Vancouver may soon see a dramatic addition: Sen̓áḵw, 11 towers holding 6,000 apartments. It’s being built by the Squamish First Nation. Since it's on land they own, they don't have to follow Vancouver’s zoning rules. And they've chosen to build bigger, denser and taller than anywhere else in Canada.
Predictably, this rubs against a widespread belief that the Squamish, are an indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast, are living fossils with a duty to embody a romantic vision of life before Europeans came here:
City councillor Colleen Hardwick said “How do you reconcile Indigenous ways of being with 18-storey high-rises?” And Gordon Price, a Vancouver urban planner and a former city councillor, said “When you’re building 30, 40-storey high rises out of concrete, there’s a big gap between that and an Indigenous way of building.”
Neither of these people are members of the Squamish First Nation. Sen̓áḵw existed as a city of cedar longhouses long before Vancouver was built. Its Squamish residents saw their land carved up for railways until their homes were torched and they were loaded onto a barge and shipped away in 1913. Now they're back.
Much of my text was paraphrased from this article by Michelle Cyca, which has more cool pictures:
@johncarlosbaez looks quite desirable as housing.
@tbrunner @johncarlosbaez to me, it looks like a poor ghetto in the making but maybe it's an improvement. I'm unfamiliar with the topic.
