I am in Rhodes, Greece. This visit is part of a three-month sabbatical in which I am focusing on writing, reading, and reconnecting. My partner and I came to Rhodes, for the first time, to meet the place where his grandparents made a home as Sephardic Jews. They moved to Rhodes when expelled from Spain by Queen Isabella in 1492, stayed for 400 years, and then packed up and moved to Seattle, USA. This monarch initiated a campaign of cultural genocide, demanding that Jewish and Arab people become Catholic, leave, or be killed. Then, almost a decade ago, after Spain’s recent economic struggles, the banished Jewish people were invited back as citizens, along with an apology of sorts for these violent events.
This morning, on day two, after last night’s visit to the synagogue in the old city, I took a swim in the pool. The hotel is filled with Scandinavians. This is part of their “sällskap resan” (fungroup holiday) destination. Many families have been returning year-after-year for a summer vacation. From my lawn chair, I see a Swedish pre-teen crying. Her grandmother, who is beside her with her feet in the pool, doesn’t know how to console her. Through her tears she cries, “I want to go home! I want to go home.” I wonder what she is longing for. I imagine she might be missing the familiar: her friends, her routines, predictability. Being on foreign soil has its ups and downs. And, when you live in a land that has been occupied, it can be difficult to actually know where home is.
Northern Turtle Island is home to three Indigenous peoples: First Nations, Métis and Inuit. The place used to be theirs entirely. In the settlement project, many of their children were interned, as you may know, in institutions set up by government, with complicity of the churches (except the Quakers) and the RCMP (police). Canada’s Indigenous residential school survivors were told, just this past week, by the head of the Roman Catholic church Pope Francis, that he is sorry for the abuses that took place. The lives of these (former) children were torn apart forever by all sorts of violence. Unlike Spain, Indigenous people have not yet had land and rights restored. However, as is predictable, Spain wants the Sephardic Jews to attain citizenship, return, buy property, invest money, and help build the country. They didn’t even invite the Moors back. (At least Spain is not bombing its Arab neighbours).
My partner and I have been involved in this repatriation process. Spain began processing his citizenship application three years ago. Covid has placed a delay on receiving the passport. Even there, the homeland situation is complicated. We love the Basque country, which extends into the western Pyrenees and, we are also enchanted by Cataluña, home of so many important historical movements and creativity. The issue is that the Basque is a nation independent of Spain; and Cataluña is striving for independence, to which I can relate. They feel oppressed by the nation of Spain and desire sovereignty.
A few years back, my therapist and colleague Allan Wade introduced me to the St. Albans, an institutional psychiatry movement. As such, I became interested in the life and work of François Tosquelles and his colleagues. In addition to working as a psychiatrist, Tosquelles was also one of the anti-fascist fighters who tried to stop dictator Franco in his path of atrocities as a Nazi collaborator. Both Allan and I, and our team at The Centre for Response-Based Practice, are interested in non-pathologizing, critical, and community-based approaches to therapy, as demonstrated in our work supporting a number of Indigenous Communities in their culturally based healing initiatives.
Katie Joice, in an interview with Tosquellian historian Camille Robcis, documents some of this history:
“Catalan psychiatrist Tosquelles fled to France in 1939. Earlier, in Barcelona, he had been one of the first members of the POUM, an anti-Stalinist, anarchist-inspired group that advocated federalism, decentralization, and the idea of permanent revolution. During the Spanish civil war, Tosquelles fought with the Republican army. After Franco’s defeat, he escaped France and was placed in a concentration camp for Spanish refugees. Both at the front and in the camp, Tosquelles set up therapeutic communities to treat the combattants and the refugees. These experiences convinced him that psychiatry could be practiced anywhere, even “in the mud” as he liked to say. Living through the war and the camps had also persuaded Tosquelles that fascism and totalitarianism affected the psyche in crucial ways.”
I also want to escape problematic, neo-liberal psychiatry and be involved in creatively therapeutic settings, where people may recover from violence and hardship on the land…. and celebrate their resistance.
As an Indigenous woman who supports Indigenous nationhood and self-determinization, I related to the aspirations of the Catalan separatists. As well, the mountains seem filled with magic and mystical traditions, such as the path of the pilgrims on the camino de Santiago de Compostello. I always feel that I’m part of a centuries old spiritual “community” when I walk on these paths and/or see the backpacker pilgrims passing through the towns or countryside. It gets me thinking about special sites in Canada that echo the footpaths of my Indigenous ancestors, places such as Wanuskewin, prairie lakes and rivers, the Red River, and Batoche. I feel this connection to history in Cowichan Territory, in the Fraser Canyon and special places in BC, as well as Yukon. For me, many places linked to “home” have been covered with cement. One reason I felt pushed away from Vancouver Island was the sprawling megalopolis of car lots, fast food stations, structures euphemistically called “development” or “developments”.
Sometimes, on this trip, I long for home. I guess I have more than one – a few places on Vancouver Island and a few places in Quebec. Typically, when I first arrive somewhere and am entranced, I feel that I could fall in love with the place, settle and stay forever. That feeling usually lasts about three days. Spain may become another home. Most likely I will continue to move à la façon du pays, taking part in Métis seasonal rounds, seeking salmon, berries, cool lakes, harvest. Then I make efforts to find peace with the chilling and persistent Quebec winters. I think I thrive on contrasts and contesting the “everyday” when it becomes complacent or too sure of itself.