October 2020 - Page 3 of 3 - We Are Not Divided

In early 2019, I quit my job to begin a journey across the country. My goal was to have vulnerable and human conversations with people whose perspectives were different from my own. I met these people at Trump rallies and farms, in rural Appalachian towns and Midwestern cities. As a queer, Asian-American who was born in Hawaii but now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, my hope was simple: to forge connections and bridge divides.

The trip was supposed to continue until this year’s elections, but it was cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic — yet another circumstance, it turned out, that would further divide our country.

I did make it to Minnesota, however, where I met the team behind a podcast called On Being, hosted by Krista Tippett. They were engaged in a divide-bridging effort of their own called the Civil Conversations Project. We decided to collaborate on a short film that tackles a topic I care deeply about: bridging the LGBTQ+ and faith divide.

As someone who identifies as both queer and spiritual, I wanted to bring together LGBTQ+ people with people of faith (or both!) for a series of open and honest conversations.

The video shares just a few of those magical moments. The most interesting part of my work involved preparing participants, since some of them were skeptical or nervous about connecting across differences. We also had to create the conditions where all participants had shared power to both talk and listen during the conversation. Just to note: this video was filmed before the pandemic, which is why you won’t see people wearing masks or practicing social distancing.

My involvement with We Are Not Divided is a continuation of this work. Starting on Monday, I’ll be hosting a five-day video series right here called “Bridging Divides.” In it, I’ll interview people from all walks of life — an evangelical Christian and a gay rights activist, a Millenial and a Benectine nun — who are finding ways to come together, despite their different life experiences. I hope you’ll enjoy those conversations as much as I did.

Erskine Murphy, who is 70 years old and walks with a cane, shuffled into the crosswalk traversing San Pablo Avenue at Myrtle Street on Oakland’s west side. He was on his way to the Community Foods Market to pick up groceries. A half-dozen bright orange markers lined the road near the crosswalk, flanked on either side by two turquoise signs that read “Go Slow. It’s Essential.”

The setup is an acknowledgment that this stretch of San Pablo Avenue, a four-lane divided roadway, is a threat to pedestrians like Murphy — perhaps even more so since Covid-19. With less traffic on the roads, speeding has surged. Murphy, who is Black, is already more likely than other pedestrians to be struck and killed by a car. Now, with bus service reduced, he is walking more than usual, often along West Oakland’s “high-injury corridors,” which include just two percent of the city’s streets but over one-third of its pedestrian collisions. The corner of Myrtle and San Pablo is on one of them.

But Murphy’s walks recently got a bit safer. This stretch of San Pablo Avenue has become one of 15 sites around Oakland designated an “essential place” during the Covid-19 pandemic. Oakland launched the Essential Places initiative in May to reduce the threat to pedestrians in these high-injury corridors, many of them located in low-income communities of color. The initiative consists of an assortment of cones, barricades and signage strategically placed to slow or divert traffic. While Murphy, who has been hit by a car once and sustained minor injuries, recognizes that a few markers aren’t going to solve the problem — he still sees reckless drivers on the road — he’s happy the barricades are there. “It helps safety-wise,” he says.

Feedback from residents suggests that the program is well liked, but it wasn’t always. An earlier version that focused primarily on expanding recreational space revealed a blindspot in the city’s planning — one that it is now correcting. At a time when urban planners are increasingly being called out for white elitism, Oakland is feeling its way, clumsily at times, down a different, more equitable path.

Essential Places is an offshoot of Oakland’s “Slow Streets” program, which closed a handful of streets to through traffic so that people could bike or jog while safely social distancing. Surveys administered by the city showed that the program was popular, but there was a problem. Two thirds of survey respondents were white and 40 percent had annual household incomes of $150,000 or more. In Oakland, white residents comprise 24 percent of the population and the median household income is $76,000.

“We got the feedback from the survey and said, ‘Wow, this isn’t representative,” says Warren Logan, policy director for mobility and interagency relations and the chief architect of Essential Places. Pressed by advocates, he doubled down on efforts to get feedback from residents in marginalized neighborhoods, especially in East Oakland, where more than three quarters of residents are Black or Latino and more than half of households are low-income. Residents in these neighborhoods, many of whom are essential workers, have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19.

Logan’s team started holding weekly, hour-long meetings with community members, who, as it turned out, felt very differently than most of the people who had responded to the survey.

“We’re not asking for that,” says John Jones III of the slow streets program. Jones is a longtime resident of East Oakland and director of political engagement for Just Cities, an organization that advocates for more equitable urban planning and policymaking. “No one is jogging or riding their bikes in these streets.” He and other advocates pushed the city to change course.

“One of the key areas of feedback, particularly for many residents in East Oakland, was that we had missed the mark,” says Logan. “They understood why slow streets might be helpful for people working at home who are more affluent or don’t necessarily have the same traffic challenges that they might have. But the residents there felt like the city should—if they’re going to focus on anything in East Oakland—be focused on helping people get to their essential places, whether that’s health clinics, to schools that were distributing food, to grocery stores.

The disconnect revealed a stark reality: For many marginalized communities, engaging with cities on urban policy is akin to screaming into a void. “City governments, historically and today, are really bad at planning with people,” says Margaretta Lin, executive director of Just Cities.

City officials often seek feedback from Brown and Black residents as a formality or a box to check, but rarely act on it, perpetuating a deep mistrust in government that goes back to before the Jim Crow era. From federal redlining to race-based real estate covenants, the history of urban planning is fraught with racist and classist policies that have served to disenfranchise communities of color. Essential Places is an example of what can emerge when government confronts that history head on.

During the Great Migration, the arrival of Black Americans in northern and western cities sparked an exodus of white families to the suburbs, nudged along by highway construction and discriminatory whites-only housing subsidies. “What it left were cities with large concentrations of poor people, largely Blacks and eventually immigrants coming into the United States,” says Malo Hutson, associate professor of urban planning at Columbia University and director of the school’s urban community and health equity lab.

What followed was a long period of disinvestment, made worse by the decimation of manufacturing jobs. As white families began returning to cities starting in the 1990s — what Hutson calls the “rediscovery of cities” — capital came with them, but it flowed into the kinds of investments that invited gentrification: things like bike lanes, dog parks, smart technologies and e-scooter programs that benefit affluent communities but don’t always serve the most immediate needs of poor ones.

When urban planners try to engage communities that have been hurt by government in the past, all of this accumulated trauma comes to bear. “They have every single right not to trust anything you say,” says Logan.

To understand the concerns of struggling communities in Oakland, Logan, who is Black, had to recognize the lingering weight of that history. “If so many people have such an irascible response to something as simple as an A-frame barricade at the beginning of an intersection, that tells me there’s a lot of deeper trauma that you’ve got to work through. So, let’s go there and be courageous enough to say, ‘I’m sorry. Tell me more. Yes, that was messed up. Tell me why.’”

Crushed by negative news?

For some residents in East Oakland, the bright orange signage used by the city to demarcate slow streets sites was an unwelcome reminder of another city-led project: construction of a bus rapid transit system that has been underway since 2012, creating traffic problems and reducing foot traffic for local businesses. Street closures may also require the presence of police, which can be traumatic for already overpoliced communities of color, especially in light of recent police killings of unarmed Black people.

“It doesn’t matter how great a program is. None of that matters if people feel like it’s not for them.”

Because these kinds of concerns aren’t always obvious, especially when the context is a street with a few barricades on it, uncovering them requires deeper engagement than administering an online survey. But engaging face to face, says Logan, can mean first having to bear the brunt of a lot of frustration. “I think that a lot of planners, especially probably white planners, are uncomfortable with getting yelled at by people of color,” he said.

That can pose a barrier to the kind of community engagement that many experts believe is necessary for urban planning to be inclusive and equitable, especially given that 85 percent of urban planners are white, but more than half of urban counties in the country are majority nonwhite.

There are few better examples of the impact of that lack of representation than cities’ efforts to establish bike lanes, a topic that has, for better or worse, come to epitomize bougie, white-centric urban policy, despite the fact that minorities are the fastest growing group of bicycle riders nationwide and are more likely to be hit by a car while riding. “The Great Bikelash” has dominated urban planning discourse and pitted (falsely, some would say) the goal of building more sustainable cities against the goal of creating more equitable ones.

At first blush, the issues seem straightforward. In Washington D.C., a group of Black faith leaders opposed bike lanes that would have reduced available parking around churches. In other distressed communities, residents were wary of biking because of the risk of traffic fatalities.

But a lot of the opposition from historically marginalized groups also had to do with process — how decisions about bike lanes were made and who was making them (bicycle advocates, like urban planners, are predominantly white).

“In urban planning, we’ll talk a good game,” says Hutson. “People say, ‘Oh, well, yeah, we do equitable planning and this and that. But at the end of the day, it’s how do you implement these things? Who is at the table? Who have you reached out to? Which voices are heard and which voices are not heard? That’s what I see as being the huge challenge.”

In many cities, the push to establish bike lanes occurred in tandem with rapid gentrification and displacement. Oakland introduced its first protected bike lane in 2014 in one of the city’s fastest gentrifying neighborhoods. Between 2000 and 2010, 34,000 African Americans were displaced from the city, a 24 percent decline. The frenzy to put in bike lanes, often justified on the basis of making streets safer for (mostly white) bicyclists, was particularly galling to many people of color because pedestrian safety in their own communities has gone largely unaddressed for decades. “It doesn’t matter how great a program is,” said Jones. “None of that matters if people feel like it’s not for them.”

In rolling out slow streets, Oakland appeared to be repeating the same mistakes as bike lane proponents. “East Oakland has the most dangerous streets in Oakland,” says Lin. “What East Oakland really needs are safe streets, not slow streets.”

Instead of being asked to weigh in on a program that had already been introduced, Lin said the city should have started with a different question. “It should have been, ‘What do you need in your community to survive this pandemic?’” She wants the city to implement a long-term health and safety plan that includes the installation of traffic lights and other infrastructure at dangerous intersections.

Logan says he hears the feedback and is listening. “We want to make sure we’re working with them through the process,” he says (emphasis Logan’s). But he also warns against what he says is a tendency for cities to give up too easily on programs when communities react negatively. “You also can’t just say, ‘I heard the first thing a Black person told me, I’m going to take that as gospel and run away when I get yelled at.’ That’s also not doing the work.”

At least one community leader from East Oakland told Logan, essentially, pick up your barricades and leave. But Logan said he kept pressing. “I said to her, ‘I’m going to repeat back to you what I just heard so that we can be really clear about what you’re telling me to do. You said you don’t like this program. So, if I were to take your point, I’m going to ask all of my staff to pick up every single barricade in the entire neighborhood and leave all of the barricades in [more affluent] North Oakland. What do you think that might look like if I were to go through with that?’ And she was like, ‘Wait a minute, I didn’t say get rid of the program.’”

That extra prodding revealed the community leader’s real concern, which was that the barricades weren’t doing enough to stop people from driving dangerously. A better solution, she told Logan, would be to fully close short segments of streets to through traffic during certain times. “What came across initially as, ‘We don’t like slow streets’ transformed into, ‘Hey, this program isn’t strong enough to accomplish the thing that you say you’re trying to accomplish,’” Logan recalls.

In May, a month after the initial rollout of the slow streets program, Oakland introduced Essential Places, with a new goal of helping pedestrians in low-income areas move around safely. His team is now working with community representatives to understand how to strengthen barricades (people have been driving over or moving the markers the city is currently using). It is also exploring a public art project in which East Oakland artists create barriers that are less reminiscent of a construction zone, which he expects will kick off by the end of the month.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the pivot from slow streets to essential places in distressed neighborhoods, in direct response to the community’s feedback, has been generally well received. According to Department of Transportation data, there have been no collisions at designated Essential Places sites, even though all are part of the city’s high injury network where most collisions occur.

While there is still a long way to go, the city doesn’t believe it could have gotten that result if it had, as residents had initially demanded, simply packed up its barricades and left. “There are two different types of tendencies,” says Logan. “The first tendency is to not even ask Black and brown communities what impact you’re having on them in the first place. The second is… transactional engagement: We heard negative feedback, so we’re just going to quit. We’re not even going to try and ask, ‘What would make it an improvement? You just said you don’t like it, so I’m going to stop.’ I say that that’s not real equity.”

For Jones in East Oakland, the fact that the city was willing to redesign the program in response to the community’s feedback is a step in the right direction.

“Anytime people are willing to say, ‘Look, we could have done this better,’ and when there’s an opportunity to do that they act on it, that’s a success.”

This article was funded in part by the Solutions Journalism Network.

THIS Q+A IS PUBLISHED AS PART OF AN ONGOING SERIES INTERVIEWS WITH MEMBERS OF STANFORD’S POLARIZATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE LAB

Polarization isn’t a single, monolithic phenomenon. There are two types: the kind we express in wonky disagreements over laws and policies, and the kind we feel — that visceral red-vs.-blue passion that fuels partisan acrimony and take-no-prisoners elections.

In this interview — the latest in our series of conversations with researchers on the science and dynamics of polarization — Jan Gerrit Voelkel, a PhD student in sociology at Stanford University and an affiliate of the Polarization and Social Change Lab (PASCL), breaks down these two types of polarization and explains the mercurial forces that drive political division.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jan Gerrit Voelkel

Can you walk me through the two major types of polarization?

The two major dimensions of polarization discussed in the literature are attitudinal polarization on the one side and affective polarization on the other. Attitudinal polarization is about policy views. The study of affective polarization is relatively young — it is oftentimes seen as the tendency for partisans to like their own fellow partisans and to dislike their opposing parties.

What does affective polarization — the partisan kind — tell us about how we see each other?

One American national election survey that has been going on for a long time has asked respondents how they feel towards the parties and the candidates of the parties. You can see that people have always preferred their own party over the other party. But now this gap has very much widened, and it is not so much driven by the fact that people now like their own party more — that has been relatively constant over the last two decades. But it’s more that people really started to like the opposing party much less.

How do we know this? Is there a way to measure our feelings about the “other side?”

One traditional measure is to ask: How much do you like or dislike Republicans and Democrats? However, important research has shown that it very much depends on how you ask these questions, because people may answer this about elites or about the mass public. My view might be different for Republican elites versus the Republican voter base. They find that you need to be careful to not mistake a dislike of politics in general, for a dislike for voters for the opposite party.

What can affective polarization potentially lead to?

The next level would be partisan spite, a real contempt for the other side and the willingness to compromise other principles just to keep the other side away from governing. [We may do this] to an extent where we sacrifice democratic principles and ignore the rules that we have all agreed on because we think we are really on the right side.

Crushed by negative news?

Sounds perilous. Does affective polarization ever have the potential to result in a positive outcome?

You can see affective polarization relate to more political activity, caring more about politics, seeking out more information, being willing to protest and stand up for what you believe in. And I totally think that there can be positive externalities of that.

This is why it’s so important to study the links between negative partisan effects, then partisan spite or contempt at the next level, and then the things that we think are problematic for society. One thing I’m very concerned about is if we receive the same set of facts and we interpret these two facts very differently, then it becomes really difficult to find agreement on anything.

A functioning government that is incentivized by the voters to work together and to implement what the majority of the country clearly wants is really important. This can be undermined by polarization, because polarization can lead to more incentives for politicians to not compromise, to play to their base and hope that the other side is so disliked that even the more moderate voters who lean towards their own party will still support them.

Why do you think affective polarization has happened at a mass scale, while attitudinal polarization, which is more about policy and facts, has been less extreme?

This is exactly the right question to ask. My main answer is, “We don’t know.” One thing is that people have evolved into different, new circles, and are getting different views from different sources. That wasn’t so much the case for a long time when there were a few national television programs from which people would get the news. Now there’s a lot more choices and people can select into these bubbles and receive the news, and that may more strongly drive their views for the parties.

So do Americans actually agree on a lot of policy? Or is it more like they don’t necessarily have strong views on policy in the first place?

The concept of attitudinal positions has a lot of sub-dimensions. There is partisan sorting, and research strongly suggests that it has increased in the sense that people’s policy views are just more aligned nowadays with each other than before. For instance, my attitudes on climate change might be more aligned with my attitudes on gun laws and everything follows pretty much along the same party line.

Polarization can lead to more incentives for politicians to not compromise, to play to their base and hope that the other side is so disliked that even the more moderate voters will still support them.

Recent research suggests that people do care a lot about policy positions. If someone is from my own party but disagrees with me on abortion or on immigration policies, then I do like them less. If you ask Americans “Why do you dislike the other side?” polls show that they will answer “Well, because they have different attitudes, because they are wrong.”

There is a lot we still don’t know about the relationship between attitudinal and affective polarization. How are you and your colleagues working to build the knowledge base?

Our team at the Polarization and Social Change Lab is working hard on what we call the “depolarization challenge.” The evidence that is out there suggests that we need a lot of additional information. And with the political moment that we were in, we feel like we need that information quickly to determine to what extent is polarization — and, in particular, partisan animosity or affective polarization — an issue with important downstream consequences and how it can be changed.

As soon as we launch the challenge, everyone out there who is interested will have a chance to submit interventions [strategies]. Then a certain number of our board of experts will choose what they think are the most promising interventions to be tested in a large-scale experiment. We will hopefully have more answers. I hope that by doing this challenge during this coordinated large-scale project, we will make fast progress on identifying more of the answers that we need to determine to what extent polarization matters, and how we can change the trend that we’re in right now.

This story was produced by Freakonomics Radio, a We Are Not Divided collaborator.

You probably hold certain beliefs that you think no one could ever change your mind about. Well, humor us, because in this episode of Freakonomics Radio, we’re pretty sure that we can change your mind about that.

The truth is, our minds are pretty changeable. Under the right conditions, even the concepts, ideologies and general truths that we hold to be sacrosanct are often prone to alteration. We showed you some examples of how this works in our story “Are You Liberal? Are You Sure?” And we’ll offer even more examples in the coming weeks.

For now, however, tune in to this episode of Freakonomics Radio: “How to Change Your Mind.” It kicks off with a conversation between host Stephen Dubner and Reasons to be Cheerful editors Christine McLaren and Will Doig.

As soon as he heard the news, Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation’s Chief Paul Prosper’s heart began to race. A school bus, a grade school and a sign in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, the remote county on the east coast of Canada encircling Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation’s reserve, had been tagged with anti-Black and Indigenous racist slurs. Prosper’s heartbeat was anticipating terse interactions with parents, the school board and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, not to mention the students. “You’re sort of walking into a hornet’s nest, you know, you’re bound to get stung,” he says.

But looking back now at the 2018 incident, a different detail stands out to him: a text message from Owen McCarron, warden of the County of Antigonish, who wrote: “I heard what has happened. This is completely unacceptable, it doesn’t reflect the attitudes of the vast majority of people and I’m here to support in any way I can,” Prosper recounts.

“That was sort of a moment for me. That indicated to me that somebody actually cared for us,” Prosper, who has since moved on from his role as Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation’s Chief to become a Regional Chief for the Assembly of First Nations, says. Later, some members of the County of Antigonish council stood behind him at a school-wide debrief of the events.

These are small gestures, but what they represent is revolutionary. Across Canada, hundreds of municipalities like Antigonish sit right next to First Nations communities with very little communication, let alone collaboration. While the Canadian government now touts a “nation-to-nation” relationship with Indigenous Peoples, at the local level reconciliation is more of an afterthought. Municipalities often treat reserves as “blank spaces” as they develop around them and on the Nations’ traditional territories. For this and many other historical reasons, Indigenous communities like Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation report that racial divides are ever-present.

Antigonish County and Paqtnkek Joint Council — An Antigonish County and Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation joint council, part of a program designed to help longtime neighbors act like neighbors. Credit: County of Antigonish

But the united front that Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation and the county of Antigonish presented that day did not come easily. For the past five years, they have benefitted from a unique country-wide program designed to help longtime neighbors like them become neighbors. The First Nation–Municipal Community Economic Development Initiative, known as CEDI, empowers municipal and First Nation leaders and their staff to, for once, sit down and talk as equals.

CEDI is a partnership between the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Council for the Advancement of Native Development Officers, known as Cando, which represents Indigenous communities in support of economic growth. Since 2013, 15 pairs — out of hundreds of requests — have taken part in the program that is in principle about joint economic development, but in reality more decolonization bootcamp.

CEDI was born out of a tragically common juxtaposition in Canada. Municipalities across the country were investing millions in municipal water infrastructure. Meanwhile, according to an OECD report, it is estimated that “half of the water systems on First Nations reserves pose a medium or high health risk to their users.”

“How could it be that the municipality has perfectly clean piped water, and across the street, if it’s a reserve, they could be living with a boil-water advisory? Where’s the breakdown?” Josh Regnier, a facilitator for the program, reflected on the program’s origins.

For Cando, the motivation to develop CEDI was pragmatic: over the years, funding for First Nations infrastructure and development from the federal government has eroded, generating an incentive to combine efforts regionally toward economic prosperity. “That, though, is easier said than done,” says Cando’s executive director Ray Wanuch.

Though it seems obvious that immediate neighbors should pool resources to share in water treatment plants or firefighting, it’s not that simple. In Canada, municipalities are products of the provinces, while First Nations have a direct relationship with the federal government. Although chiefs, mayors and councillors may share the same grocery stores, they have no obligation to work together.

The jurisdictional barriers, however, create a false sense of separation. The elephant in the room is that municipalities like the County of Antigonish across Canada have taken over Indigenous land. As Prosper points out, in the early 18th century Indigenous nations signed peace and friendship treaties with Great Britain to respectfully coexist. But in the centuries that followed, Indigenous Peoples were increasingly faced with racist policies aimed at eradicating their identities and taking their land. In many communities, the relics of this violence — such as the residential schools where children were forcibly assimilated — still stand in neighboring towns.

“Some of our communities have had very bad history and relationships with their surrounding municipal neighbors,” says Wanuch.

That’s why the CEDI program doesn’t kick off talking logistics or finances — it starts with history.

Credit: County of Antigonish

“There's an understanding that we are connected, that our success will only further success in the area surrounding us.”

In one of the key early exercises, each community’s council and staff, along with Indigenous elders, are asked to outline their own understanding of the region’s history through sticky notes on the wall. Regnier describes one regional partnership where the municipalities outlined a laundry list of infrastructure: town hall, school, fire hall. The First Nations, at their turn, outlined a much longer timeline of teachings, cultural history, and relationships and wars with other Nations. At the end of their timeline came a turning point, a nation-to-nation treaty signed with colonial governments, followed by a tight succession of painful events: the Indian Act defined Indigenous rights and identities, residential schools removed youth from their parents, the last fluent language-speaker passed. They were deeply offended that the treaty responsible for the existence of the municipalities, and the many examples of First Nation resiliency, were ignored.

From this groundwork, deeper conversations sprang up, like the question of who should have a voice in development decisions. With help from independent mediators and regular meetings over three years, the municipalities now include First Nations in development planning. “We should have been doing that all along,” said one participating mayor. “Better late than never.”

Collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities has never been more vital.

Across the United States and Canada together, there are more than 1,200 federally recognized Indigenous communities. Urban centers are growing and sprawling closer to Indigenous reserves, 80 percent of which are less than 500 hectares in size (roughly 2.5 percent the size of Portland), limiting independent infrastructure. Meanwhile, challenges from homelessness to wildfires eschew borders and demand a regional response.

The relationship between Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation and the County of Antigonish shows what incremental steps toward reconciliation can accomplish.

In the 1960s, a section of the Trans-Canada Highway connecting Halifax and Cape Breton severed Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation’s reserve lands in two. And while they were guaranteed access in the early negotiations, the Nation was locked out from 200 hectares (500 acres) of its reserve lands. McCarron said it was an “eye-opener” to learn of this deep wound in early meetings. Despite being effectively landlocked, his Mi’kmaq neighbors were “resilient in their resolve to someday get access to that highway,” McCarron says.

Now they have. With a multimillion-dollar highway expansion in 2019 came “an opportunity to right a historic wrong,” says Prosper. Through negotiations with all levels of government, and support from CEDI, the Nation was able to recover access to its land with a highway interchange complete with a fuel depot, travel center and cardlock.

In 2018, Prosper and McCarron signed a friendship accord in ceremony that acknowledges the Mi’kmaq territory on which they all live, and commits to regular joint council meetings. Now, they’re working towards a joint solar energy farm that will employ members of both communities. “There’s an understanding that we are connected, that our success will only further success in the area surrounding us,” says Prosper, adding there’s “a genuine feeling of congratulations” from the wider community. From his own conversations with the non-Indigenous community, McCarron agrees: “Attitudes are changing.”

Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation and Antigonish aren’t the only communities making progress.

In Thunder Bay, where more than a third of Canada’s reported anti-Indigenous hate crimes took place in 2015, Fort William First Nation and the City of Thunder Bay found their own shared area of economic interest. The First Nation had a large piece of contaminated lands they couldn’t use. The city, on the other hand, had run out of land for industrial clients. So they came together, pitched the idea of an industrial park to funders and were able to secure the money needed to bring it to market.

Fort William First Nation and the City of Thunder Bay came together to pitch the idea of an industrial park to funders. Credit: John Mason

Elsewhere, First Nations and municipalities from British Columbia to the Northwest Territories and the Atlantic are working together to build transit infrastructure, establish joint tourism initiatives and improve emergency management.

And though they have every reason to turn inward in face of Covid-19, these relationships are proving their strength. The pandemic has revealed the lack of relationship between many municipalities and First Nations across Canada, as towns reopened without consulting their First Nation neighbors, many of which still have travel restrictions. In contrast, Antigonish and Paqtnkek Mi’kmaw Nation released a joint statement in response to the pandemic in March, while in April, a regional district and First Nation in British Columbia built a joint economic recovery task force through video conference. In Manitoba, partners overcame a deep historical trauma to lobby governments and investors to reverse the closure of a local factory that would have eliminated roughly 250 jobs. As CEDI prepares to welcome another cohort in 2021, program managers say its primary funder, the federal government, is looking to adapt the model toward recovery from the pandemic.

Marissa Lawrence, senior program officer for CEDI, says the nine partnerships finishing the program have embraced video conferencing, but there’s no doubt Covid-19 presents challenges. “My personal opinion is that you can’t replace relationship-building face-to-face,” says Lawrence, noting that their current partners had spent one year together before the pandemic hit.

As this crisis has us turning back to local economies, Lawrence says, these relationships are proving their worth. A resolve to come back to the table in the face of disruption may be harder to measure — but it’s an important marker of success.

Chief Prosper has a similar measure: “If it appears to be uncomfortable, and you seem almost out of your place, then I think that’s a certain indicator that you’re doing something groundbreaking.”

This story was produced by CBC q, a We Are Not Divided collaborator

Standing in front of an audience at last fall’s Toronto Biennial of Art, AA Bronson was nervous. As a member of the General Idea collective, founder of the NY Art Book Fair and a leading conceptual artist, the 74-year-old was no stranger to public performance — but this was different.

For the first time, Bronson was going to deliver his text A Public Apology to Siksika Nation — the culmination of a five-year project he had been “hurtling towards” for the last seven decades. It was so essential that when he started it, he stopped making other art.

Two-spirit Blackfoot artist Adrian Stimson, clothed in ceremonial dress, was among those who had gathered, along with several Siksika elders, all of them survivors of Canada’s notoriously brutal residential schools — including the Old Sun Indian Residential School, which operated on the Siksika reserve until 1971.

Bronson — who was born Michael Tims — and Stimson have a lot in common. They’re both queer artists working in a range of media; they’re both known for groundbreaking performance art; they’re both recipients of Governor General’s Awards and other high honors.

But their history dates back to over a century ago to the Alberta plains where their ancestors were sworn enemies.

Stimson’s great-great-great-grandfather was Chief Old Sun, a renowned Blackfoot leader and reluctant signatory to Treaty 7, the 1877 agreement with the Canadian Crown that imposed the reserve system and removed most of the Siksika’s rights to their traditional lands.

“He was highly suspicious of the newcomers,” Stimson says in an interview with q host Tom Power. “He didn’t want to sign the treaty, but in the end he acquiesced. He was a bit of a rebel and a very fearless leader.”

AA Bronson. Credit: Triple Threat / Courtesy of the Toronto Biennial of Art, 2019

Six years later, in 1883, Bronson’s great-grandfather, Rev. John William Tims, became the first Anglican missionary sent to the Siksika nation, where he was tasked with building the community’s first church and residential school.

As was the case across Canada, Indigenous children were taken from their parents and forced into residential schools where they were physically, sexually and emotionally abused, creating profound intergenerational trauma that still ricochets through the community half a century after Old Sun closed. Many call it a cultural genocide.

“[Rev. Tims] took the children away from their parents, he forbade them to speak their own language or practice their own customs or wear their own clothes,” Bronson says of his ancestor. “And he did his best to destroy Siksika culture.”

In a bitter twist, the Siksika school was named after Stimson’s ancestor, Chief Old Sun.

“It’s ironic that his name would be used in an institution that was meant to kill the Indian in the child,” says Stimson, who himself suffered abuse at residential schools.

According to oral histories from both artists’ families, diphtheria and tuberculosis swept through the schools in 1895.

Crushed by negative news?

“Children were dying, and sadly, Reverend Tims would not allow those children to go home,” says Stimson. “So you can imagine the sadness and anger the parents felt.”

An uprising followed, and the church and the school were burned to the ground. Siksika people warned Tims he should leave or he would be killed.

For decades, Bronson wanted to confront this history in his art. The combination of his advancing age, growing public awareness of Indigenous issues and a call from the Canada Council for works that marked 150 years of Canadian history spurred him to move ahead.

While various governments and religious groups have offered apologies, Indigenous people continue to be overrepresented in the country’s jails and prisons, face racism in policing, and have higher rates of violence against women, poverty and infant mortality.

residential school — Children at the North Camp School on Blackfoot reserve in 1892. Courtesy of Glenbow Archives

So when Bronson first approached the community about making an apology, they hesitated.

“There’s the saying, ‘Walk the talk.’ And when apologies are given, often the walk afterwards is either nonexistent or very slow. So there is cynicism,” says Stimson, who took the idea to Siksika elders. Myrna Youngman, one of the elders, noted apologies were rare, and suggested they listen.

“The cynicism went away at that point, and we decided that this is important,” remembered Stimson. “Let’s listen to him. He’s approaching us in the right way.”

He invited Bronson, who stepped into his artistic alter ego Buffalo Boy — a wryly humorous and gender-fluid spin on Buffalo Bill — to the Siksika Nation for a special dinner.

At the table, Stimson and several elders asked difficult questions about the nature of apologies, and the painful history between Rev. John William Tims and the Siksika people.

“It’s really meaningful that you’re acknowledging what your grandfather did. He wasn’t made to do it. He did what he did and you’re acknowledging it, which means a lot,” says Youngman, pushing back tears, in an episode of CBC’s In The Making that documented the dinner.

Stimson also took Bronson to the school.

“I don’t know how it stays standing,” Bronson says. “If I were Siksika, I would burn it down again.”

Credit: Triple Threat / Courtesy of Toronto Biennial of Art, 2019

Included in Siksika artist Adrian Stimson's response to AA Bronson's apology were photographs of 68 boys who attended the Old Sun residential school on the Siksika reserve. ‘All of those boys are now our fathers,’ says Stimson.

Bronson, along with research assistant Ben Miller, spent months poring through archival photographs, journals, documents and news reports. Many accounts had portions destroyed or removed, in particular, those that dealt with the uprising.

“In the records of the Anglican Church, there was no such uprising — just Tims was reassigned to a different church after some vague trouble. It really was erased from history,” says Bronson. Through Miller’s diligent research, they pieced the story together.

“And of course, the story comes from the dinner table. It comes from stories that my father told and my grandfather told.”

In Bronson’s apology, which he published as a book, he speaks directly to Old Sun, Red Crow, Chief White Pup and other chiefs of the late 19th century; to the children who suffered at residential schools; to the parents who lost their children to abuse and disease; to the medicine men who couldn’t attend to the dying; and to those who participated in the Siksika uprising.

“I have no excuse for the slaughter of the buffalo, nor the genocide of First Nations,” he writes. “I have no excuse for decades of mass incarceration and abuse of children, disguised as residential schools, disguised as ‘for their own good.’”

Collodion wet plate self portrait by Adrian Stimson

Bronson also speaks to those in later generations who have experienced abuse, HIV/AIDS, suicide and murder. At the end of the book is a meticulously detailed timeline of events, an essay about the Siksika rebellion and archival photographs.

“It’s an invocation of the dead. It’s inviting the dead to join us in considering this piece of history. And I do believe we are a community of the living and the dead. We can’t escape that. The dead are part of us, and that needs to be acknowledged,” says Bronson.

“And that harm that my ancestors did to Adrian’s ancestors needs to be acknowledged and brought into the room. And we need to sit with that history.”

Stimson has heard and read the apology many times. But he is clearly moved when he hears Bronson read from it.

“It still resonates,” he says, his voice cracking.

“When the government apologizes, that’s fine, and a lot of people did a lot of work around that. But the real acts of conciliation happen between individuals.” (Stimson prefers to say conciliation, arguing that conciliation needs to be achieved before reconciliation is possible.)

“It’s the people themselves who have to take it upon themselves to find ways of creating relationships,” he says. “And it may not always end up in an apology. But it’s so important to understand that history, and look to ways of repairing or creating new relationships into the future.”

As an artistic response to the apology, Stimson created Iini Sookumapii: Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, a recreation of the dinner table where he and the elders first met with Bronson, which was also on show at the Toronto Biennial.

Stimson asked Old Sun survivor Gordon Little Light to build a table similar to one that might have been found at the school, then appointed it with fine silver and dinnerware — a stark opposite to what Indigenous children would have experienced.

“Then I put a little bronze bison on each plate, sort of looking at the diner as a way of interrogating,” explains Stimson. For millennia, bison were a primary source of food, clothing, commerce and ceremony for the Blackfoot people; white settlers wiped out their population, leading to deprivation and starvation.

“A lot of my work deals with the slaughter, which is very analogous to what happened at the table.”

Credit: Triple Threat / Courtesy of the Toronto Biennial of Art, 2019

“When the government apologizes, that’s fine, and a lot of people did a lot of work around that. But the real acts of conciliation happen between individuals.”

A vase of white roses with one red rose, symbolizing the government’s aggressive push for assimilation, also sat on the table, while a light from the Old Sun school hung above.

Behind the table, a large photograph featured a group of boys at the school, some of them looking despondent, others smiling.

“It really struck me that all of those boys are now our fathers here on the nation, many who have passed and some who are still with us,” Stimson says.

“Although many were smiling, you could only imagine the heartache that existed from being taken away from their families and having to live in that school — and I certainly know that from my father’s own stories of being in that place.”

While the collaboration was first brought into public view at last year’s biennial, it didn’t end there. After witnessing the apology, Stimson and the elders shared it with the Siksika community. The book has also been widely distributed within the nation.

This spring, Stimson had planned to host a powwow where Bronson would make the apology directly to the community. But the Covid-19 pandemic put those plans on hold.

Of course, no apology could ever properly address a genocide, Bronson says.

“There’s no way to make up for what was done,” he says. “That’s impossible.”

Still, their collaboration speaks to the power of individual action. Recently, Stimson had to prepare a statement about the abuse he suffered at residential schools — a task that invariably triggers profound sadness and anger. But in the process, he realized working with Bronson has been healing.

“I know for the elders who were present, they’ve felt very much the same. They really felt somebody listened to them. And in listening to them, that hurt and that anger, that resentment, all those things that come with that history are somewhat lessened,” says Stimson.

“It never will ever go away. But at the same time, as you build trust, as you build friendships, as you come to know and come to understand that in the hearts of many people, there is a willingness to change and to address these things and move forward in a good way,” he says.

“Seeing that certainly gives us hope that other people will start doing this, and actually really start walking the walk of an apology.”

This story was produced by CBC q, a We Are Not Divided collaborator

Simone Saunders and Tekikki Walker have never met each other in person. But the two artists found much in common with each other when they connected as part of a long-distance collaboration.

Their project is part of the Long Distance Art series, an initiative that connects different artists online, kind of like a matchmaking service for creators.

“Tekikki’s work was just mesmerizing to me: the Black content, the color palette, the vibrancy of her work,” Saunders, who is based in Calgary, tells q host Tom Power.

simone saunders — Simone Saunders is a Calgary-based artist who creates hand-tufted textiles. Courtesy of Simone Saunders

For Walker, who lives more than 3,200 kilometers (2,000 miles) away in Cleveland, the professional admiration was mutual.

“I love her work pretty much for the same reasons — a lot of the content and the vibrancy,” she says. “She just seemed like a really dope artist. And I was like, I’m so excited. I want to work with her.”

Saunders and Walker were put in touch with each other by Torontonian Nick Green, creator of the Social Distancing Series that spawned the Long Distance Art Series.

The series connects artists from a variety of media and artistic disciplines from around the world as a way to build bridges between artists and art-lovers as the Covid-19 pandemic makes in-person meetings difficult to impossible.

Saunders and Walker’s project, titled This Ain’t No Video Game, We Want Outta This Circus, explores the parallels between the Black experience, especially anti-Black racism, on both sides of the American-Canadian border.

Both artists submitted a series of images in their preferred medium — digital collages from Walker, and textile “rug tufting” from Saunders.

The project also includes personal essays from both that compare and contrast their experiences with systemic racism and the unique ways that racism has manifested during the pandemic.

Saunders says they drew inspiration from a Washington Post story in April that described two Black men who were followed by police through a Walmart for wearing protective face masks.

They were particularly struck by Kip Diggs, a 53-year-old Nashville marketing consultant who chose to wear cloth masks in bright, pastel colors like Carolina blue and lime green to appear less intimidating to passersby, including police.

“It says a lot for someone like Diggs, a marketing consultant, to think about the ramifications that stems from stereotyping and how one’s appearance or wardrobe could warrant danger in the face of another crisis,” Walker wrote in her essay.

The story highlighted the fact that some societal schisms have been widened by the pandemic, rather than uniting them.

“We started talking about the pandemic itself … especially in terms of marginalized communities and how they were not receiving the equitable care that was deserving of them,” says Saunders.

Canada doesn’t have any plans to collect nationwide race-based data on the pandemic. But some cities, including Toronto and Montreal, have found that reported Covid-19 cases were more frequently found in neighborhoods with diverse racial backgrounds and lower incomes.

“Unfortunately, [Covid-19] has had a greater impact on those in our community who face greater health inequities,” Toronto’s medical officer Eileen de Villa said in July.

Saunders and Walker began working together in the early days of the pandemic. But soon after, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis — and the ensuing resurgence of the Black Lives Matter protests — put these considerations into even sharper focus.

“Excuse my language — I’m frankly pissed about everything,” says Walker.

She said she uses contemporary and historical imagery in her digital collages to signal the importance of history and historical context in our current dialogues about systemic racism.

“I want to keep talking about those issues … layering with things that may have happened with Black folks in America and in past times,” she says.

In her essay, Saunders acknowledges that the Black experience in Canada isn’t exactly the same as her peers’ in the U.S., such as Walker.

She’s thankful for her relative economic privilege and access to health care during the pandemic, and put a spotlight on racism that Indigenous and other communities suffer.

Despite these differences, however, they found their causes had more in common with each other, and could strengthen each others’ voices by speaking as one through this project.

“I think that was the most poignant thing, was that two Black women were able to connect over this line in the sand … across borders and really talk about a Black history and what was meaningful to both of us,” says Saunders.

Despite the remote nature of the work and the difficult, personal subject matter, Saunders and Walker consider their contribution to the Long Distance Art Series a success — and, hopefully, the prelude to more collaborations.

“I really do hope that Tekikki and I can stay connected and to keep that sisterhood, because we really are here for one another, even within these two different countries,” says Saunders.