remembering Mida

for Mida

my mind reels

       to think the world goes on

and you have fallen out of it

        I hope there are many

               companions to speak Kaska to

where you have gone

my heart aches remembering

       all the times we went

               into the bush

looking for medicine

    talking about the land

         remembering times long ago

we laughed like girls

   delighting in being out

      on the land together

walking trails of the past

       of the present

          dreams of girlhood

             Auntie Minnie–

                  cranberries

mistsí standing up

   in the wild rhubarb

            giving us a hard stare

your orange garbage bag rain coat

   rifle slung on your back

       as we walked up through the alpine

           on Jade mountain looking

for tangles of brown caribou horn

I remember burning wolverine’s packsack

   to bring the sky down

fires were burning up the land

too many years have gone by

     my academic career

         the rest of your days

now– empty

      a dull ache I

            cannot shake

I’ll never sit in your bright

   quiet living room watching you sew–

bright beads, patterns of flowers

  and stars, endless

     font of colours and patterns

spangling piles of uppers

empty– and still I cannot

            cry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Reflections on seeing a coyote cross the path

Coyote looks back

Tsoska Dzidze Whisky Jack's Berries

Yesterday afternoon as I walked in the ravine, a sleek grey and white coyote ran across the meadow in front of me and disappeared into the trees. Coyotes are beautiful animals, but are caricatured in Western cartoons (Wile E. Coyote versus the Roadrunner), made ridiculous, stupid and ugly. In Indigenous narratives, coyote is a trickster, who is smart but often outsmarts him [or even her-] self. I think of the wonderful coyote stories of Native American author Thomas King, and the allusions to coyote found in Hunn’s Nichi Wana, the Big River. Coyote’s opportunism is seen as both intelligent and competent, and self serving at the same time. Coyotes are nothing if not adaptable. living easily on the peripheries of human settlement, elusive and quick witted. Coyotes are predators, feeding on rabbits and other smaller animals, and also take advantage of berries. I saw a lot of saskatoon berry filled scat in the ravine this summer.

In Western thought the concepts of “predator” and “vermin” [aka “varmint”] carry negative connotations....the big bad wolf and the sweet innocent defenseless deer. Carnivores (other than us) are bad, and herbivores [unless rodents] are good. The rodent thing is an interesting one; we are generally fine with squirrels and chipmunks in Western culture [which typically live in the woods and not in our homes or outbuildings, and don’t spoil our food stores or crops]. Beavers are fine too (unless they are blocking culverts or damming fishing streams or cutting down fruit trees along the creek). Rats and mice, however are not fine. Rats carry the plague, and are depicted as evil “underworld” creatures in cartoons. Rats are the target of extermination programs in poor urban neighbourhoods in places like New York. [In the mid 1990’s in Aotearoa/New Zealand Maori biologist Mere Roberts roused a remarkable amount of negative attention trying to defend the kiori, a small rat which was a traditional Maori food. The label “rat” carried the day, and programs to eliminate this endangered cultural animal from protected areas continued.] And in less urban settings, gophers are definitely not fine. Reading the draft of a book on environmental history by my Athabasca University colleague Donald Wetherall a few weeks ago, I was startled to find that in Alberta there had been a bounty on gophers as a “predator” in the early 20th century. In my biology classes I learned that a predator preys on other animals, usually herbivores. Apparently in Alberta a predator can prey on roots, if people take exception to its foraging habits.

I was also distressed to find that there was a bounty on magpies, intelligent and beautiful cousins of jays and of crows, birds with lovely black and white markings, and iridescent blues and greens, with long graceful tails. They too were “predators” because they include the eggs and young of other species of birds in their diet, and are scavengers of carrion and well as eating a wide range of other foods. The bounty was paid per pair of magpie legs, and thousands of pairs were collected. Enough to sicken me....but it helped me understand why the people of Alberta today continue to denigrate magpies, often calling them “aerial rats”. (The contrast with the beautiful song celebrating magpies written by Donovan Leach in the mid ’60’s is noteworthy; it goes---
The magpie is a most illustrious bird
black and blue and white-
I would that I had feathers three
black and blue and white

The magpie is a most royal bird
dwells in a diamond tree
one brought sorrow and one brought joy
sorrow and joy for me

I saw the gentle magpie birds
in a dusky yestereve
one brought sorrow and one brought joy
and sooner than soon did leave

I have known this song, and sung it, since I was a teenager. I was thrilled to come to Alberta where these beautiful and intelligent birds are common place). Crows too were bountied and persecuted. Their depredations on grain were balanced by their consumption of rodents that also preyed on grain, as some farmers tried to point out, but the anti-crow and magpie faction prevailed.

The history of discomfort with crows and ravens is an ancient one in Europe. The birds are black, like night, intelligent, unfathomable, quintessentially adaptable, and associated with carrion, thus with death and with the despoilation of corpses. The Norse God Odin had two ravens, wisdom and thought...and they were also associated with death in battle. Edgar Allen Poe’s uncanny poem the raven evokes a creepy aura of death and fate. The fantasy author JRR Tolkien similarly casts crows and wolves with an aura of evil in the Lord of the Rings.

Yet in the Northwest Coast, Raven is a powerful being, laughable but also recognized as a creative force, the trickster creator who liberated daylight along with many other adventures. Raven is one of the two moieties of the Haida and the Tlingit, and one of four Clans of the Nisga’a on the Nass River. Txeemsim, the raven, lived along the Nass River which is also Txeemsim, and many of his stories are localized there. Raven is frequently depicted on Crest items and blankets and on totem poles in that region.

The ways that people relate to and conceive of animals, are shaped by culture and means of livelihood. Hunters, herders, and farmers all see things differently. Those who separate humans, and culture, from animals, and nature, are less tolerant of fellow travellers. In European folk-lore and contemporary popular culture such as cartoons, predators and raptors get bad press for the most part. Reynard the Fox is a sly and cunning animal who grabs the grey goose, and the wolf is a leering evil creature who poses a risk to benighted travellers, or to Sonya the duck in “Peter and the Wolf”. “Chicken hawks” were formerly reviled, and shot on sight. (Our attitude toward “chicken hawks” has shifted somewhat now that many of us in North America are no longer farmers; we made substantial efforts as a society to help the peregrine falcon recover from the brink of extinction due to pesticide use).

While staying with my Gwich’in teachers on the Peel and Mackenzie Rivers, I witnessed very different attitudes and senses of the same species. Although the town ravens in Inuvik ravage unprotected garbage bags and wake one with their croaking and scuffling, on the land people leave food for the ravens, and recognize their role in cleaning the land. The intelligence and inherently comical character of the raven are both recognized in traditional narratives throughout the North. Raven is another trickster, like coyote, shaping the world almost by mistake, and often being brought up short by his own scheming.

In the Northwest Coast region as I noted above, raven is widely credited with bringing daylight to human kind. Versions of this story are found in Raven Steals the Sun by Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst (Haida) and Wii Gyet Wanders On (Bookbuilders of Ksan; Gitksan). Other stories of raven highlight his foolish greed, as in the Witsuwit’en story of Estes (their name for this trickster figure) and the swans; he tries to trap too many at once by tying their legs together, and they lift him into the air....ultimately he falls, embedding himself in a rock near Francois Lake, and he has to rely on lynx’s rough tongue to wear away the rock to free him. Lynx’s lovely ear tufts are hair pulled out by Estes in payment. (Stories of the Carrier Indians 1977). At times Raven (‘Wii Gyet with his tattered old Gwiis Gaak or raven blanket) is outsmarted by his hubris, as when he taunts a stump while his bear meat is roasting, and wakes to find the anticipated feast under the spreading rootwad of the stump, which has slipped down to cover Wii Gyet’s bounty.

The wolf is seen as a good hunter in northern Dene cultures, human-like in its skill and as provider for its family. Their emnity to dogs is not appreciated, but my teacher Mary’s Auntie Mary was scolded for shooting a wolf for no reason when she was a young woman. That inappropriate behaviour is likely to have consequences.

Gwich’in and Kaska leave food out for ravens and whisky-jacks (also known as Canada or Grey Jays; whisky-jack is derived from the Cree name for the bird). They have a proscription on harming these birds or gulls; I was told if you harmed a raven or a gull, it would make bad weather come. I watched while Mary Teya painstakingly freed a whisky-jack from fish netting she had placed over her drying fish to keep the gulls from spoiling it. I also watched her leave out the skull of a moose on top of a shed, after the meat had been cut off it, so the whisky-jacks and ravens could clean off the last of the meat. Auntie Alice, one of my Kaska teachers speaks fondly of “uskacha”, the whisky jack, and the fruits of Arctous rubra, the red bear berry, are whisky jack’s berries.

Gulls, I was told, help to clean the land....they are emblematic of summer for Gwich’in, and I was told were more significant locally than eagles. I was told to spill the fish offal on the sandbar for the gulls to eat, not put it in the water. The gulls cleanse the land, and also remove the guts and wastes that might tempt a bear to frequent the camp. Various lakes are named for the gull Tidigeh Van. (Once the gulls return southward, raven takes over clean-up duty for fall fisheries.)

When I was growing up, gulls were associated with garbage dumps, and though beautiful, were not especially valued. To the Mormons, however, gulls saved them from a plague of Mormon crickets which locust like threatened their first grain crops, and there is a statue to the seagull in Salt Lake City.

Our own culture has some ambivalence about wolves and raptors in the present, as magnificent emblems of wildness, beauty and freedom. This plays out in the complexities of endangered species restoration of wolves in Wyoming and Montana, and the immediate re-institution of a hunting season on wolves once their population has recovered....and the immediate response of the Natural Resource Defense Committee to rally wilderness and nature lovers to the defense of the wolves through political means. Whether we can respect other beings on their own terms and leave them space to live is yet an unanswered question.