Ancient Wisdom Rising

“I like your earrings!” said the older woman sitting at the café table.  We frequently meet Dolly when we go for Saturday morning breakfast at the Village Mercantile. We always stop to chat with her as people do in a small town.  Once a general store, this large building now houses vintage and antique furniture, hardware for the cottagers and a café along the front beside the huge old fashioned windows.  We are two of the regulars for weekend breakfasts.

The earrings in question are large aluminum cut outs of sea turtles.  I bought them from a non-profit organization that had a booth at a festival this summer.  They were made by people in Nicaragua who are re-purposing things that would otherwise be garbage, as a way to support their children.  I suspect my earrings are made from a pop can.  They are light and shiny and people notice them.  They remind me of my daughter who spent part of a holiday in Costa Rica and Nicaragua volunteering at a sea turtle protection group.  She spent the days picking up plastic garbage from the beach and the nights patrolling the beach to protect nesting sea turtles from poachers.  The earrings have stories attached to them, stories of people rising from poverty, stories of cleaning up and re-purposing garbage, and stories of protection. Those stories go with me as I go about my days.

Jade turtle bracelet

Brenda, one of the owners of the Village Mercantile, heard our conversation.  “I have something upstairs to show you,” she said.  A few minutes later she placed a bracelet on the table.  It was made from eight tiny turtles carved from jade.  A thick lace went through them all so that they were nose to tail.  The bodies were about the size of the end of my thumb.  They looked just like the baby snapping turtles that we had seen a few weeks earlier.

The trail that we walk on every evening is a perfect spot for Snapping and Map turtles to nest in.  Since it runs along Georgian Bay, the turtles come out in June, climb up to the trail and dig holes in the substrate that is alongside the trail.  A local man started a group called Kids for Turtles a few years back.  If anyone notices a turtle digging a nest and laying eggs, this organization will come out when they are notified, to place a “cage” over the nest.  This wire protection is secured with deep tent pegs to prevent predators such as skunks and raccoons from digging up the eggs and eating them.

Newly hatched Snapping Turtles climb over the Kids for Turtles nest protector

We have seen quite a number of these cages along the trail all summer.  But a few weeks ago, we noticed that there was a baby snapping turtle sitting on top of one of these cages.  Then we spied another and another emerging from the earth.  They climbed up the side of the cage, scrambled over the top and went down the other side on their way to the water.  It was pretty exciting to see them hatching and setting off on their lives.  And the line of turtles was just like the bracelet. 

Detail of bracelet

Brenda gave me the bracelet because we like turtles so much and of course we showed her pictures on our camera of the baby hatchlings.  I hung the bracelet on the kitchen wall to remind us of the hatching that we witnessed.  It will help us to remember the gift of being there just at the right moment to witness the miraculous event.

As I looked at the bracelet, it also reminded me of Thomas King’s 2003 CBC Massey Lecture entitled The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative.  He begins the five lecture series this way: “There is a story I know.  It’s about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle.”  Once, he says, a storyteller telling this story was asked by a young girl what was beneath the turtle.  The storyteller replied, well, another turtle.  The girl wanted to know how many turtles there were. “No one knows for sure, he told her, but it’s turtles all the way down.”  As I look at the eight turtles hanging on my kitchen wall, I hear Thomas King’s deep voice, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

You can read the story or listen to it on the youtube link above.  Thomas King is a wonderful storyteller.  He tells the creation story involving Sky Woman being helped by the animals to make her home on the back of a turtle which is why North America is also called Turtle Island.  King compares this creation story to the one found in Genesis in which God creates everything in the world and at the end of all of this, God creates a man and then a woman.  He then gives them “dominion” over everything else.  In the story of Sky Woman, the animals make it possible for her to exist.  The relationship of dependency is clear.  In the Genesis story, the relationship is interpreted to be a hierarchical one with the people at the top.

Well, my ancestors have certainly taken the “dominion over” idea to the extreme.  The creation story that underlies how business is done here in North America has led to taking as much as is possible from the Earth and giving back very little.  If this was a relationship between two humans, we would call this an abusive relationship and we would advise the victim to leave.  King explains that the creation story of Sky Woman and the turtle is one in which the humans remember that they are dependent on all the other life forms.  After all, that Turtle could just swim away.

Ancient Wisdom by Paul Shilling

Anishinaabeg artist Paul Shilling

painted a beautiful picture of a turtle which he called Ancient Wisdom.  We have a print of it in both of our offices and one at home as well.  It is beautiful and hopeful as the turtle swims up to the surface of the water, or perhaps the turtle is hatching from the earth, or floating in space.  See what you think.  The ancient wisdom of the First Peoples on Turtle Island, this land that we now call North America is one based on a creation story in which people are part of life, not dominate over it.  And that ancient Wisdom is rising.

This past Sunday, while riding our bicycles on the trail, my partner suddenly screeched to a dusty stop.  There near his front tire was a tiny newly hatched snapping turtle walking along the trail.  It needed to get to water soon, so my partner picked it up and put it in the grass pointing to Matchedash Bay.  A brand new turtle starting it’s life here on Turtle Island.  We wished it well. 

A little further down the trail, we found the nest.  It was obvious because egg shells littered the disturbed gravel.  One little egg shell had a dead turtle inside that hadn’t managed to find it’s way out.  It’s not easy being a turtle.  They are preyed on by all sorts of animals and we humans don’t make it any easier with our roads and boats.  However, people seem to be catching on to their importance.  More turtles than ever before were brought to the Ontario Turtle Conservation Centre in Peterborough for medical help this year.

I wonder how much further this experiment in domination has to go before we listen to the ancient wisdom of this land.   Perhaps we are already remembering our relatives the turtles and are renewing that ancient relationship.  Perhaps deep within us, in our DNA, we are remembering who we are and our place in the world.  Remember the creation story about the turtle and the wisdom embedded in the story.  Let it work in you.   Let it grow, just like the little turtles will.  See what it grows into. We can change the story we are telling.  Thomas King's famous words remind us of that:  "The truth about stories is that's all we are."