason. But I wouldn't do it for, for personal gain.
Ry Moran
Besides their cultural significance, old growth trees are also the foundation of ecosystems that support plant and animal biodiversity. One of the most important carbon sinks on earth, they also help slow the effects of climate change.
Carey Newman
so that's what I'm what I'm doing, I'm working on a bunch of different ways of creating totems that are still connected to Cedar, but where I'm no longer complicit in the very thing that I'm asking others to stop, which is cutting down old growth trees.
Ry Moran
A couple years ago, Carey called me up with an idea for a new project.
It’s a project he called ‘the Seedling.’
Carey Newman
The idea is that I design a totem in 3D software, so it exists only digitally. And then we plant a western red cedar seedling. And this university has committed to making and raising the pole when the tree is mature. To give people an idea of the timeline that's anywhere between 450 and 600 to 1000 years from now.
And for me, that's kind of like really stretching the way that we think about our responsibility. And hopefully, through ideas like giving title of the land that the seedling is growing on, to the land itself, we'll be able to encourage people to start to rethink about our collective relationship with land, because we have property, and we view land as a resource – like as a society - and we view it as something that we have a right to, to cut down, to dig up, to extract. And we don't do a lot of thinking about what are our responsibilities to future generations? What is our responsibility to those who came before us and didn't just take it all for their own gain? And I, and I hope that, that this project, that in doing that, we start to think differently, we start to dream differently, we start to take responsibility in a different way for the impact that we have on the world around us.
[music]
Ry Moran
And it seems like what is so necessary is, is just a fundamental reconfiguration, with how we see it, how we're in relationship with it, how we respect it, and then, how we ensure that future generations aren't continuously robbed from as well. Like make better choices basically, know better, do better.
Carey Newman
If you're going to say it, you got to live it. We have a word in Kwak'wala, and it's ‘Awi’nakola.’ And it means 'to live in good relationship with the land, air, water, spirit world, and everything in them.' And I'm trying to do that, right? And it's difficult because, because there's a lot of - there's a lot of ways to live a contradictory life, you know? And there’s a lot of things and luxuries that we take as we start to feel like we’re entitled to. And so the practice of remaining thankful, and grateful, and recognizing that we as humans aren't outside of that cycle -- that we are part of the land, and what we do to the land we do to ourselves -- that's something that's - maybe in the same way that truth is a huge thing that takes a long time, and at the same time, it's super simple - maybe, maybe this collective transformation of the way we think about our relationship with land. So it's not going to be easy to disentangle.
But I think art can play a role. It can start to change what people feel in their heart. And, amidst all of that, all of those really challenging existential questions, we still have to find hope.
[music]
Ry Moran
For Alyssa, the connections to enable information flow are vital to ensuring a future for species on this planet.
Alyssa Gehman
One of the things that this particular outbreak showed us was that, while we had the pieces of a network to communicate over the scale that this happened, we didn't have a strong functioning network. So it was a lot of piecemeal talking to each other. And so that's something we're, we started to form a couple of years ago, which is called PRIME that's primary responders to emerging diseases. And we're working on developing a network where we can, if we see a bunch of animals looking sick and dying in a region, we can alert the whole network to look where they are. So that that is our hope, our hope is to at least be able to respond better.
[music]
Alyssa Gehman
I mean, I guess I still have hope that we are going to be able to turn things around at some point, just because I think that I need that to continue doing the work I do.
Ry Moran
We have to have hope. We have to keep doing the work too, we have no other choice.
Alyssa Gehman
And hope means that we hope gives us the ability to do work that needs to be done to move towards a future where we are, in fact, making it more possible for things to stay alive on the planet.
Ry Moran
Reconfiguring our relations with the environment through a lens of mutual respect and responsibility is the pathway to begin healing our relationship with the natural world.
When we sit with the full expanse of the definition of ‘reconciliation’ presented in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work we see that the responsibility to establish and maintain mutually respectful relationships extends not only to our human kin – but also, to the very land itself.
Mavis Underwood
So, I do hope, you know, that we can get to a really strong place of reconciliation for ourselves, and truths that we begin to realize for ourselves. And then we also now begin to challenge and articulate to systems that we all operate with, in partnership with. Let's really talk about truth, justice, and a way of life for people.
And I really - I believe that our people do need to stand together and stand up for the environment that's provided for us, but also really stand up against the exploitation, industrial violence in the environment.
Yeah like I said, let's put our minds together and do some important work that helps raise children in a healthy way.
[music]
Ry Moran
This podcast was created through the direct teamwork of an incredible group of people. It was written and produced by Karina Greenwood and myself, editing and consulting by Cassidy Villebrun-Buracas, mixing and mastering by Matheus Terra, and music by myself, Ry Moran.
Special thanks to the UVic Libraries team that assisted in countless ways on this production.
Maarsii to our guests Alyssa Gehman, Mavis Underwood, Sean Holman, and Carey Newman.
Taapwaywin is made possible through the University of Victoria Strategic Framework Impact fund, and with direct support from the University of Victoria Libraries and CFUV Radio.
This podcast was created on unceded lək̓ʷəŋən and WSÁNEĆ territories.