First Contact

First Contact is a TV series that takes six average Canadians who have strong and mostly negative opinions about Indigenous people on a 28-day journey across Canada into Indigenous communities in Winnipeg, Nunavut, Alberta, Northern Ontario and BC.  The six participants meet a wide variety of Indigenous people who share their stories, history and information.  The journey is an inner journey for the participants as well as an outer one as their opinions and beliefs are challenged by their experiences that they feel in their bodies, hearts and minds.

The six participants

The show aired on APTN (Aboriginal Peoples Television Network) in September and is now available for viewing on its website.  The show is hosted and narrated by social justice activist George Stroumboulopoulos and is modeled after a show by the same name that was created in Australia in 2014.

Participants go on patrol in North Winnipeg to keep the neighbourhood safe.

The participants have experiences that range from patrolling North Winnipeg by night, going on a seal hunt, visiting Indigenous inmates in healing centres, dragging the Red River, learning about boiled water advisories that are thirty years old, going to a pow wow and other ceremonies and hearing about the effects of Indian Residential School from most of the people they meet.  

The participants go out onto the land with their Indigenous hosts.

Some of the participants were quick to change their attitudes as they took in the new information while others were slower and one appears to be unchanged after all of the experiences.  However, the show is about more than the journeys of six people.  These “average Canadians” reflect the attitudes of much of Canada and it is informative although at times infuriating to listen to their reactions when they experience a brand new reality.  There are also beautiful moments where individual participants connect with the story of an Indigenous person and it becomes just two people sharing.

Much of the show is of the two groups sitting around tables talking and listening to each other which is not what usually happens for most Canadians and yet this is an important part of the reconciliation process.  The producers of the series had trouble finding a station to air it because the major stations don’t want to tell this story.  However APTN and TVO agreed to show it and bring this important dialogue forward.

 You can check out the trailer here  and if you like it, watch the episodes and talk about what you learned with a friend!

Half a Fairy Ring

Last week’s blogpost included a video in which the speaker suggested that the forest is a blueprint for teaching us how to get along together.  As I hiked through a forest this past weekend, I was thinking about that statement.  I waited for inspiration to arrive from the trees and the forest floor.  I thought about the diversity that I saw all around me.  There were hardwoods and softwoods, wild flowers and shrubs.  I thought about how they all found their niches, their space in the canopy or in and around the trees.  I thought about how they supported each other and provided food and shelter for the forest animals that in turn spread seeds and fertilized the soil.

Eventually, we came to a cedar grove which is one of my favourite places to spend time.  I stopped to look at it and felt immediately invited in.  Very little grows on the forest floor beneath cedars so the path was open and easy.  I wandered through the family groupings of trunks and past some very large grandmother trees.  The light filtered down through the branches onto the ground, all rusty brown from the dead cedar needles.

Suddenly, something orange caught my eye.  Bending over, I found a colony of bright orange mushrooms growing in a line.  Then beside them, I discovered a line of blood red mushrooms following the same line.  Then there was a patch of white lacy fungus still in the same line and then beige mushrooms.  Stepping back, I could see that they formed an arc that looked like half of a circle.  Immediately, I thought of the fairy rings of European legends where fairies dance within a circle of mushrooms.  My mother used to talk about fairies at the bottom of the garden and this ancient belief that Roman enforced Christianity never quite managed to squelch still captured my imagination.  The fairy rings were sacred places where mortals shouldn’t intrude according to legend.  This was only half a circle though.  But somehow it did feel kind of magical to see so many different fungi growing in an arc.

My partner felt that likely, the fungi were growing out of a dead and rotting cedar root that curved.  I tried to picture the root deep under the earth and all the fungal networks there as well.  Which tree did it come from?  It’s very interesting to cast one’s imagination deep into the earth. I wondered if this was part of the forest blueprint and what it was telling me. 

Walking on, I came across a large boulder covered in bright green moss.  It was just the right height to sit on and I greeted this ancient grandmother as I sat down.  I wondered what she - since she'd been around for a very long time- might know about the blueprint and what the mushrooms had to teach me.  Straight away an idea popped into my head.  “Don’t forget about hidden resources.”  

The dead and buried root had become a resource for the mushrooms and they were transforming its life into another form.  Their networks would let the trees communicate underground and share resources as well.  What I could see above the surface was minuscule compared to what was below.

As I continued to walk I thought about all the resources that seem to be invisible in our world such as the wisdom of elders, the insights of women that are often ignored, and the brilliance of children.  So often, only the loudest, most competitive voices are heard and the information they share is the same old story of scarcity, might over right and greed.  The forest blueprint was showing me that the hidden resources and voices were important to pay attention to.  That they could give life and voice to something magical, to something new.

The Ancient Dance of Earth and Sky

Dark cumulus clouds rolled ominously across the bay.  The still humid air began to move as well, bringing with it the smell of ozone.  The weather report warned of thunderstorms but for us it was the chance to see a great evening show.

As the sky began to flash, we could hear far away rumbling.  So, we picked up speed as we walked back to our car, parked at the water’s edge.   Safely inside the car, we could see the entire expanse of Sturgeon Bay through the windows.  The clouds to the south began to light up with brighter flashes of sheet lightning.  Then the clouds to the north began to send brilliant forks of light to greet the earth.  The thunder rumbled back and forth.

We knew that the electrons in the clouds were attracted to the positive charge of the earth.  As the negative charge made its way to the earth, the positive charge moved up to meet it.  Their dramatic union created so much electrical energy that light was produced and the heated air created the thunder that made its way to our ears some time after the light.

This exchange of electrons restores the electrical balance between earth and sky.  Our atmosphere is made up of 78% nitrogen but the nitrogen atoms have three electron bonds between them, making it so stable that we can’t use the nitrogen we inhale even though we need nitrogen to make proteins.  The plants can’t use it either. 

It takes a great deal of energy to break these bonds which is exactly what lightning has.  As the electrical current moves through the air, it knocks electrons from the nitrogen atoms.  Then the nitrogen atoms can combine with oxygen and hydrogen to form nitrates which are washed to earth with the rain that follows the lightning.  Plants can then synthesize these nitrates into proteins which can be used by animals and humans.  Lightning provides about twenty per cent of the nitrogen to the soil every year. 

Lightning also produces ozone which as we know, shields all of us from harmful ultraviolet light from the sun.  That’s why you can smell ozone as a thunderstorm approaches.

So, by restoring electrical balance, new materials are liberated that can be used to create life and materials are created that will protect us. And it is estimated that lightning hits the ground one hundred times a second worldwide, or over eight million times every day.

As we watched the lightning strike over and over, more cars came to the water, their occupants drawn by this Saturday night spectacle.  The wind picked up and the rain began.  Eventually the rain obliterated the view except for bright flashes and loud cracks.  I thought about all that nitrogen being washed to earth and into the lake where the plants could use it to create proteins that animals and fish would eat.  And I would eat local plants and fish and meat.  The lightning was bringing life to us all.

For some people the storm would have been terrifying and they would have hidden in their homes. But I kept thinking about how the storm was restoring balance.   Earth and Sky knew their ancient dance so well.  It was big, it was cosmic, it was bright and loud.  There was nothing subtle or half-hearted about electrons rejoining their positive counterparts.  I could almost see the Thunderbirds of the Anishinaabe in the clouds sending healing energy to the people.  And I could feel that healing, that life giving, that beauty in my own body as the water and fire came from the sky that summer’s night.

Green Renaissance Breathes New Life

Green Renaissance is a “passionate collective of four creatives” who make films with positive stories.  These films are on-line and free with funding by donation.  These are films without a corporate agenda, that are meant to inspire.  You can hear these four young people describe their dream here:

To get a taste of what Green Renaissance is creating, here is a short film on Regenerative Living.  The idea is that all the information that we need to be able to live together is offered by nature and by listening to nature we can create a new way to be.

And lastly, here is a short film called Love of Trees that features an eighty-four year old woman who talks about her relationship with trees.

   

You can check out more films on the Green Renaissance You tube channel.  Use it as an antidote to the madness on mainstream media and take part in this new story.