well-organized thoughts.

the auriol range of the kluanes, haines junction (dakwàkàta), feb. 19/08

haines junction sunset, feb. 19/08

1. Fieldwork

I have about a week of fieldwork left now... & I just came back from a week in Haines Junction (Dakwàkàta) & I know I have lots & lots of information (& more surveys to come trickling in) but I don't know... I still find it hard to really think about my data while I'm still in the midst of gathering... I wish I could write more about my fieldwork but it's just so difficult, to be immersed in it & trying to process it at once. Sometimes my thesis feels like a branching plant that's growing at the speed of a sped-up time-lapse photograph, all these new questions springing up all along the edges, & I worry, do I have enough information? Should I pursue that? & not only is it growing, it's shifting, transforming, & maybe I have too much. Or not enough. It's hard to say. But I'm enjoying myself. Even if I can't think straight. I swear I learn more in a week in this situation than I do in a month of being in classes...

2. Grandmothers

If my Баба were still alive, she'd be 93 today. This week, sitting with the Elders in Haines Junction as they worked on sewing a traditional ground-squirrel robe, I was missing my grandmother especially much. All the ladies, with their smiles & swift hands & irreverent humour.... I felt so fortunate to be able to watch them creating this, & so nostalgic... One woman in particular reminded me of my grandma, the way she teased me, her sense of humour as she sewed the skins together, joking that the first row she made could be a 'gopher miniskirt'... I couldn't stop seeing my grandmother's hands, knitting, embroidering, & her hands themselves -- skin gone soft & olive-coloured, paper-birch with aching gnarls. I look study my own hands -- all wind-chapped, now -- & wish I could show her the Athapaskan-style beadwork I've been doing... Is she there? Sometimes I feel like I have assimilated so much of her, her memory... I feel her most strongly whenever I am making something with my hands... Other times there is still that overwhelming faraway...

3. Language/Land

Southern Tutchone country is called 'dasi keyi' dän k'e -- my grandfather's country, or occasionally 'dasu keyi' -- my grandmother's country. This makes me feel the need to go with my mother to Nebyliv, to my own grandmother's village in Ukraine, take her ashes there, as soon as we can. But when?

4. Birds & Dreams

It is just a coincidental quirk of the language, but it makes me very happy that the words for 'my grandmother' & 'my bird' are nearly phonetically identical in Southern Tutchone.

In my dream last night there was a barn owl calling in a tree. I was drawn to it, but then the owl's eyes glowed red (like a mothman, eep) & so I got out of there rather quickly. Then in another part of the dream I was reading a book, & then became the character in it. In the front yard of the house where I grew up there were three birds in a tree... one was a meadowlark, the other two I wasn't sure. I tried to get closer to them, & then they turned into girls, their wings becoming long long hair & I had to braid the meadowlark's black hair.

5. Quietness.

On the drive home from Haines Junction in the middle of the night, the post-ecliptic moon was full & clear. The massive snowdrift mountains were all visible, & the road was lined with the charcoal-smudge shadows of bluish highway pines. Only two cars passed in two hours... the only other creatures were restless elk milling about the Takhini valley, & there was just such a stillness, a quiet bowl of earth under this silvery scraggly-clouded sky, sometimes frozen, sometimes flowing, everything bright & soundless & still. Often such quiet feels so delicate, so ephemeral, but this was overwhelming, immovable, felt like it could not end. Feeling my own smallness swallowed up in such immensity is so lovely; I find that feeling held by the land so wholly can sometimes be more deeply comforting than human touch.