Of (Universal) Nature, (Ethno)Ecology and (the) Environment

Rocher de Boule and Bulkley River, May 1994
I’ve been thinking for some time about three terms: Nature, environment and ecology. My thinking on these words has been focussed of late by my efforts to work on two courses, an undergraduate course in Ecological anthropology and a graduate seminar in Environment, Traditional Cultures and Sustainability, and some of the reading I’ve been undertaking in preparation for that teaching, especially in Sutton and Anderson’s new edition of their text in Cultural Ecology, and in reading Anna Tsing’s Friction, an Ethnography of Global Connection. Last night I was reading a chapter on Nature Lovers in Indonesia which quite stretched my understanding in revealing ways.

This blog is entitled “Reflections on Nature, Culture and Society”. Obviously, I’ve been reflecting on meanings of the term “Nature” for quite a while. When I mention I’ve been for a walk in the ravine, many of my friends and acquaintances in Edmonton, a highly urban environment, talk about approvingly about being out in “Nature”- some undifferentiated, healing, restorative opposite to pavement, malls, the Internet, parking, job frustrations, indoor canned air and fluorescent-lit windowless rooms. This construal of my relationship with the Land and with Place and Season as “being in Nature” feels uncomfortable, not descriptive of how I see or understand the Land, or this land- a place with specificity, history, process, particularity, species composition, impacts, throughputs, human past (and present), subject to the management of the departments of the City of Edmonton. How natural, after all, is it? It does feature seasonal cycles of growth, flowering, fruiting, and quiescence, return and nesting of birds, the quiet twitter of chickadees and the buzzing group aeriobatics of fast moving flocks of Bohemian waxwings. It does allow some respite from urban light pollution, and therefore a chance to feel the phases of the moon, view stars dimmer than the brightest 1st magnitude stars like Sirius. It does facilitate noticing the differences in rising and setting and zenith positions of the sun through the seasonal round, significant differences at 53.5 degrees north latitude. But is it Nature? What is Nature?

When I used to think in terms of Nature rather than the land, I meant unspoiled places, with inspiring prospects, undammed waterways, towering forests, displays of indigenous wild flowers and beautiful flowering shrubs. I thought of Yosemite (minus the people) as perhaps John Muir first encountered it, I thought of the magnificence of the winter Sonoran desert in the Kofa Game Range as I once experienced it, camping among the red wind-sculpted rocks and drinking from tinajas crusted with ice. I thought of sea cliffs and sea stacks and crashing waves, seals and perhaps migrating whales off the shore. I thought of the admonition to visitors to “Wilderness Areas” (a designated wilderness is by definition an oxymoron, but when I was young and lived in California, the irony eluded me): take only pictures, leave only footprints. Take pictures I did, and leave footprints too. And decry trail bike and snowmobile users, dams, cross country power lines, second home developments, luxury lodges, logging cuts and like as desecrators and desecrations. (Somehow the signs and the trails did not strike me as inappropriate). I thought of the splendid images produced by Ansel Adams and Galen Rowell, collected into annual feasts of the visual, aesthetic and between the lines spiritual in the guise of the Sierra Club Calendar (which I still buy and revel in). I admired Aldo Leopold, Bob Marshall, Adolf and Olaus Murie, John Muir and read their books. I read John Wesley Powell, and his more recent and embittered admirer, Edward Abbee. I got wildflower books for new regions I visited, brought the Field Guide to Animal Tracks with me when I travelled in the back country, carried my binoculars and my fieldbook, and wrote poetry and sketched peaks and lakes and shorelines and trees. I remembered my childhood in Japan, when we made annual pilgrimages to the mountains north of Tokyo around Nikko, the precipitous slopes, pink and purple of azaleas in bloom, or scarlet leaves in fall, the ethereal lacy cascades and sheer waterfalls, a shrine on the shores of Lake Chusenji which framed Mt. Nantai-san. Mountains in their natural state as worthy of reverence, as sacred place.

But there was another strand of my Nature loving which derived perhaps from the time I came of age- I wanted to be in nature, to be at home, to belong. I admired the survival skills of Bob Marshall as well as his appreciation of wilderness (his vision inspired the designation of natural areas as Wilderness Areas ). I wanted to know the names and uses of plants. I bought books on edible plants. I tasted things and quickly learned how much you need to know to actually make a living on the land. We (my future husband Allen and I) spent our first summer together living in a lean- to at about 5000’ elevation in the Siskiyou Mountains, in a defacto wilderness, a roadless area with several tall mountain peaks, meadows, alpine areas, and the most diverse coniferous forest in North America- or maybe it was the world. There were I think 17 genera of conifers there, and a number of species. The southernmost locality of Alaska Yellow Cedar was just above our camp, and numerous species of pines, endemic Brewer’s spruce, fir, douglas fir, Port Orford Cedar, red cedar, incense cedar and others were easily accessible from our camp. I set about learning all the vascular plants I could, and recording observations of birds and animals. I tried to find edible plants with Donald Kirk’s Edible Plants of the Western United States. I began to have respect for the amount of knowledge it really takes to survive. Had I known, we were camped in a meadow that was abundant with a food plant used by Native Americans of the region, Peridaridia gardneri or yampa. I think I tasted a root, but had no concept of how to prepare or harvest it. I also tasted the rhizomes of the yellow pond lily Nuphar polysepalum and found them highly unpalatable. They were said to be an important food of the Modoc of northeastern California. If so, they knew something about preparation that I don’t know. More recently I have found that this rhizome is highly regarded as a medicine against tuberculosis and topically for fractures (see Gottesfeld and Anderson 1988 and Johnson 2006) a use that seems more consistent with their strong bitter taste.

I digress. But the point I want to make is that I was coming to have a view of nature which implied taking more than pictures, and to have a sense of the particularity and richness of interacting with land. With a particular area of land and its biota, its affordances. That led me on a long journey from a universal and unpopulated Nature to an appreciation of the local, of emplacement, of homelands. The relationship with the land that Tim Ingold refers to as dwelling. And thence to a long fascination with traditional knowledge and ethnoecological perspectives. Some of the story of that transformation is detailed in other writings, including my recent book Trail of Story, Traveller’s Path (AU Press 2010) so I won’t repeat it here.

Having spent a long time moving away from this impersonal and universal Nature, this arena of beauty and encounter of the Self by removal from society, and direct grappling with the challenges of the non-social world, to an appreciation of the subtlety and skill and particularity of knowledge of homelands and how to live in them, I was unprepared for the phenomenon of Indonesian Nature Lovers as described by Tsing in her 2005 book.

Tsing carefully describes how Indonesian youth are trained in how to regard Nature, and are deliberately trained in cosmopolitan skills like backpacking, rafting, and mountain climbing, enculturated in a peculiarly Indonesian cosmopolitanism in their adoption of values of universal Nature, and love of Nature divorced from particularity of place, skills in making a living or any continuity with local tradition. They wear flannel shirts and hiking boots, and use Western style outdoor equipment as accoutrements of the identity as a Nature Lover. They even bring guitars and sing (European and North American style) folk songs, in English, as part of their camping and Nature Loving activities. Tsing delicately teases out continuities to the Indonesian Youth movement, carefully apolitical but nationalistic during the New Order under President Suharto. She shows how, in contrast to similar seeming movements supporting outdoor recreation in North America with which I am familiar, camping is not a family activity. And unlike North American or European environmentalism, once women marry and have children, they stop being active Nature Lovers. Instead the Nature Lover identity shows continuity with a phase of youth exploration before settling down to serious family life and responsibilities of making a living which characterized pre-existing culture. New waves of Nature Lovers come up through the schools and Universities. They learn to regard the local peoples where they travel as quaint and picturesque as they separate themselves from any conception of connection to the land as homeland or the site of livelihood.

I found this form of Nature Loving a peculiar mix of the familiar and deeply different. How often do similar external forms mask deep, even perhaps incommensurable differences underneath? These thoughts crossed my mind as I walked through one of the branch temples of Nature Loving in Canada: the Edmonton store of Mountain Equipment Coop, MEC. Ethnographic examination of Nature Lovers also calls to mind Kay Milton’s seminal book Loving Nature, which focusses on the concerns and values of British environmentalists.

And what is “environment”? When I went looking for discussions of the term to prepare an introduction for a course…it seemed that everyone took the meaning of the term for granted. It appeared unproblematic. Environment is, well, what is around one. It encompasses the abiotic environment (rocks, water in its various forms, mountains sans the vegetation cover, dirt, sand, soil -leaving out of course the microbiota, the air, and derivative concepts like weather and climate) and the biotic environment (the complex agglomeration of living things of all sorts from microbes and pond scum to elephants to giant sequoias, rainforests and the like). “The environment” is subject to pollution, degradation. Terms like environmental quality come to mind. The environment is not us. It is outside us. Sutton and Anderson write:
The environment consists of the surroundings in which an organism interacts, a pretty broad definition. One of the problems in defining the environment is this breadth; it can be viewed as different things in different places and at different geographic or spatial levels or scales– a pond, a valley, a continent, the earth, the solar system or even the universe.


What of ecology? Although in the speech of many people today, ecology, or “the ecosystem” is used interchangeably with Nature and with “the environment,” for me “ecology” produces a somewhat different focus, a more scientific gaze on the one hand, and a focus on relationships, fluxes, processes. And on biodiversity, species richness.

A point to consider: an environmentalist is not equivalent to an ecologist. One advocates and one studies.

I was an undergraduate at Stanford during the first Earth Day. I had been studying ecology in several different ways, and was full of zeal to save the environment. I learned about “ecosystems” from EN Kormondy, and from Eugene Odum’s classic works. I read Rachel Carson. I was concerned about pesticides, contaminants, the impact of a growing human population. I was concerned about invasive species and conservation of native flora. No one had yet any inkling of global warming, so climate change was not on the agenda. I was groping toward concepts of process such as cycles of fire, but not yet there. I had not yet imagined ethnoecology, examining the traditional environmental knowledge and (arguably) sustainable ecological relations of local human groups. No one had yet coined the term “sustainability”; we were still more than a decade before the Brundtland Report.

Toward locality from the global. Toward cosmopolitan from the regional. North Americans going to Bali to experience the local, wear sarongs, batiks, experience Place. Indonesians in flannel shirts and hiking boots enacting cosmopolitan Nature.


Sources:
Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston, Cambridge, Mass. : Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Press.

Gottesfeld, Leslie Main Johnson and Beverley Anderson. 1988. Gitksan traditional medicine: herbs and healing. Journal of Ethnobiology 8(1):13-33.

Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment, Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. New York and London: Routledge.

Kirk, Donald R. 1970. Wild Edible Plants of the Western United States. Healdsburg: Naturegraph Publishers.

Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. London: Oxford University Press.

Johnson, Leslie Main. 2006. Gitksan Medicinal Plants–Cultural Choice and Efficacy. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 2:29 doi:10.1186/1 746-4269-2-29 Published 21 June.

Johnson, Leslie Main. 2010. Trail of Story, Traveller’s Path, Reflections on Ethnoecology and Landscape. Edmonton: AU Press.

Kormondy, E.I. 1969. Concepts of Ecology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall.

Milton, Kay. 2002. Loving Nature, Towards an Ecology of Emotion. London, New York: Routledge.

Muir, John. 1988 [1914] The Yosemite. Reprinted by Sierra Club Books, San Francisco.

Murie, Olaus J. 1954. A Field Guide to Animal Tracks. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Odum, Eugene 1971. Fundamentals of Ecology, 3rd Edition. Philadelphia: Saunders.

Sutton, Mark Q. and E.N. Anderson. 2010. Cultural Ecology. Second Edition. Lanham: AltaMira Press.

Toledo, Victor. 2002. Ethnoecology: A conceptual framework for the study of Indigenous Knowledge of Nature, pp. 511-522 In J. R. Stepp, F. S. Wyndam, and R. K. Zarger (eds.), Ethnobiology and Biocultural Diversity. Athens GA: International Society of Ethnobiology.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction, an Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

On Cranberries

Lowbush cranberry or lingonberry, Vaccinium vitis-idaea growing in moss under pine. Southern Yukon 2004.
A year ago I wrote more generally on the ethnobiology of Thanksgiving. Today I want to write about cranberries. Botanists have been somewhat indecisive about whether cranberries are, as it were, a red wetland-dwelling blueberry with a very tart flavour, or whether they should be segregated in a genus of their own, Oxycoccus (‘sour ball’) because of their trailing stems and vine life form, and their azalea like pink flowers which differ from the little heather urn-shaped flowers of blueberries, blaeberries, huckleberries, whortleberries, bilberries and their ilk. And of course their eponymous sour fruits, while blueberries are generally sweet when ripe. The cranberry of commerce is the large New England species designated Vaccinium macrocarpon if we take the position that “true” cranberries belong in the genus Vaccinium. This is the large tart berry associated with Thanksgiving sauces and jellies, and now ubiquitous in the form of jugs of sweetened cranberry juice and also common as dried sweetened cranberries. These cranberries find their native habitat in acidic wetlands, that is, in peat bogs. In the course of researching this blog I have learned that, although natural wetlands were formerly the sites of cranberry cultivation, now industrial cultivation involves stripping the fertile soil and leveling the future cranberry field, and surrounding it with dikes made of the topsoil, while placing acidic sand on the carefully leveled field. These diked fields are then managed in a manner reminiscent of rice paddies, being carefully flooded at specific times in the growth and harvest cycle of the fruit. I read that industrially produced cranberries are harvested by flooding the fields and sucking up the floating berries with huge mechanical harvesters. These fruits, often bruised, then are immediately processed into canned cranberry jelly or sauce or perhaps for juice. Apparently to get a quality that can be sold as unfrozen berries, you have to harvest the fruit dry, and humans run the machines that pick these higher quality berries, a mere 2 or 3% of the cranberry harvest. At some point in the past, there was a scare about pesticide contamination, so industrial growers are now very careful with the chemicals they apply.
Although a lot of commercial cranberries are no longer cultivated in wetlands, cultivation on the periphery of wetlands in soils naturally moist and acidic still occurs. This cultivation has the predictable effect of altering the hydrology of wetland areas, and can introduce chemical contamination from agricultural chemicals (e.g. nitrogen or pesticides) applied to the crop. As bogs are naturally highly oligotrophic (low in nutrients) this can cause decline in native bog species on the periphery of the cultivated area and invasion of weedy species, threatening unique bog ecosystems. Not to mention the decline of biodiversity in the cultivated plots themselves. Cranberry cultivation has been one of the threats to Burns Bog, a large peatland wetland area on the Fraser River Delta in British Columbia which exists in the midst of extensive urban and cultivated agricultural landscapes. This site is highly revered for its wildland bog habitat and recreation potential within the Lower Mainland, but has also been threatened with a number of schemes for its transformation or elimination, from housing developments to landfills, and its sensitive hydrology is threatened by various proposed dikes and drainage ditches. I recall learning about the environmental risks of the commercial cultivation when I still lived in BC, and there was concern about contamination with agricultural chemicals. This led me to try to buy organic cranberry products whenever possible.
What makes a cranberry? The classic cranberries of bogs (Vaccinium macrocarpon, V. palustris, V. oxycoccus) are viney evergreen members of the heath family living in peatlands, and which have persistent tart red fruits that develop from lovely spreading pink flowers. In northwestern North America we would call these “bog cranberries” and our local species has much smaller leaves and fruits than the classic cranberry of commerce, and is much lower in productivity. The taste is the same. And we also have what we would call “low bush cranberry”, which I have also seen rendered as “mountain cranberry”. This is Vaccinium vitis-idaea, the “blueberry” ‘grapevine of Mt. Ida’, also a low growing, but not viney, member of the genus Vaccinium with glossy evergreen leaves, usually growing in moss…but here the feather moss of spruce or pine stands, not usually of sphagnum bogs….which has small tart red fruits that taste like cranberries. These develop from classic heather family urn shaped flowers of white or very pale pink. In Scandinavia, where they are revered, they are lingonberries, and a national food of Sweden. When I have the opportunity, these are what I pick during late summer fieldwork to freeze for my Thanksgiving cranberry sauce. Alas, not only was it a poor berry year this past summer, I left the Yukon too early, before the cranberries were even minimally ripe. So it will be purchased V. macrocarpon for me this year.
Cranberries (aka lingonberries) are one of the most important fruits for northern Athapaskans. For Gwich’in in the Mackenzie Delta region of the Northwest Territories there are “yellowberries” nakal (Rubus chamaemorus, the cloudberry) a golden bog dwelling raspberry, blueberries (Vaccinium uliginosum, the bog blueberry) and cranberries. Cranberries last the longest, keep the best, and can be harvested in larger amounts. In the boreal forests of the southern Yukon, Kaska love cranberries too. They are called itl’et in Kaska, and people pick and freeze relatively large amounts. Cranberries can be eaten in the spring after they thaw. Anore Jones quotes a poignant tale of death and survival of a Yupiq woman in her “Plants that we eat” (1986 Maniilaq Association). A woman who was widowed and travelling alone with two small children managed to survive on sparse spring cranberries. One of her two children also made it. This was the grandmother of one of the elders Jones worked with in the 1980’s.
Cranberries are good for more than survival. A Kaska elder friend said she treated her husband’s urinary tract infection by feeding him cranberries. Contemporary herbal medicine also suggests cranberry juice, or cranberry capsules, for prevention of urinary tract infections or chronic cystitis. Cranberries, along with blueberries, apparently contain lots of anti-oxidants, considered to be cancer preventative through combination with free radicals. I buy cranberry capsules at my local organic food store which I take faithfully to prevent cystitis.
The Wikipedia article on “cranberry” mentions that some species of Viburnum are also called “cranberry”, which they consider erroneous. No, merely ethnobotanical…fruits of various species of Viburnum, locally V. edule and V. trilobata have red fruit that ripens in the fall and it is the gustatory quality of astringence, sour and a bit bitter, which makes them “cranberry”, not their botanical affiliation (they are in the Caprifoliaceae or honeysuckle family, and grow on tall woody bushes). Though they have large flat white seeds which make the fruit dissimilar to “real” cranberries to eat, they make a fine sauce or jelly. They lack the large amount of pectin of true cranberries, so the sauce is runny…but delicious. I wrote last fall on highbush cranberries (aka the Viburnums). I’ve been snacking on them as I walk in the ravine by my house. I’ll close now and wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving, and hope they are enjoying cranberries in one way or another to mark the holiday.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranberry
http://peterwood.ca/res/research/burnsbog/Burns%20Bog%20Protection%20Values%20and%20Management%20Options.htm
Jones, Anore. 1983. Nauriat Nigiñaqtuat, Plants That We Eat. Kotzebue, Alaska: Maniilaq Association.

other sources which discuss cranberries:
Parlee, Brenda, Fikret Berkes and Teet'it Gwich'in Renewable Resource Council. 2006. Indigenous Knowledge of Ecological Variability and Commons Management: A Case Study on Berry Harvesting from Northern Canada. Human Ecology 34(4):515-528.
Andre, Alestine and Alan Fehr. 2001. Gwich’in Ethnobotany, Plants used by the Gwich’in for Food, Medicine, Shelter and Tools. Inuvik: Gwich’in Social and Cultural Institute and Aurora Research Institute

Reflections on local food self sufficiency-

Processing local apples today for apple butter and applesauce. I prefer to use the fruit of local trees…besides being pesticide free, they often represent old varieties, or the unique qualities of fruit trees grown from seed. The flavours are distinct, more interesting, less bland, than applesauce made from commercial fruit. When I lived on the Skeena, I used to harvest the fruit of a motley assortment of apple trees, each one distinct, that had been planted 50 years or more before by an early homesteader, and apple trees from seed “planted” by birds sitting on the fence post, or by the scat of a passing bear. I used to pick the fruit green to try to get it before the bears broke the trees down, harvesting the fruit the same way they would the berries of a tall saskatoon bush. The flavours were unsurpassed, and the fruit was tangy, sour, bitter. My daughter and I would sit on a low stool and run the cooked pulp through a hand cranked Foley foodmill in the kitchen of our cabin cum new-old-farmhouse. The pectin from the green apples made the sauce thick before it was reheated with sugar to can.
Today I am processing the fruit from three old Edmonton apple trees. Apple trees planted by homeowners decades before are often neglected by contemporary supermarket-oriented residents, the fruit a nuisance rotting on the ground. Fruit trees are an investment that take decades to reach their prime, and stability over decades is a rare thing in today’s urban areas. The mentality to put food by, the skills and equipment to can or make jelly, are no longer universal, especially in urban areas where even home cooking from “scratch” is increasingly rare. I went to the market to buy apple juice needed for the cooking liquid to make apple butter…the closest source I could find was organic apple juice processed in Chilliwack near Vancouver. The sugar I will add is organic fair-trade demerara- hopefully ethically produced and both socially and environmentally “OK”….but certainly not within my 100 mile radius for “local”. I would have to search out a local honey producer for that, and I would find, in our climate, that the overwintering bees must be fed on sugar syrup, most likely tropical cane sugar, and neither environmentally nor ethically produced…so the honey I eat is local, but the bees are sustained by the global food system. We cannot escape the connections.
In urban North America our social system no longer supports food self-sufficiency either; we have jobs and time commitments. There is neither time to harvest food nor time to process it around our work obligations and our family and other social relationships. Today is a work day, and I have a nagging sense of guilt as I process the apples rather than marking papers, reading student web posts, working on my new course. We don’t get time off for harvest…but the apples need to be processed now. They have their own seasonal imperative.
Yesterday I also nibbled some high-bush cranberries on a walk and collected some mushrooms in the ravine by my house, an urban greenspace used mostly for urban dog-walkers, joggers, and mountain bike enthusiasts along with occasional pram-pushing parents taking babies out for a walk. The mushrooms are a gourmet treat- wild relatives of portobellos. The trick is to find them before they are too old, riddled with the larval excavations of mycetophylid flies. And of course to wash them well. I manage to find enough for a couple of skillets full that are still good, and now have a couple of freezer packs of “wildcrafted” mushrooms in the freezer. Mushroom harvest requires experience, local knowledge, and detailed ethnobiological knowledge of how to recognize edible kinds and distinguish them from unknowns or poisonous varieties. Some of my fellow harvesters come from mycophllic cultures like Italy or Poland. Most of my Euro-Canadian neighbours lack the skills necessary (and the inclination) to add local edible fungi to their diets.
I found it poignant when we were in Regina a couple of weeks ago after my partner’s mother’s death to go out into her tiny backyard to pick some things for my sister in law to add to the family lunch and find a neatly tended and highly productive vegetable garden, with chard, carrots, potatoes and onions ready for harvest. Few yards in my Edmonton neighbourhood have a ready source of fresh vegetables outside the back door, though it was common a generation ago. Jean came from a farm family, and valued growing her own.

Environmental Change and Variation in the Yukon

Photo:
Willows yellow from drying or disease along Frances River
I just got back from the southern Yukon where I went to do research on observations of environmental change by Kaska Elders. The weather was alternating between being very hot (up to 30C) and rainy, though there had been little rain early in the season, and a light snow pack the winter before. During a trip up the Liard and Frances River by boat with one elder my collaborator Linda and a Japanese anthropologist and I helped the elder put out a small forest fire that was burning in the moss at a camping site along the river. Berries seemed to be a couple of weeks ahead of normal in terms of ripening, but crops seemed poor, perhaps because of poor weather when the flowers were pollinated. People speculated that perhaps the bears were bolder because the berries were poor. I found a correlation like that in nuisance bear reports down on the Skeena River in the Terrace area in the 1980's. Just as I was getting ready for a trip down the Alaska Highway to the Toad River area to speak with some Elders there, a young Kaska friend told me there were two fire balls down the Cassiar highway. The next days the smoke was quite perceptable far to the east of the area the fire had ignited. I began to hear that the highway was closed south out of Watson Lake....not encouraging, as I needed to go that was to go down to the Skeena River to do some follow-up on last year's research on tumplines. Rumours began to circulate that the community of Lower Post would be evacuated...I returned with some anxiety to Watson Lake through the smoke plume, and when I arrived, massive smoke clouds filled the sky to the south, rising like a thunderhead at the west end, right down where the Stewart-Cassiar runs. At the barricade I was told they would likely convoy traffic through first thing the following day....there was some rain in the night, and indeed I was able to get through. At that point about 10 km of the highway passed through the smoking fire. Its estimated size then was about 3000hectares. Last I heard it was up to 15,000. The fire sparked my thinking about disturbance frequency, and whether the fire frequency may be changing....given that the boreal forest renews itself through episodic conflagration, it was hard to tell if this fire was unusual, or within the normal range of fire occurrence. Last year there was a large fire north of the Yukon border along the Cantung or Nahanni Range road....and when I was there in 2004 there were large fires at Contact Creek and at Swan Lake on the Alaska highway...this was one of the questions we asked the Elders about. When I got down to the Skeena River, the weather was so dry there were virtually no mosquitos....unheard of...and river levels were at a near record low. Sockeye salmon escapement is at about 1/3 normal for the second year running, and this reduction is not attributable to salmon farm sea lice as no fish farming is permitted off the north coast of BC. So--likely collapse of food chains in the mid Pacific due to global warming is the cause. Allen Gottesfeld, who works for the Gitxsan Watershed Authority pointed out this disturbing fact to me....commercial salmon fishing is now virtually extinct in Prince Rupert, formerly a city of canneries, and food fish for Tsimshian and Gitxsan are running low, prompting shifts to less preferred species (coho and spring/king salmon instead of the diminishing sockeye).

Thinking about Birds, Thinking With Birds

Photos: the late William Teya with three black ducks on the Peel River
and male surf scoter or "black duck" deetree aa in Gwich'in

Birds are salient actors in human environments around the world, and are carriers of meaning, their actions invested with a range of significance.The observations I share were made by spending time on the land with people and in conversation —that is in everyday circumstances and through commonly repeated traditional stories. Accordingly what I present is a series of examples of certain salient birds and their meanings across the range of localities where I’ve worked. As such they are common birds, frequently observed. Relationships with these birds include: commensalism and sharing; power; birds as food; symbolic and metaphoric associations; and ecological relationships. Birds often appear as art motifs, and have strong roles in traditional narratives. Birds also enrich human experience.
What follows was learned by spending time on the land with people, and just in conversation while doing ethnobotany, ethnomedicine and ethnoecology research, that is, in everyday circumstances for the most part, and through some commonly repeated narratives, not through specific ethnornithology research.
I’ll present perspectives learned in working with four communities in northwestern Canada: Gitksan of the Skeena River drainage in northwestern British Columbia; Witsuwit’en, Athapaskan speakers whose traditional teritories border those of the Gitksan in the Bulkley/Morice River drainage and those of the Dakelhne in the Nechako River drainage in northwest/north central British Columbia; the Kaska Dena of northern BC and the southern Yukon, and the Gwich’in in the Mackenzie Delta region of the northwest Territories. Natural environments range from the inner edge of the Coast Mountains and forests of coastal affiliations (Coastal Western Hemlock and Interior Cedar Hemlock biogeoclimatic zones) through Sub-boreal and Boreal forests dominated by white spruce with pine and extensive subalpine willow and dwarf birch, to the taiga tundra ecotone in the low Arctic of the Gwich’in homeland. Large rivers, lakes and wetlands of variable extent characterize all of these northern forested environments.
Fisheries focussing on salmon species, lake charr, grayling, and whitefish species help to support local communities, and the diverse fish populations also support numerous birds (loons, ospreys, bald eagles, diving ducks, gulls). The ubiquitous northern corvids- ravens, crows and jays, scavenge fish and scraps from carcasses of animals hunted by people or wolves, year round residents and long companions of the human residents of the North. Owl species—great horned, great grey, and barred, – swoop silently through the night forests. Hawk owl and snowy owl are active by day. The wetlands and river banks host various sandpipers and wading birds such as yellowlegs, cranes, and spotted sandpipers. And in the sub-boreal forests and coastal forests, the tiny chickadee is a year round gregarious resident.
The Gitksan and neighbouring Witsuwit’en share the symbolic crest system of the Norhwest coast, in which Raven and Eagle and Owl figure , among other bird figures that belong in the histories (adaawk) of specific Clans or Houses. Grouse is also a crest of certain Fireweed (Gisgaast) houses. The late Mary Johnson (Antkulilbisxw) explained to me that in a time of starvation in ancient Temlax’aamit, two sisters and a brother were seeking to escape an unnatural winter and in their journey the brother starved. When they were finally able to kill a grouse, the women wept because this food, had they gotten it in time, would have saved the brother.
Raven is also allied with a set of trickster creator tales shared beyond the Northwest Coast region, appearing as Txemsim on the Nass, Wii Gyet [‘the big man’] for the Gitksan, or Estes for the Witsuwit’en. Sometimes other birds are involved in these stories besides the raven figure and his adventures. For the Gitksan, the figure Wii Gyet is at once an insatiable bumbling giant [the name means “Big Man] and raven, and the tales refer to his ‘Gwiis Gaak’ or raven blanket. A story shared by Gitksan and Witsuwit’en involves greed and Wii Gyet/Estes’ miscalculation when trying to hunt swans with the aid of a borrowed swan decoy hat. Because he tries to take too many, he is carried up into the sky by the swans whose legs had tied...with highly unpleasant results for him when he plunges earthward from a great height.
For both Gitksan and Witsuwit’en, bird names can form part of plant names and place names, indicating metaphorical connections, and ecological associations [as indeed bird related plant names may in English as well]. So in Gitksanimx, the plant called in English black twinberry (Lonicera involucrata) is sgan ‘maaya gaak ‘raven’s berry plant’, alluding to the shiny black (and inedible) fruit. It is a medicinal plant, not a food plant, and the bird name probably signals its inedibility to humans. Similarly, among the Witsuwit’en, the related white snowberry (Symphoricarpus albus) is called citsit ‘mi cin or grouse’s berry stick, and has medicinal uses. The bird/place name connection in Gitksan also involves berries: a traditional high elevation black huckleberry patch is called Anxsi ‘maa’y litisxw ‘blue grouse’s berry on it’. Here I assume the information is ecological in terms of the habitat and food of the blue grouse, the the fruit itself is not named for blue grouse (being the “real berry” sim ‘maa’y everywhere it grows).
Birds, as their migration is seasonally predictable, can also carry what Trevor Lantz and Nancy Turner have called traditional phenological knowledge. A Gitksan language primer explains that the song of the robin, when it appears in spring, says Gii gyooks milit, milit “the steelhead are coming, the steelhead, are coming”, indicating that steelhead can be fished in the rivers and creeks once the robins have arriverd.
And the tiny chickadee whose piping and flitting presence around camps in the winter woods is named. I was told that when you hear a chickadee, someone is coming to visit. Besides being a crest ayuks owl apparently also indicated impending death, and hearing an owl hooting was cause for disquiet..
Eagle Down is a sacred substance used to enforce peace for both Gitksan and Witsuwit'en. The late High Chief Johnny David said "Eagle Down is our Law", which anthropologist Dr. Antonia Mills used as the title of her book on Witsuwit'en traditions, history and law.
The Kaska Dena live in what is now northern British Columbia and the adjoining Yukon Territory, in the Cassiar Mountains north of the Stiking River in the drainage of the Liard and Pelly Rivers, and in the adjoining Logan mountains on the border with the Northwest Territories. Kaska lack the complex Clan/House structure of the Gitksan and Witsuwit’en, butm they do have the moiety structure widespread throughout most of the Yukon, of Wolf Tsíyone and Crow. Elder Mida Donnessey explained the fundamental division of society this way: Crow and Wolf are brothers in law, she said, but they couldn’t travel together, because Crow (Nusga) travels in the daytime and the wolf travels at night.
Travelling with Auntie Mida in the spring 10 years ago, she commented about grouse, and how the pleating of its muscular stomach taught people how to gather the toes of their round toed moccasins Grouse aka ‘chicken’ di’ is also a reliable food source, one available to women and children, and a back-up in the absence of large game like moose. Hence, one of the two sentences I can manage in Kaska is “I saw one chicken”...Hligah dí’ ne gánesta– which can describe what was seen in a journey across the land, a subject of frequent discussion when people meet. The habitats of different birds are well known; grouse like young pine stands. Ptarmigan prefer willows in winter.
Birds as agents and actors on the land can also hold and bestow power. My collaborator Linda McDonald told me that swan was a power bird for her late mother Edna McDonald. Swans are also a source of food (prohibited now with migratory bird treaties).
Along with detailed knowledge of the habitats and habits of birds and animals, people are oberservant of timing of significant seasonal events, such as the migration time of ducks, and geese. These are now changing, and are taken by elders as an indicator of environmental change. This is a topic Linda McDonald, my Kaska colleague and I will take up in more detail through our research this summer.
Ravens and whisky jacks (grey jays) are intelligent and observant birds, and their sometime destructive behaviour is tolerated. People have lived a long time in the North with ravens and whiskey jacks, which are adaptable year round residents. Another English name for the whiskey jack is “camp robber”, aptly descriptive of their deft pilfering of unattended food in camp. However, people may in fact leave food out for the whiskey jacks, perhaps with the logic that if food is freely given, they will leave the rest alone. Raven figures in stories among the Kaska as well as Gitksan and Witsuwit’en. Both raven and whisky jack lend their names to plants. The valued medicinal plant Juniperus communis is called in Kaska Nusga dzidze “crow’s brush or crow’s berries . The berry like cones are not edible by people, though they add to the strength of medicinal decoctions made from the plant. Arctous rubra, called “red bearberry” in English, is ts’oska dzidze, ‘whisky hack’s berry” in Kaska.
As I travelled with and listened to my elder teachers, birds were woven into conversation and commentary. I am a somewhat “scattered” person who easily misplaces or looses things. Auntie Mida explained to me after one such incident that it was because I has looked at an osprey on the nest; if you look at osprey on the nest it causes you to loose things easily.
Wading birds and cranes have very long legs. In a narrative recorded in Dene Guideji, Kaska Narratives, Elder Clara Donnessey recounts how the sisters who married stars escape their pursuer by crossing the Liard River canyon on the legs of yellowlegs as a bridge, which then refused to allow the pursuing wolverine to cross over. When I was told the story, my source described the bird, in English, as “crane”.
I gained a different sense of ravens when I went North. Instead of the ravens sitting solitary on the top of spruce or cedar, and tolling their bell-like calls, or hungrily feeding one or two at a time on the carcasses of dead and dying salmon beside the river, ravens in Inuvik were raucous, forward, in-your-face, interacting and squabbling in groups in the morning hours, hanging around dumpsters. It was in the Mackenzie Delta region I first really understood the ancient commensal relationship of ravens to northern peoples. Ravens scour the land widely for sources of food, which in winter prominently feature the kills of wolves, and the kills and camps of people. In February of 2000, I went up the Peel with my teachers William and Mary Teya to their winter trapping camp at Road River. It took 4 days for raven to find us after we arrived. When William got a cow and calf moose during our stay, the skulls were placed on the roof of a shed for raven to finish cleaning the bits of meat we had not been able to cut off for our own use.
The story of raven and his wooden jaw known in Tsii geh tchic as well as way south on Skeena. The location this occurred, it is said, is right where they later built the Catholic Church in Tsii geh tchic. Stories are localized on the land. In summer fish camp on the Peel River, we returned to camp one day to find raven mess on the fish cutting table. As she cleaned the white splotches off the wood, Mary told the story of raven’s bride, and how she was similarly despoiled by her handsome new husband, the ever active raven. I was told that you can’t harm raven, even if he breaks into your smoke house and steals some of your drying fish. It would bring bad weather, a serious threat in the low Arctic country where the Gwich’in dwell.
Gulls have an important place in the Gwich’in world. Gulls are not year round residents in Gwich’in country, coming with break-up and leaving when the country starts to freeze up. I was told that for Gwich’in, gulls are more important than eagle. Gulls are associated with the milder weather and easier times of summer fishing. In fish camp, the fish offal is to be spilled on the sandbars or gravel bars near, but not in, the river, for the gulls to clean up. Visitors to the country such as myself and a company of French paddlers who stayed a day or two at Alestine Andre’s 2000 Tree River camp on the Mackenzie, are carefully instructed in this matter. The cleaning role of the gulls is much appreciated, and may help to avoid confrontations with bears at the fishing sites. Two different places are named “gull lake” Tidigeh van, one a large lake up a tributary creek emptying into the Delta near Inuvik, and the other on a flat beside the Peel, not far from the Road River camp. After the gulls leave, I was told, raven takes over clean-up duties, and takes care of the spilled fish offal. Gulls can be a nuisance in the summer season, feeding on and spoiling fish left to air dry before being put in the smokehouse. In one camp I was at, fish netting was draped over the air drying fish, and a light fire lit where the smoke would blow toward the fish as gull deterrents. But even if the gulls spoil fish, they can’t be harmed, or bad weather will come.
As with Kaska, the sometimes pestiferous whiskey jacks are not harmed by Gwich’in. I watched while Mary carefully freed a bird who had entangled herself in the netting intended to deter gulls, a rather delicate process. The same (or another) whisky jack later slipped into the smokehouse from time to time, snacking on the drying whitefish and coney. It was not molested.
A last bird that stood out to me in Gwich’in country were the “black ducks”, surf scoters and common scoters who frequent the Peel and Mackenzie in summer. Black ducks are good to eat, and greatly appreciated when you can get them.

In closing, birds are salient actors in our worlds, readily available for symbolic interpretation, good for food, feathers and down used in material culture, associated with seasonal cycles of change and with specific habitats. The ever present raven has been a commensal of humans in northern regions of North America since people began to inhabit these lands. People carefully observe ravens, and ravens carefully observe people. Ravens many lead human hunters to game, and human hunters provide a reliable source of food for ravens throughout the cold dark winters. Raven’s intelligence and human like antics provide rich food for comedic analogy and moral thought. Raven is also powerful, seeing and knowing things humans do not, capable of transformation and of generosity.
Birds provide seasonal information, may be crests or personal sources of power, and are valued sources of food (especially grouse, ptarmigan, and various ducks, geese and swans, though many other birds were also eaten, such as cranes, and even loons in some places, though others consider them inappropriate to eat). As sources of food, certain birds can be proscribed for the young, or for pregnant women, such as loons who are “awkward” birds because they cannot walk on land. Or instead can be eaten with intent to invoke their qualities by those at these critical junctures in their growth and development, as the Witsuwit’en practice of feeding young boys ptarmigan to make them swift and agile on snowshoes.

Spring and Oolachans

Oolachan net at Fishery Bay, 1980

Equinox time again...the spring equinox always seems to look forward, while the Fall perhaps look back. As the snows melt and anticipation of spring rises, the air is fresh and wet and full of smells and birdsong, I think about oolachan time. Oolachan, also spelled eulachon (Thalicthys pacificus) are anadromous smelt, rich in oils. In coastal Alaska the same fish are prized, and often termed “Hooligans”. Their arrival in the estuaries of rivers along the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska was widely anticipated and welcomed, as they brought an abundant source of fresh and rich food at a time in the year when stored foods were diminished and declining in quality, and hunting was extremely difficult due to deep wet soft snow. Many years ago my then husband and young daughter canoed to Fishery Bay on the Nass Estuary. The Nass (the name apparently means “belly” and comes from Tlingit) drew people from all the surrounding nations at the time of oolachan harvest in mid March to early April. Cedar dugout canoes made the trip from Haida Gwaii. Tsimshian and Nisga’a converged on their fish camps. Inland Gitksan and Witsuwit’en walked long trails known as “grease trails” through deep melting snows to the head of canoe navigation to come to harvest and trade for grease, the rendered oil that was (and is) the most prized product of the little fish. I was told they carried so much that each leg of the trail had to be walked three times to carry the goods to the coast and then back again with grease and fish. When Allen and Rose and I visited the fish camp of Charlie and Eunice Swanson when Rose was about 3, Eunice told us a story....she said that spring salmon and the oolachan had an argument about who was the saviour of the people....she laughed and said she forgot who won.

At the fish camp in Fishery bay the clouds of gulls wheel and fly in every direction, startled into the air by the slightest sound. They are attracted to the fish run, and to the fish meal left over after the grease is rendered. There is plenty of food for the birds. When we visited there some 30 years ago, people harvested some of these fat oolachan fed gulls along with the fish....I had never heard of anyone eating gulls before (nor since), but apparently they are quite palatable when they have been feeding on oolachan. People also hunted seals that came to follow the spawning oolachans.

The three pole frames for air-drying oolachans (digit) are conspicuous features of the oolachan camps. The long hand knotted trawls (long cone shaped nets) hung to dry after use are another conspicuous feature of the camps. These nets were formerly made of nettle fibre twine, and apparently took a year to make....no small amount of labour, given the need to harvest many mature tall nettle stalks and process them into fibre, spin the twine, and then knot the long fine net. It is fortunate that the rich soils fertilized by fish meal around the camp are excellent places to grow good quality nettles...and the investment in time to make the net would be repaid with tons of nutritious fish good for one’s own family use as fresh, dried, and smoked fish, and as fish oil. The fish and oil are valued and valuable for trading and for feasting (potlatching), where consumption and sharing of the grease adds stature to the Chief’s name and House.

Today walking in the ravine in Edmonton, the weather was fresh, and the melting snow and moist air reminded me of northwest BC in March. I found a tall fireweed stalk from last year, which had retted enough over the winter, and which was moist enough to work, and twisted a length of string while I walked. I used to do this with nettle stalks from by our barn when I lived in northwest BC. At the Museum of Civilization last month, I wasn’t able to see the nettle cord net they have in their collection, but I did see two spreading dogbane bana or large dipnets, and a couple of hanks of prepared fibre from dogbane(Apocynum androsimaefolium, related to Indian hemp) , called lekx in Gitksan, ready to twist into twine for netmaking. The dogbane cord in the nets was so well made and uniform I never would have believed it to be locally made cordage if the tag and accompanying fieldnotes hadn’t explicitly identified the material of the cord.

Seasonal knowledge and knowledge of seasonal cycles is vital in traditional life; being able to predict the timing of the spring high tides that will bring the life-giving oolachans was important business that could make a life or death difference to people’s ability to survive the year. Knowing when to start out from inland areas more than 100 kilometres away by trail was an exacting business. One way of coordinating this seasonal round of harvest and trade was by traditional phenological knowledge, such as the song of the robin which to Gitksan means that the steelhead (milit) will be moving in the rivers and can be caught. Another way is by the use of “calendrical sites” where the shift in location of the rising sun is tracked over a period of weeks at a known site to determine when it is time to depart the winter camp to go down river to meet the salmon (the “footprints” on the Sam Goozley territory, a Witsuwit’en clan territory are one such site). Talking to a colleague of mine at Tofino on Vancouver Island a couple of weeks ago I inquired about whether oolachan were on the coast. She replied that there were no longer oolachan runs into rivers on the west coast of Vancouver Island, but that the herring were in. The roe of spawning herring was another important seasonal resource on the coast, and I recall the crunchy salty taste of the roe with fondness.

Equinox...moving into the bright half of the year.

Of White Deer and Spirit Bears-

Left Image Deer Dances (watercolour by LM Johnson)
Right image Gitksan spindle with spun mountain goat wool purchased by Harlan Smith in Gitwingak in the mid 1920's artifact VII-C-1302, Canadian Museum of Civilization (photo by LM Johnson 2010)

A news clip my sister sent me started me thinking. She forwarded me a link to a video clip from Public Television in Wisconsin about white deer. (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/video/flv/generic.html?s=inwi10s22a3q81f
March 26, 2009 #722 White Deer “ghosts of the forest”)
...for many years I have rendered images of a white doe as a personal spiritual symbol, and I have read in neo-pagan literature that the white stag is symbolic of spiritual transition or connection between worlds....but I had never heard of actual material white deer. Now I learn that there is a herd of white deer living in northern Wisconsin, and that they apparently figure in both Native American legend and the accounts of explorers, suggesting persistence of a relatiely large number of free living albino deer in a particular region over a substantial period of time. The author of the text of a recent book on these remarkable deer “White Deer” commented in the interview that though visible to natural predators over the 7 months of the summer season [and in the lower 48, these may not be as abundant as they once were], the deer are well camophlaged in the winter and are protected from human hunters by state law. The deer are described as looking like ghosts or spirits.

That started me thinking about a somewhat parallel case in Coastal British Columbia of the Kermode or “spirit” bear, a population of white bears [biogically, black bears, Ursus americanus] which exist in relatively large numbers on Princess Royal Island in Coast Tsimshian country, and extend on to the surrounding mainland. Ths Tsimshian name for them is simply moskgm'ol "white bear."
The late photographer Myron Kozak of Hazelton published a post card in the 1980’s of a kermode [also spelled Kermodei] bear in the woods near Hazelton. Western Canada Wilderness featured a campaign to save the home of the spirit bear about 10 years ago. The bears are legally protected in British Columbia. Like the Wisconsin deer, a single family may have naturally pigmented and white members, so as a biological population really includes normally pigmented members and a relatively high percentage of white animals.

Why such “spirit animal” populations should persist in specific areas over long periiods of time is intriguing. Kermode bears figure in Tsimshian narratives just as the white deer figure in the stories of the Native Americans who share their homeland....I began to think that the unusual appearance of these white animals impresses people and makes us think of spiritual connections.....perceiving the animals as extraordinary, then, perhaps causes them to have a special status for all, causing indigenous hunters to refrain from hunting them in the same way that contemporary state and provincial laws also prohibit hunting. And we are all enriched by the existence of these elusive spirit animals.

I started this blog a month ago now. Since then I’ve had occasion to think about whiteness and spiritual power in animals which are normally white as well. I was just at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec, looking at Northwest Coast weaving and spinning from 100 years ago. The animal that was used as a source of wool before the advent of European and American traders was the mountain goat, and I was priviledged to see beautiful and skillfully spun mountain goat wool yarn, still on the spindle as it was made in the mid 1920’s, and a lovely ball of two ply yarn ready to weave with. A number of burden straps were woven with mountain goat wool, combined in these straps with dyes sheep’s wool and commercial string obtained from the traders. Mountain goats were formerly an important source of food, and part of the annual cycles of Gitksan and other people dwelling on the coast. It was the mountain goat who taught the Haisla and Henaksiala to hunt according to Chief Kenneth Hall....and their wool was valued for weaving chief’s blankets, and the useful and versatile burden straps. The mountain goat also taught the Gitksan about respect for animals when they were abused in the days of Temlaham as Haxbagwootxw, Ken Harris narrated in translation of traditional narratives from his House. The survivor of the goats’ revenge was lent the skin and hooves of the goat kid he had saved, and the power chant “let it be scree” to help him return safely from the crag and bring the goats’ message to the remaining people of Temlaham. This summer I hope to replicate a traditional spindle and try my hand at creating beautiful fine yarn from their fur. With due reverence and respect to the goats.


Sources:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/video/flv/generic.html?s=inwi10s22a3q81f
March 26, 2009 #722 White Deer Boulder Junction Wisc. “ghosts of the forest”

In the Manituwish/ Waters area and Boulder junction- north central Wisconsin
people feed white deer and protect them, and there are also laws that protect them.

there are also white deer in New York
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_deer#White_Deer
which are protected on a former military reservation.

A 2 min 15 sec video of a Kermode bear posted - 12 Feb 2007 - entitled
The rare White Kermode Bear aka Spirit Bear.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vspuhFs5lZE
In the video they claim that the Tsimsian say the Kermode bear have been left by the Creator as a reminder of the times when the world was white and cold; the video interprets this as a a 10,000 year old memory [since deglaciation]

http://www.savespiritbear.org/project/spiritbear/about_bear/index.html
Valhalla Wilderness Society website

from Steve’s Menagerie
http://users.aristotle.net/~swarmack/kermode.html

Harris, Ken. 1974. Visitors Who Never Left, the Origin of the People of Damelahamid. Vancouver: UBC Press.

For more information about Gitksan artifacts in the Canadian Museum of Civilization, please see their on-line catalog in their website at http://www.civilization.ca/cmc/explore/collections/collections

For images from my recent research, please contact Curator Leslie Tepper at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau, Quebec, Canada.