A visit to the Eastern Cherokee

Greetings everyone- I recently returned from the Ethnobiology meetings in Cherokee North Carolina.  Fascinating place.  It's the home of the Eastern Cherokee who evaded removal in the 1830s when the 5 civilized tribes were removed from their homelands in the southeastern US and marched across the continent to new homes in Oklahoma.  Many perished in that forced removal, and it is widely known as the Trail of Tears.  The Eastern Cherokee are the descendents of 700 (of about 14,000) who hid out in the Great Smoky Mountains, for a couple of years, and ultimately, through the lobbying efforts of an adopted white man who read law, were allowed to buy back their lands and become citizens of North Carolina.
They presently have a large casino which provides them income to fund language revitalization efforts, cultural activities, conservation of arts and of the materials that artists and artisans need, and a range of other benefits to the tribe. The Cherokee Preservation Foundation is funded by the casino, and one of its ethnobotanical programs is called "RTCAR" restoring the Cherokee artist's resources.  David Cozzo, the ethnobotanist who works there, was instrumental in hosting our conference.  In addition to academic sessions, we visited their museum, which tells the story of Cherokee history and contains many lovely artifacts, their artists' coop gallery, and the Oconaluftee Indian Village, which is a recreated 18th century village with crafts people doing traditional arts, dance performances, and re-enactment to interpret their history and culture for visitors.

Baskets made by the eastern Cherokee included both white oak and river cane baskets, both featuring dyed patterns coloured with blood root and black walnut.  The educational efforts sponsored by the Cherokee Preservation Foundation have revitalized basket weaving, especially the intricate river cane double weave baskets, and also enhanced the availability of materials for basket making.   Crafts we watched at the Oconaluftee village included finger weaving, traditional Cherokee pot making, wood carving, and basket weaving.

A sample of traditional Cherokee pot types. The intriguing vessel in the centre with large knobs was for carrying fire, for example to the council house, without burning your hands, the potter told us.

The finger weaving was intricate and very varied in pattern.  The weavers were using commercial yarn for the most part.

 One feature that stood out to me were weavings that featured beads added to the web in a diamond pattern.  The weavers showed us a small sample of bison wool yarn with a similar diamond bead pattern, which we were told represented the type of weaving the Cherokee did before the introduction of coloured trade wool.

weavers doing finger weaving

bison wool strap sample, decorated with beads

I had not known that Cherokee traditionally used blow guns, from smoothed lengths of river cane, to shoot light weight darts for bird hunting.  The tips were fire hardened, and they were fletched with down of the thistle Carduus!
 We learned that the number seven is sacred to Cherokee, who also have 7 clans, and the Council House in the recreated village has seven sides.  The seven is derived from the four directions, mother earth, father sky, and the centre or place of the heart.  At the opening ceremony and reception we were privileged to hear Elder and master storyteller Freeman Owle recount several key Cherokee myths (in English so we could understand), including how water spider successfully obtained fire for humans.
We also learned about the ethnobotany of Cherokee in the conference itself (along with many other fascinating papers and some videos), and on the fieldtrip, where David Cozzo showed us plants used by Cherokee in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  One thing that stuck in my mind is that "stickers" are an intermediate category (a grouping of folk species or generics), and can be used medicinally to improve memory!  David told of one young person who was treated with a decoction of various kinds of "stickers" to treat a learning disability.  Apparently this was effective and the young man went on to be successful in school and is now in college.  We also learned that one can eat the young tips of cat briar (a species of Smilax, or green briar) and that violet leaves are another good spring edible.  Towering tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipiferum) have sweet nectar in the "tulips", and apparently very useful wood. (If you want to read more about Cherokee ethnobotany, David has a paper from his dissertation material in Stepp et al. (eds) 2002 Ethnobiology and Biocultural Diversity entitled "Cherokee System of Folk Classification" (pp139-151) which is published by the University of Georgia Press.)

Spring Greens

Oconaluftee River, Cherokee, North Carolina

I just got back from the Society of Ethnobiology conference which was held in Cherokee North Carolina this year, in the southern Appalachians.  David Cozzo, who was one of the meeting organizers, led our fieldtrip into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  He was describing Cherokee plant uses and ethnobotany to us, and slipped in various comments about spring edibles....tender tips of cat briar (Smilax sp.) were one edible David pointed out.  Violet leaves were another.  Today I got back out into my garden to try to clean up the perennial beds, digging out the tenacious roots and shoots of the creeping bellflower Campanula repens, an aggressive European species combining the worst of quackgrass with dandelions in the structure and depth of its roots, which infests my beds.  While digging out the campanula, I dug out some large dandelions in the same spade-fulls.  At that point I remembered that my friend Riva wanted to try to make dandelion root coffee, and I decided to dig her enough roots to try it.  (Organic and local....) My raspberry patch has quite a few old large dandelion plants among the berry plants.  I don't ordinarily till it, so they have been growing undisturbed for quite a while.  I took the spading fork in there and managed to dig out a bunch of plants with good roots. While I was digging, my friend Riva came over.  I snapped the crowns off the roots, and put the root pieces in one bowl and the tops in another.

When we took them inside to wash the roots, Riva said, "Can't you eat the tops too?"  They were larger and more open grown that dandelions I usually pick for spring greens, but the flowers still hadn't opened in my yard.  I washed the bowlful of tops in several changes of water and left them soaking when we went for a walk.  When we came back, the tops had perked up quite a bit, and I thought, well, maybe we should make a spring stir-fry with them.

When I lived on the Skeena River in BC, I would pick tender semi-shade grown leaves of dandelion, some tops of the wild nodding onion (Allium cernuum), and if possible some morrel mushrooms, and make them into a dark and flavourful stir-fry, with tamari and sesame oil.  The bitter greens taste good with the salty soy and flavourful oil, and feel very healthy as the first fresh greens.  In fact we used to call it our first greens feast, by analogy to the first salmon feast traditionally held by the Gitksen 15 km upriver in Gitwangak.
Though I was uncertain of the quality of the tops today, I decided to try them.  I enjoyed the southern collards cooked with bacon on my trip, so thought, why don't I try cutting some bacon and fry the greens in the bacon grease?  The bacon I have is from Irving's Farm Fresh, a heritage Berkshire pork producer in central Alberta who sells at the Strathcona Farmer's Market.  Since it was to be our dinner, I decided to cut a couple of chicken tenders and marinate them in tamari (gluten free for me now) and sesame oil.  Riva finds onions don't agree well, so I grated fresh ginger instead. I took the opportunity to cook quinoa to go with the stir-fry; I rinse the grain once in water to rinse out some of the saponins before I boil it (2 parts water to one part quinoa). For the main course, I took out my little Indian wok.  I started out cooking several thick meaty slices of the bacon, cut into strips, for the grease.  Then I tossed in a sliced brown crimini mushroom, and the chicken breast with the marinade and stirred in the wok for a couple of minutes, and finally added the dandelion tops, which I had cut up into sections a couple centimeters broad.  I cooked the mix until the dandelion tops had all wilted and the breast meat was cooked, and served it over the quinoa.  We sat at the table on the back deck overlooking the garden and enjoyed the flavour of the spring in our bowls and the gentle green of the opening leaves in the yard.  It was completely delicious. The first spring meal from my small plot of urban land. Our dinner tonight only used half of the tops, so we have another good meal in store.  I'll have to report back later on the dandelion root coffee. There should be about a pound of roots to roast and prepare.

Truth and Reconciliation- healing ethnocide and ecocide

teepee at the TRC, photo by  Riva Benditt

I spent today at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's event in Edmonton, where I live.  For those who are not Canadian, or who may not be in touch with the Residential School issue, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been holding gatherings all over Canada, enabling residential school Survivors to tell their stories, find healing in the sympathy of others who have experienced similar trauma, engage with traditional healers who can help them with their healing journeys and set the record straight.

Residential schools were explicitly racist in agenda, seeking to assimilate and Christianize Indigenous children by forcibly removing them from their families and institutionalizing them.  Some got to go home for a couple of months in the year.  Others not.  Children were deliberately placed apart from their siblings, and forbidden to speak their languages.  Many died of disease.  Some died attempting to escape, freezing to death trying to go home. Sexual and physical abuse of various kinds permeated these institutions where the power of those in charge was rarely overseen or checked. (This occurs in non-indigenous settings as well, as with the Mt. Cashel orphanage in the Maritimes).

The US had its Trail of Tears (the forced march of the southern tribes to Oklahoma, and other such genocidal removals), and in Canada we had instead schools of tears.

The mere telling of trauma suffered by individual children, or the parents or relatives of those who were in residential schools, is neither the object nor the stopping place.  First, the truth must be told, and the wider public must hear.  The government of Canada and the major churches have already made official apologies.  But the degree of disruption of language, culture, community, emotional and physical health, and traditional knowledges has created a huge rupture in all Indigenous communities in Canada.  As one speaker addressing the issue commented today, it's not about simple oh, they were wrong, and were blinded by their religion.....the policies of assimilation were part and parcel of the colonial enterprise, here in Canada as well as other places around the world.  The assault on language and culture, and the attempt to transform Indigenous peoples into "civilized Christians" was about the extension of empire, access to land and resources, clearing the way for development of hinterlands and ecological conversion to agricultural landscapes or to promote forestry and mining where the land was not suited to agriculture.  In short, for nation building.  Today I heard my friend Alestine, who experienced 12 years of residential schooling in the NWT and has since gone on to a University degree and a Masters in Environmental Studies, lament not only the personal difficulties of being in residential school, but the loss of opportunity to learn her culture "hands-on" .  Her passion for language preservation and the documentation and transmission of traditional knowledge is I think what she has done to make up for the loss of her birthright.  She was fortunate to have elder relatives who could still teach her when she came home.  She is making significant contributions to building a better future for her people.

The fallout of the residential school social experiment have been huge, not only in loss of language, threat to aboriginal spiritual beliefs and hand skills, but also in community health, as whole communities of traumatized children stumbled toward personal healing and empowerment and tried  to figure out how to parent, when they themselves had not been allowed the love and nurture of parents, how to own and set goals when finally they could, how to deal with the legacy of pain, internalized worthlessness and repressed anger at their mistreatment.  The collective trauma ricochets, and affects the generations who come after.  Their cost is measured in violence against women and in general, people on the streets, numbing pain with alcohol and other substances, dysfunctional communities, and many in the prisons, far out of proportion to the population.  The statistics are widely known.  The ultimate responsibility, in the colonial nation-building process itself, is rarely acknowledged.  Ways forward are challenging.

In other work that I do, I work with communities to preserve traditional knowledge of plants, of the land, traditional skills. Trying to build a bridge over the generation(s) of disruption.  Trying to restore health through facilitating reconnection to the land.  My friend Linda, Kaska language and culture teacher, and Elders we worked constantly emphasize the need to get people out on the land, to rebuild the skill set that nurtures self-sufficiency, spiritual balance and pride.  No easy task.  The world is changing quickly. iPads and smartphones and facebook are alluring.  

2012 project to document hide processing

Making moosehide is hard work.  Spending time on the land to learn skills is hard to square with school periods and parental consent forms.  Teaching appropriate reverence and respect for the land, the medicines, and the animals and plants that provide food is also a challenge. Fetal alcohol exposure lowers the capacity of many children to learn.

So the reconciliation and healing phase of truth and reconciliation is very wide ranging.  Not only must social relations be mended, understanding sought from the rest of the people who now occupy the country we call Canada, but knowledge of language, of stories which bring traditional wisdom, and connection to the land and its foods  and medicines must be re-established.  Only through all of these can we retreat from the brink of ethnocide and ecocide and walk toward health.

I wanted to share some images of positive approaches to repairing the loss of connection to land; these examples are from the Plants for Life Camp held by the community of Deline, NWT on the Great Bear River at Stick Creek, summer 2006.
.

Elders and youth together picking blueberries on the land

Close up of blueberries, healthy food from the land

Pot of Medicine the Elders were cooking to show the youth how to make healing teas.

Hai Hai.  Meegwetch. Masi cho. Misiy co. Sugosinlá.
Thanks for listening.

"Tradition" is a Moving Target

I've often fantasized having a bumper sticker on the back of my car with the words tradition is a moving target.  People often think of traditions, or traditional people as somehow frozen, a fixed form rigidly reproduced set by authority at some unspecified time in the distant past.  Essentialized and objectified.  Such readings of "tradition" figure largely in determinations of aboriginal rights, of allowed and disallowed techniques of harvesting and using fish and animals and berries, of relationships to landscape (which has relevance both in popular discourse and in treaty negotiations and court cases).  Such notions also figure in judgements of what is "authentic" or "inauthentic" in Aboriginal arts and crafts.  I recently viewed a video on German Indian re-enactment posted on the web by a Canadian First Nations woman.... the German participants used considerable rhetoric about how Indigenous North Americans, and their knowledges, were endangered and disappearing, and how these German admirers were preserving and carrying on the traditions....somehow failing to acknowledge living Indigenous North Americans, and their agency in moving their cultures, arts and identities into the present and future.  "Preserving the knowledge of the Elders"– something that has in fact occupied a good deal of my professional life– does not negate creativity, adaptation, resilience, or changing meanings and contexts.  And I have always striven to show that people I work with are contemporary Canadians, my teachers, friends, collaborators and sometimes neighbours.  Their knowledge is not fossil knowledge of the past, but knowledge that can be brought forward for now, and for the future.
Use of new materials, for example, does not render art less "authentic"; the authenticity resides in who creates it, in its meaning, in intent and purpose, in linkage with past in which it is rooted.  Silk screen prints, for example, were not a traditional way to depict Northwest Coast crests, which were displayed on wooden screens, in woven dance blankets (gwiis halaayt or Chilkat blankets)....in making this statement we run into two difficulties: one, what is the relevant time horizon for "traditional"? and two, in what way is the new hybrid form of silk screen prints made by Indigenous artists depicting Indigenous themes not traditional?  (Even the question of production of art or craft for sale is certainly now "traditional" if we can take practices from the 18th and 18th centuries as "traditional." Certainly in terms of cuisine, for example, no one would argue that boxty, made of potatoes that originated in Peru, is not traditional Irish fare, and certainly no one would contest the traditional nature of a Thanksgiving dinner featuring turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, all introduced to European and Euro-American cuisine in the 16th and 17th centuries.)  Museums and collectors all accept these art pieces as "traditional".

Another example of "tradition" that comes to mind is the beautiful appliqued art form usually known as "button blanket" (gwiis gan mala).  (The blanket shown here is a Haida example from a Totempole raising and Longhouse dedication in June of 1978.  It's iconic to me because of the contemporary context, and the presence of the little girl, now probably 40 years old). Abalone shell was a treasured embellishment on the Northwest Coast long before the advent of European trade goods.  Crest form chiefly blankets displaying prerogative and authority displaying appliqued House, Clan or moiety crests are widespread up and down the Northwest Coast, and are certainly taught in traditional form by older knowledgeable women teaching younger ones how to cut, applique and embellish the blankets, though fulled red, navy or black woolen cloth is certainly not Pre-Contact.  Social relations in who draws the pattern, and who stitches blankets for whom continue to display ancient patterns of clan or house reciprocity and gender roles as well. Now I have learned that people use computer applications to draft complex and precise patterns for the appliqued figures.  Hybridity, and evolving tradition both. So tradition is not a reified set of practices, or products, it is a process which creates linkage between past and future through the constantly shifting moment of the present.
Iain Davidson-Hunt and Michael O'Flaherty have described cultural landscape as emergent in a similar vein.  Contesting now entrenched notions of heritage conservation as the preservation of things, of forms, they contend that preservation of cultural landscapes must instead by approached from the perspective of the set of relationships between people and land, and the customary practices (themselves evolving) that have shaped, and continue to shape the land.  The relationships are what is required to create and maintain a cultural landscape.  Many traditional peoples are deeply in relationship with their homelands, conceiving of themselves as part of the land (for example, Catherine McClellan and Council of Yukon Indians book on Yukon First Nations in the last quarter of the 20th century is entitled part of the Land, Part of the Water).  I discussed these issues in an earlier blog on the Hortobagy Salt Steppe World Heritage Site in Hungary, and I've also written of these matters in Trail of Story, Traveller's Path, Reflections on Ethnoecology and Landscape (available through Creative Commons on the AUPress Website at http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120163).
The difference of perspective on what heritage conservation is speaks to conceptual separation or integration of humans the land, and the other entities that share it, that is, whether people are part of ecosystems, in webs of relationship with the biophysical environment and integral to the environments of which they form a part, or separate from them and potentially destructive of a pure and vulnerable "nature".   The crux of the matter, then, is are we part of "Nature", or separate from, and potentially destructive of it?  Are relationships with the land, with the natural world, so to speak, to be conceived of as relationships of mutually supporting entities, or will "Nature" be stripped of all of its richness, its rights, its agency to be objectified and commodified, to be bought and sold, reduced to monetary value and universal exchange? How will we deal with the rights and relationships of Indigenous peoples to homelands in our complicated pastiche of nation states, settlers, immigrants, migrants and globalization?

On grouse and ptarmigan-sounds , memories and meanings

A brief memory trip inspired by an internet sound search- thinking of the resounding of the blue grouse in the Coast Mountains in BC in May- peaks wreathed in clouds, air intoxicatingly clear, and the sound....reverberating among the peaks, the sound of the mountains in May.  My attempts to hear this sound from digital sound clips decontextualized on an iPad- utterly missed the mark.  I went hunting for old diaries to see if I had recorded my impressions....I found none from the right period in my life.  Fieldnotes were too voluminous and detail-oriented to record (or locate the record) of the aesthetic experience I remember.  Walking up the Seven Sisters in May, up the Coyote Creek trail...a trek through the Coastal Western Hemlock Zone halfway up the mountains, the trail twisting and turning, uphill and sometimes down, through the forest above the last logging cut.  Moss and hemlock and fool's huckleberry aka rusty Menziesia (Menziesia ferruginea)- a huckleberry relative which bears dry capsules instead of juicy dark berries-, some real black huckleberry, in flower at this time of year....as we near the little pond near the upper limits of the forest- the sound, throbbing, deep, resounding through the forest. The sound of the quickening spring.  Below, the accelerating rattle of the ruffed grouse, here the deep booming of the blue grouse. Litisxw. '
The little lake reflects the peaks and dark trees, just at the edge of the old burn from the 1930's then half a century before.  We pause for a bit of food then push on past the trees to the open terrain of the moraines and rocky glacier bed between what we called the Black Sister and the tallest peak, Weeshkinisht on the map  'Wii Sga'nist, the big mountainin Gitxsan.  The peaks surround.  Goats frequent the still bare alder thickets on the flanks of the Black Sister.  The remnant glacier is a small snowfield up near the headwall of the cirque. 

Down below, at the base of the mountain where we lived, the ruffed grouse dominated, generally the grey form.  Put–put-put-put-put-put –the chainsaw that never starts.  Theirs the realm of thimbleberry and birch and hazel, of heart-leaved Arnica, morrels, and dandelion greens, the deciduous and mixed woods of the valley bottom.  I used to enjoy their trail of tracks across the snowpack in winter too, and sometimes little curled droppings appearing almost like compressed sawdust or wood shavings.   Grouse, unsurprisingly perhaps, is a Gitxsan crest, and figures in the Adaawk from Temlax'amit that is on the pole of Ant'kulilbisxw in Kispaayaks. The crying woman on Mary's pole holds a bird, the grouse that could have saved her brother from starvation had she and her sister been able to procure it in time...  I have a Walter Harris print of the grouse hanging in my house, and a carved painted plaque. I like to eat grouse too, though as I'm not a hunter, I haven't cooked it many times.  My favourite is with wild mushrooms in a kind of stew or fricassee. I also have some beautiful banded grouse tail feathers in a little basket with other beautiful "found feathers" in my Edmonton living-room.
Spruce grouse, "chickens" figure in my memories of more northerly places.  The first time the wonder of spruce grouse, black hooded, sitting dark and immobile in the small snow wreathed black spruce of the boreal forest near Ethel Lake in the central Yukon. My daughter was almost 6, and lost her first tooth that day....A few years later, we were driving south in late August having taken the Alaska Ferry to Haines Alaska and driven down the Alaska highway to the junction with Highway 37.  We started down the Stewart-Cassiar south toward the Skeena.  Allen had a hankering to go fishing, and we pulled off at a place signed Wheeler Lake south about an hour from the Yukon border.  Before he could catch anything, he somehow broke the tip of his rod.  Frustrated, he noticed there were a number of young-of-the-year spruce grouse sitting fearlessly in the small black spruce and willows.  He and Rose set to work with sticks and stones, and soon we had two spruce grouse to share....cooked up on our coleman stove with freshly picked delicious lactarius mushrooms, and a side of low-bush cranberry sauce.  A delicious and memorable meal off the land that I still think of, decades later, whenever I drive by the sign that says "Wheeler Lake".  This was before I came  back to the Watson Lake area to work with Kaska Elders.....
Travelling with my Elder teacher Auntie Mida, one of the first Kaska sentences I learned to say was "Hligah dí’ ne gánesta" I saw one "chicken".  Kaska usually talk about any animals they have seen when traveling, and ask travelers what they have seen.  Probably in the days of more local travel this was useful, even necessary, information.  Driving out to pick some berries on the trapline of another Elder teacher, we saw three or four grouse, but had no 22.  I took out my camera to photograph the grouse, and Auntie Alice commented- "You want take picture, I want to eat them!"    She also explained that "chickens" like thick jack-pine, but willow ptarmigan, another grouse-like bird that turns snowy white in winter, prefers willow.
I once saw a beautiful cock willow ptarmigan on the upper Skeena/Klappan divide down on the borders of Spatsizi park, with his brown summer mottling, and brilliant red eyebrows.  I've also seen willows loaded with winter-white ptarmigan like partridges in a proverbial pear tree on the shore of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories.

Alice is right; willow ptarmigan do indeed like willows, and roost there in the winter.  In 1998 I spent some research time in Inuvik in the Mackenzie Delta region of the northwest Territories, a bit north of the Arctic Circle.  My friend Rob and I drove down the Dempster to the Mackenzie River Ferry at Arctic Red (Tsiigehtchic) and dozens of striped summer plumage ptarmigan darted out of the alders and willows along the highway flank.  Somehow we avoided hitting any..... While I was there in 1998 I also bought a beautiful print of a silk painting of ptarmigan (in their showy white winter plumage), looking very much like the ptarmigan I later saw myself on the shores of Slave Lake.
I came full circle on grouse and ptarmigan when I was visiting in Gitwangak  on the Skeena River last February.  I was working with a group of Elders and my friend Ruby discussing community health planning.  Dinim Get, my long time teacher, asked if I had a name.  He considered if he should give me the name Ay-aa'y, "ptarmigan", one of the names of his Lax Gibuu House.....

Of Trails and Roads- "among the trees" versus travelling through country

The first time I drove down the Alaska Highway in 1997, large sections of the highway between Watson Lake and Fort Nelson were narrow two-lane highway, slipping through the trees in curving pathways, up rises and down. It was not a high speed route, but the highway ran along in the aspen and spruce woods, giving a real sense of the nature of the place. I felt like I was there, had been there. When I drive there now, the improved high-speed highway punches through the landscape, in a wide swath, topography muted by big road-cuts and fills, the trees cut back so that one glances at the forest on either side, rather than travelling among the trees.

The cleared highway right-of-way is mowed annually, features exotic grasses and legumes used routinely to vegetate highway roadsides, and has incidentally been recognized by the re-introduced bison as a nicely maintained bison pasture that attracts them and creates serious road hazards for motorists. A broad swathe of artificial low herbaceous vegetation now transects the boreal forest for the length of the Alaska Highway. This broad and straight expanse of pavement facilitates the transport of people and goods from one end-point to another. The pavement itself is expanded by the sloping cut banks and the fill slopes to create an entity of substantial area that extends many thousands of times its width to create wide corridors of disruption and disturbance from whose familiarly similar pavement we view many kinds of landscape and cityscape. That we pass through without actually being there. Yet somehow we still think of roads as lines, in the geometric sense, having length and trajectory, but not extent. We bracket them out of our imagining of the places we've seen.
 I began to think about the difference between roads and trails again this past week, walking in the faux natural urban greenspace (at this season, snowspace) by my home in Edmonton, Mill Creek Ravine. In the time I've lived here, the city has consistently expanded the width of its trails, widening pavement of the paved bike trail, now kept plowed all winter long, and heavily gravelling the official walking trails until they are in fact single lane gravel roads, used as such by Parks and Recreation, which drives maintenance trucks on them. The roadside vegetation is religiously mowed back more than a meter on each side of the gravel edge now, obliterating wildflowers like the lovely star-flowered solomon's seal, Canada violets and wild lily of the valley, (Maianthemum canadensis), and promoting disturbance tolerant weeds like dandelions and bladder campion. They also cut back the stems of the fruiting saskatoons with brush blades, to create a neat corridor through the aspen woods and gallery forest along Mill Creek. Dog walkers, joggers, strolling friends, and cyclists make use of this easy route. Few stop to pick fruit, or watch birds. Some sport ear buds, or talk on cell phones.
 I often take the unofficial side trails, created by human feet (and mountain bikes), about a shoulder's width to the trail bed, winding their way among the trees and bushes, pausing for views, anastamosing, looping both sides of the main trails of the official net, and creating shortcuts between major routes. I feel that I am, as Dene speakers would say, among the trees when I walk on these trails. With the degree of traffic, one does need to look for roots that might trip a walker...the flowers along the trail are intact. Wild sarsaparilla grace the trailside in summer, highbush cranberries heavy with fruit in fall. I rarely encounter dogwalkers in these places (but sometimes have to step aside for mountain bikers). My feet are at home, finding their path where others have walked. Gravel does not crunch underfoot.
 In winter, as now, there is rarely a sheet of ice along the path, as the traffic is less. I am really there. The pathways are marked by the tracks of those who have walked, inscribing the trail through the act of walking itself. These trails, of course, are tame, as they are created by urban recreationists in a large city. I do not have to glance around for bear scat, or tracks. I have no fear of becoming lost. For trails are routes. They choose where to travel in going from one place to another. Or rather, they instantiate the choices of many who have travelled from one place to another. Even these trails require maintenance; natural processes work to obscure and disrupt trails. We had high winds a week ago, and many trees and branches fell across the trails. People moved them aside, to re-establish effective walking.
 In more remote and unsettled places, trails can feel like lifelines. They need more maintenance there, where washouts, bank erosion, treefall, and brush growth can erase signs of the route, or make following it nearly impossible. In Northwest British Columbia where I used to live, and have worked with local First Nations for nearly 30 years, the network of traditional trails was crucial. For trails of regional significance, work to create them beyond the mere passage of feet was required. These often required a fair amount of construction, leveling trail beds where they ran along sidehills, pecking foot and handholds where rock walls needed to be ascended, even construction of timber bridges to span impassable rivers in this dynamic mountainous landscape. Routes were marked by blazes (at least once steel axes were acquired), or by bending over branches. Brush had to be cleared so it would not spring up and cause injury when it was walked on when bowed down with heavy snow. Lore detailing routes, details of ownership of territories and location of boundaries, and how to cross hazards like avalanche slopes without excessive danger were passed in families, along with accompanying place names. These trails required skill in walking, balance, the ability to cling to a steep slope or to cross a cottonwood log over a rushing creek, and to avoid being caught up in brush. They required route finding. Trails led to resource areas, and were named by the type of use (berry patch trail, mountain goat hunting trail, and so on).
 Some of the Indigenous trails because roads. Others became disused, as settlement patterns changed, ways of making a living were altered and resource use shifted. These fade from memory, as people cluster in the valley bottoms and the Elders who ranged these lands are gone.

This is an image of an old blazed Kaska trapline trail in the Yukon.

The word atane means 'trail'; you can indicate a moose trail, for example with keda 'tane.

Another Kaska trail between a gravel truck trail and a fishing site is clearer and more currently used.

Trails themselves offer a network of human spaces on the land. Walking on land with no trail is a highly skilled activity. One must choose a path, assess the footing, dodge bushes and branches, step over logs and downed trees, look ahead to decide which pathway will lead to the clearest route with least effort– and still get where one desires to go in the larger scale (e.g. go up the correct ridge, not slip over into the next valley, arrive at the lake and so on). One must also return without getting lost or arrive at the next camping place as anticipated. When we went walking with my Manhatten-bred niece many years ago, the fact that traversing country requires skill was brought home to me. Deb had literally never had to decide which side of a clump of bushes to walk on before.

 My colleague Rob Wishart wrote a piece about the Gwich'in skill of walking...this resonated with me, because years before I had been travelling along the Dempster highway with my Gwich'in elder teachers and had commented that the rolling alpine made me want to just go running across the land....William looked at me and commented that it isn't easy to walk across the land. I thought about it and realized there are sedge-tussock marshes, exhausting to negotiate, wet ditches, low tangled dwarf willow, and deep soft sphagnum. It may look like one could run across it like a farmer's pasture, but this land takes much more skill than that.

Forested landscapes have their own set of skills. And walking on winter landscapes, assessing snow quality, ice safety, and deciding if snowshoes are needed is a whole different set of skills.

The packed trail or blazed path offer comfort and security, welcoming. Others have been here. Places and destinations are known.  Cross-country traversing, trail walking, and driving on roads all reflect different levels of intimacy with the land, different sets of skills, different scales of concern and different perception of grain.  Finally, the bird's-eye view offered by air travel gives yet another distinctive set of perceptions of pattern and land while being literally removed from the landscape one contemplates.

Food Security, Cultural Landscapes, Communities and Sustainable Farming

(photo of agricultural land in Scotland south of Stonehaven)
Another dimension to the whole business of food sovereignty and local food self-sufficiency is of course land, and support for farming economy, and farming communities as well as agroecology. Today at Athabasca University, where I teach, my colleague Ella Haley talked about issues of ethical investment and "land grabs". Her talk title was "Pension funds, farmland grab, human rights violations and divestment campaigns - how are your pension funds being invested?" This struck home with many of our colleagues, as ethical investment is a goal, but difficult to realize. Even our Canada Pension Plan funds are apparently implicated in conversion of vast tracts of farmland in the prairie provinces to investment income generating commodity.....
I think of my late Mother in law, from a marginal north Saskatchewan farm, with five generations on the land. I also think of the now deserted small farming communities between Shell Lake and Saskatoon, emblematic of the great depopulation of the Saskatchewan landscape. About a century since the fields were proved up, and families settled on the land to make their livings and grow food for the country and the world. My partner's uncle was an organic farmer, growing wheat a bit north of the optimal zone for number one red wheat; fall rains in the northern fringe of agricultural production spoil the perfect colour. The value added of organic farming helped make up the difference. He's retired now, though some of his younger relatives still farm or grow specialty fruit crops (saskatoons and the like).
The realization that, as global population grows, and some other forms of investment have become unstable, farmland makes an attractive investment for income generation was new to me. Similarly, the realization that international investors take diverse agroecologies and convert them to depauperate monocultures was familiar to me, but I had never linked the consequences of human ecologies, communities and economies with global investments and commodity production for global trade so explicitly. Similarly, Ella discussed the leap-frogging of pressure to sell out farms for potential development, or as investment property over the Toronto region green belt. Having grown up (in part) in suburban southern California, I was familiar with the leveling of lemon groves for subdivisions, the division of ranch lands and crop lands to accommodate urban sprawl. These days the pressures to give "options" on farms, to convert large swaths of formerly diverse family farms to depopulated properties for income purposes seems to have shifted in scale and quality. The greenbelts of southern Ontario were intended to preserve ecological and environmental diversity, and peri-urban rural amenities around cities like Toronto and Hamilton. This has succeeded, but the geographic scale of economic pressure has simply lept over the protected lands. Certain large scale developers apparently are buying up land in Alberta, in rural Ontario, and in diverse other parts of the globe, like Africa, where diverse swidden agricultural areas and managed diverse forest are converted to vast sterile monocultures of crops like oil palm. The more I learn about that crop, the more I try to stay away from purchasing anything with palm oil in it– but it is virtually impossible to avoid.
On the local scale, the rich Saskatchewan River valley farmlands of northeast Edmonton are also at risk from large investors. The Greater Edmonton Alliance has called attention to the risks of urban sprawl eliminating our local food production capacity. Some of the vendors I patronize at the Farmers Market have thriving market gardens and farms within the city limits.

When my daughter was small, we had a tape recording of Woody Guthrie singing this song:

When the farmer comes to town
With his wagon broken down,
Oh the farmer is the man who feeds them all.
If you'll only look and see,
I'm sure you will agree,
That the farmer is the man who feeds them all.

The farmer is the man,
The farmer is the man,
Lives on credit till the fall;
Then they take him by the hand
And they lead him from the land,
And the middleman's the man who gets it all.

Oh the lawyer hangs around
While the butcher cuts a pound,
But the farmer is the man who feeds them all;
And the preacher and the cook
Go a-strolling by the brook,
But the farmer is the man who feeds them all.

The farmer is the man,
The Farmer is the man
Lives on credit till the fall;
With the interest rate so high,
It's a wonder he don't die,
For the mortgage man's the man who gets it all.

When the banker says he broke
And the merchant's up in smoke,
They forget that it's the farmer feeds them all.
It would put them to the test
If the farmer took a rest,
Then they'd know that it's the farmer feeds them all.

The farmer is the man,
The Farmer is the man
Lives on credit till the fall;
His pants are wearing thin,
His condition, it's a sin,
He's forgot that he's the man who feeds them all.

I think it summarizes many of the issues of the conversion of farming and farmland into corporate investment opportunities with no concerns for the integrity of either communities nor land. It interests me, as I've commented earlier in this blog, that the traits of the cultural landscape of the Salt Steppe (Hortobágy) in Hungary could not be maintained without maintaining the cultural practices of land management realized by traditional herders. Similarly, the health of the agricultural landscape, and its human communities I would argue is necessary for food sovereignty and a healthy social-ecological system here in Canada, let alone where foreign corporate interests dispossess subsistence farming communities in many regions of the global south.