Good Sunday Morning!
Hoping to see some of my Sunday readers at today’s Victoria Pride parade! Meet MLA Rob Botterell and me at the marshaling spot on Chatham Street between Douglas and Government at 10 am. And afterwards, I rush off to serve strawberries at the annual Saanich Strawberry Festival at Beaver Lake Park.
I had a grand time with Alberta Greens over the weekend at the Calgary Stampede. I am often asked to defend my decision to attend the Stampede. As Greens, we do not support the events that involve animal cruelty, so I do not go to any rodeo events. But Stampede is a national political event. As Naheed Nenshi once quipped when he was Calgary mayor, “Welcome to the politicians petting zoo!” This year, the Prime Minister attended and of course Poilievre, but I was the only other party leader in attendance. Even the small media notes remind people we exist and are a viable option to the increasing focus on Canada as a two-party system.
When at Stampede, I focus on the parade and meeting people milling about. I was joined by Deputy Leader Rainbow Eyes who has attended since she was a kid with her family. There is a little-known bond between First Nations and Stampede. For many Indigenous people, annual community rodeos are part of local culture. But a few years ago, I was surprised to learn that the Stampede founders in the late 1880s and particularly in 1912–the first really large effort at a Calgary Stampede–had to wage a real battle with the federal government to embrace Indigenous participation. Stampede founder, an American trick rider named Guy Weadick, invited Treaty 7 nations to Calgary to be fully part of the events and camp at the bend in the Elbow River. The Indian Act made it illegal for Indigenous people to leave their reserves and illegal to practice traditional ceremony. Weadick took it to the Governor General and gained political support in Ottawa from future Prime Minister R. B. Bennett. The Stampede created a safe zone of ten days when the federal Indian Agents were held at bay. If not for the political strings Weadick pulled, the routine raids by Indian Agents that occurred throughout BC when potlaches were routinely raided and Indigenous hereditary chiefs, spiritual leaders, and elders were arrested and their regalia stolen, would have been the inevitable fate of Treaty 7 peoples accepting the invitation to Calgary Stampede. It may seem an oddity that this cowboy extravaganza ended up being a defender of Indigenous rights to hold pow wows and ceremony- as part of the annual Calgary Stampede. The culture of relationship between horse and rider, and the job of a working cowboy, one my husband knows so well as one of those whose job it was to be on a saddle horse, all day, moving thousands of cattle throughout the year, was a life shared by many Indigenous cowboys. I so want him to write a book about his life in the 1960s, living without electricity or plumbing or any other modern comforts–a life essentially unchanged from that of cowboys in the 1800s.
John Kidder here! Elizabeth writes here about the interlocks among the Calgary Stampede and Indigenous peoples of the prairies. In the interior of BC, the connections between rodeo and the first people are just as strong.
Horses, feral escapes and their millions of descendants from the originals brought by the Spanish to the Americas in the 1500s, first got to the BC interior somewhere around the early 1800s – the Nez Percés of what is now Washington State were famous horse people – the spotted Appaloosa horse was from their Palouse country. By the 1820s, horses were well known in southern BC, and made their way to the Chilcotin before 1840. They are marvellously useful animals, of course, and became essential tools for riding and packing and hauling in a traditional life that was still pretty much nomadic, roaming around the country with the seasons.
When I started cowboying in 1967 at Douglas Lake in the Nicola Valley, i got to know a lot of native guys. I was a kid from Labrador, and I didn’t know from nothing. Luckily guys my age from Spahomin reserve like my long-time partner Scotty Holmes and Les MacDonald and Jake Coutlee , the best cowman I ever knew, let alone the famous cowboy elders like Old Joe Coutlee, Jake’s father – they always knew more than me about horses and cows and open country and timber and of course about the ways of the people who had always lived there. This is from “Colliers and Cowboys”, a 2013 SFU Liberal Studies Master’s thesis by Michael Sasges:
“The Nicola Valley’s aboriginal households lived by the annual cycle. When moving their animals, and the animals of others, between ranges and when managing those ranges, as the seasons demanded and permitted, Syilx (“Okanagan”) and Nlaka’pamax (“Thompson”) people were moving vertically, as they had since time out of mind. Theirs was the Douglas Lake Cattle Co. cycle: “Turnout from the winter feeding grounds to the spring ranges of open bunchgrass commences in mid-March and continues through April, with the cattle being moved higher as spring reaches the upper elevation.” Their annual cycle, however, no longer started and ended in valley-bottom pit houses, but in framed or log homes in settlements like Shulus, on the right bank of the Nicola River a few kilometres below the confluence of the Nicola and Coldwater rivers.”
Nothing much had changed by 1967. We lived in cow camps most of the year – in our spring calving camp at the Morton, low down in the valley, we used a cabin built around 1880 by Joseph Beak, an original homesteader, still in use in the ’60s, 80 years after he built it. It’s still there, still in use, 140 years old, now with a heritage plaque outside. Of course, no power, no water, wood the only fuel, no radio – as Elizabeth says, no real change from 1880 except for pickup trucks to go the Home Ranch or to town. A few years later, an economics prof described to a class the terrible conditions in what was then called the “developing world” – no power, no water, wood or dung the only fuel – didn’t seem like privation to me at the time, just like life.
The Morton camp was right next to the Chillihitzia Field on the reserve. Named for Chief Chillihitzia , famous as the 19th century Nicola valley negotiator and peacemaker, great-grandfather of Sophie Chillihitzia who was our camp cook and a good friend for years. The Chilllihitzia field was about 15,000 acres of open, rolling, sometimes broken land with a few small lakes and maybe two thousand feet of elevation drop from the high point down to Nicola Lake.It has a permanent population of a few hundred horses, some broke to ride, many just out there being horses. Once a year, luckily while we were still camped at the Morton, we would get to be part of a great horse gather – there is truly nothing to compare with running flat out chasing a couple of hundred horses across rough ground, steep sidehills and scree slopes, jumping the occasional downed cottonwood in the valley bottom, whooping and hollering like the best cowboy movies until the horses were run into the big corral by the reserve rodeo arena. The tame horses were roped and taken out by their owners, the most promising of the wild ones horses would be bucked out to see which ones bucked best and they were kept in for the rodeo The rest were turned loose again, to head back for the open country, running at great speed, bucking, jumping and side-stepping, so pleased to be out of there.
The reserve rodeo competitions were just the original rodeo events – saddle bronc riding and team roping – actual cowboy work – all the nonsense with riding bulls and riding around barrels and roping little tiny calves and racing chuckwagons came much later when local farm competitions morphed into professional sport. The rodeo at Spahomin was as down and local as you could get – horses from the hills around, riders and ropers from nearby reserves and ranches – riding unbroken broncs and team roping two-year old steers. Hardly ever hurt an animal. Often drove into the dirt or banged hell out of or broke bones of or stomped all over or smashed into fences the various native and white cowboys. Indigenous and settler-culture agricultural workers, in the modern parlance. Just a fine time had by all, not much drinking, hardly ever any fights, and then a big party at the reserve hall with tons of food and stories and maybe a bit more drinking and maybe a dustup or two, all just as friendly as could be.
From our cow camps, we went to the rodeos at Falkland, Vernon, Kelowna, Ashcroft, Kamloops, Merritt. Always camped out near the rodeo grounds for at least a couple of days with other white and native cowboys and indigenous families from around and about. Those rodeos were an essential part of binding the settlers and the first peoples together – a shared common experience, so unlike the rest of our colonial relationships. When priests and cops, no friends of either cowboys or Indians, tried to ban indigenous people from local rodeos in Alberta, we got the Calgary Stampede. In BC, I don’t think anyone ever tried. They’ve always been joint cultural events at the very base of the rural community.
In the 1970s, I spent a lot of time doing range surveys farther north and west in the Cariboo and Chilcotin – made most of the little local rodeos at Riske Creek, Big Creek, Alkali Lake, the Deer Ranch, the big pro show at the Williams Lake Stampede, and my favourite of all, the Anahim Lake Stampede way out in the west Chilcotin (famous cow riding event at Anahim – in the pissed-off bovine category, an angry cow beats your average bull down to the ground).
Local events here too, with traditional competitions. Except for one invented by writer and Liberal MP Paul St. Pierre (if you want to get more about this culture, read St. Pierre’s “Breaking Smith’s Quarter Horse” or “Chilcotin Tales”). He created “the Chilcotin Gate Race”. Contestants were a man and woman, generally partnersany age, any race. The husband drove the pickup into the arena, the wife beside him. The race course was simple – three gates. First, a pole gate of the familiar Cariboo type – dragging on the ground, poles ready to come out of sockets and fall to pieces. Second, a “slipwire” gate or barbed wire, held in place between posts by putting one end into a wire loop at the base of the post and then “slipping” another loop of wire over the top to hold it in place – slipwires are always either too tight, and they spring suddenly back when loosened and are nearly impossible to stretch out again, or too loose, and they collapse into a muddle of tangled barbed wire (nothing tangles and ties itself together like barbed wire). Third, a board gate, always made of lumber too twisted to use in anything else, always weighing hundreds of pounds, and always dragging so deep in the dirt that it is almost impossible to move in any direction. All the gates are closed. The husband drives the truck up to the first gate. The wife gets out, opens to gate to varying degrees of difficulty as described above, the husband drives through, the wife closes it with generally even more difficulties too much laughter and cheering, then she gets back in the truck, the man drives to the next gate, etc. If the guy is into it, he often makes a little show as he sits comfortably in the truck of rolling a smoke while his partner struggles with poles and wires and boards. A great event, and like bronc riding and team roping, coming right from real life. It will never make it to the Calgary Stampede.
At these little rodeos back in the bush, and all over the Chilcotin and the Blackwater and the Anahim and Tatlayoko country a main mode of transport for the indigenous people was flatdeck rubber tired farm wagons drawn by one or two horses. You’d come across them everywhere, miles from reserves or habitation – a couple of saddle horses tied behind to go on a hunt, piled with saws and axes and gear for firewood or fence rails, maybe a mower and a rake and bales or sometimes loose hay cut from the enormous Chilcotin meadows – and always kids, always the kids. Just plodding along at a walk for all those miles. And at the rodeo grounds, always a big campsite with fires large and small, families and friends, Indian and white, just living in the country.
Much of this is gone now – the roads are better so trucks can get where only horses could before, the communities are plugged into televisions and the internet so truly local stuff just gets lost in the attention economy, there are far fewer working ranches and working cowboys, and the people on the back country reserves are no longer back country people. Now, we’re all part of the great homogenized mass of consumers. Local rodeos are dying, spectacles like Calgary are bringing what is now called rodeo to people who, like me when I first went into that wonderful world, didn’t know which side of a horse to get on or which end of a cow gets up first. When I get back up into that country, I feel profoundly at home, with the people who have been living there for fifteen thousand years or so. My country, my people.
Local rodeo is what has tied these communities together for a century or so. Sad to see it go. Now back to Elizabeth!
As Green leader it is important to connect in person, as often as I can, with local Green Party volunteers and friends across Canada. One of whom, Doug Gook, is gearing up as the Green candidate in the Battle River-Crowfoot by-election especially created so the defeated MP from Carleton, Pierre Poilievre, can be back in Parliament. With the by-election now called, Carney is helping Poilievre to be back in the House by the opening day of the fall session September 15. Recently Doug ran in the same riding in the general election. It would be a stretch to say Doug achieved a lot of name recognition. Still, there is no doubt he has spent more time in Battle River-Crowfoot than has Pierre Poilievre who remains resident in the finest public housing anywhere in Canada–Stornaway!
As Trump’s new big, beautiful baloney budget bill gets its inevitable victory, former US President Biden’s moves for climate action in the Inflation Reduction Act will be swept away. As I write “swept away” another image come to mind, all those campers, including children, on the river banks in Texas.
Climate crisis conditions do not seem to register with some local authorities, whether in US or Canada. Despite the cutbacks Trump has made to the US weather service, they were warned. Yet local officials expressed shock. “We knew there were warnings, but who could imagine anything like what we saw? It was unprecedented!” All those lives so avoidably lost as so many hold tight to denial.
I am often asked what hope there is when it seems Canada is backing away from climate action with Carney canceling the consumer carbon pricing system and floating trial balloons on giving up on EV goals. We need to raise our voices and push back. The good news may be in the extent to which the world is moving past fossil fuels based on the economics of very cheap renewables. This article from the Globe and Mail, coming from a place of economics only, seemed to be worth sharing:
Trump’s green-bashing is precisely why it’s a good time to buy green
John Rapley is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. He is an author and academic whose books include Why Empires Fall and Twilight of the Money Gods.
“This is a full-on legislative assault on wind and solar,” said one energy analyst of Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” Since the U.S. President returned to the White House, the assault on everything ESG has gone full bore.
Companies are abandoning their climate pledges, cancelling investment plans and knocking down the share prices of companies in the renewable-energy sector, pushing the global index of clean-energy companies down to its lowest level in five years. Meanwhile, here in Canada. Prime Minister Mark Carney appears to have abandoned his concern about climate change and fallen in with the oil and gas industry.
All of which makes this a good time to buy green. When you live so close to Washington it can feel like it sets the world’s agenda, but on the energy transition, it doesn’t. All Mr. Trump’s anti-renewable backlash is doing is handicapping the United States in a race with China. In the wider world, the energy transition proceeds apace, and the reduction in the price of assets and products, thanks to Mr. Trump’s Luddism, creates a golden opportunity for both investors and consumers.
If you ignore the noise and look at the activity, you see that the green train keeps rolling. Largely overlooked in the reporting of Germany’s huge expansion in defence and infrastructure spending was that in return for its support, the Green Party secured a ring-fenced commitment that €100-billion ($160-billion) would go into renewable-energy investments. This is less idealism than good economics. One of Europe’s best-performing economies has been Spain, and a key reason for that has been that it has much cheaper energy. Why? Because unlike Germany, whose energy costs soared when Russian gas supply was cut off, Spain produces most of its electricity with renewables, and is looking to further expand the sector.
You see the same thing across much of the developing world, and especially in Asia. The availability of cheap Chinese solar panels is leading countries to aggressively
adopt renewable energy even without government guidance. By localizing energy supply, businesses and consumers can free themselves from the vagaries of global energy markets they can’t control, providing themselves with endless cheap power.
Carney tells energy leaders how infrastructure projects in national interest will be assessed
The same goes for transportation technology. You wouldn’t know it if you look at American or, for that matter, Canadian roads, but electric vehicles are sweeping the world. The Chinese manufacturer BYD has invented a supercharger that fills a battery in five minutes, about the time it takes to gas up a car. Meanwhile, a South African company is pioneering a network of recharging stations powered entirely by solar microgrids, which will enable the country to eliminate fuel imports and travel on endless cheap energy. Following a brief fall in EV sales in 2024 that led some analysts to say their popularity had peaked, sales leapt back up this year, reflecting the obvious advantages of this new technology.
In fact, the principal effect of Mr. Trump’s policy will be to handicap American producers in the race to keep up with new entrants in both this fast-growing sector, and possibly put the country behind China in artificial intelligence as well. AI demands enormous amounts of energy, and the cheapest energy is now renewable, which is why renewable-energy installation is outpacing carbon-intensive energy even in the U.S.
The U.S. government expects natural-gas-fired electricity production to fall 3 per cent this year, but solar generation to increase by 34 per cent. Even in Republican-run Texas, efforts to reverse the renewable-energy push have failed, because it is providing lowest-cost power. Mr. Trump’s bill will now further raise U.S. energy costs.
Mr. Trump’s national self-harming policies create a window of opportunity for Canada. Even if it’s too late to compete with China in the production of solar panels or EVs, there will be countless opportunities in this fast-growing sector, including such things as grid management, storage and the integration of AI. Most of the jobs created in the renewable-energy sector are not in manufacturing but in services further up the supply chain, such as installation, deployment and maintenance.
Moreover, there will be lots of dynamic American startups looking for new homes, which Canada should welcome with open arms. Add to this the potential growth in green finance, where recent research has revealed that countries with stricter environmental controls are those with the most developed green bond markets, and the possibilities multiply yet further.
And that renewable index Mr. Trump managed to knock for the eight-count? After plunging when he took office, it’s risen nearly 20 per cent. Meanwhile the index for oil and gas companies he’s so determined to bring roaring back to life has fallen nearly 10 per cent. Investors see what Donald Trump refuses to: No matter how loudly he screams “drill, baby, drill,” the world will just move on without him.”
Meanwhile the BC government, thanks to the agreement with BC Greens, is proceeding with hearings on getting rid of First Past the Post, I am not sure if I am going rogue here as it does not seem to be planned, but I think, whether we are allowed to speak or not, we should all show up at the Legislative hearings. Written briefs are due on July 25. But let’s show our support for fair voting and show up!
There are “presentations on democratic engagement, voter participation, and electoral reform” scheduled Monday, July 14 to Friday, July 18 (8:30am-6:00pm) at the Victoria Legislature (Douglas Fir Committee Room, Room 226).
Idle no more…for democracy, for climate, for our future. Any opportunity, any rally, any “moment”, let’s show up!
Much love,
Elizabeth
Saanich-Gulf Islands Greens
https://www.sgigreenparty.ca/