what beauty this is

{riverlot field}

driving home i see those flooded fields... how can people not know what beauty this is?

-- neko case, ‘fox confessor brings the flood’

There are some things I would like to tell the counter-protesters in Caledonia, Ontario who have issues with the peaceful protest by some people from the Six Nations.

Yes, it’s certainly inconvenient to have a road blocked for a month, isn’t it?

However, wouldn’t you agree that it’s also rather inconvenient to have the land you know taken from you and exploited for centuries, rather problematic to have your ancestors’ graves overturned and shoved beneath excessive unnecessary suburban development? Yes?

I just cannot understand how so many people feel no connection to the landscape. Or, if they can appreciate the beauty of it, it’s only in a very superficial way, like it’s picture painted especially for them, instead of something far more vast & powerful, & something they are part of. In the industrialized world, cities are not connected to the land, even though their sewers and cables and basements form a twisting labyrinth beneath the surface – cities float above the earth on a crust of pavement, and the boundaries between cities and the ‘wilderness’ is definitive. There is a binary, the ‘civilized’ and the non. This does not exist everywhere.

In Anna Maria Kerttula’s book 'Antler on the Sea', about Yup’ik, Chukchi and Russian relations in the village of Sireniki, she relates a conversation between a Yup’ik woman and a Russian visitor. The Russian is poking fun at the woman, because she is walking around outside in slippers. He says, ‘What are you doing, wearing those out on the tundra, you’re supposed to wear those inside the house, they’re for the home.’ She replies indignantly, ‘Isn’t the tundra my home?’

I think of my own forest that I know and love so much. I think of how comforting it is for me, how much more sane & like a real person I feel when I am there. How I know the certain trees by their bright splashes of lichen, trees with bark nibbled by the porcupine, the birch cradling the lost antler of a deer. The pussywillow tree, the fuzzy hanging candles of aspen blossoms, the woodpeckers in the rustling poplar. & the saskatoon bushes, the kalyna-berries, the waxwings calling. The curve of the hill at the edge of the earth, the eight deer wandering in the long grasses, white flashes, the soft silence when through the branches one will look you right in the eye. The sunlight coming through blackened branches, warm furnace of the woods. I lie in the field there & feel the earth under my back & my bones are filled with good. It fills me, the land fills me.

I think of my dad and I once, we were hiking up a ridge & looking over the Kananaskis Lakes to Elk Pass, & my dad said, “I look out over this land, and I just wish I were big enough to wrap my arms around it all, and just hug it.”

This land hasn’t been in my family for millenia. My ancestors never knew it. But it’s a part of my self, it’s woven into my memories. So much has happened there to me. Skiing, running, wandering there & speaking to people I remember the sound of my breath echoing in cold ear-caverns, the calls of waxwings, the way the light looked when something was said to me that if I stand there long enough I hear it all come back. If I can feel so strongly to this forest – what would it be to have the stories of my people’s cosmogenesis, creation, history, and collected memories for thousands of years all cached in the same land? If humans had been created, right there, under the manitoba maple? If those small ridges in the hill are the ribcages of my ancestors?

When the stand of aspens I could once see from my window was suddenly cut down, I was devastated. The empty line of the sky made me nauseous for days. I felt severed. When I think of this, I realize I understand a very small bit of what it might be line to be forcefully evacuated from a homeland of ancestors, of your lineage’s history. How can people not see how psychologically damaging it is to relocate people, to take their land from them? This is unfortunately a major part of Canadian history, this process of forced disconnection.

If my forest was destroyed by people bent on building & buying, I honestly don’t know what I’d do. I cannot comprehend losing it. It makes me ache for anyone – & there are hundreds upon hundreds of cases here – who has had their land taken from them.

I recently wrote a paper on the linguistic links to place and landscape among the Inuit, and the ‘oral maps’ created that not only help in navigation, but in creating a sense of belonging, as when Mark Nuttall and Béatrice Collignon speak of the ‘memoryscape’. This is a powerful way of understanding place and its connection to people – people who do not live on the land, but live with the land, because they were created as it was created. & they know that there is so much knowledge stored in the landscape. Knowledge, memory, and the land becomes a living mnemonic; as you experience it, you remember, and it changes each time you visit, yet remains the same presence, the same force, the same place.

I am so grateful to my parents for raising me in a way that taught me to feel a connection to the land, despite dwelling in an pavement-covered environment. Teaching me respect for it and the value of connecting with the earth. Taking me to Kananaskis when I was less than a year old, my mother carrying me on her back up the mountain, around Marl Lake. My dad taking me to the creeks and lakes of the Windfall boreal forest, going mapless & learning to follow water and changes in vegetation to wind your way around, showing me places he loves and feels spiritual about. My grandma, always with earth caked under her nails, always in the garden with her raspberries and root vegetables, praising growth. It helps me to understand better and truly appreciate the different ways the land can be understood.

I just strongly believe in recognizing multiple epistemologies, respecting different understandings and ways of knowing. Maybe if the people in Caledonia actually thought about what it represents, what it means to live in “Canada, your home on Native land”, there might be a little bit of enlightenment. If they would think beyond the narrowminded, ethnocentric roadblocks in their own minds, their dominant truth that oppresses multiple others, perhaps the barricades could start to come down. If they cannot face this, that block will remain.