On Fireweed

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

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

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

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

my Edmonton yard, April 23

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

wild roses

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

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

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

Seasons. Connections. Memories.

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.

Spring Greens

Oconaluftee River, Cherokee, North Carolina

I just got back from the Society of Ethnobiology conference which was held in Cherokee North Carolina this year, in the southern Appalachians.  David Cozzo, who was one of the meeting organizers, led our fieldtrip into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  He was describing Cherokee plant uses and ethnobotany to us, and slipped in various comments about spring edibles....tender tips of cat briar (Smilax sp.) were one edible David pointed out.  Violet leaves were another.  Today I got back out into my garden to try to clean up the perennial beds, digging out the tenacious roots and shoots of the creeping bellflower Campanula repens, an aggressive European species combining the worst of quackgrass with dandelions in the structure and depth of its roots, which infests my beds.  While digging out the campanula, I dug out some large dandelions in the same spade-fulls.  At that point I remembered that my friend Riva wanted to try to make dandelion root coffee, and I decided to dig her enough roots to try it.  (Organic and local....) My raspberry patch has quite a few old large dandelion plants among the berry plants.  I don't ordinarily till it, so they have been growing undisturbed for quite a while.  I took the spading fork in there and managed to dig out a bunch of plants with good roots. While I was digging, my friend Riva came over.  I snapped the crowns off the roots, and put the root pieces in one bowl and the tops in another.

When we took them inside to wash the roots, Riva said, "Can't you eat the tops too?"  They were larger and more open grown that dandelions I usually pick for spring greens, but the flowers still hadn't opened in my yard.  I washed the bowlful of tops in several changes of water and left them soaking when we went for a walk.  When we came back, the tops had perked up quite a bit, and I thought, well, maybe we should make a spring stir-fry with them.

When I lived on the Skeena River in BC, I would pick tender semi-shade grown leaves of dandelion, some tops of the wild nodding onion (Allium cernuum), and if possible some morrel mushrooms, and make them into a dark and flavourful stir-fry, with tamari and sesame oil.  The bitter greens taste good with the salty soy and flavourful oil, and feel very healthy as the first fresh greens.  In fact we used to call it our first greens feast, by analogy to the first salmon feast traditionally held by the Gitksen 15 km upriver in Gitwangak.
Though I was uncertain of the quality of the tops today, I decided to try them.  I enjoyed the southern collards cooked with bacon on my trip, so thought, why don't I try cutting some bacon and fry the greens in the bacon grease?  The bacon I have is from Irving's Farm Fresh, a heritage Berkshire pork producer in central Alberta who sells at the Strathcona Farmer's Market.  Since it was to be our dinner, I decided to cut a couple of chicken tenders and marinate them in tamari (gluten free for me now) and sesame oil.  Riva finds onions don't agree well, so I grated fresh ginger instead. I took the opportunity to cook quinoa to go with the stir-fry; I rinse the grain once in water to rinse out some of the saponins before I boil it (2 parts water to one part quinoa). For the main course, I took out my little Indian wok.  I started out cooking several thick meaty slices of the bacon, cut into strips, for the grease.  Then I tossed in a sliced brown crimini mushroom, and the chicken breast with the marinade and stirred in the wok for a couple of minutes, and finally added the dandelion tops, which I had cut up into sections a couple centimeters broad.  I cooked the mix until the dandelion tops had all wilted and the breast meat was cooked, and served it over the quinoa.  We sat at the table on the back deck overlooking the garden and enjoyed the flavour of the spring in our bowls and the gentle green of the opening leaves in the yard.  It was completely delicious. The first spring meal from my small plot of urban land. Our dinner tonight only used half of the tops, so we have another good meal in store.  I'll have to report back later on the dandelion root coffee. There should be about a pound of roots to roast and prepare.

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

Oolachan net at Fishery Bay, 1980

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

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

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

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

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

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