Hope in Shadows

HOPE IN SHADOWS Residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside are not bound by poverty or addiction but rather driven by a sense of community, kinship, and above all, hope. For each of the past five years, Pivot Legal Society’s annual Hope in Shadows photography contest has empowered residents of hood. Working with this archive, Brad Cran Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside by providing and Gillian Jerome have collected the personal Cran / Jerome ARSENAL PULP PRESS | PIVOT LEGAL SOCIETY them with 200 disposable cameras to docu- stories behind these stunning photographs. ment their lives—thus giving them an artistic In surprising and astounding ways, Hope means to enter the ongoing and often stormy in Shadows will not only change the way you dialogue over the place they call home. Since think about the Downtown Eastside and other the contest’s inception, DTES residents have impoverished neighbourhoods; it will also taken over 20,000 images of their neighbour- change your view of society as we know it. Includes a foreword by Libby Davies, Member of Parliament for Vancouver East. Brad Cran is a poet, essayist, and photogra- They are contributing editors at Geist Maga- pher. Gillian Jerome is a poet and teaches in zine and live in East Vancouver with their the English Department at the University of daughters Rory and Micah-Sophia. British Columbia. Author royalties and partial proceeds for the sale of this book are donated to Pivot Legal Society. ARSENAL PULP PRESS | PIVOT LEGAL SOCIETY ISBN 978-1-55152-238-8 Social Issues / Photography $19.95 US & Canada HOPE IN SHADOWS HOPE 6GH:C6AEJAEEG:HHE>KDIA:<6AHD8>:IN IN SHADOWS Stories and Photographs of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside brad cran and gillian jerome With a foreword by Libby Davies HOPE IN SHADOWS Copyright © 2008 by Pivot Legal Society, Brad Cran and Gillian Jerome Foreword and Introduction copyright © 2008 by the authors Second printing: 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permis- sion of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright. ARSENAL PULP PRESS 341 Water Street, Suite 200 Vancouver, BC Canada V6B 1B8 arsenalpulp.com PIVOT LEGAL SOCIETY 678 East Hastings Street Vancouver, BC Canada V6A 1R1 pivotlegal.org The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Pro- gram and the Government of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program for its publishing activities. The authors acknowledge the support of Arts Now, part of 2010 Legacies Now. Book design by Shyla Seller Front cover photograph by Wilda; back cover photograph by Skyla Printed and bound in Canada by Transcontinental Printing. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication: Cran, Brad, 1972- Hope in shadows : stories and photographs of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside / Brad Cran and Gillian Jerome; with a foreword by Libby Davies. Co-published by: Pivot Legal Society. ISBN 978-1-55152-238-8 1. Downtown-Eastside (Vancouver, B.C.). 2. Downtown-Eastside (Vancouver, B.C.)—Biography. 3. Downtown-Eastside (Vancouver, B.C.)— Pictorial works. 4. Downtown-Eastside (Vancouver, B.C.)—Social conditions. I. Jerome, Gillian, 1974- II. Pivot Legal Society III. Title. HN110.V3C73 2008 971.1'33 C2008-901767-6 Dedicated to the people of the Downtown Eastside. CONTENTS 9 Foreword by Libby Davies 151 Jo 14 Preface 162 Russ 18 A History of Pivot Legal Society 171 Kevin Sleziak 175 Verouz 33 Hendrik Beune 184 Marcin Kubat 39 Tom my Taylor 191 Olga Afonina 45 Dolores Dallas 197 Marlene Thistle 56 Edie Wild 203 Elisha-May Walker 63 Gary 209 Rosalynn Humberstone 71 Bronwyn Elko 217 Hannah Walker 76 Tom Q u i rk 224 Aurora Johnson 83 Aaron Bolderson 229 Kathy Walker 89 Frank Thompson 237 Tristan Vox 95 Teresa Chenery 244 Wilda 111 Gordon Matthews 248 A l T. 115 Gregory Liang 254 Skyla 121 James Cumming 261 Helen Hill 129 Laurel Dykstra 138 Clyde Wright 269 Acknowledgments 144 Donna Gorrill FOREWORD How many times have you opened a newspaper, turned on the TV, or listened to the radio, and there it is again: more headlines, more human tragedy, more sensational grit and grime from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. I do it all the time, and sometimes feel overwhelmed by how negatively the community can be portrayed. Sometimes I think there’s empathy and realism in the stories. I appreciate that because it shows what is really happening in a community that I have known for three decades, once lived in, and now represent as a Member of Parliament. Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside gets more attention than pretty well any other neighbourhood in Canada. People are alternately shocked, saddened, disgusted, and awestruck at the various news stories about it, yet the media coverage doesn’t even begin to portray what the meaning of the Downtown Eastside really is. Thirty-five years ago it was called Skid Road and wasn’t seen as a neighbourhood at all; not by the powers-that-be and often not even by the people who lived there. Residents were considered bums, down and out, alcoholics, and “clients” of one government agency or another. It took a revolutionary effort in the early 1970s to transform Skid Road into a community called the Downtown Eastside. This happened because visionary people like Bruce Eriksen started organizing and fighting for people’s rights to decent housing, community space, protection under the law, and simple human dignity. The fight began with the Downtown Eastside Residents As- sociation (DERA) in 1973 and the community has struggled to survive ever Foreword 9 since, sometimes against overwhelming odds. People who live in this fragile yet highly resilient community have endured much and have given much. From their experience comes the truest sense of community that you will ever encounter. Back in the ’70s—when I was a young organizer with DERA—the area’s population was mostly older. It included injured workers and old-timers who came to know the hotels and rooming houses as home. There was no homelessness then, as we see today. There was no visible drug use on the street. People were poor and the single-room hotels were terrible places (as many are today), run mostly by absentee landlords who earned the bulk of their revenue from the numerous beer parlours. But the depth of poverty was not like what we see today. We got Oppenheimer Park fixed up, we battled the city to save the old historic Carnegie Library (now a community centre), and we fought tooth and nail for the Standards of Maintenance bylaw to be enforced against slum landlords. In addition, new, higher quality social housing got built; fi- nally, the neighbourhood seemed to be improving. But in the 1990s, massive cutbacks in federal housing programs, the erosion of social programs, and welfare cuts took an enormous toll. Poverty deep- ened, and drug use and homelessness became visible and prevalent. (The im- pact it has had on individual lives is apparent in the stories told in this book.) On top of this, smart-assed developers realized that the Downtown Eastside was a gold mine, a would-be blank slate for extending the wealthy downtown business district; probably more than anything, this has been the enduring struggle and story of this community for more than three decades. Elsewhere in North America, most other low-income inner city neighbourhoods have been obliterated: demolished, gentrified, and sanitized, and some left empty and uninhabitable. Not so here. The only reason is because the people of the Downtown Eastside fought back. They asserted their right to live, to exist, to have hope, and to have a future. Their story is one of resistance—one that deepens the value of what community and survival really means to the lives of its residents and the place as a whole. There have been many attempts over the years to wipe out the Downtown Eastside. Even today, encroaching and rapid redevelopment threatens the very soul of this historic area. It is a never-ending battle. Any other community might have given up the struggle and accepted these powerful forces as inevitable. But not here, and maybe never. There is the physical survival of the neighbourhood from the forces of development, block by block. But there’s also the political survival to contend with too. I’ve witnessed various attempts over the years, under the guise of public policy, to break up the community in order to save it from itself. The view here is that poor people should not live together in a community because it creates a “ghetto,” allowing anti-social and deviant behaviours to take over. In order to deal with crime and the visibility of poverty on the street, it is seen as necessary to disperse people, all done in the name of “revitalizing” the area and ridding it of these social ills. This view gains credence as the visibility of poverty increases. There’s a general wringing of hands, and the pressure mounts to clean things up (read: people). I wonder in what other place today would we tolerate people being moved about like goods to be sold. Histori- cally, such policies have been seen as oppressive and colonial. What estab- lished community—with history, deep roots, and social connections—would willingly submit to dismantling itself? Foreword 11 And so the struggle continues for a small community, not only to survive, but to thrive.

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