maps of experience

{swallows swooping over the athabasca river, on the windfall bridge}

I’ve been thinking about place again, as I read (my professor) Andie Palmer’s book Maps of Experience, which discusses stories recorded while travelling through Secwepemc territory. She places such a clear focus on how everything happens at both a time as well as a place, and how this unification of time & place is rooted to the land.

It also reminds me of a quote from Catherine Taine-Sheikh’s article in La rencontre du temps et de l’espace, “Poésies d’intineraire...”, which discusses toponymy and the role of places in the poetry of Mauritanian nomads:

‘La mobilité du bédouin est devenue une référence pour le nomadisme modern. Pourtant ses déplacements qui obéissant à une multitude de déterminations de tous ordres (écologique, économique, climatique, tribal, religieux), renvoient à une conceptualisation spatiale plus complexe qu’il n’y paraît de prime abord, même si elle se construit essentiellement autour de lieux bien concrets – et non pas largement rituels comme dans l’univers mondialisé de l’hypercapitalism.’

To roughly paraphrase her French, essentially she’s saying that the conceptualisation of space for Bedouin people is fundamentally different from the concept of most people in a non-nomadic, industrialized society. It differs in that the Bedouin concept is centred around actual, concrete places, whereas in our industrialized society (‘the global world of hypercapitalism’, she says), place is more ‘ritual’; it is not concrete.

It’s true. With the invention of the telephone, you didn’t have to be within earshot of a person to have conversations with them. Now, of course, between internet & cellphone (or internet on the cellphone!) you can be anywhere at all. You are not limited by land & distance.

Now, of course, this expansive communication network has allowed for the dispersal, the sharing of information & thus the furthering of knowledge & ideas in unspeakably vast ways. What it has done for learning, for creating is invaluable. It allows people to communicate who would otherwise never meet, & I realize this, and value it because of this.

However, I also feel that this type of communication, for all its connection, creates a certain dis-connection. Not only between people, for few people actual bother to see each other when they exchange information or thoughts anymore, but between people & their environments, their places, their lands.

In many societies (such as the Secwepemc that Andie Palmer describes) the transmission of story and knowledge is directly anchored to the land – land acts as a mnemonic, helping the teacher recall the important information that must be conveyed. The distinction between the oral and the written is also involved here, but for the sake of simplicity, I just want to emphasize that there are still other ways of understanding places, and understanding what they represent.

That what has happened before at a particular place, that what is happening now is all important. What a place represents needs to be remembered and respected.

This is a place too
They call it Nuklawt
That’s where we get
wild rhubarb in the springtime...
it’s the roots
boil it
and put it wherever you’re sore...

-- Angela George, p.106, Maps of Experience

If people recognized the knowledge in the landscape – whether it’s related to the knowledge of ecosystems, as in a particular plant growing in a particular place that is remembered by a related story that describes its medicinal use, or the knowledge of one’s history or spirituality (e.g. Nose Hill in Calgary being the nose of the first man/creator of the land for the Siksika cosmology) – I think that they would be apt to respect the earth more. Instead, perhaps, of thoughtlessly paving over sacred ‘noses’ and endangering plants.

“How the environment is categorized as ‘human’ or ‘built’, versus ‘natural’, may reflect how members of that culture behave with respect to the earth.”

-- Andie Palmer, p. 160, M of E

I also like to be mindful of the personal mythologies I have created in particular places. I think of the Riverlot 56 woods at the Edge-of-the-Earth, the field for headstands and alien-regeneration & all the stories and conversations there... Places in Kananaskis (like Lost Goldpan Creek, Ptarmigan Cirque, & all our myths created over years of returning... Our personal experiences with the land instill us with connections.

I find that I tend to remember important things by associating them with places – sometimes I can remember only particular details about the place, for instance, how the wind was rustling in the leaves, the angle of light through a window, or the acutely bright sunset colour of the sky, but those (mostly natural) details help me to recall exact words, sometimes. I like to be aware of places like this, for their own presence, the presence created by history, as well as what is happening, what I am living out as I am in a place. These connections present me with a certain orientation – of my history, my identity, my inspirations.

It’s important for me to share these connections to the land. Speaking with my father when we went camping and hiking this year, we discussed how it’s so nice to go to a place that we both know so well, & love so much – a place that we feel a similar connection to, a place that we understand & appreciate the same way. This has grown from our shared experiences in significant places, and the knowledge he has passed on to me on each trip, in every little spot along the way.

With all this abstract technology, the world is in your house; but with the way we seem to live on our little wireless methods of communicating, & existing, our houses seem less in contact with the world, as the earth, the land.

I know that our wired & wireless ways of communicating, bridging time & space so swiftly and adeptly, are valuable, crucial, and in many ways quite necessary. But I strongly believe it is important to remember the memory & knowledge of concrete places, & what they mean to us and to others.