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It was the summer of 2005 when I met Travis at a Songhees powwow in Victoria BC. His regalia was beautiful and I wanted to photograph him. Since he was a young boy, I thought it prudent to get permission from an adult. I asked a nearby jingle dancer if she knew who his parents were. Come with me, she said. I followed her to an RV. She told her grandmother, He wants to take a picture of Travis. The grandmother sized me up and asked if I'd had lunch. I hadn't. She invited me in to eat with them. She was appreciative of the fact that I asked. Most people don't ask, she said. She was Travis' grandmother, and she had a story to tell.

"I came from a family of seven children. I'm the only one left. The others died, of alcohol, suicide, and one was murdered. I want to protect my grandchildren from a similar fate. That's why they dance. I want them to know who they are and to take pride in their heritage. Travis wears braids. He sometimes complains about being teased at school. But I tell him he is a warrior, and warriors are strong. Warriors are brave and proud of their aboriginal heritage. Warriors practice kindness and patience. Warriors respect their elders."

I was moved by her story. Aboriginal people lost their land, their language and their culture. They were uprooted by a society who felt superior. As a consequence, many suffered as victims of manifest destiny. They bore many of the symptoms that accompany victimization: alcohol abuse, sexual abuse, drug abuse, suicide and a sense of displacement. Dancing is a way to remind us where we've come from, to participate in an identity we've lost, and an identity we've felt a shame to possess. We are still suffering, and that's why I encourage my grandchildren to dance. I don't want them to end up like my brothers and sisters.

Her story moved me. There are many other stories like hers, tragic, and without hope. I trust, in some way, we can share the burden of the aboriginal peoples of the world.

Geoffrey Alexander Parsons 1985-2012

Author, poet, man struggling to find his place, died recently of causes not yet known.

In his book, Unwanted Hopeless Romantic Morons, he writes - Why do I think that I can be saved by people that hate me? - I am a mess. I am on the verge of killing myself. I am weak. I have a hard time smiling...

Geoff was part of a poet's group that met bi-weekly to read at the Argo Bookshop in Montreal. His poems appear in Show Thieves 2010, An Anthology of Contemporary Montreal Poetry. GAP, as some called him, has several unpublished works and a nearly completed manuscript.

Excerpt from his, Hate Poem...

Did I really write
that trite Please
tell me, are my
thoughts my own?
Do I feel?
OR was I taught?
AM I A Product
Or a Producer?
Cool? A loser?
I am a drunk
and A boozer
A habitual Drug user
An Addict to
Addiction,
Addicted to conflict
To contradiction
Unable to tell truth
from fiction
A social affliction
OR A self-deployed invention.
My Own Voice
OR Someone's diction,
the sum of
consumption.

Hang out on
the outskirts
of the truth
if there is such
A thing.
Looking At it
where does it
start where does
it end if that's
HOW it works
it makes my
brain hurt

unable to sort
So I'll finish
short

GAP

He hunkered, in mission dormitories,
warmed by hypodermic needles
and Dilaudid pills, subsisting on Big Macs
and riding metro trains, picking fries from the bag
through the season of death.

The city is a loneliness. But one must have friends,
sixty dollars a day for Dilaudid,
living in judgment, and evictions.
Loneliness is a luxury of the employed.
Who was with him when he died?

It rains through the city
on the vagrants with guitars.

Compromise is easier.
His face groans mangled from the cover of his book,
drunk, howling desperate emails, beatings,
losers, hospitals, cruelties.
He scalded the compromised
and now he is the judgment of the dead.

The city's hate blows
behind their jeers, junky, junky.
Where are the vagrants with their guitars?

Does Dilaudid amputate the soul?
Dredging up his books and needles
won't uncover from his cynic laughter
the blood blooms and needles,
his days of vagrants with guitars.

"I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them."


- Ansel Adams, forward to The Negative, 1968

The wall's textures, shapes and muted colours inspired a friend to pen the following poem:

the walls
of the concrete tunnel weep,
gritty remnants
seep
downwards, dripping,
dipping lower
to escape the swell
of gravity-laden
wet air
from the
steel rail heavens
above.

this is not
the work of time;
only the molecular
shake of evolution -
discarding,
rebuilding,
sinking
and expanding
within
the eternal
struggle for balance.
(atoms to ashes,
dust to must)

Lorrie Beauchamp, 2012