Natalie Virginia Lang is a writer and teacher who has written several book reviews for The BC Review and has won multiple awards from Simon Fraser University for her work in the Graduate Liberal Studies department. She lives on Sumas Mountain and is ardently dedicated to the preservation of natural spaces.
Remnants: Reveries of a Mountain Dweller offers a vision of Sumas Mountain throughout the seasons to expose the impact of toxic progress. Author Natalie Virginia Lang ventures into the mountain’s natural spaces, illuminating the errors of the modern colonial approach to progress and posing philosophical queries for alternate pathways into the future.
Interviewed by Joyce Hobday
Interviewed Edited for Length
Joyce Hobday (JH): You have titled your book Remnants: Reveries of a Mountain Dweller. In the book, you make several references to remnants of the past. What are these remnants and how important are they for us to preserve and learn from?
Natalie Virginia Lang (NVL): The remnants that I am referring to are the remnants of nature, of the environment, things that existed at one time and have been changed or eliminated throughout time. But then I’m also talking about the remnants of the people who have come through this area, Indigenous groups, as well as non-Indigenous settlers.
And there’s also the element of remnants about respect for a place that I feel in a lot of ways is lacking as we’ve gone through history, as we’ve delved further into this mode of progress and development and progress just for progress’s sake. I believe that if we don’t preserve all those different forms of remnants, all those different pieces of the past, these traces of what once was there, who once was there, and what we once thought or felt about places, then we can’t learn from them. If we don’t preserve them, if we don’t know what they are, we can’t learn from them. If we don’t have them to learn from we will not have any form of memory of what was once here; we’ll have forgotten how we came to be in this place, how we came to be in this time.
And then we’ll sort of lose the trace of where we were, where we are, and how it links to all these different moments in time. I believe that our link to the past is important to help us understand our present and plan for the future by linking all these different pieces…
JH: Your book, which chronicles your experiences and ruminations throughout the year 2021, is mostly written in the present tense, with some incidents relayed in past tense. Can you tell me about your choice of tense? In some incidents you start with the past tense, and then you switch into the present tense while you’re still relaying the incident.
NVL: I don’t think that I was completely aware that I was doing that when I was writing. So initially, it wasn’t a conscious choice to do that. It just kind of emerged naturally. And then, my editor pointed that out to me as I was doing some of the essays. She asked me if I wanted to keep that, if I thought that was important. I had to think about it and I was like, okay, well, I could go back and I could make it all nice and keep all the tenses where they’re supposed to be. I decided that that would be disingenuous, partly because the changing of the tense really captures this understanding that I have that we cannot live in the present without connecting to the past…When the choice came to change that or keep it and then develop it, I decided to develop it because it really reflected the message that I was trying to convey.
JH: The book is very rooted in place – your place on Sumas Mountain. In the spring section, in the Voice of Nature, you include a story about being caught in a rainstorm on a mountain in China. Tell me why you include this.
NVL: I included that story as well as another story where I take a trip on a ferry to the Sunshine Coast for a couple of reasons. I wanted to impress the universality of the story. So yes, this story is centered on Sumas Mountain. Yes, it’s centred in a particular place in a particular time. And yes, it’s from my point of view. But those sentiments that I discuss – the remnants of the past, the environmental destruction, the loss of place, connection to nature, the issue of climate change, the need to the embody the places that we are in, I felt that even though I was telling this particular story, I had had those feelings at other times in my life and other places around the world. . . . I really wanted to bring those in to show that these feelings can be felt and experienced anywhere by anyone.
JH: You write lyrical descriptions of your forest walks on Sumas Mountain and the beauty that you are immersed in there. You also can see beauty in the open view provided by the cut block on the mountain, and in the flooded valley you see “the ghostly beauty of what Sumas Lake once was.” Does it surprise you that you can find beauty in destruction?
NVL: I wasn’t entirely surprised by being able to see this. Poets and artists and writers have been finding beauty in darkness forever. I’ve always been able to do that. That duality of beauty and destruction is always there. I think it’s in humanity. I think it’s in all of nature. A tree dies, and then it decomposes and then it makes room for makes room for other things to grow. So there’s a certain beauty and rebirth in that death, in that tragedy. Rains come and wash away what is there and that can be extremely disruptive, but then it can open up a space for something new that can offer a different life for something else. It makes way for something so in the wake of tragedy there is opportunity…
And so I wasn’t surprised that I could do that. Maybe it’s part of how I grew up, part of the privilege and opportunity of being where I am. And I was given the opportunity as a young person to just kind of exist in the world. I didn’t have a bunch of scheduled things to do all the time. I was given time and space to learn how to be and then that’s been developed throughout my life. I think it surprised me that very few people either weren’t given the opportunity to do that or cultivated that or even knew that that was possible to widen that perspective to see the really beautiful elements of a flooded valley alongside that tragedy.
We need both. We can sit in that difficulty and feel the wonder of it at the same time. I think it’s really hard for a lot of people to get their minds around that you have both. We default to one or the other: this is a beautiful moment; this is a tragic moment. And it’s hard to blend them. It makes us really uncomfortable to do that.
JH: In the book you write, “Mine is a complex relationship with Sumas Mountain. I try to be an advocate for the space I knew as a child, yet I am part of the colonial story of this country.” What do you think is important to keep in mind as we work towards reconciliation?
NVL: I think it is important to recognize the complexity of it and to understand all parties may not completely be satisfied with what we do to reconcile this because it’s complicated. In order for Canada to be what it is today, that came at the sacrifice of too many people to many places and we can’t fully reconcile that. We cannot go back. We can’t change the past, but we can keep in mind that every single person who comes to live here, whether they are Indigenous, settler descendant, new migrant to the country, we’re still part of that story. We’re all part of the process of reconciliation, and I don’t think that there will ever be an end point to reconciliation. It’s an ongoing, continuous, fluctuating way forward.
We all have a role in thinking about the colonial history, whether it’s our personal colonial history, whether it’s how we were impacted by, and how we have impacted place, people, et cetera. And we all have a role in learning about that story. And it will continue to impact people culture, environments. And I believe it’s important to acknowledge and recognize that it’s a collective responsibility to do the work of learning, to do the work of acting upon what we learn. To listen and then to discover where we fit inside that story and understand what role every single individual has to play to help make this country one where we can all belong in some form. Because we can’t go back; we can’t change the actions of our ancestors…
Now there are many other people who have many different opinions. Different Indigenous groups will have their own answer to this question. And I think we all need to come to our own answer to this as individuals, as collective parts of the complexity of this place.
JH: Your book contains devasting descriptions of clearcuts − “the vast emptiness of missing trees.” You acknowledge that “we must take from the natural world to survive, but how we do it makes all the difference.” How do you hope your book will help to make a difference in the way we see ourselves within the natural world and how we take from it?
NVL: The other day, I received an email from someone who had discovered my book and read it and I’ll just read you a little bit about what they said to me. One section in particular had made them stop and reflect about their relationship with nature around them in ways that they had never done before.
My entire goal is for whoever picks up the book at some point, in some way, to stop and reflect. Whether it’s someone making a policy, whether it’s someone living on Indigenous land, whether it’s someone who logs in the forest, whether it’s farming, whatever it is. The hope is that they will just stop and reflect. Maybe they had already been pondering their place in all of this. Or maybe they had certain things that never occurred to them. But I hope my book helps to encourage a sense of opportunity for a new and wider perspective.
And then that perspective might change the way they interact with their environment, whatever that environment is around them, whether it’s the forest or the ocean, or a wetland, or even a park near an apartment building. To change the way they see it, change the way they interact with it, to make different choices. Each day those little choices that we make and those little moments where we can stop and observe. All that stuff builds up. And the goal I think overall is to shift the narrative..
All it really is, is an invitation for observation and for a shift in the narrative, a shift in one’s perspective. That’s all I can hope to do. I can’t tell anyone how to live, I can’t tell anyone how to go through the world. Everyone’s story is different, and everyone comes to this narrative through their own point of view and their own background and their own personal history. All that I can hope to do is offer space for an opportunity for something else.