From the Poplars - Tapa blanda

In the North Arm of British Columbia’s Fraser River lies an uninhabited island. In the midst of major industry and shipping, it is central to the waterfront of British Columbia’s original capital of New Westminster passed by daily by thousands of SkyTrain commuters. Poplar Island is lush and unspoken, but storied. It is the traditional territory of the Qayqayt First Nation. Made into property, a parcel of land belonging to the New Westminster and Brownsville Indians,” this is the location of one of British Columbia’s first Indian Reserves.”

This is also a place where Indigenous smallpox victims from the south coast were forced into quarantine, substandard care and buried. As people were decimated the land was taken and exchanged between levels of government. The trees were clear-cut for industry, beginning with shipbuilding during the First World War. The island still serves as booming anchorage for local sawmills.

From the Poplars is the poetic outcome of archival research, and of listening to the land and the stories of a place. It is a meditation on an unmarked, twenty-seven and a half acres of land held as government property: a monument to colonial plunder on the waterfront of a city, like many cities, built upon erasures. From an emplaced poet and resident of New Westminster, this text contributes to present narratives on decolonization. It is an honouring of river and riparian density, and a witness to resilience, tempering a silence that inevitably will be heard.

demonstration parcels bought and sold repeatedly
as the record shows, stolen
quarantine and bury there the government

not taking graves into account
warships were built view down a launch ramp

Cecily Nicholson is a writer, curator, and community worker in the impoverished and inspiring Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.

Cecily Nicholson has worked in the Downtown Eastside community of Vancouver since 2000, in recent years as a coordinator of the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre. She is currently the Administrator of Gallery Gachet. Her collaborative efforts include work with ReWorks in Progress at Algoma University and the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre; the Centre for Innovation in Culture and the Arts in Canada, of Thompson Rivers University; the Audain Gallery of Simon Fraser University; and VIVO Media Arts. Cecily is the author of Triage (Talonbooks, 2011) and a contributor to Anamnesia: Unforgetting (VIVO Media Arts, 2012).