Читать книгу Common Ground in a Liquid City - Matt Hern - Страница 8

THESSALONIKI, GREECE PHOTO BY SELENA COUTURE

KEEPING IT REAL

Thessaloniki, Greece

I’m walking down the hill from the Old Town with Kristos, Stavros, and Kostas. We’re looking for a bar that is somewhere downtown, near the water. We pass a smallish city block that is lazily fenced off, dropping down into what looks like a construction site. I stop and look down. There are a few brick piles of rubble, a few half-built walls here and there, a short dirt road winding around, some more fencing that seems to be fencing off nothing, a truck, and not much else. I ask what it is. The boys look at each other, “Just some Roman ruins.”

I look around more closely and come across a little wooden box zap-strapped to a chain-link fence. The box holds pamphlets describing the area as the remains of a Roman agora, built in the fourth century. What the hell? There is almost no fanfare, no promotion, just a cheap fence and a box of damp brochures. There is virtually nothing to prevent people from wandering down there. Cars are parked densely right up against the fence, roads jammed in tight on all four sides, just short of obvious disrespect for these historic ruins.

It’s kind of staggering for me, coming from the city of Vancouver where history is presumed to have started in the 1870s. Aren’t these the kind of monuments people travel across the world to gape at?

The guys who brought me here are anarchists and social ecologists, so they are appropriately sneering at the remains of empire, and I’m good with that, but c’mon, these are freaking Roman ruins. Shouldn’t they be celebrated a least a little? Shouldn’t there be a big sign up, a tour guide, a kiosk to sell tickets, and audio tour headsets for rent? We have historical markers around Vancouver for shit that happened in the 1950s.

I try to engage my friends on this point. I tell them that in Canada we learn extensively about Greek and Roman cultures in grade school and that people know vastly more about Athenian history than local history. Pretty much everyone I know has a sophisticated understanding of ancient Greek myths but knows virtually nothing of local Native mythology, myself included. Stavros looks at me and shrugs.

There are a few mitigating factors. West Coast indigenous cultures didn’t really build in stone or cement and Vancouver’s relentless climate and precipitation doesn’t let wood structures last long. North American First Nations have also never been written cultures, relying dominantly on oral traditions, leaving more discrete historical trails. Still, though, the lack of knowledge and the lack of interest in preservation of the history of this region are pronounced: Vancouverites know virtually nothing of the history of this place beyond 150 years ago and for the most part do not care much.

There are some grasping attempts at honoring the past here but they tend to come off as reflexive and obligatory. Check out the official tourism Vancouver website (tourismvancouver.com): it takes a little hunting around, but there is a page over in the “About Vancouver” section called “Vancouver’s History.” There is a paragraph about 16,000-11,000 BCE talking about Native people arriving and settling here, including nuggets like “And they liked the forests teeming with wildlife” (I didn’t make that up). Then the story leaps forward twelve-and-a-half thousand years to 1592-1774, when Spaniards start dropping by. The website then carefully documents each critical step of the establishment of the city from Captain Vancouver’s arrival through Gassy Jack to the Canadian Pacific Railway to the opening of the first shopping mall to the opening of the Ford Centre to the first polar bear swim. Natives are not mentioned after the opening paragraph.

By comparison, the first thing that jumps out on any of the major Thessaloniki websites is that the city was founded in 315 BCE by Cassander, King of Macedonia, and was named after his wife, Thessalonike, Alexander the Great’s sister. In 50 CE Paul first spoke of Christianity there, Demetrios was martyred in the city in 303 CE becoming the patron saint of the city, and Salonica (as it was then called) was the second most important Byzantine city after Constantinople. I knew all this after like fifteen minutes of the most vapid kind of browsing. Virtually all of the tourist material about the city prominently features old city walls, the White Tower, ancient churches, Roman baths, and markets. You think about Thessaloniki and you just have to think about its past, both near and very far.

Kostas is patient while I try to articulate this difference. He makes it clear that others are welcome to celebrate these ruins, but for him they are just a reminder of an imperial past that has long since passed, a history that is as much a burden as a source of pride. Thessaloniki is a city where the weight of the past is everywhere: spend half a day wandering the city core and without trying you will bump into at least a score of major historical sites. You couldn’t avoid the past if you tried.

The best book I know of on the city is called Salonica: City of Ghosts. Mark Mazower writes:

[Thessaloniki] is a densely thriving human settlement whose urban character has never been in question, a city whose history reached forward from classical antiquity uninterruptedly through the intervening centuries to our own times.⁵

But Mazower also makes clear that Salonica has gone through 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 the hodgepodge of accumulated, contradictory activities and events in the park. I am entertained by a park that contains Saturday night renegade bike courier races at Prospect Point and Sunday afternoon cricket on Brockton Oval. I like the paradox that we seek to commune with nature by walking on the seawall (a project that would never pass an environmental review today).

The old polar bear pit, now overgrown with blackberry bushes, wasn’t removed when the zoo was closed. Now it stands as a relic of the days when we had a different relationship with animals when it was okay to put animals in cages and stare at them for pleasure. I am glad that its concrete presence will not allow us to pretend that we weren’t those people.

But of course we were—and largely are—those people. And I’ll submit to you that getting honest about our urban relationships with nature is a prerequisite for constructing a real city—here or anywhere else.

Stanley Park is almost always one of the very first things visitors and residents alike speak of when they catalog what’s good about Vancouver. It was established in 1888, right at the city’s inception, and is one thousand acres of forest, gardens, trails, beaches, seawall, playgrounds, restaurants, and an aquarium in the heart of Vancouver, making it the third largest urban core park in North America. The park hosts more than eight million visitors annually, and occupies a central role in marketing the city.

Vancouver focuses much of its identity, branding, and advertising around its natural beauty, its proximity to the ocean and mountains, and its overall wholesome healthfulness. Stanley Park is a vital player in that effort, and reifying its “naturalness” and “untouched” splendor is critical both for Vancouverites and tourists in constructing an ideological space for the park. As an early city paper wrote in 1939:

A city that has been carved out of the forest should maintain somewhere within its boundaries evidence of what it once was, and so long as Stanley Park remains unspoiled that testimony to the giant trees which occupied the site of Vancouver in former days will remain.⁹

It is clear that from the very earliest days of both the park and the city that maintaining this “unspoiled” character has been a critical (if absurd) project, which begins to explain the outpouring of very public hand-wringing and emotional sentiment about the trees. Notably, however, that interest has hardly extended to the Native people who occupied the park for millennia and were almost literally paved over in Stanley Park’s creation. The city’s 1985 Stanley Park Master Plan acknowledged that “[b]efore 1840, the peninsula was used by several thousand coast Indians” but failed to mention that Natives continued to inhabit the area for many more decades.¹⁰

In the 1880s, as Stanley Park was being established, Natives used sites all over the peninsula for a variety of uses and there were at least seven Native settlements in the park area, the biggest being Xwayxway (Whai-Whai)—near Lumberman’s Arch where eleven families lived:

You know the Lumberman’s Arch (Whoi-Whoi) in Stanley Park. Well, the big house was about 200 feet long, and 60 feet wide…. That was the “real” pow-wow house. The name of it was “Stah-hay”; no meaning, just name, and six families lived in it.

Then to the west of it, was a smaller house, about 24 by 16 feet deep; one family lived in that, and on the extreme west was another pow-wow house—it was measured once—and I think the measurement was 94 feet front by about 40 feet deep; the front was about 20 feet high; the back was about 12 feet. Here two families lived. All these houses stood in a row above the beach, facing the water; all were cedar slabs and big posts; all built by the Indians long ago.¹¹

The settlement was razed for Park Road. The eagerness to create the park meant that communities and homes were just in the way. Road workers chopped away part of an occupied Native house that was impeding the surveyors at the village of Chaythoos near Prospect Point. City of Vancouver historian J.S. Matthews interviewed August Jack Khatsahlano, who was a child in the house at the time.

“We was inside this house when the surveyors come along and they chop the corner of our house when we was eating inside,” Khatsahlano said in that 1934 conversation at city hall.

“We all get up and go outside see what was the matter. My sister Louise, she was only one talk a little English; she goes out ask whiteman what’s he doing that for. The man say, ‘We’re surveying the road.’

“My sister ask him, ‘Whose road? Is it whiteman’s?’

“Whiteman says, ‘Someday you’ll find good road around, it’s going around.’ Of course whiteman did not say park; they did not call it park then.” ¹²

Most of the Native inhabitants at Chaythoos left and went to live on the reserve at Kitsilano Point, which was later transferred by the province into the posession of the federal government and eventually sold.¹³

It’s not entirely true to say that Vancouver’s colonialist effort has attempted to erase Native peoples from this territory, but we want only very specific, very limited renditions of Native life to remain. There is now, for example, a tasteful little brass plaque at the site where the Chaytoos settlement once stood.

Some of the most iconic symbols of Stanley Park are the totem poles, which are prominently profiled in endless tourist publications and grace the cover of books and thousands of postcards. The Brockton Point totems are now the “most visited tourist attraction in all of British Columbia”¹⁴ and are intended to symbolize and “honor” the area’s indigenous population. But the Coast Salish did not traditionally carve totems and the poles that now inhabit the park were imported from all over the Northwest Coast, brought in from Alert Bay, Haida Gwai’i, Skeena River, and elsewhere.

The poles are a replacement for what was originally planned as a full-scale “Indian Village” tourist attraction, which was proposed to be built by the Vancouver Arts, Historical and Scientific Society who presented a plan to the Park Board.

They proposed a “model Indian village” that would “suitably house and preserve historic relics and curios relating to the Indians.” The idea was to purchase “some old, deserted village,” transplant it to the proposed site, and reassemble it there. The Board gave vigorous assent to the proposal.¹⁵

The plan was also to transplant some Native folks who would “make permanent quarters there, carrying on their Native life.”¹⁶ The Society then began purchasing totem poles from various parts of British Columbia and erecting them in the park. In 1925, the Squamish Indian Council objected to the whole plan because neither the planned “village” nor the poles had much to do with local Native culture or peoples. The Society, concerned about controversy, quickly turned the whole project over to the Park Board who reluctantly abandoned the village project, but the totems stayed.

The Park Board has just now been taking some first steps to ameliorate this weird situation. In June of 2008, Susan Point, an excellent and renowned Musqueum artist, installed three traditional House Posts—often called portals or gateways—titled People Amongst the People, that now sit alongside the existing totems and are the Coast Salish people’s welcome to visitors of Stanley Park. At the opening ceremony, Larry Grant welcomed people to the unceded land of the Halkomelem-speaking people. “We are finally being acknowledged as the Salish people of this territory. The rain you see coming down is very much like the tears of our ancestors who inhabited this land many years ago prior to the city making this into a park.”¹⁷ I spoke to Susan about six months after the installation:

I 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 as an important “heritage” of the city, one that is materialized through the placement 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.