Moving at the Pace of Trust
An exciting announcement for the future of bioregional storytelling.
Obvious, yes: The media landscape is wild. Lots of fracture. Lots of silos. Feels like confetti right now, like someone just bashed the media piñata and bits of candy are flying everywhere.
So what would dream regenerative storytelling platforms look like?
To me, they would be ones that…
were in right relationship with the living world, that
displayed all the top-shelf precision treatment of art and editorial but that took risks, got weird, surprised me, and that
didn’t sell their integrity for algorithmic efficiency but whose signatures of creative vision were co-authored by elements, by patterns of a bioregion, guided by winged and finned migration and conscripting human contributors who care bone-deep about taste and truth, who offer their voice to be part of some multispecies chorus.
What if storytelling platforms weren’t trying to do everything and be everywhere, but instead focused on centering subtlety and texture, smaller notes moving at a pace of trust, coming closer as a way of reaching further to amplify, celebrate, and defend the living planet, at the tenor-scale of watersheds?
I’m so excited to announce that I’ve taken on a part-time role as managing editor for the revamped bioregional narrative platform, Magic Canoe.
It’s the storytelling wing of the Salmon Nation Trust/Ecotrust, presently overseen by Indigenous leadership, where its primary aim is to highlight solutions-forward environmental, political, and cultural action being done in Salmon Nation.
You might think of Magic Canoe as a place where this bioregion can start speaking not solely by us but through us.
Welcome to the Nature State
The founders of Magic Canoe use the term, "Nature State," as opposed to "Nation State," to redefine creative jurisdiction through language and reclaim our contours of care as ecological, an attempt to reorient us into a watershed politic, shapes that have been here all along, shapes we can be proud of representing, subverting in its own small way the residue of settler-colonial-nation-state boundaries of power.
Magic Canoe aims to decolonize the imagination, to set it within a far more intimate and right-sized body of relations, quite literally placing our creative capacity in the context of an expressive planet as we live into a future where everyone is taken care of, where housing and local food systems are top priority, where the cultural pyrotechnics of joy and mutual aid gurgle and twerk and ritualize alongside one another to grow durability for facing future political and planetary turbulence.
Because this growing wave of challenge, it steepens every day. The task ahead is daunting, sure, but this canoe, this canoe is built to fit everyone.
Time to get in. Time to paddle together.
Have a story tip? Want to write for us? See our submissions page and/or email me: nick (at) magiccanoe (dot) org.