Friday, August 31, 2007

comfort language part one

(little cairn, one of the campus 'waterfalls')

(rock in the midst of the same waterfall)

comfort language, part one (very drafty draft)

how maia told me about her dying
father, how he struggled for words
in his last moments, how he
was so restless, mouth a mask,
that silent o:

& how she couldn’t think
of any words he would understand,
(english a long forgotten shoreline)
she hunted for the yup’ik words to say to ease
his pain –

but words drowned in the mouth of the kuskokwim,
no sound in the stretch of mudflats, beaver-tail tongue
thudding in her throat –

he passed away, she said, &
there was nothing i could say to him.
he was so lonely,
like raven, when he was creating
the world –

all the other little mud-people, the strange creatures
like tigers & horses & palm trees
they spoke different language than him,
so raven scattered them all over the earth –

but i’ve got to find the yup’ik, he said
i need to gather up their words, dive
for them, swallow them singing,
the only ones i understand --

that’s when i knew i had to go
she said, to carry that yup’ik home
i need to find words again, breathe
life into their muddy hibernation,

then aata will hear me from heaven
& maybe he’ll be less alone

Thursday, August 30, 2007

green gentleness

(kalyny, high-bush cranberries like a chandelier, in the river valley)



(serene white dog sitting under a tree, along 76th ave)




I truly love Joanna Newsom's long rambling epic songs; every time I listen, a new little stanza catches in my ear & settles there. This is one for the end of summer:



While down in the lowlands,

the crops are all coming;

We have everything.

Life is thundering blissful towards death

In a stampede

Of his fumbling green gentleness.


-- Joanna Newsom, 'Only Skin'
(here you can download live harp or piano versions of this song...)

Sunday, August 26, 2007

reminiscing over københavn...

(oh, københavn, how i miss your fresh flowers, & the bicycles that tried to squish me as i crossed your streets...)

(how i miss hearing the guttural sounds of dansk, all those tasty swallowed vowels)

(& all your fantastical nordic architecture, including this shrieking valkyrie who looks like she coughed out a bus.

(Nothing much, just thinking about earlier this summer, & the seminar in Copenhagen.)

* * *

(poem-bits)

in copenhagen

"...that in this moment there is life and food /For future years." – William Wordsworth

in copenhagen, we talked.
talked all day during classes
over endless tea & wienerbrød

talked as we walked back
to the hostel, past cyclists
swooping over bridges,

their bells like swallows crying,
sudden & gone ringing over the canals
where we sat & talked,

swinging our legs, sipping tuborg &
eating soft-is, tour boats &
accordions moving on past --

til dinner, down strøget we tipped
over cobblestones, & feasted
on thoughts:

how everything brought us
together, our expressions &
stories & dissertations & lives

& we poured them out
like good wine, all sweet & difficult
& maddening in their complexity

you can’t describe but will
die trying all the same, because
it’s just so good to be talking,

talking with the honesty of
strangers, intensity of intimates
in an academic ecstasy, all night

our words exploding like fireworks,
we left smoke hanging over tivoli
like fields of phantom dandelions,

turning every ashy seed into a star

Thursday, August 23, 2007

black earth

(red currants near astotin lake, elk island)

(farm near star, ab, south of homestead)
(nettles & wildflowers, star, ab.)
Something that I've always wondered about why there seems to be so little written in the history books (by this, meaning books & museums & cultural centres, etc) about Ukrainian and First Nations interaction in Canada. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places, but there really seems to be a lacuna in the literature, in the documentation of this. I know Dr. Klymasz (Ukrainian-Canadian folklorist) has mentioned the need for people to research it... I don't even know where they'd look, though, anyone who wants to find out about it. I've poked around on the internet, the libraries... no luck thus far. All I could find was an Alberta heritage project with a page documenting 'Aboriginal and Ethnic Minority Women' -- it mostly just comments on how both Ukrainian settlements and Aboriginal communities were targets of missionary and government policy which were attempting to 'Christianize/civilize/Canadianize' both groups, as women in both groups were not seen as 'ideals of womanhood'. And in booklets and informational materials from Kalyna Country, they talk about Ukrainian culture, French Culture, Aboriginal Culture... but never mention the links, the cross-over, or any shared influences...


I have family members who were part of the second wave of immigrants from Western Ukraine, as well as an ancestor who was first Ukrainian to ever end up in Canada, back in the 1890s -- the one who started the exodus... The end of serf-dom in Ukraine meant lots of agrarian people wanting land & wood & employment... & he heard that Canada was running around then advertising free land! free land! so he went on a scouting mission with his friend & to make a longer story much shorter, he returned to Ukraine telling everyone they should go: "We’re coming back and we’re selling everything that we have. This is Heaven compared to what we have, we’ve got to go." The Austro-Hungarian government imprisoned him for six months, charging him with 'inciting people to emigrate' but he came the following year, to the Edna-Star settlement... & hundreds followed him there to North-Central Alberta, & then to Saskatchewan, & Manitoba...


Of course, the motives of the Canadian government were to use these settlers as colonial pawns, to populate the Western part of the country, to demonstrate their sovereignty over that land, the land inhabited by the Cree & Siksika & Anishinaabe & Tsuu T'ina & Dene Suliné & Dene Tha & Métis...


Huge tracts of that first bloc settlement at Star border Saddle Lake, stretch up to the Dene community at Cold Lake... why isn't there more documentation of the links between the communities? Or did they interact much at all? I know the bloc settlements kept ethnic groups together, mostly... but surely the general proximity would have encouraged some kind of interaction, whether amicable or hostile...


No one from that first wave of immigrants is alive anymore. I know about my own extended family's links with their Métis and Cree (& French & German neighbours), links of work & marriage, but as a cultural whole, I'm curious about patterns of interaction -- the Ukrainians & the First Nations (whose land they were now farming...) I know they were both socio-politically marginalized groups at the turn of the last century... was there cooperation, alliances formed? Or did they remain separate, internally isolated?


* * *


(fragments.)


what did they think
of that strange man,
arriving somewhere north
of amiskwaciy waskahigan


standing barefoot
at the train station,
hidden in a shaggy coat,
stamping like a buffalo,
snorting in the cold --


his face, holding his daughter,
steep cheekbones like riverbanks,
his breath hanging in a foggy
ravine


that autumn they built
the burdei, buried themselves
within black earth, seeded themselves
in their new land, hoped to sprout
for a foreign spring --


*


bright kalyna, dog-star red
the trees heavy with currant earrings;
my great-grandmother weaving
the rushes into floor-mats,
singing with miss irene
in french & cree


elle est comme l'hirondelle
she's like the swallow
yes


we sing about swallows too!

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

bison are lovely creatures.



(bison on a hill above the road, elk island national park, last week)

(grazing mama bison with calf, by the roadside, elk island)

(milk time for the baby one, elk island)


Speaking of large land mammals, I just finished reading 'Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia', by the anthropologist Piers Vitebsky, and I adored it. It was such a gorgeous book, not only as anthropological writing, but as honest and poetic storytelling... and as a gift, a tribute to the Eveny people (and reindeer) who shared their lives & migrations with him, who taught him so much. It was tremendously compelling, and made me cry. (and also want to go to the Sakha Republic even more...)

I hope that someday I can write a book about my own future fieldwork & experiences that is so generous & well-crafted & eloquent. He lets the subjects of his book speak for themselves & weaves histories and personal narratives together in a way that is so refreshing.

My other inspiring book-writing anthropologists:

Julie Cruikshank -- Live Lived Like A Story-- Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders; Do Glaciers Listen? -- Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination
Andie Palmer -- Maps of Experience -- The Anchoring of Land to Story in Secwepemc Discourse
Keith Basso -- Wisdom Sits In Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache

The book is not my favourite, but I do give points for the title of 'Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers' by Edward Schiefflin.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

till we don't be.


(alaska, again: ballaine lake on the uaf campus, 11 pm, july 27)

We could stand for a century,

Staring,

With our heads cocked,

In the broad daylight, at this thing:

Joy.

Landlocked in bodies that don't keep,

Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being,

Till we don't be.

-- Joanna Newsom, 'Emily' (mp3 here)

Saturday, August 04, 2007

in alaxsxaq

billowy cloud, with aurora-like wispy edges... the skies in the tanana valley were beautiful.

smith lake, on the skarland trail on the university of alaska fairbanks campus. unknown mountain in the distance.

fringed grass-of-parnassus (such a good name), skarland trail, fairbanks.

The name 'Alaska' comes from the Aleut (Unangan) word alaxsxaq, meaning 'the mainland', or, more specifically 'the object towards which the action of the sea is directed'.

(Oh, the beauty of the specificity of deictic terms in the Inuit languages!)

In Fairbanks there was no sea, of course, but the sky was oceanic, with white-cap cloud waves and light past midnight. In summer you can't see the northern lights, but it's very comforting somehow to think of them still being there, just like Denali on the horizon, bluish and ghosty, hidden in the haze unseen but calm and there all the same.