there where you have landed --

bright shadows on midday snow, ridge above lu zel män (fish lake), yukon, jan.27/08.

from a ridge where we snowshoed, above lu zel män, yukon, jan. 27/08.

From an Atlas of the Difficult World -- Adrienne Rich

I know you are reading this poem

late, before leaving your office

of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window

in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet

long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem

standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean

on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven

across the plains' enormous spaces around you.

I know you are reading this poem

in a room where too much has happened for you to bear

where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed

and the open valise speaks of flight

but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem

as the underground train loses momentum and before running

up the stairs

toward a new kind of love

your life has never allowed.

I know you are reading this poem by the light

of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide

while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.

I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room

of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.

I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light

in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,

count themselves out, at too early an age. I know

you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick

lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on

because even the alphabet is precious.

I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove

warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in yourhand

because life is short and you too are thirsty.

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language

guessing at some words while others keep you reading

and I want to know which words they are.

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn

between bitterness and hope

turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else

left to read

there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

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

* * *

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.

long quiet highway (or, zen & the art of crying)

flowerhead in the snow, river valley trails, late november 2007

more flowerheads, river valley trails, nov.07

* * *

I actually made resolutions this new year; this is a rare occurrence, mostly because my natural new year's rhythm seems to fall on one level in September at the beginning of the academic year, & on another level in the springtime, in late March, when everything's melting... so it's always seemed odd to me to have a new year in the middle of winter, when my resolve for a lot of things tends to be hibernating. Nevertheless, I made resolutions, one of which is to

*read more books that have nothing to do with my thesis!

This is not to say that I don't really enjoy thesis-reading, because I do, & I read a lot of books that are only tangentially related on various linguistic anthropology things & the like. But I need to remember to branch out a little more. I have quite the list picked out, and I am excited to lose myself in something other than Language and Symbolic Power for awhile.

This afternoon I finished reading 'Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America' by Natalie Goldberg... which was part memoir, part 'Zen & the Art-of-just-sitting-down-and-writing'... I've never read any of her other books about writing (like 'Writing Down the Bones') in which she specifically discusses writing practice as a form of Zen practice (akin to zazen, or sitting meditation) but I found what she spoke of to be compelling and refreshing, as well as comforting in the strangest way. She is such an unpretentious writer, & she writes of the littlest details in a way that does not try to make them into BIG SYMBOLIC THINGS, but just presents them as they are, important and profound in and of themselves. Here she tells of a moment she experienced whilst teaching a grade six class in Taos, New Mexico.

"I stood up in the middle of 'Please, please, be quiet' and suddenly stopped. The place where my chest was sore -- it was opening, opening, red and enormous like a great peony, and it was radiating through my body. I felt the blood flowing in my hands and legs. I turned and looked out the winfow. I looked at the smoky appearance of the spring cottonwoods near the parking lot. Any day now they would break into leaf. There was a spindly Russian olive near our window. Suddenly it looked beautiful. Then I had one simple vision: I saw myself wandering in autumn fields and I felt that nothing, nothing else was important..." (Natalie Goldberg, in 'Long Quiet Highway', p.58-59)

* * *

A strange thing happened today while I was reading. I started crying about three-quarters of the way through the book, not because it was particularily sad, or intense... I can't even identify a page or a line that catalysed it... it was just strangely moving in its simplicity, so much so that before I was really cognizant what was going on, I was sitting at my kitchen table, weeping, and I couldn't stop. Not of sadness, or anything in particular. Just crying for the sake of crying, and it felt surprisingly good. I wasn't even terribly alarmed, I wasn't worried, wasn't wondering if I was going crazy, wasn't even trying to pin down my weeping on a reason. I just sat there, content in the stripes of late-afternoon sun coming through the red venetian blinds, crying until I was finished crying. & then I felt tired, & a bit strange, but oddly refreshed, like I'd just run very hard in the cold. & I am not really sure what to make of this, I know I'll read the book again & probably be able to discern what brought on this profound bout of tears, but right now it just seems a very fitting reaction, for a book about writing, & living: the importance of the unanalysed, the momentary being-not-thinking of Zen.

poems from edge of the earth

dusk at the field at the edge of the earth, november 2007

the edge of the earth, nov.2007

old wheat stalks... looking a bit like underwater corals or fronds of some sort... nov.2007

high-bush cranberries in the forest by the field at the edge of the earth, nov.2007

* * *

poems in various states of poem-finishedness, out to get some air... i've also written about the edge of the earth here, back in january 2006 when i first discovered it... (see very bottom of page)


i)

down beyond the last of the houses
where suburbia bleeds out
its last paved streets we found
the field at the edge of the earth.

over the rise, the trampled wheatstalks
waving again pure, treeless sky,
there is no curving horizon to remind you
of the earth as an oblate spheroid,

no geographers to remind you
that there is no abyss, just another dip,
remnant of an ancient riverbank
swimming in yellow skeletons of rye.

we just found the field that
snowless december, funeral-weary &
wandering in the woods not knowing
whether we escaped ghosts or

sought them. tried to feel a quiet
hand in the ice-fog settling, dancing
on the earth that held them, held
us in its dizzying spherical waves,

snapped pictures of our fuzzy forms
whirling in the frost, running up over
the illusory slope until we felt them,
there, on the periphery of our breathing,

in the suggestions of our flurried movements,
the bend of the tired grass spines,
creeping up on the hill’s rim
our sparse tears, the fingers of the wind --


ii)

at the edge of the earth
lie the bleached skeletons of wheat,
still spines curving under sleep-weight,
blue smoke of winter;

deep underneath,
my ancestors dream seeds:

from those tightly curled embryos
they arise and fly as skeins of geese
unravelling, a living memory
in that ragged purl of a v,

a migrant blanket
moving over cloud-gates &
continents, pulling us over
the edge of the earth –


iii)

at the edge of the earth
i lie fallow at dusk
waking & wondering
what holds me here?

born here i was made
of this dust, mixed with
star & pulsar, consumed it
& consuming, water & soil:

a river breathing ice
on its edges, my baba
with handfuls of that dark
matter, nodding at the mass

in her hands as we
planted, & i still sow her
carrots & poppies, wondering
what holds me here

when those i love are scattering,
slowly shifting in their orbits,
in distance, til our fingers can’t touch,
in words, til soon we’re unintelligible –

when i rise there are deer
dashing over the crooked fences,
whiteflag tails trace a camera-flash
of their paths over the night fields,

never looking back as they
run leaping, spreading themselves
wide over
the edge of the earth –

it's a new year and i'm glad to be here, so let's sing...

the shores of chain lake, north of athabasca

(blistery sun, north of athabasca)


I can’t sleep when I think about the times we’re living in, / I can’t sleep when I think about the future I was born into (...) / And the pain that we left at the station will stay in a jar behind us. / We can pickle the pain into blue ribbon winners at county contests.
('2080', Yeasayer)

* * *

Let’s play this one out, until it explodes / Into a thousand tiny pieces / What’s the story universe /You are melody in numbers / You were shapes you were rhythms /There are signs that we can learn / Place over the heavens / To predict how long we’ll burn /How long will I last? (...)
('Thousand Tiny Pieces', Sean Hayes)



* * *



Happy New Year! з Новим Роком! That is really all for now...



Here are some songs I find appealing... (lyrics above). I feel exactly like both of them at once.





2080 (mp3) -- Yeasayer (All Hour Cymbals)



Thousand Tiny Pieces (mp3) -- Be Good Tanyas (Hello Love)



(Also, both of these CDS are lovely & most definitely worthy of purchase, in case you are wondering)

in quietness, & time

ashberries, hanging in the river valley (taken a few weeks ago)
(ice lilies freezing up on the north saskatchewan, taken a few weeks ago)

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is those moments where everything seems to fall into place & you know that what you are doing right then is exactly what you are supposed to be doing... those moments when everything is flowing, & you don't even really understand why, or how, it all got this way, because maybe there were a lot of tumultous or troublesome things, or even just the most subtle, unnoticable things... but somehow, you got here & you know you are exactly where you are supposed to be, doing exactly what it is you know you should do.

It's about feeling synchronous & connected, because so many things had to come together, an infinite number of things, really, for this to all fall into place. & I suppose this is really how I understand fate, or destiny -- it's not predestination, not a predetermination, as such, but just an understanding of how everything is unified, and connected. & those moments where you know, you feel a sense of visceral connection, are like little enlightenments (as in Buddhism -- being able to see the entire intricate infinitesimal web of things, all at once).

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet:

'Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakably tender hand, placed beside another thread, and held and carried by a hundred others'

I don't think that tender hand comes from anything outside of ourselves -- we are the ones who guide ourselves (as much as we are ever ourselves, as part of something greater than us) & weave ourselves in alongside so many other threads... & I just find myself constantly comforted when I experience those clear moments where I realize where I am right now amidst those nets of connections, & those inexpressible little pulls & tugs on the web that ground me, reassure me that I am doing exactly what I should, right here, right now.

Palaces and stormclouds
The rough straggly sage and the smoke
And the way it will all come together
In quietness, and in time...

-- Joanna Newsom, 'En Galop'

you do not have to be good.

(top: geese flying south over the sturgeon river, mid-november. bottom: sturgeon river half-frozen, sunset)

* * *

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

~Mary Oliver

* * *

This is really very lovely... I can't believe I didn't know much of Mary Oliver's poetry before. It is so honest & comforting... I especially like: You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

chickadees and cars

this kind of light is sustenance.



walking in the cold a few days ago, i recorded some of the soundscapes i moved through --



chickadees & cars



the delicious muffled creaking of the snow, squirrels



as i walked by the river, singing to myself



i tried to get the ice lilies crunching on the river, & the sound of a magpie flying over ahead (wings flapping like the soft shake of a pillowcase) but they were too subtle, too ephemeral, too far away...

grandmother-salmon

(at tthe yanlin -- canyon creek -- off the alaska hwy, southern tutchone country, yukon, sept.07)

When I was doing my fieldwork, I would often start to feel completely overwhelmed -- drowning in so much rich and substantial information that I wasn't even sure what I was submersed in anymore -- there was just so much to take in. Something that always reassured me, though, something would always appear to remind me that yes, in the midst of all of this, there is sense, and unity...

Slowly I am piecing everything together, of course, and coming up with more and more fine-tuned questions. & it never fails to inspire me, hearten me, when I hear these stories, these little things that remind me I am on the right track:

the tightlywoven sense of community, the love for the language, & the bonds, experiences with language shared between children and their grandparents, especially their grandmothers --

(little themes that are mirrored in my own experiences, these resonant threads that keep surfacing boldly throughout my own life with such cohesion...)

& i marvel so gratefully at all of this! what i have been able to experience, what has been shared with me... so many people taught me so much, & i just want to give back, and give back.

mostly i just know she's there, with me, watching me.

(щиро дякую)

* * *

grandmother salmon (notes for a poem, not yet done, etc)

"They say when the fish go up the river their great-great grandmother is at the head of the creek. And that's why they go up to visit the great-great grandmother, that fish. They come back to the same place."

-- Elder Kitty Smith.

(i hear my teachers saying i hope
my grandchildren come speaking to me
dän k’e)

& i am listening to äsua annie ned
in my headphones, & wishing
she was alive so I could meet her
but she’s that salmon grandmother
now, waiting at the head

of the river, maybe she’s sitting there,
beading slippers while she talks to
my own knitting grandmother, who’s
singing 'kazalo divchatko'
while annie whispers her fish-sounds

conversing with silt, slipping into
a dream, waiting for the summer
when her children’s children's children
will leave school, come swimming upstream
she’ll hear their th’ tl’ ch’! & the bubbling ɬ

they’ll say dännch’e, äsua? &
she’ll smile through the swells,
strengthening, äshea! nigha shäw nithan!
for finally her words have returned
to her, finally all of them will speak –

oh, don't bend the branches, i am grieving...

(I know I've posted this picture before, but it is one of my very favourites of my grandma, Anne Pechanec / моя баба Анна М. Пехник.

February 22, 1915 - November 26, 2005 / 22ого Лютого 1915 - 26ого Листопада 2005)

* * *

It's been two years; still understanding how someone can be here & not here all at once, how I can still feel wholly suffused with their presence & their being (in thoughts & dreams & birds & trees & my mother & my heart, myself) & yet still miss them, still ache.



Ta j vylitala halka, oy, z hliboko yarka

oy, vylitala druha z zelenoho luha...



Ta j sila-vpala halka, oy na zelenij sosni

ta j na zelenij sosni, na hiltsi rozkishnij...



Oy, ne khylijsja hilko, oy, bo tak meni hirko

ne khylijs' na more, oy, bo tak meni hore...

-- ukraïns'ka narodna pisnya.

* * *

and the jackdaw flew off, from the deep little ravine
& another flew away from the meadow

and the jackdaw alit and tumbled from the top of the green pine-tree,
on the top of the pine, luxurious branches of a wedding-tree,

oh, don't bend the branches, i am grieving...
oh, don't bend towards the sea, i am too full of sorrow...

-- ukrainian folk song

'dark bird' performed here (click to get mp3 from yousendit) by alexis kochan & paris to kyiv

* * *

comfort language part two

rosehip & sagewort, on the rocks at tthe yanlin ('water flowing through the rocks'), southern tutchone country, yukon, sept. 29/07

last autumn flower, tthe yanlin, s.t. country, yukon, sept.29/07

comfort language, part two (draft)


three days before her death
my baba spoke her last;

she sang after me,
repeating the words of a
folk song i was coaxing out
of her, trying to see if she
remembered, if she still
flickered beneath the slow
breathing & candle-ash sighs –

the erosion of english
had left her old tongue
emerging on the surface, like
the colours on a pysanka
after the wax slowly melts
away –

o kazalo divchatko
moje holubiatko!

her head on the pillow,
& she was smiling.

how the softest needles
embroidered those words,
the timbre of her voice
cross-stitched across a pillowcase
into my head –

scho virno kokhaje mene!

how she is still singing
those words now, over and over
& maybe

this can finally let us all
rest.

in support of linguistic diversity, & multilingualism.

Naalen ('water flowing around') mountain, Southern Tutchone country, Yukon. September 29, 2007.

So a long time ago, almost a year ago, I wrote some little counterpoints to this essay that... annoyed me. & mystified me... as I really couldn't quite believe the linguist who was writing it was actually saying the things he was saying (a lot of respect I had for him disappeared rather swiftly). But anyway... & I suppose I was in an argumentative mood, so I felt compelled to write responses. Then I put it away, because really I only did it for myself, to make it stop irking me, but now I just found it whilst going through some older files and I decided to post it now, because the topic of 'dying languages' has been popping up a lot lately... It is a little snarky, perhaps, but it's how I feel. & I really do think it was an irresponsible article -- there is SO much that he is overlooking! So much...

Here I have italicized quotes from him that I am addressing... Again, the full piece of his writing is here.

* * *

“Surely easier communication, while no cure-all, would be a good thing worldwide. There's a reason the Tower of Babel story is one of havoc rather than creation.”

Yes, the Babel story is one of chaos – but seeing multiplicity & diversity as chaos is but ONE of the many myths and folktales dealing with the creation of different languages. Many are quite neutral about multiple languages, or even see it as a positive solution that arose from too much fighting when everyone spoke the same language. (I personally like the image from the Gunwinggu language of Northern Australia, who speak of a Dreamtime goddess giving each of her children a language as a toy to play with, leading to their descendants speaking these diverse tongues) Regardless – it’s really narrow to look at diversity as only chaotic. Really unfortunate. I’ll return to this.

“Languages are hard to learn for adults, especially ones as different from English as Native American ones. In Pomo, the verb goes at the end of the sentence. There are sounds it's hard to make when you're not born to them. For busy people with jobs and families, how far were they ever going to be able to get mastering a language whose word for eye is ‘uyqh abe?”

I find this especially ignorant coming from a linguist who apparently speaks other languages, & should also not be forgetting the immense capacity we possess to adapt, & to learn and maintain multiple languages. Yes, it’s certainly easier when you’re under 10, perhaps, but it’s far from impossible even when you’re much older. Easier communication is certainly a goal, but it can be attained by everyone becoming multilingual, not reducing human speech to ONE language. Just because McWhorter believes that learning a language is difficult, doesn’t mean that people who do strongly value learning a certain language for whatever reason, is going to let a pharyngeal consonant or some different verb placement rules stop them? Clearly McWhorter has never been in the situation of learning a language much different from English. He severely underestimates the cultural value of language and is just repeating popular beliefs about the ‘difficulty’ of language learning. If you want to learn a language – especially if you are, for example, of a minority group like the Pomo speaking an indigenous language – you may have any number of reasons for motivation that could be sacred, ancestral, etc, that transcend the busyness of daily life. From my own recent research in the Southern Yukon, I have witnessed a number of different strategies that busy people incorporate into their daily lives to make practice a part of their routines and this too helps motivate them. (I must be sure write about this as a bigger part of my thesis!)

...Supposedly one's language determines one's cultural outlook. But a simple question shows how implausible that notion is. To wit, precisely what "cultural outlook" does English lend its speakers? Thinking about the broad heterogeneity of people using this language, it is obvious that the answer is none, and the academic literature on the topic yields little but queer little shards of faint support for the "language is culture" idea. Which brings us back to languages as, simply, languages.

This, frankly, is pretty flippant. I can't believe it, really. Is he just trying to play devil's advocate here? Firstly, it seems he hasn’t been reading much anthropological linguistics lately, as there is plenty support for the ‘language is culture’ idea (I can make a reference list quite easily!). I am no extreme linguistic determinist – I don’t think that language itself is the sole determiner of what you can think about, or how you think – but I can cite both literature & anecdotes aplenty that show how language can certain shape our thought. Anyone fully bilingual, or even having seriously studied another language, been immersed in it & conversation could tell you how they speak or write or even structure thoughts differently in their various tongues. Different vocabularies, structures do affect us. Yes, if we try, if we invent new words, coin new phrases, we can talk about anything in any language. But some languages (in both their structure and content) are designed better for talking about certain things that are culturally relevant, and that makes it very difficult to deny the reciprocal relationship between language and culture.

Maybe Inuktitut doesn't have as many words for snow as we used to think, but if you'd like to talk about seal hunting -- or caribou hunting, if you're a Northern Athapaskan, I promise its not hard to find specialized vocabulary for this. In many cases, language and traditional environmental knowledge are deeply interlinked, and many conservationists are looking to not only cultural practices but to the languages spoken by those cultural groups to better understand ecological systems -- place names are a perfect example of this -- names often encode meanings of the practices performed at a particular place. To learn these places is to better understand how to preserve the balance in that system.

(A new book has just come out, by K. David Harrison, and it discusses much of what I just alluded to --

& then his query as to what cultural outlook does English lend its speakers? Yes, it’s a vast & heterogeneous popit's called 'When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge'. I highly recommend it) ulation that speaks this language, & thus McWhorter shuts it down all straw-person-like. Really, maybe he should be asking: what cultural outlooks (PLURAL!) do the different varieties of English (PLURAL!) lend their speakers? East Indian Englishes, First Nations Englishes, all are diverse ways (PLURAL!) of speaking.

Also, if we want to look at English as a global language – for many it is a language of commerce, of business, etc. That’s definitely going to be a reciprocal force in affecting one’s cultural outlook. Languages are not simply languages. Just because most contemporary Englishes (as opposed to the power of the word in say, Old English, e.g. see Beowulf) do not lend a spiritual value and power to the act of speaking, as say, the contemporary Sakha language does, does not mean we can impress our beliefs about language on others. Languages are vessels for beliefs. To allow them to be eliminated for the sake of thinking that we’ll all communicate better is simply colonial. Thus I squirm when he says things like:

Yet the extinctions cannot be stopped, for the most part.

Yes, it can be difficult to reverse language shift, but it can be done, & will continue to be done. I don’t disagree with McWhorter when he implies that language death is natural and part of diversity. This is true. Languages do die out. No one speaks Gothic or Sogdian or Anasazi anymore. However, if people wish to stop their language (& their culture) from being wiped out but colonialism and dominant cultures and languages, they need to be supported. It is not too late, & it is not a worthless task. There will always be many people who believe that it’s natural to let even their own native tongue disappear, & many others who will devote their lives to keeping that language alive. Ideologies differ cross-culturally and within any given group from one culture. However, I feel it’s my responsibility not to contribute to another’s language death; as a linguistic anthropology student I want to ally myself with people who are working to revitalize their languages and cultures.

Maybe despite many people best efforts, 90% of our 6000-ish languages will disappear and we’ll only speak one or two someday. But it’s also a natural part of language growth that the cycle of language creation would begin again, groups splitting off creating dialects turning into languages. That wouldn’t stop. Diversity would recreate itself, in the grand scheme of things. (He should know this! He studies creoles!)

For those still uncomfortable given that this single language would be big bad English, then notice how that discomfort eases when you imagine the language being, say, Lenape.

Um, no I am not less comfortable imagining the world language being Lenape, or Edo or Kirghiz or Maori or Ukrainian. Any one of these languages being the sole human method of communication means that we lose the other nearly-6000. Simply, that disturbs me. There are different insights to be gained from different languages, different ways of speaking and communicating, & you don’t have to subscribe to some extreme version of linguistic relativity to comprehend that.

If people truly come together, then they speak a common language.

You need only look to places where people apparently speak the same language (Serbo-Croatian in Yugoslavia, English in Northern Ireland, Kinyarwanda in Rwanda) & have certainly not been creating togetherness. Truly coming together, in my mind, is learning to respect and understand diversity, not eliminating it, and this certainly includes becoming functionally multilingual.

* * *

our home on Native land.

rivery bog

leafy dew

Sometimes the governing bodies of this country disappoint me into speechlessness. (This happens more than I like to really think about.) Being up here in the Yukon right now, I am especially realizing the repercussions of the refusal of Canada's representatives to support the U.N. declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. Our Indian and Northern Affairs minister is making feeble excuses, stating 'oh, it doesn't really specify what the country is responsible for doing, blah blah blah, we don't know how to balance it with the rights of others, the Canadian constitution is good enough already, blah', which seems to me to really translate as 'we're grasping at any excuse not to give indigenous peoples any more self-determination and rights to their own decision-making processes'.

Reading this article, I agree very much with Beverley Jacobs -- the Canadian government is afraid. And since it passed in the world anyway, hopefully it will indeed aid in burgeoning self-government development in many parts of Canada anyway, and might force our backward, Bush-worshipping conservative government into facing their fears of indigenous self-determining government.

berry-picking on the may (grey mtn)

here i am, picking berries (itl'ät = low-bush cranberry) on the may (grey mountain)
lower slopes of the may, down to the tagà shäw

looking east to cantlie lake, from the may

itl'ät, on the may -- tasty goodness. we also picked crowberries.

looking south from the may to marsh lake, widening of tagà shäw

* * *

Berry Compote

2 parts berries (here, a mix of itl'ät and crowberries)

1 part sugar

1 part water

spices (e.g. cinnamon, nutmeg, if you like)

Heat water and sugar until sugar is dissolved and the syrup is at a low boil. Add berries and bring to a full boil (so that there is happy pink bubbly froth) -- turn down the heat and let it simmer for about 7 minutes, or until the berries are bursting open. Add spices now, if you like. Turn off the heat and let cool slowly, and thicken. Pour over cake, ice cream, pancakes, toast, etc. & enjoy.

along the river, after the rain

rapids and sunset light, along the yukon river (tagà shäw)

wild poppies along tagà shäw

i'm odd & full of love.

(Upper Kananaskis Lake, looking to Ubithka Mabi (Nesting of the Eagle - Stoney name), a beautiful cradle-like mountain... )

(driftwood and pebbles, shore of Upper Kananaskis Lake)

Words for the Wind -- part 3 -- Theodore Roethke

Under a southern wind,
The birds and fishes move
North, in a single stream;
The sharp stars swing around;
I get a step beyond
The wind, and there I am,
I'm odd and full of love.

Wisdom, where is it found? --
Those who embrace, believe.
Whatever was, still is,
Says a song tied to a tree.
Below, on the ferny ground,
In rivery air, at ease,
I walk with my true love.

What time's my heart? I care.
I cherish what I have
Had of the temporal:
I am no longer young
But the winds and waters are;
What falls away will fall;
All things bring me to love.

* * *

Lately I am very much absorbed in Mr. Roethke's poetry... it is very comforting for giddy/excited/melancholy/anxious/grateful/in-awe/full-of-love/important feelings (e.g. pretty much the state of my brain right now). It is also very much a kindred spirit to my own writings, in a very complimentary way -- I read little bits & often instantly think of something I wrote in a very different way, but still the same.

His writing is like Wordsworth's in its reverence for all things, but even more direct, connected to his subjects... & just so full of such love, love in the most vast yet intimate sense, it makes me weep. I like to think that Roethke reminds me a little of my father, sometimes -- my father is not at all friends with poetry, but he often says very poetic things very much unconsciously, & so sometimes I think this would be something like what my father would write if he was a poet -- he writes of land the way my father taught me to love it & know it, & so I think of him, & also my grandfather (mother's father) whom I never knew. But I've been told he loved everything like this too, the same gentleness in his soul.

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

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...)

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

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!