animal mother & crow.

arctic maidenhair, banks of the tagà shäw (yukon river), late october 2007

looking over kwanlin (whitehorse) & the tagà shäw from the trail to long lake

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Those are just two of the six million other pictures that I took while in the Yukon this past autumn but still have not yet posted... I am returning in just eight days, now, for the second part of my fieldwork & despite the fact I still have another six million little things to do before I leave, I am very, very excited. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to go up again... & I miss the people -- I miss interviewing & asking questions & photographing & filming (so tired of being chained to a computer), I miss learning the language from actual speakers (not tapes), -- & I miss the land terribly...

I felt so at home there so quickly, much more so than I have ever felt in any other place in such a brief time, really. There is something about the northern boreal & plateau that just swallows you up, engulfs you, makes you feel as if you are just as vast.... this feeling struck me swiftly, & still remains with me, even now.

* * *

(poem fragment)

animal mother, she speaks dän k’e
sibilants that carve riverine & gentle,
like a herd breathing over the land,
cool spreading stream of the tagà shäw
singing over rocks, down the valley
from the marshy glacial lake in the sky

crow carries a voice, bubbling
up sulphury, call hollow as a cave,
blue ice & a spirally sinuous consonance
rolling over the land’s knobby vertebrae, his
wings smoothing out her tired back.

animal mother, her rich arms of a mountain,
cradling you even in the crumbling loneliness
is the land that swallows you whole
takes you away from the white silences
singing owl-lullabies

lets you burst through the goat-fleece sky
like a rose-hip, bitten-lip thorns along the silty cliff
with rivers of aspens shaking copper into spring
& the strangest kind of understanding
of this tongue you’ve not yet heard

* * *

'Animal mother', as her name suggests, created a number of important animals in Southern Yukon traditional stories... a number of the stories are told by angela sidney in 'life lived like a story' by julie cruikshank, a book I highly recommend... it was one of the prominent things inspiring me to focus on a Yukon Athapaskan language for my MA. the way it frames the life histories of three Southern Yukon women is deeply respectful & compelling. The way it presents the traditional narratives embedded in these women's stories reveals so much about local understandings of place, history, belonging & the transmission of knowledge.