Rita Wong Interview 3
Details
Rita Wong Interview 3
Metadata (MODS) |
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|---|---|
| Titles | Rita Wong Interview 3: Clip 3 |
| Name | Rita Wong |
| Name | Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Type of Resource | sound recording-nonmusical |
| Genre | Interview |
| Identifier | Interview |
| Identifier | rita wong interview clip 3 |
| Abstract | 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. |
| Extent | 4:06 |
| Form | sound recording |
| Note | 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. |
| Access Condition | Contact Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Subject Topic | High-- |
| Subject Topic | -- |
| Subject Topic | -- |
| Subject Topic | Water-- |
| Subject Topic | Education-- |
| Subject Topic | Government Intervention-- |
| Subject Topic | Re/development |
| Subject Geographic | Pacific Ocean |
| Subject Hierarchical Geographic | North America--Canada------Vancouver |
| 2010-2020 | |
| Subject Local Name | High------Water--Education--Government Intervention--Re/development--Pacific Ocean--2010-2020 |