“You shouldn’t use the word ‘sustainability’,” the city councillor known for championing environmental sustainability warned.

I replied, “Why? Cultural sustainability is about ensuring that people’s ways of life, identities, heritage, language, and its manifestations such as through the arts can sustain.”

She snapped back: “Do you want sexism to sustain? Racism to sustain?”

“No,” I said. “It’s the idea that culture must live on.”

Cultural sustainability isn’t new. Just like environmental, economic, and social sustainability, it’s about ensuring that people’s culture endures. 

As a cultural organizer working within both the arts sector and the Chinese diaspora, I first began thinking about cultural sustainability when I couldn’t understand why the City of Vancouver didn’t seem to value culture. The city seemed so eager to let its heritage be built over and its artists evicted—as if these were natural processes beyond the control of governments and people.

Then I discovered that others have grappled with this problem before, and better yet, had even developed a conceptual solution. John Hawkes wrote a seminal report titled The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s Essential Role in Public Planning, which laid the groundwork for Agenda 21 for Culture, a global initiative of the United Cities and Local Governments that now advances this concept worldwide. Montreal was one of the founding municipalities that led the charge in its creation.

But fancy policy frameworks with even fancier names are one thing. What does cultural sustainability actually look like in practice?

In the Global North, particularly in settler colonial states, culture generally means arts—the ballet on stage, the paintings on white walls, and the museum showcasing even whiter heritage.

Some call it “Big C” Culture, the formal, institutionalized kind, as opposed to the “messy,” everyday forms of “little c” culture, lived around kitchen tables and spoken over the counter at the Chinese butcher. little c culture is treated as less worthy, precisely because it’s little c, not Big C, a hierarchy built into the language itself.

Big C Culture is supported by government “Cultural” Departments that, in practice, function as arts departments. In settler colonial states, whiteness is treated as the cultural default, and institutionalized arts and heritage are seen as the most legitimate expressions. The English language, Christian traditions, white customs, and white aesthetics don’t need special programs as they are already embedded as the norm in everyday life.

True to settler colonial logic, even arts and culture become sites of capitalist extraction: culture is something to be packaged, displayed, and consumed. Arts funding is framed as an “investment” where artists are compared to athletes on how much economic return they can generate.

But this narrow view of culture neglects the fact that whiteness in settler colonial states is not the norm. It was violently imposed and then institutionalized. It also ignores that for most people, culture is not a consumable good, but a way of life, a way of being every day. Indigeneity is treated as a special exemption rather than a sovereign foundation, while other racialized cultures are rendered as multicultural decorations for consumption, only regarded when they fit neatly within the confines of Big C Culture.

“I thought we met the grant qualifications. We held a two-day cultural festival last year,” I told the Canadian Heritage grant officer, bewildered by our rejection.

She replied sternly: “But the first day of your last festival was…making sweet dumplings.”

“Yes,” I said. “That is culture, no?”

“No,” she said. “Food is not considered culture.”

Food is not culture…

Language is not culture, but accessibility…

Community culture will jeopardize “artistic excellency”…

These are all phrases and sentiments I’ve heard and witnessed in arts and cultural spaces, expressed not only by white institutional leaders, but also by people of colour who have internalized this way of thinking.

Diasporas of colour in these spaces often reproduce packaged representations of culture: flattened, branded, and curated for the white, anglophone gaze. 

Cultural spaces become reduced to neat photo lightboxes for display, dislocated from community and illuminated as spectacles for outsiders. Heritage becomes a conceptual muse, translated into gallery installations and music videos for popular consumption. Everyday objects are turned into exoticized touring art exhibitions. Culture is reduced to ornamentation, framed as arts and crafts programming that’s Orientalized, infantilized, and Instagrammable.

Cultural foods must be “elevated”, “cleansed”, and “branded” to be taken seriously. Heritage words and practices are deconstructed through a white lens as if it was fresh playdough, molded and reshaped without any interrogation of their roots. English must be used to communicate culture in order to be legible and “accessible.” Cultural concepts must be translated and explained in terms that assume whiteness as the baseline for understanding.

Heritage is only regarded as visible and credible when it’s encoded in government policy, housed in white-walled institutions, and liked on social media feeds. Cultural expression is roped off into annual festivals, theatre shows, and designated heritage months that reward consumption and outward performance over inward reflection and everyday celebration. 

We applaud when people outside our culture wear it, perform it, or teach it, as if it becomes more impressive, more legitimate, only when it’s been embraced and validated by the other. Meanwhile, we gaslight ourselves into believing it’s acceptable to reduce our heritage to an aesthetic that outsiders can commodify and remix, only to have it taught back to our elders, reinforcing appropriation, gentrification, and erasure.

Why are our imaginations so limited? Why do we cling on to a settler norm that has never been normal? As diasporic people, why are we re-colonizing our cultures, our communities, our minds, and our bodies, when we should be un-assimilating, decolonizing, and unshackling ourselves from the systems, standards, and stories that were never made for us in the first place?

So let’s ask again: what does cultural sustainability look like when we move away from Big C Culture?

To sustain culture across generations, we don’t need grand strategies or glossy policy frameworks. We just need to do what our ancestors have always done: live the culture. Understand the culture. Embody it. Practice it. Safekeep it. And when we can, pass it on. Teach it to the next generation, who we hope will do the same for the one after that.

In community cultural organizing, cultural sustainability means doing the slow, sometimes difficult work of building relationships with cultural knowledge keepers. These are the local aunties and uncles who may be seen as “difficult” only because they don’t operate within white institutional norms or speak the dominant language, even though they carry deep cultural wisdom.

It means creating space and offering resources for them to share their food, language, arts, and embodied knowledge, and, just as importantly, relinquishing control so they can lead, organize, and teach in their own ways. Instead of peppering a heritage plaza with recognition plaques from colonial governments, it means advocating for unglamorous infrastructure like tree shade and paved ground, the kind that creates informal community living rooms where culture can unfold spontaneously.

It means recording and centering the stories and histories of everyday people, not just the model minorities recognized and decorated by white institutions. It means taking time to talk with the exhausted shopkeeper who feels underappreciated, and offering a small gesture of care when he quietly worries that no one will carry on his food traditions.

It means prioritizing community archiving and safeguarding cultural artifacts, not for museums, art projects or researchers, but for future descendants, so they can understand their ancestral stories and stay rooted in where they come from.

It means using your heritage language audibly, visibly, and with reverence, even if you don’t know every word. It means resisting the pressure to constantly code-switch or translate every word just so whiteness can understand.

It means practicing a disappearing traditional dance you haven’t mastered yet, but holding on to that fragile thread long enough for the next generation to hold it too.

And it means letting elders teach you how to make dumplings and play mahjong, instead of designing workshops where young people get paid to “teach” them in English what they already know.

Cultural sustainability is generational work. It requires us to work together, across time. 

It also requires us to realize another understanding: Culture is not static. It doesn’t need to be preserved, frozen, or exactly replicated. We’re not trying to sustain sexism or racism. Culture evolves with the people who live it. Yet too often, “how it was done” is mistaken for sacred tradition.

And so we hear:

Women cannot sit at the clan table.

You cannot perform without the blessing from the society’s patriarch.

You cannot start a new cultural team without permission, or it’s bad luck.

You can’t learn your own heritage practice; it’s a team secret.

You can take from another community’s heritage if your face looks like theirs.

Queerness must stay invisible.

Seniors are too old to dance.

It needs to be in English to be “official” and “accessible”.

Don’t ask for compensation in any form, you should feel lucky just to be trained.

These are not traditions or customs. They are hierarchies, exclusions, and even abuse, misremembered as culture. As present-day bearers of culture, we have both the power and the responsibility to shed these inequities, and to transform tradition into something more just, more inclusive, and more alive.

So where do we go from here?

We begin again. We practice our culture, not on stages, but in our every day.

In Chinese, the word for culture is 文化 (wén huà), which literally means the patterns of civilization that transform, evolve, and change. In other words, the process of a people’s becoming.

For diaspora communities to sustain culture, especially within settler societies, we should embrace this ongoing process of becoming—not for validation, but as an act of assertion. This means dismantling the confines of Big C Culture and re-embracing 文化: culture rooted in our histories, lived through our ways of being, and evolving with us from generation to generation.