FRIDAY
January 23 2015
Vol. 106 No. 06
NEWS 9
CP beats city in court PACIFIC SPIRIT 12
‘Barbaric’ brouhaha SWEET SPOT 21
Accent on soufflé at Sutton There’s more online at
vancourier.com WEEKEND EDITION
THE VOICE of VANCOUVER NEIGHBOURHOODS since 1908
Exhibits bring Musqueam legacy alive Cheryl Rossi
crossi@vancourier.com
Howard E. Grant remembers visiting the Museum of Vancouver in the 1950s when it was called the Vancouver Museum and situated downtown. “It showed things called artifacts of my people and other people,” said Grant, a Musqueam band councillor. “It was dead, it was gone. It was as if they no longer existed.” The case was the same at the Museum of Anthropology and the Royal B.C. Museum. “One-third was personal regalia that shouldn’t be shown,” he said. He and Leona Sparrow championed changes at the Museum of Anthropology in the 1970s and now a new, unprecedented three-site exhibition called c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city, opens Jan. 25 and aims to further rectify the representation of aboriginal people in museums. “It’s one of the first times where Musqueam’s really been able to tell our own history in our own words,” said Jordan Wilson, a member of the Musqueam Nation, co-curator of the exhibit at the Museum of Anthropology
and part of the curatorial collective for MOV. The exhibits at the Museum of Vancouver, the Museum of Anthropology and the Musqueam Cultural Education Resource Centre and Gallery highlight historical and contemporary activities of Musqueam people, with their belongings and multiple voices presented in written, audio and video form. And they are belongings, not artifacts, notes Museum of Vancouver curator Viviane Gosselin, who served as a member of a curatorial collective. Artifacts sounds too lifeless, sterile and scientific, she said. Text layered over scenes of Vancouver in a video welcomes visitors to the c̓əsnaʔəm exhibit at MOV. Visitors are asked to hang their preconceptions about native people on a rusty nail outside. Inside, the exhibit is welcoming and warm, with brick-red accents, a large video animation and cedar walls reminiscent of a longhouse. This room precedes the museum’s history of Vancouver exhibit, which previously started with the 1900s. It will remain at MOV for at least five years. Continued on page 5
HOCKEY NIGHT IN KITS Linesman Kieran Evans, 17, prepares to drop the puck in a peewee hockey game between the Vancouver Thunderbirds and North Shore Hawks at Kitsilano community centre Jan. 20. The T-Birds have pioneered a mentoring program for novice officials. Read more page 24. PHOTO DAN TOULGOET
Homeless head count numbers unknown Mike Howell
mhowell@vancourier.com
A staff update to city council Tuesday on the state of homelessness came with many numbers but the one number missing from the presentation was how many people are living on the street. In a year that Mayor Gregor Robertson promised to end street homelessness, city staff say the street population is difficult to determine because of a variety of factors,
including tracking where the 536 people counted last March are today. “We do see properties closing and other issues coming forward which may increase the numbers but that’s quite difficult to quantify at the moment,” said the city’s chief housing officer, Mukhtar Latif, noting the city won’t know how many people remain on the street until another homeless count is conducted in March. Asked by reporters
whether the mayor’s goal of ending street homelessness will be achieved this spring, Latif said the city is “working towards that deadline and doing our best to achieve that. That’s all we can say at the moment.” Latif acknowledged the last accurate number for the homeless population was the one he disclosed in an affidavit filed last fall as part of the city’s application to get an injunction to remove campers in Oppenheimer Park.
In his affidavit, Latif wrote that about 200 of the 536 homeless people had been housed in temporary housing at the former Biltmore Hotel, the former Ramada on East Hastings and the Kingsway Continental. Some also moved into new social housing on Burrard Street. More people were expected to move off the street and into new social housing slated to open before the end of 2014 and into early 2015, including a 139-unit building
at 111 Princess Ave., which opened in December. Taylor Manor, a 56-unit building at Adanac and Boundary, is scheduled to open in mid-March and be home to people with mental illness. That opening will be followed a month later by the 146-unit social housing building at 220 Princess Ave., which will house women-led families with approximately 50 children. This winter, homeless people also moved into
shelters and found temporary housing at the former Quality Inn at 1335 Howe, where 140 tenants now live. City shelters and temporary winter response shelters have been at capacity, staff said in their presentation, although they couldn’t explain why extreme weather response shelters — which opened about 10 times this winter — only had 50 per cent of a combined 160 mats occupied when the weather turned bad. Continued on page 4