The Globe and Mail has sought out columns from thought leaders in Western Canada, people whose influence is shaping debate, but whose names may not be widely recognized.
I write this from a little cedar cabin on the northern tip of Haida Gwaii, where I am a visitor for a couple of weeks. At some point on the road here, the elliptical swoop of electric lines gives way to a tunnel of old trees bearded with moss. It is almost as if the trees guard the cabin from the influences of electricity. I am prepared, having charged my laptop at the co-op in the village of Massett. Sixty-seven per cent of its lithium-ion battery life is mine to use or squander.
Here, by the Naikoon Provincial Park, the bogs of the Argonaut Plain, and a large Pacific coast, the question that constantly recurs is this: Must we choose between nature and culture?
As an arts producer, I have had this question marinating in my head ever since making Vancouver my home five years ago. It is among the most beautiful cities in the world, and yet it achieves this by not being a city. It is most certainly not Vancouver's architecture that gives this city its particular charm, but the way in which Vancouver has enfolded, or been enfolded, by nature. This is rare for me, coming from India, where cities are swirling, pulsing, baffling things driven by millions of human engines. Being able to walk out of my home on Main Street, step into a kayak and paddle out into English Bay, where a 1,000-acre temperate rain forest acts as the city's bookend, is nothing short of miraculous.
It is also the city in which I have felt most culturally cut off from the rest of the world. It's almost as if this is the price of being surrounded by so much natural beauty. Apparently, it isn't my relative newness to the city that is the cause of this feeling – it is a sentiment echoed by so many of my friends in the arts (many of them Vancouverites for several generations). It's not uncommon to hear statements such as, "We're brought up to feel that exciting things only happen in other cities," or, "You need to make it big in New York or London before Vancouver notices you," or, "We're still searching for our cultural identity."
Vancouver (and this seems to apply to the rest of B.C. as well) doesn't see itself as being part of a global conversation. And the vicious cycle of conversations is that when you don't speak up, you're left out of them. And yet, the world is contained within Vancouver – one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse cities on Earth. With such a richness of cultures, surely Vancouver must have tentacles around the world, feeding cultural impulses both ways?
This time in Haida Gwaii has been an education and a time of reflection for me. These islands have reminded me that stories and art have been in B.C. for many thousands of years, growing with and bridging the natural and imaginary worlds. Our cultural confidence, in my view, must not come from trying to recreate multiple nostalgic pasts or mimic cultural big brothers. Instead, I hope that as a society, we can tap into the enormous stream we currently ignore to put forth something new. For this we will need to be humble yet brave, respectful yet unsentimental. We will need to educate ourselves about what has gone many centuries before us and about the many cultures that surround us today. We will need to bridge cultures and disciplines. If we can use our proximity and connection to the natural world, and the many, many narratives that run beneath our amnesiac surface, I think that we might be able to emerge as a society of distinctive storytellers. And then perhaps we will not need to choose between those two life-affirming sources – nature and culture.
Sirish Rao is the artistic director of Vancouver's Indian Summer Festival. ISF is an annual festival of the arts and ideas, bringing top-calibre writers, artists and musicians from South Asia and Canada together on stage. A former publisher, Mr. Rao is also a writer whose books have been published in 17 languages around the world.