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.

Spring Tonic

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Spring tonic

Working in the garden…it’s early, really early this year.  Pruning last year’s raspberry canes.  Digging the quack grass that snuck into the berry patch when we replaced the fence last fall….and I notice that I’ve uprooted some prime dandelions….so I toss them aside while I remove the quack grass and creeping campanula from the turned earth.  After a while I think….oh, I’d better take care of the dandelions before they dry out.  And I dig some more to round out the batch.  I rinse the dirt off once outside, and scrub the roots twice inside the house, removing all of the tops that have not wilted yet.  I cut the root into small relatively uniform chunks and set them outside to dry for dandelion “coffee”.  (Some of the depsides, flavour compounds in roasted chicory root, and I presume dandelion root as well, are the same as the compounds that flavour roasted coffee.  Naturally caffeine free.)

Then I turn my attention to the tops, selecting relatively undamaged crowns, pulling off older damaged leaves.  And then I think of my spring tonic on the Skeena years ago….so I check the herb bed to see if the chives are up….and they are! So I pull a handful of new chive tops in lieu of the nodding onion I used to add to my stir-fry.  I chop a half jalapeño and some ginger root (definitely not locally sourced) and heat oil in my wok (a mixture of grape seed and sesame), toss in the greens and accompaniment, and stir-fry til they are bright green and wilted.  I add slices of hard-boiled egg (those are local, from the Farmer’s market), stir a bit longer, and eat my spring tonic.  Thank you dandelions and chives.  Spring blessing.

 

As I harvest, process, and eat, I think about multi-species ethnography, research through practice, and "attending." I am reading the dissertation of a young colleague who is writing about the stories of plants and people.  I’ve also been listening to other colleagues at the recent ethnobiology conference in Tucson talking about multi-species ethnography.  So.  Definitely “located knowledge” as the dandelions are from my urban back yard.  Definitely I have been attending to the dandelions, and the ground where they grow, for the 15 plus years I have lived on this 10 by 40 metre plot of urban landscape.  The raspberries are leafing out.  Already.  At least three weeks before “normal”, whatever that is in this time of progressive and stochastic change.  The chives agree that spring is here.  The maples have opened their flowers and the honeysuckles and cotoneaster are also opening their leaves.  The ground in the raspberry patch is graced by clumps of glorious blooming purple violets. 

They are spreading rapidly, apparently undamaged by the fencing activities of the fall.  In fact, they began to bloom two weeks ago, at the beginning of April.  First blossoms of spring.  All of this in Edmonton, at latitude 53 North, in the Canadian prairies….

We read last night that this is the 11^th warmest month on record in a row, itself a record series. And this is global temperatures, not an Alberta anomaly.  Climate change really is here, and all bets are off.

Enjoying spring.  And crossing my fingers for the summer to come.

Dwelling, Snow and Memory

I've been reading some of Tim Ingold's new book....so thinking about dwelling- and living- life as process, as medium.  Walking on my snowshoes along the back trail in the ravine, I pause for some frozen highbush cranberries.

Their refreshing tang is sharp on the tongue.  Experiencing snow, red jewels of colour, aspen and wild cherry trunks.  Being.  Moving.  Traversing the line of the trail, also a line of memory.  (But of course one must not forget that lines have width, extent, as well as length.  This line was widened by my snowshoes, which require a wider trail width than the feet of walkers, or the fat tire of snow bikes).  Looking down at my snowshoes, made of maple, laced with babiche of deer and of cowhide, decked with red and black pompoms.  Percy made these.  Percy had been making snowshoes since he was 14.  He's gone now, on the trail to wherever we go when we leave this place.  Percy made these for me 37 years ago, when my daughter was a tiny infant still riding in a snugglie pack.  I enjoy the pattern their prints make on the new fallen snow, enjoy the freedom to pick my path as depth of snow is not relevant to constraining my motion.  I'm wearing my canvas boots, Tli Cho work, made for my late mother in law Jean when she was community health nurse in what was then called Rae Lakes.  She gave them to me when I went north for winter fieldwork 15 years ago.  Enjoying the comfort of the deep red wool duffel liners made by my Gwich'in friend Agnes, hand stitched with herringbone stitch in variegated tones of blue and purple.  She found it a bit of a challenge to fit Gwich'in cut duffel liners into Tli Cho canvas boots....but they work wonderfully, keeping feet and legs warm.  Like wearing slippers or walking on a cloud.  They are perfect for the snowshoes, fit the bindings effortlessly, allow one to step into the shoes, and as easily step out, sparing the hands from fumbling with frozen buckles or laces. Dwelling.  Sharing life with the trees and birds and animals of the ravine.  Walking among the trees.  A good way to walk into the new year.

Truth and Reconciliation- healing ethnocide and ecocide

teepee at the TRC, photo by  Riva Benditt

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

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

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

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

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

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

2012 project to document hide processing

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

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

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

Close up of blueberries, healthy food from the land

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

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

Food Security, Cultural Landscapes, Communities and Sustainable Farming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.