On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land
An Interview with Sadie Couture and Daisy Couture
Sadie Barker
This past summer, I had the opportunity to interview Sadie and Daisy Couture about their family’s co-written project, On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land. I’ve known sisters Sadie and Daisy for some time. We all grew up in East Vancouver (Musqueam [xʷməθkʷəy̓əm], Squamish [Skwxwú7mesh], and Tsleil-Waututh [səliľwətaʔɬ]), on Commercial Drive –a twenty-two block artery known for its local grocers, cheap sushi, and predominantly orange NDP signs. Though we attended different public schools, growing up on “the drive” (as I’m sure Sadie and Daisy could attest), means it’s likely that you know each other, or, at the least, of each other. Late night pizza, the playground swings after midnight, and the railway tracks are well-tread teenage hubs; the public library, the East Van Cultural Center, and parks such as Grandview, McSpadden, and Victoria, meeting points for many.
Aside from all growing up in a neighborhood that seemed, almost innately, to celebrate community, Sadie, Daisy, and their parents, Matt and Selena, were central to the labour of building it. Matt was an organizer of Commercial Dr.’s “Car Free Day,” an annual July day when the street would barricade its intersection and restaurants would spill out, musicians would play, and people would roam. It was a celebration of local businesses, but also a safeguard of time and space: a day for neighbors to encounter each other and strike up conversation. In 2000, Matt and Selena started The Purple Thistle, an East Van neighborhood arts center that would provide free arts and arts organizing facilities and resources to youth for fifteen years. I have memories of attending shows there and afternoons spent in the darkroom. In 2011, I participated, alongside Daisy and a handful of others, in the SEVEC Youth Exchange—an exchange between Dene youth from Fort Good Hope, NWT, and settler youth, from East Vancouver. Organized by Matt, Selena, and FGH community organizer, Francisco, this exchange saw us, as residents of the Commercial Dr. neighborhood, touring our exchange partners of the neighbourhood we knew and loved before spending a week in their community. In Fort Good Hope, we played basketball, fished, slept in canvas tents under the stars, swam in the McKenzie River, and hung out in the community center. The experience was a gift.
Left: Commercial Dr.[taken from Vancouver Planner]; Right: Justine, Cora, and Dani wandering in Fort Good Hope (Sadie Barker photo)
In short, the Couture/Hern family’s community organizing is abundant, and it’s organizing which I, as a close neighbor, have closely benefited from. Yet, while the Hern/Couture’s have long practiced community building on Commercial Drive, On This Patch of Grass asks: What does it mean to build community on stolen land? What does it mean to build community in a place like Vancouver–a city whose urban infrastructure, despite its association with progressive politics, subsists through aggressive gentrification and property rates? And, what does it mean, in the case of settler families, such as Sadie and Daisy’s, and my own, to be attached to space–parkspace–encoded by histories of colonial occupation and Indigenous dispossession? What does productive engagement with that attachment look like? Commercial Dr., while celebrated for its local businesses and spirit of “the commons” (indeed, book shares and community gardens abound), is no less premised on the colonial history shaping the city, province, and country, nor less implicated in the complexly fraught politics of public space left in its wake. While parks, On this Patch of Grass asserts, “are lionized as ‘natural oases,’ and urban parks as ‘pure nature’ in the midst of the city…[parks] are as ‘natural’ as the roads or buildings around them, and just as political.” Indeed, “every park in North America is performing modernity and settler colonialism everyday.”
On This Patch of Grass refracts these realities of “postcolonial Canada” through a single park: Victoria Park–a crucial patch of grass to the Commercial Dr. community. Bookended by reflections from Denise Ferreira da. Silva and Glen Sean Coulthard, the book self-identifies as “a collaborative exercise between one white family and some friends looking at the park from a variety of perspectives, asking what we might say about this patch of grass, and what kinds of occupation might this place imply.” Indeed, Victoria Park is a scarcely unoccupied stop on the Commercial Dr. circuit. It’s where, prior to the SEVEC Exchange, we gathered to brainstorm and plan; on Commercial Drive Days, it’s where groups of friends drift to when the main street gets too busy. It’s where the Italian community has played bocci for so many years it’s referred to as “Bocci Ball Park.” It’s a park I have spent many hours in, as a child, then a teenager, and now, an adult, seeking shade, sun, and socialization. On This Patch of Grass does not diagnose these moments of ordinary attachment so much as ask us to consider them—their depth, weight, texture, and complexity. This is an important assertion in-and-of-itself when one considers the rhetorics of “public,” “free,” and “equal access” that so often enshroud parks in cities like Vancouver. How we feel about parks, this book suggests, and our diverse relations to them, reveals something important about the politicized conditions of the “postcolonial” everyday, the diverse historical inheritances of the present, and about the public itself.
I had the joy and good honour of reconnecting with Sadie and Daisy this summer and hearing more about their book, directly from them.
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SB: Thank you both so much for doing this interview! Part of what we’re trying to think about with Refractions is alternative ways of producing knowledge and ideas beyond the (oftentimes) individualized metrics of academic output. You wrote this book about a community—the community of Victoria Park—but you also wrote it as a family. What did you learn from this process? How does this experience of collaboration inform, or perhaps, compare and relate to your current work today, as graduate students in the university? What insights did you gain in the process of producing this book, and the particular way in which you did?
Sadie: As I see the book, it’s ultimately about place, both our relationships to places we come from and the places that we exist within now and in the future. We all come from somewhere, and have to live somewhere, and for me, it’s about that dynamic, those places. And places are full of people! Places are always collective and collaborative (sometimes despite efforts to make them otherwise). For us, the questions we wanted to ask and the space we wanted to open up weren’t things we could do alone and that was obvious to all of us from the get-go. So the book is not single-authored, but also beyond that it is deeply collaborative. All the people who were interviewed, all the people whose work we think with, Denise and Glen who wrote the foreword and afterword, Erick who illustrated it, our editors and reviewers, and all the people who make the park what it is were vital contributors. I think the multivocal way we approached the project suited the subject matter well in that the park is a very complex space, and in that when thinking about issues of power and difference it can be super fruitful to try to challenge our own thinking in small ways. Not only did we sense it suited the project in its final form, but also the process of talking to people and thinking alongside people was key to the type of work we wanted the book to do. Doing research for the book, doing the interviews, talking to people about the park not only helped us understand what we were doing and that place itself on a different level, but also helped us build more relationships with people and that place in ways which we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do. Now, as a grad student, I continue to work collaboratively within academia when I can. Collaboration keeps me accountable, it keeps me inspired, it keeps me grounded and oriented towards what matters to me, and is a great reminder of how intellectual work isn’t separate from other aspects of our lives. As you allude to, collaborative work isn’t always as valued, but I try not to think about that and instead do what feels right to me! Maybe what I learned from this project is that ‘outputs’ can look many different ways; they can be a book or a piece of writing, a thread of interest, a new way of thinking, or a deeper relationship, and I have tried to hold onto that as I move through my life and the sometimes odd structures which hold it together.
Daisy: I think Sadie has really excellently described why this project needed to be multivocal and our goals in making it a collaboration, both between the four of us as a family and with the many generous interlocutors who participated, from Denise, Glen, and Erick to the people who appeared in my photographs and those that Sadie interviewed. This project was a huge learning process for me. While the book was published in 2018, I started taking photographs on January 1, 2015 when I was just 17. And while I certainly had scholarly ambitions (I headed to university in the Fall of that year), I had no idea what it might look like to work on a project of this size. As such, the collaborative nature of the project served as a scaffold for my own thinking about parks, land, and occupation. As each of Sadie, Matt, and Selena’s pieces developed and were slotted into place, they changed how I was thinking about the photographs I had taken and still was taking. It’s a real pleasure and privilege to be surrounded by people thinking perhaps both more sophisticatedly and at different angles than you. Additionally, having this collaborative project as an early model of academic work has been really significant for how I’ve approached life and work in academia. As a Master’s student in the competitive and individualized world of academia, it’s easy to feel constantly behind or overwhelmed by your own deficiencies. However, having both been a part of and witnessed the collaboration that went into making this book, has helped me accept academic communities as full of collaborators rather than competitors, as people who can help me climb in my own thinking. Not to say that this is easy! I still get competitive and downtrodden, but having been part of a different kind of model early on gives me hope for the different kinds of work that are possible.
SB: How would you describe Victoria Park?
Daisy: I would describe Victoria Park as a fairly ordinary urban park for the part of the world it is in – in its features, uses, and colonial history. It has a playground and a large field, four entrances, and a path that snakes through it. Trees line the edges of the park and there are bocce ball courts at the East end. And all sorts of people use the park and coexist to varying degrees of harmony and friction. It can be put as simply as that or it can fill an entire book! On This Patch of Grass is a case study of urban parks and an exploration of how one particular white, settler family (ours) tried to grapple with our relationship to land. But it’s also a portrait of this particular park, and it took somewhere between 4 and 50 people (depending on how we’re counting) to tell that story and describe it.
Victoria Park (images from the City of Vancouver website)
SB: On the back of your book, you juxtapose the relations between the colonial realities and common perceptions of parks, noting that while “parks are lionized as ‘natural oases,’ and urban parks as ‘pure nature’ in the midst of the city…Parks are as “natural” as the roads or buildings around them, and just as political. Every park in North America is performing modernity and settler colonialism everyday.” In what ways did Victoria park perform, reveal, or, enact this juxtaposition? How did your case study speak to this broader tension that parks, in settler-colonial states, uphold?
Daisy: The juxtaposition, or I would say simultaneity, that you note here is central I think to the work we hoped this book would do. Victoria park is, at face-value, a largely unremarkable urban park; it has a playground and a field and some trees. And yet it also is the result of the long history and continued present of colonialism. Those two things are true at once. In fact I think the “naturalness” or “ordinariness” of the park is essential to the ways in which it performs colonialism. The park needs to seem like a natural oasis to succeed in its work of claiming Indigenous land. It’s a lot easier to not care that the land you’re on is stolen when it’s beautiful, when you can freely walk your dog, play with your kid, or drink a beer with friends there after work. By writing this book, we were saying, in a way, that this park wasn’t just an ordinary patch of grass, but a place that is entangled in histories and presents of occupation, resistance, and contact. But also that this isn’t because Victoria park is extraordinary. I hope the book can help us attend to the layers and convergences and aporias inherent all around us, especially in terms of our relationship to and with place. I think one of the main arguments of the book is that when you attend to the so-called ordinary—when you look and listen without rushing—it expands and fractures, revealing both the oppressive ideologies that allow and shape its existence and the multitude of everydays that exist all at once.
Sadie: As Daisy says, holding many things is what I see to be the greatest challenge and also one of the modest successes of the book; that “On This Patch of Grass” there exist many experiences, that everyday city parks are part of the politics of land even if they seem far removed from it, and that daily interactions have the possibility to be either oppressive or emancipatory or both.
SB: Part of this book seems to be working with the idea of complicity and positionality. In the synopsis you explicitly identify as a “white family” and “uninvited guests,” and in doing so, invite the reader to read your work through this frame. This book does an amazing job of speaking to the sense of nostalgia and attachment that often accompanies the experience of growing up in a space, and simultaneously, how those feelings do not occlude the fact that we benefit differently from those spaces, their political organization, and colonial histories. We would love to hear a bit about how you negotiated, encountered, or thought about identity in the process of writing this.
Sadie: Spaces and places are very important to people. They are where we live, they inform how we understand ourselves, and how we move through the world. For our family, the area around the park has been really important. Our parents moved there a few months before I was born, and both Daisy and I were born in homes adjacent to that park, grew up playing there, and never really moved until we were young adults. Our family has felt deeply rooted in that place for my whole life, and that comes with feelings of home, of belonging, of safety. And, I’m sure many Refractions readers can envision a place that feels similar to them—a family cabin, a city, a lake, a neighbourhood, a street, an apartment—which feels like theirs and that they feel very connected to. However, as you mention, many of these places have histories and presents of violence and complicity in oppressive power structures. For example, our family are white settlers whose presence on this land has been very brief, and in general violent and traumatic for Indignous people and the land. While generations of our family on both sides were born in North America, this history really pales in comparison to the relationship that Indigenous people have to their territories. This thick brew of love and shame and fear and desire is likely familiar to many who have inherited difficult circumstances. However, as fraught as all this is, we are connected to these places that we inhabit, and I think that the strong connections and affective ties that we have to places ought to be mobilized for good rather than seen as merely a source of discomfort or confusion. Love for place is beautiful and powerful and I think if as settlers we can put that love to work then maybe we could begin to have more responsible relationships with those places that we love.
Daisy: This project was early on in my own grappling with whiteness and being a settler. Until we decided to write this book I think I’d avoided thinking too closely about what it meant to be a settler. At that point I had no idea how to feel at home somewhere without feeling like it was mine. Just the process of us deciding to write a book as a settler family, to look straight at the fact that despite our best intentions we were complicit in centuries of violence in this place we loved was a reorientation for me. The medium I used was one of the main ways I remember grappling with my complicity and identity at that time. I was quite awkward when I started taking the pictures, worrying about anybody seeing me do it or catching anybody in the frame and while some of that went away with time, some of it remained because sometimes taking pictures felt exploitative, like I was trying to take something from this place that I had no right to. On the flipside I was also often frustrated by the fact that some things were outside the frame of my pictures, from the spot I chose you can’t see the bocce ball courts or the washrooms or most of the playground. Photography is an introduction to the intense and unending partialness of your view. I wanted readers to be able to see the park, to know this place that we wrote about and that we feel so much about, but these photos aren’t really showing you the park, they’re showing you how I saw the park, from one particular angle across 2015. I still don’t know how to be an ethical settler, but the conversations we had while writing this book helped me accept that the violence our ancestors enacted on this land is my responsibility. Because of the circumstances in which I was born, nowhere I go in the world will I be at home on land that belongs to me, so I need to accept that, but also find a way to use my love to come into better relationship with the land and hopefully disrupt cycles of violence, including doing everything I can to help that land return to its rightful stewards.
SB: What was the greatest challenge in producing this book? What was the greatest joy? What was the biggest surprise? We would love to hear a bit about the emotional arcs that accompanied the process of production.
Sadie: The biggest challenge was keeping everyone on task! We were working on this project during a time of real transition for everyone in our family. Daisy graduated from high school and started her undergrad at UBC, Selena finished her PhD and got a job at the UofA, Matt was starting the organization he now spends most of his time on, and I graduated from my undergrad and moved back home in a bit of an awkward and opaque time in my life. So we were all busy and our routines and schedules were changing, we weren’t all living at home all the time, and we all had other work and school and priorities which was difficult to coordinate. I was nominated to be the wrangler so maybe that was just my experience! In terms of joy, I think just working together. It felt good and important and right to think about these questions in a space that feels very safe to me: my family.
Daisy: I dispute that! My piece was finished before everyone else’s! But yes, there’s always a lot of moving pieces with collaborations like this and often those pieces are moving at very different schedules. I think the biggest surprise for me was how emotional I felt once the year of photos was complete. For some reason, the first time I scrolled through all 365 images together and watched the seasons change, watched fog and rain dissipate and the green of the grass become fuller and then dried and yellow and then the leaves fall and the rain and fog return, watch posters and flyers appear and rip and disappear from the lamppost, I felt quite overwhelmed. All that time I spent taking pictures I’d never really imagined what it would look like to see a year shown through them. As for joy, I’ll echo Sadie. Working on a shared project together was a gift; they’re my favourite people to create with.
SB: We would love to hear a bit about each of your mediums. Sadie, you used an interview/reflection format; Daisy, you used a photography/reflection format. How did these formats affect your relations to your subjects? How did they shape your insights? Part of what is so striking about each of your approaches is their candidness: In each case, you open yourself up to the variability of the park (the possibility that someone will walk into the frame, or, say something surprising) at the same time that you document it. Sadie, did you feel that a written format captured the spirit of your interviews? Was the information, insight, and experience of those interviews compatible with text? Daisy, can you discuss your process around the framing of your shots? What was the thinking around capturing the park in the “same place, same time”? Were there any photographic influences, at work here, for you, in this process? Did it lead to encounters with people—spoken and unspoken—that transpired outside the frame?
Sadie: The format I chose was the start of an ongoing interest of mine in oral history and in challenging who counts as an expert on a subject and what is considered the official record about the past. The book is many things but in part it’s a history of that small park, and Selena’s chapter does a great job with a lot of the archival sources and textual evidence around that area of the city. In my section I wanted to offer something different, something to add to that story and I was really happy with the range of people who were generous enough to share their experiences with me. That also meant including some views and opinions which I very much disagreed with—and that was hard to come to terms with—but ultimately I hope that the contrasting standpoints represented in my section help illustrate and support some of the arguments we make in the book about conviviality, sharing space, and both the harmony and cacophony which can be what the park sounds like.
Daisy: Matt was the one who suggested that my contribution be a photo essay and that I take a picture every day for a year, but it was a logical choice because I’ve always loved taking photos and at that point had been in photography classes in high school for a couple of years. I chose to take the pictures from the South-West corner of the park for a few reasons: it was the corner closest to our house so it was convenient, that was the way I walked to school; it was also the entrance closest to the Drive and the liquor store and so got a lot of foot traffic; and I thought the tree and lamp post on the right and the open space to the left were aesthetically pleasing. However, there is, of course, too much left out of the frame. The photos let you stand with me and see what I saw on that day, but you can’t look beyond it or walk through the park. I don’t know if I realized it at the time, but, as I’ve discussed above, it was in many ways a helpful exercise in the partialness of my own perspective. As for people, I was surprised by how few people asked me about the pictures. People often noticed me, sometimes they looked directly at the camera or said hello, but very few people ever asked what I was doing. The most memorable encounters I had were with friends. There are many people in the photographs that I know; sometimes people came with me to take the photo and then got in front of the camera, either accidentally or intentionally, but sometimes I took the picture and when I lowered the camera I realized that there was a friend smiling and bounding towards me who I’d accidentally captured without realizing. That always made me happy! To see them of course, but also to have this accidental evidence of how much my life and the lives of the people I loved were entangled with and criss-crossed the park.
SB: Is there anything, now, revisiting the book through this discussion that stands out to you? Has your view of it changed?
Sadie: Well, we have all since moved away from the park. Daisy and I now go to school in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal and our parents now live on the Fraser River in Musqueam territory. So, it almost feels like the project was a type of book-end to our time there, a way to say goodbye to a place that held us so well, and to express love and commitment and care towards it as we changed our relationship to it. I don’t think we necessarily knew it at the time—maybe we sensed that something was shifting—but I don’t think that was explicitly stated as we were working on it.
Daisy: I inevitably look back on the book, especially my work, and think of how young I was when I took those pictures and wrote the reflection. As I’ve mentioned already, my thinking about land and place and being a settler has significantly evolved since then. However, the conflicting feelings of love and shame, belonging and alienation haven’t disappeared for me. The years since I took the pictures have changed many things. None of our family lives near that park anymore and my life has taken me away and brought me here to Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. However, not being there has not made my feelings about the park any simpler. In many ways they feel more intense. My love for that land has grown since I’ve been away and I think of it often more rosily than I should as I sit here on different stolen land. When people ask me where I’m from (as happens a lot when you move and meet new people), I say unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territory (also known as Vancouver), but what I immediately think of, in many ways, is still that park, that corner of the city and the neighbourhood – it’s maybe not home anymore but it’s where I was raised. I think now I’m better at embracing how I feel in relation to the land. And I feel that when I revisit the pictures and the book. I love that place and I owe it a debt, a debt to care for it better than my ancestors did.
On This Patch of Grass: City Parks on Occupied Land is available from Fernwood Publishing.
Daisy Couture is a medical anthropologist who was born and raised on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ land. She has a BA in English Literature and Psychology from the University of British Columbia and is currently an MA student in the Department of Anthropology and Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University (Tiohti:áke/Montreal) where her work focuses on psychiatry, medically unexplained symptoms, and uncertainty in medicine.
Sadie Couture (she/her) is a media historian and a digital media artist, producer, and educator. Sadie is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. sadie.couture@mail.mcgill.ca
