indigenous

Learning from her ancestors

Tasha Faye Evans shares a work in progress at Dance in Vancouver. (photo courtesy Scotiabank Dance Centre)

“With everything I do, I always ask myself, what is the medicine of this work? How is this dance, this play, this project, contributing to the greater health and well-being of my community? Who is this character speaking for? Who am I dedicating this work to? Then, when it comes time to perform,” said Tasha Faye Evans, “I am rarely nervous, because it’s not about me and my skills, its more about the work I am doing and who I am doing it for.”

Evans was speaking to the Independent in advance of Dance in Vancouver, which runs Nov. 20-24 at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. The dance and theatre artist, who has Coast Salish, Welsh and European-Jewish grandparents, is presenting t’emək’ʷqən-seed, a work in progress, in a free-to-attend double bill with Starr Muranko/Raven Spirit Dance on Nov. 22, 2 p.m. A moderated conversation with the artists will follow the performances.

“There is not a word in Coast Salish culture for art,” writes Evans on her website. “Our art is functional. Our dances, prayers. Our songs, blessings. I am an artist because I love fiercely and creating work is my way of having hope, preserving the sacred and imagining a better future for all our relations.”

“My own body of work has always been because I am not a blockader, I don’t write the letters to the people in charge, I am weary of shaking my fist in the air,” she told the Independent. “My dance, theatre and community work are my way of addressing a helplessness I feel in the face of the misused powers in the world. My community work is mostly about redress and recalibrating values to align with the original caregivers of these Coast Salish lands and waters. We all share in a sacred responsibility to ensure a future of health and well-being for all our relations, and my work is in service of this sacred responsibility.”

Evans’s choreography has been presented by various companies and she has participated in performances and festivals around the world. She has many projects on the go, in dance and more broadly. One initiative is In the Presence of Ancestors, an exhibition of five Coast Salish House posts being carved and raised in Port Moody along its Shoreline Trail. She was recognized for the

exhibit with a 2023 Edge Prize, which is given to leaders, or “Edgewalkers,” in the Salmon Nation, described on the prize’s website as “a bioregion defined by the historic range of wild Pacific salmon, from the Salinas River in California, north to the Yukon River in Alaska.”

seed was inspired by a sculpture created by Coast Salish artist James Harry.

“The sculpture was part of KWÍKWI – The Seventh, an exhibit James Harry and his partner Lauren Brevner dedicated to their daughter, the seventh generation born in James’s family since colonization,” said Evans. “seed draws upon what master carver Xwalacktun [James Harry] refers to as the Ancestor’s Eye or the Salish Eye, and the fundamental shapes and teachings of Coast Salish art and design, the sphere, crescent and trigon. The Salish Eye can be found carved into the oldest Coast Salish tools and, for that matter, I refer to these shapes as sxwōxwiyám, part of our original stories, written into the land and shared generation to generation, teaching us how to be human.”

Having collaborated with master carvers for more than a decade now, Evans said her “choreography experiments with how Coast Salish art and design can be expressed in movement, gesture and architecture of the space. I am developing a methodology that is based in the shapes and cultural teachings of the Ancestor’s Eye, the sphere, trigon, crescents, and the space in between. I am passionate about showcasing Coast Salish art form and culture and I am driven to share sxwōxwiyám and invoke a sacred responsibility in my audiences for all our relations.”

photo - Tasha Faye Evans — Tasha Faye Evans (photo by Yasuhiro Okada)

What people will see at Dance in Vancouver is “the tap root of t’emək’ʷqən-seed,” said Evans, “the first part of the work to grow, unfolding itself first towards the earth. I’ll be sharing that vulnerable moment of the creative process where the story is newly manifesting, taking root in the body and just beginning to grow.”

seed was commissioned by Odd Meridian Arts, whose artistic director is Ziyian Kwan. While in residence there, Evans created another work, Song.

“My connection with Odd Meridian Arts began decades ago when I was a shaved-head theatre kid and Ziyian was one of those dancers I’d see on posters and just stare at in awe,” shared Evans. “She’s always represented ambition for me and what a successful career as an artist looks like. (I don’t think I’ve told her this.) Ziyian has always been one of those artists whom I could only aspire to be.”

It was during COVID that Evans said she “got over” herself and responded to a message Kwan had posted on Facebook.

“Song was also a seed,” said Evans. “It was a section of a larger piece I am still creating called Cedar Woman. It was a landing piece in my creative process, when I was exploring how to re-member myself to a legacy of Coast Salish women. I follow the song I hear calling me in my heart. The dance is a journey through the song, all the way back in time to my first grandmother, singing the song as prayer for her grandchildren during the great flood. I don’t dance Song the same in Cedar Woman any longer, but the core of Song, is finding itself in seed.”

For Evans, being part of such diverse ancestry, holding space for her Coast Salish, Welsh and Jewish heritage, is challenging.

“For much of my adult life, it has been learning how to sit in the circle within my Indigenous community,” she said.

“I didn’t grow up in Jewish culture more than our comfort foods like chicken soup, matzah, and lox and cream cheese. We did not practise being Jewish and I learned very little about this part of me other than the trauma we all carry. For years, I wore a Star of David, mostly because it was a gift from my Nana. Sometimes, I feel my Jewish great-grandmother Faye nudging me disgruntledly until I mention her name, too, when I introduce myself. I’m not sure how to hold being Jewish in this body while living here in these Coast Salish lands and waters.

“There is a piece I’d like to create for my GG Faye, actually. I have a long mink coat that reminds me of one of the photos I have of her, taken just before World War II. I know she’d really appreciate that and I welcome the parts of me I would discover dancing for her.”

Her Welsh heritage has also been less explored, but, said Evans, “I have always longed to go to Wales. To dance on those lands and waters and listen to the language calls me for sure.

“While it’s these Coast Salish lands and stories that dance in me the loudest, I do honour that I am the dream of all my ancestors.”

Dance in Vancouver also features a work by Action at a Distance/Vanessa Goodman on Nov. 23 and DIV Unstructured on Nov. 24 includes Idan Cohen/Ne.Sans Opera & Dance. For more information and tickets, visit thedancecentre.ca.

Did Judeans cede their lands?

The Kotel (Western Wall) in Jerusalem (photo by James Blake Wiener)

Two weeks ago, 34 student organizations published a letter blaming Israel for the violent attacks that occurred on Oct. 7, on the holiday of Simchat Torah, that killed hundreds of Israelis in a brutal fashion. The letter claimed that Israel is entirely responsible for all unfolding violence and further claimed, “today’s events did not occur in a vacuum, for the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison,” according to ABC News.

On the Stanford campus, an instructor in a civil, liberal and global education course asked Jewish students to take their belongings and stand in a corner, saying, “This is what Israel does to the Palestinians.” According to the Forward, the teacher then asked, “How many people died in the Holocaust?” The students answered, “six million”; the response from the instructor was, “Colonizers killed more than six million. Israel is a colonizer.”

Those of us who grew up in the West in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s always thought Hitler was the embodiment of all evil and the Nazis were the greatest evil known to mankind. The merging of pure hatred and technology created an evil unmatched because of its scale and virulence. However, in today’s world there appears to be a sin worse than that of being a Nazi, that is to be a “colonizer.”

The theory of (Western racial colonizing) was made famous by a professor in whose class I studied, Edward Said. The New Yorker several years ago reflected that Said’s most famous book, Orientalism, “proved to be perhaps the most influential scholarly book of the late 20th century; its arguments helped expand the fields of anti-colonial and post-colonial studies.” The crimes of colonialism cannot be ignored … including many tragedies such as the Trail of Tears, residential schools, the partitioning of India and more.

The reflexive hatred of Israel, even as its citizens are being slaughtered and taken hostage, stems from those who believe the Jewish presence in Israel is among the last vestiges of colonialism. Such rationalization theorizes that civilians are really a military asset because they advance the aims of the conquering nation and, as such, civilians are a legitimate target.

Hamas uses a similar thought model for its theory of mind for the Israeli population. Haviv Rettig Gur, a columnist for the Times of Israel, wrote the following: “Arab opponents of Israel speak of it often as an artificial, rootless construct doomed to collapse in the face of Palestinian faith and resilience. It is at heart, they say, a colonialist project that for all its outward power lacks the inner authenticity and conviction to survive.”

That interpretation of Israel isn’t just a put-down; it’s a call for action, including especially the kind of sustained terrorism and cruelty that pushed other colonialist projects out, from the French in Algeria to the British in Kenya. This interpretation of Israel is the basic logic behind Palestinian suicide bombings, rocket fire and the whole slew of terrorist tactics employed by Hamas on Oct. 7.

One thousand years ago, as the Crusaders were first launching the military campaign to recapture the Holy Land from the infidels, Rashi was musing about land rights as well. Rashi wanted to explain why a lawbook, the Torah, does not begin with laws, but rather with the story of Creation. Rashi says that the nations of the world will ultimately call the Jews thieves, or colonizers in a more (contemporary) flexible translation. The Torah, therefore, begins with the story of creation to establish that all the land belongs to G-d and G-d gave title to the Children of Israel. Nachmanides, another great medieval scholar, argues that Rashi’s explanation ignores the important stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The land of Israel is the land of their stories, of Moriah, Beit El, Chevron, Be’er Sheva. This is where our ancestors are buried.

Did the tribe of Reuven ever cede its land to Aram? Did Ephraim ever cede its land to Ashur?

If you were to walk the archeological sites in the land of Israel and look at the graves, the etchings on the walls, the seals from sites dated between 3,000 and 2,500 years ago – this is the Iron II period, from 1000 to 586 BCE, between the time of Solomon and the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon – what names would you find? The vast majority of those names carved into stones and pottery are names that end with YHU or YH’L these are Hebrew names for G-d: names like Yishayahu/Isaiah, Uriah and Or Samuel, respectively. (Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 134, No. 4, October-December 2014; pp. 621-642) The stones speak the names of tribes that never willingly gave up their land to their conquerors.

The Judeans also did not cede land to the Romans. When Omar ibn Khattab conquered Jerusalem from the Romans in 638, he did not establish a treaty with the Jews, he did not trade high-value consumer durables for the land. He conquered it and, in 717, less than 100 years later, his successor Omar II forbade the Jews from praying in Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, a policy that was to last through Muslim rule of Jerusalem.

When Omar conquered, he brought Arabic into Israel for the first time. Hebrew inscriptions in Israel were already 1,500 years old when Arabic first arrived in Israel with the conqueror’s sword. Compared to the thousands of Hebrew inscriptions from the time of Solomon, there is only one find of an ancient dialect of Arabic, likely from a traveler.

We Jews are not colonizers, we are the people from the unceded lands of Judah and Benjamin, Naftali and Ephraim, Dan and Zevulun. Our language has always been Hebrew.

Prof. Yeshayahu Gafni of Hebrew University notes that, if you want to read a letter written by a Jew 2,000 years ago, you need to know Hebrew. Jews have always spoken, read and written Hebrew. If you want to write a letter to those who will be your descendants 2,000 years from now, you should write it in Hebrew.

We Jews have to make sure there is no daylight between our identity now, and the identities of our ancestors whose graves and etchings can be found from Tel Dan to Be’er Sheva. We need to embrace our language. There is no reason not to know it; it is ours.

Furthermore, we need to know the story of who we are, of the land and the people in it. We need to know who is Yeshayahu, who is Yehoshaphat, and Yoav, and Chizkiyahu, and Uziyah, and Abigail, and Jezebel and Atalyah. And we need to know how an Ephrati pronounces Shibbolet. These names figure prominently in the story of our people and our land. We need to embody the identity that holds their story true.

When we carry that identity together, we do not allow them to call us imperialists and colonizers. We are the people of the unceded lands of Judah and Benjamin. We must embrace that identity.

Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt is senior rabbi at Congregation Schara Tzedeck. This article was originally published on the synagogue’s special Israel page at scharatzedeck.com.

Honouring others in death

There’s nothing like a tree stump to put things in context. I walk the dog in an area full of mature trees and wildlife. Tucked in a bend of a river, we’ve got a lot of trees here. However, this enormous tree had died. I contemplated its huge stump and growth bands. My impatient dog pulled me towards her usual routine, so I didn’t manage to count the rings to learn just how long it lived, but likely it has existed since long before settlers claimed this land.

One gift I’ve gained from living in Winnipeg, where more than 15% of our population is Indigenous, is a better connection to and respect for the earth and living things. In my urban daily walks with the dog, I’ve seen woodpeckers, ducks, geese, hawks, deer, fox, and more. I’m filled with awe by the wild natural world around us and the contexts offered by Canada’s First Peoples.

However, I’ve also seen the traumas played out through what Canada has done to its Indigenous population. There are unhoused people nearby, living in camps along the riverbank in all kinds of weather. On a warm day, I saw a woman on the ground. I thought she was sleeping and went on my way. Then I struggled, wondering if I should have called for help. Perhaps it was an overdose or something worse. At the time, I promised myself that if she were still there when I returned, I would call for help. The whole walk, I debated whether it was better to involve police or not. Indigenous Canadians aren’t always treated fairly by law enforcement. She was gone by the time I returned. I felt relief because I hadn’t been forced to make a decision. Would sleeping on the ground in an area that was her people’s ancestral land result in an arrest or accusation of criminal behaviour?

This situation, of not being sure if a call to the police was safe, came to mind when hearing the latest news reports regarding the deaths of four women in Winnipeg. These women’s remains were left in multiple garbage bins in May 2022, according to police reports. Some of these dumpsters were sent to Prairie Green landfill on May 16. Jeremy Skibicki is accused of killing these Indigenous women: Rebecca Contois, Morgan Harris, Marcedes Myran and a fourth woman, unidentified, who Indigenous leaders have named Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or Buffalo Woman.

Some of Contois’s remains were found at Winnipeg’s Brady Road landfill in June 2022; her remains were in at least two dumpsters, one of which was spotted before being picked up by the dump truck. The police didn’t find the other women’s remains and declined to do a search for them, saying it would be dangerous and expensive. They have arrested the man they think committed the crimes and said they didn’t need to find the bodies to press charges. Public outcry, along with the families’ voices, forced the government to do a feasibility study regarding a search of the Prairie Green landfill, which has now been released. It says it could take up to three years and $184 million to search for their remains.

Like many Manitobans, I was horrified by how this has unfolded. The idea that these women’s bodies should remain in the trash rather than have a proper, culturally sensitive burial, is abhorrent. I couldn’t imagine why anyone needed a feasibility study to determine that their remains should be found as soon as possible. I, like many others, couldn’t understand why a search didn’t commence immediately in June 2022. I wouldn’t be alone in saying that it seems as though the decision to not recover the bodies promptly seemed inherently flawed and racist.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a new situation. Jewish tradition is rich with historic detail. The Babylonian Talmud, codified by about 500 CE, has already described what to do about it. Even a kohain (priest), who normally must avoid the dead to avoid becoming “defiled” (unable to do Temple sacrifice, during the days when there was a Temple in Jerusalem) is commanded in the Talmud to bury any dead person he finds abandoned on a road. This is called a meit mitzvah. Today, it’s considered a special and important mitzvah (commandment) for all Jews to uphold: if we discover a dead person with no next of kin, we must do the right thing. We must tend to that dead person with respect and bury them properly.

In the Babylonian Talmud Tractate Sotah, on page 45b, we learn that we’re responsible for burying bodies that we find. We must find body parts and bury them together. There’s a rabbinic discussion about what the proper rituals and procedures are “if he was strangled and left in a garbage heap.”

Walking by that enormous tree stump with its yearly growth rings reminds me that we have only a set time here on earth to do the right thing. Jewish tradition teaches us to be upstanding while we’re here. The families who lost their loved ones in these awful crimes deserve to have their rituals around death observed. These include a proper burial and send off of their loved ones’ spirits. Deuteronomy 16:20 reminds us “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” That sometimes requires us to dig at a landfill, i.e. a modern-day garbage heap, to pursue it.

It’s sometimes expensive and hard to do the right thing. It’s even more expensive and harder to correct an error like this one, when someone believes certain bodies on a trash heap are somehow less valuable or important. The police force took an unacceptable approach – to stall, and then find excuses for why we shouldn’t treat every person equally, and value every life taken.

Joanne Seiff has written regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. Check her out on Instagram @yrnspinner or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.

Racism is a Jewish issue

On June 4, New Brunswick resident Chantel Moore, originally from the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation near Tofino, B.C., was shot to death by a police officer sent to her home to check on her well-being. On May 27, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, an indigenous-black woman, fell 24 floors from her apartment during a police incident in Toronto.

In the United States, George Floyd died on May 25, after being pinned to the ground with a knee pressed into his neck for more than eight minutes by a police officer in Minneapolis. Breonna Taylor was killed March 13 in her bed in Louisville, Ky., in what amounts to a home invasion by police. Ahmaud Arbery was chased by three armed white neighbours and murdered on Feb. 23, while he was jogging in Georgia.

The challenge in compiling a list of names of black Americans and indigenous and racialized Canadians killed by police or lynched by vigilantes is choosing which from a horrifically long list of victims’ names to include. And the structural conditions that have led to this particular moment of upheaval are not new. Similar demonstrations have occurred after particularly egregious incidents, like the killing of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014; Trayvon Martin, who was murdered in 2012 by a cop-wannabe; and the beating of Rodney King by police in Los Angeles in 1991. Again, the list of just the most familiar incidents could fill pages. And they are not limited to the United States.

Could this time be different? One thing that some Black Lives Matter proponents are noting is the apparently unprecedented engagement of non-black allies in this moment. Is this because we all have more time on our hands right now? Or have we reached a tipping point, when the lofty language of equality has finally penetrated deep into the mainstream of North American society?

There are parallel streams happening, from the issue of police violence to the broader matter of societal behaviour toward racialized people. These are exacerbated by the unpardonable conduct of the U.S. president. When Trayvon Martin was killed, then-president Barack Obama noted that, if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon. The current president tweets threats of violence and has police forcibly clear peaceful demonstrators so he can have a photo taken in front of a church he has never entered. In a country aflame, the president’s comportment is incendiary and perilous.

This is a time for our community, the Jewish community, to consider our complacency and complicity in upholding racist systems. It is, as American historian and author Ibram X. Kendi implores, not enough to be not racist. We must be actively anti-racist. We must stand in solidarity with those who are suffering and recognize that the pain of racism is also the pain of antisemitism.

The solidarity and support we crave when we are threatened is the solidarity and support we must give other communities when they are in need. Give your time to an anti-racism organization. Donate your money to support black-owned businesses and organizations working to support the black community. Pray for the healing that is so badly needed in our society. March for equality and justice (in a safe manner). Stand up when you see injustice or hear a “casually” racist remark. Sign your name to a petition asking decision-makers to step up and rein in the militarization of policing and the funding that gets diverted from community into the over-policing of racialized communities.

Interrogate Canada’s colonial history and the lived realities of indigenous communities. Ask our educators to explore with their students global histories and the untold stories of millions, including richer views of Jewish history and the experiences and contributions of Jews who are not of European descent. Read a work of fiction by a black or indigenous author. Learn about how black culture forms the bedrock of North American culture and from where those art forms come. Explore the history of the black community here in Vancouver and how the early Jewish community, along with other minorities, together have called Strathcona home.

Absorb the teachings of Abraham Joshua Heschel, who referenced the calls of the Hebrew prophets in the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s and who marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for justice. If you’re already doing all of these things, share your knowledge and example with your family, your synagogue and the organizations and schools you support.

Some Jewish observers have expressed reservations about the Black Lives Matter movement, at least partly because the umbrella organization endorses the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. This is an unfortunate and misguided move on their part, especially since BDS harms Palestinians in addition to Israelis. But the issue of black people – and people of colour in Canada and elsewhere – being murdered by police or lynched by racists must take precedence now. We can argue over Israel and Palestine later.

If one feels the need to prioritize Jewish or Israeli concerns at this moment, then let’s prioritize the safety of black Jews and Jews of colour. The vast majority of Jews are morally affected by what is happening in our society and black Jews are immediately and personally impacted both by what is happening in the world and by what is happening in our community around this issue.

Let us not pretend that this is not a “Jewish issue.” Rather, let us live by what is referred to as one of the “eternal religious obligations” of Judaism: “Justice, justice you shall pursue.”