By Bernard Perley, President of CASCA

Kwey psiw te wen.  Hello everyone.

After gathering in Montreal for the annual CASCA conference, I found the theme, confluences, appropriate to places, peoples, species, and pluriverse possibilities.  I’m from Nekutkuk (Tobique First Nation) Wabanakiw (in the land of the dawn).  My ancestral home lies at the confluence of the Tobique River and the St. John River.  There is a crazy story describing how the name Tobique came to be.  It involves our culture hero Kaluskap and the Devil.  Believe me, it is a crazy story. Why the St. John River was named after St. John is a mystery to me.  We call the river Wolastok.  The name translates as “peaceful waves.”  Notably, there are days the river appears as smooth as a mirror.  As a community we have been called by others Maliseet but we call ourselves wolastokwiyik, people of the “peaceful waves” river.  This brief discussion of the currents and eddies of the confluence of the Tobique and St. John Rivers illustrate the salience of the theme for our CASCA conference.

CASCA is fundamentally about confluences, the coming or flowing together of peoples, experiences, and ideas.  As anthropologists, we welcome the engagement with what may seem to be divergent ideas and perspectives.  By doing so we can identify mutually beneficial journeys that honour and respect difference while imagining common goals and interests.  Often, our confluences create turbulence and perplexities.  For example, how did the Devil and St. John enter into the ancestral currents of Wolastokwi lives?  How did colonial languages and ideas erase Indigenous languages, place names, stories, and lived experiences from their ancestral lands?  Today, how do the diverse rivers of our collective experience contribute to the mixing and turbulence of lives, beliefs, and practices that continue to offer challenges toward meaningful reconciliation and sustainable futures for all?  Anthropology has navigated these turbulent currents since the inception of the discipline.  Each generation poses new challenges and each subsequent generation offers insights into new understandings as well as new questions.  We continued that engagement in Montreal at the CASCA conference.  I delighted in hearing your insights for our collective future.

This is my last reflection for Culture as President of CASCA.  The currents and tides that dominate our conversations often respond to immediate crises or prominent advocacies of the moment.  The slow violence of colonialism continues as a deep undercurrent on our daily lives.  The Confluences conference was an opportunity to bring those currents to our attention so that our disciplinary engagement with social science can provide knowledge and awareness to the structural inequities that continue to undermine the health and wellbeing of our at-risk community members.  I want to thank the CASCA Conference planning committee for imagining and organizing such an engaging conference; one that empowers us all to continue doing the critical work of research, engagement, and transformation that is foundational to CASCA.  It has truly been an honour to serve the CASCA community as President this past year and I look forward to working with you all as we make CASCA a vital part of our conversation toward truth and reconciliation.

Wisoki woliwon psiw te wen ciw psiw te kekw.

Bernie

Photo caption: Bernie and the Cree Bears