by Carter Brooks
Camp Nor'wester is a summer camp for boys and girls 9-16, which until recently, was located on Sperry Peninsula in the San Juan Islands of Washington. I was both a camper and a staff. Like many Nor'wester alumni, I know the peninsula like the back of my hand. I carry a sharing of that landscape that only other Nor'wester alumni know. Camp Nor'wester has shaped my life, my imagination, my core values and the practical skills I use every day.
I am an artist and activist. As such, I find my occupation is often to elude definition. So, my card has about a dozen job descriptions from "technology counselor" to "modern day bard" to "activist clown." I have been called a "renaissance man," "guerilla pamphleteer" and even "magical being." Perhaps my friend Pam put it most simply while introducing me to her husband. She said, "Carter lives outside the box." The central thrust and intent to my work is to create, facilitate and leverage cultural expression in pursuit of environmental miracle, social justice and cultural celebration.
It was on my very first overnight as a Nor'wester Camper that I was first sparked with a real sense of the landscape, the story of the Earth and the sensation of geologic time. Our counselor took a moment to show us the scratches on the basalt bedrock that peeked out from the eroding cliffs by the beach. He explained how the little scratches were from glaciers thousands of years old. Glaciers which had carved the islands we were on. It was a moment I have never forgotten. From then on I never saw the landscape the same. The landscape became a story. My appreciation and awareness of the details in the landscape held in vision of geologic time.
The beaches of Sperry Peninsula and their different characters, are a lesson in and of themselves. In less than a quarter mile of coastline, the rock beaches go from big apples sized rocks, to small pokership sized perfection. All from the variations in prevailing currents. The clam shell speckled beaches below the lodge carried the story of feasts of native people long since driven from the land. Sitting ouside my teepee, I never tired of watching the feeding rhythms of the local bird life. Especially that calm and sunny low tide of Mud Bay, with herons prancing daintily, while seagulls swooped and stalled to dropped clam shells on the rocks to try to get them open for breakfast. In the high tide, I learned to appreciate the natural feeding cycles of the day, a subset of the cycles of the seasons. As a camper, I never snuck out as much as I thought I was supposed to. But as a staff member accustomed to finding my way without flashlight, I came to appreciate the cycles of the moon and the evolving character of night.
The opportunity to listen to the natural world, to live outside, free from the television, the concrete, cars and other distractions of modern life is an essential element in shaping the values of the potential environmental educator and activist. Nothing else in my life has served this purpose as effectively as Camp Nor'wester.
Camp Nor'wester was also a profound cultural experience. Through the involvement of Bill Holm, Nor'wester has a living example of Northwest Coast Culture not available to the average white american. Bill Holm was on the first staff of Camp Nor'wester at Sperry Peninsula. He is also a scholar of and participant in the traditions of the Kwakutl and other Northwest Coast tribes. He studied by doing. So he is a carver. He is a dancer. He is a storyteller. He and his family are a living example of a family of the longhouse.
To live surrounded by Northwest Coast art, real totems on the landscape, can't help but give one an appreciation of Northwest Culture. But to sit in a REAL longhouse and witness sacred dances is truly profound. To come to know that the longhouse is the only one remaining with a dirt floor, cedar sparks floating up from the central fire, and uninvaded by water pipes and electricity, is to be taken back in time. It expands the ground of imagination that true cultural respect stands upon.
The exposure to this tradition is not without paradox. The paradox of being a largely white community carrying on the spirit of the Northwest Coast native peoples is a complex one. Participating in this process, however, I have learned to hold the kind of complex contradiction that I believe is necessary when facing the truly dramatic social and environmental challenges that face us today. As a skill and a perspective, it is highly leveraged moving beyond "political correctness" to more lasting and effective social and environmental change.
Certain aspects of Northwest culture are evident in my work as activist, storyteller and performance artist. Perhaps the most important cultural value, however, that I learned from Bill Holm and his family, was that in order to understand a culture you must participate in it. As a value, this is important in building real multicultural expression as opposed to simple cultural appropriation. As a practice it is what opens the door to cultural creativity and participation. Nor'wester did this in my life.
This focus also led me to recognize the importance of culture in shaping our environment and landscape. As participants in the Nor'wester experience, we create unique culture. Camp Nor'wester and the alumni of Sperry Peninsula are, in fact, a culture. As the aboriginal peoples of Australia "sing" the land into being, the activities of Camp Nor'wester are what "sang" Sperry Peninsula into being. Sperry Peninsula was our cultural landscape. As such, it carried our cultural heritage and memory. This cultural aspect of landscape is central to framing my work as environmental activist. To see landscape as a cultural manifestation, not only supports an understanding of the importance of "place" in the work of environmental education. But also, I believe, it makes essential the importance of using cultural values as an leverage point in protecting our environment. It is for this reason and from my Nor'wester experience that so much of my work is in the field of cultural expression.
The importance of culture in shaping the landscape was demonstrated in a very unfortunate way, however, when Sperry Peninsula, and so Camp Nor'wester, were sold to the culture of Microsoft billionaires. In 1996, through unfortunate and cool-hearted circumstance, Sperry Peninsula was sold to Paul Allen. Paul Allen is Microsoft's lesser known co-founder. He's not as rich as Bill Gates, (but he's still top ten rich.)
Camp Nor'wester's resulting eviction from its home has been instrumental in shaping both the urgency and inspiration for my work as an activist. While this event was not a part of the regular camp "program," it is relevant for it is an experience that all Camp Nor'wester alumni hold in common. For many it is what seeds our determination to carry on our tradition in an even more vibrant incarnation on John's Island.
For me, as an environmental activist, I see removal of Camp Nor'wester from the landscape of Sperry Peninsula as microcosm of the larger world events that threaten our cultural heritage and diversity, not to mention our environment and ecosystem. As a poet, it is globalization bulldozing my lodge. It is contractor culture raping with concrete. It is the borg invading my homeland.
The sweeping change brought about by a virtual economy, and the accompanying redistribution and rapid accumulation of wealth are the story of the day that is uprooting our expectations and our long held assumptions. The AOL swallow up of Time Warner is only the most recent example of this. AOL is still a teenager and it swallows up the old man. This new age has a tendency to circumvent the old rules, whether it be freedom from taxes, or stock values free from P/E ratio expectations.
The virtual wealth of the internet billionaires has great power to make physical change on the landscape, but also—(perhaps more concerning)—it has the power to abuse our cultural heritage. In theory we have legal and other protections to prevent such abuses. But in practice these systematic protections are weak. For example, Camp Nor'wester was listed as one of the "ten most endangered cultural landscapes" of Washington. Yet this cultural recognition had no legal teeth. Attempts of volunteer lawyers to hold Paul Allen accountable to the legal restrictions that did exist, were no match for an organization with deep pocket resources, and government officials who at times lacked understanding of the laws and other times the conviction to enforce them. Not to mention spokespeople buffers from face to face connection. The camp's eviction was a front page New York Times story. Yet this was not enough to stir Paul Allen's moral conscience.
The macrocosm here is that our cultural feedback loops, like our environmental feedback loops, are not functioning. (Our economy, at least, ignores ecosystem feedback loops) Input to the decisions that shape our very lives are shut out to the majority of those affected. This is an insight not lost on the greater population. In fact, it is exactly this observation that brought thousands of activists to the streets of Seattle in November to speak out for democracy.
As a tribe, Camp Nor'wester and it's alumni have experienced an act of cultural violence and rudeness. Violence in the sense of "violation." And rudeness in a determined will to disregard the outcry of hundreds of citizens. The last line of Tim Egan's NYT story read, "For all the schooling in native crafts and lore, the last class of Camp Nor'wester seems likely to learn one final thing known to many American Indians — what it feels like to be kicked out of place called home." This lesson is a seed of magical activism. My own activism has been catalyzed by this experience.
For organizations interested in leveraging their grant money to protect and restore our environment, this is the most compelling reason to fund the needs of the Camp Nor'wester community. In the alumni of Sperry Peninsula is the seed of thousands of environmental and cultural activists. It is the fire in the belly of the Nor'wester alumni who will shape the next generation's Nor'wester experience into an even more profound commitment to environmental and cultural tradition.
Ironically, this experience of injustice has also been a reason to practice compassion. This is both a value and a tool. For while initially it is easy to direct anger, frustration, rage and even hate at the symbol of the problem—in this case Paul Allen—ultimately, this is self destructive. In the same way, it is self destructive and ineffective to imagine the CEOs of destructive corporations as consciously evil. When working to redress structural and systematic problems in our society, remembering and recognizing the humanity in would be adversaries is a VERY powerful value. It is, perhaps, THE value that opens the door to transformative change. This does not mean just staying quiet.
Holding compassion towards the billionaires and the CEO's should not be confused with an escape from consequences, however. The responsible buddha, when hit by a drunk driver, does not forget to take down the offender's license and insurance. He/she simply has to do it and hold a complex compassion at the same time. In the same way, it is important to hold the individuals who wield the wealth of corporations to be accountable to winds they sow. To do this from a place of compassion carries with it a spiritual power to the political practice.
The events that led to Camp Nor'wester's relocation, and so its need for funding, continue to be an opportunity to practice this difficult human lesson.
The core values that drive my activism and commitment to the world were formed by my years as a member of the Camp Nor'wester community. But it was the loss of our home that called them into. Paul Rogart in his article "Making our lives count" sums it up the inspiration nicely. "...silence is more costly than speaking out, because it requires the ultimate sacrifice—the erosion of our spirit. The toll we pay for stifling our emotions in personal life is fairly obvious. Swallowed words act like caustic acids, eating at our gut. If the condition persists and the sentiments are sufficiently intense, we grow numb, detached, dead to the world around us. When, however, we take steps to redress our private losses and sorrows, we often feel a renewed sense of strength and joy, of reconnecting with life.
"A similar process occurs when we want to address public issues but stay silent. It takes energy to mute our voices while the environment is ravaged, greed runs rampant, and families sleep in the streets. It takes energy to distort our words and actions because we fear the consequences. It takes energy, in other words, to sustain what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton calls 'the broken connection,' splitting our lives from our values. Like autistic children, we can blank out the voices of our fellow human beings, feeling overwhelmed. But if we do, we risk the decay of our humanity. When we shrink from the world, our souls shrink, too..." (from "Making Our Lives Count" and article published in the Fall/Winter 1999 edition of Organica. Paul Rogart Loeb is author of _Soul of Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time_ )
Of course, the story of Sperry Peninsula will not be story of the new Camp Nor'wester. Camp is not an appropriate venue for political indoctrination. The focus will not be on the past. The story of the new Camp Nor'wester will not even be about "speaking out." But the energy that motivates the commitment of the Nor'wester alumni to create an incredible experience is rooted in the profound spirit of Sperry. Whether expressed as an intellectual thesis (as I have done here) or just felt as an indescribable "fire in the belly," it is a powerful asset of our community. Given the opportunity of a new landscape, the alumni of Nor'wester will wield it like a powerful magic. And as a magician never reveals the source of his magic, and as a good myth never spells out it's lessons directly, the magic of Sperry will reveal itself in a new form that will even surprise the Raven himself.
(copyright January 2000, Carter Brooks)