In the Preface ...”Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.”
p.5, “Our elders say that the ceremonies are the way that we remember to remember”.
p.7, “These are not “instructions” like commandments through or rules; rather, they are like a compass: they provide an orientation but not a map. The work of living is creating that map.”
p.7, my favourite passage is one that compares the orientation of Skywoman and Eve, same species, same earth ...“sister, you got the short end of the stick”
p.8, “Skywoman asks in return for a gift of the world on a turtle’s back, what will I give in return?
p.8, “Perhaps the Skywoman story endures because we too are always falling. Our lives, both personal and collective, share her trajectory. Whether we jump or are pushed, or the edge of the known world just crumbles at our feet, we fall, spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us.” for yourself... will be different for each of us and different for every era.”
p.9, “Can they, can we all, understand the Skywoman story not as an artifact from the past but as instructions for the future?”
p.9, “For all of us, becoming Indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered....to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual depended on it”.
p.15, “Not one tree in a grove, but the whole grove; all across the country and all across the state. The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one, happens to all.”
p.25, “Our gift was time and attention and care and red-stained fingers.” (p 25)
p.29, the world speaks to me in metaphor
imagine a different relationship where people and land are good medicine for each other..
human beings “as the younger brothers of creation”
In terms of Emily Carr, what do we think of as “our Common”?... The things that are to be stewarded?
thinking about the importance of the “gift” economy
thinking about what counts as knowledge and why
Instead of granting personhood to corporations, imagine if we grant personhood to trees and rivers! What a different world?
For a detailed account of the history of the Whanganui River and it being granted “legal personhood” see David Boyd’s The Rights of Nature.
Karen Barad talks about bringing different knowledges together but that one can’t assume they haven’t already been in conversation with each other. And that things aren’t separate to be woven together, but rather one might look at one thing through another, to see what patterns emerge. In that sense understanding the details of what you’re “reading” through something else. And she speaks about how we are always already in relation to other things, but then also that these entanglements are always being reworked and reconfigured.
“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also reap that broken dignity.”- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
p.34, “Ohh, here are the ones who know how to say thank you”.
p.34, “When we call a place by name it is transformed from a wilderness to a homeland.” This speaks so cogently to the importance of place names and the colonial strategy of changing place names to eradicate the local histories and replace it with theirs
“the land knows you even if you are lost”
p.42, “The questions that scientists raised were not , “ Who are you?, but “ What is it?” No one asked the plants, “What can you tell us?”
our other than human relations are holders of knowledge
the makers of the word “Pupowee” understood a world full of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything”.
Such a responsibility I have to these people and these trees, left to me, an unknown come to live under the guardianship of the twins, with a bond physical, emotional, and spiritual. I have no way to pay them back. Their gift to me is far greater than I have ability to reciprocate. They’re so huge as to be nearly beyond my care, although I do scatter granules of fertilizer at their feet and turn the hose on them in summer drought. Perhaps all I can do is love them. All I know to do is to leave another gift, for them and for the future, those next unknowns who will live here.
I like the lesson from Lena, the elder who is teaching Robin how she picks up sweetgrass. If we don't treat nature with respect, nature will leave us! I feel that is very much related to the question if the world loves us back. In 2019, 100,000 species went extinct so those beings did leave us because we did not love them enough.
“They could not have imagined me, many generations later, and yet I live in the gift of their care.”
I just joined a local Buy Nothing Group on Facebook... I’m really curious about the exchange/trade/gift economy it espouses
Decolonizing bibliographies
Decolonizing our bookshelves
For folks decolonizing bookshelves, please consider adding YA! There is some AMAZING new work by BIPOC authors in “YA” category but I don’t think they should be judged by their category!
“The lettered city”
There is a scholar at UVic who works with a John Burrows the head of Indigenous law there who is doing research on Indigenous citation. Wish I remember their name.
That would be great! I recently had this conundrum in writing a paper with gifting as a central tenet and wanting to reference potlatch and not knowing how.
I just had a meeting where we talked about the library hosting a session on citing oral, land- based or other types of knowledge. Maybe we can do it in partnership this group somehow?
I loved the part about beans having belly buttons.
I always seem to mix up my garden planting, my mom used to do that and it annoyed me and it has annoyed me that I do this, that I always mess up my garden and cannot always follow straight rows and end up with chaos. Now I see it in a new way and will go with it, what a relief
Reminded me of the documentary littlest big farm - it’s such a beautiful example of a biodiverse growing. - also on Netflix
https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/
I found the emphasis on balance all through these chapters as extremely important as well as the need for everyone to find out what our 'unique gift' is.
Robin Wall Kimmerer's stories provide many metaphors to show us the way. I was raised in gardens, either weeding, picking potato bugs or harvesting. These gardens were tended by both my paternal and maternal grandfathers. White settlers who planted everything in perfect rows. These men loved the earth and took pride in their gardens and I learned their ways. When I had the ability to have my own little plot I replicated the way of my grandfathers and created tiny little rows to separate each species of plants. However, unlike my grandfathers I had little room and my garden developed into a chaos that I was always trying to overcome. I felt entrenched in the belief of these straight rows, unable to imagine another way.
This spring when I plan my garden I will step away from my rows and create an opportunity to repair my relationship with the earth by planting corn and beans and squash together. I look forward to decolonizing my garden and welcoming the way of the Three Sisters into our family. I wonder what my grandfathers would think of my new approach to gardening, and you know, I think they would love it. Though they never thought about their rows in this way, they both had such gratitude for the gifts that we received from the earth. They gave me a love and respect for nature. I have been the one to forget their teachings along the way. I think this is why this book has so strongly spoken to me from its first paragraph in the preface, "Breath it in an you start to remember things you didn't know you'd forgotten."
Following up on your question yesterday - I went back through my notes and that circular question of “what kind of earth are we leaving our children, and what kind of children are we leaving our earth” came from Kairyn Janecke, a principal in McBride, who was sharing about the Elder’s Outdoor Education Camp she helps organize at Beaver Lake Lodge in northern BC. (The presentation was at a conference Jean and I attended in October called Classrooms to Communities.)The Elder’s Outdoor Education Camp is a really amazing 2 day camp where Elders gather to share knowledge with primary school students in the summer. The camp runs several times each summer for different age groups. The set of resources they shared are here: https://c2c.ourconference.ca/index.php?Page=Workshop&code=WV2EVD
My offer... a Gift of Rambling......The maple nation chapter really started to bring forth the pedagogy of the book and connecting ecological thinking to social practice, that it’s not just about plants, that the social fabric is essential, that our paths to making meaning (through things other than consumerism) and the practice of care and maintenance of relations with people, determine the character of our pursuits and their eventual aggregate impact on natural systems. That we need the ecological big picture perspective not as a knowledge, but to understand how the problems we face stem from things that are quite often outside, they stem from how we conceive our relations to others, the mundane choices we make about what to eat and how to get around and what we give as gifts and what we determine to be a priority for how make our way through the world and whether we see that as an individual pursuit or a collective one.
• Introductory Cautionary Tale
When Nanabozho, the Anishinaabe Original Man, our teacher, part man, part manido, walked through the world, he took note of who was flourishing and who was not, of who was mindful of the Original Instructions and who was not. He was dismayed when he came upon villages where the gardens were not being tended, where the fishnets were not repaired and the children were not being taught the way to live. Instead of seeing piles of firewood and caches of corn, he found the people lying beneath maple trees with their mouths wide open, catching the thick, sweet syrup of the generous trees. They had become lazy and took for granted the gifts of the Creator. They did not do their ceremonies or care for one another. He knew his responsibility, so he went to the river and dipped up many buckets of water. He poured the water straight into the maple trees to dilute the syrup. Today, maple sap flows like a stream of water with only a trace of sweetness to remind the people both of possibility and of responsibility. And so it is that it takes forty gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup.
• p.68, Our people call this time the Maple Sugar Moon, Zizibaskwet Giizis, the month before is known as the Hard Crust on Snow Moon. People living a subsistence lifestyle also know it as the Hunger Moon, when stored food has dwindled and game is scarce. But the maples carried the people through, provided food just when they needed it most.
•p.69, Nanabozho made certain that the work would never be too easy. His teachings remind us that one half of the truth is that the earth endows us with great gifts, the other half is that the gift is not enough. The responsibility does not lie with the maples alone. The other half belongs to us; we participate in its transformation.
•p.70, I realize that those first homesteaders were not the beneficiaries of that shade, at least not as a young couple. They must have meant for their people to stay here.
• pg.78, “Hazel leaned on my mother’s arm as we circled around the clearing outside, pointing out trees she had planted and flowerbeds long overgrown. At the back of the house, under the oaks, was a clump of bare gray branches erupting with a froth of stringy yellow blossoms. “Why lookee here, it’s my old medicine come to greet me,” she said and reached out to take the branch as if she was going to shake its hand. “I made me many a batch of this old witch hazel and folks would come to me for it, special. I’d cook up that bark in the fall and have it all winter to rub on aches and pains, burns and rashes—everybody wanted it. There ain’t hardly no hurt the woods don’t have medicine for.”
• pg.81, We got word that Hazel had died a couple of years after we moved. “Gone, all gone with the wind,” she would have said. There are some aches witch hazel can’t assuage; for those, we need each other. My mother and Hazel Barnett, unlikely sisters, I suppose, learned well from the plants they both loved—they made a balm for loneliness together, a strengthening tea for the pain of longing.”
• pg.86, Ponds grow old, and though I will too, I like the ecological idea of aging as progressive enrichment, rather than progressive loss.
• pg.87, I’m a botanist by trade, and so of course I needed to know who these algae were.
• pg.88, The whole green field was in motion, with iridescent tumbleweeds of Volvox and pulsing euglenoids stretching their way among the strands. So much life in a single drop of water, water that previously looked like scum in a jar. Here were my partners in restoration.
• pg.88, Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge.
• pg.90, But my good intentions meant nothing to tadpoles if they struggled and died in a compost pile. I sighed, but I knew what I had to do. I was driven to this chore by a mothering urge, to make a swimmable pond. In the process, I could hardly sacrifice another mother’s children, who, after all, already have a pond to swim in.
• pg. 92. It came to me once again that restoring a habitat, no matter how well intentioned, produces casualties.
• pg. 94, On Saturday mornings, Sunday afternoons, year after year, I would go to the solitude of the pond and get to work. I tried grass carp and barley straw, and every new change provoked a new reaction. The job is never over; it simply changes from one task to the next. What I’m looking for, I suppose, is balance, and that is a moving target. Balance is not a passive resting place—it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in.
• pg.95, The pond built my muscles, wove my baskets, mulched my garden, made my tea, and trellised my morning glories. Our lives became entwined in ways both material and spiritual. It’s been a balanced exchange: I worked on the pond and the pond worked on me, and together we made a good home...Being a good mother means teaching your children to care for the world, and so I’ve shown the girls how to grow a garden, how to prune an apple tree.
• pg.96-97, Paula Gunn Allen, in her book Grandmothers of the Light, writes of the changing roles of women as they spiral through the phases of life, like the changing face of the moon. We begin our lives, she says, walking the Way of the Daughter. This is the time for learning, for gathering experiences in the shelter of our parents. We move next to self-reliance, when the necessary task of the age is to learn who you are in the world. The path brings us next to the Way of the Mother. This, Gunn relates, is a time when “her spiritual knowledge and values are all called into service of her children.”...
“Life unfolds in a growing spiral, as children begin their own paths and mothers, rich with knowledge and experience, have a new task set before them. Allen tells us that our strengths turn now to a circle wider than our own children, to the well-being of the community. The net stretches larger and larger. The circle bends round again and grandmothers walk the Way of the Teacher, becoming models for younger women to follow. And in the fullness of age, Allen reminds us, our work is not yet done. The spiral widens farther and farther, so that the sphere of a wise woman is beyond herself, beyond her family, beyond the human community, embracing the planet, mothering the earth.”
• pg.97, The circle of care grows larger and caregiving for my little pond spills over to caregiving for other waters. The outlet from my pond runs downhill to my good neighbor’s pond. What I do here matters. Everybody lives downstream.
• pg.98, “It is the fundamental unfairness of parenthood that if we do our jobs well, the deepest bond we are given will walk out the door with a wave over the shoulder. We get good training along the way. We learn to say “Have a great time, sweetie” while we are longing to pull them back to safety. And against all the evolutionary imperatives of protecting our gene pool, we give them the car keys. And freedom. It’s our job.”
• pg.101, Pond lily leaves get their light and air at the surface, but are attached at the bottom of the lake to a living rhizome as thick as your wrist and as long as your arm. The rhizome inhabits the anaerobic depths of the pond, but without oxygen it will perish. So the aerenchyma forms a convoluted chain of air-filled cells, a conduit between the surface and the depths so that oxygen can slowly diffuse to the buried rhizome.
• pg.102, The new leaves take up oxygen into the tightly packed air spaces of their young, developing tissues, whose density creates a pressure gradient. The older leaves, with looser air spaces created by the tatters and tears that open the leaf, create a low-pressure region where oxygen can be released into the atmosphere. This gradient exerts a pull on the air taken in by the young leaf. Since they are connected by air-filled capillary networks, the oxygen moves by mass flow from the young leaves to the old, passing through and oxygenating the rhizome in the process. The young and the old are linked in one long breath, an inhalation that calls for reciprocal exhalation, nourishing the common root from which they both arose. New leaf to old, old to new, mother to daughter—mutuality endures. I am consoled by the lesson of lilies
• pg.103, The earth, that first among good mothers, gives us the gift that we cannot provide ourselves. I hadn’t realized that I had come to the lake and said feed me, but my empty heart was fed.
• pg.104, “We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.”
• pg.106, Many Native peoples across the world, despite myriad cultural differences, have this in common—we are rooted in cultures of gratitude.
• pg.107, Here the school week begins and ends not with the Pledge of Allegiance, but with the Thanksgiving Address, a river of words as old as the people themselves, known more accurately in the Onondaga language as the Words That Come Before All Else. This ancient order of protocol sets gratitude as the highest priority. The gratitude is directed straight to the ones who share their gifts with the world...It is said that the people were instructed to stand and offer these words whenever they gathered, no matter how many or how few, before anything else was done. In this ritual, their teachers remind them that every day, “beginning with where our feet first touch the earth, we send greetings and thanks to all members of the natural world.”
• pg.108, The Address is sometimes mistakenly viewed as a prayer, but the children’s heads are not bowed. The elders at Onondaga teach otherwise, that the Address is far more than a pledge, a prayer, or a poem alone.
• pg.110, Part of its power surely rests in the length of time it takes to send greetings and thanks to so many. The listeners reciprocate the gift of the speaker’s words with their attention, and by putting their minds into the place where gathered minds meet. You could be passive and just let the words and the time flow by, but each call asks for the response: “Now our minds are one.” You have to concentrate; you have to give yourself to the listening. It takes effort, especially in a time when we are accustomed to sound bites and immediate gratification.
• pg.111, “Imagine raising children in a culture in which gratitude is the first priority*...And, while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness**...Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That’s good medicine for land and people alike.”
* Why isn’t this the case??
** Ah, here is the answer. Isn’t it crazy that children are taught capitalism right from birth? I see it when my 4 year-old looks through catalogues that come in the mail (Lee Valley Tools is one of his favorites). He points at things and tells me “we should buy this...” It seems so engrained that I hadn’t even thought about it until reading this passage. We teach him to be thankful, but we need to be teaching him gratitude and reciprocity.
• I love this quote,. I just want to live with this for a little while — starting from the assumption that there is enough. More than enough.
• Recognizing that the emptiness we so often feel has been deliberately cultivated in us to change our behaviour
• the “Buy Nothing” groups are on facebook, you can find them by neighborhood
• pg.112, “It reminds them that much is expected of them eventually. It says this is what it means to be a good leader, to have vision, and to be generous, to sacrifice on behalf of the people. Like the maple, leaders are the first to offer their gifts.” It reminds the whole community that leadership is rooted not in power and authority, but in service and wisdom.
• pg.112, What would it be like to be raised on gratitude, to speak to the natural world as a member of the democracy of species, to raise a pledge of interdependence? No declarations of political loyalty are required, just a response to a repeated question: “Can we agree to be grateful for all that is given?” In the Thanksgiving Address, I hear respect toward all our nonhuman relatives, not one political entity, but to all of life. What happens to nationalism, to political boundaries, when allegiance lies with winds and waters that know no boundaries, that cannot be bought or sold?
• pg.113, What if our leaders first found common ground before fighting over their differences?
• pg.114, Thanksgiving also reminds us of how the world was meant to be in its original condition. We can compare the roll call of gifts bestowed on us with their current status. Are all the pieces of the ecosystem still here and doing their duty? Is the water still supporting life? Are all those birds still healthy? When we can no longer see the stars because of light pollution, the words of Thanksgiving should awaken us to our loss and spur us to restorative action. Like the stars themselves, the words can guide us back home.
• pg.115, Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them.
• pg.116, But the boundaries of what I honor are bigger than the republic. Let us pledge reciprocity with the living world.
• pg.122, The land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with roasting ears and blackberries and birdsongs. By a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons. She provides for us and teaches us to provide for ourselves. That’s what good mothers do.
• pg.122, This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden—so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone.
• pg.123, in regards to whether the earth loves us...
“Where’s the evidence? What are the key elements for detecting loving behavior?” That’s easy. No one would doubt that I love my children, and even a quantitative social psychologist would find no fault with my list of loving behaviors: • nurturing health and well-being • protection from harm • encouraging individual growth and development • desire to be together • generous sharing of resources • working together for a common goal • celebration of shared values • interdependence • sacrifice by one for the other • creation of beauty If we observed these behaviors between humans, we would say, “She loves that person.”
• pg.124, So I made it hypothetical and asked, “What do you suppose would happen if people believed this crazy notion that the earth loved them back?” The floodgates opened. They all wanted to talk at once. We were suddenly off the deep end, heading for world peace and perfect harmony. One student summed it up: “You wouldn’t harm what gives you love.” Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.
• pg.125, I wonder if much that ails our society stems from the fact that we have allowed ourselves to be cut off from that love of, and from, the land. It is medicine for broken land and empty hearts.
• pg.125, People often ask me what one thing I would recommend to restore relationship between land and people. My answer is almost always, “Plant a garden.”
• The more plants we added to the library, the more students have loved this, very important to be near plants
It should be them who tell this story. Corn leaves rustle with a signature sound, a papery conversation with each other and the breeze.
• pg.128, A microphone in the hollow of a swelling pumpkin would reveal the pop of seeds expanding and the rush of water filling succulent orange flesh. These are sounds, but not the story. Plants tell their stories not by what they say, but by what they do. What if you were a teacher but had no voice to speak your knowledge? What if you had no language at all and yet there was something you needed to say? Wouldn’t you dance it? Wouldn’t you act it out? Wouldn’t your every movement tell the story? In time you would become so eloquent that just to gaze upon you would reveal it all. And so it is with these silent green lives....But plants speak in a tongue that every breathing thing can understand. Plants teach in a universal language: food.
• pg. 129, When the colonists on the Massachusetts shore first saw indigenous gardens, they inferred that the savages did not know how to farm. To their minds, a garden meant straight rows of single species, not a three-dimensional sprawl of abundance.
• pg. 129. "To their minds, a garden meant straight rows of single species, not a three- dimensional sprawl of abundance."
• pg.130. Pumpkins and squash take their time—they are the slow sister. It may be weeks before the first stems poke up, still caught in their seed coat until the leaves split its seams and break free. I’m told that our ancestors would put the squash seeds in a deerskin bag with a little water or urine a week before planting to try to hurry them along. But each plant has its own pace and the sequence of their germination, their birth order, is important to their relationship and to the success of the crop.
• pg.131, Native people speak of this gardening style as the Three Sisters.
• pg.132, Their layered spacing uses the light, a gift from the sun, efficiently, with no waste. The organic symmetry of forms belongs together; the placement of every leaf, the harmony of shapes speak their message. Respect one another, support one another, bring your gift to the world and receive the gifts of others, and there will be enough for all.
• pg.132, The firstborn girl knows that she is clearly in charge; tall and direct, upright and efficient, she creates the template for everyone else to follow. That’s the corn sister. There’s not room for more than one corn woman in the same house, so the middle sister is likely to adapt in different ways. This bean girl learns to be flexible, adaptable, to find a way around the dominant structure to get the light that she needs. The sweet baby sister is free to choose a different path, as expectations have already been fulfilled. Well grounded, she has nothing to prove and finds her own way, a way that contributes to the good of the whole.
• pg.135, One of the girls is dressed for allure that might work in a dance club, but not on a botany field trip. She has avoided any contact with the dirt so far. To ease her into the work, I suggest that she take the relatively clean task of simply following a squash vine from one end to another and diagramming the flowers...“You mean a squash comes from a flower?” she says incredulously, seeing the progression along the vine. “I love this kind of squash at Thanksgiving.” “Yes,” I tell her, “this is the ripened ovary of that first flower.” Her eyes widen in shock. “You mean all these years I’ve been eating ovaries? Blech—I’ll never eat a squash again.”
• pg.138, The truth of our relationship with the soil is written more clearly on the land than in any book. I read across that hill a story about people who value uniformity and the efficiency it yields, a story in which the land is shaped for the convenience of machines and the demands of a market.
• pg.139, The Three Sisters offer us a new metaphor for an emerging rela-tionship between indigenous knowledge and Western science, both of which are rooted in the earth. I think of the corn as traditional ecological knowledge, the physical and spiritual framework that can guide the curious bean of science, which twines like a double helix. The squash creates the ethical habitat for coexistence and mutual flourishing. I envision a time when the intellectual monoculture of science will be replaced with a polyculture of complementary knowledges. And so all may be fed.
Pg. 140, " Of all the wise teachers who have come into my life, none are more eloquent than these, who wordlessly in leaf and vine embody the knowledge of relationship. Alone, a bean is just a vine, squash an oversized leaf. Only when standing together with corn does a whole emerge which transcends the individual. The gifts of each are more fully expressed when they are nurtured together than alone. In ripe ears and swelling fruit they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship. This is how the world keeps going."
• pg.143, Growth rings are formed by the cycle of the seasons, by the waking and resting of the fragile layer of cells that lies between the bark and the newest wood, the cambium. Peel away the bark and you feel the cambium’s slippery wetness. The cells of the cambium are perpetually embryonic, always dividing to add to the girth of the tree. In the spring, when the buds detect the lengthening of the days and the sap starts to rise, the cambium grows cells made for feast days, big, wide-mouthed tubes to carry the abundant water leafward. These lines of large vessels are what you count to determine a tree’s age.
• pg.144, Traditional harvesters recognize the individuality of each tree as a person, a nonhuman forest person. Trees are not taken, but requested. Respectfully, the cutter explains his purpose and the tree is asked permission for harvest. Sometimes the answer is no. It might be a cue in the surroundings—a vireo nest in the branches, or the bark’s adamant resistance to the questioning knife—that suggests a tree is not willing, or it might be the ineffable knowing that turns him away. If consent is granted, a prayer is made and tobacco is left as a reciprocating gift. The tree is felled with great care so as not to damage it or others in the fall. Sometimes a cutter will make a bed of spruce boughs to cushion the landing of the tree.
• pg.145. Depending on the individual history of the tree and its pattern of rings, a strip might come off carrying the wood of five years or sometimes just one. Every tree is different, but as the basket makers pound and peel, he is always moving back through time.
• pg.146, “This tree’s a good teacher,” he says. “That’s what we’ve always been taught. The work of being a human is finding balance, and making splints will not let you forget it.”
• pg.149, The other place where saplings were thriving was near communities of basket makers. Where the tradition of black ash basketry was alive and well, so were the trees. Black ash and basket makers are partners in a symbiosis between harvesters and harvested: ash relies on people as the people rely on ash. Their fates are linked.
• pg.150, “So, be on the lookout,” John says. “We have to protect our trees, that’s our job.” When he and his family are harvesting logs in the fall, they take special care to gather up fallen seeds and spread them around as they move through the wetlands. “It’s like anything else,” he reminds us. “You can’t take something without giving back. This tree takes care of us, so we have to take care of it.”
• pg.151, Many of our traditional teachings recognize that certain species are our helpers and guides. The Original Instructions remind us that we must return the favor. It is an honor to be the guardian of another species—an honor within each person’s reach that we too often forget. A Black Ash basket is a gift that reminds us of the gifts of other beings, gifts we can gratefully return through advocacy and care
• pg.152, Responsibility to the tree makes everyone pause before beginning. Sometimes I have that same sense when I face a blank sheet of paper. For me, writing is an act of reciprocity with the world; it is what I can give back in return for everything that has been given to me. And now there’s another layer of responsibility, writing on a thin sheet of tree and hoping the words are worth it.
• pg.152-153, ...weaving a basket
In weaving well-being for land and people, we need to pay attention to the lessons of the three rows. Ecological well-being and the laws of nature are always the first row. Without them, there is no basket of plenty. Only if that first circle is in place can we weave the second. The second reveals material welfare, the subsistence of human needs. Economy built upon ecology. But with only two rows in place, the basket is still in jeopardy of pulling apart. It’s only when the third row comes that the first two can hold together. Here is where ecology, economics, and spirit are woven together. By using materials as if they were a gift, and returning that gift through worthy use, we find balance. I think that third row goes by many names: Respect. Reciprocity. All Our Relations. I think of it as the spirit row. Whatever the name, the three rows represent recognition that our lives depend on one an-other, human needs being only one row in the basket that must hold us all. In relationship, the separate splints become a whole basket, sturdy and resilient enough to carry us into the future.
• pg.154, Today, my house is full of baskets and my favorites are Pigeons. In them I can hear John’s voice, can hear the doonk, doonk, doonk, and smell the swamp. They remind me of the years of a tree’s life that I hold in my hands.
(see black ash basket youtube video in links)
• pg.155, In that awareness, looking over the objects on my desk—the basket, the candle, the paper—I delight in following their origins back to the ground. I twirl a pencil—a magic wand lathed from incense cedar—between my fingers. The willow bark in the aspirin. Even the metal of my lamp asks me to consider its roots in the strata of the earth. But I notice that my eyes and my thoughts pass quickly over the plastic on my desk. I hardly give the computer a second glance. I can muster no reflective moment for plastic. It is so far removed from the natural world. I wonder if that’s a place where the disconnection began, the loss of respect, when we could no longer easily see the life within the object.
Kimmerer cleverly sets up this chapter within a typical western academic research structure. ie. Literature review, methods, references, illustrating a radical Indigenous research model.
Under methods
• pg.158, To me, an experiment is a kind of conversation with plants: I have a question for them, but since we don’t speak the same language, I can’t ask them directly and they won’t answer verbally. But plants can be eloquent in their physical responses and behaviors. Plants answer questions by the way they live, by their responses to change; you just need to learn how to ask.
• pg.159, Our research was most definitely grounded in theory—Lena’s, primarily—in the traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous peoples: If we use a plant respectfully, it will flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away.
• pg.160, Getting scientists to consider the validity of indigenous knowledge is like swimming upstream in cold, cold water. They’ve been so conditioned to be skeptical of even the hardest of hard data that bending their minds toward theories that are verified without the expected graphs or equations is tough.
• pg.164, Many grasses undergo a physiological change known as compensatory growth in which the plant compensates for loss of foliage by quickly growing more. It seems counterintuitive, but when a herd of buffalo grazes down a sward of fresh grass, it actually grows faster in response. This helps the plant recover, but also invites the buffalo back for dinner later in the season. It’s even been discovered that there is an enzyme in the saliva of grazing buffalo that actually stimulates grass growth. To say nothing of the fertilizer produced by a passing herd. Grass gives to buffalo and buffalo give to grass
• pg.165, The question was, how do we show respect? Sweetgrass told us the answer as we experimented: sustainable harvesting can be the way we treat a plant with respect, by respectfully receiving its gift.
• pg.166, as the conclusion of the scientific research: With their tobacco and their thanks, our people say to the Sweetgrass "I need you." By its renewal after picking, the grass says to the people, "I need you, too."
• pg. 166. ix. References Cited; Wiingaashk, Buffalo, Lena, the Ancestors *
* this brief notation speaks volumes about the differences between Western and Indigenous epistemologies particularly in regards to research paradigms in terms of who we acknowledge as bonafide knowledge keepers and conveyors of knowledge...like our plant relatives
• pg.168, There’s a beautiful map of bioregions drawn by an organization dedicated to restoring ancient food traditions. State boundaries disappear and are replaced by ecological regions, defined by the leading denizens of the region, the iconic beings who shape the landscape, influence our daily lives, and feed us—both materially and spiritually. The map shows the Salmon Nation of the Pacific Northwest and the Pinyon Nation of the Southwest, among others. We in the Northeast are in the embrace of the Maple Nation
• pg.169, Both of my parents have been active in their town government for years, so I’ve seen firsthand how stewardship of a community happens. “Good communities don’t make themselves,” my dad said.
• pg.169, My Onondaga Nation neighbors call the maple the leader of the trees. Trees constitute the environmental quality committee—running air and water purification service 24- 7. They’re on every task force, from the historical society picnic to the highway department, school board, and library.
• pg.170, ask them my question: What does it mean to be a good citizen of Maple Nation?
• pg. 171, He goes on to explain that these forests are part of the college’s plan to be totally carbon neutral: “We actually get a tax credit by keeping our forests intact, so they can absorb carbon dioxide.”
• pg. 173, The United States rarely permits dual citizenship—you have to choose. On what basis do we select where to invest our allegiance? If I were forced, I would choose Maple Nation. If citizenship is a matter of shared beliefs, then I believe in the democracy of species. If citizenship means an oath of loyalty to a leader, then I choose the leader of the trees. If good citizens agree to uphold the laws of the nation, then I choose natural law, the law of reciprocity, of regeneration, of mutual flourishing.
• pg.174, We do not pay at the pump for the cost of climate change, for the loss of ecosystem services provided by maples and others.
• pg. 176, Eating leeks is a spring tonic that blurs the line between food and medicine. It wakens the body from its winter lassitude and quickens the blood. But I have another need, too, that only greens from this particular woods can satisfy. Both of my daughters will be home for the weekend from the far places where they live. I ask these leeks to renew the bonds between this ground and my children, so that they will always carry the substance of home in the mineral of their bones.
• pg. 177, If we are fully awake, a moral question arises as we extinguish the other lives around us on behalf of our own. Whether we are digging wild leeks or going to the mall, how do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives that we take?
• pg. 178, Asking permission shows respect for the personhood of the plant, but it is also an assessment of the well-being of the population. Thus I must use both sides of my brain to listen to the answer. The analytic left reads the empirical signs to judge whether the population is large and healthy enough to sustain a harvest, whether it has enough to share. The intuitive right hemisphere is reading something else, a sense of generosity, an open-handed radiance that says take me, or sometimes a tight-lipped recalcitrance that makes me put my trowel away. I can’t explain it, but it is a kind of knowing that is for me just as compelling as a no- trespassing sign.
• pg. 179, The traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous harvesters is rich in prescriptions for sustainability. They are found in Native science and philosophy, in lifeways and practices, but most of all in stories, the ones that are told to help restore balance, to locate ourselves once again in the circle.......
• pg. 179, Cautionary stories of the consequences of taking too much are ubiquitous in Aboriginal cultures, but it’s hard to recall a single one in English. Perhaps this helps to explain why we seem to be caught in a trap of overconsumption, which is as destructive to ourselves as to those we consume.
• pg. 180, I am a student of this way of thinking, not a scholar. As a human being who cannot photosynthesize, I must struggle to participate in the Honorable Harvest. So I lean in close to watch and listen to those who are far wiser than I am. What I share here, in the same way they were shared with me, are seeds gleaned from the fields of their collective wisdom, the barest surface, the moss on the mountain of their knowledge. I feel grateful for their teachings and responsible for passing them on as best I can.
• pg. 181, the story of the rice and not eating it all
The settlers took this as certain evidence of laziness and lack of industry on the part of the heathens. They did not understand how indigenous land-care practices might contribute to the wealth they encountered
• pg. 182, When my basket holds enough leeks for dinner, I head home. Walking back through the flowers, I see a whole patch of snakeroot spreading its glistening leaves, which reminds me of a story told by an herbalist I know. She taught me one of the cardinal rules of gathering plants: “Never take the first plant you find, as it might be the last—and you want that first one to speak well of you to the others of her kind.”
• pg. 183, story of the snakeroot and the woman who needed it
So I talked to that plant, addressed it just like you would a person whose help you needed, and it gave me a bit of itself. When I got where I was going, sure enough, there was a woman there who needed that snakeroot medicine and I could pass on the gift. That plant reminded me that if we harvest with respect, the plants will help us.”
• pg. 183, The state guidelines on hunting and gathering are based exclusively in the biophysical realm, while the rules of the Honorable Harvest are based on accountability to both the physical and the metaphysical worlds.
• pg. 184, What we imagine, we can become. I like to imagine what it would be like if the Honorable Harvest were the law of the land today, as it was in our past. Imagine if a developer, eying open land for a shopping mall, had to ask the goldenrod, the meadowlarks, and the monarch butterflies for permission to take their homeland. What if he had to abide by the answer? Why not?
• pg. 185, As a culture, though, we seem unable to extend these good manners to the natural world. The dishonorable harvest has become a way of life—we take what doesn’t belong to us and destroy it beyond repair: Onondaga Lake, the Alberta tar sands, the rainforests of Malaysia, the list is endless. They are gifts from our sweet Grandmother Earth, which we take without asking. How do we find the Honorable Harvest again?
• pg. 185, How can we distinguish between that which is given by the earth and that which is not? When does taking become outright theft?
• pg. 185-6, “And then, without explanation, there’s one who walks right into the clearing and looks you in the eye. He knows full well that you’re there and what you’re doing. He turns his flank right toward you for a clear shot. I know he’s the one, and so does he. There’s a kind of nod exchanged. That’s why I only carry one shot. I wait for the one.
• pg. 187, The Honorable Harvest does not ask us to photosynthesize. It does not say don’t take, but offers inspiration and a model for what we should take. It’s not so much a list of “do not’s” as a list of “do’s.” Do eat food that is honorably harvested, and celebrate every mouthful. Do use technologies that minimize harm; do take what is given. This philosophy guides not only our taking of food, but also any taking of the gifts of Mother Earth—air, water, and the literal body of the earth: the rocks and soil and fossil fuels.
• pg. 187, And the code might ask of any harvest, including energy, that our purpose be worthy of the harvest. Oren’s deer made moccasins and fed three families. What will we use our energy for?
• pg. 189, the story of the student from Turkey and her grandmother
In her house, we learned that everything we put in our mouths, everything that allows us to live, is the gift of another life. I remember lying with her at night as she made us thank the rafters of her house and the wool blankets we slept in. My grandma wouldn’t let us forget that these are all gifts, which is why you take care of everything, to show respect for that life. In my grandmother’s house we were taught to kiss the rice. If a single grain fell to the ground, we learned to pick it up and kiss it, to show we meant no disrespect in wasting it.” The student told me that, when she came to the United States, the greatest culture shock she experienced was not language or food or technology, but waste.
• pg. 190, One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence.
• pg. 195, While the digging of the leeks and the digging of the coal may be too far removed to see, we consumers have a potent tool of reciprocity right in our pockets. We can use our dollars as the indirect currency of reciprocity.
• pg. 197, Wild things should not be for sale.
• pg. 199, I’ve never been shopping like this before, with such intentional awareness of what goes on here. I suppose I’ve blocked it out in my usual hurry to get in, make my purchase, and get out. But now I scan the landscape with all senses heightened. Open to the T-shirts, the plastic earrings, and the iPods. Open to shoes that hurt, delusions that hurt, and mountains of needless stuff that hurts the chances that my grandchildren will have a good green earth to care for. It hurts me even to bring the ideas of the Honorable Harvest here; I feel protective of them.
• pg. 199, The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands.
• pg. 200, The land is no longer hospitable for the medicines and we don’t know why.
• pg. 205, The Creator called out the name to the four directions so that the others would know who was coming. Nanabozho, part man, part manido—a powerful spirit-being—is the personification of life forces, the Anishinaabe culture hero, and our great teacher of how to be human.
• pg. 206, The ground where I sit with Sitka Grandmother is deep with needles, soft with centuries of humus; the trees are so old that my lifetime compared to theirs is just a birdsong long. I suspect that Nanabozho walked like I do, in awe, looking up into the trees so often I stumble.
• pg. 207, With all the power and all the failings of a human being, Nanabozho did his best with the Original Instructions and tried to become native to his new home. His legacy is that we are still trying. But the instructions have gotten tattered along the way and many have been forgotten.
• pg. 207, What happens when we truly become native to a place, when we finally make a home? Where are the stories that lead the way? If time does in fact eddy back on itself, maybe the journey of the First Man will provide footsteps to guide the journey of the Second.
• pg. 208, Today, far from my neighbors in Maple Nation, I see some species I recognize and many I do not, so I walk as Original Man may have done, seeing them for the first time. I try to turn off my science mind and name them with a Nanabozho mind. I’ve noticed that once some folks attach a scientific label to a being, they stop exploring who it is.
• pg. 208, Most people don’t know the names of these relatives; in fact, they hardly even see them. Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection “species loneliness”—a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors. It’s no wonder that naming was the first job the Creator gave Nanabozho.
• pg. 209, Linnaeus looks wistful about that. “I ended up having to translate everything into Latin,” he says of binomial nomenclature. “We lost any other common language long ago.” Linnaeus lends Nanabozho his magnifying glass so he can see the tiny floral parts. Nanabozho gives Linnaeus a song so he can see their spirits. And neither of them are lonely.
• pg. 210, The lessons Nanabozho learned are the mythic roots of Native science, medicine, architecture, agriculture, and ecological knowledge. But true to the circle of time, science and technology are starting to catch up with Native science by adopting the Nanabozho approach—looking to nature for models of design, by the architects of biomimicry. By honoring the knowledge in the land, and caring for its keepers, we start to become indigenous to place.
• pg. 211, His gratitude for their abilities grew and he came to understand that to carry a gift is also to carry a responsibility.
• pg. 211, But I need to remember that the grief is the settlers’ as well. They too will never walk in a tallgrass prairie where sunflowers dance with goldfinches. Their children have also lost the chance to sing at the Maple Dance. They can’t drink the water either.
• pg. 213, Even as I sit in her still shadow, my thoughts are all tangled. Like my elders before me, I want to envision a way that an immigrant society could become indigenous to place, but I’m stumbling on the words. Immigrants cannot by definition be indigenous. Indigenous is a birthright word. No amount of time or caring changes history or substitutes for soul-deep fusion with the land. Following Nanabozho’s footsteps doesn’t guarantee transformation of Second Man to First. But if people do not feel “indigenous,” can they nevertheless enter into the deep reciprocity that renews the world? Is this something that can be learned?
• pg. 214, Maybe the task assigned to Second Man is to unlearn the model of kudzu and follow the teachings of White Man’s Footstep, to strive to become naturalized to place, to throw off the mindset of the immigrant. Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.
p.255, The government’s goal of breaking the link between land, language, and Native people was nearly a success. But the Mohawk call themselves the Kanienkeha—People of the Flint—and flint does not melt easily into the great American melting pot.
p.255, “That Language had not been heard here for centuries”
p.255, On graduate school forms it says that I’m her professor, but I’ve been telling her
all along that it is the plant who will be her greatest teacher.
p. 256, Despite Carlisle, despite exile, despite a siege four hundred years long, there is something, some heart of living stone, that will not sur-render. I don’t know just what sustained the people, but I believe it was carried in words.
p.256, “Let us put our minds together as one and send greetings and thanks to our Mother Earth, who sustains our lives with her many gifts.” Grateful reciprocity with the world, as solid as a stone, sustained them when all else was stripped away.
p.256, The marvel of a basket is in its transformation, its journey from whole-ness as a living plant to fragmented strands and back to wholeness again as a basket. A basket knows the dual powers of destruction and creation that shape the world. Strands once separated are rewoven into a new whole. The journey of a basket is also the journey of a people.
p.258, The language was teetering on extinction, like an endangered species with no habitat to rear its young. When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world.
p.259, Plants are also integral to reweaving the connection between land and people. A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit. To recreate a home, the plants must also return.
P.259, “...ancient teachings braided into his conversation as naturally as comments on the weather. Strands of spirit and matter are woven together like black ash and sweetgrass.”
p.260, Tom told us how in the final roll, as the peach stones hung for a moment in the air, all the members of Creation joined their voices together and gave a mighty shout for life. And turned the last pit white. The choice is always there.
p.261, Losing a plant can threaten a culture in much the same way as losing a language. Without sweetgrass, the grandmothers don’t bring the granddaughters to the meadows in July. Then what becomes of their stories? Without sweetgrass, what happens to the baskets? To the ceremony that uses these baskets? The history of the plants is inextricably tied up with the history of the people, with the forces of destruction and creation.
p.263, What we contemplate here is more than ecological restoration; it is the restoration of relationship between plants and people..... We might look to the Thanksgiving Address for guidance on weaving the two. We are dreaming of a time when the land might give thanks for the people.
p.265, How surreal it seems that Carlisle has earned a reputation in America for fervent preservation of its heritage, while in Indian Country the name is a chilling emblem of a heritage killer. I walked silently among the barracks. Forgiveness was hard to find
p.266: Here on my knees on the dirt, I find my own ceremony of reconciliation. Bend and dig, bend and dig. By now my hands are earth colored as I settle the last of the plants, whisper word of welcome, and tamp them down.
p.266, For grief can also be comforted by creation, by rebuilding the homeland that was taken
p.269, I once heard a Navajo herbalist explain how she understands certain kinds of plants to be “married,” due to their enduring partnership and unquestioning reliance on one another.
p.272, When times are easy and there’s plenty to go around, individual species can go it alone. But when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous, it takes a team sworn to reciprocity to keep life going forward. In a world of scarcity, interconnection and mutual aid become critical for survival. So say the lichens.
p.274, The lichen, in a single body, unites the two great pathways of life: the so-called grazing food chain based on the building up of beings, and the detrital food chain based on taking them apart. Producers and decomposers, the light and the darkness, the givers and receivers wrapped in each other’s arms, the warp and the weft of the same blanket so closely woven that it’s impossible to discern the giving from the taking. Some of earth’s oldest beings, lichens are born from reciprocity.
p.275, For millennia, these lichens have held the responsibility of building up life and in an eye blink of earth’s history we have set about undermining their work to usher in a time of great environmental stress, a barrenness of our own making. I suspect that lichens will endure. We could, too, if we listen to their teachings. If not, I imagine Umbilicaria will cover the rocky ruins of our time long after our delusions of separateness have relegated us to the fossil record, a ruffled green skin adorning the crumbling halls of power.
p.275, These ancients carry teachings in the ways that they live. They re-mind us of the enduring power that arises from mutualism, from the sharing of the gifts carried by each species. Balanced reciprocity has enabled them to flourish under the most stressful of conditions.
p.275, Our indigenous herbalists say to pay attention when plants come to you; they’re bringing you something you need to learn.
p.276, Rock tripe, oak leaf lichen, navel lichen. I’m told that Umbilicaria is known in Asia by another name: the ear of the stone. In this almost silent place I imagine them listening. To the wind, to a hermit thrush, to thunder. To our wildly growing hunger. Ear of stone, will you hear our anguish when we understand what we have done? The harsh post-glacial world in which you began may well become our own unless we listen to the wisdom carried in the mutualistic marriage of your bodies. Redemption lives in knowing that you might also hear our hymns of joy when we too marry ourselves to the earth.
p.278, And trees are just the beginning. The numbers of species of mammals, birds, amphibians, wildflowers, ferns, mosses, lichens, fungi, and insects are staggering. It’s hard to write without running out of superlatives, for these were among the greatest forests on earth, forests peopled with centuries of past lives, enormous logs and snags that foster more life after their death than before.
p.278, This seeming chaos belies the tight web of inter-connections between them all, stitched with filaments of fungi, silk of spiders, and silver threads of water. Alone is a word without meaning in this forest.
p.278-279, Mother Cedar... Along the creeks and bottomlands, the women sang their way down well- worn trails to find just the right tree for each purpose. Whatever they needed they asked for respectfully, and for whatever they received they offered prayers and gifts in return. Notching a wedge in the bark of a middle- aged tree, the women could peel off a ribbon a hands- width wide and twenty- five feet long. Harvesting bark from just a fraction of the tree’s circumference, they ensured that the damage would heal over without ill effect. The dried strips were then beaten to separate the many layers, yielding inner bark with a satiny softness and a glossy sheen. A long process of shredding bark with a deer bone yielded a pile of fluffy cedar “wool.” Newborn babies were delivered into a nest of this fleece. The “wool” could also be woven into warm, durable clothing and blankets. A family sat on woven mats of outer bark, slept on cedar beds, and ate from cedar dishes.
p.279, Every part of the tree was used. The ropy branches were split for tools, baskets, and fish traps. Dug and cleaned, cedars’ long roots were peeled and split into a fine, strong fiber that is woven into the famous conical hats and ceremonial headgear that signify the identity of the one beneath the brim. During the famously cold and rainy winters, with a perpetual twilight of fog, who lit the house? Who warmed the house? From bow drill to tinder to fire, it was Mother Cedar.
p.279, When sickness came, the people turned again to her. Every part is medicine for the body, from the flat sprays of foliage to the flexible branches to the roots, and throughout there is powerful spiritual medicine as well. Traditional teachings recount that the power of cedars is so great and so fluid that it can flow into a worthy person who leans back into the embrace of her trunk. When death came, so came the cedar coffin. The first and last embrace of a human being was in the arms of Mother Cedar.
p.279, Just as old- growth forests are richly complex, so too were the old- growth cultures that arose at their feet. Some people equate sustainability with a diminished standard of living, but the aboriginal people of the coastal old- growth forests were among the wealthiest in the world. Wise use and care for a huge variety of marine and forest resources, allowed them to avoid overexploiting any one of them while extraordinary art, science, and architecture flowered in their midst.
p.279-280, Rather than to greed, prosperity here gave rise to the great potlatch tradition in which material goods were ritually given away, a direct reflection of the generosity of the land to the people. Wealth meant having enough to give away, social status elevated by generosity. The cedars taught how to share wealth, and the people learned.
p.281, It’s amazing to think that, within the lifetime of those old trees on the ground, they have gone from being revered to being rejected to nearly being eliminated, and then somebody looked up and noticed they were gone and wanted them again.
p.281-282, Only at the top of Mary’s Peak, within the boundaries of a preserve, is there a continuous span of forest, rough textured and multihued from a distance, the signature of the old- growth forest, the forest that used to be.
“My work grew out of a deeply experienced sense of loss,” he wrote, “the loss of what should be here.”
p.282, The alders came to try to hold it in place, and then the maples. This was a land whose native language was conifer but now spoke only the slang of leggy hardwoods. Its dream of itself as groves of cedar and fir was gone, lost under the unrelenting chaos of brush.
p.283, He wrote, “These forty acres were to be my retreat, my escape to the wild. But this was no pristine wilderness.” The place he chose was near a spot on the map called Burnt Woods. Scalped Woods would have been more apt. The land was razed by a series of clear- cuts, first the venerable old forest and then its children. No sooner had the firs grown back than the loggers came for them again.
After land is clear- cut, everything changes.
p.284, The pioneers produce a community based on the principles of unlimited growth, sprawl, and high energy consumption, sucking up resources as fast as they can, wrestling land from others through competition, and then moving on. When resources begin to run short, as they always will, cooperation and strategies that promote stability— strategies perfected by rainforest ecosystems— will be favored by evolution.
p. 284, Industrial forestry, resource extraction, and other aspects of human sprawl are like salmonberry thickets— swallowing up land, reducing biodiversity, and simplifying ecosystems at the demand of societies always bent on having more. In five hundred years we exterminated old- growth cultures and old- growth ecosystems, replacing them with opportunistic culture.
p. 284, If we are looking for models of self- sustaining communities, we need look no further than an old- growth forest. Or the old- growth cultures they raised in symbiosis with them.
p.285, As Franz wrote, “It is important to engage in restoration with development of a personal relationship with the land and its living things.” In working with the land, he wrote of the loving relationship that grew between them: “It was as if I discovered a lost part of myself.”
p.285, The wood itself is dead supportive tissue, so the harvest of a few boards from a big tree does not risk killing the whole organism— a practice that redefines our notions of sustainable forestry: lumber produced without killing a tree.
p. 286, “I wanted to do right here, even if I had little idea of what ‘right’ meant. To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it.”
p.286-287, Over time, Franz became a very good ecologist, reading his way through both the printed library and the more subtle library of texts offered by the forest itself.
p.287, Human time is not the same as forest time.
p.288, The unique chemistry of cedar endows it with both life- saving and tree- saving medicinal properties.
p.288-289, “Almost any part of the tree that rests on wet ground can take root, in a process known as layering. The low swooping foliage may send roots into moist beds of moss. The flexible branches themselves can initiate new trees - even after they’re cut from the tree. Native peoples probably tended cedar groves by propagating them in this way. Even a young cedar that has tipped over or been flattened by hungry elk will reorient its branches and start over. The aboriginal names for the tree, Long Life Maker and Tree of Life, are appropriately bestowed.”
p.289, One of the most touching place names on Franz’s map is a spot he called Old Growth Children. To plant trees is an act of faith. Thirteen thousand acts of faith live on this land.
p.289, His plan to grow cedars on the stream banks was a good one, except that’s where the beavers also live. Who knew that they eat cedar for dessert? His cedar nurseries were gnawed to oblivion.
p.290, “I definitely should have met with a council of mice, boomers, bob-cats, porcupines, beaver, and deer before I started this experiment,” he wrote.
p.290, After completing the final plantings, Franz wrote, “I may heal the land. Yet I have little doubt of the direction that the real benefits flow. An element of reciprocity is the rule here. What I give, I receive in return. Here on the slopes of Shotpouch Valley, I have been engaged less in a personal forestry of restoration than in a forestry of personal restoration. In restoring the land, I restore myself.”
p.290, Given my lack of technical expertise, I could not reconcile myself to the title of ‘forester,’ but I could live with the idea that I am a writer who works in the forest. And with the forest. A writer who practices the art of forestry and writes in trees. The practice of forestry may be changing, but I am unaware of any instances where proficiency in the arts is sought as a professional qualification by timber companies or schools of forestry. Perhaps that is what we need. Artists as foresters.”
p.291, Old-growth cultures, like old- growth forests, have not been exterminated. The land holds their memory and the possibility of regeneration. They are not only a matter of ethnicity or history, but of relationships born out of reciprocity between land and people.
p.293, In contrast, the fall of rain on moss is nearly silent. I kneel among them, sinking into their softness to watch and to listen. The drops are so quick that my eye is always chasing, but not catching, their arrival. At last, by narrowing my gaze to just a single frond, I can see it. The impact bows the shoot downward, but the drop itself vanishes. It is soundless. There is no drip or splash, but I can see the front of water move, darkening the stem as it is drunk in, silently dissipating among the tiny shingled leaves.
p.293, Most other places I know, water is a discrete entity. It is hemmed in by well- defined boundaries: lakeshores, stream banks, the great rocky coastline. You can stand at its edge and say “this is water” and “this is land.”
p.294, “But here in these misty forests those edges seem to blur, with rain so fine and constant as to be indistinguishable from air”
p.294, I’m not sure I can trust what I’m seeing. I wish I had a set of calipers, so that I could measure the drops of moss water and see if they really are bigger. Surely all drops are created equal?
p.295, “I could not bear the loneliness of being dry in a wet world”
p.296, Time as objective reality has never made much sense to me. It’s what happens that matters. How can minutes and years, devices of our own creation, mean the same thing to gnats and to cedars? Two hundred years is young for the trees whose tops this morning are hung with mist. It’s an eye-blink of time for the river and nothing at all for the rocks.
p.297, As I watch, the wandering thread touches upon a leaf just millimeters away. It seems to tap several times at the new leaf and then, as if reassured, stretches itself out across the gap. It holds like a taut green cable, more than doubling its initial length. For just a moment, the two mosses are bridged by the shining green thread and then green light flows like a river across the bridge and vanishes, lost in the greenness of the moss. Is that not grace— to see an animal made of green light and water, a mere thread of a being who like me has gone walking in the rain?
p.297, “Nothing random in a forest - all is steeped in meaning, in relationship - one thing with another”.
p.297, Down by the river, I stand and listen. The sound of individual raindrops is lost in the foaming white rush and smooth glide over rock. If you didn’t know better, you might not recognize raindrops and rivers as kin, so different are the particular and the collective. I lean over a still pool, reach in my hand, and let the drops fall from my fingers, just to be sure.
p.297, Suddenly I see the experiment I need to test my hypothesis; the materials are neatly laid out before me. I find two strands of lichen, equal in size and length, and blot them on my flannel shirt inside my raincoat.
P.298, One strand I place in the leaf cup of red alder tea, the other I soak in a pool of pure rainwater. Slowly I lift them both up, side by side, and watch the droplets form at the ends of the strands. Sure enough, they are different. The plain water forms small, rapid drops that seem in a hurry to let go. But the droplets steeped in alder water grow large and heavy, and then hang for a long moment before gravity pulls them away. I feel the grin spreading over my face with the aha! moment. There are different kinds of drops, depending on the relationship between the water and the plant.
p.298, Perhaps we cannot know the river. But what about the drops?
p.299, Every drip it seems is changed by its relationship with life, whether it encounters moss or maple or fir bark or my hair. And we think of it as simply rain, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it. I think that moss knows rain better than we do, and so do maples. Maybe there is no such thing as rain; there are only raindrops, each with its own story.
p.300, Listening to rain, time disappears. If time is measured by the period between events, alder drip time is different from maple drip. This forest is textured with different kinds of time, as the surface of the pool is dimpled with different kinds of rain. Fir needles fall with the high- frequency hiss of rain, branches fall with the bloink of big drops and trees fall with a rare but thunderous thud. Rare, unless you mea-sure time like a river. And we think of it as simply time, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it.
p.300, “Maybe there is no such thing as time; there are only moments, each with its own story.
p.302, Plants are the first restoration ecologists
p.304, Windigo stories were told around the fire to scare children into safe behavior lest this Ojibwe boogeyman make a meal of them. Or worse. This monster is no bear or howling wolf, no natural beast. Windigos are not born, they are made. The Windigo is a human being who has become a cannibal monster. Its bite will transform victims into cannibalstoo.
p.304, Starvation in winter was a reality for our people, particularly in the era of the Little Ice Age when winters were especially hard and long. Some scholars suggest that Windigo mythology also spread quickly in the time of the fur trade, when overexploitation of game brought famine to the villages. The ever-present fear of winter famine is embodied in the icy hunger and gaping maw of the Windigo. As the monster shrieked on the wind, the Windigo stories reinforced the taboo against cannibalism, when the madness of hunger and isolation rustled at the edge of winter lodges.
p.305, Creation stories offer a glimpse into the worldview of a people, of how they understand themselves, their place in the world, and the ideals to which they aspire.
p.305, Windigo is the name for that within us which cares more for its own survival than for anything else.
p.305, Stable, balanced systems are typified by negative feedback loops, in which a change in one component incites an opposite change in another, so they balance each other out. When hunger causes increased eating, eating causes decreased hunger; satiety is possible. Negative feedback is a form of reciprocity, a coupling of forces that create balance and sustainability.
p.306, The old teachings recognized that Windigo nature is in each of us, so the monster was created in stories, that we might learn why we should recoil from the greedy part of ourselves. This is why Anishinaabe elders like Stewart King remind us to always acknowledge the two faces—the light and the dark side of life—in order to understand ourselves. See the dark, recognize its power, but do not feed it. The beast has been called an evil spirit that devours mankind. The very word, Windigo, according to Ojibwe scholar Basil Johnston, can be derived from roots meaning “fat excess” or “thinking only of oneself.” Writer Steve Pitt states that “a Windigo was a human whose selfishness has overpowered their self-control to the point that satisfaction is no longer possible.
p.306, The native habitat of the Windigo is the north woods, but the range has expanded in the last few centuries. As Johnston suggests, multinational corporations have spawned a new breed of Windigo that insatiably devours the earth’s resources “not for need but for greed. ”The footprints are all around us, once you know what to look for.
p.307, The footprints of the Windigo. They’re everywhere you look. They stomp in the industrial sludge of Onondaga Lake. And over a savagely clear-cut slope in the Oregon Coast Range where the earth is slumping into the river. You can see them where coal mines rip off mountaintops in West Virginia and in oil-slick footprints on the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. A square mile of industrial soybeans. A diamond mine in Rwanda. A closet stuffed with clothes. Windigo footprints all, they are the tracks of insatiable consumption. So many have been bitten. You can see them walking the malls, eying your farm for a housing development, running for Congress.
p.307, We are all complicit. We’ve allowed the “market” to define what we value so that the redefined common good seems to depend on profligate lifestyles that enrich the sellers while impoverishing the soul and the earth.
p.307, The Windigo myth may have arisen from the remembrance of the banished, doomed to wander hungry and alone, wreaking vengeance on the ones who spurned them. It is a terrible punishment to be banished from the web of reciprocity, with no one to share with you and no one for you to care for.
p.308, On a grander scale, too, we seem to be living in an era of Windigo economics of fabricated demand and compulsive overconsumption. What Native peoples once sought to rein in, we are now asked to unleash in a systematic policy of sanctioned greed.
p.308, The fear for me is far greater than just acknowledging the Windigo within. The fear for me is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light. Indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous is now celebrated as success. We are asked to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable. The consumption-driven mind-set masquerades as “quality of life” but eats us from within. It is as if we’ve been invited to a feast, but the table is laid with food that nourishes only emptiness, the black hole of the stomach that never fills. We have unleashed a monster.
• p.308-309, We continue to embrace economic systems that prescribe infinite growth on a finite planet, as if somehow the universe had repealed the laws of thermodynamics on our behalf. Perpetual growth is simply not compatible with natural law, and yet
a leading economist like Lawrence Summers, of Harvard, the World Bank, and the U.S. National Economic Council, issues such statements as, “There are no limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind at any time in the foreseeable future. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.” Our leaders willfully ignore the wisdom and the models of every other species on the planet—except of course those that have gone extinct. Windigo thinking.
p.310, Traditional Onondaga understand a world in which all beings were given a gift, a gift that simultaneously engenders a responsibility to the world. Water’s gift is its role as life sustainer, and its duties are manifold: making plants grow, creating homes for fish and mayflies, and, for me today, offering cool drink.
p.313, Today, the land where the Peacemaker walked and the Tree of Peace stood isn’t land at all, but beds of industrial waste sixty feet deep. It sticks to shoes like thick white school paste used in kindergartens to glue cutout birds onto construction-paper trees. There aren’t too many birds here, and the Tree of Peace is buried. The original people could no longer find even the familiar curve of the shore. The old contours were filled in, creating a new shoreline of more than a mile of waste beds.
p.315, The water has been tricked. It started on its way full of innocence, full of its own purpose. Through no fault of its own it has been corrupted and, instead of being a bearer of life, it must now deliver poison. And yet it cannot stop itself from flowing. It must do what it must do, with the gifts bestowed upon it by the Creator. It is only people who have a choice.
p.316, The salt, the oncolites, and the waste impede the growth of rooted aquatic plants. Lakes rely on their submerged plants to generate oxygen by photosynthesis. Without plants, the depths of Onondaga Lake are oxygen-poor, and without swaying beds of vegetation, fish, frogs, insects, herons—the whole food chain—are left without habitat. The fish that survive, you may not eat.
p.317, Onondaga Lake in the 1880s was famed for its whitefish, served freshly caught on steaming platters alongside potatoes boiled in salty brine. Fine restaurants did a booming business along the lakeshore where tourists came for the scenery, the amusement parks, and picnic grounds where families spread their blankets on a Sunday afternoon. But swimming was banned in 1940. (That’s only sixty years later.)
p.318, The creek that was once a fishery for Atlantic salmon, a swimming hole for kids, and a focal point of community life now runs as brown as chocolate milk. Allied Chemical and its successors deny any role in the formation of the mudboils. They claim it was an act of God. What kind of God would that be? (How do we hold these companies and ourselves accountable?)
p.318, The wounds to these waters are as numerous as the snakes in the Tadodaho’s hair, and they must be named before they can be combed out. The ancestral Onondaga territory stretches from the Pennsylvania border north to Canada. It was a mosaic of rich woodlands, expansive cornfields, clear lakes and rivers that sustained the Native people for centuries. The original territory also encompasses the site of present-day Syracuse and the sacred shores of Onondaga Lake. Onondaga rights to these lands were guaranteed by treaties between the two sovereign nations, Onondaga Nation and the United States government. But water is more faithful to its responsibilities than the United States would ever be.
p.318, When George Washington directed federal troops to exterminate the Onondaga during the Revolutionary War, a nation that had numbered in the tens of thousands was reduced to a few hundred people in a matter of one year. Illegal takings of land by the state of New York diminished the aboriginal Onondaga territories to a reservation of only forty-three hundred acres.The Onondaga Nation territory today is not much bigger than the Solvay waste beds. Assaults on Onondaga culture continued. Parents tried to hide their children from Indian agents, but they were taken and sent to boarding schools like Carlisle Indian School. The language that framed the Great Law of Peace was forbidden. Missionaries were dispatched to the matrilineal communities—in which men and women were equals—to show them the error of their ways. Longhouse ceremonies of thanksgiving, ceremonies meant to keep the world in balance, were banned by law.
p.319, The people have endured the pain of being bystanders to the degradation of their lands, but they never surrendered their caregiving responsibilities. They have continued the ceremonies that honor the land their connection to it. The Onondaga people still live by the precepts of the Great Law and still believe that, in return for the gifts of Mother Earth, human people have responsibility for caring for the nonhuman people, for stewardship of the land. Without title to their ancestral lands, however, their hands were tied to protect it. So they watched, powerless, as strangers buried the Peacemaker’s footsteps. The plants, animals, and waters they were bound to protect dwindled away, though the covenant with the land was never broken. Like the springs above the lake, the people just kept doing what they were called to do, no matter what fate met them downstream. The people went on giving thanks to the land, although so much of the land had little reason to be thankful for the people.
p.319, Generations of grief, generations of loss, but also strength—the People did not surrender. They had spirit on their side. They had their traditional teachings. And they also had the law. Onondaga is a rarity in the United States, a Native nation that has never surrendered its traditional government, never given up its identity nor compromised its status as a sovereign nation. Federal laws were ignored by their own authors, but the Onondaga people still live by the precepts of the Great Law.
p.320, The Onondaga Nation took a different approach. Their claim was made under United States law, but its moral power lay in the directives of the Great Law: to act on behalf of peace, the natural world, and future generations. They did not call their suit a land claim, because they know that land is not property, but a gift, the sustainer of life. Tadodaho Sidney Hill has said that the Onondaga Nation will never seek to evict people from their homes. The Onondaga people know the pain of displacement too well to inflict it on their neighbors. Instead the suit was termed a land rights action. The motion began with a statement unprecedented in Indian Law:
“The Onondaga people wish to bring about a healing between themselves and all others who live in this region that has been the homeland of the Onondaga Nation since the dawn of time. The Nation and its people have a unique spiritual, cultural, and historic relationship with the land, which is embodied in Gayanashagowa, the Great Law of Peace. This relationship goes far beyond federal and state legal concerns of ownership, possession, or other legal rights. The people are one with the land and consider themselves stewards of it. It is the duty of the Nation’s leaders to work for a healing of this land, to protect it, and to pass it on to future generations. The Onondaga Nation brings this action on behalf of its people in the hope that it may hasten the process of reconciliation and bring lasting justice, peace, and respect among all who inhabit this area.”
p.322, Onondaga Chief Irving Powless characterized the solution as a Band-Aid on the lake bottom. Band-Aids are fine for small hurts, but “you don’t prescribe a Band-Aid for cancer.” The Onondaga Nation called for a thorough cleanup of the sacred lake. Without legal title, however, the powers that be will not give the nation an equal place at the negotiating table.
p.322, Clan Mother Audrey Shenandoah made the goal clear. It is not casinos and not money and not revenge. “In this action,” she said, “we seek justice. Justice for the waters. Justice for the four-leggeds and the wingeds, whose habitats have been taken. We seek justice, not just for ourselves, but justice for the whole of Creation.” In the spring of 2010, the federal court handed down its ruling on the Onondaga Nation’s suit. The case was dismissed.
p.322, In the face of blind injustice, how do we continue? How do we live our responsibility for healing? The first time I heard of the place, it was long past saving. But no one even knew. They kept it hidden. Until one day the sign appeared, eerily, out of nowhere.
p.325, The Solvay waste beds: how very fitting a venue for our fears. What we ought to be afraid of isn’t in the haunts, but under them. Land buried under sixty feet of industrial waste, trickling toxins into the sacred waters of the Onondaga and the home of half a million people— death may be slower than the fall of the ax, but it is just as gruesome. The executioner’s face is hidden, but its names are known: Solvay Process, Allied Chemical and Dye, Allied Chemical, Allied Signal, and now Honeywell.
p.325, More frightening to me than the act of execution is the mind- set that allowed it to happen, that thought it was okay to fill a lake with toxic stew. Whatever the companies are called, individual people were sitting behind those desks, fathers who took their sons fishing, who made the decision to fill the lake with sludge. Human beings made this happen, not a faceless corporation.
p.326, Philosopher Joanna Macy writes of the oblivion we manufacture for ourselves to keep us from looking environmental problems straight in the eye. She quotes R. J. Clifton, a psychologist studying human response to catastrophe: “Suppression of our natural responses to disaster is part of the disease of our time. The refusal to acknowledge these responses causes a dangerous splitting. It divorces our mental calculations from our intuitive, emotional, and biological embeddedness in the matrix of life. That split allows us passively to acquiesce in the preparations for our own demise.”
p.326, Waste beds: a new name for an entirely new ecosystem. Waste: we use the word as a noun to mean “a leftover residue,” “refuse or rubbish,” or “a material such as feces which is produced by a living body, but not used.” More contemporary uses are “an unwanted product of manufacturing,” “an industrial material rejected or thrown away.” Wasteland is, therefore, land that has been thrown away.
p.326, As a verb, to waste means “to render the valuable useless,” “to diminish, to dissipate, and to squander.” I wonder how the public perception of the Solvay waste beds would change if, instead of hiding them, we put up a sign along the highway welcoming people to the lakeshore defined as “squandered land covered in industrial feces.”
p.326, Ruined land was accepted as the collateral damage of progress.
p.327, The land had been kidnapped. Bound and gagged, it could not speak for itself.
p.327, We could take the path of fear and despair.
p.327, Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it— grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again.
p.328, Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth. Environmental despair is a poi-son every bit as destructive as the methylated mercury in the bot-tom of Onondaga Lake. But how can we submit to despair while the land is saying “Help”?
p.328, Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more- than- human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. It’s not enough to grieve. It’s not enough to just stop doing bad things.
p.328, We have enjoyed the feast generously laid out for us by Mother Earth, but now the plates are empty and the dining room is a mess. It’s time we started doing the dishes in Mother Earth’s kitchen. Doing dishes has gotten a bad rap, but everyone who migrates to the kitchen after a meal knows that that’s where the laughter happens, the good conversations, the friendships. Doing dishes, like doing restoration, forms relationships.
p.328, How we approach restoration of land depends, of course, on what we believe that “land” means. If land is just real estate, then resto-ration looks very different than if land is the source of a subsistence economy and a spiritual home. Restoring land for production of natural resources is not the same as renewal of land as cultural identity. We have to think about what land means.
p.330, The National Research Council defined ecological restoration thus: The return of an ecosystem to a close approximation of its condition prior to disturbance. In restoration, ecological damage to the resource is repaired. Both the structure and the function of the ecosystem are recreated. Merely recreating form with-out the function, or the function in an artificial configuration bearing little resemblance to a natural resource does not constitute restoration. The goal is to emulate nature.
p.331, The grasses feed the ants with seeds and the ants feed the grasses with soil. They hand off life to one another. They understand their interconnections; they understand that the life of one is dependent on the life of all. Leaf by leaf, root by root, the trees, the berries, the grasses are joining forces, and so there are birds and deer and bugs that have come to join them. And so the world is made.
p.333, The beds are greening over. The land knows what to do when we do not. I hope that the waste beds do not disappear entirely, though— we need them to remind us what we are capable of. We have an opportunity to learn from them, to understand ourselves as students of nature, not the masters. The very best scientists are humble enough to listen.
p.333, We could name this tableau Land as Teacher, Land as Healer. With plants and natural processes in sole command, the role of land as a renewable source of knowledge and ecological insight becomes apparent. Human damage has created novel ecosystems, and the plants are slowly adapting and showing us the way toward healing the wounds.
p.333, This is a testament to the ingenuity and wisdom of plants more than to any action of people. I hope we’ll have the wisdom to let them continue their work. Restoration is an opportunity for a partnership, for us to help. Our part of the work is not complete.
p.334, The waters have not forgotten their responsibility. The waters are reminding the people that they can use their healing gifts when we will use ours.
p.335, To witness the regenerative power of the land tells us that there is resilience here, signs of possibility that arise from partner-ship between the plants and the people.
p.335, When I visited with the students with shovels in their hands, their pride in the planting was evident. I asked what motivated them in their work, and I heard about “getting adequate data” and “devising a solution” and a “feasible dissertation.” No one mentioned love. Maybe they were afraid. I’ve sat on too many dissertation committees where students were ridiculed for describing the plants they’ve worked with for five years with so unscientific a term as beautiful. The word love is unlikely to make an appearance, but I know that it is there.
p.335- 336, That familiar fragrance was tugging at my sleeve again. I raised my eyes to meet the brightest green in the place, shiny blades gleaming in the sun, smiling up at me like a long lost friend. There she was— sweetgrass— growing in one of the last places I might ever have expected. But I should have known better. Tentatively sending out rhizomes through the sludge, slender tillers marching bravely away, sweetgrass is a teacher of healing, a symbol of kindness and compassion. She reminded me that it is not the land that has been broken, but our relationship to it.
p.336, Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long- lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the eco-systems that sustain them. We restore the land, and the land restores us.
p.337, Ecological restoration is inseparable from cultural and spiritual restoration, and is inseparable from the spiritual responsibilities of care- giving and world- renewal.
p.337, What if we could fashion a restoration plan that grew from understanding multiple meanings of land? Land as sustainer. Land as identity. Land as grocery store and pharmacy. Land as connection to our ancestors. Land as moral obligation. Land as sacred. Land as self.
p.341, The story of our relationship to the earth is written more truthfully on the land than on the page. It lasts there. The land remembers what we said and what we did. Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationship to land. We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers. All stories are connected, new ones woven from the threads of the old.
p.341-343, The Mayan story of Creation (* adapted from the oral tradition):
It is said that in the beginning there was emptiness. The divine beings, the great thinkers, imagined the world into existence simply by saying its name. The world was populated with a rich flora and fauna, called into being by words. But the divine beings were not satisfied. Among the wonderful beings they had created, none were articulate. They could sing and squawk and growl, but none had voice to tell the story of their creation nor praise it. So the gods set about to make humans.
The first humans, the gods shaped of mud. But the gods were none too happy with the result. The people were not beautiful; they were ugly and ill -formed. They could not talk— they could barely walk and certainly could not dance or sing the praises of the gods. They were so crumbly and clumsy and inadequate that they could not even reproduce and just melted away in the rain..
So the gods tried again to make good people who would be givers of respect, givers of praise, providers and nurturers. To this end they carved a man from wood and a woman from the pith of a reed. Oh, these were beautiful people, lithe and strong; they could talk and dance and sing. Clever people, too: they learned to use the other beings, plants and animals, for their own purposes. They made many things, farms and pottery and houses, and nets to catch fish. As a result of their fine bodies and fine minds and hard work, these people reproduced and populated the world, filling it with their numbers.
But after a time the all-seeing gods realized that these people’s hearts were empty of compassion and love. They could sing and talk, but their words were without gratitude for the sacred gifts that they had received. These clever people did not know thanks or caring and so endangered the rest of the Creation. The gods wished to end this failed experiment in humanity and so they sent great catastrophes to the world— they sent a flood, and earthquakes, and, most importantly, they loosed the retaliation of the
other species. The previously mute trees and fish and clay were given voices for their grief and anger at the disrespect shown them by the humans made of wood. Trees raged against the humans for their sharp axes, the deer for their arrows, and even the pots made of earthen clay rose up in anger for the times they had been carelessly burnt. All of the misused members of Creation rallied together and destroyed the people made of wood in self- defense.
Once again the gods tried to make human beings, but this time purely of light, the sacred energy of the sun. These humans were dazzling to be-hold, seven times the color of the sun, beautiful, smart, and very, very powerful. They knew so much that they believed they knew everything. Instead of being grateful to the creators for their gifts, they believed themselves to be the gods’ equals. The divine beings understood the danger posed by these people made of light and once more arranged for their demise.
And so the gods tried again to fashion humans who would live right in the beautiful 7yuworld they had created, in respect and gratitude and humility. From two baskets of corn, yellow and white, they ground a fine meal, mixed it with water, and shaped a people made of corn. They were fed on corn liquor and oh these were good people. They could dance and sing and they had words to tell stories and offer up prayers. Their hearts were filled with compassion for the rest of Creation. They were wise enough to be grateful. The gods had learned their lesson, so to protect the corn people from the overpowering arrogance of their predecessors, the people made of light, they passed a veil before the eyes of the corn people, clouding their vision as breath clouds a mirror. These people of corn are the ones who were respectful and grateful for the world that sustained them— and so they were the people who were sustained upon the earth.*
p.343, Of all the materials, why is it that people of corn would inherit the earth, rather than people of mud or wood or light? Could it be that people made of corn are beings transformed? For what is corn, after all, but light transformed by relationship? Corn owes its existence to all four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. And corn is the product of relationship not only with the physical world, but with people too. The sacred plant of our origin created people, and people created corn, a great agricultural innovation from its teosinthe ancestor. Corn cannot exist without us to sow it and tend its growth; our beings are joined in an obligate symbiosis. From these reciprocal acts of creation arise the elements that were missing from the other attempts to create sustainable humanity: gratitude, and a capacity for reciprocity.
p.343, “But in many Indigenous ways of knowing, time is not a river, but a lake in which the past, the present, and the future exist. Creation, then, is an ongoing process and the story is not history alone - it is also prophecy. Have we already become people of corn? Or are still people made of wood? Are we people made of light, in thrall to our own power? Are we not yet transformed by relation to earth?”
p.344, As David Suzuki notes in The Wisdom of the Elders, the Mayan stories are understood as an ilbal—a precious seeing instrument, or lens, with which to view our sacred relationships. He suggests that such stories may offer us a corrective lens. But while our indigenous stories are rich in wisdom, and we need to hear them, I do not advocate their wholesale appropriation. As the world changes, an immigrant culture must write its own new stories of relationship to place—a new ilbal, but tempered by the wisdom of those who were old on this land long before we came. So how, then, can science, art, and story give us a new lens to understand the relationship that people made of corn represent?
p.344-345, Respiration—the source of energy that lets us farm and dance and
speak. The breath of plants gives life to animals and the breath of animals gives life to plants. My breath is your breath, your breath is mine. It’s the great poem of give and take, of reciprocity that animates the world. Isn’t that a story worth telling? Only when people understand the symbiotic relationships that sustain them can they become people of corn, capable of gratitude and reciprocity.
p.345, The very facts of the world are a poem. Light is turned to sugar. Salamanders find their way to ancestral ponds following magnetic lines radiating from the earth. The saliva of grazing buffalo causes the grass to grow taller. Tobacco seeds germinate when they smell smoke. Microbes in industrial waste can destroy mercury. Aren’t these stories we should all know?
p.345, For what good is knowing, unless it is coupled with caring? Science can give us knowing, but caring comes from someplace else.
p.345, Does science allow us to perceive the sacred in the world, or does it bend light in such a way as to obscure it? A lens that brings the material world into focus but blurs the spiritual is the lens of a people made of wood. It is not more data that we need for our transformation to people of corn, but more wisdom. While science could be a source of and repository for knowledge, the scientific worldview is all too often an enemy of ecological compassion...Science is the process of revealing the world through rational inquiry.... The practice of doing real science brings the questioner into an unparalleled intimacy with nature fraught with wonder and creativity as we try to comprehend the mysteries of the more-than- human world.
p.346, Contrasting with this is the scientific worldview, in which a culture uses the process of interpreting science in a cultural context that uses science and technology to reinforce reductionist, materialist economic and political agendas. I maintain that the destructive lens of the people made of wood is not science itself, but the lens of the scientific worldview, the illusion of dominance and control, the separation of knowledge from responsibility.
p.347, But while scientists are among those who are privy to these other intelligences, many seem to believe that the intelligence they access is only their own. They lack the fundamental ingredient: humility. After the gods experimented with arrogance, they gave the people of corn humility, and it takes humility to learn from other species.
p.347, In the indigenous view, humans are viewed as somewhat lesser beings in the democracy of species. We are referred to as the younger brothers of Creation, so like younger brothers we must learn from our elders.
p.348, If cars scarcely brake for Homo sapiens, what hope can we hold for Ambystoma maculata, our other neighbors who travel this road in the night?
(Ambystoma maculate is the Spotted Salamander)
p.349, Collateral damage: shielding words to keep us from naming the con-sequences of a missile gone astray. The words ask us to turn our faces away, as if man-made destruction were an inescapable fact of nature.
p.350, Largely unseen, but equally dramatic, is the migration of salamanders from winter burrows to the vernal pools where they will meet their mates. The first warm rain of spring, a soaking rain coinciding with a temperature above forty-two degrees, sets the forest floor to rustling and stirring. En masse they rise from the hidden places, blink at the open air, and start on their way. This outpouring of animals is nearly invisible, unless you happen to be in a swamp on a rainy spring night. Salamanders move when darkness protects them from predators and rain keeps their skin moist. And they move by the thousands, like a herd of sluggish buffalo. Like the buffalo, too, their numbers diminish each year.
p.350, But their route is interrupted by a road that snakes through the hollow. The pond and surrounding hills are protected as state forest, but the road is a free-for-all.
P.350, Salamanders aren’t the only ones on the move tonight: wood-frogs, bullfrogs, green frogs, leopard frogs, and newts also hear the call and begin their annual journey. There are toads, peepers, red efts, and legions of tree frogs all with mating on their minds. The road is a circus of jumps and leaps flashing in and out of our flashlights. My beam catches the glittering gold of an eye.
p.351, I stoop to pick her up, circling my two fingers just behind her front legs. There is surprisingly little resistance. It’s like picking up an over-ripe banana: my fingertips sink into her body, cold and soft and wet.
p.352, Without the benefit of satellite or microchip, salamanders navigate by a combination of magnetic and chemical signals that herpetologists are just beginning to understand. Part of their direction-finding ability relies on a precise reading of the lines in the earth’s magnetic field. A small organ in the brain processes magnetic data and guides the salamander to its pond.
p.352, Once they are close, homing in salamanders seems to be similar to salmon identifying their home river: they smell their way with a nasal gland on their snouts. Following the earth’s magnetic signals gets them to the neighborhood and then scent takes over to guide them home. It’s like getting off an airplane and then finding your way to your child-hood home by following the ineffable odor of Sunday dinner and your mother’s perfume.
Imagine a world where we pay attention to the migration of salamanders in the Spring. Imagine a world where we create culverts so that salamanders can cross the road.
p.354, The newborn salamanders stay behind in the safety of the pool for several months, metamorphosing until they are capable of life on land. By the time the pool has dried up and forced them out, their gills will be replaced by lungs and they are ready to forage on their own.
p.354, The juvenile salamanders, or newts, are wanderers who will not re-turn to the pond until they are sexually mature, four to five years later. Salamanders can be long- lived beings. Adults may make the mating migration through a lifetime as long as eighteen years, but only if they can cross the road. Amphibians are one of the most vulnerable groups on the planet. Subject to habitat loss as wetlands and forests disappear, amphibians are the collateral damage we blindly accept as the cost of development.
p.355, Tonight, though, when the fog wraps us all in the same cold blanket, the edges seem to blur. The carnage on this dark country road and the broken bodies on the streets of Baghdad do seem connected.
p.356, Salamanders, children, young farmers in uniform—they are not the enemy or the problem. We have not declared war on these innocents, and yet they die just as surely as if we had. They are all collateral damage. If it is oil that sends the sons to war, and oil that fuels the engines that roar down this hollow, then we are all complicit, soldiers, civilians, and salamanders connected in death by our appetite for oil.
p.357, Aldo Leopold had it right: naturalists live in a world of wounds that only they can see.
p.358, What is it that drew us to the hollow tonight? What crazy kind of species is it that leaves a warm home on a rainy night to ferry salamanders across a road? It’s tempting to call it altruism, but it’s not. There is nothing selfless about it. This night heaps rewards on the givers as well as the recipients. We get to be there, to witness this amazing rite, and, for an evening, to enter into relationship with other beings, as different from ourselves as we can imagine.
p.358, It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sad-ness, a “species loneliness”—estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance, and with our homes brightly lit against the night. For a moment as we walked this road, those barriers dissolved and we began to relieve the loneliness and know each other once again.
p.358, They bring us face to face with our innate xenophobia, sometimes directed at other species and sometimes directed at our own, whether in this hollow or in deserts halfway around the globe. Being with salamanders gives honor to otherness, offers an anti-dote to the poison of xenophobia. Each time we rescue slippery, spotted beings we attest to their right to be, to live in the sovereign territory of their own lives.
p.358, Carrying salamanders to safety also helps us to remember the covenant of reciprocity, the mutual responsibility that we have for each other. As the perpetrators of the war zone on this road, are we not bound to heal the wounds that we inflict?
p.359, One word becomes clear, as if spoken in English. “Hear! Hear! Hear! The world is more than your thoughtless commute. We, the collateral, are your wealth, your teachers, your security, your family. Your strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of Creation.”
p.359, “Weep! Weep!” calls a toad from the water’s edge. And I do. If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.
p.359, “The world is more than your thoughtless commute. We, the collateral, are your wealth, your teachers, your security, your family. Your strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of creation.”
p.360, So much depends on the spark.
p.360, “Firewood warms you twice,” he would always say as we emerged from the woods hot and sweaty. In the doing of it, we learned to recognize the trees by their bark, by their wood, and by the way they burned for different purposes: pitchy pine for light, beech for a bed of coals, sugar maples to bake pies in the reflector oven.
p.361, Knowledge of the flora was a given, as was respectful treatment of the woods, so that you gathered without doing harm.
p.361, We earned high praise for the ideal one- match fire, but plenty of encouragement if we needed a dozen. And at some point it became natural and easy, no feat at all. I found a secret that al-ways worked for me: to sing to the fire as I touched the match to tinder.
p.361, Woven into my dad’s fire teachings was appreciation for all the woods gave us and a sense of our responsibility for reciprocity. We never left a camping place without leaving a pile of wood for the next people on the trail. Paying attention, being prepared and patient, and doing it right the first time: the skill and the values were so closely entwined that fire making became for us an emblem of a certain kind of virtue.
p.361, Fire building was a vital connection to those who came before.
p.361, Wewene, I say to myself: in a good time, in a good way. There are no shortcuts. It must unfold in the right way, when all the elements are present, mind and body harnessed in unison. When all the tools have been properly made and all the parts united in purpose, it is so easy.
p.362, “Did you know,” he asks them, “that there are four kinds of fire?” I am expecting his lesson on hardwoods and softwoods, but there is something else on his mind.
p.362, Well, first, of course, there’s this campfire you made. You can cook on it, keep warm next to it. It’s a good place to sing— and it keeps the coyotes away.”
p.362, “Forest fires?” one of the students tries tentatively. “Sure” he says, “what the people used to call Thunderbird fires.
p.362, The people set these fires on purpose, to take care of the land— to help the blueberries grow, or to make meadows for deer.
p.362, But we were also given the responsibility to care for land. What people forget is that that means participating—that the natural world relies on us to do good things. You don’t show your love and care by putting what you love behind a fence. You have to be involved. You have to contribute to the well- being of the world.
p.362-363,” He holds up a sheet of birch bark. “In fact, look at all that birch bark you used in your fire. Young paper birches only grow up after fire, so our ancestors burned. The people set these fires on purpose, to take care of the land— to help the blueberries grow, or to make meadows for deer.” He holds up a sheet of birch bark. “In fact, look at all that birch bark you used in your fire. Young paper birches only grow up after fire, so our ancestors burned forests to create clearings for birch. The symmetry of using fire to create fire- building materials was not lost on them.
p.363, But we were also given the responsibility to care for land. What people forget is that that means participating—that the natural world relies on us to do good things. You don’t show your love and care by putting what you love behind a fence. You have to be involved. You have to contribute to the well- being of the world.
p.363, “The land gives us so many gifts; fire is the way that we can give back.In modern times, the public thinks fire is only destructive, but they’ve forgotten, or simply never knew, how people used fire as a creative force.
p.363, Our people were given the responsibility to use fire to make things beautiful and productive— it was our art and our science.”
p.364, “Okay— what are the other kinds of fire?” my father asks as he adds a stick to the fire at his feet. Taiotoreke knows. “Sacred Fire, like for ceremonies.” “Of course,” my dad says. “The fires we use to carry prayers, for healing, for sweat lodges. That fire represents our life, the spiritual teachings that we’ve had from the very beginning. The Sacred Fire is the symbol of life and spirit, so we have special fire-keepers to care for them.
p.364, “You might not get to be around those other fires very often,” he says, “but there’s fire you must tend to every day. The hardest one to take care of is the one right here,” he says, tapping his finger against his chest. “Your own fire, your spirit. We all carry a piece of that sacred fire within us. We have to honor it and care for it. You are the fire-keeper.”
p.365, “You must always remember that fire has two sides. Both are very powerful. One side is the force of creation. Fire can be used for good— like on your hearth or in ceremony. Your own heart fire is also a force for good. But that same power can be turned to destruction. Fire can be good for the land, but it can also destroy. Your own fire can be used for ill, too. Human people can never forget to understand and respect both sides of this power. They are far stronger than we are. We must learn to be careful or they can destroy every-thing that has been created. We have to create balance.”
p.365, Anishinaabe knowledge keepers— our historians and scholars— carry the narrative of the people from our earliest origin, long before the coming of the offshore people, the zaaganaash.
p.366, The leaders heeded the prophecy and led the nation west along the St. Lawrence River, far inland near what is now Montreal. There they rekindled the flame, carried with them on the journey in bowls of shkitagen.
p.366, A new teacher arose among the people and counseled them to continue still farther west, where they would camp on the shore of a very big lake. Trusting in the vision, the people followed and the time of the Second Fire began as they made camp on the shores of Lake Huron near what is now Detroit. Soon, though, the Anishinaabe became divided into three groups— the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi— who took different routes to seek their homes around the Great Lakes.
p.367, The first prophet said that if the offshore people, the zaaganaash, came in brotherhood, they would bring great knowledge. Combined with Anishinaabe ways of knowing, this would form a great new nation. But the second prophet sounded a warning: He said that what looks like the face of brotherhood might be the face of death. These new people might come with brotherhood, or they might come with greed for the riches of our land. How would we know which face is the true one? If the fish became poisoned and the water unfit to drink, we would know which face they wore. And for their actions the zaaganaash came to be known instead as chimokman— the long- knife people.
p.367, The time was foretold when the children would turn away from the elders; people would lose their way and their purpose in life. They prophesied that, in the time of the Sixth Fire, “the cup of life would almost become the cup of grief.” And yet, even after all of this, there is something that remains, a coal that has not been extinguished. At the First Fire, so long ago, the people were told that it is their spiritual lives that will keep them strong.
p.367-368, The people of the Seventh Fire do not yet walk forward; rather, they are told to turn around and retrace the steps of the ones who brought us here. Their sacred purpose is to walk back along the red road of our ancestors’ path and to gather up all the fragments that lay scattered along the trail. Fragments of land, tatters of language, bits of songs, stories, sacred teachings— all that was dropped along the way. Our elders say that we live in the time of the seventh fire. We are the ones the ancestors spoke of, the ones who will bend to the task of putting things back together to rekindle the flames of the sacred fire, to begin the rebirth of a nation.
p.368, And so it has come to pass that all over Indian Country there is a movement for revitalization of language and culture growing from the dedicated work of individuals who have the courage to breathe life into ceremonies, gather speakers to reteach the language, plant old seed varieties, restore native landscapes, bring the youth back to the land. The people of the Seventh Fire walk among us. They are using the fire stick of the original teachings to restore health to the people, to help them bloom again and bear fruit.
p.368, We do indeed stand at the crossroads. Scientific evidence tells us we are close to the tipping point of climate change, the end of fossil fuels, the beginning of resource depletion. Ecologists estimate that we would need seven planets to sustain the lifeways we have created. And yet those lifeways, lacking balance, justice, and peace, have not brought us contentment. They have brought us the loss of our relatives in a great wave of extinction. Whether or not we want to admit it, we have a choice ahead, a crossroads.
p.368, I don’t fully comprehend prophecy and its relation to history. But I know that metaphor is a way of telling truth far greater than scientific data. I know that when I close my eyes and envision the crossroads that our elders foresaw, it runs like a movie in my head. The fork in the road stands atop a hill. To the left the path is soft and green and spangled with dew. You want to go barefoot.
p.369, In the valleys below the hill, I see the people of the Seventh Fire walking toward the crossroads with all they have gathered. They carry in their bundles the precious seeds for a change of worldview. Not so they can return to some atavistic utopia, but to find the tools that allow us to walk into the future. So much has been forgotten, but it is not lost as long as the land endures and we cultivate people who have the humility and ability to listen and learn. And the people are not alone. All along the path, nonhuman people help. What knowledge the people have forgotten is remembered by the land.
p.371, What does it mean to be the people of the seventh fire, to walk back along the ancestral road and pick up what was left behind? How do we recognize what we should reclaim and what is dangerous refuse? What is truly medicine for the living earth and what is a drug of deception? None of us can recognize every piece, let alone carry it all. We need each other, to take a song, a word, a story, a tool, a ceremony and put it in our bundles. Not for ourselves, but for the ones yet to be born, for all our relations. Collectively, we assemble from the wisdom of the past a vision for the future, a worldview shaped by mutual flourishing.
p.371, Our spiritual leaders interpret this prophecy as the choice between the deadly road of materialism that threatens the land and the people, and the soft path of wisdom, respect, and reciprocity that is held in the teachings of the first fire. It is said that if the people choose the green path, then all races will go forward together to light the eighth and final fire of peace and brotherhood, forging the great nation that was foretold long ago.
p.371, Supposing we are able to turn from destruction and choose the green path? What will it take to light the eighth fire?
p.371-372, The spark itself is a mystery, but we know that before that fire can be lit, we have to gather the tinder, the thoughts, and the practices that will nurture the flame.
p.373, It’s not that the tools are lacking— the pieces are all there, but something is missing. I do not have it. I hear again the teachings of the seventh fire: turn back along the path and gather up what has been left beside the trail.
p.373, As the seventh fire people walk the path, we should also be looking for shkitagen, the ones who hold the spark that cannot be extinguished.
p.373, We find the firekeepers all along the path and greet them with gratitude and humility that against all odds, they have carried the ember forward, waiting to be breathed into life. In seeking the shkitagen of the forest and the shkitagen of the spirit, we ask for open eyes and open minds, hearts open enough to embrace our more- than- human kin, a willing-ness to engage intelligences not our own. We’ll need trust in the generosity of the good green earth to provide this gift and trust in human people to reciprocate.
P.373, I don’t know how the eighth fire will be lit. But I do know we can gather the tinder that will nurture the flame, that we can be shkitagen to carry the fire, as it was carried to us. Is this not a holy thing, the kindling of this fire? So much depends on the spark.
p.374, There are so many ways to harvest honorably, but he chose otherwise, leaving only diseased beech and a few old hemlocks, worthless to the mill.
p.374, I fear that a world made of gifts cannot coexist with a world made of commodities. I fear that I have no power to protect what I love against the Windigo.
P.375, Given the rampant destruction wrought by our contemporary Windigo- mind, I wondered if our ancient stories contained some wisdom that might guide us today.
P.375, There are stories of banishment that we might emulate, making pariahs of the destroyers and divesting ourselves of complicity with their enterprises.
p.375, Some folks argue that we need do nothing at all— that the unholy coupling of greed and growth and carbon will make the world hot enough to melt the Windigo heart once and for all. Climate change will unequivocally defeat economies that are based on constant taking without giving in return.
p.376, In an essay describing hunter- gatherer peoples with few possessions as the original affluent society, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins reminds us that, “modern capitalist societies, however richly endowed, dedicate themselves to the proposition of scarcity. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world’s wealthiest peoples.”
p.376, The shortage is due not to how much material wealth there actually is, but to the way in which it is exchanged or circulated. The market system artificially creates scarcity by blocking the flow between the source and the consumer.
p.376, What is the alternative? And how do we get there? I don’t know for certain, but I believe the answer is contained within our teachings of “One Bowl and One Spoon,” which holds that the gifts of the earth are all in one bowl, all to be shared from a single spoon.
p.376, And yet, while creating an alternative to destructive economic structures is imperative, it is not enough. It is not just changes in poli-cies that we need, but also changes to the heart. Scarcity and plenty are as much qualities of the mind and spirit as they are of the economy. Gratitude plants the seed for abundance.
p.377,"Each of us comes from people that were indigenous once. We can reclaim our membership in the cultures of gratitude that formed our old relationships with the living earth. "
p.377, Gratitude is a powerful antidote to Windigo psychosis. A deep awareness of the gifts of the earth and of each other is medicine. The practice of gratitude lets us hear the badgering of marketers as the stomach grumblings of a Windigo. It celebrates cultures of regenerative reciprocity, where wealth is under-stood to be having enough to share and riches are counted in mutually beneficial relationships. Besides, it makes us happy.
p.377, Gratitude for all the earth has given us lends us courage to turn and face the Windigo that stalks us, to refuse to participate in an economy that destroys the beloved earth to line the pockets of the greedy, to demand an economy that is aligned with life, not stacked against it.
p.377, We are not powerless against the Windigo, they say. Remember that we already have everything we need. And so— we conspire.
p.381, This is our traditional giveaway, the minidewak, an old ceremony well loved by our people and a frequent feature of powwows.
p.381, In the Potawatomi way, this expectation is turned upside down. It is the honored one who gives the gifts, who piles the blanket high to share good fortune with everyone in the circle.
p.381, The ceremonial giveaway is an echo of our oldest teachings.
p.381, Generosity is simultaneously a moral and a material imperative, especially among people who live close to the land and know its waves of plenty and scarcity. Where the well- being of one is linked to the well- being of all. Wealth among traditional people is measured by having enough to give away.
p.381, Hoarding the gift, we become constipated with wealth, bloated with possessions, too heavy to join the dance.
p.381, In a culture of gratitude, everyone knows that gifts will follow the circle of reciprocity and flow back to you again. This time you give and next time you receive. Both the honor of giving and the humility of receiving are necessary halves of the equation.
p.382, A gift is different from something you buy, possessed of meaning outside its material boundaries. You never dishonor the gift. A gift asks something of you. To take care of it. And some-thing more.
p.382, I don’t know the origin of the giveaway, but I think that we learned it from watching the plants, especially the berries who offer up their gifts all wrapped in red and blue. We may forget the teacher, but our language remembers: our word for the giveaway, minidewak, means “they give from the heart.”
p.382, They carry the lesson, passed to us by our ancestors, that the generosity of the land comes to us as one bowl, one spoon. We are all fed from the same bowl that Mother Earth has filled for us. It’s not just about the berries, but also about the bowl. The gifts of the earth are to be shared, but gifts are not limitless.
p.382, Something beyond gratitude is asked of us. The berries trust that we will uphold our end of the bargain and disperse their seeds to new places to grow, which is good for berries and for boys. They remind us that all flourishing is mutual. We need the berries and the berries need us. Their gifts multiply by our care for them, and dwindle from our neglect. We are bound in a covenant of reciprocity, a pact of mutual responsibility to sustain those who sustain us. And so the empty bowl is filled.
p.383, But the uncertain path to the future could be illuminated by language.
p.383, In Potawatomi, we speak of the land as emingoyak: that which has been given to us. In English, we speak of the land as “natural resources” or “ecosystem services,” as if the lives of other beings were our property.
p.383, We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Water knows this, clouds know this. Soil and rocks know they are dancing in a continuous giveaway of making, unmaking, and making again the earth.
p.383, We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Water knows this, clouds know this. Soil and rocks know they are dancing in a continuous giveaway of making, unmaking, and making again the earth.
p.383, Our elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to re-member.
p.384, The moral covenant of reciprocity calls us to honor our responsibilities for all we have been given, for all that we have taken. It’s our turn now, long overdue. Let us hold a giveaway for Mother Earth, spread our blankets out for her and pile them high with gifts of our own making.
p.384, Gifts of mind, hands, heart, voice, and vision all offered up on behalf of the earth. Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world.
In return for the privilege of breath.
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