this project helps me to imagine what i would want to see on a billboard instead of ads… i mulled over possible tweets… i’ve been thinking a lot with & through water, how it materializes relationships between human & nonhuman communities if we track water’s flow, how the indigenous peoples here coexisted & flourished with the fifty-plus salmon streams that ran through the unceded lands we now call vancouver before they were paved over and culverted into sewers by colonists, drastically reducing the biodiversity and wild food supply, how so few people realize how rapidly the ocean is changing & how key it is to our future survival), so i started with water:
1. people + planet are 2/3 water. take care of yourself: protect the oceans from pollution, overfishing, & global warming
2. From Stalew (Fraser River) to Great Pacific Garbage Patch, water links all. We breathe thanks to ocean (phytoplankton). Water lovers unite!
since we’re threatened by the corporate requirement to profit at the expense of the environment (notwithstanding greenwashing as well as real efforts to move beyond that deadly paradigm), i thought the following might be one way to address that:
3. Moving from federal to feudal @ the speed of capitalism? Time to redefine the responsibilities of corporations. Earth first!
since i’ve been influenced for many years by a small book called Give Back: First Nations Perspectives on Cultural Practice, compiling writings by Lee Maracle, Jeannette Armstrong and more, i wanted to harken back to that title:
4. Dear guests: please honour & respect Khahtsahlano’s descendants. Give back the best gifts you can.
but in the end, i thought it was important to start with the basic acknowledgements that were for too long ignored, and still bear repeating today:
5. May salmon streams return to Senakw Staulk & Saltwater City. May we respect this land’s cultures: Musqueam, Tsleil Waututh, Squamish
so much history + urgency to try to pack into 140 characters!
earnestly & humbly…