Rita Wong Interview 4
Details
Rita Wong Interview 4
Metadata (MODS) |
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|---|---|
| Titles | Rita Wong Interview 4: Clip 4 |
| Name | Rita Wong |
| Name | Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Type of Resource | sound recording-nonmusical |
| Genre | Interview |
| Identifier | Interview |
| Identifier | rita wong interview clip 4 |
| Abstract | 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. |
| Extent | 5:20 |
| 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. 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. |
| Access Condition | Contact Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Subject Topic | High-- |
| Subject Topic | -- |
| Subject Topic | -- |
| Subject Topic | Water-- |
| Subject Topic | Education-- |
| Subject Topic | economy-- |
| Subject Topic | Environmental Degradation-- |
| Subject Topic | Colonisation |
| Subject Geographic | Pacific Ocean |
| Subject Hierarchical Geographic | North America--Canada------Vancouver |
| 2010-2020 | |
| Subject Local Name | High------Water--Education--economy--Environmental Degradation--Colonisation--Pacific Ocean--2010-2020 |