It is the Time

photo credit: Mother Earth News

It was the time of the year

When the blackbirds       flocked;

Red-winged, Rusty, Brewers, Grackles, Starlings, Cowbirds.

Gone were the   competitions

And rivalries of mating,

Nesting, laying, feeding,   and fledging.

Now they gathered as one.

Standing on the trail by   

  the marsh,

They flew over our upturned faces.

photo credit: Amazon.com

Thousands and thousands

Heading to their night roosts.

Each little bird flapped furiously,

While the flock as a whole

Was a slow graceful wave

That undulated over the trees.

It was the time of the year

When the wild grapes hung     suspended,

Dark purple orbs beckoning

From vines that treeclimbed high.

We picked them by the hundreds into   buckets,

Collected the juice to make jelly.

Our fingers becoming purple red

photo credit: Nature Hills.com

As the Red Oak leaves did the same.

It was the time of the year

When the aspens turned yellow

And yellowy brown and

A dozen hues in between.

  

We stood mesmerized

As their trembling thousands

Became shimmering gold

In the breeze, at sunset.

It was at this same time of year

That people started to flock in the   millions.

Students, children, parents, seniors

In parks, on bridges, by roadsides.

Gone were the petty squabbles

Over differences real and imagined.

The threat of climate change

Bound the individuals together.

 

Locations of the Friday for Future protests
Fridays for Future

There was something in these flocks

A sense of hope, the empowerment    of youth,

Relief from fear and paralysis.

A graceful wave undulating beneath    the trees.

Across the Earth people listened to     the land

And renewed their relationships

With ALL their relations.

It is that kind of time.

And here is a nice little video showing the flocking of blackbirds in case you've never seen them:

Call of the Forest

Call of the Forest: The Forgotten Wisdom of Trees Is a beautiful feature length film featuring the work of Diana Beresford-Kroeger.  She is a “world recognized author, medical biochemist and botanist” who was born in Ireland and was tutored in the Celtic knowledge of trees and plants by her family.  Beresford-Kroeger blends these two knowledge systems throughout the film, as she visits forests around the world and those who are planting and protecting them.

From Japan, where we view the tiniest urban forest in the midst of Tokyo, to Japanese forest bathing which has been practiced for a thousand years, she takes us to her farm in Ontario where she has been creating a living library of tree genetics for over forty years.  With her, we visit Vancouver Island and California, home to the mighty Redwoods as well as Pimachiowin Aki an  PIC area in Manitoba protected by Indigenous people who are working to have the area protected as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. 

Pimachiowin Aki from UNESCO Biosphere website

We visit Ireland where most of the trees were cut down by the British to conquer the people of that land.  It was said that the Irish would not be conquered until there were no leaves left as their understanding of life was based on the wisdom and knowledge of the forest.  For this reason, Beresford-Kroeger says that an intact forest is a mighty act of peace.

Beresford-Kroeger explains the chemistry of the medicinal aerosols that trees emit in the forest as well as the links between the health of the forest and the health of the oceans.  If the trees disappear, then so will the fish.  Japan is now planting “fishermen’s forests” after deforestation led to the disappearance of ocean fish.  “The chain is invisible until the chain is broken,” she says. 

Beresford-Kroeger also takes us to the great Boreal Forest which grows around the north pole and which represents 30% of the world’s forest.  Expansion of the Alberta tar sands threatens this forest.  All we need to do is protect the Boreal Forest, she states.

Narrated by Gordon Pinsent, the film introduces us to passionate forest protectors around the globe as well as how trees can mitigate the effects of climate change.  And the viewer meets ancient and enormous trees as well as young ones.  By the end of the film, Beresford-Kroeger sums it up simply.  Planting trees can change the climate and her calculations reveal that if every person on earth planted one tree a year for six years, that would make a difference.  Since we can’t all plant trees, some of us will have to plant trees for those who can’t and some of us can fund people who are planting trees.  

And beyond this, she wants people to develop a different relationship to nature.  She is not the only voice saying this at this time in history.  But she is adding a rich, intelligent and passionate voice to the growing choir.

Does this sound too simple?  Well judge for yourself.  You can check out the trailer here: 

Or watch the film in its entirety here: 

You can view her plan here.  As well as committing to planting one native tree per year for the next six years, she also suggests the following:

• Encourage your friends and neighbours to plant native trees
• Protect the trees in your neighbourhood
• Protect the native forests in your community by getting involved and writing letters to your government representatives 
• Help keep the Boreal Forest intact

So watch the film and decide what you will do.  I guarantee that she will inspire you.

Sharing The Weight

I recently viewed this version of The Weight, the famous song by The Band in celebration of the song’s 50^th anniversary.  Playing for Change is well known for getting musicians all over the world to play the song “together” through the magic of technology.  This version starts with Ringo Starr from the Beatles phoning up Robbie Robertson from The Band to ask him what key the song is in.  Since Ringo is a drummer, the key is of course of no significance and the humour of this “call” sets the stage for a lovely collaboration of musicians from near and far as they celebrate the song together.

Watching this video made me feel happy.  Watching people collaborate and create together makes me happy.  This is what people all over the world are doing every day.  The fact that all this good news doesn’t make it onto the official “news” broadcasts does not make it less true.  So enjoy this video.  I hope it makes you feel happy too.

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."

Kissing the Earth with Your Feet

Re-envisioning What it Means to be Canadian

Daniel Heath Justice

“We have to re-envision what it is to be Canadian,” said Daniel Heath Justice.  This Indigenous author and UBC professor of First Nations and Indigenous Literature was participating at the 3^rd Gathering: Festival of First Nations Stories.  The Festival was organized by the Orillia Centre for Arts and Culture in the town of Midland.  The Festival included Indigenous authors visiting and presenting at local schools, the Midland Native Friendship Centre, the Midland Cultural Centre, Public Library and Huronia Museum.  Playwright and musician Tomson Highway performed his music with two other artists, Songs in the Key of Cree on the Friday night.  

And on the Saturday, six authors and two artists shared their work, held dialogues and answered questions.

I had read Daniel Heath Justice’s book Why Indigenous Literatures Matter which taught me a great deal and so I was listening carefully to what he had to say.   Justice explained that Indigenous authors give context to the individual stories that we hear.  This context explains how people got to where they are.  If you don’t know the context, he explained, then problems appear to be a “problem of being”, not a problem that emerged from within a context.  That then, skews the solutions offered.

Daniel Heath Justice and Alicia Elliott at Gathering in the Midland Cultural Centre theatre (from OCAC facebook page)

Alongside him was author Alicia Elliott.  I had read her book A Mind Spread Out on the Ground earlier this year and found that this young writer has a courageous voice as she tells her story.  She weaves her own story with well thought out and clear contexts for how Indigenous people got to where they are now and the part that the Canadian governments and non-Indigenous people play in that context.  In her dialogue with Justice, she commented that although so many of the problems that are experienced today by Indigenous people were caused by colonialism, the solutions offered up by non-Indigenous people are often also colonial.  She gave the example of the problems experienced on reserves such as the absence of clean drinking water.  The solution offered up by some is simply for Indigenous people to move to the city which comes from a colonial mind set. This is instead of addressing the inequity of communities on either side of her reserve in Southern Ontario having clean drinking water while her community which has a water treatment facility, lacks the infrastructure to deliver this water to people's homes.

Cherie Dimaline holding The Marrow Thieves

Later in the day, Cherie Dimaline author of The Marrow Thieves which has won many prestigious awards spoke of her connection to the land near Midland.  Her Métis  family ended up in this area after being evicted from their land in the Red River Valley and then Drummond Island.  

Dimaline told the audience that she wrote The Marrow Thieves as a love letter to Two Spirit Indigenous Youth who are dying by suicide at an alarming rate.  I read this book last summer and couldn’t put it down.  During her presentation, Dimaline told the story of working with Indigenous communities whose land would be used for a cross Canada pipeline (that never got built).  Her job was to collect the stories of these communities and present them to the people who give permission for such projects.  She found that the communities that had become more "Christianized" were more likely to agree to having a pipeline than communities that retained traditional ways and connection to the land.  The traditional communities had sacred areas on the land whereas the more Christianized ones had churches.  Just as Daniel Heath Justice had said earlier, this Indigenous author was adding context for the audience.

Listening carefully to these and the other authors, I learned so much about the context of Indigenous lives as well as the connections to colonial thinking.  Chair of the Orillia Cente for Arts and Culture, Fred Larsen, thanked the authors for their work many times.  He stated that these and other Indigenous authors have been “doing the heavy lifting,” explaining our own history to us and telling their stories.  “It’s time for us to do more of that heavy lifting,” he said to the non-Indigenous people in the audience.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard an older white man say that to an audience before and I was heartened by his words.

Returning to the words of Daniel Heath Justice, “We have to re-envision what it is to be Canadian,” I looked up the word envision. The Cambridge on-line dictionary defines envision as “to imagine or expect that something is a likely or desirable possibility in the future.”  So perhaps re-envision is to let go of what we were imagining or expecting the future will look like and imagine something else.  Justice said that this re-envisioning includes how we relate to the land, our histories and our shared experiences.  He went on to explain that when Indigenous communities flourish, it’s good for everyone.  Justice cited the example of a Cherokee community in the US that is doing well and is providing health care for themselves as well as for the non-Indigenous people in the area.  However, when corporations do well, it isn’t necessarily true that it is good for everyone, especially when they relocate to make higher profits.

Justice explained that Indigenous futurist writing is important because those authors are imagining a world in which Indigenous people not only do well, but also lead the way in survival.  Quite a few of the authors I listened to at the festival explained that Indigenous people in Canada have already survived an apocalypse, in which their land, homes, language, culture, children, and health were taken away.  Who better to teach us about resilience and survival?  In a world which is in trouble due to a lack of respect for the land and the climate, Indigenous writers offer a worldview that holds part of the solution.  Einstein is often quoted as saying that problems can’t be solved with the same mindset that created them. 

In re-envisioning what it is to be Canadian, we have this profound resource of thoughtful Indigenous writers with diverse voices.  They are giving us the context and more of the history than we have been taught, to understand how we all got here.  They are telling the stories of what their lives are like now within that context and they are giving us a different idea of what the future could look like. Cherie Dimaline told us that The Marrow Thieves has replaced To Kill a Mockingbird in many Canadian classrooms.  It is also in production as a NetFlix series. These stories will help our youth to envision a different future.

There is a reason that conquerors and dictators kill the artists and destroy their work right at the beginning of a take over. Art has a power to convey meaning, give us courage and help us imagine a future that is different from the one that the usurpers seek.  That’s what makes it dangerous to dictators.  That’s what makes it critical for us.  It is fairly easy to buy or borrow a book by an Indigenous author and read it.  It is a little harder to open up your worldview to allow another story to enter into it.  I believe that it is a sign of intelligence to be able to take that new information and find a place for it within you, let that story work with you, become a part of that story, and imagine a new one.

Politics on TV is not the only story.  It is just a loud and repetitive one that celebrates bad behaviour with extreme attention.  There are so many other stories out there waiting to be heard, waiting to do their work and helping us all to imagine a better future.  

After absorbing the voices of the authors and artists all day, my partner and I went for a walk in the late evening, down by the lake, under the stars.  We stopped to look at all of the constellations in their magnificence.  They were so beautiful and their groupings created for us constellations that all have stories from thousands of years ago.  I felt humbled and immensely grateful in their presence.  And then I realized something.  This was the exact same feeling that I felt at the Gathering.

Colonial Musings

Waubaushene, the town that I live in, has been a townsite since the mid nineteenth century.  Before that it was the home of the Wendat people until the 1600’s when they were virtually wiped out in the French/English conflicts.  After that, the Anishinaabeg moved into the area until they were pushed out by European settlers.  Long before that, this area was mostly under a large inland sea which is why there is so much limestone around.

The name of this area has changed with the changing inhabitants and no one seems sure where the name Waubaushene comes from.  Some say it means “place of rocky marshes”, which would describe the water at the edge of the town very well.  Some people have shortened it to just Waub.

The early settlers were involved in the lumber industry and old pictures of the townsite show no trees at all.  The area was covered in White Pine once upon a time, but the early settlers deforested it.  Beginning in  1922, the Simcoe County Forest project planted 33,000 acres of what had become "wasteland" with Red Pines.  Subsequent residents of the Waubaushene townsite planted other varieties of trees and now there are huge Silver Maples, Red Oaks, Basswoods, White Pines, Scots Pines, Sugar Maples, Eastern White Cedars and many others.

Waubaushene Public Elementary School now closed

Times change and first the Separate Elementary School and then the Public Elementary School have closed.  The town’s kids are now bused to the next town to go to school.  The Elementary School property was sold to the Simcoe School Board for one dollar by the town a long time ago, so that the local children could walk to school.  But apparently, we have less money now then we once had and the school board decided to sell the building and the property.

A group of local women wanted to change the building into a community hub including the local library.  They got some support, but the local council lacked the imagination to envision this new idea.  And so, the school board sold the property to a local car salesman, Paul Sadlon, who is also involved in property.  All summer, a dumpster sat outside of the school whose sign still sadly reads "Have a Good Summer" and the residents wondered what this man had in mind. In late August a farm wagon with a painted sign was parked in front of the school that read “You are in Paul Sadlon Country.” 

School with farm wagon on right

Close up of the wagon at the school with the ironic "No Trespassing" sign

And here we thought we lived in Waubaushene, not Paul Sadlon Country!  It made me think of how North and South America are named after Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine navigator and explorer who was part of exploring the “New World”.  The early explorers thought they had found India and called the residents Indians.

Well, Waubaushene is on the shore of Georgian Bay and sometimes boaters end up in Waubaushene thinking they have arrived in Honey Harbour, a holiday town to the northwest.  If the old ways of naming a place still apply, then will we end up being called “Honeys” or “ Huns” for short?  Maybe Waubaushene will be called Sadlonica or Paulville.  

Perhaps it is coincidental, but at the same time as the wagon appeared, construction started in our little town of five hundred for concurrent Tim Hortons and a Liquor Control Board where the town meets the highway.  This will likely put the Country Style Donuts and Subway sandwich outlets across the road at the gas station out of business.  Despite the fact that you can drive to one of three LCBO’s in ten minutes, we now are getting our own.  I suppose we need more coffee and alcohol in Paul Sadlon Country.  

There is a story I have heard that back when lumber was the only business in town, there was a hotel in Waubaushene where the men drank after working hard in the bush.  The story goes, that the women of the town burned the hotel down because the men were drinking all their wages.  The hotel was rebuilt and the drinking continued until it mysteriously burned down again.  Since then, the only place to drink has been the Legion.

But now we are in a new country and we are  getting a taste of what colonial thinking feels like from the colonized perspective.  It feels invasive to have a stranger with money arrive in town, buy up the school, put up a no trespassing sign and then call it his “country”.

Well, the story continues and now the farm wagon is still there but the boards with the words and picture are gone.  Did people complain about the name?  Has Paul Sadlon sold the property?  If so, why is the wagon still there. It is hard to understand the ways of the colonizer.

Wagon with signs now removed.

This past weekend, on a rainy Saturday, my partner and I decided to go to Huntsville for a Buskerfest.  My partner has always wanted to go to a Buskerfest.  The event was historically a Macaroni and Cheese festival in honour of the pasta factory in town but this year they have added buskers.  Arriving in downtown Huntsville, we could see vendors' tents set up on the main street.  Visitors could buy tickets to sample the seven competitors' mac and cheese while they watched street performers who were very entertaining despite the cool cloudy weather. 

At one point it began to rain and we ducked into the Town Hall which advertised an art show.  We had just got inside the foyer, when we were invited by a very pleasant woman to go on a tour of the city hall.  She only had two participants so far, so we agreed, having nothing better to do.  This woman took us first into the old section of the city hall, down in the basement.  The bricks that were laid in 1926 are now crumbling and the town has to decide what to do about this.  She touched one of the bricks and part of it came off as a cloud of dust.  I had to think to myself, "the foundation is crumbling."  It seemed like a powerful metaphor for the foundation of colonialism which also seems to be crumbling now.

We continued on the tour and saw the old outdoor steps which are no longer deemed accessible, the old theater, the new theater, council chambers and the accessibility elevator which has been added in later years. The tour ended in the rear foyer, where our guide pointed out the historical plaques.  According to these information plaques, George Hunt arrived in the area as a settler in 1869 getting the “free land” that was offered to settlers.  He went on to build a small agricultural centre whose growth was aided by the engineering of a water route to the area and by 1886, the railroad had arrived and the town was incorporated as Huntsville.  The Muskoka Colonization Road reached Huntsville the following year and the town was on its way.

Our tour guide told this history very proudly.  After all, it was the story of the town that she knew and loved.  But for my partner and I, the history felt chilling.  The words “free land” slipped so easily off of this woman’s tongue but for us, it was stolen land.  In 1923, the Williams Treaty was signed for that land and the land where we now live in Waubaushene.  The land was taken but never paid for.  Just in the last few years, the government has finally been forced to honour that treaty, after being in the courts for years.  The crumbled foundation of a treaty not honoured by the Crown was removed and a new deal was reached that will allow the First Nations involved to strengthen the people in their communities well into the future.

The more that we learn about the history of this land, not just the story that the settlers and their families told but from the perspective of the families of those who were pushed off the land and cheated, the harder it is to feel comfortable with the status quo.  The foundations of colonization are crumbling for us. 

The town of Huntsville, where ironically, my partner’s father was born, is trying to figure out what to do about the crumbling foundation.  Should they shore it up, renovate, rebuild or relocate?  It made me think about our common story, our history.  What do we do with that?  Do we keep on telling the story of “free land” and keep shoring that up?  Or do we let it crumble and make space for the rest of the story?  It is up to us as we write the old stories in a new way.