remembering Mida

for Mida

my mind reels

       to think the world goes on

and you have fallen out of it

        I hope there are many

               companions to speak Kaska to

where you have gone

my heart aches remembering

       all the times we went

               into the bush

looking for medicine

    talking about the land

         remembering times long ago

we laughed like girls

   delighting in being out

      on the land together

walking trails of the past

       of the present

          dreams of girlhood

             Auntie Minnie–

                  cranberries

mistsí standing up

   in the wild rhubarb

            giving us a hard stare

your orange garbage bag rain coat

   rifle slung on your back

       as we walked up through the alpine

           on Jade mountain looking

for tangles of brown caribou horn

I remember burning wolverine’s packsack

   to bring the sky down

fires were burning up the land

too many years have gone by

     my academic career

         the rest of your days

now– empty

      a dull ache I

            cannot shake

I’ll never sit in your bright

   quiet living room watching you sew–

bright beads, patterns of flowers

  and stars, endless

     font of colours and patterns

spangling piles of uppers

empty– and still I cannot

            cry

Mida Donnessey, my Elder, mentor, friend, teacher, passed away at 90 on December 8.  I first met Mida and went out on the land with her in September 1997.  

On Dis-Location and Rootedness

Indigeneity implies rootedness, long connection to land/sea/place, since time immemorial. From this long term connection arises traditional knowledge, wisdom about the land, relations among beings, living in place.  I have spent much of my career learning from teachers whose knowledge has deep roots, is emplaced in the web of relationship between cultures and homelands, between people and lands and waters where their ancestors have dwelt in relationship.  I've been reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, and in one chapter she briefly explores the question of whether people can become indigenous. Upon reflection, she concludes that one cannot substitute will or desire for the depth of roots.  One cannot become Indigenous.

What relations then are possible for migrants? In this time most of the world's population has migrated from some imagined or real place of ancient origin, possibly through a long saga of  travels through many places.  Many of us are in some sense hybrid, partaking of multiple points of origin in other places, having no single original homeland.  Some of us continue to be travellers, and our relations with any particular land then is likely to be that of passing through....not a relationship of depth, located in place.  Others have fled homelands or situations of impossible repression, grinding poverty, or outright devastation and war.  The refugee problem...

Some of us had ancestors who participated in Settler Colonialism, arriving to lands which were not tabula rasa or terra nullius.   They arrived at lands which were occupied, homelands of original cultures with a long history of relationship to the lands seen by our ancestors as "empty" or "new".  If empty, that was likely due to the passage of disease before settlers or adventurers arrived at any particular place.  New only to our ancestors, not to the original inhabitants.  With a surety born of God given mandate, and concepts of personhood limited not only to our own species, but even to the specific cultures from which they came, our ancestors elbowed their way onto the land, making homes, transforming the land to support the visions of relationship which came from their European agrarian origins.  They cleared forests, created cities, made canals, polluted rivers, mined minerals.....and believed that the alterations in the land, landscape, web of life represented "progress", instantiated the arrival and propagation of "civilization". Some of us have ancestors who have been in our colonized nations for centuries.  I had ancestors who came on the Mayflower, and the most recent European migrants in my family migrated from Scotland in the 1830s.  We have national narratives, now becoming subtly displaced, of the growth of nationhood, of brave pioneers, of the founding of cities, and of institutions of culture and political entities.  In this most recent period, an unease is growing....a double vision of bravery and devastation, of enlightenment and subjugation.    The excesses of the model of "civilizing" the land led to massive ecological changes in forests, in prairies, for productive estuaries and rivers.  A litany of ecological change, based in the shift of inter-species interactions from relationships to economies and commoditization of components of ecological systems.  In scientific circles, the conception of the land, or other entities that dwell there as subjects, as persons rather than inanimate objects, resources to be used or not as we will---cannot be entertained.  Yet this objectification of the land and the web of life which comprises its living subjects is what enables the massive transformation of the land.

Of course there is reaction by the thoughtful, poetic and philosophical among us, rooted also in the romantic notions of Nature and the polar opposite to the profaned world of urban places and the obvious dirt and filth of 19th century industry....Scottish Miller John Muir founded the Sierra Club in thelate 19th century in reaction to mining and grazing in the Sierra Nevada.  The destructiveness of these practices to the beauty and ecological integrity of the Sierra was evident.  But the role of the Sierra Miwok and other nations in creating the "natural" beauty of the Sierra through their relationship to land was somehow invisible.  At this point in time, many of us seek to "preserve wilderness" and revere "nature".  We may claim ally-ship with Indigenous Stewards (but the  relationship with land is theirs, not ours- I would argue we can at best be "fellow travellers"). Or we may seek to form our own relationships with the land.  And yet while personally meaningful, we cannot claim the depth of relationship, the web of respectful relationship amonggroups over deep time, that comprises Indigenous relationship with the Land.  I would echo Robin Wall Kimmerer: we the migrants cannot become  Indigenous.

 I realize I am Dis-Located.  I have no homeland, though such a relationship is something for which I yearn.  In my own personal history, I don't even have a home town.  My parents moved frequently during my childhood, in various places in North America, and also in Japan and Hawai'i.  When I was in University I added  Mexico and Britain to the places I had lived. In the same way that I sought grandparenting and valued my relations with Elder teachers, I also sought relationship with land.  My then husband and I spent three months on the land on the Oregon -California border in the early 1970s, building a lean-to shelter, cooking over a fire, and– learning all of the plants in that diverse forested landscape of the Siskiyou's .  Learning the way the phases of the moon interact with the height of its passage across the sky.  Observing meteors, pond lilies, and rough skinned newts. It was hard to go back to the City after that. We went to British Columbia to live in a Doukhobor cabin in the West Kootenays, Back-to-the-land-ers, seeking to reclaim the esoteric rural skills of our ancestors.  Cooking with a wood stove.  Getting our water from a spring with buckets. Procuring firewood. Learning (again) all of the plants I could, even the mosses.  Observing animals and learning about tracks. We were hooked.  More than citizens of any nation, I felt like a citizen of the Western North American Bioregion.

There was still a missing piece, however.  We had never lived any place with a substantial population of Original Inhabitants in the US or Canada.  The echoes of the former presence of Indigenous peoples could be seen in oddly spelled names, in stories of removal, in re-tellings of histories or legends.  But not in living relationship with Land. 

More than 40 years ago, when I was pregnant with my daughter, we took a trip to the northwestern corner of British Columbia, and spent a month canoeing on a lake known in English as Morice Lake.  A deep finger lake, extending from the interior Sub Boreal Spruce forest into the heart of the Coast Mountains, at lake level (some 2500 feet) making the transition from interior forests to the Mountain Hemlock Zone, higher elevation coast forest types.  There were no present inhabitants of the lake and its environs.  There was no logging, and no roads.  We saw only one person in the nearly 4 weeks we were there.  Again, we delved deeply into the nature of the place, both from a standpoint of scientific ecology, and a more poetic personal level.  We sought to embrace this powerful place with all of the abilities we possessed. 

The one person we met turned out to be the key to a new job for my ex, and a new home for us.  And now we lived in a land with Original Inhabitants. Still in Place.  My then-husband Allen taught in the Aboriginal Studies Program at Northwest College in Terrace.  He taught biology and environmental studies to First Nations people, including Elders, as well as local undergraduates of various origins.  We began to learn about Indigenous perspectives on Land.

I shared skills in pressing plants with the Aboriginal Studies students.  They shared what they knew of uses of the plants.  I went out on the land with one student, and carried out my maiden research in ethnobotany.  She told me uses.  I collected plants and wrote notes. 

Eventually we moved upriver to Cedarvale.  Once again, I sought to learn all of the plants,observed and made notes on the animals we saw.  We travelled on the land.  But now we knew First Nations people.  I took a Gitxsan class at the local school.  I began to want to know- what do people need to know to live on this land?  I began to see the land as history, as story, as resource patches (owned and cared for within the local social structure, the local laws).  And I began to see that my relationship to Place, however deep and meaningful to me, was qualitatively different than that of my Gitksan and Witsuwit'en teachers, friends, and colleagues.  They had an entitlement that I did not.

With my Gitxsan colleague I began to record Gitxsan ethnobotany.  I learned from Elders and teachers, and recorded what they shared to help to preserve knowledge, and, though I hadn't really analysed this yet, to repatriate knowledge to help those torn from land and culture through Residential schools, and to their descendants.  To help to repair the holes in a social fabric, the transmission of knowledge, and relationship to the land itself  that the institutions of the Settler Colonial government hadcreated.  But my relationship to these teachings and this knowledge, imperfect and partial as it is, refracted through the lens of my natal language and culture, is at best custodial.  These interactions, this knowledge, experiences on the land, have changed me, but still  I cannot claim Indigeneity, become truly rooted.  It is in a deep sense not my place, not my history. 

The Gitxsan and Witsuwit'en, like other Indigenous peoples, have deep and complex stories, histories, that relate to their homelands, their laws, the truth of the world.  This history engenders, and grows out of rootedness.  When we first moved onto Gitxsan territory, we learned that people disparagingly referred to us newcomers at "DP's", displaced persons.  A designation that is stingingly accurate, though I more often refer to our relationship as Dis-Located.

So if we cannot become Rooted, cannot aspire to achieve Indigeneity, what is possible?  There is no doubt that many "White" people have a deep reverence for the land, for its beauty, for its biodiversity, for its iconic animals and birds. Many people speak glowingly (but vaguely) about "Nature" and the restorative powers of being "in Nature". For those of us who have deep and spiritually grounded love of the Land, is finding a Home possible?  Kimmerer makes the analogy that, if we cannot become Indigenous, we may be able to become Naturalized, like a plant from elsewhere that finds a spot in the local web of life to become a regular part of the living community.  Perhaps that is as good as it gets.  I feel that knowing and acknowledging, respecting, the original human inhabitants is a key step.  Acknowledgement and respect yes, but not usurpation.  Respect is key.  And humility.  Perhaps in this way we can earn a spot in the garden.

Those fleeing war and oppression, refugees, face a double challenge, of finding a home in the social fabric of contemporary Canada (or the US), and learning to be comfortable with climate, vegetation, landscape vastly different from that of their country of origin.  Truly refuegees have been transplanted into very different environments from those from they came.  Challenges exist in learning new species and environmental values both.  And further to both of these, to be aware of and respectful of the Original Inhabitants and their relationship to the Land.

On the Sacredness of preparing food

This time of year is harvest time.  In the old Celtic calendar it was Lamas or Lunasagh.  I spent today processing beautiful organic peaches, a ritual I have undertaken for more than 40 years.  Beautiful fragrant peaches, rosy in colour and floral in scent.

The day was warm, but anticipating the heat and moisture of canning, I cut up and fried an organic chicken yesterday-- soul food for my Missouri ancestors. NOT batter fried. Lightly dredged in seasoned flour (gluten free for me).  When I visited my Great Aunt with my then new husband in 1973, fried chicken was what Aunt Estelle fed us when she welcomed us into her house.
Cold fried chicken is a perfect meal on a hot day. Slipping the skins on the peaches, gently stripping away the outside, leaving a heavy slick globe cradled in my hands- reminded me surprisingly of delivering a baby. [Don't drop it as it squirts into your waiting hands!] Red havens- my favourite peach variety. The first time I canned red havens they were from Creston BC, and I was pregnant with my daughter.  We canned peaches before moving from Sproule Creek to northwest BC, and brought our canning with us.  Now I buy them by the case from the growers at the Old Strathcona Farmers Market in Edmonton. I give away a lot of what I can.  A gift of peaches is like a gift of sunshine that you can eat.  It is a gift that makes sense to my Elders and First Nation friends in Northwest BC.  A gift of the work of hands.
Today I also thought of putting up fish in the smoke house, another intensive focus of seasonal food preparation.  On the Skeena and Bulkeley Rivers (aka Xsan and Widzinkwe) it is sockeye or spring salmon in the fish camps and smokehouses- deep orange flesh falling away from sharp blades wielded by skilled hands. ts'el.  If half smoked, not enough to keep without canning or freezing, the resulting fish is called ts'el.  To make fully smoked you have to leave it in the smokehouse, in cool smoke, to finish drying. (The extra thickness is removed through a thinning process to make the highly valued and delicious strips huuks, which are threaded on clean sticks to be smoked into salmon jerky). When you do the same process with a spring salmon (aka chinook), the result is like a small pink blanket thrown over the pole in the smokehouse.  They are BIG. I watched a Tahltan lady in Glenora on the Stikine River doing this once.  It was impressive.

spring salmon hanging to fully dry ASG photo 1984

The process of smoking salmon here involves opening out the fish like a blanket, scoring to- but not through- the skin.  There are special boards shaped like a peaked wooden roof on a sawhorse to accomplish this. In Gitxsan the process is
On the Mackenzie and Peel Rivers, the fish we worked with in fish camps were coneys (inconnu or sheefish (Stenodus leucichthys ), broad whitefish and crooked back, a second smaller whitefish species. The approach to cutting and drying was quite different, but the reverence for the gift of food was the same. And the beautiful skill of hands and knives creating valued food was also the same. Fish are air dried first, with care taken to discourage hungry gulls from snacking, and then smoke dried in a smokehouse. 

fish air drying at Tree River Fish camp, August 2000

The resulting dryfish is golden toned and utterly delicious.
On the Skeena, the unused parts of the fish must be returned to the water, or burned in the fire.  On the Mackenzie and Peel Rivers, the guts and trimmings are spread out on the sandbar for the gulls to eat.  The gulls are thanked for cleaning the land, and are welcomed. Tidigeh. For my peaches, and the local apricots I spent the past week turning into preserves, unusable parts are returned to the earth via my compost.
In all of these cases, the process, the goal, is the same: taking the gifts of the season, of the Earth, and putting them up to sustain family and friends, to feed the people. A ritual of enacting thanks, and perpetuating relationship. Prayer in motion.

On Fireweed

Last week I was working in my garden.  The patch of Canada violets was lush and green, covered with white violets.  Young fireweed stalks were coming up in a clump along the path from the gate.  They are spreading, as are the ostrich ferns, making the land their own.  I picked a tender young stalk, stripped off the leaves and peeled the cortex off to eat the soft green inner stem. Taste of spring.  Taste of locale.  Very local.  From my 10 by 40m urban yard.  Made me think back to Verly Nelson teaching me to eat fireweed on a walk nearly 40 years ago to the Kitamaat reserve on the delta of the Kitimat River in northwestern British Columbia. I found that properly peeled young fireweed stalk reminds me of raw kohlrabi, or broccoli stems.  The very young tender tops can also be cooked and eaten as a potherb; we used to combine them with tender dandelion leaves, nodding onion and, if we were lucky, morel mushroons when I lived on the Skeena near Cedarvale.

  Fireweed (Chamaerion angustifolium) has many uses.  Its magenta blossoms brighten large expanses of cut over land and burnt forest and is a great source of nectar for bees. It is circumpolar; in the British Isles it goes by the moniker "willow herb" and in Ireland, Blooming Sally.  Fireweed honey is delicious, white and a touch acidic. I used to melt honey on the wood stove to put on whole wheat sourdough pancakes a long time ago when I lived in little off-grid cabins in the Kootenays in southeastern BC. Before my daughter Rose was born. Before I moved to Gitxsan Territory in northwest BC.  Fireweed is the territorial flower of the Yukon, and one of the four Clans of the Gitxsan, the Gisga'ast.   Its image is rendered in crests and artwork.  The Gil haast, the single fireweed, is described in the migrations of  chronicled by the late Walter Wright, from Kitselas in the slender volume called Men of Medeek (Wil Robinson, 1966, Sentinel Press, Kitimat BC) The Gitxsan used to take the marrow of somewhat older fireweed stalks and use it as a binder in their table sized fruit leathers, aka berry cakes, most typically made from black huckleberry (Vaccinium membranaceum) known in Gitxsanimx as Sim M'aay, the "real" berry.  Other fruits also could be made into berry cakes, including red elder berry.  The small seedy red berries of bunch berry (Cornus canadensis)  sgan gapgoyp were an alternate source of thickening.  The late Olive Ryan, Gwans, told wonderful stories of berry camp in the subalpine on the mountain known as Steykooden, behind Gitsegukla.  People picked for a couple of weeks, and then the berries were boiled in large bentwood boxes covered with woven cedarbark mats. Rocks were heated in a fire and then dropped in to the box of berries until the liquid began to boil.  When the fruit was cooked, it was ladled onto cedar splint berry racks (skeexsin) covered by skunk cabbage leaves ["like Indian wax paper"] or layered thimble berry leaves to prevent leakage. (see Johnson 1997 Plants, Land and People, Gitksan Ethnobotany, PhD Dissertation, University of Alberta) for more detail of Olive's story and Gathering what the Great Nature Provided, People of Ksan, 1980, for more about cooking berries and making berry cakes).

The fireweed can also provide cordage suitable for fish nets and other uses.  Mrs. Harriet Hudson, Tsimshian from Kitselas, told Indigenous ethnographer William Beynon about the discovery of the use of nettle fibre to make fish nets in 1948 (narrative number 29 in Tsimshian Narratives volume 1, edited by Cove and MacDonald, published by the Canadian Museum of Civilization  in the 1987).  Incidentally, when describing how to process the nettle fibre, she mentioned that fireweed stalks could also provide a suitable string.  Harlan Smith's Gitxsan consultants from Gitwangak in the 1920's also mentioned how to make this string (Ethnobotany of the Gitksan Indians of British Columbia, edited by Compton, Rigsby and Tarpent, Canadian Museum of Civilization 1997).  Both nettle (Urtica dioica) and fireweed fibres are bast fibres, like the flax fibre (from Linum usitatissimum) that is used to make linen. Similarly, the mature stalks must be retted, that is, they must decompose just enough that it is possible to separate the fibres from both the papery cortex and the woody vascular cylinder.  To little, the fibres break with the brittle vascular tissue.  Too much, the fibres break because they are rotted.  I have tried this myself, and finger twined quite reasonable two ply cord of a pleasing reddish brown tone.
I find it comforting to have fireweed appear in my urban yard in central Alberta. A reminder of wilder and more northern places I've lived and travelled.

Another spring (I guess) in the era of chaotic climate

my Edmonton yard, April 23

Another spring.  I guess.  In the era of chaotic climate.  My last blog post was April 16 of last year, with a comment two weeks later on the McMurray fire.  I talked about dandelions, and wild blue violets, then about my concerns for a dry summer. This year....I'm looking at a sodden blanket of very wet spring snow.  For the third time in April, a couple of warm days and the snow finally off....followed by grey, drizzle, rain and sleet and finally a new blanket of wet snow covering everything.  In February the weather was lovely- +12 or so, the snow melting fast, sunny.  Then March brought a return to snow/thaw cycles.  Oscillations of temperature and precipitation.  The manitoba maples are poised to open their flowers...but keep getting snowed on.  The aspens tassled already several weeks ago, and the hazel flowers, tiny crimson fringed stars, were already opening.  Now LONG grey and white days.  It is nearly May Day, but no green is to be seen around the fresh blanket of white. The past few years have seemed to feature rapid temperature oscillations throughout the entire year.  Literally, if you don't like the weather, wait a minute.  Core-less winters and summers both.  What seems evident in lived experience is the utter lack of predictability.  This winter, and last, cross-country skiing was poor, sporadically available.  New snow followed by a melt and thaw, then cold temperatures with no snow.  You can't ski on ice.  In February it literally felt like spring this winter and last.  February, traditionally the heart of winter in this northern prairie climate.  This year we had snow on Thanksgiving (early October in Canada) but then barely had snow for Christmas.
The lack of predictability, of melts and hard freezes, has ramifications.  In the North, caribou (and reindeer) have trouble feeding when a midwinter followed by a hard freeze created a layer of ice they can't paw through to find lichens.  River ice, crucial for winter transport in the Canadian north, freezes late and has to be artificially thickened to enable motorized transportation across rivers, as crossing the Dempster Highway at Tsiigehtchic.  Warmer climate can cause heavier snowfalls in some places as well, as warmer air holds more moisture than cold.  Plants can flower too soon, fooled by anomalously warm weather, and then young fruit can freeze in later cold.  Chronic stress can cause trees and shrubs to be more susceptible to fungi and to insect attack.  Pathogenic fungi, and insect pests may increase their range, no longer being killed off by prolonged winter cold snaps.  This is the mountain pine beetle story, pushing widespread change in forest composition across British Columbia and elsewhere in the mountain west. 
It's never as simple as "climatic warming". We experience shifts in weather, and in frequency of different weather events.  On a recent trip to the US, I noted that weather reports featured maps showing occurance of "extreme weather".  This was new for me....but not really surprising, as the "atmospheric rivers" are bringing massive amounts of rain, and flooding, to definitively end California's multi-year severe drought. Rainfall and flooding have reached records in some areas not surpassed in the period of recordkeeping
But climate warming, the aggregate of all of the intensified fluctuations, does drive larger changes, melting of permafrost, increasing aridity, changes in range distributions of everything from algae to trees, and of animals species as well. Pacific salmon are appearing in the Arctic, running up the Mackenzie system at the same time as sockeye numbers are diminishing in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.  Probably small rises in mid Ocean temperatures, and in the temperature of the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean are responsible.
Yesterday was Earth Day. Blessings to our planet and may it continue to sustain (and tolerate ??) us.  Yesterday thousands of scientists and concerned citizens marched for the defense of science, which has been under attack by the climate-denying regime in Washington.  I never imagined I would read of thousands and thousands of scientists and supporters marching [having to march] to underscore the value of science to humanity, to bring the necessity of good science to the public....in part because key segments of the US do not want the inconvenience of having to make significant changes to limit the impacts of our species, and [try to] retain the state of the planet in a pattern that can sustain our own well-being. They would prefer to deny that human action, that business-as-usual, could be causing serious, and likely irreversible, changes to global climate. 
The short-sightedness of the President's pro-coal efforts, at the point when coal use is already declining world-wide, is a small piece of evidence of the self-defeating and unwise courses of action prompted by short-term economic perspectives in reaction to the challenges of actually dealing with ameliorating climate change.  I have deep sympathy for the dislocation of traditional ways of life and can understand the frustration of those from coal mining regions. But a more pro-active response through economic diversification would be a better response than to promote a short lived extension of coal economy, with the inevitable impacts of these last paroxysms of mining on these already much altered landscapes.
We are in uncharted waters.  Our numbers, and our impacts on our home planet are unprecedented.  People argue that our influence on Earth processes is so great that we are actually in a new geologic epoch, the Anthroposcene. (My ex-husband, in a moment of disparagement some twenty two years agocalled it the Obscene some twenty years ago). Climate change and other forms environmental change proceed at global scales. The chemistry of both oceans and atmosphere are changing in response to our activities. We also live in an age of unprecedented communication and interconnection.  People form virtual communities of continental, or even global reach. New modes of communication offer hope as well as threat as we can find those of like mind all over the world, and can promote our diverse messages far beyond the reach of our individual communities.  Chillingly, they can also create echo chambers so we hear only the voices of those with whom we agree, thus polarizing our very senses of reality.  Alt facts are lies.... but depending on where you stand, which is the "alt"? Does truth even exist in a "post-truth century"?  I would argue yes it does. Events like the Oroville Dam flood in California a few weeks ago did happen, even while their causes might be argued.  The March for Science speaks to the necessity of knowing as much as we can, in a dispassionate way, to try to make good decisions for our collective future.

wild roses

I walk with wild roses through the green
while the crystal globes of the dandelions shed their seeds on the wind
the birds dance in the air above the lapping stream
and the rustle of the poplar leaves is threaded with birdsong

The wild roses are blooming in the ravine, sweet heady scent.  After the rain, the ground is soft and dark, and the green burgeoning.  Most things have recovered now from early heat and drought, though it looks like there will be no hazelnuts this year.  The creek flooded from the heavy rains in the past two weeks and the lower trail is sticky with thick mud and logs drifted across the path.

I always think of my mother at this time of year.  The wild roses bloom around her birthday, June 6.  Things are a bit early this year....I saw three yellow warblers, like impossibly bright moving flowers, dart among the green leaves as I walked, a blast of complex interwoven trajectories, like celtic knotwork in motion– then gone from sight.

Seasons. Connections. Memories.

Raining

Raining.  The whole day cool and grey, welcome blessed rain soaking the parched ground.  After the heat and dry, cool and wet.  Made channa curry tonight....made me think back to days long ago, living in a little bush cabin, cooking our dried garbanzos with spices and our home-canned tomatoes, gathering 'wild ginger' root (Asarum caudatum) to use in place of the store-bought ginger we didn't have.  Washed down with home-made green tomato chutney.  Nice to be home, quiet, in the house.  A moment's solitude.  Tonight I used store-bought ginger from my local natural food store, and a garam masala that I bought rather than mixed myself.  And I made a wonderful eggplant curry with little Indian eggplants I bought down in "Little India" in Millwoods, the Indo-Canadian community at the southeast corner of Edmonton.  I was trying to replicate something I've recently had at an Indian restaurant buffet....first time I've seen these little egg-shaped eggplants for sale....so I had to try some.  I had to interpolate between my friend Sigrid Shepard's recipe, one I found on the web, and my memory of the dish I'd eaten; none of the recipes did quite what I wanted.  However I worked it out, the result was delicious, and will serve for tomorrow's lunch as well.
Glad as I am the rains have come, this unnaturally early year still speaks strongly to global climate change.  Apparently this year is on the way to being the warmest on record.  I've read that in fact this is the 11th month in a row that is a record warm year planet wide.  No surprise that the boreal forest around Fort McMurray has burned- more than 450,000hectares to date.  Yesterday, before it began to rain, the wind shifted and the smoke was so thick it was as nearly as bad as I experienced 10 m from a major forest fire near Tsiigehtchic in August of 1999.  And that fire was 12 km from where I was.  This- hundreds.  Air quality went from three to 7 to 10 (top of the scale) in a few hours here in Edmonton.  Then the forcast rain began to fall.  We've had no rain of consequence til now in more than a month.  The soil surface yesterday was dry as powder walking in the ravine.  Dust bowl days come again.
Tipping points.  My ex used to call the current time period the Ob-scene (coming after the Holocene, completely recent, the time after the ice left in the Pleistocene).  It is now fashionable to call this the Anthropocene.  I dragged my feet a bit on the new term....but the more I think about accelerating species extinctions, ocean acidification, being poised to loose the whole suite of Arctic fauna, an entire ecosystem, with the probable complete loss of permanent sea ice.....much more than the iconic Polar bear....3/4 of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia suffering substantial coral bleaching.....and I think, hmm.  Yes this kind of faunal overturn, changes in ocean chemistry, temperature shifts....yes they do seem to rival big dramatic changes in Earth History, in the paleaontological record.
And I've read that this year is already 1.5 °C above the long term mean of the 20th century....Paris sets us to try to limit change to that level over the next 65 years.....a strong El Niño, yes.  But something beyond.  Anthropogenic, yes.  So the Anthropocene is here. And we are all complicit, caught in a way of life that requires gulping energy to subsidize everything about our current globally connected urbanized lives.  Whether we drive a hybrid or put solar panels on our roof, or poo-poo the whole thing and use our wealth to maintain our current comforts,  we are all complicit.  And having caught this iconic tiger by the toe....how then do we, can we, let go?  Where do we fit all of our other values against this one BIG problem?  Future discounting is so characteristic of our species, and so tempting....putting off the problem for the grandchildren to cope with, or at least until tomorrow, or next year, or....
I live in what passes for a heritage house in Edmonton, 95 years old, made of beautiful clear timber from BC's lower mainland.  I honour my house, and the lives of the trees it took to make it.  I honour its history.  But where then do I fit energy efficiency?  Because of the cold weather today, I have the (gas powered) heat on, in late May....the walls are insulated with sawdust; there are some voids at the top of the walls, as the sawdust has settled with time.  Should I be ripping up my walls to insulate more heavily?  I work at home, so the commute doesn't consume energy (I walk across the hall), but I do travel for work, conferences, research....and put 5 to 10,000 km per year on vehicles for that purpose, and several lengthy air flights.  I also do not ride my bike for errands all through the winter, but use my car....so we are all complicit.
As the day slowly darkens into night, I wonder what will happen with the Alberta economy in the wake of both an oil price down-turn and the destruction of infrastructure and homes in the vicinity of Fort McMurray?  Sobering choices.  At least the rain may the fires and check their explosive growth.  For now. And there were several other large fires in Northern Alberta, and elsewhere, this unnaturally early spring which have sparked (so to speak) more evacuations.