Life is Really a Slinky

The idea of the great hoop circle of life that some Lower 48 tribes refer to is echoed in the description that tribal systems “recognize multiplicity at every single level.” That circular concept is something that

I’ve always embraced. I teach it in my writing classes when I tell students that writing is recursive. We first write in a big circle and then, with repetitive rewrites, the circle becomes smaller and smaller, paying attention to minute details. However, the recursive process is never complete; the continuum is infinite. There is a point where we must stop and turn the writing in, but it is never complete - thus, the many editions of the same textbook. All writers know this. All parts of the writing process are interactive and overlap and circle back around. It only makes sense that all things in life are like this. Familial relationships - parents raise children who then come back around to take care

of the parents. Work life - we start out with a part-time job and eventually move on to a full-fledged career, only to ease off toward retirement, maybe even down to part-time before staying home altogether. My husband, 65, is now semi-retired, working only in the summers for Fish & Game, much like he only worked summers when he was a teenager. Also, a friend of his from childhood, Steve (who he has known since they were 4 years old), is also now retired and they often go fishing in the middle of the week, always planning where they’re going to go next, just like they did when they were kids, always fishing together. Adulthood came and took away the time for that, but now the time is back again.

In my head, I envision familial ties as a sort of slinky that goes round and round, never intersecting, but always connected, almost circling back on itself. My grandparents raised my father who circled back around to take care of them while raising me and then as I grew up, my respect for them increased and I wanted to learn more. As they faded into the next world, my dad was growing older and I was learning from him as I was raising my children, alone. He was a stand

in dad and the circle kept spiraling. Just as he passed on, my children started having children and now I am trying to share my wisdom with my children and grandchildren. As I walk through the garden, hand in hand with my grandson, I see the spiral continuing as he learns what flowers are edible and goes home with that knowledge to work in the garden with his mother, my daughter.

This brings me to the idea that “gynocracy is more about grandmothers’ femininity than about mothers’ femininity.” It was truly about the time my first grandson was born, 4 years ago today, that I first started understanding and practicing mindfulness. I was living offgrid on the Unalakleet River with my husband. I didn’t use one drop of water without thinking about it. Sunlight was precious. The river was our lifeblood. It all interconnected and we took care of our environment and it took care of us. Today, now having lived on the road system

for not quite 18 months, I still never brush my teeth without being thankful for the running water. I’m especially thankful for the warm running water to wash my hands. I’m a conservationist, taking short showers and not flushing the toilet every time. My husband thinks I’m a little crazy, telling me that we have a large septic tank and there is no need to conserve. I tell him that it’s not just about our septic tank; it’s about the environment as a whole. He just shakes his head and laughs. His ancestry is Viking - did they not conserve? Oh well, I will never let another food scrap go to waste or wander off the trail with my 4-wheeler or snowmachine. I will never leave trash on the tundra, and I will always recycle and reuse whatever I can. I will always garden organically; pulling weeds is a wonderful time for mindful thinking.

The understanding that “you can’t address health without providing water; you can’t address the need for water without protecting the environment” was so on track with my own understanding. It’s all a package deal. Actually, it’s more than that. It’s bigger than a package. It’s recursive. It’s circular. It’s a slinky. Economy, ecology, social constructs, and political systems are all interconnected. None can stand alone.

As I move forward with designing indigenous curriculum, this will be in the forefront of my mind. Even the idea of grade levels (first grade, second grade, third grade, etc.) doesn’t make sense to me. When I first started Kindergarten, we lived in St. Louis and there was a new elementary school using the “open concept.” My father, an educator, and my mother, Native American, chose to send me to that new school. It took the idea of the one-room schoolhouse and expanded it to a school population of approximately 200 K-6th grade students. The Kindergarten classes were the only classes held in a separate room. The rest of the school was designed as a big circle with a library in the middle. There were no walls, only 6-foot high partial dividers between classes, and all classes were open in the back to the library in the middle. There were no grade levels; instead, there were six teams. A student may be in Team 3 for Math and Team 5 for Reading. It all depended on each individual student’s needs. Each class could contain students with 2-3
years of difference in their ages. I went to that school until the third grade, when my parents divorced my mother and I moved to Wisconsin. It was quite a shock to my system when I went to a normal

Hoop Dance

school, but I eventually adjusted. I can remember Kellison Elementary School like I was just there yesterday. With all of the changes in education, the school has since been remodeled and reimagined into the same format as every other school.

My hope is that soon indigenous communities will be able to make their own decisions about what is best for their young people, instead of being governed by the state lawmakers. It is only when we return to this indigenous knowledge framework that we can truly begin to rethink education and what success looks like in those communities.

Wishbone Lake Observation Journal

For my class this semester (Traditional Ecological Knowledge), one of the assignements was to go to an outdoor place, away from people and civilization, and just spend time there, alone. No phone. No dog. Just be. This was my resulting essay: 

Everywhere you go, there you are. As I sat in my camp chair in the middle of frozen Wishbone Lake, I had time to reflect on the space and time of my visit. 

It was a 10-mile snowmachine ride into the backcountry of the Talkeetna Mountains right behind our house. My husband and I took separate machines and he led the way, having explored that area a couple of weeks prior to my starting these observations. Even on Saturday afternoons, we seldom saw another soul on the well-worn trail through the trees, across creeks, and past ragged cliff faces. Recovering from achilles surgery, the vibration of the motor had a healing sensation on my foot, and I enjoyed the rides immensely. 

Once out on the lake, I set up my chair on the trail behind my machine and settled in to enjoy the peace and quiet that is so much a part of the last frontier while my husband continued on down the trail to give me some alone time for the next hour. 

As the silence closed in around me, my tinnitus heightened, and I found myself wishing for wind. On one occasion, the wind answered, bringing snow along for the ride. As I sat there, in the middle of the lake, I tried to see how much snow would pile up on me before the torn discs in my lower back begged me to move. The flakes were small, but my dark jacket and snow pants allowed for close examination of the hexagon shapes, each different and unique. I love the wind. I love the feel of it. I love the sound of it. I loved watching it roll through the trees and across the snowblown lake, creating drifts and shallows as it went. 

In all my time there, I never saw an animal, not a bird, not a sound. There were tracks, moose and rabbit, maybe a fox here or there. We saw wolf tracks on the trail on the way in, which made me feel the need to look behind me now and again as I sat there. I wondered if there was some being just inside the treeline, hunkered down, watching me and wondering what I was doing. Was a crossfox curiously scurrying from tree to tree? If he was there, I did not see him or hear him. Perhaps it was a she, fattened with kits, heading back to her den with a mouse or a vole who had met his demise. 

I couldn’t have been more than 5 miles from a blacktop road, just a couple of miles from a gravel road neighborhood and a lake, 17-mile Lake, filled with ice fishermen, women, and children. It was because of this that the complete silence took me by surprise. I noticed that I couldn’t even hear Gregg coming back until he had come over the top of ridge. 

I’ve only been to Wishbone Lake in the winter, this winter. I look forward to driving the 4-wheeler into it this summer, though, from the look of it, there may be some wet crossings that will add to the adventure. I wonder… will there be birds chirping in the trees in the summer? Will there be fish jumping in the lake? Will an occasional moose dare to show its face at the water’s edge? For now, the lake is sleeping. It’s tucked in under a thick blanket of snow, silently sleeping. 

The lake sits in a sort of hollow, surrounded by mountain peaks, and makes me grateful that this is in my backyard; we had driven the snowmachines straight from our house to this wild place. The hills that rise up from the edge of the lake are tree covered, but the craggy mountaintops are just beyond. I would say that I’m lucky, but really, luck had nothing to do with it. A lot of hard work and dream chasing brought me to that very spot on Wishbone Lake. There, I was. Everywhere I go, there I am.

CCS 612 Reaction Paper 4

I'm taking CCS 612 (Cross-Cultural Studies: Traditional Ecological Knowledge) as a step toward my PhD in Indigenous Studies.

This is a reaction to Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future by Melissa K. Nelson.

This week’s chapter readings (Nelson) gave me a lot to think about. I came away from it thinking about the positive impact that indigenous knowledge, native science, could have on western civilization if only the concept of colonization could be wiped clean. As I type this, I’ve got my hair pulled up because my face is covered with a greasy salve that I bought from a lady in Nome. The salve doesn’t have a name and she makes it with local ingredients. It’s a healing ointment for dry skin, psoriasis, and such, and my face is just flaking away from dryness, partly because of physical therapy in a pool once/week and partly because it’s just so dry this time of year. I’ve had the salve for several years and seldom use it. Instead, I turn to mass-produced lotions and skin care, but the face creams I’ve been using don’t seem to be helping at all, and I saw this little jar in my medicine cabinet today and thought, “Well, duh! Isn’t this just what I’ve been reading about? Native science!” It seems like just a bad habit that I fall into, searching for answers on Amazon or in storefronts. I’ve been making a concerted effort lately to really pay attention to what food and drink I’m putting into my body, so it only makes sense to pay attention to what I’m putting on it, as well.

In Chapter 18, Mohawk was talking about food as medicine, and it made me pause and think about the floral jellies that I make. I research edible flowers and then grow them from seed, harvest the petals, and make jelly. I’ve learned a lot over the last few years about nutritional, even medicinal, benefits of many of the flowers. Some of the flowers, I harvest in the wild, like Fireweed and Dandelion. I also find it fun to learn what the different flavors are that come from the flowers. Nasturtium jelly tastes like nectarines. Black Pansy jelly tastes like blackberries. Calendula jelly tastes lemony. Bachelor Button jelly tastes like strawberries. There are more that I have discovered, but I’ll stop here. Last summer, when my then 3-year-old grandson was walking with me through the garden, I would pick petals off of this flower or that one and give them to him to eat. The raw petals don’t have much flavor, but it was fun to teach him that he could eat grandma’s flowers. When Mohawk wrote about elders being a repository of knowledge, it made me think about that day and about how my daughters, and even my sister, often call me for advice or information regarding cooking, baking, and gardening. Before my dad passed, he would also call me with questions about those things. Now, I get to start passing on that knowledge to my grandchildren and it’s difficult to describe the feeling of leaving an almost tangible impression on other humans to carry with them long after I’m gone.

In Chapter 19, Nelson was talking about being Ojibwe and the deep meaning behind the annual wild rice harvest. I spent some time teaching at a BIA school on the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe reservation in northern Wisconsin, and students were often “in class” outside of the classroom in the mornings. In the fall, often coinciding with the beginning of the school year, was the wild rice harvest. This pulled students into the local lakes and waterways until late morning on most days. However, the integration of Traditional Ojibwe Knowledge into the regular school day was the key lifeline for those students. The reward was having wild rice for lunch! The K-12 school had no more than 100 students when I was there in 2005-2007, and the cafeteria cooks made lunch from scratch every day, and the menu depended on the season. However, whenever they said we were having a feast, it meant that wild rice was on the menu. In that culture, if you had wild rice, you were livin’ large. Fall also meant deer hunting, so it was not unusual for us to have venison with our wild rice. Duke mentioned this same feast tradition in Chapter 22. It brought back good memories and a hunger for wild rice!

I loved how Rivera, Chapter 20, put it when he said that the Andeans would have a conversation with wild plants before, during, and after harvest. It reminded me of picking berries on the tundra behind our cabin on the Unalakleet River. Hundreds, probably thousands, of acres of blueberries, salmon berries, cranberries, black berries (crow berries) all mixed in together. There was a special time in late summer and early fall when I could go out to the tundra and sit in one spot and pick all 4 kinds of berries within arm’s reach. I was always alone, the spot being 12 miles from town, so I would often sing or just talk to the berries and the mountains in the distance, partly because it made me feel a connection with the earth and partly because I didn’t want a bear or a wolf to just happen upon me out there.

Memories of my own ocean food gathering were brought to mind as I read Ross’ Chapter 21. When I lived in Homer, we would go digging for razor clams in September. Earlier in the summer, we would go across the bay to camp. While over there, we would scour the boulders at low tide for mussels and butter clams which would be steamed and served with a coconut curry broth and big hunks of fresh French bread. It was so delicious that I can taste it as I type. Ross also emphasized thinking small - home gardens, using what’s around on the land and in the water, and steering clear of big-business food products. It’s all so true and I’ve lived most of my adult life according to that very principal. My daughters, having been raised with gardens, now have their own gardens and are teaching their children about organic (native) home-grown food. Food gathering can also be a fun, family experience like when I go blueberry picking with my daughter and grandson out at Hatcher’s Pass. We have made it an annual family tradition. This coming Saturday, we (my husband, myself, my daughter, her husband, and my grandson) are all going ice-fishing together. I love that we do those things together. Bonding over the catching and harvesting of food is food for the soul in itself.

Finally, in Chapter 23, when Mohawk talked of the fragility of a high tech civilization, it made me reflect on how thankful I am for the modern conveniences that we now have, that we didn’t have when living offgrid in the 400sf cabin on the Unalakleet River. Much like the Andeans, I have conversations with my appliances on a regular basis. I don’t know that I’ll ever turn on a tap for warm running water again and not be grateful for it. I’m thankful every time I open the refrigerator to get a cold glass of iced tea. I’m so very thankful to have ice in the summer, not just in the winter. The robot vacuum, dishwasher, washing machine, and dryer - I’m very spoiled now, but I am thankful. However, the fragility of it all is not lost on me. I’ll always garden, hunt, fish, gather, and put up all that I can.

Food is medicine and so is the acquisition of that food. Mindfulness in all steps of the process is as nourishing as it is healing. Now is the time to extend that thought pattern to medicine for the external. Over the last couple of years, I have been learning about essential oils and rely on my homemade roll-ons to ease back pain, capsules to ease stomach pain, and cleaners to keep my home as nontoxic as possible. Why didn’t I turn to that healing salve first? From now on, I will.