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 grouse and ptarmigan-sounds , memories and meanings

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

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

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

Spring and Oolachans

Apologies for the delay...this was actually written in March 0f 2010 and got lost as a draft. sigh. I got distracted trying to find photos. This one is an overview of the camp at Fishery Bay in spring 1980, showing the drying oolachans hanging on the racks.

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.

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).