WHAT DO YOU see in the photo at right? Name all the objects. Spend a moment.
Hillside erosion. A semi-trailer truck with sleeper unit and maple leaf logo. Chain-link fence. Two people. U-locks at necks. Banner. Ecclesiastical stole. Heavy-grade straight chain. Clerical collar. Tree trunk. Small orange ribbon.
What is the subject of the photo? What does the camera leave out?
Photographer Murray Bush took this photo last year on May 25 on Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia. The truck is for horizontal drilling and belongs to the firm Kinder Morgan, one of the largest energy infrastructure companies in North America. The company specializes in pipelines and petroleum terminals and is the first pipeline operator to purchase a fleet of oil tankers. The fence marks a boundary—and contested space.
The two people, Laurel Dykstra and Lini Hutchings, are members of Salal + Cedar, a Christian community in Coast Salish territory. The lock-on hardware around them—the U-locks and chain—is to delay removal by the 17 Royal Canadian Mounted Police who showed up. In 2015, the Anglican Diocese of New Westminster appointed Dykstra as a sort of “priest to the Fraser River watershed.”
Michif visual artist Christi Belcourt designed the “Water Is Life” banner. The image, according to Belcourt, depicts a pregnant woman with ceremonial markings on her face and clothing, raising her fist in the air. Water courses through her womb before returning to the clouds that send rain to replenish her container.
The Salal + Cedar stole draped over Dykstra’s shoulders was made by the liturgical arts guild of St. Catherine’s Anglican Church in North Vancouver. Its patchwork of batik fern and leaf patterns reflects the evergreen temperate rainforest of the region. The clerical collar recalls that a priest belongs to God at the service of all.
The photo is dominated by one subject—the trunk of a Douglas fir, a pioneer species in the Fraser River watershed, about 200 feet tall and a century or two old, marked by surveyors in an area where there had been recent cutting. Firs of this age and older produce most of the cones for community regeneration. All this on Burnaby Mountain, pushed up from a vast alluvial plain 5 million years ago and held in trust by Coast Salish peoples for at least 5,000 years.
What does the camera leave out? A nesting pair of northern flickers. Eagle Creek below, a salmon-spawning stream. Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline and tank facility expansion for shipping extreme-extraction bitumen crude from the Alberta tar sands. The hundreds of arrests over several months to block oil tankers from entering the port of Vancouver, stop clear cutting and construction, and protest invasion by the settler colonial state and extractive corporations into First Nations territory without consent.
“We prayed, read poetry, and sang psalms for six hours while attached to the tree,” Dykstra said.
Look back at the photo. What do you see? I hear Paul’s letter to Jesus followers in Philippi 20 centuries ago: “And because of my chains, most of the believers have become confident in the Lord and dare all the more to proclaim the gospel without fear” (1:14). I see a creation community fighting for life.
Rose Marie Berger, a Catholic peace activist and poet, is senior editor of Sojourners magazine. She is author ofBending the Arch: Poems.
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