The Native Person's Ties to the Land: Green Childhood in a Green Birthplace

     

        He grew up in an era when kids roamed freely in residential neighbourhoods and parents were less watchful. He and his friends played in their large gardens and the woods close to their homes. They went out in all weather, sun-bathing or puddle-jumping as conditions dictated. In summer they picked blackberries, and the taste of the sweet juice bursting on the tongue was a memory they never lost, it spread deep into their unconscious like the stain of blackberry juice on clothing.

       They combed the local beaches and were accustomed from toddler-hood to cold salt water and sand between the toes. They dug clams and out on the reef collected oysters. They made friends with crows. They rode bikes to the tops of hills where they ate picnics while surveying the beloved landscape of their childhood spread out below, the roof-tops of houses hiding within the remnant oak forest and the air alive with birdsong.

       This outdoor life, these sensations, smells and sights bound them to land and climate and fed their spirits through the later challenges of adulthood, the highs and lows and whatever life brought them.
       Who were these children of this landscape where nature still survived in residential areas, and kids played on the land and not at computer terminals? They were grandchildren of immigrants to British Columbia from Great Britain and Europe, twentieth century kids who lived a green childhood, on intimate terms with the landscape. They were native to this land (meaning, born here) and native to nowhere else: this was their homeland. It had seeped into their spirits and personalities and by absorbing it they owned it, which is another way of saying that it owned them.

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