Hey Gordon

Ken Lum had three 3/4 scale models of once-upon-a-time skwat shacks assembled by a prop-shop working from borrowed photos and placed temporarily in the pool in front of the Shangri-La-La Hotel (a rotating exhibition venue curated by the VAG). You might recognize the middle one was mine (part of a Canada Council grant I received at that time was to build our home from effluent ). To the left is Paul Spong’s, the save the killer whales guy. Historically it was about 100 yards to the east of our home. The shack to the right was Malcolm Lowry’s which was about a mile to the east, the other side of Chef Dan George’s Tsleil-waututh people’s land. It was razed in 1954, Spong’s and my family's homes were torched in 1971. All three done-in by the same Corporate District of North Vancouver building inspector. Ken (& the VAG) present no on-site notation of the shack’s authors. At the very least they could have given accreditation to the inspector.

The Liz Magor shack is of a similar scale but presented craft-like in aluminum down to encrusted barnacles. Surely she did the research to discover the “Spratt’s Oilery Disaster” ( along with easily obtainable circa 1890 images of their pole sheds virtually in front of her permanent installation; so similar in image to her Freight Shed ). Spratts naively employed Alfred Nobel’s new invention of dynamite to stun the herring-run which was scooped-up and rendered for grease to lubricate the skids that allowed logs to be transported to the mills. They did it for three years until in 1885 the herring did not return to Coal Harbor or the salmon that fed on them. First Nations people in the vicinity of that tidal area had harvested these yearly cycles for mellennia. Their way of life was constructed on the return of the salmon. It was over. Freight Shed? maybe she means the freight of European ignorance.  

In 1970-71 there was a lengthy supreme court case in the building that now houses the Vancouver Art Gallery. The case debated skwat rights on the Maplewood flats . The judges wore robes, the scent of marijuana hovered in the public washrooms. During the trial we noticed that the boundaries of the two parties who purported jurisdiction over the flats did not match-up. Their individual land surveys, that of the Corporate District of North Vancouver and that of the National Harbours Board had been completed several years apart. They should have joined evenly on the mean high tide line but alluvial fill from the creek running beside our shack had created an oblong-shaped piece of land that neither party claimed. It was large enough to contain the shack, 90 feet out in front on the flats.

In early December 1971, knowing that our rear guard action in s-court was fading, we decided to move to no man’s land. Among the dedicated group of volunteers who facilitated lowering the shack onto driftwood rollers and making the 90-foot move were British situationist historian Ron Hunt http://ronnaprojects.co.uk who curated the seminal exhibition, Poetry Must be Made by All! at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1969, and CARFAC organizer Glenn Toppings who joined the UBC faculty of Fine Arts as a martyr of the 1969 SFU strike (he had been a logger and knew what to do). We got it out there. Cabin Move

Close to Xmas, court order in hand, the building inspector of the Corporate District of North Vancouver led a crew to the flats to demolish the skwat. Our shack was roped off in an area with signage declaring No-Man’s-Land. Feeling humiliated by the protracted trial and horrified that it might begin again, he snapped. The inspector torched the shack, corporate arson. So much for the s-court service. Cabin Burn

In a Straight article on Ken’s installation, Robin Laurence quotes that Vancouver was recently identified as having the highest housing-price-to-household-income ratio in the world. In 2008 Emily Carr U of Art awarded Vancouver real estate marketing wizard and high school drop-out Bob Rennie an honorary doctorate. 

T