Jeff Huggins - Photo by Adam Huggins
Summary
Forever is a really long time. This episode is about death, and its transformative power on the landscape. It’s also the last episode of Season 1.
It may be trivial to remind you that death is an unavoidable part of life. However, death is an act that leaves ripples in life. Some may last for thousands of years.
You might expect us to talk about new sustainable burial technologies (See: Jae Rhim Lee & Katrina Spade), and honestly so did we. As we started working on it, we realized that we would rather let TED Talks handle that sort of thing. Instead, this episode takes a broad view through the lens of ritual, urban planning, and ecological entanglements, with a distinct focus on the Salish Sea.
It’s been a huge honour to bring you all of these stories over the past 5 months. This seemed like the most appropriate way to close out our first season. We can’t wait to bring you Season 2!
Show Notes
This episode features Jeff Huggins, Glen Hodges (Manager of Mountain View Cemetery), Paula Jardine (Artist and Co-Founder of the Night For All Souls), and Darcy Matthews (Funerary Archaeologist, Ethnoecologist, and Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria).
Special thanks to Bill Pechet, Amanda Cassidy, Lynne Werker, David Skulski, Riley Byrne, Nicole Jahraus, Conor Fanning, Cassy Allan, Ilana Fonariov, Eleanor Arkin, Andrew Philips, Maceo Quintanar, Hannah Carpendale, Blaine Doherty, Kevin Matheson, Sean Parker, June Moon, Andrzej Kozlowski, Erin Cadwell, Jaclyn Lim, Lauren Magner, Vincent Van Haaff, Schuyler Lindberg, Lindsay Kathrens, Michael Hathaway, Laryssa Gervan, Teresa Maddison, Spencer Stuart, Louise Gadd, Kieran Fanning, Sarah Sax, Zach Bergman, Kirsty Cameron, Michelle Haber, Jake Sigg, Jody Baker, Clare Wilkening, and Jacob Kalmakoff.
Music for this episode was produced by Cat Can Do, Radioactive Bishop, PORTBOU, Selkies, Zeellia, Calvin Cairns, and Sunfish Moonlight.
A lot of research goes into each episode of Future Ecologies, including great journalism from a variety of media outlets, and we like to cite our sources:
Bayliss, Graeme. “Dissolving the Dead.” The Walrus, 26 Mar. 2016, thewalrus.ca/dissolving-the-dead/.
Benesch, Chris. “Bio-Cremation.” Earth's Option Cremation & Burial Services, 12 June 2018, earthsoption.com/blogs/blog-entries/2/Bio-Cremation-Initiative/1/Bio-Cremation.html.
Doughty, Caitlin. From Here to Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2018.
Matthews, Darcy L. “Burial cairn taxonomy and the mortuary landscape of Rocky Point, British Columbia.” University of Victoria, 2006.
Matthews, Darcy L. “Funerary Ritual, Ancestral Presence, and the Rocky Point Ways of Death.” University of Victoria, 2014.
You can subscribe to and download Future Ecologies wherever you find podcasts - please share, rate, and review us. Our website is futureecologies.net. We’re also on Facebook, Instagram, iNaturalist, Soundcloud and Youtube. We’re an independent production, and you can support us on Patreon - our supporters have access to cool supporter-only mini-episodes and other perks.
Future Ecologies is recorded on the unceded territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil- Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.
This season of Future Ecologies is supported in part by the Vancouver Foundation. Learn more at https://vancouverfoundationsmallarts.ca/.
Photo by Luis Alvoeiro Quaresma
Transcript
Adam Huggins 00:01
All right, we're recording.
Jeff Huggins 00:03
Great.
Adam Huggins 00:03
But we burn as much tape as we as we want. There's really no...uhh.
Jeff Huggins 00:08
The digital world is infinite, huh?
Adam Huggins 00:11
More or less [laughs]...more or less. Unlike this one.
[Sound of chemotherapy device cycling]
Adam Huggins 00:17
So Dad, Um, I was wondering, why you chose to be cremated?
Jeff Huggins 00:29
Well, I think I've wanted to be cremated for a long time. Not that I wanted to rush it, [laughs] but that would be eventually the way. And I think it's because I like the idea of intermingling back with nature. I think of that as very peaceful and where I belong, rather than sort of trying to cling to my human shape, which as you can see, is not quite so handsome as it once was. [laughs]
[Sound of chemotherapy device cycling]
And so rather than wanting to cling to my human shape and spending all that time in a box, I thought if I were cremated and spread in a natural environment, that would be wonderful. Yeah.
[Wind chimes]
So, and in particular, as you know, one of my, perhaps my favorite environment is in or near the ocean. We all originated in the ocean. So, we crawled out of the ocean long ago and why not go back? [laughs]
Adam Huggins 01:47
Yeah.
[Wind chimes and sounds of waves, rushing water]
Jeff Huggins 01:49
So part of what I'm trying to do is, is be as natural as I can. I've already gone a little bit over that barrier because I'm taking lots of chemotherapy and so... but I want to try and be as natural as I can in my final weeks and days and stuff. What the Church says, If I understand correctly is that you should be buried. But uh...nature doesn't take a stand on that, nature certainly doesn't say 'hey, you need to be full of embalming fluids and spend eternity in a box.' And I think that if there, if there is some sort of supernatural being or force, then they would be more neutral or benevolent. So I can't imagine that, that any truly authentic power says, 'thou must be buried in a box.'
Jeff Huggins 02:56
[laughs] So I don't think I'm violating anything. Yeah. [more laughter]
Jeff Huggins 03:09
We made an appointment and the guy said, well, it'll be about an hour and a half, because we wanted to go through it soup to nuts, to understand the process, but also most of it, you might imagine, in these bureaucratic days involves the signing of paperwork and so forth and so on. So, Jared and I joked a little bit ahead of time, wondering if the, you know, wondering if the ambience and the gentleman himself would fit the stereotype of a, you know, mortician and mortuary and it turned out it pretty much did. [chuckle] The gentleman who was very kind and gentle and used all the right calming words, uh, had a big long, black beard.
Adam Huggins 03:55
Oh dear.
Jeff Huggins 03:56
Uh, and he certainly didn't have a tan or anything, I won't, I won't call him morbidly white. It's not as if he, you know, came out of the casket that morning.
Adam Huggins 04:06
[laughing]
Jeff Huggins 04:08
But he, he definitely fit the stereotype in most ways. It made me wonder—he's also in the family business of course. A lot of these things work this way. So his grandfather had founded it and his father had run it and now he is taking it over. It made me wonder a little bit—I know this seems closed minded and silly, but it just, it made me wonder a little bit about his social life.
Adam Huggins 04:36
[laughing] I bet he is the life of the party.
Jeff Huggins 04:39
We joked about this afterwards. We were thinking of asking him if he had ever seen the movie Soylent Green, but neither of us could quite [laughs] get that up. And we spent a whole lot of our time, of you know him making sure he described it because I guess, you know, the client, which is me, has to understand it and sign that I've understood it. You know, he can't do anything with my body unless I've signed, you know all the right paperwork and stuff like that. Much of which is for the death certificate which you need these days to, to, uh...y'know...
Adam Huggins 05:15
...to prove that you're dead.
Jeff Huggins 05:16
To prove that you're dead! [both laughing] Or at least somebody else needs it to prove that you're dead. [both laughing] The proof is out of my hands anymore. [both laughing]
Jeff Huggins 05:27
Before you put me into the furnace, make sure a medical professional [both laughing] has actually confirmed that I am dead [laughing] 'cause I'd appreciate not being burned alive! [both chuckling] So since we actually do have a very beautiful, wonderful urn, which is very lovely. I chose the, the simplest approach there you know, because the mortuary has all sorts of urns that you can buy, decorative urns and stuff like that. And out he brings this thing, it looks like a...a garbage can [laughs] that you would have in the study, and as soon as he pulled it out, he still wanted to make us comfortable with it so he said, 'oh, well, I know it's not that aesthetic, but it's very functional.' [Adam laughing] 'Look, it's easy to pour,' he said, [both giggling] And he showed us how you could pour from it. [laughing]
Jeff Huggins 06:24
You know, the end result is that they, they give you, they give my ashes in a box to you and Jared, and then you can spread them as you see fit. Now, it's not quite that simple. Because it turns out in our society, there are all sorts of, you know, norms and regulations. You're not supposed to have your ashes spread here or there, or over here or over there. Or, you know, at the coast unless it's a certain distance off the coast and all this type of stuff. But the guy without 'literally' winking, he let it be known that basically what really happens is that they hand my ashes off to you. And then I'm in your hands. [sound of tape reel] But I did do a calculation when I was thinking about this, I think I may have mentioned this to you before, but I'll repeat it here. If you compare the number of gallons of water in all the oceans, in fact in all the earth, so, the oceans plus the rivers and lakes and the atmosphere, the gallons of water, to the number of atoms in the human body, there are many, many, many more atoms in the human body, than there are gallons. So in some super long term sense, you can think of, you know, if you are cremated and ultimately end up in the ocean, then in some super long term sense, you can think that your atoms, you know, at least one or two atoms may be present in almost every single gallon of water. You know?
Adam Huggins 08:00
Right. You're like a homeopathic remedy for the planet.
Jeff Huggins 08:04
[laughs] I don't know if I'd call myself a remedy, but at least I'll be present. You know, it allows me to think that hey, Adam, hey, Jared, whenever you go swimming in the ocean, I may be nearby. Now I'm not sure that that's a pleasant thought for you to think. [both laughing]
[Acoustic guitar melody, melancholic singing]
Adam Huggins 10:33
My dad, Jeff Huggins, passed away on May 7th of this year in the sunlit backyard, surrounded by the garden that we had grown together. We spread his ashes in Point Reyes in Pacific Grove in the ocean, off the coast of California. I live surrounded by the ocean now, on a little island off the coast of British Columbia. It might be a few years before the currents truly disperse my dad around the world, or this far North up the coast, but the thought comforts me when I stand by the ocean.
[Sound of wind chimes accompany the melancholic guitar melody, then both slowly fade out]
Adam Huggins 11:23
This is Future Ecologies. I'm Adam Huggins.
Mendel Skulski 11:26
And I'm Mendel Skulski.
Soundscape 11:27
[sound of gentle wind chimes]
Mendel Skulski 11:33
Almost as soon as we started talking about making this podcast, we knew we would end our first season with this episode. We've gone on a journey from Guatemala through Mexico, all over California, up to Washington and the Olympic Peninsula, the Gulf islands and back to our home in the Southwest corner of the land, commonly known as 'Canada.'
Adam Huggins 11:54
For those of you who've made it this far, thanks for joining us.
Mendel Skulski 11:58
We've done a lot of talking about the land. And how we relate to it. Now, it's time to talk about how we become part of it.
Adam Huggins 12:07
Everything that lives will someday die, and through death, is recycled into new life. Death and reproduction are twin agents of change, renewing our exquisite, diverse jewel of a planet. And how we treat our dead, affects not just ourselves, but the ecosystems around us. Though most of us don't perceive it on a daily basis, we live in funerary landscapes—landscapes shaped and influenced by the deaths of humans and nonhumans alike through the millennia.
Mendel Skulski 12:38
Death touches the lives of each of us. With it comes the sorrow of finality. Of knowing that all of a person's stories have been written. To cope with this sorrow, a huge range of funerary practices have evolved around the world. We don't have time to even begin to talk about all of them. So, we decided to focus on where we live. I went to Mountain View Cemetery, the only cemetery within Vancouver city limits. That's where I met Glen.
Glen Hodges 13:11
My name is Glen Hodges, and I'm the manager of Mountain View cemetery for the City of Vancouver.
Mendel Skulski 13:16
Glen brought me up to speed on the grave history of Mountain View.
Adam Huggins 13:21
[chuckles] Oh no...
Mendel Skulski 13:22
In 1986, exactly 100 years after it opened, Mountain View had run out of space for Vancouver's dead. They had to close the sale of new burial plots, although still reserving some for indigent burials, that is, subsidized interment for those too impoverished to afford their own funeral rites. The last of these indigent burial plots was filled in 1997.
Glen Hodges 13:46
Our cemetery is the only one in the municipality of Vancouver. So if you lived here, were born in Vancouver, lived your whole life here and died after 1986 and didn't have a spot here, you had to leave the city. So you were then going out to one of the surrounding municipalities, so one of the two or three private cemeteries of Burnaby, or maybe into the North Shore or even further out into the Fraser Valley. So folks are sort of forced with, you know if, you know, the closest you could get for casket burial for your loved one to be buried was a pretty long commute or, you know, a tough transit ride to get there, which is not convenient for folks. So yeah, you were kicked out of the city when you died if you didn't have space here.
Adam Huggins 14:29
Luckily, these days Mountain View cemetery is accepting new applicants.
Glen Hodges 14:32
They went through a period in the late 90s where they were thinking there might be potential to reopen and reactivate the cemetery. And so I came out here and took this opportunity in June of 2002, at which point we started working on the planning to start to get the construction, to actually eventually reopen again in December of 2008.
Adam Huggins 14:53
Smack dab in the geographic center of Vancouver, with 106 acres at play. Glen made it his mission to reimagine just what a cemetery could be.
Glen Hodges 15:02
And then part of reopening the cemetery in Vancouver was also trying to reestablish its role within the broader community as not just a place for the dead but more of a place for the living. So we've tried to get involved with some different events and different things going on and create some interest, so people feel—have a reason to maybe come to the cemetery other than a funeral; establish a bit of a relationship with the cemetery in terms of its community. So that when they are faced with that eventuality, it's, it's a place they're more comfortable with and not afraid of. So, those things are starting to change a little bit.
Adam Huggins 15:36
Mountain View is becoming more than simply a final resting place.
Glen Hodges 15:39
We're doing a whole bunch of other things with trees and planting beds and flowers and, we've got bees on the roof of our operations building or planting meadows to support pollinators and now we've got bird watchers in here, so the new trees we've planted are species specific to encourage that kind of habitat. So it's ah, oh, and, on the side, we still, you know, provide places for burial and commemoration. [chuckles] So it almost seems like the, the main utilitarian aspect of it is almost becoming a, you know, a part of what we do.
Mendel Skulski 16:14
Bees, birdwatchers, gardening, and, oh yeah, I guess you can have a funeral here too.
Glen Hodges 16:21
We have a photographer in residence, an artist in residence, a composer in residence. So they're all contributing in different ways to help that out. And so really trying to challenge and question you know, the sort of history of what we have and how that's going to affect and impact the cemetery moving forward.
Adam Huggins 16:40
I actually have to say I really do like hanging out in Mountain View Cemetery when I'm in Vancouver. I've always lived somewhere near it, and it's the nicest biggest park around; one of the few places in Vancouver where I feel like you can see the stars well.
Adam Huggins 16:57
Interestingly, Vancouver has an especially high rate of cremation. Of the 10,000 or so deaths expected in Greater Vancouver this year, about 8,000 will be cremations. Back when Mountain View closed in 1986, over 70% of deaths would get a casket burial. Today, we lead North America in cremations at a rate of about 80 to 90%. You, like us might be wondering 'why'?
Glen Hodges 17:23
You know, that's the million dollar question nobody knows the answer to. The only—my own personal sort of thing is, again, that sort of West Coast, you know, the attraction to the mountains, the ocean, the strong sense of environment that people have had here for decades. And a reaction to sort of the maybe the corporatization or the sense of corporatization of funeral service in the 60s I think, and that hippie influence maybe in Vancouver that we've felt a little bit stronger sort of made people withdraw or look for something else than the traditional funeral. So people just sort of went away from cemeteries, went off to this notion of simple, just cremate, and I'm going to scatter them in the ocean or in the river or up on some hiking trail with all this natural beauty around that those hippie notions all sort of combined, and we decided that was a much better way.
Mendel Skulski 18:25
But, Glen sees a potential swing back from this cycle. For some folks, it may feel like a missed opportunity to not have a record or a commemoration to meditate on a loved one. If a person's remains have been scattered out in the world, where do you go to remember them?
Adam Huggins 18:42
I mean, I go to the ocean.
Mendel Skulski 18:44
So, unless you're like Adam and don't mind spending time in the freezing cold ocean, you might wish that you had a place to go and look up your grandparents, your distant ancestors, and for many people, that is the local cemetery.
Glen Hodges 18:59
Now with the internet and documents more easily available, people are starting to do a lot more research in genealogy. And where do you go when you start looking to find someone? You come to the cemetery. So they're coming back trying to look for these people and they're not finding any record of them, because they were cremated and never placed in a cemetery. And they can’t find these records. Now they're going, they're realizing, 'oh, my parents or my grandparents were cremated, and they aren't anywhere. And that's sort of sad. So maybe there is an importance to the cemetery.
Mendel Skulski 19:35
So when a person dies, their next of kin are faced with choices on choices. To bury? If so, do you embalm or go natural? Or do you cremate? But then, do you scatter? Or inter in a columbarium?
Adam Huggins 19:50
Which, is basically just a wall filled with rows of urns, right?
Mendel Skulski 19:53
[chuckle] Yeah, it's actually, uh, it has nothing to do with columns. It comes from the Latin word columba, which means dove. They were actually, originally in ancient Rome, repurposed dovecotes, or pigeonholes.
Adam Huggins 20:06
What...what is a pigeonhole?
Mendel Skulski 20:07
[laughs] Like, a place where you store your pigeons, you hole them up.
Adam Huggins 20:13
I don't, I don't have any.
Mendel Skulski 20:15
[both laughing] You got to get with the pigeons. [Adam laughing]
Mendel Skulski 20:18
You gotta get yourself a flock.
Adam Huggins 20:20
You would store your...your pigeon in a hole, in the wall?
Mendel Skulski 20:23
Yep.
Adam Huggins 20:24
And you can also store a person's ashes in a hole in the wall?
Mendel Skulski 20:29
[laughs] Yeah.
Adam Huggins 20:29
I got okay.
Mendel Skulski 20:30
[laughs] Yeah, that's it. Uhmm...
Adam Huggins 20:32
Yeah.
Mendel Skulski 20:33
Anyway, in some jurisdictions, there is another option for dealing with human remains: Alkaline Hydrolysis.
Glen Hodges 20:41
It involves a process of highly alkaline solution and heat.
Adam Huggins 20:47
That sounds...intimidating.
Mendel Skulski 20:49
Yeah, as of right now, it is not actually legal for funeral use in BC. But, it is in Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Quebec. It might be kind of a hard sell to tell people you're going to load their relative into a pressure vessel and dissolve them with water and lye for two to four hours.
Adam Huggins 21:08
That's, yeah, a little bit less romantic than cremation or burial. Although cremation is actually a pretty industrial process in and of itself, right, like I, I actually loaded my dad into the furnace and you know, pressed the start button and, it's, it feels like a you know, once you go out of the funeral parlor, into the back where they have that kind of furnace room, it...it feels very industrial, you know?
[Subtle spacey synth in background]
Mendel Skulski 21:34
Yeah, yeah, it's a pretty far cry from a funeral pyre. But, um, at least alkaline hydrolysis has a lot of environmental points going for it. It actually uses less than an eighth of the energy of cremation. And of course, it skips the CO2 emissions, it doesn't put mercury, ah, from dental fillings up into the atmosphere and the effluent, the, the wastewater, is supposed to be completely safe for water treatment plants. It's, it's actually being called flameless or water cremation. After processing, just like cremation, all that's left is powdered bone.
Adam Huggins 22:09
So there's no casket to build, no embalming fluids to worry about, and it doesn't use up any more land.
Mendel Skulski 22:14
Yeah, and on that note, when it comes to burial, our most limited resource is the land itself.
Glen Hodges 22:21
In urban centers like Vancouver, you know, Toronto, Montreal, those cities for sure, um, cemetery space is becoming a real um, concern. And there are actually planners who are starting to look at that and go, 'we plan these cities and we plan for parks and industrial and residential and multi-this and green space and streets and blah, blah, blah, blah'. There's, I'm—I don't know if there's a city that's actually planning in their new areas for how to deal with their deceased. And so that's an issue that's interested a couple of planners that are really pushing that, like, we need to plan for this stuff, we aren't and we haven't been for a long time, and...death is inevitable.
Glen Hodges 23:08
Our cemetery here in Vancouver, we're the canary in the, coal mine. I mean we first ran out of space in '64 and then we did something to last till '86 and then we actually closed and now we've actually reopened and we've reclaimed green space, but we're still—we're going to run out of casket space again, in the next 10 years.
Adam Huggins 23:27
I think it's fair to say that death hasn't exactly been a priority in Vancouver civic planning.
Mendel Skulski 23:33
[sighs] Yeah, I can't even imagine a new cemetery getting zoned, with the housing crisis as it is. It might seem a little bit ridiculous to offer infinite tenancy to, well, corpses.
Glen Hodges 23:47
Forever is a long time and not a realistic, um, notion for a cemetery that, you know, eventually, that space should be and needs to be reused.
[Spacey keyboard synth sounds amplify]
Adam Huggins 24:09
That's already the case in much of Europe and parts of Asia. And it has been for a long time. In dense, old urban spaces, interment is often temporary. In Hong Kong, burials in public cemeteries are exhumed after six years and remains are moved into ossuaries, which is basically a word for...
Mendel Skulski 24:29
...bone house. Yeah.
Adam Huggins 24:30
Yeah, bone house. In Paris, cemeteries offer various leases on grave plots, which may or may not be renewed by the next of kin. And in, in Guatemala, the cemetery that I visited in Xela, when we were doing the story on earthquake lights, there were plots that were very permanent with giant monuments on them, you know, if you had the money, you could go visit your dead on a Sunday, which a lot of people do, right? Major Sunday activity. Whereas, there were also plots for largely Indigenous Mayans, who couldn't afford that same kind of permanence, that are frequently dug up and burnt essentially, if, if the person doesn't claim or pay for it long term. So that cemetery, it's a beautiful, colorful, fascinating place but you can see class very clearly.
Mendel Skulski 25:21
Here in Vancouver, Glen is thinking about other ways that we could get even more usable burial space out of Mountain View, going, in a word, vertical.
Adam Huggins 25:31
That is so Vancouver! [chuckles]
Glen Hodges 25:33
Only prior to 1964 I think, um when we got the first backhoe, all the graves were dug by hand. So you had limitations on how deep you could actually go depending on soil conditions, that sort of thing. Now we've got shoring capacities related to occupational health and safety. We have backhoes and these machines that we can physically and more safely accommodate, a deeper interment. So maybe two caskets, you know, which is sort of the limit now. Or maybe we can actually fit three in where we used to only fit two, or fit two where we could only fit one. So those are sorts of notions, ah, moving away from these burial vaults and liners which slow down that natural decomposition and maintain this rigid space, for a long period of time, if we remove that, allow that natural decomposition to take place, um, then that can facilitate those remains to disintegrate, decompose and compress, to allow us to put additional people in there more quickly.
Adam Huggins 26:39
So there's a lot to think about when it comes to dealing with physical remains. But there's so much more to death than just what we do with our bodies. I think our modern, increasingly secular culture has lost its grip on ritual as a way to process emotions. Especially grief.
Mendel Skulski 27:03
Well, there's someone going to great lengths to build community and create modern traditions for death and bereavement. Glenn suggested I speak with her directly.
Paula Jardine 27:16
Glen...Glen Hodges is a really unique and fabulous person.
Adam Huggins 27:20
Who’s that?
Mendel Skulski 27:22
I know, you know, that's Paula Jardine.
Paula Jardine 27:25
I used to call myself a lively artist, because in the Edmonton journal, it was the Lively Arts, and I thought 'I'm a lively artist’!
Mendel Skulski 27:32
There's a wonderful irony to that, considering much of Paula's art practice now focuses on death, and how we process it. Paula is a pretty big deal in what you might call the experiential art scene in Vancouver and Victoria. She was a co-founder of one of Vancouver's greatest sources of parades and magical happenings, the Public Dreams Society. Now, together with Marina Szijarto, she curates the annual Night for All Souls at Mountain View Cemetery.
[Chorus of harmonized voices]
Paula Jardine 28:00
I like to organize things, experiences for people to have, that's my favorite way to socialize.
Mendel Skulski 28:10
The Night for All Souls can actually be a week-long affair starting each year on the Saturday before Halloween and running evenings, through November 1st. This, according to Paula's ancestral tradition...
Paula Jardine 28:23
...is the time when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest.
Adam Huggins 28:27
2018 held the 14th annual All Souls event. It's built as an opportunity for the public to remember their dead, weather interred at Mountain View cemetery or not, in a gentle atmosphere of contemplative beauty. It includes all kinds of memorials—music, conversations, processions, and of course, candles.
Paula Jardine 28:47
One of the women that I encounter every year Nada, who works at the church supply place, that's where we get our candles, hundreds of candles every year. She said in Serbia where she grew up, you could feel the heat of the cemetery as you approached it before you even stepped inside, and to me that's evidence of regard, of the community.
Mendel Skulski 29:08
The Night for All Souls is Paula's attempt to foster that sort of community regard in Vancouver. To create a kind of village culture.
Paula Jardine 29:16
That's what works for us as humans. That scale. Village culture is when you know the people that you live around, or you have support outside of your family, shared customs. And I think we've created some shared customs like 13 years at Mountain View is, significant I think, that there are children alive today who cannot remember a time when there wasn't an important event at their cemetery where they go and remember their dead and, where they first learned about a distant relative.
Mendel Skulski 29:53
I'm really grateful to live in a place that feels like a village on all sorts of scales. If you feel like that's missing from your life, Paula's advice is just to go out and make it. If you organize your own Night for All Souls, your community will really appreciate it. Especially those who stalled their grieving.
Paula Jardine 30:12
I have actually heard that from people that they, they, it gave them an opportunity to grieve in a way that they were not allowed before. And there's something about being held by the group, I think is really important.
[Chorus of voices fades out]
Paula Jardine 30:28
And the event that we do in Victoria at the burial park is a daytime event and it has its own charm and it has some lovely moments in it. And people value it. But there's something about being in the dark that, I don't know what it is, but it is more powerful. Lighting a light in the dark is a profound act that is, I believe, universal. And also, when you're in the dark, if you are feeling like you just need a moment to yourself, all you have to do is step back and you're in the dark and...you have the solitude that you, that you need. There's just something about it.
[Gentle plucky violin]
Adam Huggins 31:21
It's a moment for remembrance, no matter how distant your loved ones are in space or time.
Paula Jardine 31:27
It was part of the impulse, you know, like, what do we do if we, because we're such a transient population, most of us don't live where our dead are buried. So where do you go? Well, we've made these beautiful little shrines and you can go there. You can leave something there. You can write their names.
Mendel Skulski 31:45
And, if you've lost the connection to your ancestral practices, as so many settlers have, it can be a place to meet others and share knowledge.
Paula Jardine 31:55
My sister in law's dad grew up in Africa, and the belief in, in the village where he grew up, that there are two levels of heaven...and one is very active...and that's where all the spirits of the people who are remembered are. And then when the last person who knows your name dies, you go into the silent zone.
Paula Jardine 32:21
And ah...I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing like, do we look forward to that? I don't know. But that's an interesting way to think of it. And just to reinforce that it's important to remember.
Adam Huggins 32:40
I guess the best we can do is just to honor our old traditions, in whatever way feels right, and strive to be unafraid to create new ones. And here on the Salish Sea, some traditions go back a long, long time.
[Organ drone comes into background]
Darcy Matthews 32:58
A lot more Indigenous people lived here in the past, then I think we think, because by the time Europeans began arriving and making their observances and setting up fort here, ah, before that, diseases like smallpox and other diseases had spread up from the Spanish patients, so that we really lost incredible numbers 70 or 80%, of, of the Indigenous peoples here were dead before, you know, any real significant initial contact—dry contact. And so, right from the very beginning, we have a mental idea that populations of people here were really small. And that's not the case. And we, by extension, I think we're kind of always surprised when we find Indigenous human remains or archaeological sites in general, and we shouldn't be. Because there were a lot of people living here for a long period of time.
Darcy Matthews 33:56
My name is Darcy Matthews. I'm an assistant professor in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. I'm an archaeologist and an ethnoecologist. So, I, in terms of the archaeology I do, I'm interested environmental archaeology and have been for a long time, but I'm also a funerary archaeologist. So, um, my research for my doctoral degree, for example, focused on working with Coast Salish community looking at funerary ritual. Funerary practices over the last 1500 years.
Adam Huggins 34:32
About 1,500 years ago, the funeral practices of the Coast Salish changed pretty dramatically. There was a shift from underground burials to above ground interment. Remains were housed in large structures of stacked rocks known as burial cairns. These cairns are the focus of Darcy's study.
Darcy Matthews 34:52
I just acknowledge that it's the patience and the expertise of the Coast Salish people that I work with that, really, I'd like to acknowledge because they're there my whole other set of teachers. When I was finishing my PhD, I had my academic community at the University, I went to, here, at UVIC, but I also had this Coast Salish community. And I felt like, you know, I had obligations to both of them to meet the terms and conditions and expectations of this research. But it was that Coast Salish community again, that, you know, wasn't here on campus but there was a profound sense of responsibility to them. To make sure that I was telling their story in a way that was respectful, and in accordance with their values. But also still having a scientific rigor and an objectivity to it. And that's, that's the difficult balance.
Mendel Skulski 35:50
In this line of work, sensitivity to cultural perspectives is critical. Archaeology has had to do a lot of work on the way to becoming a true dialogue of worldviews.
Media Clip 35:59
[unspecified media clips] "That belongs in a museum! So do you!"
Mendel Skulski 36:04
Darcy holds Coast Salish traditions with the utmost respect.
Darcy Matthews 36:07
One of the aspects of this is that the dead are still in some ways sentient. That they're present. That they are still contributors to the society and the world of the living.
Adam Huggins 36:23
If you read Darcy's PhD thesis, you'll quickly see that scientific rigor practically flows through his veins. It's an incredible piece of spatial and statistical analysis. An approach to learning about the social structures of ancient peoples by the relationships between their graves and the landscape. But Darcy recognizes that this kind of science doesn't always tell the whole story.
Darcy Matthews 36:45
There are lots of examples but maybe one of the, one of the earliest examples for me came when I was working out in Metchosin, and I was working in this very large burial cairn cemetery and I found, you know, all these burial cairns in this particular cemetery. There was over 300, 333 found in a three hectare area. So, there really is a cemetery like, headstones everywhere, if you think about these burial cairns as headstones, and there was kind of this constellation of loose constellation of stones around each burial cairn. And at first I thought maybe they're radiating lines going off, or maybe they're concentric rings or they're something else. So I spent weeks and weeks, maybe even months mapping these in detail and looking at them and puzzling over them. And the rocks were not random in their association with the burial cairn, but they were random in that they weren't forming lines or rings or anything else. And I couldn't figure it out and I kind of thought, okay, this is a mystery I'll never solve.
Mendel Skulski 37:45
Then one day, Darcy was asked to travel to the Gulf Islands to consult on Hul'q'umi'num' remains, which had been disturbed during the construction of a driveway.
Darcy Matthews 37:54
The elders, they are in direct communication with the ancestors, and asking them what their needs are and listening to them. And it was determined through this, their conversation, that they wanted a burial cairn to be built for them, because they didn't want to be disturbed again. And so the ancestors and the elders thought, in their communication together with each other, that a burial cairn should be built. And so, now we're going to build a burial cairn. And so I was asked to help with this and participate. And so we were sent out to collect stones. And as far as I know, burial cairns haven't been built for four or 500 years. But in this instance, it was the appropriate thing to do. And so we all go out to collect stones. We're bringing stones back, and building a burial cairn is a lot of work. It's hard, the stones are heavy and everything else, finding rocks is tricky even, without taking them from another cairn, which of course you're not going to ever do. So, over a period of a few hours, we get enough rocks together and we start building the burial cairn. And it was this really powerful process of the elder in communication with this—the spiritual dead, saying, 'okay, you pick up that rock and put it here, you pick up that rock and put it here.’ And in this communication, this three way communication with this mediator, you know, this elder mediating in a sense, the ancestor building their own burial cairn in a way that they want it done. We've actually built a pretty substantial burial cairn by this point, and we have rocks left over. I had a rock in my hand, others had rocks in their hands and we've gone through a lot of work to carry these rocks here. And so, when the elder said, we're done, you know, those of us holding rocks, we went to put the rocks on the burial cairn and the elder said, 'no, we're done, drop them,' and so we dropped the rocks. And then all of a sudden I looked around and I'm like, we have a very distinct burial cairn, with this loose constellation of stones around them. And I thought, 'aha.' The only way I could understand the archaeological signature that I saw, was to participate and, and to do it, and to have those kinds of relationships and entanglements.
[Sparkly, rippling synth sounds]
Mendel Skulski 40:51
I just want to say that I really loved this story. I've been so excited to share it ever since I spoke to Darcy way back in March.
Adam Huggins 40:59
But this isn't just a great story. It's also the reality of the ground underneath our feet here when we walk and when we live on this coast. And that has real repercussions for us.
Darcy Matthews 41:11
These cemeteries, these landscapes—it took thousands of years for them to come into place that the Coast Salish people today, even if they don't openly, always talk about it, that these places are still very, very important to them today. If you live here in Victoria, it means to become entangled with these ancient people, these Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ landscapes and their living descendants today. You can choose to ignore that, or you can choose to resist it. Um, I don't think that's a particularly mature approach. How we treat the remains of the people who have lived here for many thousands of years, their dead bodies, and I would also argue the way we treat their heritage sites, their villages, and also their plants, the gardens and their ecosystems, speaks volumes about how we continue to treat their living descendants today. And it's not, it's not, in this age of reconciliation, this is a popular word in the last couple of years. I mean, if we really take that seriously, then reconciliation means taking the measure of responsibility. And this isn't just a government taking responsibility, or a municipality. This is individual citizens.
Adam Huggins 42:24
The first time that Darcy took me on a walk, out to a Coast Salish gravesite… I've gotten used to looking at the landscape and reading the landscape in terms of plants, in terms of water, in terms of fungus, in terms of animal species, trying to see all the different layers of the onion, right, that I before in my life wouldn't have noticed. And I get a little deeper each time, right I get a little bit more intimate with the landscape. But walking with Darcy, following in Darcy's footsteps, opens up an entirely different world of prior and ongoing human modification of the landscape; a different layer that, that I was blind to before. And it was one of the most transformative experiences I've had up here in British Columbia. Learning to see the landscape, not just as a collection of animal and plant species and ecological processes, but as a kind of unfolding drama of human habitation over time. The burial cairns? They're all over the coast. And if you don't know what to look for, you'll walk right by them and you'll never notice. But if you know what you're looking for, it completely changes the way that you experience the landscape. And for me, it has changed the way that I experience my place in that landscape.
Mendel Skulski 43:53
It's a beautiful realization to see that the impacts of funeral sites is more than just the graves themselves but is, it's the plants and the shaping of the whole ecosystem around them.
Darcy Matthews 44:04
So as I was recording these burial cairns and I was measuring, you know, their length and their width, and the type of rocks and everything, again, I was still focused on the burial cairns. And one of the things I began to notice right away is that there were these purple flowers all over the place. And I kind of knew that they were camas, like the two varieties of camas, but you know, I really hadn't thought too much about it. But there were other plants as well, that seemed, whenever I found these burial cairns I often saw these other plants. And I also noticed that there were Douglas fir trees. Like they're really big veteran old growth trees, you know, that were, you know, six or seven or 800 years old. So those trees that are growing there were, you know, growing at the time that some of these burial cairns were probably built, and that the bark, had clearly at times in the past been taken off the tree. That people have been harvesting bark in a way that was very sustainable. And so at this time, of course, I'm working with these Coast Salish experts and communities and they're saying, 'okay, look...this isn't this, the ancestors are not just a point in space and point in time.' That they have these relationships around them and these relationships exist today. And it's not just relationship between people, it's a relationship to the place, to the spirits, to the rocks, to the trees and the plants. And thinking about that really also made me think that 'okay, here I am, I'm studying these burial cairns and I'm still thinking about the rocks that went into building them,' and I was kind of, I was missing the larger relationships. I wasn't even thinking about the relationship that two burial cairns might have to each other, as though they were living people. And at some point in the past, you know, the families who buried each of those people had relationships with one another. And those plants. That people had a relationship with these plants, you know, in particular these plants like blue camas, which were nutritionally and economically really vital.
Mendel Skulski 45:57
And as he was involved in, um, cleansing and washing off practices as part of working with human remains, that those same plants and the seeds of those plants were present in those rituals. And naturally and intentionally leads to this kind of, ah, concert of all these important beings in one place.
Darcy Matthews 46:19
You can imagine that 1,000 or 800 years ago or whatever point in time, that people are going into the cemetery from the village. And the villages aren't too far away. And they're burying their loved one, and they're building a rock cairn, and then before they leave the cemetery, they do a brushing off, the burning the seeds of Q'uxmin [Lomatium nudicaule], and those seeds, some of them don't burn and they end up in the ground and they germinate and pretty soon that plant, you know, carries on through time, and other plants as well. And I began to notice that, that oftentimes as I was walking through a place, I would see certain plants grow, then I'd be like, 'I must be getting close to burial cairns,’ and then I find the burial cairn.
Mendel Skulski 47:00
What Darcy mentions about living in a, in a web of relationships, about becoming entangled with place and, and the people within it? I think it's pretty clear that this is not unique to the Pacific Northwest.
Adam Huggins 47:14
No, it's, it's a part of living anywhere really. Like maybe your roots go deep where you live, or maybe you're a more recent transplant, like ourselves. But we all have roots, we all have connections. And there are always more to be discovered. And in that profound moment of losing somebody that you love, it's those connections, which will give you meaning.
[Sweet melancholic keyboard interlude]
Darcy Matthews 47:52
Ultimately, what a funeral does, and this is true for many funerals around the world, is it transforms somebody who was living from a corpse into an ancestor.
Mendel Skulski 48:04
And over time, every choice we make as living and dying beings will inevitably transform our landscapes. Thank you again for being part of Future Ecologies. We'll be back in 2019 with more stories.
Adam Huggins 48:22
Season One isn't going anywhere, just in case you haven't already listened to it.
Mendel Skulski 48:26
This has been an independent production of Future Ecologies, which, for Season One, has just been the two of us. Myself, Mendel Skulski.
Adam Huggins 48:34
And me, Adam Huggins, plus the help of all our amazing, generous guests, patrons, and with music from our dear friends. But we are growing. We can't wait to introduce you to our new producers for Season Two. In the meantime, keep your eye on the feed. We're planning on releasing a few bonus episodes before we kick off next season. In this episode, you heard my dad, Jeff Huggins, Glen Hodges, Paula Jardine, and Darcy Matthews.
Mendel Skulski 49:06
Music in this episode was produced by Cat Can Do, Radioactive Bishop, Selkies, Calvin Cairns, PORTBOU, Zeellia and Sunfish Moonlight.
Adam Huggins 49:16
Special thanks to Bill Pechet, Amanda Cassidy, Lynne Werker, and David Skulski.
Mendel Skulski 49:22
Hey, that's my mom and dad!
Mendel Skulski 49:25
Also to Riley Byrne, Nicole Jahraus, Conor Fanning, Cassy Allan,
Adam Huggins 49:30
Ilana Fonariov, Eleanor Arkin, Andrew Philips, Maceo Quintanar, Hannah Carpendale,
Mendel Skulski 49:37
Blaine Doherty, Kevin Matheson, Sean Parker, June Moon, Andrzej Kozlowski,
Adam Huggins 49:43
Erin Cadwell, Jaclyn Lim, Lauren Magner, Vincent Van Haaff, Schuyler Lindberg,
Adam Huggins 49:43
Louise Gadd, Kieran Fanning, Sarah Sax, Zach Bergman, Kirsty Cameron,
Mendel Skulski 49:49
Lindsay Kathrens, Michael Hathaway, Laryssa Gervan, Teresa Maddison, Spencer Stuart,
Mendel Skulski 50:02
Michelle Haber, Jake Sigg, Jody Baker, Claire Wilkening and Jacob Kalmakoff. Thank you all for your love and support.
Adam Huggins 50:11
And thanks to the Vancouver Foundation for supporting our first season.
Mendel Skulski 50:14
And if you like this show enough to listen all the way to the end of the credits, please give us a five-star rating and a review on Apple Podcasts, or, whatever podcast service you use. It would really make our day.
Adam Huggins 50:25
You can keep in touch with us on Instagram, Facebook, and iNaturalist. Just search for Future Ecologies. To get on our mailing list or just to say hi, head over to our website, futureecologies.net and keep your eye on the feed for the next few weeks. We've got some goodies lined up for you.
Mendel Skulski 50:44
[whispering] Niccceeee......
Transcribed by https://otter.ai, and edited by Maya Lune Gauvin & Victoria Kline