We crossed the bridge from this reality to the next. Bob said it was okay: "tell them Bob told you so!". The rain had just started to come down something dreadful.... this was the start of the thing we've now learned to call an 'atmospheric river'. When I first heard Johanna Wagstaffe use the term a week or two ago, I thought she had invented a beautifully poetic expression. Now, it seems, we regularly have atmospheric rivers circling our skies like Falkor the Luck Dragon. Within a 2 days of my visit to Finn Slough, on November 13th, BC was dealing with historical flooding.
Anyway - we followed Bob across the bridge.
Two worlds collide in this area - bureaucracy & laws versus tradition & legacy, heritage based on 'big buildings' and official sites versus a way of life and oral traditions.
The community of Finn Slough was founded by Finnish settlers, who had come to Richmond in the 1880s and made a living from the fishing industry. [Richmond News, 2013].
In the 1920s they created the "unplanned, unregulated collection of dwellings, boardwalks, net sheds and boats" - you can hear the disapproval in this statement! - straddling the channel between Whitworth Island and Lulu Island on the Fraser River. Located outside the protection of the dyke, this small fishing community is ordinarily accessed either on foot or by boat. [source: Richmond Online Heritage, "Planning and Zoning department"]
For generations, the Finnish settlers docked their fishing boats at Finn Slough, mending their nets, repairing their shacks and staying overnight during salmon runs.
They heated with propane or wood. In the 1930s, the City of Richmond connected them to water. In the 1940s, electricity came.
[source: Teresa Murphy blog]
The Richmond Online Heritage inventory says "There are no individual significant buildings as such in Finn Slough. The importance of the built form in this area stems from the cluster arrangement of the structures, their history as a group, and their development over time. "
David Dorrington, a resident who has written and posted about Finn Slough, observes that that "heritage is not only about saving large old buildings, heritage works by keeping alive valuable ideas by associating those ideas with real things, things you can see and touch and walk around" -- David N-Dorrington
Historiography usually bases itself on written sources, which means that those that do not leave a documented legacy can find themselves excluded from our lens on the past ( see also Social Exclusion).
In one reality, the Finn Slough residents are 'squatters'. In another reality, their claims are based on legitimacy through connection with the land.
"In 2000, residents attended a City of Richmond meeting to try to resolve land tenure issues. Here, the jurisdictional levels were clarified. City representatives explained that the highest level of government, the federal government through Port Metro Vancouver (PMV), controls land between the Fraser River’s (and its estuaries and sloughs) high and low water marks. The provincial government controls and owns foreshore land. This meant Finn Slough is on Crown land." [Source: Teresa Murphy blog; italics are mine]
I can see how this "clarification" put this fishing community on a challenging course to navigate the slow moving waters of bureaucracy.
At the City Council meeting, Finn Slough villagers asked if they could lease the dike under from the City of Richmond. The minutes from Richmond City Council are from 2000, and I have not found whether the issue has been resolved, but the CBC reports in 2017:
"Although the municipality boasts of Finn Slough as one of its heritage areas, they say Finn Slough is technically Crown land, and ultimately the Ministry of Forest, Lands, and Natural Resources is responsible for the area. When asked about Finn Slough, the B.C. Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development said in an e-mail, "The Province is aware of unauthorized occupation and it is one of a number of trespass issues that we will be working towards addressing. Ministry staff recognizes the historic value of this land and will be working with occupants to resolve this uncertainty. " [CBC Doc Project, 2017]
The nearby municipality of Richmond, B.C. heavily invested in protective dikes that keep the rising waters at bay. However, Finn Slough is a homesteader community that sits just outside those dikes. Therefore, no governmental body is currently providing support for Finn Slough's mounting environmental challenges. [CBC Doc Project, 2017]
In this reality, there is no process or procedure to slot this community into, they are not part of the official archetypal history - and therefore they are left to address the impacts of climate change by themselves.
Credit: Sonja Peterson Photography
"Over his lifetime, Gus Jacobson, a community elder and unofficial caretaker of Finn Slough, says the water has risen at least 18 inches. He has developed a do-it-yourself strategy for raising the houses to meet the rising tides. Jacobson uses a small hydraulic jack to raise homes incrementally off their stilts, slipping small pieces of wood underneath to prop them up, then replacing the existing stilts with taller stilts. " [CBC Doc Project, 2017]
I really hope this unique community has survived the flooding elsewhere in BC this week, despite the dire warnings in the CBC article from 2017: "Tamsin Lyle, principal engineer at Ebbwater Consulting, predicts that within 50 years, Finn Slough will likely be submerged by water each day at high tide. She suggests they seriously begin considering relocation plans."
An uprooted community is not a community. Historiography has started to change focus from the contemporary biographies and representations, written by the survivors, written by the powerful, to what can be deduced from court records, from incarcerations, from the types of disputes brought in front of judges and arbitrators, from census information that counted the number of chimneys and recorded that the servants were guaranteed salmon on sunday.
The world would be a dull place if we didn't have these divergent places, these quirky places with boardwalks, homes built from reclaimed wood, a bridge you have to cross 'at your own risk'. I will visit this community again soon in better weather, to see how it survived the rising tides. I am also very curious about the building with the sign "Dinner Plate Island School" - the second picture. Surely there's a story there...
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