WEBVTT
00:00:01.520 --> 00:00:02.799
Trigger warning.
00:00:03.200 --> 00:00:15.119
This episode contains themes and language relating to racist and settler colonial violence, transphobic and homophobic histories, and outdated terms relating to gender and sexuality.
00:00:15.599 --> 00:00:18.000
Listener discretion is advised.
00:00:20.160 --> 00:00:29.839
The conquest of utopia is impossibility, a place that does not exist, an etymological quote, not place.
00:00:30.399 --> 00:00:37.439
Haterotopia is the place of hammer's photographs.
00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:41.520
Other, another different place.
00:00:57.759 --> 00:01:00.719
Chapter three, Utopia.
00:01:03.520 --> 00:01:20.719
Utopia, a literal no place, was named by Sir Thomas More in 1516, 24 years after Christopher Columbus first landed on an island in the Bahamas named Guanahani, which he named San Salvador.
00:01:21.760 --> 00:01:29.280
The notion of utopia has existed in the North American imagination since the beginning of settler colonialism.
00:01:29.680 --> 00:01:51.120
That the outdated and cramped edifices of the so-called old world could be shed in favor of a new and more perfect society, an Eden as constructed as the whiteness that settlers would harness in their rapacious exploitation and expropriation of land, resources, and people.
00:01:52.879 --> 00:02:02.799
The vision of a more just and beautiful world for some, in other words, would come at the expense of others.
00:02:13.360 --> 00:02:31.840
In 1966 and 67, the French philosopher Michel Foucault began to outline his vision of heterotopia as a physical representation of utopia, a world within a world, a place of otherness, of difference, of heterogeneity.
00:02:32.879 --> 00:02:38.879
He uses a mirror to describe the relationship between heterotopia and utopia.
00:02:39.199 --> 00:02:48.479
A mirror is a virtual place, a reflection or perhaps projection of oneself, and thus is a utopia.
00:02:49.039 --> 00:02:56.240
But it's also a heterotopia in that it is a real object, one that is connected to its surroundings.
00:02:56.560 --> 00:03:09.599
There are heterotopias of time, like museums, heterotopias of deviation, like prisons and social movements, and heterotopias of ritual or purification, like a beach.
00:03:11.599 --> 00:03:17.360
The origins of North American utopianism can be traced right back to the first ships from Europe.
00:03:18.159 --> 00:03:32.960
But it really took off at the dawn of photography in the early 19th century, when, partially inspired by Shaker communities a century earlier, intentional communities began to pop up, built on ideals of collective and communal living.
00:03:33.199 --> 00:03:43.120
Ideals that would re-emerge again in the late 1960s, as many young artists, hippies, and radicals left urban centers for rural areas.
00:03:50.080 --> 00:03:52.639
Is that there is a very large group.
00:03:53.199 --> 00:04:01.039
I'm talking about the church of the health, the opportunity for extreme.
00:04:03.360 --> 00:04:05.520
The establishment does not offer anything.
00:04:06.560 --> 00:04:12.080
The only place for those two people is part of a huge organization.
00:04:12.319 --> 00:04:13.759
And nothing has been offered.
00:04:18.399 --> 00:04:33.759
In the late 1960s, Barbara Hammer and her then husband Clay were two such people moving to Sonoma County in California to build a homestead of their own adjacent to other famous hippie communes.
00:04:35.040 --> 00:04:39.839
We bought land in Sonoma County for$1,000 an acre.
00:04:40.240 --> 00:04:46.480
We had six thousand six acres with a creek, a live creek going through it for six thousand dollars.
00:04:46.959 --> 00:04:50.800
We drew our own plans, we had them approved by the county.
00:04:51.279 --> 00:04:56.879
We dug out our own basement and we built a two-story house there, large.
00:04:57.600 --> 00:05:10.639
While doing this, we built ourselves a shower out of a redwood tree that we would put in a metal water container and heat with a wood fire so we could have hot water.
00:05:10.879 --> 00:05:12.319
We dug our own well.
00:05:13.120 --> 00:05:15.360
Um we were radical.
00:05:16.160 --> 00:05:18.800
I wanted him to blow up the Bank of America.
00:05:19.439 --> 00:05:21.680
The hippies were active at the time.
00:05:22.079 --> 00:05:32.720
They were confronting the bourgeois America in kind of the same way that the 1% movement did, which I support, but there was more violence attached.
00:05:32.800 --> 00:05:34.800
I hadn't looked at her yet.
00:05:36.079 --> 00:05:43.279
What I was doing was reading biographies because suddenly I had become a bit trapped as a housewife.
00:05:43.759 --> 00:05:45.439
Her house wasn't finished.
00:05:46.240 --> 00:05:49.199
Most houses don't get finished at the builders built.
00:05:49.600 --> 00:05:51.040
But we were living in it.
00:05:51.759 --> 00:06:00.480
And people would come over, interesting neighbors, poets, different artists, other people interesting people.
00:06:01.120 --> 00:06:04.639
And the men would congregate and I would serve the coffee.
00:06:05.439 --> 00:06:07.839
I was getting stuck in a housewife role.
00:06:08.560 --> 00:06:12.480
And even if the women came over, I wasn't a feminist yet.
00:06:12.800 --> 00:06:17.120
I would prefer to hang out with the guys because they might be talking physics.
00:06:17.600 --> 00:06:18.959
Something more interesting.
00:06:19.680 --> 00:06:21.439
And what the women were talking about.
00:06:21.600 --> 00:06:23.519
I didn't really give them much of a chance.
00:06:23.839 --> 00:06:25.279
But the hippies moved in.
00:06:25.360 --> 00:06:29.120
They moved out of Hay Ashbury into the neighborhoods around us.
00:06:29.680 --> 00:06:34.720
Morning Star Ranch was born where a lot of the famous hippies went.
00:06:35.120 --> 00:06:42.319
And closer to us in Sonola County, where we were, was Bill Walker's ranch.
00:06:42.879 --> 00:06:47.199
Bill was a painter and rich.
00:06:47.439 --> 00:06:52.560
I mean he lived like a hippie with his wife, but they opened their land to anybody.
00:06:52.800 --> 00:06:58.079
And so there'd be big school buses on there and dilapidated trucks parked.
00:06:58.319 --> 00:07:00.319
And I used to hang out there.
00:07:01.279 --> 00:07:07.439
I started going there and teaching school to the kids because the parents weren't LSD.
00:07:12.079 --> 00:07:17.920
To me, she never expressed a utopian view.
00:07:18.639 --> 00:07:32.720
Uh I mean, it was always wonderful for her to be surrounded by female energy and women and women's bodies and uh the diversity in women's bodies.
00:07:33.040 --> 00:07:35.839
So she just was not at all about that.
00:07:36.240 --> 00:07:45.040
It was more just uh how women inhabited their bodies.
00:07:45.360 --> 00:07:53.519
I don't think I ever heard any kind of reference to a utopian point of view.
00:07:56.160 --> 00:08:07.360
It's um fascinating and curious and fortunate for me that I came out at a time when a lot of women were coming out.
00:08:07.600 --> 00:08:15.920
It was the same time I was coming out as an artist, and I had decided to be a filmmaker rather than a painter.
00:08:16.399 --> 00:08:34.159
I came out with a woman, not knowing I was a lesbian, but being part of a woman's circle, and making a trip to San Francisco from Santa Rosa where I was teaching, and sitting next to her while we were watching Ken Kissis.
00:08:35.440 --> 00:08:46.559
One flew over the cuckoo's nest, her leg touched my own, and I felt this incredible rush, erotic rush, just through our knees.
00:08:46.879 --> 00:08:52.159
And I thought, oh my god, I'd never felt this for a woman before.
00:08:52.559 --> 00:08:56.320
I, or even that much for a man as I can remember.
00:08:56.720 --> 00:09:04.159
And I decided right then I can act on I can act on this or ignore it.
00:09:04.399 --> 00:09:06.480
I decided to act on it.
00:09:06.720 --> 00:09:08.000
And so Marie A.
00:09:08.240 --> 00:09:16.879
Shaw and I went back to my place in Santa Rosa and spent the night and were still up to see the dawn.
00:09:17.759 --> 00:09:19.600
I became a lesbian.
00:09:31.200 --> 00:09:34.639
It's spring 1973 in California.
00:09:35.600 --> 00:09:36.399
Roe vs.
00:09:36.639 --> 00:09:42.080
Wade, protecting a woman's right to abortion, had just passed in January.
00:09:42.559 --> 00:09:45.679
The Paris Peace Accords, ending U.S.
00:09:45.840 --> 00:09:55.840
involvement in the Vietnam War, also were signed in January 1973, although soldiers were still being conscripted well into June.
00:09:57.039 --> 00:10:11.039
The wounded knee occupation is ongoing, with members of the Oglala, Lakota, and American Indian movement occupying the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, following the murder of Buddy Lamont by federal officers.
00:10:12.159 --> 00:10:15.120
Watergate is reaching a climax.
00:10:15.679 --> 00:10:20.879
Stephen Biko has just been banned by the South African apartheid government.
00:10:21.120 --> 00:10:26.000
And in China, the Cultural Revolution is in full effect.
00:10:27.279 --> 00:10:35.919
Up and down the west coast of North America, from California to British Columbia, a counterculture is in bloom.
00:10:36.559 --> 00:10:50.480
The social experiments that had hatched out of the 1960s hippie civil rights and student movements are becoming established, with communes, intentional communities, and backed land movements sprouting in rural areas.
00:10:51.120 --> 00:10:58.080
In the cities, there are consciousness-raising groups, raps, meetings, festivals, and marches.
00:10:58.639 --> 00:11:06.720
New age philosophy, infused with psychedelics and ancient and eastern philosophy, provides aesthetic.
00:11:10.159 --> 00:11:31.600
But from within the guise of countercultural expression, of experimentation, and world-building, lies an imbalance in which the liberation of historically marginalized groups is placed at odds with these social and political movements organized by the white university-educated bourgeoisie.
00:11:32.879 --> 00:11:37.919
I look for Barbara and Terry in these interest dises.
00:11:41.440 --> 00:12:08.080
She told me something really interesting once about San Francisco in that period, and and she said that, you know, those of us who were in Berkeley who were so politicized, who were so interested in political change, we did not respect the the hate-ash gray hippies who were um you know just all there for sex and drugs and rock and roll.
00:12:08.159 --> 00:12:16.240
I mean that this this is supposed to be a movement that was supposed to change the world, not just make yourself feel good all the time, right?
00:12:16.799 --> 00:12:42.879
And and the reason I mentioned that is I think that if she found someone in San Francisco like Barbara who was an intellectual peer, was you know somebody who was interesting and dynamic and had something to offer Volcarry in the world, well then pursue that, you know, why not why not engage with that?
00:12:43.120 --> 00:12:47.679
Um and so it makes sense that they you know could have had a connection.
00:12:48.320 --> 00:12:55.279
Four years after Stonewall, 1973 becomes a pivotal year for gay liberation.
00:12:55.759 --> 00:13:04.080
By December, both Canada and the US will permanently remove homosexuality from their registers of mental disorders.
00:13:04.480 --> 00:13:10.559
Seminal gay and lesbian books, movies, record labels, and small presses emerge.
00:13:10.879 --> 00:13:42.240
For the lesbian community, there's Olivia Records, Amazon Quarterly, and NIAD Press in the US, The Circle in New Zealand, Press Gang in British Columbia, Canada, landmark lesbian literature, including Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation, Rita May Brown's Ruby Fruit Jungle, Audrey Lorde's From A Land Where Other People Live, and Monique Whitting's Le Corps Lesbienne are all published in 1973.
00:13:43.360 --> 00:13:53.440
But from within the gay and women's liberation movements, the Lavender Tide, lesbian feminism is simultaneously flourishing and fracturing.
00:13:53.679 --> 00:14:03.840
There are the lesbian separatists, radical lesbians, lesbian socialists, lesbian academics, black lesbians, third-world lesbians, lesbian mothers.
00:14:04.720 --> 00:14:08.879
I search for Barbara and Terry through their events.
00:14:09.679 --> 00:14:21.279
The festivals, the conferences, the protests, the demonstrations, the concerts, the readings, the screenings, the lectures, the workshops, the consciousness-raising meetings, the raps.
00:14:30.080 --> 00:14:32.000
Hey, a group of us are going to be a little bit more.
00:14:34.399 --> 00:14:35.600
I really like your article.
00:14:36.720 --> 00:14:38.879
Can we get together sometime and talk about it?
00:14:39.120 --> 00:14:41.039
What's the colour?
00:14:46.720 --> 00:14:49.120
Can I be in your consciousness raising group tonight?
00:14:49.360 --> 00:14:50.240
That was a great catch.
00:14:50.320 --> 00:14:51.279
You made a softball.
00:14:54.080 --> 00:14:55.600
Don't we vote in the same garage?
00:14:56.240 --> 00:14:58.000
I can't afford to buy a lesbian nation.
00:14:58.080 --> 00:14:58.559
Can I come up?
00:15:00.159 --> 00:15:01.519
We're doing a radio show.
00:15:01.679 --> 00:15:02.960
Would you like to come?
00:15:03.679 --> 00:15:16.399
On April 13th and 14th, the West Coast Lesbian Conference takes place at UCLA, organized by Kate Millette, the lesbian feminist writer and a new friend of Barbara's.
00:15:16.960 --> 00:15:35.440
The event marks a controversial moment in lesbian feminism in which the trans musician and activist Beth Elliott is forcibly ejected and accused of rape by audience members who assert that she is not welcome at the conference due to her gender assignment at birth.
00:15:35.919 --> 00:16:00.320
On the second day, the poet and activist Robin Morgan gives a transphobic speech, one of many that would contribute to the historic fissure between queer women who are welcoming trans and non-binary folks within lesbian discourse and those who would come to be defined as TERF or trans-exclusionary radical feminists.
00:16:01.840 --> 00:16:07.840
Barbara Hammer is at the West Coast Lesbian Conference at the behest of Kate Millette.
00:16:08.320 --> 00:16:11.360
She documents the event's proceedings on her Bolex.
00:16:12.000 --> 00:16:17.120
Her 1974 film Sisters will emerge from the footage of this day.
00:16:17.360 --> 00:16:20.080
Sister, sister, sister, sister, sister, sister.
00:16:20.399 --> 00:16:22.080
Please quiet down for just a second.
00:16:22.799 --> 00:16:33.200
A large number of women got together this evening because we felt very unconnected to what had been happening since we've been at the conference.
00:16:34.320 --> 00:16:41.279
And we feel like a lot of us would like to get to know more different people and a chance to talk to people in smaller groups.
00:16:43.200 --> 00:16:51.200
And to um have the opportunity to find out what it is we'd like to know from each other.
00:16:52.240 --> 00:16:59.039
Barbara writes about the incident with Beth Elliott in her diary, but does not include mention of it in the film.
00:16:59.759 --> 00:17:11.519
We were back from the convention of hissing and booing, of outrageous screaming and incompatible and incomparable invectives.
00:17:12.079 --> 00:17:24.480
The divisive nation of lesbians, the woman hating women whose ideologies and blind hate ran far in advance of their compassion.
00:17:25.359 --> 00:17:43.759
The transsexual guitarist appearance that split the sisters into argument and frustration, rushing to the defense of the shaken woman slash man who sat on the stage with proud, fierce arms of the mistress of God around her shoulders.
00:17:44.319 --> 00:17:56.720
East Bay Dykes, with their metal chains hanging from belts, with knives where guns should be, challenged the unorthodoxy of men in their presences.
00:17:57.200 --> 00:17:59.680
Men at a lesbian conference.
00:18:28.000 --> 00:18:48.079
White feminists and lesbians should render their own histories, subjectivities, and writing complex by attending to their various implications in overlapping social discursive divisions and their histories.
00:18:49.599 --> 00:18:51.200
Barbara Smith.
00:18:52.000 --> 00:19:00.640
Audrey Lord, speaking at the first lesbian conference at UCLA in nineteen seventy-three, said what I will never forget.
00:19:04.720 --> 00:19:07.200
There are only a few of us here, but we are here.
00:19:10.720 --> 00:19:14.319
And when you go back to your cities, uh we will be there.
00:19:24.000 --> 00:19:34.799
When you see our faces again back in your hometown, black women have uh have a full history of strength and have always given an awful lot to everything they're involved in.
00:19:35.599 --> 00:19:39.200
Uh we are proud and we are a vital force.
00:19:39.839 --> 00:19:49.359
Uh we are part of the lesbian feminist revolution, and we are willing to give of ourselves for the effort of liberation.
00:19:50.160 --> 00:19:56.400
As women, as black women, we have known dimensions of oppression that you don't know anything about.
00:19:57.359 --> 00:20:05.759
Uh I've heard someone mention today that uh that the lesbians were the most down people, and I would like to deal with that.
00:20:06.559 --> 00:20:17.920
Uh when you return to your cities and your jobs and your CR groups and your bars, remember your black sisters and do this for yourselves and for us.
00:20:20.160 --> 00:20:25.359
Every time a racist act is done in your presence, don't let it pass.
00:20:50.319 --> 00:20:55.680
As I was saying, every time a racist act is done in your presence, don't let it pass.
00:20:56.960 --> 00:21:05.200
When you're in your office or wherever it is that you are and something is done or said which is derogatory to me, your sister, I want you to stand up for me.
00:21:08.160 --> 00:21:20.000
On May 26th, Barbara attends a women's conference at Sacramento State University titled Women's Studies in Feminism: Survival in the 1970s.
00:21:20.559 --> 00:21:26.480
At the time, the conference would be called a battle between the Marxists and the matriarchs.
00:21:27.279 --> 00:21:33.839
Terry's close friend, the professor Joan Hoff-Wilson, was a professor at Zach State at the time.
00:21:34.559 --> 00:21:37.119
I looked for Barbara and Terry there too.
00:21:37.839 --> 00:21:49.440
It strikes me that that's maybe the way in which Barbara and Terry would have met in the first place is through if not Kate Millette or Marie Del Drago or not Joan.
00:21:49.599 --> 00:21:55.680
If Joan didn't uh know Barbara, then there was somebody in this ether who would have put them together.
00:21:56.799 --> 00:21:59.519
I I think you know, we have to remember how rare it was.
00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:04.559
For women to get professorships and teaching assignments and in this program.
00:22:05.039 --> 00:22:08.079
All of these women are pioneers in academia.
00:22:08.799 --> 00:22:14.640
And um it makes total sense to me that they all know each other.
00:22:14.799 --> 00:22:16.799
Even if they're totally different fields, right?
00:22:16.880 --> 00:22:23.680
I mean that Berkeley is the it's like the forecast, it's the place where they all meet.
00:22:23.759 --> 00:22:26.400
It's the it's the the center of the storm.
00:22:26.799 --> 00:22:30.559
Given what happened in Berkeley in the 60s and 70s, that makes total sense too.
00:22:30.720 --> 00:22:44.160
So even if you're a tax state, even if you're anywhere, if you're an academic, I think you're gonna and on the left, you're gonna be pulled towards that atmosphere one way or another.
00:22:47.359 --> 00:22:56.880
In her diary on May twenty-eighth, Barbara writes Circle talk of academic women and faculty and students.
00:23:12.000 --> 00:23:21.359
Barbara is seeking inclusion in this new community that she's a part of, but more so recognition from them as an artist.
00:23:22.480 --> 00:23:26.319
I told Andrea to remember the maverick.
00:23:26.559 --> 00:23:34.559
She called me the artist, and Jill Johnston too walked up and said, Aren't you an artist?
00:23:35.680 --> 00:23:37.920
Recognition from women.
00:23:38.160 --> 00:23:45.839
What I wanted so long now, if you satisfy my need is not so great.
00:23:47.680 --> 00:23:58.160
Jill Johnston suggests I write my experiences upon coming back to the US and finding myself during nine months in the women's movement.
00:23:59.039 --> 00:24:04.960
We talk about need to work apart from the group as individual artists.
00:24:05.359 --> 00:24:10.319
I feel like more and more these days of collective politics.
00:24:10.559 --> 00:24:12.160
I am estranged from.
00:24:14.160 --> 00:24:17.599
Generally, though, politics bore me.
00:24:18.400 --> 00:24:23.839
It is myth, imagination, dream that excite me.
00:24:25.279 --> 00:24:29.759
Female politics, too much like the oppressors.
00:24:30.480 --> 00:24:40.880
Hierarchical, structured, energy sapping, watered down, mundane, boring.
00:24:41.039 --> 00:24:44.160
My heart is a city of fire.
00:24:45.440 --> 00:24:49.200
I got this country's firewell.
00:24:49.680 --> 00:24:52.799
I don't know where it will lead to.
00:24:53.359 --> 00:24:56.319
I just love untraveled in all.
00:25:18.640 --> 00:25:37.680
As the conferences and protests and festivals raged in the cities in the early and mid-1970s, some LGBTQ people, and particularly lesbians, were choosing to relocate to rural areas, setting up and moving to intentional communities closer to nature.
00:25:38.559 --> 00:25:44.720
Just as there were homesteaders, hippies, and back-to-the-landers, there were queer separatists.
00:25:45.440 --> 00:25:53.200
Lesbians began buying property and setting up women's land, particularly up and down the west coast of North America.
00:25:54.799 --> 00:26:06.000
For many people in the US, particularly those opposed to the Vietnam War, Canada represented another kind of ideal, a place to escape the draft.
00:26:06.880 --> 00:26:12.720
Hornby Island on the west coast of British Columbia was one such ideal.
00:26:25.119 --> 00:26:46.880
Even before um, the only the only way to follow.
00:27:37.920 --> 00:27:42.480
But then came the draft dungeons, and with them the American counterculture.
00:27:42.799 --> 00:27:49.200
Today there are nearly a thousand full-time residents, and the counterculture is still alive and well.
00:27:49.440 --> 00:27:53.440
There is no police department, they will settle disputes on their own.
00:27:55.279 --> 00:27:57.839
Virtually everything in Hornby gets recycled.
00:28:02.559 --> 00:28:10.960
And if anyone needs some clothes or an appliance or whatever, they go to something called the free store where items are turned in rather than thrown out.
00:28:11.279 --> 00:28:15.200
There's also a non-profit food colony where the customers are the ownership.
00:28:15.440 --> 00:28:24.160
There were draft judges and hippies and just generally people getting the hell out of style things.
00:29:20.799 --> 00:29:50.079
And so she wanted to break away from that and was so bitterly opposed to the war that this was a way of you know, but basically, I'm gonna move to Canada because I don't believe in America, and uh so I can I can see that if that was her overall disposition, the idea of a communal utopian community on Cornby was just nirvana.
00:29:50.319 --> 00:29:52.160
I mean it was just perfect for her, I think.
00:29:52.240 --> 00:30:04.400
And I think that um falling in love too or having an affair, whatever with the nature of the relationship, um yeah, it was um I think it was a very powerful experience.
00:30:06.960 --> 00:30:25.519
The photos that Barbara took on Hornby Island that summer in August 1973 represent a spectrum of emotions intimately associated with that transition from powerlessness to empowerment, disenfranchisement to possibility.
00:30:26.400 --> 00:30:34.400
But what do these photos mean for the queer women who arrived at Hornby in the intervening years around Barbara and Terry's visit?
00:30:34.799 --> 00:30:38.880
And what does it mean for the people who grew up on the island at that time?
00:30:40.240 --> 00:30:45.039
The photos you shared, Barbara Hammer's photos, they were from what time, early 70s.
00:30:46.960 --> 00:30:47.680
73.
00:30:48.000 --> 00:30:49.599
Yeah, I would have been 10.
00:30:50.240 --> 00:30:59.599
I was completely unaware of any such I mean, and it they would have been probably quite private too.
00:30:59.759 --> 00:31:06.480
You know, like I don't know that those women would have walked around sort of holding hands at the co-op store.
00:31:07.440 --> 00:31:13.599
The the naked women and the water and the rocks and the all that kind of thing.
00:31:13.680 --> 00:31:15.759
Um they're very familiar.
00:31:16.480 --> 00:31:22.880
There's lots of those kind of photographs uh from from the 70s.
00:31:23.119 --> 00:31:35.440
So there's a lot of naked women and naked women at festivals, and naked women on women's land, and naked women in water, and naked, like just wasn't just it was just a thing.
00:31:35.680 --> 00:31:40.160
And we were all much younger and had bodies like those bodies.
00:31:40.960 --> 00:31:43.440
So that that that was that's my main reaction.
00:31:43.680 --> 00:31:56.720
I don't think I've I don't recognize, I don't think, any of the the people in any of the photographs, but it's the the the imagery in those photographs is very familiar.
00:31:57.200 --> 00:32:00.640
We're the country dykes, you know the country dikes.
00:32:00.799 --> 00:32:04.400
All of us at the beach, this is exactly what we look like.
00:32:04.720 --> 00:32:12.000
Um now whether I can you know pick out the specific places on them with them, I you know, I don't know.
00:32:12.400 --> 00:32:20.160
Um, but but yes, they do all they all do resonate, and this is exactly what we were all doing.
00:32:23.359 --> 00:32:26.240
But we all had little children running around naked too.
00:32:27.039 --> 00:32:35.279
Yeah, making out all the steps of the co-op and and and you know we were free.
00:32:54.000 --> 00:32:55.519
We were here on Hornby.
00:32:56.000 --> 00:33:10.720
We were safe haven for the women in the cities, doing Gale and the whole group of those women when they needed to get out of town, or when heat was on them, they came to Hornby.
00:33:11.039 --> 00:33:38.240
We put them all up and we fed them and we massaged them and we cared for them and we were the safe place, haven't for all these women coming out of the cities that were doing hard, big, and uh we were all would go down for those, but we were also the safe haven spot for um many of the um city lesbians.
00:33:39.599 --> 00:33:51.119
There were queers here, but there was not a queer community because it's small, it didn't feel like it was a queer community.
00:33:51.279 --> 00:33:58.079
It felt like there were queer folks within the community.
00:33:59.599 --> 00:34:20.079
It was great to be met by super friendly queers, but it wasn't that kind of um almost defensive protective queer community that I was used to.
00:34:22.239 --> 00:34:24.320
It's like the artists too.
00:34:24.559 --> 00:34:29.199
It wasn't like oh the artists all associate with each other.
00:34:29.280 --> 00:34:34.159
It was like, yeah associate with each other, who else is there?
00:34:34.480 --> 00:34:35.119
You know.
00:34:35.679 --> 00:34:40.239
It's a symbolic community, you kind of associate with everyone.
00:34:40.880 --> 00:34:45.199
The the social norm is you are okay with weirdos.
00:34:46.559 --> 00:34:57.760
By the mid-1980s, uh there was a thriving population of lesbian and queer women on Hornby Island, including artists, lesbian separatists, and single moms.
00:34:58.559 --> 00:35:02.559
Some of the women who had grown up on Hornby Island also set up communal housing.
00:35:03.039 --> 00:35:05.519
There was Claire, me, Kathy, and Gail.
00:35:06.000 --> 00:35:06.400
Yeah.
00:35:06.559 --> 00:35:09.760
And we all lived in Westview, which is this big old farmhouse.
00:35:09.840 --> 00:35:11.760
It's now been renovated and quite beautiful.
00:35:12.159 --> 00:35:14.400
But we all lived in what I call the Trimble House.
00:35:14.639 --> 00:35:17.039
You know, and it was the first time I'd actually moved out of the house.
00:35:17.119 --> 00:35:20.320
My own ho my mom's and I was building this at the time.
00:35:20.400 --> 00:35:22.960
So living there, living on EI and building this.
00:35:23.199 --> 00:35:23.519
Right.
00:35:23.760 --> 00:35:24.000
Yeah.
00:35:24.159 --> 00:35:24.320
Okay.
00:35:24.480 --> 00:35:28.800
And then Gail would pretty much just she taught me how to use a chainsaw and drive a standard.
00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:33.360
And then would kick me out the door to go work here every day.
00:35:33.920 --> 00:35:40.400
My first few years on Hornby were involved with um uh the lesbian community.
00:35:40.880 --> 00:35:53.280
Some uh you know, really, really um what do you call the um sort of man-hating separatists?
00:35:53.519 --> 00:35:55.519
Yes, yes, yes.
00:35:55.840 --> 00:35:58.880
So I fell into that for about a week.
00:36:01.119 --> 00:36:04.719
It's like I can't, you know, this is not my scene.
00:36:04.800 --> 00:36:09.280
And I don't hate men, and I don't like the patriarchy, but I don't hate men.
00:36:09.920 --> 00:36:20.079
And so we it was hard to stay in a separatist state, um uh and and get along and be part of this community.
00:36:20.400 --> 00:36:24.559
There was these two factions on Hornby at that point in those early days.
00:36:24.639 --> 00:36:31.599
There were the separatists, and then there were lesbians that were not separatists.
00:36:34.639 --> 00:36:40.960
So uh one thing that I have learned since being here is about the the quote unquote women's land that was on Mount Road.
00:36:41.119 --> 00:36:41.519
Yep.
00:36:41.679 --> 00:36:45.199
Um were you did you have much involvement in that or could you have it?
00:36:45.440 --> 00:36:46.480
Yeah, but you know what?
00:36:46.559 --> 00:36:49.039
That that that was also weird.
00:36:50.400 --> 00:36:52.320
Because they were separatists.
00:36:52.559 --> 00:37:00.960
Even some of the women who were involved with them didn't really go along with our their ideology.
00:37:01.199 --> 00:37:14.639
Like they didn't want men on the land, and they didn't want i if you had a a boy, a son, which I had, they didn't want son to come around, you know, strange things like that.
00:37:14.960 --> 00:37:20.000
So it was difficult, and once again, you know, there's always division.
00:37:20.079 --> 00:37:26.079
Some of them were like, oh sure, it's fine, and others were like really hardcore.
00:37:27.280 --> 00:37:29.760
It wasn't like women's land.
00:37:29.920 --> 00:37:48.400
It wasn't like, I don't know, like maybe in the 70s, where you had, you know, women's land and you know, women walking around nude and you know, hanging out in the grass or making love re you know, and it wasn't like that at all.
00:37:50.960 --> 00:37:51.599
At all.
00:37:52.719 --> 00:37:54.239
So what what was it then?
00:37:56.159 --> 00:38:04.880
I don't know, it was just this there was only they were they were a family who had this land up there.
00:38:05.599 --> 00:38:08.880
You talked about the the scene up on Mount Road.
00:38:09.039 --> 00:38:18.559
Well, I was very involved in that, in those women and in supporting them in choosing to live their lives the way they needed to and wanted to.
00:38:18.800 --> 00:38:23.440
That was uh that was a scene back then up on Mount Road.
00:38:24.639 --> 00:38:55.760
And um and I very much supported it, and they adopted a lot of uh little girls, um, five to be exact, or six, and um it's blown up in their face, all of that now, and all the girls, none of the girls have ended up being lesbians, which is devastating to, you know, two of the women, and and they're not accept anyhow.
00:38:55.840 --> 00:39:12.159
It's uh it's uh was a hard scene, but that was going on in Hor uh on Hornby back in the that would have been from about 87 um till the mid-90s.
00:39:12.880 --> 00:39:28.639
That's interesting because I um I was looking around, poking around the archives here quite a bit and looking at the the there's a folder on the women's center here or the the women's mov like the Right, Betty Fairbanks and all of us, yes.
00:39:28.960 --> 00:39:29.440
Yeah.
00:39:29.760 --> 00:39:34.079
And there's a lot of notes that say we don't want to be lesbian separatists.
00:39:34.880 --> 00:39:38.559
But then and I think that that that comes up a number of times.
00:39:38.800 --> 00:39:52.320
So I kind of that makes kind of tracks with the that there was I could get the sense that there was like a separation of the separatists and the non-separatist lesbians.
00:39:52.719 --> 00:39:56.480
And it was uh I I found it very, very difficult.
00:39:56.800 --> 00:40:10.159
And um and the separatists were always causing um causing a scene which we all felt unnecessary in our little tiny community.
00:40:13.440 --> 00:40:15.599
What was it like raising your son here?
00:40:16.079 --> 00:40:26.400
Uh very I mean having nothing to do with being a lesbian, I don't think.
00:40:26.639 --> 00:40:33.199
Um, very, very, very supportive community for a single mom, even though the dad was here.
00:40:33.360 --> 00:40:36.559
Uh for a single mom raising uh a son.
00:40:37.199 --> 00:40:51.760
And uh that year that was 87, that was the year that my son was born, uh nine months after the harmonic conversions, because we all converged.
00:40:51.920 --> 00:40:58.400
And there was 23 kids born that year, the most that's ever born on Hornby in one year.
00:40:59.360 --> 00:41:03.039
So there was lots of lots of support.
00:41:03.199 --> 00:41:16.639
Lots of us didn't do uh school, we did homeschooling because there were so many kids and so many big big um group that have stayed connected over the years.
00:41:17.440 --> 00:41:24.719
So it kind of sounds like when you arrived here in the in the mid-80s, it was just like a thriving, cool scene.
00:41:24.960 --> 00:41:25.920
Thriving.
00:41:26.239 --> 00:41:27.920
Thriving, thriving.
00:41:28.480 --> 00:41:31.840
The community hall had just been re-redone.
00:41:32.000 --> 00:41:47.119
The separation of of old timers and locals and um and the hippies had happened because there was huge conflict between the old timers and the hippies.
00:41:47.360 --> 00:42:04.559
So then that's when the community hall was redone and Lloyd House and all that crowd, you know, built and converted the hall from a square building into this, put the round room on it and the big um stump and all of that.
00:42:04.639 --> 00:42:10.559
So it turned it, you know, all all that creative, the creative hippies had their own place now.
00:42:10.639 --> 00:42:14.000
So the hall became community hall became ours.
00:42:14.400 --> 00:42:20.800
When we came that first summer, it was the first, the um new school had just been built.
00:42:21.039 --> 00:42:26.880
So there was 140 kids in school.
00:42:27.199 --> 00:42:32.960
The family life was just, and the kids were just, it was incredible.
00:42:33.199 --> 00:42:38.000
Um, you know, I was, of course, an American, um, broke.
00:42:38.159 --> 00:42:41.840
I'd put everything I had into fixing getting my van fixed.
00:42:42.000 --> 00:42:48.559
Couldn't my my parents, everybody was mad I was here and nobody would send money or support me.
00:42:50.000 --> 00:42:52.320
We were a depressed area.
00:42:52.880 --> 00:42:54.719
There were no jobs.
00:42:55.280 --> 00:42:59.119
You could buy a lot in Sandpiper for$6,000.
00:43:01.440 --> 00:43:04.000
Really, really, really a depressed area.
00:43:04.159 --> 00:43:08.480
The whole area from here to, you know, the fishing industry had collapsed.
00:43:08.559 --> 00:43:12.559
The lumber, uh, uh all natural resources had collapsed.
00:43:12.719 --> 00:43:19.519
There was, it was a very difficult time on Vancouver Island during that time.
00:43:20.079 --> 00:43:23.360
There was no tourism, there was no any of that.
00:43:23.840 --> 00:43:27.199
So welfare was easy to get.
00:43:27.920 --> 00:43:34.880
And so many single women moved here with their children, moved here just to have babies.
00:43:35.039 --> 00:43:39.360
They weren't forced to work, they could stay at home because there were no jobs.
00:43:39.519 --> 00:43:41.920
You, you know, oh yes, I'm looking for work.
00:43:42.159 --> 00:43:43.840
There were no jobs.
00:43:44.239 --> 00:43:53.199
So you were this was a place to come and raise your kids and and and and be on welfare.
00:43:55.039 --> 00:43:59.760
Around that time, uh in the late 1980s, uh, a group of women on the island.
00:44:00.239 --> 00:44:09.519
Got together to form a women's center, a place for mutual support, education, creativity, and child care.
00:44:11.280 --> 00:44:20.159
We used to have a really strong women's collective, or we never called it the center.
00:44:20.559 --> 00:44:21.280
Group.
00:44:21.599 --> 00:44:28.239
We used to have gatherings and potlucks and there used to be quite a few of us.
00:44:28.719 --> 00:44:34.320
So Amanda and I had some pretty interesting conversations and decided to start a women's center.
00:44:34.400 --> 00:44:35.679
And I feel like it was more her push.
00:44:35.760 --> 00:44:37.840
And then Moira Armour, have you heard of her yet?
00:44:38.000 --> 00:44:38.559
Um, yeah.
00:44:38.719 --> 00:44:39.920
Uh Judith told me about it.
00:44:40.159 --> 00:44:44.559
Right, Moira and Judith Howells and were like, yes, and especially Moira though.
00:44:44.639 --> 00:44:46.639
Moira's fucking hardcore, man.
00:44:46.719 --> 00:44:48.960
Like, she just pushed us, but we did.
00:44:49.039 --> 00:44:50.800
Like, we got it going, we got a library.
00:44:50.960 --> 00:45:18.000
I mean You know, just like everything over the years, it's kind of dissipated, and now everybody sticks to their own whatever, and I mean, but it's pretty much like that on the whole island, not just the women's group, but you know, we used to have movies every week, and we used to have pot bucks all the time, and now none of that happens.
00:45:18.559 --> 00:45:19.119
I know.
00:45:19.840 --> 00:45:22.000
And this is before COVID.
00:45:22.239 --> 00:45:28.480
I mean, COVID really kind of sealed it in, but even before COVID it started happening.
00:45:28.639 --> 00:45:34.880
I don't know, I think it kind of started happening with maybe the social media, internet.
00:45:36.320 --> 00:45:44.639
Uh why go out when I can, you know, do everything I want to do on my my tablet or my computer, you know.
00:45:45.199 --> 00:45:50.559
So, and then uh various of the old crones, of course, died.
00:45:51.280 --> 00:45:56.159
And women moved on, and it just, yeah.
00:45:56.559 --> 00:46:05.599
Just doesn't seem to be that uh connect- there's hardly any of us left, you know.
00:46:06.079 --> 00:46:14.480
Well, Hornby has really changed a lot, but I've always been kind of a hermit.
00:46:14.800 --> 00:46:31.519
The kind of artwork I do is different from what a lot of artists here do, so um there were some people here who I had like close artistic relationships with, like Lane Savoy.
00:46:32.400 --> 00:47:07.679
Um, but a lot of people, like I really appreciated their work, and they seemed to appreciate my work, but there wasn't that kind of connection like I had with um a lot of artists in Vancouver, like either queer artists or artists with disabilities, um, where you know the subject matter and the politics was just like burning our heart.
00:47:08.719 --> 00:47:29.519
Um which, you know, people like Barbara Hammer really feel like they're like our older sisters, people from my generation, they're our older sisters, they're our trailblazers.
00:47:30.079 --> 00:48:09.440
Um they started doing crazy stuff during a time when it was just like unthinkable, and they made so much thinkable for us coming after them, and um so I can just adore someone's landscape, but I don't have that kind of connection of the burning subject matter.
00:48:10.639 --> 00:48:13.119
Um, you know what I mean?
00:48:14.000 --> 00:48:17.679
I can go, oh my god, that's so beautiful.
00:48:17.840 --> 00:48:38.480
Oh the brush is broke, oh the colors, oh your vision, but it's not the same as Oh my fucking god, he used a brass band as a visual finding his way device.
00:48:42.320 --> 00:48:47.360
He did that Carmen Papaglion.
00:48:50.880 --> 00:48:59.360
So you know, I miss my Vancouver art community, but I'm still connected with my Vancouver art community.
00:48:59.679 --> 00:49:07.280
I'm connected with the Toronto disability art community.
00:49:07.519 --> 00:49:15.599
I was thinking we should have some sort of I don't know, get together.
00:49:16.239 --> 00:49:18.960
So you miss you miss the feeling of community?
00:49:19.440 --> 00:49:24.000
Or that feeling that like there's a group of people, yeah.
00:49:24.159 --> 00:49:26.480
Yeah, yeah, we used to have a good time.
00:49:30.960 --> 00:49:33.199
There is no queer community.
00:49:33.920 --> 00:49:34.880
Interesting.
00:49:35.760 --> 00:49:51.920
There's lots of queer and gender diverse people, and there are there aren't high levels of of uh homophobia or transphobia that I know of that there might be that I don't know of.
00:49:52.079 --> 00:50:06.400
Um but there's uh there is no um there's no overt organized community like and it's the first time in 50 years that I've lived without it, and it's really weird.
00:50:06.639 --> 00:50:09.679
It's very weird for there not to be a community.
00:50:11.840 --> 00:50:26.559
I mean, I think that Terry and Barbara were liberated women, they were fully out and you know, uh probably really comfortable with their sexuality, and it was a time when they they had a lot of support in terms of like all the movements that were happening.
00:50:26.800 --> 00:50:30.880
But I I just recall uh this is kind of a cute anecdote.
00:50:31.039 --> 00:50:34.559
I had a girlfriend for a while when I was in Montreal who was from Cape Breton.
00:50:34.719 --> 00:50:40.800
We drove out uh to Nova Scotia and we went and visited her family in Badak.
00:50:41.199 --> 00:50:44.320
And then we got in the car and we were gonna drive around Cape Breton.
00:50:44.400 --> 00:50:47.360
But my gay friend was like completely uninhibited.
00:50:47.440 --> 00:50:51.599
He'd go to the beach and he'd strip all his clothes off, and then I would follow suit.
00:50:51.679 --> 00:50:55.280
So we were naked and we were sort of sunbathing naked and swimming naked on the beach.
00:50:55.360 --> 00:51:00.800
And my my um my girlfriend who was from there was like beside herself.
00:51:00.880 --> 00:51:02.880
She's like, get your clothes back on.
00:51:03.199 --> 00:51:05.360
Someone's gonna come down and yell at us.
00:51:05.679 --> 00:51:08.159
Because Cape Breton's very traditional.
00:51:08.320 --> 00:51:11.679
Like nobody, you don't go to the beach and take your clothes off.
00:51:12.639 --> 00:51:17.119
So we were kind of experiencing freedom because we weren't from there.
00:51:18.159 --> 00:51:25.519
None of our aunties or you know, people in the village up at the top of the bank were gonna come down and yell at us or call, you know.
00:51:26.639 --> 00:51:33.679
So we felt we were kind of somehow above any kind of any any sort of um repercussions.
00:51:34.239 --> 00:51:37.440
Or we were free from repercussions, we felt free.
00:51:37.920 --> 00:51:53.119
So like that idea, that's interesting to me how to be queer, you have to go away in order to really be myself in terms of the expression of my queer lesbian identity and self.
00:51:53.679 --> 00:51:59.519
I have to go away from my family, away from the people who knew me when I was a child.
00:52:00.559 --> 00:52:05.039
So whenever I came back to Hornby, it was kind of like partial.
00:52:05.519 --> 00:52:11.199
Like if I was just me and a couple of friends on the beach and no one was around, then we could kind of be free.
00:52:11.280 --> 00:52:16.800
But if anyone was around to witness, then I felt self-conscious.
00:52:16.960 --> 00:52:21.039
I felt uncom it just wasn't free.
00:52:21.280 --> 00:52:22.559
Uncomfortable.
00:52:24.960 --> 00:52:26.159
Uh, what is it now?
00:52:26.320 --> 00:52:28.000
Well, now it's money.
00:52:28.400 --> 00:52:31.440
Seems as if it's all about money.
00:52:31.679 --> 00:52:33.760
So we're just heading to Ornby Island for a week.
00:52:34.159 --> 00:52:36.159
Nah, this is gonna be home.
00:52:38.719 --> 00:52:40.000
Wait until I get to three hours.
00:52:46.000 --> 00:52:49.920
It's a different place than the one that I grew up in, you know.
00:52:50.079 --> 00:52:57.519
It's almost like in my mind there was a chapter up until the point where I graduated from high school where there were also lots of transitions.
00:52:57.679 --> 00:53:11.840
But I I hold in my mind and in my dreams when I dream about Hornby, a kind of space that was like kind of the 70s, the earlier part of the 70s, what I remember call and being like.
00:53:12.480 --> 00:53:52.159
And then there's a new chapter, which is kind of post that, which is much more about people moving to the island, but not to go back to the land, you know, that they were moving to the island maybe to retire or maybe to find a new life for themselves, still very aspirational, but they were building houses that were had all the modern conveniences, and you know, so the chapter that I recall that my my kind of subconscious recalls is like the the roads were dirt, and people lived in hand-built houses, and there was the co-op was this one small building that had very basic groceries.
00:53:52.320 --> 00:54:07.360
It would there were it was beautiful, it was there was a kind of expansiveness to the fact everything was really slow because to get anywhere, you know, it was like bumping along a dirt road, and there was big clouds of dust behind all the vehicles.
00:54:07.440 --> 00:54:13.840
And if you're walking along the road, you have to get off the road so that you didn't get covered with dust when the cars went by.
00:54:14.480 --> 00:54:22.000
So I think when I go back, part of me kind of connects in glimpses with memory.
00:54:22.559 --> 00:54:27.840
I have glimpses of memory of the way it felt when I was a kid.
00:54:28.400 --> 00:54:33.199
And I think I have a quite a deep longing for that, to kind of connect with that.
00:54:33.440 --> 00:54:39.760
But at the same time, it's not really possible to be on Hornby.
00:54:40.239 --> 00:54:47.119
It is kind of on, it's definitely very known to tourism, you know.
00:54:47.920 --> 00:54:58.000
There's a lot of, there are a lot, there's a lot of kind of being, like the way people are be on Hornby that I is unrecognizable to me.
00:54:58.239 --> 00:55:13.840
Like this kind of um coming with all your like your your stand-up paddle boards and your your bikes, and you're gonna kind of like recreate with your family of like a whole handful of kids.
00:55:15.440 --> 00:55:18.960
I feel like when I when I see people like that, I'm like, that's really lovely.
00:55:19.039 --> 00:55:28.480
That what what a great thing for those, you know, these kids who are coming to this beautiful place, but it's like they're not experiencing anything that I think of as Wornby.
00:55:29.760 --> 00:55:41.039
Like they're not, there's that texture of of it being kind of like um things weren't easy.
00:55:48.800 --> 00:56:06.079
As opposed to just sort of like driving through listening to your soundtrack, your playlist, and you know, I I feel that I think it's kind of like not a loss, but a longing for.
00:56:07.440 --> 00:56:11.199
You know, so many resort communities, and that's what we are now.
00:56:12.239 --> 00:56:21.199
And we weren't then, and the Gulf Islands really weren't that, and they were much more family-oriented than they are now, and it's a it's a shame.
00:56:21.599 --> 00:56:27.599
And um, it has, it's changed drastically, and and I will not say it's for the best.
00:56:28.639 --> 00:56:38.400
Um, and I don't think it'll never go back, it's just gonna get more exclusive because of what Hornby is.
00:56:39.199 --> 00:56:49.199
You know, this beautiful jewel of an island with some of the most incredible beaches and forests and parks in all of the islands.
00:56:49.519 --> 00:56:53.599
So there's no going back.
00:56:56.960 --> 00:57:04.000
Another layer that I acknowledge is always having a premonition that I that I didn't belong there.
00:57:04.960 --> 00:57:11.440
And my dad and I have this conversation, it's about a longing for rootedness, and I think it's a way of acknowledging our settlerness.
00:57:12.400 --> 00:57:21.039
And always longing for connection, but realizing that the place that you're at, that you're in, you're you're a guest.
00:57:21.199 --> 00:57:22.880
You're not from, you know.
00:57:22.960 --> 00:57:27.599
I mean, I'm experiencing it again here now in southern Alberta.
00:57:27.920 --> 00:57:34.079
But I think even as a as a child, I had no, my parents didn't talk race politics at all.
00:57:34.159 --> 00:57:41.760
They didn't talk about um nobody talked about the presence of indigenous people, peoples.
00:57:42.159 --> 00:57:51.199
Um, but I had an intuition of like having kind of like landed and not really fully belonging.
00:57:53.119 --> 00:58:04.159
That I think unsettles and interrupts and troubles, it troubles all of those utopian kind of narratives of going back to the land.
00:58:09.119 --> 00:58:27.039
New Friend is made by Bitsy Knox with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Barbara Hammer Estate, and the Beinickee Road Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, as well as 96.5 CHFR, Hornby Island Community Radio, and Kashmir Radio, Berlin.
00:58:28.000 --> 00:58:31.599
In this chapter, you heard clips from the following sources.
00:58:31.840 --> 00:58:55.679
Lesbian Sisters Getting Together in the Lesbian Community from July 3rd, 1973, Courtesy of Radio Pacifica, Beth Elliott's Good Time, 1976, Kathy Fire's City on Fire, 1978, An Oral History with Barbara Hammer, recorded for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art by Svetlana Kitto in 2018.
00:58:56.400 --> 00:58:59.039
You also heard Nim Hughes reading from A.
00:58:59.360 --> 00:59:08.960
Steiner's essay in Truant, Photographs 1970 to 1979, by Barbara Hammer, published by Capricious in 2018.
00:59:09.440 --> 00:59:22.880
A recording of Michel Foucault talking about heterotopias for a French radio broadcast in 1966, and excerpts from Barbara Hammer's film Sisters of 1974, and Tender Fictions from 1996.
00:59:23.519 --> 00:59:58.079
Thank you so much to all of those who contributed their voices to this chapter of New Friend, Nim Hughes, Persimen Blackbridge, Bonita Wexler, Elaine Savoy, Claire Cronia, Annie Martin, and Judith Lawrence, and to the water, rocks, wind, sky, plants, and all living and non-living beings of Hornby Island, Jedi H, to whom I extend gratitude and respectfully acknowledge that these recordings were made on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral lands of the Comox First Nation.
00:00:01.520 --> 00:00:02.799
Trigger warning.
00:00:03.200 --> 00:00:15.119
This episode contains themes and language relating to racist and settler colonial violence, transphobic and homophobic histories, and outdated terms relating to gender and sexuality.
00:00:15.599 --> 00:00:18.000
Listener discretion is advised.
00:00:20.160 --> 00:00:29.839
The conquest of utopia is impossibility, a place that does not exist, an etymological quote, not place.
00:00:30.399 --> 00:00:37.439
Haterotopia is the place of hammer's photographs.
00:00:38.000 --> 00:00:41.520
Other, another different place.
00:00:57.759 --> 00:01:00.719
Chapter three, Utopia.
00:01:03.520 --> 00:01:20.719
Utopia, a literal no place, was named by Sir Thomas More in 1516, 24 years after Christopher Columbus first landed on an island in the Bahamas named Guanahani, which he named San Salvador.
00:01:21.760 --> 00:01:29.280
The notion of utopia has existed in the North American imagination since the beginning of settler colonialism.
00:01:29.680 --> 00:01:51.120
That the outdated and cramped edifices of the so-called old world could be shed in favor of a new and more perfect society, an Eden as constructed as the whiteness that settlers would harness in their rapacious exploitation and expropriation of land, resources, and people.
00:01:52.879 --> 00:02:02.799
The vision of a more just and beautiful world for some, in other words, would come at the expense of others.
00:02:13.360 --> 00:02:31.840
In 1966 and 67, the French philosopher Michel Foucault began to outline his vision of heterotopia as a physical representation of utopia, a world within a world, a place of otherness, of difference, of heterogeneity.
00:02:32.879 --> 00:02:38.879
He uses a mirror to describe the relationship between heterotopia and utopia.
00:02:39.199 --> 00:02:48.479
A mirror is a virtual place, a reflection or perhaps projection of oneself, and thus is a utopia.
00:02:49.039 --> 00:02:56.240
But it's also a heterotopia in that it is a real object, one that is connected to its surroundings.
00:02:56.560 --> 00:03:09.599
There are heterotopias of time, like museums, heterotopias of deviation, like prisons and social movements, and heterotopias of ritual or purification, like a beach.
00:03:11.599 --> 00:03:17.360
The origins of North American utopianism can be traced right back to the first ships from Europe.
00:03:18.159 --> 00:03:32.960
But it really took off at the dawn of photography in the early 19th century, when, partially inspired by Shaker communities a century earlier, intentional communities began to pop up, built on ideals of collective and communal living.
00:03:33.199 --> 00:03:43.120
Ideals that would re-emerge again in the late 1960s, as many young artists, hippies, and radicals left urban centers for rural areas.
00:03:50.080 --> 00:03:52.639
Is that there is a very large group.
00:03:53.199 --> 00:04:01.039
I'm talking about the church of the health, the opportunity for extreme.
00:04:03.360 --> 00:04:05.520
The establishment does not offer anything.
00:04:06.560 --> 00:04:12.080
The only place for those two people is part of a huge organization.
00:04:12.319 --> 00:04:13.759
And nothing has been offered.
00:04:18.399 --> 00:04:33.759
In the late 1960s, Barbara Hammer and her then husband Clay were two such people moving to Sonoma County in California to build a homestead of their own adjacent to other famous hippie communes.
00:04:35.040 --> 00:04:39.839
We bought land in Sonoma County for$1,000 an acre.
00:04:40.240 --> 00:04:46.480
We had six thousand six acres with a creek, a live creek going through it for six thousand dollars.
00:04:46.959 --> 00:04:50.800
We drew our own plans, we had them approved by the county.
00:04:51.279 --> 00:04:56.879
We dug out our own basement and we built a two-story house there, large.
00:04:57.600 --> 00:05:10.639
While doing this, we built ourselves a shower out of a redwood tree that we would put in a metal water container and heat with a wood fire so we could have hot water.
00:05:10.879 --> 00:05:12.319
We dug our own well.
00:05:13.120 --> 00:05:15.360
Um we were radical.
00:05:16.160 --> 00:05:18.800
I wanted him to blow up the Bank of America.
00:05:19.439 --> 00:05:21.680
The hippies were active at the time.
00:05:22.079 --> 00:05:32.720
They were confronting the bourgeois America in kind of the same way that the 1% movement did, which I support, but there was more violence attached.
00:05:32.800 --> 00:05:34.800
I hadn't looked at her yet.
00:05:36.079 --> 00:05:43.279
What I was doing was reading biographies because suddenly I had become a bit trapped as a housewife.
00:05:43.759 --> 00:05:45.439
Her house wasn't finished.
00:05:46.240 --> 00:05:49.199
Most houses don't get finished at the builders built.
00:05:49.600 --> 00:05:51.040
But we were living in it.
00:05:51.759 --> 00:06:00.480
And people would come over, interesting neighbors, poets, different artists, other people interesting people.
00:06:01.120 --> 00:06:04.639
And the men would congregate and I would serve the coffee.
00:06:05.439 --> 00:06:07.839
I was getting stuck in a housewife role.
00:06:08.560 --> 00:06:12.480
And even if the women came over, I wasn't a feminist yet.
00:06:12.800 --> 00:06:17.120
I would prefer to hang out with the guys because they might be talking physics.
00:06:17.600 --> 00:06:18.959
Something more interesting.
00:06:19.680 --> 00:06:21.439
And what the women were talking about.
00:06:21.600 --> 00:06:23.519
I didn't really give them much of a chance.
00:06:23.839 --> 00:06:25.279
But the hippies moved in.
00:06:25.360 --> 00:06:29.120
They moved out of Hay Ashbury into the neighborhoods around us.
00:06:29.680 --> 00:06:34.720
Morning Star Ranch was born where a lot of the famous hippies went.
00:06:35.120 --> 00:06:42.319
And closer to us in Sonola County, where we were, was Bill Walker's ranch.
00:06:42.879 --> 00:06:47.199
Bill was a painter and rich.
00:06:47.439 --> 00:06:52.560
I mean he lived like a hippie with his wife, but they opened their land to anybody.
00:06:52.800 --> 00:06:58.079
And so there'd be big school buses on there and dilapidated trucks parked.
00:06:58.319 --> 00:07:00.319
And I used to hang out there.
00:07:01.279 --> 00:07:07.439
I started going there and teaching school to the kids because the parents weren't LSD.
00:07:12.079 --> 00:07:17.920
To me, she never expressed a utopian view.
00:07:18.639 --> 00:07:32.720
Uh I mean, it was always wonderful for her to be surrounded by female energy and women and women's bodies and uh the diversity in women's bodies.
00:07:33.040 --> 00:07:35.839
So she just was not at all about that.
00:07:36.240 --> 00:07:45.040
It was more just uh how women inhabited their bodies.
00:07:45.360 --> 00:07:53.519
I don't think I ever heard any kind of reference to a utopian point of view.
00:07:56.160 --> 00:08:07.360
It's um fascinating and curious and fortunate for me that I came out at a time when a lot of women were coming out.
00:08:07.600 --> 00:08:15.920
It was the same time I was coming out as an artist, and I had decided to be a filmmaker rather than a painter.
00:08:16.399 --> 00:08:34.159
I came out with a woman, not knowing I was a lesbian, but being part of a woman's circle, and making a trip to San Francisco from Santa Rosa where I was teaching, and sitting next to her while we were watching Ken Kissis.
00:08:35.440 --> 00:08:46.559
One flew over the cuckoo's nest, her leg touched my own, and I felt this incredible rush, erotic rush, just through our knees.
00:08:46.879 --> 00:08:52.159
And I thought, oh my god, I'd never felt this for a woman before.
00:08:52.559 --> 00:08:56.320
I, or even that much for a man as I can remember.
00:08:56.720 --> 00:09:04.159
And I decided right then I can act on I can act on this or ignore it.
00:09:04.399 --> 00:09:06.480
I decided to act on it.
00:09:06.720 --> 00:09:08.000
And so Marie A.
00:09:08.240 --> 00:09:16.879
Shaw and I went back to my place in Santa Rosa and spent the night and were still up to see the dawn.
00:09:17.759 --> 00:09:19.600
I became a lesbian.
00:09:31.200 --> 00:09:34.639
It's spring 1973 in California.
00:09:35.600 --> 00:09:36.399
Roe vs.
00:09:36.639 --> 00:09:42.080
Wade, protecting a woman's right to abortion, had just passed in January.
00:09:42.559 --> 00:09:45.679
The Paris Peace Accords, ending U.S.
00:09:45.840 --> 00:09:55.840
involvement in the Vietnam War, also were signed in January 1973, although soldiers were still being conscripted well into June.
00:09:57.039 --> 00:10:11.039
The wounded knee occupation is ongoing, with members of the Oglala, Lakota, and American Indian movement occupying the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, following the murder of Buddy Lamont by federal officers.
00:10:12.159 --> 00:10:15.120
Watergate is reaching a climax.
00:10:15.679 --> 00:10:20.879
Stephen Biko has just been banned by the South African apartheid government.
00:10:21.120 --> 00:10:26.000
And in China, the Cultural Revolution is in full effect.
00:10:27.279 --> 00:10:35.919
Up and down the west coast of North America, from California to British Columbia, a counterculture is in bloom.
00:10:36.559 --> 00:10:50.480
The social experiments that had hatched out of the 1960s hippie civil rights and student movements are becoming established, with communes, intentional communities, and backed land movements sprouting in rural areas.
00:10:51.120 --> 00:10:58.080
In the cities, there are consciousness-raising groups, raps, meetings, festivals, and marches.
00:10:58.639 --> 00:11:06.720
New age philosophy, infused with psychedelics and ancient and eastern philosophy, provides aesthetic.
00:11:10.159 --> 00:11:31.600
But from within the guise of countercultural expression, of experimentation, and world-building, lies an imbalance in which the liberation of historically marginalized groups is placed at odds with these social and political movements organized by the white university-educated bourgeoisie.
00:11:32.879 --> 00:11:37.919
I look for Barbara and Terry in these interest dises.
00:11:41.440 --> 00:12:08.080
She told me something really interesting once about San Francisco in that period, and and she said that, you know, those of us who were in Berkeley who were so politicized, who were so interested in political change, we did not respect the the hate-ash gray hippies who were um you know just all there for sex and drugs and rock and roll.
00:12:08.159 --> 00:12:16.240
I mean that this this is supposed to be a movement that was supposed to change the world, not just make yourself feel good all the time, right?
00:12:16.799 --> 00:12:42.879
And and the reason I mentioned that is I think that if she found someone in San Francisco like Barbara who was an intellectual peer, was you know somebody who was interesting and dynamic and had something to offer Volcarry in the world, well then pursue that, you know, why not why not engage with that?
00:12:43.120 --> 00:12:47.679
Um and so it makes sense that they you know could have had a connection.
00:12:48.320 --> 00:12:55.279
Four years after Stonewall, 1973 becomes a pivotal year for gay liberation.
00:12:55.759 --> 00:13:04.080
By December, both Canada and the US will permanently remove homosexuality from their registers of mental disorders.
00:13:04.480 --> 00:13:10.559
Seminal gay and lesbian books, movies, record labels, and small presses emerge.
00:13:10.879 --> 00:13:42.240
For the lesbian community, there's Olivia Records, Amazon Quarterly, and NIAD Press in the US, The Circle in New Zealand, Press Gang in British Columbia, Canada, landmark lesbian literature, including Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation, Rita May Brown's Ruby Fruit Jungle, Audrey Lorde's From A Land Where Other People Live, and Monique Whitting's Le Corps Lesbienne are all published in 1973.
00:13:43.360 --> 00:13:53.440
But from within the gay and women's liberation movements, the Lavender Tide, lesbian feminism is simultaneously flourishing and fracturing.
00:13:53.679 --> 00:14:03.840
There are the lesbian separatists, radical lesbians, lesbian socialists, lesbian academics, black lesbians, third-world lesbians, lesbian mothers.
00:14:04.720 --> 00:14:08.879
I search for Barbara and Terry through their events.
00:14:09.679 --> 00:14:21.279
The festivals, the conferences, the protests, the demonstrations, the concerts, the readings, the screenings, the lectures, the workshops, the consciousness-raising meetings, the raps.
00:14:30.080 --> 00:14:32.000
Hey, a group of us are going to be a little bit more.
00:14:34.399 --> 00:14:35.600
I really like your article.
00:14:36.720 --> 00:14:38.879
Can we get together sometime and talk about it?
00:14:39.120 --> 00:14:41.039
What's the colour?
00:14:46.720 --> 00:14:49.120
Can I be in your consciousness raising group tonight?
00:14:49.360 --> 00:14:50.240
That was a great catch.
00:14:50.320 --> 00:14:51.279
You made a softball.
00:14:54.080 --> 00:14:55.600
Don't we vote in the same garage?
00:14:56.240 --> 00:14:58.000
I can't afford to buy a lesbian nation.
00:14:58.080 --> 00:14:58.559
Can I come up?
00:15:00.159 --> 00:15:01.519
We're doing a radio show.
00:15:01.679 --> 00:15:02.960
Would you like to come?
00:15:03.679 --> 00:15:16.399
On April 13th and 14th, the West Coast Lesbian Conference takes place at UCLA, organized by Kate Millette, the lesbian feminist writer and a new friend of Barbara's.
00:15:16.960 --> 00:15:35.440
The event marks a controversial moment in lesbian feminism in which the trans musician and activist Beth Elliott is forcibly ejected and accused of rape by audience members who assert that she is not welcome at the conference due to her gender assignment at birth.
00:15:35.919 --> 00:16:00.320
On the second day, the poet and activist Robin Morgan gives a transphobic speech, one of many that would contribute to the historic fissure between queer women who are welcoming trans and non-binary folks within lesbian discourse and those who would come to be defined as TERF or trans-exclusionary radical feminists.
00:16:01.840 --> 00:16:07.840
Barbara Hammer is at the West Coast Lesbian Conference at the behest of Kate Millette.
00:16:08.320 --> 00:16:11.360
She documents the event's proceedings on her Bolex.
00:16:12.000 --> 00:16:17.120
Her 1974 film Sisters will emerge from the footage of this day.
00:16:17.360 --> 00:16:20.080
Sister, sister, sister, sister, sister, sister.
00:16:20.399 --> 00:16:22.080
Please quiet down for just a second.
00:16:22.799 --> 00:16:33.200
A large number of women got together this evening because we felt very unconnected to what had been happening since we've been at the conference.
00:16:34.320 --> 00:16:41.279
And we feel like a lot of us would like to get to know more different people and a chance to talk to people in smaller groups.
00:16:43.200 --> 00:16:51.200
And to um have the opportunity to find out what it is we'd like to know from each other.
00:16:52.240 --> 00:16:59.039
Barbara writes about the incident with Beth Elliott in her diary, but does not include mention of it in the film.
00:16:59.759 --> 00:17:11.519
We were back from the convention of hissing and booing, of outrageous screaming and incompatible and incomparable invectives.
00:17:12.079 --> 00:17:24.480
The divisive nation of lesbians, the woman hating women whose ideologies and blind hate ran far in advance of their compassion.
00:17:25.359 --> 00:17:43.759
The transsexual guitarist appearance that split the sisters into argument and frustration, rushing to the defense of the shaken woman slash man who sat on the stage with proud, fierce arms of the mistress of God around her shoulders.
00:17:44.319 --> 00:17:56.720
East Bay Dykes, with their metal chains hanging from belts, with knives where guns should be, challenged the unorthodoxy of men in their presences.
00:17:57.200 --> 00:17:59.680
Men at a lesbian conference.
00:18:28.000 --> 00:18:48.079
White feminists and lesbians should render their own histories, subjectivities, and writing complex by attending to their various implications in overlapping social discursive divisions and their histories.
00:18:49.599 --> 00:18:51.200
Barbara Smith.
00:18:52.000 --> 00:19:00.640
Audrey Lord, speaking at the first lesbian conference at UCLA in nineteen seventy-three, said what I will never forget.
00:19:04.720 --> 00:19:07.200
There are only a few of us here, but we are here.
00:19:10.720 --> 00:19:14.319
And when you go back to your cities, uh we will be there.
00:19:24.000 --> 00:19:34.799
When you see our faces again back in your hometown, black women have uh have a full history of strength and have always given an awful lot to everything they're involved in.
00:19:35.599 --> 00:19:39.200
Uh we are proud and we are a vital force.
00:19:39.839 --> 00:19:49.359
Uh we are part of the lesbian feminist revolution, and we are willing to give of ourselves for the effort of liberation.
00:19:50.160 --> 00:19:56.400
As women, as black women, we have known dimensions of oppression that you don't know anything about.
00:19:57.359 --> 00:20:05.759
Uh I've heard someone mention today that uh that the lesbians were the most down people, and I would like to deal with that.
00:20:06.559 --> 00:20:17.920
Uh when you return to your cities and your jobs and your CR groups and your bars, remember your black sisters and do this for yourselves and for us.
00:20:20.160 --> 00:20:25.359
Every time a racist act is done in your presence, don't let it pass.
00:20:50.319 --> 00:20:55.680
As I was saying, every time a racist act is done in your presence, don't let it pass.
00:20:56.960 --> 00:21:05.200
When you're in your office or wherever it is that you are and something is done or said which is derogatory to me, your sister, I want you to stand up for me.
00:21:08.160 --> 00:21:20.000
On May 26th, Barbara attends a women's conference at Sacramento State University titled Women's Studies in Feminism: Survival in the 1970s.
00:21:20.559 --> 00:21:26.480
At the time, the conference would be called a battle between the Marxists and the matriarchs.
00:21:27.279 --> 00:21:33.839
Terry's close friend, the professor Joan Hoff-Wilson, was a professor at Zach State at the time.
00:21:34.559 --> 00:21:37.119
I looked for Barbara and Terry there too.
00:21:37.839 --> 00:21:49.440
It strikes me that that's maybe the way in which Barbara and Terry would have met in the first place is through if not Kate Millette or Marie Del Drago or not Joan.
00:21:49.599 --> 00:21:55.680
If Joan didn't uh know Barbara, then there was somebody in this ether who would have put them together.
00:21:56.799 --> 00:21:59.519
I I think you know, we have to remember how rare it was.
00:22:00.160 --> 00:22:04.559
For women to get professorships and teaching assignments and in this program.
00:22:05.039 --> 00:22:08.079
All of these women are pioneers in academia.
00:22:08.799 --> 00:22:14.640
And um it makes total sense to me that they all know each other.
00:22:14.799 --> 00:22:16.799
Even if they're totally different fields, right?
00:22:16.880 --> 00:22:23.680
I mean that Berkeley is the it's like the forecast, it's the place where they all meet.
00:22:23.759 --> 00:22:26.400
It's the it's the the center of the storm.
00:22:26.799 --> 00:22:30.559
Given what happened in Berkeley in the 60s and 70s, that makes total sense too.
00:22:30.720 --> 00:22:44.160
So even if you're a tax state, even if you're anywhere, if you're an academic, I think you're gonna and on the left, you're gonna be pulled towards that atmosphere one way or another.
00:22:47.359 --> 00:22:56.880
In her diary on May twenty-eighth, Barbara writes Circle talk of academic women and faculty and students.
00:23:12.000 --> 00:23:21.359
Barbara is seeking inclusion in this new community that she's a part of, but more so recognition from them as an artist.
00:23:22.480 --> 00:23:26.319
I told Andrea to remember the maverick.
00:23:26.559 --> 00:23:34.559
She called me the artist, and Jill Johnston too walked up and said, Aren't you an artist?
00:23:35.680 --> 00:23:37.920
Recognition from women.
00:23:38.160 --> 00:23:45.839
What I wanted so long now, if you satisfy my need is not so great.
00:23:47.680 --> 00:23:58.160
Jill Johnston suggests I write my experiences upon coming back to the US and finding myself during nine months in the women's movement.
00:23:59.039 --> 00:24:04.960
We talk about need to work apart from the group as individual artists.
00:24:05.359 --> 00:24:10.319
I feel like more and more these days of collective politics.
00:24:10.559 --> 00:24:12.160
I am estranged from.
00:24:14.160 --> 00:24:17.599
Generally, though, politics bore me.
00:24:18.400 --> 00:24:23.839
It is myth, imagination, dream that excite me.
00:24:25.279 --> 00:24:29.759
Female politics, too much like the oppressors.
00:24:30.480 --> 00:24:40.880
Hierarchical, structured, energy sapping, watered down, mundane, boring.
00:24:41.039 --> 00:24:44.160
My heart is a city of fire.
00:24:45.440 --> 00:24:49.200
I got this country's firewell.
00:24:49.680 --> 00:24:52.799
I don't know where it will lead to.
00:24:53.359 --> 00:24:56.319
I just love untraveled in all.
00:25:18.640 --> 00:25:37.680
As the conferences and protests and festivals raged in the cities in the early and mid-1970s, some LGBTQ people, and particularly lesbians, were choosing to relocate to rural areas, setting up and moving to intentional communities closer to nature.
00:25:38.559 --> 00:25:44.720
Just as there were homesteaders, hippies, and back-to-the-landers, there were queer separatists.
00:25:45.440 --> 00:25:53.200
Lesbians began buying property and setting up women's land, particularly up and down the west coast of North America.
00:25:54.799 --> 00:26:06.000
For many people in the US, particularly those opposed to the Vietnam War, Canada represented another kind of ideal, a place to escape the draft.
00:26:06.880 --> 00:26:12.720
Hornby Island on the west coast of British Columbia was one such ideal.
00:26:25.119 --> 00:26:46.880
Even before um, the only the only way to follow.
00:27:37.920 --> 00:27:42.480
But then came the draft dungeons, and with them the American counterculture.
00:27:42.799 --> 00:27:49.200
Today there are nearly a thousand full-time residents, and the counterculture is still alive and well.
00:27:49.440 --> 00:27:53.440
There is no police department, they will settle disputes on their own.
00:27:55.279 --> 00:27:57.839
Virtually everything in Hornby gets recycled.
00:28:02.559 --> 00:28:10.960
And if anyone needs some clothes or an appliance or whatever, they go to something called the free store where items are turned in rather than thrown out.
00:28:11.279 --> 00:28:15.200
There's also a non-profit food colony where the customers are the ownership.
00:28:15.440 --> 00:28:24.160
There were draft judges and hippies and just generally people getting the hell out of style things.
00:29:20.799 --> 00:29:50.079
And so she wanted to break away from that and was so bitterly opposed to the war that this was a way of you know, but basically, I'm gonna move to Canada because I don't believe in America, and uh so I can I can see that if that was her overall disposition, the idea of a communal utopian community on Cornby was just nirvana.
00:29:50.319 --> 00:29:52.160
I mean it was just perfect for her, I think.
00:29:52.240 --> 00:30:04.400
And I think that um falling in love too or having an affair, whatever with the nature of the relationship, um yeah, it was um I think it was a very powerful experience.
00:30:06.960 --> 00:30:25.519
The photos that Barbara took on Hornby Island that summer in August 1973 represent a spectrum of emotions intimately associated with that transition from powerlessness to empowerment, disenfranchisement to possibility.
00:30:26.400 --> 00:30:34.400
But what do these photos mean for the queer women who arrived at Hornby in the intervening years around Barbara and Terry's visit?
00:30:34.799 --> 00:30:38.880
And what does it mean for the people who grew up on the island at that time?
00:30:40.240 --> 00:30:45.039
The photos you shared, Barbara Hammer's photos, they were from what time, early 70s.
00:30:46.960 --> 00:30:47.680
73.
00:30:48.000 --> 00:30:49.599
Yeah, I would have been 10.
00:30:50.240 --> 00:30:59.599
I was completely unaware of any such I mean, and it they would have been probably quite private too.
00:30:59.759 --> 00:31:06.480
You know, like I don't know that those women would have walked around sort of holding hands at the co-op store.
00:31:07.440 --> 00:31:13.599
The the naked women and the water and the rocks and the all that kind of thing.
00:31:13.680 --> 00:31:15.759
Um they're very familiar.
00:31:16.480 --> 00:31:22.880
There's lots of those kind of photographs uh from from the 70s.
00:31:23.119 --> 00:31:35.440
So there's a lot of naked women and naked women at festivals, and naked women on women's land, and naked women in water, and naked, like just wasn't just it was just a thing.
00:31:35.680 --> 00:31:40.160
And we were all much younger and had bodies like those bodies.
00:31:40.960 --> 00:31:43.440
So that that that was that's my main reaction.
00:31:43.680 --> 00:31:56.720
I don't think I've I don't recognize, I don't think, any of the the people in any of the photographs, but it's the the the imagery in those photographs is very familiar.
00:31:57.200 --> 00:32:00.640
We're the country dykes, you know the country dikes.
00:32:00.799 --> 00:32:04.400
All of us at the beach, this is exactly what we look like.
00:32:04.720 --> 00:32:12.000
Um now whether I can you know pick out the specific places on them with them, I you know, I don't know.
00:32:12.400 --> 00:32:20.160
Um, but but yes, they do all they all do resonate, and this is exactly what we were all doing.
00:32:23.359 --> 00:32:26.240
But we all had little children running around naked too.
00:32:27.039 --> 00:32:35.279
Yeah, making out all the steps of the co-op and and and you know we were free.
00:32:54.000 --> 00:32:55.519
We were here on Hornby.
00:32:56.000 --> 00:33:10.720
We were safe haven for the women in the cities, doing Gale and the whole group of those women when they needed to get out of town, or when heat was on them, they came to Hornby.
00:33:11.039 --> 00:33:38.240
We put them all up and we fed them and we massaged them and we cared for them and we were the safe place, haven't for all these women coming out of the cities that were doing hard, big, and uh we were all would go down for those, but we were also the safe haven spot for um many of the um city lesbians.
00:33:39.599 --> 00:33:51.119
There were queers here, but there was not a queer community because it's small, it didn't feel like it was a queer community.
00:33:51.279 --> 00:33:58.079
It felt like there were queer folks within the community.
00:33:59.599 --> 00:34:20.079
It was great to be met by super friendly queers, but it wasn't that kind of um almost defensive protective queer community that I was used to.
00:34:22.239 --> 00:34:24.320
It's like the artists too.
00:34:24.559 --> 00:34:29.199
It wasn't like oh the artists all associate with each other.
00:34:29.280 --> 00:34:34.159
It was like, yeah associate with each other, who else is there?
00:34:34.480 --> 00:34:35.119
You know.
00:34:35.679 --> 00:34:40.239
It's a symbolic community, you kind of associate with everyone.
00:34:40.880 --> 00:34:45.199
The the social norm is you are okay with weirdos.
00:34:46.559 --> 00:34:57.760
By the mid-1980s, uh there was a thriving population of lesbian and queer women on Hornby Island, including artists, lesbian separatists, and single moms.
00:34:58.559 --> 00:35:02.559
Some of the women who had grown up on Hornby Island also set up communal housing.
00:35:03.039 --> 00:35:05.519
There was Claire, me, Kathy, and Gail.
00:35:06.000 --> 00:35:06.400
Yeah.
00:35:06.559 --> 00:35:09.760
And we all lived in Westview, which is this big old farmhouse.
00:35:09.840 --> 00:35:11.760
It's now been renovated and quite beautiful.
00:35:12.159 --> 00:35:14.400
But we all lived in what I call the Trimble House.
00:35:14.639 --> 00:35:17.039
You know, and it was the first time I'd actually moved out of the house.
00:35:17.119 --> 00:35:20.320
My own ho my mom's and I was building this at the time.
00:35:20.400 --> 00:35:22.960
So living there, living on EI and building this.
00:35:23.199 --> 00:35:23.519
Right.
00:35:23.760 --> 00:35:24.000
Yeah.
00:35:24.159 --> 00:35:24.320
Okay.
00:35:24.480 --> 00:35:28.800
And then Gail would pretty much just she taught me how to use a chainsaw and drive a standard.
00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:33.360
And then would kick me out the door to go work here every day.
00:35:33.920 --> 00:35:40.400
My first few years on Hornby were involved with um uh the lesbian community.
00:35:40.880 --> 00:35:53.280
Some uh you know, really, really um what do you call the um sort of man-hating separatists?
00:35:53.519 --> 00:35:55.519
Yes, yes, yes.
00:35:55.840 --> 00:35:58.880
So I fell into that for about a week.
00:36:01.119 --> 00:36:04.719
It's like I can't, you know, this is not my scene.
00:36:04.800 --> 00:36:09.280
And I don't hate men, and I don't like the patriarchy, but I don't hate men.
00:36:09.920 --> 00:36:20.079
And so we it was hard to stay in a separatist state, um uh and and get along and be part of this community.
00:36:20.400 --> 00:36:24.559
There was these two factions on Hornby at that point in those early days.
00:36:24.639 --> 00:36:31.599
There were the separatists, and then there were lesbians that were not separatists.
00:36:34.639 --> 00:36:40.960
So uh one thing that I have learned since being here is about the the quote unquote women's land that was on Mount Road.
00:36:41.119 --> 00:36:41.519
Yep.
00:36:41.679 --> 00:36:45.199
Um were you did you have much involvement in that or could you have it?
00:36:45.440 --> 00:36:46.480
Yeah, but you know what?
00:36:46.559 --> 00:36:49.039
That that that was also weird.
00:36:50.400 --> 00:36:52.320
Because they were separatists.
00:36:52.559 --> 00:37:00.960
Even some of the women who were involved with them didn't really go along with our their ideology.
00:37:01.199 --> 00:37:14.639
Like they didn't want men on the land, and they didn't want i if you had a a boy, a son, which I had, they didn't want son to come around, you know, strange things like that.
00:37:14.960 --> 00:37:20.000
So it was difficult, and once again, you know, there's always division.
00:37:20.079 --> 00:37:26.079
Some of them were like, oh sure, it's fine, and others were like really hardcore.
00:37:27.280 --> 00:37:29.760
It wasn't like women's land.
00:37:29.920 --> 00:37:48.400
It wasn't like, I don't know, like maybe in the 70s, where you had, you know, women's land and you know, women walking around nude and you know, hanging out in the grass or making love re you know, and it wasn't like that at all.
00:37:50.960 --> 00:37:51.599
At all.
00:37:52.719 --> 00:37:54.239
So what what was it then?
00:37:56.159 --> 00:38:04.880
I don't know, it was just this there was only they were they were a family who had this land up there.
00:38:05.599 --> 00:38:08.880
You talked about the the scene up on Mount Road.
00:38:09.039 --> 00:38:18.559
Well, I was very involved in that, in those women and in supporting them in choosing to live their lives the way they needed to and wanted to.
00:38:18.800 --> 00:38:23.440
That was uh that was a scene back then up on Mount Road.
00:38:24.639 --> 00:38:55.760
And um and I very much supported it, and they adopted a lot of uh little girls, um, five to be exact, or six, and um it's blown up in their face, all of that now, and all the girls, none of the girls have ended up being lesbians, which is devastating to, you know, two of the women, and and they're not accept anyhow.
00:38:55.840 --> 00:39:12.159
It's uh it's uh was a hard scene, but that was going on in Hor uh on Hornby back in the that would have been from about 87 um till the mid-90s.
00:39:12.880 --> 00:39:28.639
That's interesting because I um I was looking around, poking around the archives here quite a bit and looking at the the there's a folder on the women's center here or the the women's mov like the Right, Betty Fairbanks and all of us, yes.
00:39:28.960 --> 00:39:29.440
Yeah.
00:39:29.760 --> 00:39:34.079
And there's a lot of notes that say we don't want to be lesbian separatists.
00:39:34.880 --> 00:39:38.559
But then and I think that that that comes up a number of times.
00:39:38.800 --> 00:39:52.320
So I kind of that makes kind of tracks with the that there was I could get the sense that there was like a separation of the separatists and the non-separatist lesbians.
00:39:52.719 --> 00:39:56.480
And it was uh I I found it very, very difficult.
00:39:56.800 --> 00:40:10.159
And um and the separatists were always causing um causing a scene which we all felt unnecessary in our little tiny community.
00:40:13.440 --> 00:40:15.599
What was it like raising your son here?
00:40:16.079 --> 00:40:26.400
Uh very I mean having nothing to do with being a lesbian, I don't think.
00:40:26.639 --> 00:40:33.199
Um, very, very, very supportive community for a single mom, even though the dad was here.
00:40:33.360 --> 00:40:36.559
Uh for a single mom raising uh a son.
00:40:37.199 --> 00:40:51.760
And uh that year that was 87, that was the year that my son was born, uh nine months after the harmonic conversions, because we all converged.
00:40:51.920 --> 00:40:58.400
And there was 23 kids born that year, the most that's ever born on Hornby in one year.
00:40:59.360 --> 00:41:03.039
So there was lots of lots of support.
00:41:03.199 --> 00:41:16.639
Lots of us didn't do uh school, we did homeschooling because there were so many kids and so many big big um group that have stayed connected over the years.
00:41:17.440 --> 00:41:24.719
So it kind of sounds like when you arrived here in the in the mid-80s, it was just like a thriving, cool scene.
00:41:24.960 --> 00:41:25.920
Thriving.
00:41:26.239 --> 00:41:27.920
Thriving, thriving.
00:41:28.480 --> 00:41:31.840
The community hall had just been re-redone.
00:41:32.000 --> 00:41:47.119
The separation of of old timers and locals and um and the hippies had happened because there was huge conflict between the old timers and the hippies.
00:41:47.360 --> 00:42:04.559
So then that's when the community hall was redone and Lloyd House and all that crowd, you know, built and converted the hall from a square building into this, put the round room on it and the big um stump and all of that.
00:42:04.639 --> 00:42:10.559
So it turned it, you know, all all that creative, the creative hippies had their own place now.
00:42:10.639 --> 00:42:14.000
So the hall became community hall became ours.
00:42:14.400 --> 00:42:20.800
When we came that first summer, it was the first, the um new school had just been built.
00:42:21.039 --> 00:42:26.880
So there was 140 kids in school.
00:42:27.199 --> 00:42:32.960
The family life was just, and the kids were just, it was incredible.
00:42:33.199 --> 00:42:38.000
Um, you know, I was, of course, an American, um, broke.
00:42:38.159 --> 00:42:41.840
I'd put everything I had into fixing getting my van fixed.
00:42:42.000 --> 00:42:48.559
Couldn't my my parents, everybody was mad I was here and nobody would send money or support me.
00:42:50.000 --> 00:42:52.320
We were a depressed area.
00:42:52.880 --> 00:42:54.719
There were no jobs.
00:42:55.280 --> 00:42:59.119
You could buy a lot in Sandpiper for$6,000.
00:43:01.440 --> 00:43:04.000
Really, really, really a depressed area.
00:43:04.159 --> 00:43:08.480
The whole area from here to, you know, the fishing industry had collapsed.
00:43:08.559 --> 00:43:12.559
The lumber, uh, uh all natural resources had collapsed.
00:43:12.719 --> 00:43:19.519
There was, it was a very difficult time on Vancouver Island during that time.
00:43:20.079 --> 00:43:23.360
There was no tourism, there was no any of that.
00:43:23.840 --> 00:43:27.199
So welfare was easy to get.
00:43:27.920 --> 00:43:34.880
And so many single women moved here with their children, moved here just to have babies.
00:43:35.039 --> 00:43:39.360
They weren't forced to work, they could stay at home because there were no jobs.
00:43:39.519 --> 00:43:41.920
You, you know, oh yes, I'm looking for work.
00:43:42.159 --> 00:43:43.840
There were no jobs.
00:43:44.239 --> 00:43:53.199
So you were this was a place to come and raise your kids and and and and be on welfare.
00:43:55.039 --> 00:43:59.760
Around that time, uh in the late 1980s, uh, a group of women on the island.
00:44:00.239 --> 00:44:09.519
Got together to form a women's center, a place for mutual support, education, creativity, and child care.
00:44:11.280 --> 00:44:20.159
We used to have a really strong women's collective, or we never called it the center.
00:44:20.559 --> 00:44:21.280
Group.
00:44:21.599 --> 00:44:28.239
We used to have gatherings and potlucks and there used to be quite a few of us.
00:44:28.719 --> 00:44:34.320
So Amanda and I had some pretty interesting conversations and decided to start a women's center.
00:44:34.400 --> 00:44:35.679
And I feel like it was more her push.
00:44:35.760 --> 00:44:37.840
And then Moira Armour, have you heard of her yet?
00:44:38.000 --> 00:44:38.559
Um, yeah.
00:44:38.719 --> 00:44:39.920
Uh Judith told me about it.
00:44:40.159 --> 00:44:44.559
Right, Moira and Judith Howells and were like, yes, and especially Moira though.
00:44:44.639 --> 00:44:46.639
Moira's fucking hardcore, man.
00:44:46.719 --> 00:44:48.960
Like, she just pushed us, but we did.
00:44:49.039 --> 00:44:50.800
Like, we got it going, we got a library.
00:44:50.960 --> 00:45:18.000
I mean You know, just like everything over the years, it's kind of dissipated, and now everybody sticks to their own whatever, and I mean, but it's pretty much like that on the whole island, not just the women's group, but you know, we used to have movies every week, and we used to have pot bucks all the time, and now none of that happens.
00:45:18.559 --> 00:45:19.119
I know.
00:45:19.840 --> 00:45:22.000
And this is before COVID.
00:45:22.239 --> 00:45:28.480
I mean, COVID really kind of sealed it in, but even before COVID it started happening.
00:45:28.639 --> 00:45:34.880
I don't know, I think it kind of started happening with maybe the social media, internet.
00:45:36.320 --> 00:45:44.639
Uh why go out when I can, you know, do everything I want to do on my my tablet or my computer, you know.
00:45:45.199 --> 00:45:50.559
So, and then uh various of the old crones, of course, died.
00:45:51.280 --> 00:45:56.159
And women moved on, and it just, yeah.
00:45:56.559 --> 00:46:05.599
Just doesn't seem to be that uh connect- there's hardly any of us left, you know.
00:46:06.079 --> 00:46:14.480
Well, Hornby has really changed a lot, but I've always been kind of a hermit.
00:46:14.800 --> 00:46:31.519
The kind of artwork I do is different from what a lot of artists here do, so um there were some people here who I had like close artistic relationships with, like Lane Savoy.
00:46:32.400 --> 00:47:07.679
Um, but a lot of people, like I really appreciated their work, and they seemed to appreciate my work, but there wasn't that kind of connection like I had with um a lot of artists in Vancouver, like either queer artists or artists with disabilities, um, where you know the subject matter and the politics was just like burning our heart.
00:47:08.719 --> 00:47:29.519
Um which, you know, people like Barbara Hammer really feel like they're like our older sisters, people from my generation, they're our older sisters, they're our trailblazers.
00:47:30.079 --> 00:48:09.440
Um they started doing crazy stuff during a time when it was just like unthinkable, and they made so much thinkable for us coming after them, and um so I can just adore someone's landscape, but I don't have that kind of connection of the burning subject matter.
00:48:10.639 --> 00:48:13.119
Um, you know what I mean?
00:48:14.000 --> 00:48:17.679
I can go, oh my god, that's so beautiful.
00:48:17.840 --> 00:48:38.480
Oh the brush is broke, oh the colors, oh your vision, but it's not the same as Oh my fucking god, he used a brass band as a visual finding his way device.
00:48:42.320 --> 00:48:47.360
He did that Carmen Papaglion.
00:48:50.880 --> 00:48:59.360
So you know, I miss my Vancouver art community, but I'm still connected with my Vancouver art community.
00:48:59.679 --> 00:49:07.280
I'm connected with the Toronto disability art community.
00:49:07.519 --> 00:49:15.599
I was thinking we should have some sort of I don't know, get together.
00:49:16.239 --> 00:49:18.960
So you miss you miss the feeling of community?
00:49:19.440 --> 00:49:24.000
Or that feeling that like there's a group of people, yeah.
00:49:24.159 --> 00:49:26.480
Yeah, yeah, we used to have a good time.
00:49:30.960 --> 00:49:33.199
There is no queer community.
00:49:33.920 --> 00:49:34.880
Interesting.
00:49:35.760 --> 00:49:51.920
There's lots of queer and gender diverse people, and there are there aren't high levels of of uh homophobia or transphobia that I know of that there might be that I don't know of.
00:49:52.079 --> 00:50:06.400
Um but there's uh there is no um there's no overt organized community like and it's the first time in 50 years that I've lived without it, and it's really weird.
00:50:06.639 --> 00:50:09.679
It's very weird for there not to be a community.
00:50:11.840 --> 00:50:26.559
I mean, I think that Terry and Barbara were liberated women, they were fully out and you know, uh probably really comfortable with their sexuality, and it was a time when they they had a lot of support in terms of like all the movements that were happening.
00:50:26.800 --> 00:50:30.880
But I I just recall uh this is kind of a cute anecdote.
00:50:31.039 --> 00:50:34.559
I had a girlfriend for a while when I was in Montreal who was from Cape Breton.
00:50:34.719 --> 00:50:40.800
We drove out uh to Nova Scotia and we went and visited her family in Badak.
00:50:41.199 --> 00:50:44.320
And then we got in the car and we were gonna drive around Cape Breton.
00:50:44.400 --> 00:50:47.360
But my gay friend was like completely uninhibited.
00:50:47.440 --> 00:50:51.599
He'd go to the beach and he'd strip all his clothes off, and then I would follow suit.
00:50:51.679 --> 00:50:55.280
So we were naked and we were sort of sunbathing naked and swimming naked on the beach.
00:50:55.360 --> 00:51:00.800
And my my um my girlfriend who was from there was like beside herself.
00:51:00.880 --> 00:51:02.880
She's like, get your clothes back on.
00:51:03.199 --> 00:51:05.360
Someone's gonna come down and yell at us.
00:51:05.679 --> 00:51:08.159
Because Cape Breton's very traditional.
00:51:08.320 --> 00:51:11.679
Like nobody, you don't go to the beach and take your clothes off.
00:51:12.639 --> 00:51:17.119
So we were kind of experiencing freedom because we weren't from there.
00:51:18.159 --> 00:51:25.519
None of our aunties or you know, people in the village up at the top of the bank were gonna come down and yell at us or call, you know.
00:51:26.639 --> 00:51:33.679
So we felt we were kind of somehow above any kind of any any sort of um repercussions.
00:51:34.239 --> 00:51:37.440
Or we were free from repercussions, we felt free.
00:51:37.920 --> 00:51:53.119
So like that idea, that's interesting to me how to be queer, you have to go away in order to really be myself in terms of the expression of my queer lesbian identity and self.
00:51:53.679 --> 00:51:59.519
I have to go away from my family, away from the people who knew me when I was a child.
00:52:00.559 --> 00:52:05.039
So whenever I came back to Hornby, it was kind of like partial.
00:52:05.519 --> 00:52:11.199
Like if I was just me and a couple of friends on the beach and no one was around, then we could kind of be free.
00:52:11.280 --> 00:52:16.800
But if anyone was around to witness, then I felt self-conscious.
00:52:16.960 --> 00:52:21.039
I felt uncom it just wasn't free.
00:52:21.280 --> 00:52:22.559
Uncomfortable.
00:52:24.960 --> 00:52:26.159
Uh, what is it now?
00:52:26.320 --> 00:52:28.000
Well, now it's money.
00:52:28.400 --> 00:52:31.440
Seems as if it's all about money.
00:52:31.679 --> 00:52:33.760
So we're just heading to Ornby Island for a week.
00:52:34.159 --> 00:52:36.159
Nah, this is gonna be home.
00:52:38.719 --> 00:52:40.000
Wait until I get to three hours.
00:52:46.000 --> 00:52:49.920
It's a different place than the one that I grew up in, you know.
00:52:50.079 --> 00:52:57.519
It's almost like in my mind there was a chapter up until the point where I graduated from high school where there were also lots of transitions.
00:52:57.679 --> 00:53:11.840
But I I hold in my mind and in my dreams when I dream about Hornby, a kind of space that was like kind of the 70s, the earlier part of the 70s, what I remember call and being like.
00:53:12.480 --> 00:53:52.159
And then there's a new chapter, which is kind of post that, which is much more about people moving to the island, but not to go back to the land, you know, that they were moving to the island maybe to retire or maybe to find a new life for themselves, still very aspirational, but they were building houses that were had all the modern conveniences, and you know, so the chapter that I recall that my my kind of subconscious recalls is like the the roads were dirt, and people lived in hand-built houses, and there was the co-op was this one small building that had very basic groceries.
00:53:52.320 --> 00:54:07.360
It would there were it was beautiful, it was there was a kind of expansiveness to the fact everything was really slow because to get anywhere, you know, it was like bumping along a dirt road, and there was big clouds of dust behind all the vehicles.
00:54:07.440 --> 00:54:13.840
And if you're walking along the road, you have to get off the road so that you didn't get covered with dust when the cars went by.
00:54:14.480 --> 00:54:22.000
So I think when I go back, part of me kind of connects in glimpses with memory.
00:54:22.559 --> 00:54:27.840
I have glimpses of memory of the way it felt when I was a kid.
00:54:28.400 --> 00:54:33.199
And I think I have a quite a deep longing for that, to kind of connect with that.
00:54:33.440 --> 00:54:39.760
But at the same time, it's not really possible to be on Hornby.
00:54:40.239 --> 00:54:47.119
It is kind of on, it's definitely very known to tourism, you know.
00:54:47.920 --> 00:54:58.000
There's a lot of, there are a lot, there's a lot of kind of being, like the way people are be on Hornby that I is unrecognizable to me.
00:54:58.239 --> 00:55:13.840
Like this kind of um coming with all your like your your stand-up paddle boards and your your bikes, and you're gonna kind of like recreate with your family of like a whole handful of kids.
00:55:15.440 --> 00:55:18.960
I feel like when I when I see people like that, I'm like, that's really lovely.
00:55:19.039 --> 00:55:28.480
That what what a great thing for those, you know, these kids who are coming to this beautiful place, but it's like they're not experiencing anything that I think of as Wornby.
00:55:29.760 --> 00:55:41.039
Like they're not, there's that texture of of it being kind of like um things weren't easy.
00:55:48.800 --> 00:56:06.079
As opposed to just sort of like driving through listening to your soundtrack, your playlist, and you know, I I feel that I think it's kind of like not a loss, but a longing for.
00:56:07.440 --> 00:56:11.199
You know, so many resort communities, and that's what we are now.
00:56:12.239 --> 00:56:21.199
And we weren't then, and the Gulf Islands really weren't that, and they were much more family-oriented than they are now, and it's a it's a shame.
00:56:21.599 --> 00:56:27.599
And um, it has, it's changed drastically, and and I will not say it's for the best.
00:56:28.639 --> 00:56:38.400
Um, and I don't think it'll never go back, it's just gonna get more exclusive because of what Hornby is.
00:56:39.199 --> 00:56:49.199
You know, this beautiful jewel of an island with some of the most incredible beaches and forests and parks in all of the islands.
00:56:49.519 --> 00:56:53.599
So there's no going back.
00:56:56.960 --> 00:57:04.000
Another layer that I acknowledge is always having a premonition that I that I didn't belong there.
00:57:04.960 --> 00:57:11.440
And my dad and I have this conversation, it's about a longing for rootedness, and I think it's a way of acknowledging our settlerness.
00:57:12.400 --> 00:57:21.039
And always longing for connection, but realizing that the place that you're at, that you're in, you're you're a guest.
00:57:21.199 --> 00:57:22.880
You're not from, you know.
00:57:22.960 --> 00:57:27.599
I mean, I'm experiencing it again here now in southern Alberta.
00:57:27.920 --> 00:57:34.079
But I think even as a as a child, I had no, my parents didn't talk race politics at all.
00:57:34.159 --> 00:57:41.760
They didn't talk about um nobody talked about the presence of indigenous people, peoples.
00:57:42.159 --> 00:57:51.199
Um, but I had an intuition of like having kind of like landed and not really fully belonging.
00:57:53.119 --> 00:58:04.159
That I think unsettles and interrupts and troubles, it troubles all of those utopian kind of narratives of going back to the land.
00:58:09.119 --> 00:58:27.039
New Friend is made by Bitsy Knox with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Barbara Hammer Estate, and the Beinickee Road Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, as well as 96.5 CHFR, Hornby Island Community Radio, and Kashmir Radio, Berlin.
00:58:28.000 --> 00:58:31.599
In this chapter, you heard clips from the following sources.
00:58:31.840 --> 00:58:55.679
Lesbian Sisters Getting Together in the Lesbian Community from July 3rd, 1973, Courtesy of Radio Pacifica, Beth Elliott's Good Time, 1976, Kathy Fire's City on Fire, 1978, An Oral History with Barbara Hammer, recorded for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art by Svetlana Kitto in 2018.
00:58:56.400 --> 00:58:59.039
You also heard Nim Hughes reading from A.
00:58:59.360 --> 00:59:08.960
Steiner's essay in Truant, Photographs 1970 to 1979, by Barbara Hammer, published by Capricious in 2018.
00:59:09.440 --> 00:59:22.880
A recording of Michel Foucault talking about heterotopias for a French radio broadcast in 1966, and excerpts from Barbara Hammer's film Sisters of 1974, and Tender Fictions from 1996.
00:59:23.519 --> 00:59:58.079
Thank you so much to all of those who contributed their voices to this chapter of New Friend, Nim Hughes, Persimen Blackbridge, Bonita Wexler, Elaine Savoy, Claire Cronia, Annie Martin, and Judith Lawrence, and to the water, rocks, wind, sky, plants, and all living and non-living beings of Hornby Island, Jedi H, to whom I extend gratitude and respectfully acknowledge that these recordings were made on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral lands of the Comox First Nation.
