Lelu Island and LNG

We have so much to be thankful for in the Skeena River watershed - especially to those working so hard to keep it intact. Check out the video from the Salmon Summit recently held in Prince Rupert and then help spread the word about the Lelu Island declaration.

 

 

We're running out of coffin nails

Ruling could affect more than Northern Gateway

 B.C. government told it must consult First Nations and can’t rely on federal environmental approval

It may be time to take down the sign at the bottom of my driveway - and open the champagne. Except for Site C and LNG terminals...

We're still here...

To "celebrate" the anniversary of the Joint Review Panel's decision to give permission to Enbridge to proceed with its plans to build the Northern Gateway pipelines, Friends of Morice-Bulkley and the Wet'suwet'en chiefs are hosting an event to celebrate healthy rivers and wild salmon and to send out a friendly reminder that the opposition has not gone away. Saturday, June 13, 2015 from 12 - 2 in Bovill Square in Smithers.

Plus, if you enjoyed Jennifer Skin Wickham's poem in an earlier posting, you might want to check out the interview I did with her on my Smithers Community Radio show In the Shadow of the Mountain about a month ago.

The Elephant in the Room

It's been pretty quiet here for the past few months because I've been doing a book tour for my latest book, Shafted: A Mystery, helping launch a great book of poetry, Second Growth, by Fabienne Calvert Filteau and trying to keep track (and failing) of all the LNG pipeline proposals in the northwest. (Check out the Madii lii camp on the Suskwa and the No More Pipelines website for ways in which people are resisting that boondoggle.)

But I had to take the time to thank John Vaillant for his article The Gorilla on Burnaby Mountain in today's The Tyee. And of course thanks to The Tyee for being another voice in the room along with that elephant.

Vaillant argues that Canada should take a lead on alternative energy rather than subsidizing fossil fuel industries and subverting our democratic values to support their projects.

Engussi Wedzin Kwah by Jennifer Wickham

Thanks to our new library director, Wendy Wright for telling me about Jennifer Wickham's amazing poetry in I'm a Real Skin - the Smithers library has a copy, you can buy it at Mountain Eagle Books in Smithers, and you can source it from Jennifer's webpage. 

Jennifer has given me permission to post her poem about the river many of us call the Morice or Bulkley.

She is my healer
a  consoling friend
a life giver, a grandmother
a sister to the ancient ones
she heard the songs and touched the skin
of the Original Wet'suwet'en
sacred knowledge in every drop,
but we forgot
we try to listen with our ears
time has made us deaf to her
there's too much background noise.
the smog is in our souls

shhhhhh.....can you hear her cry for you?

I need a job, I need a new car
I just bought a new eco-friendly travel mug from *fill in the blank*...
It's funny right?
The love of my life is not my cell phone
a flat screen tv or my shoes

Engussi Wedzin Kwah!

I don't need to tell you how beautiful she is
how her clear blue/green sparkles in the sun
or how her glacial currents take your breath away
and jump starts your soul and very cell in your body
how her voice sings you alive
this isn't that kind of love poem

Let's get back to listening....

What are the names of your rivers?
Can you hear them inside you?
Let's resurrect those words together
ALL our words, all at once
I want to feel all those hard and soft sounds
hitting me at the same time
just let me absorb the words of our ancestors
like Wedzin Kwah
but I'm not a river

I am a Wet'suwet'en woman
my purpose is clear

Like ancient protocol and boundaries
I'll show you where the line is
we were born her guardians
warriors watch over Wedzin Kwah

Dakota Fracking Oil

Last year, I wrote a post, Bound For Glory, after travelling through North Dakota on our way home from southern Ontario about the visible impacts of the industry on the landscape.

Earlier this year, I went to Liz Logan's presentation on the impacts of the fracking boom in BC's northeast. She tackled the issue head-on - talking about the work the industry provides and the cost of that employment. Her people are beginning to wonder if the benefits outweigh the costs.


In Brick's winter issue, I came across an article and photographs by Elizabeth Farnsworth and Terry Evans which dug much deeper into the conflicts people are facing within families and communities about the fracking oil boom in Dakota. I was happy to find this is available online: Dakota Fracking Oil Boom.

You might want to check it out.

Louder!

I came across this marvelous, terrifying poem in Brick: A Literary Journal No. 93, Summer 2014. Brick has long been one of my favourite journals. Jan Zwicky has long been one of my favourite poets. They both have kindly given me permission to post "Near" below.

You don't read poetry, you say? This will change your mind. Read in a quiet corner, read it out loud to your friends, read it even louder in the town square.Take it out into the world where it belongs. Where you belong.

Near by Jan Zwicky

It arrives. The far dream
     that terrified us—that put the steel
in our forearms, and we woke each morning
     to its distant shuddering—

is far no more. Heavy-limbed, it sprawls
     across the daylight, brushes back
the damp hair from our foreheads, stares
     and laughs. And the axle of our will

is seized, the wheel splintered, an engine
     that does not, does not
turn, and when we go below decks, find
     it is missing, a hollow, a dark sift

of emptiness, and the ferry is slammed 
     against its moorings, helpless, the contagion spreading,
and the one who knows, the one who has been readied,
     is absent from the table.

Near is the hard grief, the grief
     from the pit, whose hands shake, which cannot find
the knife, which cannot stand, or kneel, or lie,
     the grief that is tearless, that gags.

The clearcut, the dead zone, the gas-contaminated
     well, the salt earth, the foreign
investment protection, the child soldier,
     the rape, the spin, the addiction

to speed, the saving of labour, the image,
     the image, the image, the image,
the genetic modification, the electromagnetic
     field, the sense of entitlement, greed. The present

is thick-lipped and stunned; it sweats. The voice 
     of the century is a wild clanking, a loose stink that lifts
and settles in our mouths. Did you raise your hand? Did you
     say something? Louder. Louder.