The first Europeans had a wonderful first vision of California. In the late 18th and early 19th century, the ship captains give us marvelous descriptions of enormous pods of spouting whales coming through the Golden Gate, seabirds wheeling in the air, and tremendous runs of king salmon and smelt. The common description was that it looked as though you could walk across the straits on the backs of the salmon coming through. The geese and ducks would fly in and darken the sky with their numbers. There were huge herds of Tule elk and pronghorn antelope down in the Santa Clara Valley south of here. Then there were the condors and eagles and grizzly bears. It was a tremendously marvelous and fertile area.
One early description is from George Vancouver, a British sea captain who had sailed with Captain Cook in the 1780s. He formed an expedition of his own that explored a lot of Alaska and what's now Vancouver Island and Vancouver Straits. In November of 1792, he came into San Francisco Bay, stopped at the Presidio, and decided to go down the peninsula to Santa Clara by boat and then horse. He talks about the high degree of luxuriant fertility, verdant open spaces enriched with stately forest trees of different descriptions.
"Our journey was estimated at eighteen leagues in which distance the country afforded no house, hut, or any place of shelter except such as the spreading trees presented. About noon, having been advanced about 23 miles, we arrived at a very pleasant and enchanting lawn situated amid a grove of trees at the foot of a small hill by which flowed a very fine stream of excellent water.
"We had not proceeded far from this delightful spot when we entered a country I didn't expect to find in these regions. For about twenty miles, it could only be compared to a park, which had originally been closely planted with true old English oak. The underwood that had probably attended its early growth had the appearance of having been cleared away, and had left the stately lords of the forest in complete possession of the soil, which was covered with luxuriant herbage, grasses, and beautifully diversified with pleasing eminences and valleys."
Traveler after traveler would come through and find these big bold oak trees and this wonderful clear understory of land. And the common description from every person that came through was that it looked like an old English park.
In 1833 George Yount, a fur trapper, settled up in the Napa Valley in what's now Yountsville, not far from Calistoga. He said, "It was the nothing more than a wide and extended lawn, exuberant in wild oats and the place for wild beasts to lie down in. The deer, antelope, and noble elk held quiet and undisturbed possession of all that wide domain. The above-named animals were numerous beyond all parallel, and herds of many hundreds, they might be met so tame that they would hardly move to open the way for the traveler to pass. They were seen lying or grazing in immense herds on the sunny side of every hill, and their young like lambs frolicking in all directions. The wild geese and every species of water fowl darkened the surface of every bay and firth, and upon the land in flocks of millions they wandered in quest of insects and cropping the wild oats which grew there in the richest abundance. When disturbed, they arose to fly. The sound of their wings was like that of distant thunder. The rivers were literally crowded with salmon. It was a land of plenty, and such a climate that no other land can boast of."
Here's a description from a guy named Thomas Jefferson Mayfield, who came to California as a kid in 1850. He traveled over into the San Joaquin Valley. He describes the different kinds of flowers.
"As we passed below the hills, the whole plain was covered with great patches of rose, yellow, scarlet, orange, and blue. The colors did not seem to mix to any great extent. Each kind of flower liked a certain kind of soil best, and some of the patches of one color were a mile or more across. I believe that we were more excited out there on the plains among the wild flowers than we had been when we saw the valley for the first time from the mountain the day before. Several times we stopped to pick the different kinds of flowers and soon we had our horses and packs decorated with masses of all colors."
So this family entered the San Joaquin Valley, loaded up with all of these flowers over them.
California was this extraordinary and lovely land of great fertility, of abundant wildlife, of great flowers. It was always considered by Europeans to be a wilderness. Somehow or other, this was the natural state of the land. The Indians that were living there were environmentally inconsequential. They just kind of lived there. They lived there and a few acorns fell off the trees, and they ate the acorns, and then they'd go off and hunt a few deer and gather a few seeds. They lived off the excess of the land.
It was thought that California Indians had lived here for thousands of years without altering the land, without changing anything. They had left it the way they had found it. But this is not what natural California looks like. If you leave it alone, you do not get forests that look like natural parks. You do not get meadows that grow this way. I don't want to overstate the case. It wasn't as though every square inch had been cultivated, but to a large extent California was landscape managed by human beings in a very particular way.
There was a wonderful old Pomo gentleman that I knew rather well named Ben Lucas from the Stewart's Point Reservation. I remember once walking out there with Ben on the hills above Stewart's Point. It was springtime and the elderberry was flowering. I said, "Ah Ben, isn't that elderberry just beautiful?" He said, "Well it's beautiful, but it makes me sad because, when the elderberry flowers, it means that we can't go down to the bay, to the ocean anymore and collect shellfish, because the shellfish has become poisonous. When the berry ripens in the fall, that's the signal that you can go down and start collecting the shellfish again."
I remember once up in a Hupa reservation, there was this fellow Ray Baldy walking around, and this little wren began to tweet away, singing its little heart out. This itty bitty bird. I never knew something so small could have so much noise in it. But it was tweeting away out there. Ray said, "Oh good. That means the salmon will be here in another four days."
I started to collect some of this information, as it fades away rather rapidly. All of these people had a phenomenological calendar of some sort. It was a very specific calendar. It was specific to particular areas. It was a wonderfully supple and flexible kind of calendar, in which natural events were keyed one to the other.
So you knew that when the strawberry ripened, you would have a festival, and then so many days later you'd know that you could go up to certain hills and collect the Brodiaea bulbs. You could wait so many days and do this, and so many days and do that, and then something else would happen.
All of these events were linked, one to the next. Every locality had this intense and highly localized relationship to a place. It was a very specific knowledge of land. Let me give you another example. Everyone in California had rabbit drives at certain times of the year, very often in the spring. Whole villages would get together, and they would either burn them out, or there'd be this big celebration and they'd run them into nets. They had special rabbit sticks like boomerangs and would fling them at their legs, and then at the end there was all of this feasting, and people would eat a lot of rabbit and then they would use their skins and make rabbit skin blankets.
You end up taking the skins and you cut them, and spread them out, and twist them. You make them like rope, and then you weave these wonderful rabbit skin ropes, and they make all of their rabbit skin blankets for the year. It's the kind of thing that in the modern age, people try not to talk about too much. The sportsmen don't like it because it doesn't seem very sporting, and the vegetarians don't like it because it's not tofu. Nobody likes the idea of it, but nevertheless they had a really good time. What I want to point out about it is that, when you view this in terms of land management, it has certain very interesting implications. They would tend to do it in the springtime, which is the time that new plants were growing up. A big population of rabbits would be directly competing with you and everything else for all of those plants.
They ate lower on the food chain than we do, eating things that later on people developed contempt for, things like squirrels and mice and gophers and grasshoppers, which everybody said tasted like shrimp. And oak moths and moth larvae, which everybody said tasted like shrimp. And shrimp, which everybody said tasted like moth larvae.
But eating all of these kinds of animals at certain times of the year was a very powerful kind of land management tool, and the food was shared communally, which is a marvelous device that prevents overconsumption. When people hunt and gather stuff individually, they have to stockpile because next week they might be sick or have a lousy week. When it's shared over a broad range of people, then nobody really has to stockpile, so sharing is an amazingly efficient way of using resources.
They would also burn the land. When the first Europeans came, they were horrified at what they called the "addiction" that Indians had for burning the land. At certain seasons of the year, it looked like Los Angeles in terms of smog. It looked like there was smoke rising from every place.
If you go into the county laws of California, right there in the very first law books of every county is a regulation to forbid the burning of public land, which was specifically aimed at Indians. It was a way to arrest Indians for burning the land. They knew exactly why they burned. They burned because it cleared the understory and undesirable trees. Whole parts of Klamath River that are today Douglas Fir forests choked with coniferous trees were at one time, when the first Europeans came, open meadows with sugar pine.
They burned because it cleared out the brush and fostered certain kinds of grasses with large seeds that were useful. It improved the game habitat. They would burn at certain times of year because people around here ate acorns, and the oak moth was a terrible infestation on the oak tree. There's one stage where the oak moth goes into the ground and lives within the ground, and if you burn at that particular time of year, then you get rid of the oak moths for that year.
They knew exactly what they were doing. Those forests that Vancouver was talking about, those large English parks that people were going through, were not a natural environment. That is what happens when you're continually burning and continually clearing, when you're fostering the growth of large trees.
Another kind of cultural technique that people used was repeatedly clipping and coppicing basketry plants. Another reason to burn is that bear grass and other kinds of basketry plants come out as straight shoots after they're burned.
There are some plants like willows and hazel and red bud that basket weavers were continually trimming because, when you trim them down to a nub, then the next year they grow up with nice tall, straight shoots that are really great for basketry. If you don't trim them, then they all get crooked and kinky and they're no good.
The California Indians were called digger Indians by the whites who first came here, and there was an amazing irony that the first whites who came here in numbers were the gold miners. So there they were, out there digging in gravel, and they contemptuously referred to the Indians as digger Indians because they were out digging for roots a lot of the time. This was clearly something terrible and disreputable. They had digging sticks, and I used to read these descriptions of Brodiaea bulbs, which is a little lily that people would eat. These gigantic feasts of people coming home with huge baskets full of this stuff. You wonder, Where in the world did they get them all from? I mean, this is hard work with a digging stick.
This amazing woman, Kat Anderson, was working at Yosemite at one point, and she began to listen to some of these older Indians talking about how they went out to gather. She asked them, "How did you go out to gather these bulbs? When did you go out? When was the right time to go out? You didn't just go out any time--when did you go out?"
It was a very precise time when they went out, and there was a very precise way in which they dug these plants. What they would do would be to go out with a digging stick, and push the digging stick in and pry it up. If you do it at the right time of the year, you discover that, not only is there a bulb, but all around each bulb are nearly 50 little teeny bulbettes just beginning to form.
Then part of the gathering is that you rip the top off, you rub the bulb off, you throw your bulb in your basket and you go on and collect another one. The other thing is, despite a whole lot that's said about how Indians didn't own the land, the fact is they did own land. Different families had collecting rights in particular places. So you would go back to the same place year after year. So Kat did that. The second year she went back to exactly to same place, she discovered instead of there being a few Brodiaea bulbs, there were many more Brodiaea bulbs. She'd been loosening the soil and scattering those bulbettes out. She went back the third year, there were incredibly more Brodiaea bulbs. She went back the fourth year; after five years it began to look like those old descriptions of California, like that amazing description from Mayfield, patches of flowers of the same kind that would be growing all over the place. Almost a cultivated landscape.
In modern times, they say you don't need this kind of thing. In modern times, we don't eat this kind of thing. But if you want it to be there, you go out and gather it anyway. The idea was that, by gathering something, you increase the productivity of the land. You increase the number of Brodiaea bulbs. Instead of going out there as a predator and depleting the world of Brodiaea bulbs, by this action of gathering you keep it.
The huge clam beds were also created. They were not wild systems, and there were regulations. There were regulations on salmon fishing; there were regulations on game taking. There were techniques by which you would hunt certain animals and not other animals. There was game management. There was a very, very foggy line between domestic and wild. Animals would come through. There was a much more porous relationship with the animal world.
One of the greatest tools of land management was property ownership. In California, some things were owned. Fishing places were owned, trees were owned, gathering rights were owned, land was owned. That ownership was, I think, a way of allocating scarce resources. Part of that ownership involved not only a right to gather, but a responsibility to the land.
When warfare broke out in California, which it did on a fairly localized level, it was usually over somebody invading a resource that belonged to your family or belonged to your tribe. When you owned something, it was an incentive for moderation. You might have responsibilities to a particular tree, for example, and you would show restraint because you knew you would have to come back to it next year.
We have a lot to learn from these systems of ownership that on one hand give rights, but also demand responsibilities. The California Indians had very conscious systems of conservation and control, and private property was indeed one of them. It kept bunches of people off the land. It gave only a few people access to the land. If your family wanted access to this particular piece of land, you would have to ask for it. There would be a trade-off of some sort. It provided processes of regulation so that you could have moderation.
But there was other land that was held in common. There was other land that was not particularly owned. One of the most beautiful pieces of conservation was a quarry up around Oroville. It was chert, which was a hard rock used for making points, arrowheads, and the like, in an area that doesn't have a heck of a lot of obsidian or other minerals. It was very, very valuable.
In a way, it was owned in common. In this particular case, any male of that particular area could go into this quarry. It was like a cave; it was already dug in. They'd been quarrying this thing for God knows how long. It had been dug into this hill. Every male could go in once a year. Once a year, you could take out as much as you could get with a single blow of a hammer. And then you had to leave offerings of money beads on the way out. If you broke these laws, there were tremendous religious proscriptions. I think you became a hunchback or something like that. Something terrible would happen to you if you broke it.
It was religious. It was a tribute to the power of this place, and it was encoded in religion. Part of it was conservation. Part of it was limiting everybody's access to that place, making certain that nobody would take more than their share, making certain that it would last for several generations.
Then you had different places like the pell among the Yurok. A dam, a fish weir, would be built. In a way it was common, but first the religious officials would go and get whatever fish they could use. Then the common people would come in the class system, get as much as they would. But the weir could not be built more than a third of the way across the river and even then all of the fishing had to be done in the morning, and then the weir was opened so the fish would get through.
The entire fishing season was regulated so that it would end in about three weeks. They knew exactly why they were doing it, so the upstream people would get their fish, so that the fish would spawn. All the way up and down the whole Klamath River drainage, among the Yurok, among the Karok, among the Shasta, going up the Trinity River, among the Hupa, among the Wintun, among all these peoples speaking different languages, there was a whole series of, in effect, international fishing treaties.
There were regulations and laws, and the penalties were ferocious if you broke them. You had different kinds of territories and hunting territories, and it was proscribed who could use them and who couldn't use them and who had to bring gifts and so on. These were complex societies. We love to think that we live in a complicated world and Indians lived in a nice simple world. The values that people have in these long-standing traditional societies that have lived in the same place for thousands of years are coded in the language, coded in their religion, coded in custom, and coded in clan relationships. It's a very marvelously deep knowledge.
To be a human being, you need more than one generation to take this stuff up. You had a kind of transmission of several generations, and a lot of it is still around. It's really important to get a view of humanity as not living apart from, or being destructive to the world. It's people who actually live within, and by their actions can be a blessing to the world.
Excerpted from a talk given at the 1998 Bioneers Conference in San Francisco. For information about the annual Bioneers Conference contact the Collective Heritage Institute toll-free at 1-877-BIONEER; website: www.bioneers.org.
©1999 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 1999
Volume 9, Number 2
A Sense of Place
Home. It's got a good sound to it as it comes out of the mouth, sort of like the involuntary utterance we make every time our lover gently brushes the hair back from our eyes, or we slip into a cool river pool--Mmmmmm! Savor it as you say it, like a bite of the best food, and it comes out hommmme. As the Sanskrit word "Om" is said to be the root sound of all sounds, so is "home" the root condition of all life, even a people traditionally or perpetually on the move. "Chanting home"...
"I'm writing a book about Home," I offered. "Which home?" our guest wanted to know, "The heart?" Yes...home is the heart--in relationship with place. In crucial, reciprocal, devoted relationship with place. It is intimately connecting with the spirit and will of a particular area, interpenetrating, immersing. It is becoming so personal with the land that you take any threats to it personally. Clearly our task is to become indigenous again, in deep again.
Long before I hear the actual footfall of approaching visitors I'm alerted by the alarm calls of the river tern, soon followed by the shrill whistles of ground squirrel sentries positioned on rock outcroppings between me and the water. When someone comes within a few yards of the cabin the canyon wrens switch from their normal angelic, cascading notes to a series of short, agitated peeps. The neighboring wildlife are as sensory extensions of my own animal being, I wear them, and abide within them. I am housed in a particular place, a living sheath I now know as my home. It is a sense-filled envelope that not only contains and informs me, but helps define my very being.
We are told that we have no roots, but it simply isn't true. We are not rootless, but uprooted--our roots torn from the soil as we struggled to keep up with our restless, roving parents or broke out on our own. They themselves responded to an ancestral instinct they didn't understand, an inherited compulsion to search out the means of survival in specific, cyclic migrations. Fueled by culturally impressed dissatisfaction, we find fault in what is near and seek out the strange, losing affection for each thing as the shine of its newness wears off. We often pull away from any "base" instincts that seem to counter our civilized protocol or suggest a different pace or lifestyle. We jerk away from whatever seems to "hold us down," "ground" us, or threaten us with stillness. But we are not rootless. Our roots dangle out the bottoms of our skirts and trousers, as we drag them behind us through unfamiliar streets and hallways. If we really focused on it we might still feel them, the way an amputee experiences the sensation of a limb long after its surgical removal. We may have been severed from the body-earth, but our roots still protrude, grasp at the ground at our feet wherever we are, seek out with their probing tips the stability and nourishment nothing else can provide.
We are told that to develop this relationship with place, to be or to become indigenous, requires us to be born in the same watershed where we will one day die. Some scholars of these issues claim it takes generation after generation in the same spot before a people can claim a right to be there. While generational overlap undoubtedly deepens one's sense of connection through a history/herstory of place, I assert that the sole precluding requirement for that relationship of belonging we call "native" is the individual's deepest experiencing of place, their giving back to place, and promising themselves to place. This relationship I call home, like any relationship, is a reciprocal sharing requiring the involvement and approval of both the person and the place. To put it most simply, being "native"--"belonging"--means both gifting to and being accepted by the spirits of the land. Such acceptance requires attention and time, but it is ours to find.
Given human's relatively recent emergence on the evolutionary scene and the almost constant migrations that follow, everyone is in a sense a "newcomer." Yet we all remain native as well, disparate individuals arising out of a single indivisible body, an unbroken planetary sphere. The continents are not dissimilar, free-floating entities, but rather portions of the terrestrial whole, distinguished only by those thin stretches of water we call the oceans. I like to envision these continents as the exposed body parts of the planetary body, with giant mountain ranges where the planet-Gaia raises her knees out of the shallow, salty bath. To be truly native in this unique and precarious time is less a matter of sequential generations of occupation than a quality of perception, and a state of commitment.
While the Native Americans are fortunate to draw strength from the stories of their peoples' origin, geneticists and anthropologists have traced Indian roots that stretch back across the Bering Straits--Asian-Americans descended from Afro-Asians. While untold generations invested their lives in ancestral Tartar lands, the fact remains that these committed people were not delivered at the beginning of time to those mountains they hold so dear. For all of our existence we humans have been migrants, moving out of Africa and deep into all but one of the seven great continental islands, developing racial and cultural distinctions while adapting to, and being acted on by diverse new terrain, climate, and the various integral personalities of the land. A desert environ contributes to the development of a different kind of person physically and temperamentally than a damp rainforest, all uninsulated lifeforms coming to reflect in part the particular qualities and characteristics of the places where they "make" their living.
So, how is it that a region's terrestrial form and meteorological patterns have such an influence on a two-legged species known to migrate? As an evolving species, we roamed in order to survive. To belong, we had only to move slow enough. For most of our existence as erect hominids, our migrations were primarily circular and bioregional (not intercontinental), arcing north and then south with the changing seasons within a definitive, intimately familiar territory. A homeland in this case encompasses the entire range of a family or tribe's movements as they pass from one accustomed sight to the next, past one recurring landmark after another. By traveling essentially the same sacralized territory over and over, we grew knowledgeable of an expansive home-ground, grew roots in a trail that reached out but always looped back, never out of touch with that which we had relationship with. As a result, while we weren't always still we were forever coming home. Down from the arctic land bridge. Down the Rocky Mountains, the enchanted Sierra Madres and the sacred Andes rippling like a well-muscled spine, finally dipping a toe in the icy waters off Tierra del Fuego. Coming across the wilderness of ocean in flimsy craft, encircling the globe at the equator like a hug, a hug...a hug for the Earth...
How different it can be for those of us of mixed descent, born from recent immigrants in a city to no particular culture other than the cults of technology and consumerism that surround us. Or to be flown abruptly to the North American continent from a far off country, one that we may never really have known as home. In urban centers, there are none of the landforms or flora that could orient us, familiarize us with the expression and intent of the place where we find ourselves. There's probably little immediate evidence of the area's relevant history, and we're confused by identical generic suburbs sprouting on both coasts and in between; architecture that demonstrates little resonance with natural and cultural environments. In the absence of other guides, we are taught to "own" the land, rather than how one can learn to belong. We're encouraged to behave as strangers, to mythologize the "stranger" archetype, and to feel as strangers in our own bodies, communities and bioregions.
"There's no going home," the saying goes. What they mean, of course, is that there's no way to go back in time, no retreat to the comforting arms of parents who always made sure there was food on the table and the cuts on our knees healed, going back to whatever structures housed our earliest memories.
What a terrible thought--you can't go home! No matter what the circumstances under which we left our parent's domicile, at one time or other most of us experience a longing to return, not only to simpler times when others saw to our every need, but also to whatever familiar landscapes--childscapes--once permitted us a sense of being ourselves in conditional safety. We may sometimes ache to take refuge again in those well-worn tunnels under suburban hedgerows, beneath concealing stairs in a wilderness of alleys, or in the trusted arms of trees conspiratorially lifting us above the line of sight of any supervising adults. To a toddler, one's house constitutes the entire universe, as if nothing exists beyond those things within the reach of their hungering physical senses. Before long that universe expands to include a yard and then an entire sprawling neighborhood. The growing child ventures out in all directions but returns home each time, usually well before dark. Its movements back and forth trace the spokes of a wheel whose center remains essential and intact. For most kids this reality, this home keeps on changing, but each new house becomes the center of their attention in turn, the center of the known world. We want to believe, long after we're grown and on our own, that we could go back if we "really wanted to." We'd like to believe against all evidence, that even if birds ate every bread-crumb left behind to mark our trail, we could somehow find our way back home. Back not just to a time but a place where things made "sense," where our senses are at home in its characteristic tastes, sounds, sights and smells.
And taken this way, maybe we can't go home. At least not to that home, the way we remembered it. Chances are it was never really our home anyway, perhaps just one in a long string of rentals, in a succession of inner city apartment houses, or in suburbs one step ahead of urbanization. Our conceptual home often remains hidden in the "Never-Never Land" beneath the old maple bed, a place full of secrets and dragons and bears extending down through the floor and foundation, down into the soil and the depth of stories it could tell.
Houses collapse, old neighborhoods are flattened and paved over. But it is the ground, and sometimes only the ground that lasts. Home-ground. Forests are leveled, hills terraformed by men in roaring graders, and one building after another succumbs to rot and age or the fickle whims of a never-ending series of title-holders, but beneath all this surface traffic the earth abides. Micro-organisms feast in it's fermentive hold, working away in the dark, patiently feeding on those "made to last" materials standing between it and the warming rays of the sun. As children we bond not only to the layout of the rooms, but to the particular feel and odor--even the taste--of a blended soil peculiar to the area we lived in.
One can learn to listen carefully and appreciatively to the varied voices of the soil communities: the deep baritone monologue of Louisiana bayou loam, the elderly whisper of Appalachian dirt, or the chanting volcanic dust of the Mogollon rim. Perhaps as much as anything else, they each say, "Stay. Please, stay." There's something inherent in the personality of place, something intrinsic to the very soil that inspires the traveler to slow down and notice more, the seed to send its root in the direction of the core, the weary migrant to finally settle down. It puts the brakes on spinning wagon wheels, soothes the beat of restless rambling hearts, and seduces folks on their way to somewhere else to stop and run their hands into its warm, giving ground. Sense of place is not so much a progression as a return. The journey is less in pursuit of the sky gods, and more a sounding of the inspirited depths. We are at our best an outgrowth of the fertile, giving ground, the children of the soil. Real, grounded down to earth.
Listen! The canyon wrens call me back to attention, back out of my reverie. I am not only a being in, but a being of my home. Foods from this area, this ground, power my eyes and muscles as I look out to see what the wildlife is alerting me to. I often act out of dreams that seem scripted by the entities of this place. I have to make hard decisions about the land and the impact of both its allies and its obvious foes, always for the sake of the canyon itself. I look down the river in an effort to identify our unseen guests, responding to the sloshing footsteps, the shorebirds and the rock squirrels that announced their coming. This land informs me, empowers me, provokes the fullest living of my life, demands from me its own exacting definition of awareness and unflinching integrity, gifting and devotion. As is usually the case, the visitors today come seeking the combination of stimulation and serenity that natural places provide, and will be moved by the energies of this place to circumvent denial and distraction in favor of their own most authentic expression. When I give them welcome it will be made (without any need to say so) on behalf of every swaying tree and glad-faced flower, every magic grain of sand, every leaping-flying-crawling creature that animates this blessed land.
We are native when we experience ourselves at the deepest levels as integral parts of a living terrain, as relatives of every other part of the miraculous whole. In re-becoming native we re-create a contemporary culture, community, vocabulary, mythos, spiritual practice, and, finally, a history. Whoever you are, wherever you are, there exists an opportunity for this reindigenation, a set of tests and promises through which one might come to know themselves as home. This place, this moment.
Jesse Wolf Hardin is an educator whose books include Homeland: ReBecoming Native, Recovering Sense of Place (Crossing Press, 2000) and Kindred Spirits: Animal Teachers & The Will of The Land (SwanRaven Pub. '99). To book Wolf as a presenter or for information on his wilderness retreats write: The Earthen Spirituality Project, PO Box 516, Reserve, NM 87830; email: [email protected]; website: http://www.concentric.net/~earthway
©1999 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 1999
Volume 9, Number 2
A Sense of Place
Alan Kapuler, Ph.D., is Research Director of Seeds of Change organic seed company, founder of Peace Seeds (now Deep Diversity), plant breeder with a special focus on nutrition, and pioneer in the development of kinship gardening, an approach which emphasizes the importance of conserving biodiversity. A winner of the Westinghouse high school science talent search, Alan studied biology at Yale (where he graduated summa cum laude at the age of nineteen) and molecular biology at Rockefeller University, where his cutting-edge research earned him a Ph.D. and a professorship. In the early 1970s, disillusioned with the values and activities he felt his academic work was promoting, he left his career on the East Coast and arrived in the woods of the Pacific Northwest as a bucket-hauling, shovel-wielding aspiring gardener. He soon started saving his own seeds, started a small seed company, and the rest, as they say, is history. He has survived a ten-year struggle with lymphatic cancer, and is also an accomplished, prolific artist; some of his paintings accompany this interview.
I first met "Mushroom," as his friends know him, twelve years ago. Since then, in my role as an organic gardening teacher at small nonprofit ecological education centers, I have brought many groups of apprentices to his gardens to work and learn with him. He is a fascinating, gentle, passionate person with an encyclopedic knowledge of the plant world, wisdom to match, and the gift of seeing and articulating the connections among biological, cultural, personal, and spiritual issues. I wasn't sure how his stream-of-consciousness speaking style would translate onto paper, but I decided to find out by interviewing him. This conversation took place on an early Spring day in one of Alan's greenhouses in Corvallis, Oregon.
- Chris Roth
TL: What do you think of when you think of sense of place?
AK: I think of species--the biological species that inhabit a local area. Half the plant species on the world are local endemics. They like to grow in a certain region where they've grown up, where their forbears grew up. They have developed into species, they have come into existence, in place. Place is the determinant. What we mean by place is the cross-section of forces that lead to an environment: sun, water, weather, geography, geology, soils, all the life forms there. The internal milieu and the external milieu act to give us, at the interface, diversity. Place is an entry to diversity.
And we can remove that by removing the species. We can make a place into a parking lot or into a housing project. We can eliminate the little mustards and little umbels and little grasses and little legumes that gave rise to, and supported in their lives, the fabric of microorganisms and insects and birds and mammals. So place is a biological relationship in planetary time having to do with our own abilities. We generate, we destroy, we interact, and we have the potential to diversify what we call place.
The temperate zone has much more homogenous populations and many fewer species than the tropics, because the cold acts to limit the diversity. Where freezing doesn't happen, another level of diversity manifests itself. If we take a place in the temperate zone, we deal with certain issues all the time: what is going extinct, what's going to go extinct, why is it going extinct?
It's going extinct because when we made the agricultural monocultures we eliminated all those little plants that had insect cohorts that created a food web that allowed for many different kinds of plants and insects and microorganisms. The herbicides make it possible to kill every plant in the field, which could never happen before. That's genocide.
When you eliminate all these seemingly inconsequential little species that grow in these fields, you have true, sterile monocultures--as opposed to monocultures that come simply by planting only one thing repetitively in a field. We are now genociding the diversity as opposed to simply minimizing it. In one case, we usually leave a few of this and a few of that and so there are relic species; in the other case, there's nothing left.
There's also a heart chakra aspect of sense of place, which is comfort. Anybody who's had a real emotional experience in an old growth forest will understand this. You come back into old trees and there's shelter in an emotional way that's indescribable in a rational sense. The forest's nature is shelter, and literally water, warmth, security, abundance, food, happiness. All the stuff that helps the soul explore a world is present in those old growth trees and what they mean for everybody. They create place, and there's nothing that replaces that aspect, because no matter how you talk about trees in a materialistic, rationalistic model, all the critical things that trees do are left out of the equation when the economics runs its bottom line.
We have accepted a totally depraved view of reality in order to run an economic model which is clearly a failure. Sense of place is in some ways a cognomen, an icon or a label for a whole set of phenomenology that comes with an integrated ecosystem which is healthy and functioning for the collective well-being, working in a positive way to secure as many niches and as much diversity and as much shelter as can be. That's interesting because the forest and the world we live in is an evolutionary mosaic. There's a long history of events that have taken place, and what we see are the survivors. We're at a time when we can travel and get access to plants and organisms that come from the whole world. We've been moving A to B to C to D to E and rearranging it, and so there are "alien species." Agriculture is really the alien species biology.
Is the wheat we grow a native species? No. Of all the crops we grow, virtually none of them come from here. Everything we do in agriculture is alien species. The apples come from Turkistan, the pears come from China, everything else comes from South America or some other continent. Nobody eats the local crops like camas and Pacific silverweed; there's no commercialization of a Willamette Valley crop. We have an alien-permeated reality at the current time, and where human beings are around there are only relic populations of anything that corresponds to what might have been there a million years ago.
The other day we had a discussion of science in our household. Science pretends to give us reality, and yet until science addresses such issues as what is the soul, how does it actually get involved with our bodies, what is going on in existence beyond the material realm--until science ties those things together, science has virtually only a little bit to do with reality, but not very much. In that sense we shouldn't be overconcerned with the science that everybody is preaching as if it's the ultimate truth about the physical particles. Einstein had an intuitive knowledge that was obviously worth listening to as intuitive knowledge, that God doesn't throw dice, that our lives are not accidents, that the creation has a whole level of design implicit with fulfillment as soul at its core.
Yet somehow science and economics have been twisted to tell us that the meadow filled with flowers is less important than the bottom line, or than the housing project to put up cheap houses out of polluted material, exploiting and extorting people to work on jobs that they can't stand to promote activities that lead to poisons and bombs and guns, to maintain power and control over what?--something that isn't even ours, and when we were born here we had no idea about. All of that stuff needs to go.
TL: What is the relationship between agriculture and sense of place? Gardening is a way for many people to get back in touch with their place, but when they find out that they're growing mostly alien species, they may question it.
AK: We'd starve if we didn't grow alien species. My own sense is that nature works from new combinations. So there are many reasons to be supportive of alien species and the fact that this is just an ongoing process. One might still say, "Oh, in this particular area that once had none of these alien grasses in it, we're going to pull out the alien grasses and make a little area which is a native prairie." I think that's fine. The notion that one's going to regenerate the prairie at a big level is nonsense because you're not going to take agriculture and land development away from the society. Some things are just not going to be approachable.
And there are ecological and practical issues here. Logging and mining companies are destroying the forest in southeast Asia, and all the lady's-slipper orchids there are being turned into compost, and somebody says to you, "I have fifty of these plants, would you take care of them?" Now that means you need a greenhouse and warmth and attention, and so you're going to put some of your resources into maintaining something in an artificial environment that comes from another ecosystem. You might ask, "Why don't you put them in a tropical place where they'll grow well, rather than bring them to the temperate zone?" But there are complex issues here. We don't know much about diversity. So when you can buy a few seeds from something which comes from far away, and you can even grow a little plant of something that ultimately gets huge in your own greenhouse, and see what a young plant looks like, and how it grows up, and maybe make a bonsai, you learn about it.
Learning about diversity is a critical part of why alien is not alien. Alien's just a bigger self. And the same is true if we happen to meet somebody coming in on a UFO, or if there's another set of inhabited stars and solar systems. They are alien only in the sense that we don't have a view of ourselves as encompassing all living creatures. If we're kin with all life, then any living creature is just more of life, and so it's not alien. We can ask ourselves, "How does it fit, or what is its relationship, or how do I deal with it?" But that's not the same as saying, "I'm going to condemn it and I'm going to extinct it, because now it's growing in my back yard and the Forest Service and the Ag. Department say that it's a noxious weed."
We don't do a very good job of planting diversity in our parks or in our neighborhoods. We have made stupid rules that eliminate fruit and forage that's good for from our landscapes, so what we're doing is paying rent on barren ground.
We need a land reform in the United States, and a social reform which encourages people to go back to the land and live communally and grow food and take care of ecosystems. This means that everybody who's a backyard gardener has a $400 deduction allowance on their taxes. They save up their receipts for the amendments they bought and for the tools they needed and for the wheelbarrow they wanted, and the state and the national government gives a tax rebate for gardeners. If we do that we will encourage this United States to become a garden--not a garbage heap and not a strip mall, but a garden.
Gardening is healthy, it's interesting, and it promotes diversity. It gets you out of the box watching television and being an audience, always being catered to, pandered to, and ripped off while your resources are squandered. As a gardener you can fulfill a destiny: God is closer to you in the garden than anywhere else. That's not true if you spray poisons and you kill every bug and you discriminate, but if you have a touch, and you get into the flow of the beauty of nature, you have a chance to feel the illumination that comes with love and peace and goodness.
TL: Getting back a little to the alien question, what happens when an alien starts extinguishing the native species? For example, in Alton Baker Park in Eugene some people go in and pull out English Ivy because it's smothering all the natives.
AK: I pull out English Ivy also, and I see that that is simply a good response to an observation about what's going on.
As I said, the agriculture is alien species. Now Luther Burbank's blackberry is all up and down the coast and is one of the best wild-forage food plants that anyone has developed, and the birds have agreed with that. As far as I now know, according to Rick Valley, that it is Rubus procera, which is the European blackberry. So the European blackberry is loose on the coast in the Pacific Northwest, feeding people as an outlaw. People spray it, people curse at it, people dig it up, and the birds keep eating the berries and the hippies keep going out and making great blackberry jam and blackberry pies.
What I lament is that we haven't planted apple trees as the settlers who came here did. When I came here thirty years ago I could wander around, and I still can, in back roads and far places in Oregon, and find apple trees in the fall that give all sorts of heirloom and interesting fruit. We could plant this state in the same way--there could be beautiful trees and shrubs. Blueberries grow beautifully; all the parks should have hedgerows of blueberries. Everybody's worried, "Oh, what about the poor commercial people who sell blueberries?" Well, they spray most of their blueberries, and all of us don't want chemicals on them, so why not have parks with blueberries that are unsprayed so people can go get them? There's plenty of room for commerce, and there should be no worry about people being able to feed themselves when they pay taxes to towns and to the state and to the nation. Why don't we give it back to the people by having stuff in the parks that people can pick?
You go to the store and you get Granny Smith and Golden Delicious and Red Delicious, maybe five kinds of apples if you're lucky. Well, there are eight thousand kinds of apple varieties. We could plant another three hundred heirloom varieties of apples, little ones, very sweet ones, crabapples, ones that have unusual shapes, ones with unusual colors, ones with unusual flavors, and ones with medicinal properties. We could put them in the parks and we could have a fabulous fall where we really have harvest, rather than going to the store and buying plastic eggs and flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark. It's easy to see, without looking too far, that what we hold as sacred is not widely promulgated in this society of commerce. So why don't we give it back to our people, the beauty that the world has, and that is available in our ecosystems?
We see that people in the Near East are struggling for water, in other areas there are droughts, in some places there's so much snow and it's cold all the time. We live in a fertile place with great potentiality. We should be planting fruit trees and shrubs and beautiful flowers and endangered species.
Oregon State University is a famous agricultural school. Does it have a garden of the endangered species in the state of Oregon on campus so everybody can look through and see, "Oh, that's rare, and that's disappearing, and that one, this is the only population left"? These are the kind of things we need to implement if we expect to have a world which is going to make sense to some kids, and if we want society to grow out of the karma of the fear of war, the threat of war, the constant misuse of energy, and the misuse of economics. Wall Street spins the wheel to exploit the earth, to take the third world and their resources and turn them into wastelands, and to turn the first world into a hierarchy where the richest are the ones who have the most power. The ones who care about humanity are frequently left to die without having the recognition and the help they need to engender a growth of everybody.
TL: There are obviously paradoxes, where you have to figure out where the line is. For example, you could be trying to conserve a plant that's being made extinct by oil drilling, heating the greenhouse to keep that plant alive with that same petroleum.
AK: Very good, that's right, so some of the issue is access to the right circumstance. If that plant would grow better in the tropics, it's probably better to grow it in the tropics. If it grows in the temperate zone outside and you don't need to heat it, then you could do that. I have several greenhouses and I heat them, so I use petroleum, natural gas, to heat the greenhouses, and I use hydro-generated electricity from the grid. The more I live the more I see the contradictions. I don't like the circumstance I'm in, in that way.
I have to point out another level of this. In the winter when it's rainy and cold and very difficult in many ways, psychically, emotionally, and physically, coming into a warm fragrant greenhouse is a psychic uplift which is very good for our spirits and souls. And I think that if we had more greenhouses that were filled with beautiful gardens which we could walk through in the winter in this ecology, we would help our health a great deal as a society. So we need to ask: how much does it cost to heat plastic greenhouses, acquire the metal frames and all the appurtenances it takes to keep a beautiful garden alive in the season, and what does the society spend its money on that maybe you could funnel from one thing to another? For example, one could look at the amount of energy it takes to print up junk mail, the amount of energy it takes to overpackage the goods that we have, and it's clear that we waste a great deal of resources. I think that one could change the balance. We don't exactly say we live in a sustainable society--most of us know how far we are from sustainability.
Sustainability has often not even been considered. I'm reminded of the sequence where the green revolution wheat and rices reduced the size of the plants, made them have bigger seedheads with a lot of grain and very little fiber and fat. The people who used those to make their housing and roofing found they got more grain, but they couldn't keep themselves dry. They ended up having wet grain, and they lost grain, and so the green revolution was not only a failure, but it destroyed a whole aspect of a way of life.
Is this a successful model for the way we're going to develop the world and a society? We can't be gullible and trapped and seduced by lies--like the idea that we will grow more food on less ground because we'll use genetic engineering to manipulate the efficiency of the chloroplast. There are always consequences, and nature has had a long time to develop photosynthetic systems and balanced ecology to be able to make an inhabitable world.
We think we're going to simply tamper with it and then turn it loose into the biosphere. We've already done this with genetically modified organisms coming from big powerful corporations that have manipulated the USDA and the FDA to release untested genetically engineered soybeans, canola oil, corn, into the common food system. This is a crime against all of us. It's against all the laws and principles that were set in place to protect us, and it got done in the name of corporate greed and power.
We've been told lies about better living through chemistry--we're going to be cleaning it up for a long time. Atoms for peace, the pollution we have to deal with from radioactivity--we're going to clean it up for eternity. We have to be very careful what we allow in genetic engineering. If we wonder about alienness in the way we run our ecology, what about alienness in our food system? We now change genes and manipulate stuff in ways that have never happened, and we put it out for everybody and we never checked it out.
TL: That whole thing seems to be just a further step of the green revolution: we're taking away the local sense of place, the locally adapted species and varieties, and replacing them with this monoculture idea that someone, some big corporation, can own.
AK: Absolutely. That's right.
TL: Do you want to talk a little about the direction of your research?
AK: In the last ten years I've been working for the public domain as a plant breeder interested in nutrition and diversity. I am very grateful that Seeds of Change continues to supply organic seeds, and it's a tremendous job to maintain a network to grow open-pollinates and heirlooms, to keep selecting out good lines of each of the crops, to search among the diversity of heirlooms and crops and vegetables, the ones that backyard gardeners can feed themselves with and could save their own seeds of and that are worth passing on.
I've taken many F1 hybrids and turned them into open-pollinated lines and put them back into the public domain as good new varieties. I have made some crosses in the Mendelian sense, made some interesting sunflowers and marigolds.
In collaboration with Carl Jones, Jennifer Peterson, and in particular Dr. Sarangamat Gurusiddiah of Washington State University in Pullman, I also do free amino acid analyses of the vegetable juices. We're asking, within the vegetables, "What can I grow that has a nonviolent aspect, a nutritional diversity, and a future for humanity?"
I'm beginning to work on the flora of Belize, especially the orchids. I would like to help in the conservation of all sorts of species. There are 4000 species in the country, 350 species of orchids. I'm just starting to get into it.
I also need to heal myself from lymphatic cancer, or have God show me what to do to promote the healing. That means I need to study more medicinal herbs, and I'm interested in medicinal plants with a new look now. I've begun to work with Rosita Arvigo, who wrote a book called Sastun. She worked for ten years as an apprentice with Don Eligio Ponte, who was one of the elder Mayan curanderos, healers, from Belize. I find myself becoming an apprentice to her, in order to learn about and practice some herbal medicine directly.
TL: Whenever I come here or hear you speak, it's just so obvious that there's so much good work in these areas that people could be doing. You have so much knowledge about different kinds of plants, but many people can't even identify a single bean plant. They don't know where to start. It seems as if there's a problem with the ways that most of us are living our lives, when we don't have time or space to consider most of these things. Is there any advice that you would have for people to free themselves from all the distractions that keep them from the real work?
AK: The first thing is take a good deep breath. (laughs) And then make a list of all the things that you're attached to. And when you get to your ego, circle it, and get an eraser and erase it. I think that there's the recognition that we live in a fabric, of people, communities, societies, world, all these interactions, that we are not alone or isolated, we're part of a many-leveled web of many things. It's getting our priorities in order. What do you really want to have happen in the time of your life?
In a world where there's violence and fear and greed and misuse of power, all these things eventually come back upon myself. If I want to see something meaningful happen, I have to work on those issues. And how am I going to work as an individual on big, complicated, difficult issues? It starts right at home, and the food system is a good place to begin. So one starts with food, and then one starts looking inside food: "Why do I eat this? What is this? What do I like? Which do I like because my mother told me it was good for me? Which one do I like because my father grew it in the back yard? What are the patterns that I have--like my grandfather would take me fishing so I like to eat fish? How is it tied together, the fabric of our placentation in this world?"
Because although we don't have the umbilicus from our moms, we have the umbilicus to this food system that is sustaining us. When I became an adult, I realized that in life I'm going to eat, so I need to grow some of my own food. That got me to saving seeds, it got me to realizing that in seed-saving I'm completing a cycle every time I harvest the seeds and plant them again. So I'm not totally exploitative, I'm beginning to be involved in the nurturing and the maintaining aspect of it.
As your interest grows in gardening, you begin to pay attention to the other organisms. And you may wake up in the morning and look at the sun, or take a deep breath of air and say, "This air is polluted, I gotta move," or you have some orange juice and you taste a chemical taste in the back of your tongue and say, "I'm going to buy organic next time I do this," or you finally decide, "Oh, I'll spend 35 extra cents for the broccoli because it's organic."
Part of what we're brought up with in this society is the view that we are individuals, isolated, with our own lives and our own this and our own that. That's sort of like a heart with a steel shell around it. Your sensitivity, your telepathic and immunity functions are pressed into minutes. The sense of I is very tiny and it's frequently sad, alone, and unhappy. It's always searching for a girlfriend or a boyfriend or a satisfaction or a thrill or something to entertain, so it's always outer-directed.
In this process of becoming inner-directed and then getting in touch with your soul, the soul being directly in touch with the divine, you see that you're connected to a larger fabric of existence, and your life takes on another aspect. You realize that we want to have people be happy, and you ask, "How can we serve them to be happy? What does it take to have them go through experiences which make them more fulfilled and hence able to love better?" All those are the ties that bring significance.
I want to serve peace on earth. I remember, twenty-five years ago, I got to the point where I realized, somewhere around my thirtieth birthday, "What good is it going to be if we fight war, if we drop bombs on gardens, if we destroy ecologies that we have no relationship to? That will not make a world that we can tolerate. So I have to devote myself to peace on earth. How do you do that?" And then someone says, "Not you, how could you be so self-important, how could you believe that you can contribute to that?"
And yet, at the same time, what else can you contribute to, right? You can plant more flowers. I watched it as I first I grew up in a nuclear family, then went and lived communally in the hippie era. What was the hardest thing to get done? The dishes! Everybody had very high ideals but nobody wanted to wash the dishes. Everybody wanted to eat bread when it came fresh out of the oven, nobody wanted to go out into the fields and pick the wheat and clean it and grind it and turn it into flour.
And I realized, ah, those are the issues. So, from the desire to work for peace to washing the dishes to building a composting toilet to growing fruit trees and gardens and saving seeds and doing kinship gardening...the fabric all is one, it's all the same.
TL: Part of the message is that the kind of life you're talking about isn't just easy, and, you know, la-la land. It involves hard work, maybe not in the sense of the old agricultural paradigm that life is miserable, we were expelled from the Garden of Eden, the physical toil of farming is our punishment for being alive, and so forth...but still, tenacity is necessary.
AK: I believe that the struggle is spiritual, that each one of us has certain gifts, certain problems, issues, realities, that we need to work on. We can improve our spiritual health. So that's an ongoing reality, in our focused relationships with people, in our close relations with everyone we work with, in all the engagements we have. There always is room for improving the outcome, the consequences. So if we work on that, that's where the real change is. That's the place where you find wisdom, where you turn the chaff into gold. It's in the places where you get angry, where you're unhappy, where you have challenges, where you whine and complain, where you blame somebody else for something that you did. Those are the issues, where you could have done it better with a little more work, you could have broken through your being tired or your ego or your pattern for drinking the next fifteenth cup of coffee, or you could have said, "Oh, I'm going to use a tofu burger instead of going to get a cheeseburger."
There are places where you can decide that nonviolence is important to live for, and those characteristics become available as you strive to grow spiritually. As that happens, you become more able to feel fulfilled. So I struggle, I have lymphoma, sometimes it hurts, sometimes I wonder, "Oh, should I go to the AMA and let them give me chemotherapy and shrink the nodes and forget about it?" And then I ask myself, "Are you going to be seduced by that line? They can give you toxic chemicals, but then you're never going to know how to heal it in a natural way. You will not have contributed to other people who are going to get this disease. Are you going to figure out how to do it? Already ten years you're alive past the diagnosis. You did macrobiotics, it worked, you did a Hoxsey tonic, it worked. These things work for a while and then it comes back. You have to figure out the next thing. You're involved in healing."
We're all on the path, and so the more we're able to really carve a niche into the heart chakra and get real connections to God and then manifest it in this society, that's what we need. The gardening helps, and the right livelihood helps, and the suffering...Dylan said it, he said, "Isn't it interesting, those of us who have suffered intensely share so much more." So part of it is, not looking for suffering...but attachments, as the Buddha taught, bring suffering, desire brings attachment, and ignorance brings desire, so we should look into the roots of our ignorance and pursue a path of enlightenment to be able to bring transition and transformation.
Chris Roth is editor of Talking Leaves and author of The Beetless' Gardening Book: An Organic Gardening Songbook/Guidebook.
Contact Alan Kapuler c/o Deep Diversity, P.O. Box 15700, Santa Fe, NM 87506-5700.
©1999 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 1999
Volume 9, Number 2
A Sense of Place
It has been 37 years since the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The alert was sounded, some progress made in protecting bird populations from the effects of pesticides, particularly in bringing back from the brink of extinction birds like the peregrine falcon and brown pelican. Yet, where I live, in the Outer Mission district, San Francisco, a paved over, hardened urban neighborhood, the bird habitat of trees, both lining the streets and growing in back yards, is a rarity. My only relief against the deadening landscape is a five-minute walk to a 318-acre urban park, McLaren Park, still largely undeveloped for human recreation in a section of the peninsula swept by scathing, fog-laden winds from the Pacific. There, red-shouldered hawks still screech in mid-air while performing aerodynamic displays of agility; ravens croak while soaring black-figured against leaden skies; and white-crowned sparrows flit about about in dense coyote brush, trilling to each other in their characteristic, melodic song.
Curious about my newly discovered, feathered neighborhood resident, I learned from that the mockingbird species here in San Francisco will eat fruit and bread, so I put out raisins and bits of crumbs on a ceramic platter suspended high above the ground where my landlady's five cats live. While a couple of finches and a solitary, apprehensive, ground-feeding towhee have visited (not for the raisins and bread, but for seed provided from a feeder), so far the mockingbird has not landed to feed. I admit to having mixed feelings about feeding wild animals: on the one hand, it seems to encourage a kind of dependency, which is inimical to my appreciation of the fierce independence I admire in wild creatures; on the other, the feeder attracts birds within my range of observation, so that I get to know their behavior more intimately. But so far the mockingbird has not taken the bait, so to speak, although a neighbor's next door fruit tree seems to lure the bird close enough occasionally for me to study the bird from a distance with binoculars.
Early last fall, during one of those last, warm, clear Indian summer days here in San Francisco before the fog-bound chill of approaching winter begins to roll in, I heard the mockingbird trilling from a rooftop peak across a neighbor's backyard. I noticed that the object of his call was a smaller mockingbird, whom the larger bird was pursuing by diving and hopping rooftop to rooftop, as if in springtime courtship. Finding it hard to believe that two birds would be courting this time of year in preparation for mating and nesting, I did some research and determined the more likely explanation: the larger, more mature male bird was claiming his territory in a time of dwindling fruit supply. His active pursuit also demonstrated another chief mockingbird characteristic--its gymnastic talents. During mating season I've noticed the bird catapulting in air from its perch, as if to do flips, dramatically exhibiting to prospective mates his superior genetic material. The mockingbird's vocal dexterity matches its physical. Field studies record that the mockingbird is capable of imitating over two dozen individual bird songs or calls within a ten-minute span. Computer analyses of this range of mimicry, furthermore, are unable to detect differences from the original sounds.
On a clear moonlit night late last spring, while I lay sleeping, I seemed to dream I heard the mockingbird's song. Slowly awakening, I realized it was really the mockingbird singing in the distance. I did not envy my neighbor somewhere down the block, whose window perhaps opened up directly onto the mockingbird's perch. From where I lay half asleep, however, the bird's warbling evoked mystery. My cottage garden had been turned into a moon-bathed landscape, a paradise filled with the romance of many songbirds calling to each other.
Despite Rachel Carson's clarion call nearly forty years ago, the burgeoning course of human population sprawl since the publication of Silent Spring has diminished much of songbird habitat, impoverishing in turn our aesthetic and emotional wellbeing. Yet life is ever tenacious and adaptable, as demonstrated by species like the mockingbird, who teaches that birdsong will always hold a cherished place among earth sounds. Although its voice is solitary and certainly precarious in this age of diminishing biodiversity, the mockingbird sings to remind us not only of what we have lost individually in songbirds, but also what we still possess collectively as a fellow species, an appreciation of nature's gift of birdsong.:
David Graves, reared in Texas where the mockingbird is the state bird, leads school children and their teachers into San Francisco urban parks to study biodiversity and restore natural areas. When not in the parks with kids, he teaches deep ecology at the university level.
©1999 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 1999
Volume 9, Number 2
A Sense of Place
I'd like to think aloud about a single English word: the word "native." If this sounds to some like thin entertainment, let me lay that worry to rest: I am thin entertainment. I'm native entertainment, though. Maybe that's the trouble: my native land is the Columbia River Basin. Looking at my Basin's native salmon count, native big game and bird counts, native tree counts, Native American count, I see a thin native world fast growing thinner. That's why I want to think about this word now: if I wait much longer, native could become a verb meaning "to vanish."
A problematic use of the word "native" appeared on the bumpers of Columbia River Basin cars about a decade ago. Following the World Series Earthquake in San Francisco, a lot of San Andreas Fault-fried Californians came chugging up Interstate 5 into Oregon like, I don't know, a horde of U-Haul drivin', BMW-towin' Okies was how they struck me, all hoping the Global Environmental Apocalypse wouldn't be so advanced up in Oregon, with its lovely state bird, the meadowlark, and longlasting state flower, the tree-stump. When these masses arrived, thousands of old Oregon-license-plated rustbuckets began to greet them with a bumpersticker: "OREGON NATIVE," it said. I was intrigued. The stickers' owners obviously felt that being born on the same clearcut soil their vehicles were now polluting was a thing worth gloating over to the nouveau-Okies in the U-Hauls. Judging, however, by the hundreds of Oregon natives I'd known all my life, the only real difference between born-heres and newcomers was that the born-heres had spent more time turning the native landscape into an alien, non-native place. "Cascade Mountain Native," my Uncle Don could brag as he almost singlehandedly wiped out that Range's cougar population. "Montana Native," Grandpa Duncan could gloat as he helped convert his native Rockies into open-pit copper mines, or drove alien cattle up to overgraze the native hills, or rode off into wilderness to exterminate native grizzlies for the Cattleman's Association. Here's a factual, four-word statement that summarizes my whole problem with the bumpersticker definition:
BOB PACKWOOD, OREGON NATIVE.
Mere nativeness, for most of us, is nothing much to brag about. Even the best intentioned of us techno-industrial humans are mired in cash-driven, car-propelled lives. These lives render us so nonindigenous that the word "native" is an honor we must earn afresh, every day. Our individual words, actions and purchases either do, or do not, contribute to the health of what Aldo Leopold calls "the biotic community." For now it is these words, actions and purchases that make us, Indians included, most truly "native." I have longed all my life to go this definition one better--to become some kind of reborn Highland bhakti tribesman; to join a valid spiritual community; to live, in daily detail, a sustainable life. So far I manage to clean up the trash in my backyard troutstream, feed and house native birds, scare off housecats with a BB gun, annoy and occasionally scare off a few industrialists with a livid pen, and write some stories that attest to certain native truths. But those stories are published by a global media conglomerate, I own a car, a TV, a computer, my garden pretty much sucks, and my tribe is scattered to the winds. To call this a "native life" just diminishes the word. I believe we'll all, eventually, become natives of our places--that we'll have to, in order to remain alive. But it's going to take time. I dare say, lifetimes. In the meantime I want the word "native" to mean as much as it can. So it often cannot mean me.
Another way to sneak up on a word's meaning is to find its antonym. For the "Average American"--those bland creatures Gallup and Harris always manage to locate before conducting their opinion polls--the opposite of "native" is probably a word such as "foreigner," "alien," or "immigrant." If Gallup interviewed a bunch of us Western flyfishing freaks, though, they'd learn to their amazement that the opposite of the word "native" is a hatchery trout! Surprises like this are one of the things I love about nativeness: our homes, our loves, our obsessions refract and color everything, region by region, human by human, like light when it enters a prism. Gallup thinks a scud is something Iraqis fire at Israelis. My fish-nut friends know it's a fly we fire into surface film to deceive trout. Gallup thinks a sage is either a smart Oriental fella or David Carradine dressed as one. We know it as a fragrant desert bush and overpriced line of flyrods. Who's right about scuds and sage? Who's wrong? Is it a question of right or wrong? It just may be: because Gallup Thinking--the sort of generalized knowledge gained from public opinion polls and PR firms--is the opposite of the detailed, hands-on knowledge that involves us in native life. And Gallup Think governs the nation.
Gallup Think strikes me as wrong in spirit even when it's mathematically correct. Gallup Think, for instance, assumes that public opinion has value and ought to pack a wallop. But Native Knowledge has shown me that I've never caught a fish, cut and stacked a cord of firewood, or grown a garden on opinion yet. Gallup Think assumes that our samenesses define us in some crucial way. Native Knowledge demonstrates, on the other hand, that our samenesses are largely uninformative, and that it's our peculiarities that define us.
When my father played baseball, for example, he pitched three-quarter arm, and had an odd motion that gave his pitches weirder stuff. He casts trout flies with the same three-quarter-arm motion now. I threw overhand in baseball, and cast flies that way now. According to Gallup Think, the two of us fishing a lake are just two guys fishing a lake. But Native Knowledge, zooming in for detail, reveals that Dad, with his loopy delivery, puts a wind-knot in his leader on every cast, hence weakens it, hence snaps off every sizable fish that hits his fly, while my knot-free leader and I bring home the dinner. That (sorry Dad!) is the defining importance of a native peculiarity.
Another Gallup Think flaw: if 68% of Americans, with a 4% margin of error, say that a scud is a missile, is it any less a trout-fly? And if 54% of the Columbia Basin's residents say that they prefer cheap electricity to the existence of native salmon, are our salmon any less worth saving for that? In my particular overhand-castin' hatchery-trout-hatin' scud of a native opinion, any such 54% can go sit on the pencils they filled out their poll with. If we're talking about the survival of native species, so can the 99%. Fishermen and women are, first and foremost, catchers and connoisseurs of fish. Hell, we're named after 'em. A native fisher's physical, mental and spiritual connection to his native fish comprises what the ancient Hindus call a dharma--a way of life. And it's absurd, it's an insult, to think one's dharma should change simply because the majority of a Gallup-polled populace wants to save a nickle on their kilowatts. We people of the fish have our own poles, thank you. We have learned via bamboo, fiberglass and graphite that all native species are worth saving, that all native species are interwoven and interdependent, and that if a mere human majority states a preference that would exterminate a species, all it means is that the chuckleheads conducting the poll ought to have asked better questions.
Think about it. To ask some poor overworked cluck, point blank, whether he wants to spend more of his inadequate paycheck on electricity in order to help a few salmon over a dam shows about as much tact, on the part of the pollster, as a drunk asking for spare change while he pisses on your shoes. The Columbia River Salmon Poll I'd like to see might begin by asking the populace whether they love animals and birds, including their pets, and other humans, including their children; it might then ask whether they'd be willing to pay a doctor or vet to keep those children and pets alive; next it would ask whether they realize that the Columbia is the great doctor and vet to the life of our entire region; then it would ask if they realize that our generation is presiding over a biological holocaust--a third of the native plant and animal species on the planet annihilated in our brief lifetimes; it would ask if they knew that nothing like this has ever happened, that even the end of the dinosaurs did not compare; it would ask how long they think they can live with the food chain, the atmosphere, the Web of Life in tatters; it would ask how long people are living now in tattered places like Ehtiopia, industrialized China, Honduras and Haiti, lowland Brazil; then when it got to the money question, my Salmon Poll might phrase it: "Would you be willing to sacrifice a few annual dollars in order to protect your life, your children's lives, your entire biotic community, the very Web of Life, beginning with the Columbia and its vanishing salmon?"
But that's too wordy for a poll. That's the trouble with the Web of Life. Even in tatters, It has an unpollably large number of beautiful living parts. You can't invoke those parts with numbers, or even with words, really. Yet if you don't invoke the Web's beautiful parts, mere numbers, evoking nothing, can make the choice of lifelessness over Life sound like good economic strategy.
So there's my beef with Gallup. The pollsters' lowest common denominator conclusions pretend to be the "voice of democracy." But even in the age of polls we remain living, breathing, eating, defecating parts of the Web of Life. Our utter dependence upon that Web remains the basic economic, political, scientific and poetic fact. The voice of every species in the Web remains the one truly democratic voice. Most of these voices--native salmon and ancient tree voices, for instance--speak no louder as they're being annihilated than they do in health. But my favorite political argument, all my life, has been that we must remain native enough to speak for and represent salmon and trees--which is to say, our greater physical selves--as powerfully as we speak for our financial selves.
How to speak for the other life-forms of our greater physical selves effectively: there's a crucial native question. I heard the CNN newscaster, David Goodnow, speak of my native salmon once. "Some strains of Columbia River salmon appear to be in trouble," he announced to the nation. "Only one sockeye salmon made it back to Idaho's Snake River this year," he added, a full six months after that sockeye, having found no mate, became cat food. I turned up the volume anyway, waiting to see how CNN would play it. But the story was already over! "Dollars and Sense is up next," Goodnow said, then out popped a Nissan ad. And every half hour for the rest of the night CNN repeated the very same salmon sound-byte, followed by the very same ad, till even I, a native fish fanatic, got the feeling that the solution to the Columbia River mess was to kiss off the salmon, paint the car red, and rename it the "Nissan Sockeye."
On a single TV station, not long ago, I watched the bloated bodies of hundreds of murdered civilians float down an African river, wash over a postcard-pretty waterfall, and the very next instant, no warning, a range of North American mountains framed a $29,900 car I was supposed to feel in a mood to buy. When real bodies in rivers flow into lust for cars, when a real woman's slashed throat leads to hunger for a taco, when the opening of a beer can causes greased babes in bikinis to writhe before us, who knows, the extinction of species might lead to multiple orgasms. What can any would-be native make of the TV news-team, shooting its orthodontically-flawless cathode smile into us as it says: "Good evening. America's greatest scientists adjourned a week-long meeting at the Miami Convention Center last night and concluded that the entire eastern seaboard is an ecological dead zone. Over to you, Tammy."
"Thanks, Ralph. Well, the reptiles are happy in Iowa today. They just found out that, thanks to erosion, petrochemical farming, and the plundering of the aquifer, the whole state will be a desert by the year 2020. Now here's Bob with the weather." "Okay Tammy. Thank you. Well, it's warming up in Iowa!"
What can anyone do with such disembodied, non-specific, no hands, no experience knowledge? TV has made Ted Turner rich enough to horde some very nice acreage in Montana, New Mexico and Patagonia. But can it help the rest of us save anything, anywhere, ever? And if it can't, what kind of knowledge can?
In researching my latest novel--which is just a search, in the form of story, for contemporary ways to live with greater regard for the entire biotic community--I read of a contemporary band of natives, down in South America's Colombia, who spoke to me on my river of the same name:
Colombia's Makuna tribe are a neolithic people--grass and tree-bark clothing; hand-made hunting and fishing tools. That makes me nervous in searching for cultural models, since I don't believe we'll be surrendering what technology has given us any time soon. I do believe, however, that compassion will, of necessity, become the basis of every technological decision we make. And the Makuna live in a way that dissolves the Industrial World's usual compassionless split between nature and culture, between product and conscience, between animals and people, between bad daily work and good daily beliefs.
The Makuna maintain that humans, animals, plants, all of nature, is part of a great Oneness. Our ancestors, they say, were magical fish who came ashore along the rivers and turned two-legged. As these first land beings began to sing and conduct their lives, everything in the world began to be created: hills and forests; animal and bird people; insect and fish people. But--here's the twist I love--this creation process is ongoing. The making of the world is no past-tense event, as funda- mentalists and Big Bangers would have it. The world, say the Makuna, is still being created: our words and actions still determine the nature of the hills and forests, still help create, sustain, or destroy the animal, fish and bird people.
We share a spiritual essence, the Makuna say, with the swimming, flying and four-legged people. They live in communities, just as we do, with their own chiefs (picture a bull elk) and shamans (picture an old coyote, a raven, a horned owl). They have dance houses and birth houses, songs and rites, and material possessions, as we do. (We think easily of feathers and fur as possessions, but remember, too, the nests and dens, and the carefully maintained territories; remember the salmon's virtual ownership of the herring, the seal's of the salmon, the trout's of the mayfly, the osprey's of the trout). Fish, according to the Makuna, even have ceremonial paints and ritual ornaments, which they don, as we do, for certain crucial occasions. (Consider the endangered coho, justly named "silver" during its life in the ocean, but donning fangs, greens and crimsons for the sex-driven return to its birth house.)
I'll cut to the quick: according to the Makuna, our essential oneness with other species is not just a source of vague mystical pleasure, or of cool ripped-off Indian images for hip writers and artists. Our oneness is the source of an enormous obligation. We depend on fish, animal, and bird people to eat and live. In return, the fish, animal and bird people depend on us to spiritually enact, daily, the hidden oneness of all life. Anytime humans eat, anytime we gather, anytime we make merry or celebrate in our world, we have an obligation to offer "spirit food" to the winged, fish and animal people, that they may celebrate in their worlds. And if we fail to make such offerings--if we do not spiritually share with the other species--they quickly die. So say the Makuna.
I confess my modern bias: the words "spirit food" make me think of peyote and coca cults, hallucinogenic jungle brews, hopelessly neolithic people, "primitives." But what does the word "primitive" mean? A shaman of my coast, Gary Snyder, reminds us that the root of the word "primitive" is "primary." "Primitive" things are the most basic and essential things: things like water, earth, fire, air, food, shelter, nurture; things we very soon die without. So what about "primitive beliefs?" Are they equally primary? Equally indispensible? Fish, say the Makuna, consume spirit food, and need us two-leggeds to offer them such food. What does this notion mean?
Trying the idea out in my own native landscape, I thought of the huge chinook salmon of the Columbia--June hogs, we used to call them: sixty, eighty, even hundred-pound salmon that swam the entire river from the Pacific clear up into eastern British Columbia, fighting the pre-dam run-off, mightiest currents of the year. And those chinook ate nothing --or nothing physical--the whole nine hundred mile way. Non-food. Ghost-food. Spirit food. Is there a better name for what sustained them? And the humans of their day, the native tribes, did in fact offer elaborate gifts, dances and feasts to honor their coming. Were these rites the ingredient that sustained those magnificent salmon? This is a stretch for us VISA-carded jet-propelled Info-Agers, I know. But maybe there's a falls or dam we need to leap here in order to enter our native place. The Makuna insist that we must offer "spirit food" to keep the bird, fish and animal people healthy. We squirm at the archaic sound of the idea. But what industrial man offered the June chinooks instead was Grand Coulee Dam. And now those beautiful salmon are extinct. Is there some primitive i.e. primary i.e essential wisdom we're overlooking that could prevent the extinction of what remains?
I sense two things here. Both sound silly to the rationalistic half of my brain. But I feel in my native heart and bones, first of all, that most of us drastically underestimate--with tragic results for our fish, forests, rivers, wildlife and greater selves--just how primitive we still are: how basic, despite our modernity; how dependent on the company of native plants, animals, earth, water, air. And the second thing I feel we underestimate--again with tragic results--is just how spiritually alive and capable we are.
It's a prickly topic, spirituality. Sloppy or pedantical talk about God is obnoxious and dangerous, and those who parade such talk have knocked the religion clean out of a lot of us. But reverence for life is not religion. Reverence for life is the basis of compassion, and of biological health. This is why, much as it may embarrass those of us trained in the agnostic sciences, I believe that every life-loving human on earth has an obligation to remain both primitive enough, and reverent enough, to stand up and say to any kind of public:
Trees and mountains are holy. Rain and rivers are holy. Salmon are holy.
For this reason alone I will fight with all my might to keep them alive.
This is not an argument, not a number, not a polled opinion. It's just naked, native belief. But if we put our full conviction in such belief, if we feel no embarrassment over it, if we stand up and stand by it again and again, we might begin to discover some spirit-power in ourselves, and shoot it from there into our friends and kids, and into our scientific research, our art, our music or writing, and from there on out into beautiful but threatened laws such as the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species Acts, and thence into our homelands, watersheds, native country, and native co-inhabitants. Economic, political and scientific arguments, alone, just aren't cutting it. Our salmon people are leaving us. And so many other natives--finned, furred, winged and two-legged--have already gone.
What is spirit food for us industrial-indigenous halfbreeds? What is a modern day spirit offering? I'd say that now, as ever, it's anything we truly value. Our energy, our focus, the hours of our days. Anything we respect so much that, as we pour it out on the fish, bird and animals' behalf, we kind of hate to see it go. Maybe single malt scotches from the literalists among us. Prayers and mantras from the mystics. Money, time and trouble from the capitalists and activists. Unflinching accuracy, no matter the political climate, from the scientists. Stories from people like me. The big blockade to change is lack of passion. And the birth house of passion is the heart. A spirit offering, then, is anything we can offer with a whole heart--any song, dance, phone call, plea, letter, insight, gift or prayer that helps determine the way we, and other humans, continue to create our world, rivers, hills, forests, and fellow creatures.
It feels awkward (I know, I've done it) to just stand up and do a "spirit thing." But so does the Web of Life find our lethal industry, stupidity and greed awkward. And even a hokey spirit offering expresses a dream, a hope, a moment's love for another life-form. If we don't get to work with the tools at hand, we may never get to work. On that note, I'd like to try my own hokey hand at a spirit offering.
Ever get a song stuck in your head when you're out fishing? Sure. It's a fishing universal. And did you ever hate the song that got stuck? Sure. That's universal, too. But did you ever get a song you hate stuck in your head for thirty years? I did. So that's the raw material of my spirit offering. Industrial Man has fucked up so bad that a lot of the native work to be done over the next few centuries is going to be repair work. My spirit offering today is a repaired song.
That this song got riveted to my brain was hardly an accident. The Army Corps and all manner of other Industrial Gladiators have bronzed its lyrics to the concrete walls of dams, tourist centers, factories and parks all over the Columbia River Basin, and Northwest public school kids, including me in the fourth grade, get its irresistable melody and idiotic words implanted in their brains like hatchery-fish DNA a full decade before they know what terms like "brainwash" or "cooptation" mean. But the worst reason the song stays stuck in my head is that I love the guy who wrote it. He had an off-day, is all. Working on commission from the Bonneville Power Administration, Woody Guthrie--a wonderful songwriter, and one of our guys, dammit, not one of theirs!--whipped off an evil spirit offering after admiring a new dam (Grand Coulee, as a matter of fact), never suspecting the rash of bronzes that would one day immortalize his sweet face and no-brainer lyrics; bronzes that might as well read:
LOVABLE AMERICAN FOLK HERO SINGS WHOLE-HEARTED APPROVAL OF RAMPANT INDUSTRIALIZATION OF ENTIRE COLUMBIA RIVER DRAINAGE!
I have therefore made a few alterations to Woody's song.
I doubt we'll see my version bronzed on any new dams--though when the old dams start to come down we might see a few lines spray-painted on the rubble. I can't sing worth a dam either. But it's reverence, not aesthetics, that rules the realm of the Spirit Offering. There's no copyright on this thing, so feel free to quote it, xerox it, graffiti it on public school walls, de-program your coopted kids with it. I'm the crassest kind of rookie in the shaman department, but I do offer this repair job with all the sincerity in me to the native salmon and steelhead people of the Columbia River birth-houses. Are you with me, Idaho sockeyes? Here goes:
I got skunked on the Dee-schutes with one of my pals,Then he sang:
Drank too much Glenfiddich in downtown The Dalles,
Then failed to conceal it when we phoned up our gals.
Mine said, "Better not drive, you morons."So we stayed in a motel to avoid the state cops
An' our beds had machines that for two-bits a pop
Produced cute little earthquakes while to sleep we did drop
As outside the Columbia rolled on.But I'd just drifted off when my spirit awoke
To the sound of a git-tar an' a sad voice that spoke
In a sweet Okie twang tailor-made to sing folk
While outside the Columbia rolled on."Dave," the voice said, "this idn't no joke.
I been shanghaied to Limbo for a song I once wrote.
The BPA paid for it. Shit. I was broke.
It's called 'Roll on, Columbia roll on.'"The song brags up the river an' that part deserves fame.
It's the braggin' 'bout factories an' dams that was lame.
Can you take down dictation so I can salvage my name?"
I said, "You betcha, Woody. Go on."
"Roll on, Columbia, roll on. Roll on, Columbia, roll on,Everybody:
Once a free-flowin' river, now a big poison pond,
But roll on, Columbia, roll on."When I fled from the Dust Bowl an' first saw your dams
I was stunned by the power an' blind to the scams
That'd one day defile you with all the shit in the land,
But roll on, Columbia roll on."Those same mighty dams stopped the great salmon runs
Turned the planet's best fishery into pulp-mills an' lawns.
Now your June hogs 'n' sockeyes 'n' coho are gone.
But roll on, Columbia, roll on.
"Roll on, Columbia, roll on. Roll on, Columbia, roll on.Everybody:
Once a free-flowin' river, now a big poison pond,
But roll on, Columbia, roll on."Big Douglas fir stumps where your channel cuts through
Remind us of forests our grandfolks once knew,
But if you want to find wildlife better look in the zoo,
Roll on, Columbia, roll on."Your water-use laws are a huge public con
So in summer you become a huge public john
Windsurfers grow tumors while squawfish grow brawn,
But roll on, Columbia, roll on.
"Roll on, Columbia, roll on. Roll on, Columbia, roll on."Here's a salmon's-eye-view chorus:
Once a free-flowin' river, now a big poison pond,
But roll on, Columbia, roll on."The Yakima, Snake an' the Willamette too
Add toxins, dioxins 'n' cowshit to you,
Insecticides, pesticides, human doo-doo,
But roll on, Columbia, roll on."Meanwhile upriver on the great Hanford Reach
They're growin' the brains to plug nuclear leaks
By turnin' our kids into three-headed freaks,
But roll on, Columbia, roll on.
"Dam! Dam! Dam DamDamDamDam!"We ain't finished:
Dam! Dam! Dam DamDamDamDam!
Dam DamdaDam, DamdaDam, Dam Dam Dam Dam!
But roll on, Columbia, roll on.
"When Jefferson sent Lewis 'n' Clark to the WestSo we fixed it:
An empire of small farmers was the dream he loved best,
Not a plague of huge fact'ries all shittin' their nest,
But roll on, Columbia, roll on."Now industry grinds Mama Earth into hash
Creatin' extinctions to line pockets with cash
An' if we cry "It's a crime!" they say, "Let's not be rash.
Let's sing, 'Roll On, Columbia, Roll On.'"
"Roll on, Columbia, roll on. Roll on, Columbia, roll on.
Once a free-flowin' river, now a big poison pond,
But roll on, Columbia, roll on."Rain on Mountain makes River--that's The Law on this Earth.
The wild waters will keep comin' till that law is reversed,
An' dams can be unbuilt to show folks the worth
Of a land where free rivers flow on."The sunlight, the winds, the great rivers shall last.
It's Industrial Madness that one day will pass.
Sweet Columbia's just waitin' for the day we all ask
Where our beautiful river has gone."
Mortal as I am, I remember an immortal day one October just after I'd learned to drive, when I headed up the lower Columbia Gorge in my '55 Buick, found the longest sandbar in sight, walked the whole long finger of it out into midriver, and stood alone, waist-deep, Indian Summer, the evening air all glowing. Throwing spinners, hooking nothing. But who cared? Because just at dusk, all over the Columbia's vast surface, like no one who missed it can conceive today, every salmon I couldn't catch started jumping and boiling--great chinooks and bright coho; sockeyes and huge Idaho steelhead, too, in those days. The dams were in place, the extinctions had begun, but during the late '60s salmon runs the whole top of the river would still become a miles-wide cauldron, native fish rolling and leaping, crimson rings and silver roils all over the surface, both directions, far as the eye could see. For those who'll never see them in their rightfully vast numbers--and hear them: the sound was as incredible as the sight!--these words are just elegies to things foreign to experience. But what filled the river was a kind of being. And it was godlike. Heroically decisive life, pouring in from the ocean no matter what industrial madness barred its way, giving its life to create its continuation.
Something wondrous still passes, at the last salmons' coming, from the fish-people to us two-leggeds. They feed our hearts the very image of self-sacrifice; they feed our bodies with their bodies; they take a message from our inland mountains far out to sea, and bring their ocean message back to our mountains. Migration remains the needle and birds and salmon the thread whose comings and goings, in and out, sew the pieces of this region into a whole. When the great salmon runs would pour up the Columbia, the Spirit of the Basin, the very Oneness of which the Makuna speak, would fill its lungs and breathe. That I can't give the hard science behind this doesn't mean it's woowoo. Hard science deals with the physical; peace, joy, and oneness are metaphysical. That I can't give the economic value doesn't devalue it, either. To place economic value on a moment's love, joy, or wonder is a pimp's job, not a river-lover's.
The Columbia that Industrial Man has given us is dying. Those tributaries least touched by man, thrive. The finned, winged, and four-leggeds watch us, awaiting the world we do or do not create. Make your offerings, campadres. Columbia, Grand Ronde, Deschutes, Pend Oreille, Clearwater, Bitterroot, Salmon, Snake, Yakima, Umatilla, Klickitat, Willamette, Clackamas, Kalama, Blackfoot. Roll on.
David James Duncan is the author of The River Why, The Brothers K, and River Teeth. He lives with his family in the Columbia River headwaters, where he's at work on a contemporary "divine comedy" novel called Letters from God and a nonfiction book on the post-Western West called How the Pacific Makes Love to the Rockies. A version of this essay also appeared in the Winter1998 issue of Orion, 195 Main St., Great Barrington, MA 01230.
©1999 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 1999
Volume 9, Number 2
A Sense of Place
Laughter and voices reach us from the river, where most of the village has gathered to escape the oppressive midday heat. I notice the tools and seeds abandoned on the outskirts of the women's garden. Next door, a man continues his work in the plant nursery, where tiny seedlings are protected by the shade of a thatched roof. There is a boy in the pond outside the nursery, fishing from a traditional Amazonian dugout canoe. He lunges from the canoe into the brown water with a thin spear. The pond where he practices, the nursery, and the garden are part of the village's Permaculture project.
A group of foreign botanists and Permaculture activists joined with a local organization to create Permaculture America Latino (PAL), to introduce ideas of Permaculture and agroforestry to the Shipibo Indians of San Francisco. PAL and the others recognize the Shipibo people's ongoing struggle to make sense of a modern world that forces them to settle, but offers nothing to help them survive while the natural world they have always relied on disappears around them.
The difficulties faced by the people of San Francisco are shared by other Indian villages in the area. The Shipibo in their dugout canoes, fishing with spears and poles, cannot compete with the fishermen, who set nets, to feed the nearby city of Pucalpa. Furthermore, the growing population of the area has led to the destruction of a forest that once provided the Shipibo with wild fruit, nuts, barks, roots, herbs, and plants to supplement their fish-based diet. The forests have been cut down to make room for cattle or transformed into fields of yucca, plantain, and maize. PAL and the others hope that a project to promote a sustainable life will succeed among people whose grandparents remember when the river and the forest provided everything necessary in life.
San Francisco lies on the bank of Yarinacocha, an immense oxbow lake formed by the Ucayali river, a tributary of the Amazon. The village is accessible by an hour's ride in a motorized canoe from Puerto Caillo, Peru. I arrived in Puerto Caillo and paid half a Sole (about 25 cents) to the man with the brightest canoe. We traveled toward San Francisco in the fading blue dusk. Glimpses of pink skinned dolphins disappeared as quickly as apparitions. I glanced at the far shore, and the fading silhouette of a not so distant past; for I was unaware of the destruction that lay just beyond the tree lined shore. I saw only the thin shadow of a tall forest of trees giving life to dense vines and gigantic bromeliads. I didn't recognize the reality beyond the vale of wildness that manages to persevere on the edge of the cement metropolis of Pucalpa, the last outpost into the Peruvian Amazon.
I tell the old Medicine man about the image I observed on my trip out. He speaks about how quickly his people's world has changed. The rubber industry built the first roads into Peru's Amazon not more than 70 years ago, foreign oil companies paved them, and the encroaching masses followed with the dream of a better life. San Francisco is one of several small Shipibo villages that, like the image of the forest, manage to hold to the roots of their past and survive along the shore of Yarinacocha.
Iwatch a Shipibo woman and her husband walk along the giant pond toward home. He has a pole across his shoulders with two piranha dangling from either side. He flashes a toothless smile as he tells an animated story to his wife. He's had a lucky day. Many days this time of year he comes back empty handed. Even a successful day provides slim pickings for the twelve hungry mouths of the extended family they provide for.
The woman has returned from two days in Puerto Caillo, where she sells her beaded necklaces and other crafts to tourists. The first day she sold nothing and could not afford the boat fare home. This is part of the struggle that PAL and the others witnessed when they arrived in San Francisco: the challenge of daily survival in an area where what is needed has disappeared, and where the modern solutions that are presented hold little appeal. PAL recognizes, in the Shipibo of San Francisco, an incredible fortitude that transcends their grim situation. They do not wish to trade their traditions, art, and spirits for the dream of the modern world. This gives the project encouragement when difficulties arise.
PAL's history of success in South American Permaculture and agroforestry grows from their ability to work well with the local people. PAL arrived in San Francisco with the realization that to succeed they would have to find some common ground on which to sow the seeds of their ideas with the Shipibo. The creation of a pond for aquaculture was the first step, and the village's interest was piqued.
The Shipibo depend on fish as their principal source of protein. The old Medicine man tells me stories of the plentitudes of fish that once existed in Yarinacocha, when every time a Shipibo spear was sent into the obscure brown waters they emerged with food. Today, in the dry season Yarinacocha is completely cut off from the Ucayali, and the fish stocks dwindle. The fish supply of Yarinacocha is of constant concern. The stocked aquaculture of the project's pond promises to provided a backup in the dry season when Yarinacocha's stocks dwindle. The large pond is home to species of fish not necessarily prevalent in the vast waters of Yarinacocha. It provides variety in consumable fish as well as an opportunity to create additional income from baitfish. Research reveals that even swampy stagnate ponds yield 1,000 pounds of protein per acre per year if appropriate species are incorporated. The pond's aquaculture also includes the plethora of beneficial plants and herbs that flourish in the swampy vicinity of the pond, as well as water plants such as Euryhale Ferox, which produce edible seeds.
I take a walk around the pond one day with a young man from the village. Other than his American brand of shorts, he wears nothing but some beaded necklaces around his neck. Traditional strands of seeds seem to fit alongside the bright glass beads from the city. We trudge through thick underbrush; he carries a machete and wields it now and again to clear me a path. Lines of leafcutter ants march beside us. Several varieties of ripening bananas hang around us, as well as mangoes, and other tree fruit. My friend casually begins to point out important plants. It seems that almost every plant has some use. The aquaculture project is proving a simple means of self sustainability to the village.
PAL has also created a plant nursery to propagate seeds. The project depends on knowledge from tribal elders and healers about traditional plants, herbs, and medicines used by native cultures in the upper Amazon.
The seeds are collected, and cuttings taken from areas of virgin forests 20 miles down river. The plant nursery also includes a variety of fruit trees, soil enhancing species, and legumes to incorporate into the agroforestry plot.
The plants and trees started in the nursery eventually are interplanted among stands of mature trees growing outside the village. This experiment in agroforestry supplements the surrounding forest with edible and medicinal plants that were lost with the original forest. The plots also incorporate staple cultivable crops such as plantain, cassava, yucca, yams, and maize. In the tropics where 80-90% of available nutrients are retained in the biomass of the existing plants, rather than in the soil, the key to successful agriculture is to create and maintain decent humus. This is where the soil enhancing trees fit in, fixing nitrogen and creating rich compost from the leaf matter. The improved soil provides a decent base on which to experiment with various aspects of Permaculture and companion planting. The agroforestry site in San Francisco demonstrates how tropical agriculture can succeed without using the traditional destructive methods of slash and burn.
In the tropics things happen fast. One agroforestry plot planted a year ago on the outskirts of the village is a productive ecosystem in itself. As I walk along the overgrown pathways I have to watch my steps closely so as not to step on the maturing squash and pumpkins hiding within the plants, vines, and herbs. The agroforestry plots mimic the holistic system of a healthy forest. Nothing is wasted, everything has a purpose in the design. All organic matter that drops to the ground in turn provides necessary nutrients for what grows beneath, and plants complement one another by providing shade, natural insect control, or nutritional supplements. The agroforestry plots demonstrate that agriculture can exist in the Amazon without destroying the forest.
As the sun drops, the dirt streets begin to show signs of life. Erlinda and several other women gather near the Mandala garden they are creating. They laugh, catching up on the latest news. They are dressed in bright shirts and elaborately embroidered skirts. Beaded strands hang around their waists. Trade beads and bright synthetic cloth have replaced the seed beads and plant fibers of old, but the women still retain a common Shipibo identity.
The women of San Francisco are most receptive to the Permaculture project. The Shipibo are a matriarchal society, so their support is a great asset to the project's survival. The Mandala garden gives the women a means of direct involvement in the project, as well as providing a communal place to gather fruit: tomatoes, chilies, amaranth, onions, and herbs for their families. The garden is fashioned after a design in Bill Mollison's Permaculture Design Manual. In the center and in the outer circle there are trees of papaya and banana. In the inner beds they are experimenting with the companion planting of various vegetables and herbs. The women notice us across the way and shyly giggle and wave.
I smile in the direction of my companion. Together we have observed a day in the life of his people through very different eyes. His eyes are gray, sightless, knowing. Mine are young, idealistic, inquisitive. He tells me he lost his sight gradually as his people lost their world. I ask him what he thinks of the project that has taken root in his village. He tells me that lately the laughter has grown louder, he senses an emerging hope. He asks me to visit the culture center the young people have built. There they play traditional music over a battery powered boom box, accompanied by their hand made drums. They practice the dances of their ancestors, and learn about the deep traditions of their people's art and culture. It is evident in their enthusiasm that the Shipibo culture will not be another culture lost to the modern world.
The project that has taken root in San Francisco is helping to provide the village with a means of sustaining themselves, which ultimately will allow them to preserve a culture that refuses to die with the forests. The Shipibo are people of the Amazon, and like the forest they are part of, they adapt to survive. With my first image of the forest's silhouette I became aware of its perseverance. The Shipibo of San Francisco have the opportunity to emerge from beyond the thin silhouette of the forest, and take control of an uncertain future.
Suzy Loeffler has spent the last few years working on Permaculture projects throughout North, Central, and South America. She spent four months in Peru, living and working with the Shipibo of San Francisco.
©1999 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 1999
Volume 9, Number 2
A Sense of Place
Millions of years ago, when the climate was moist and warm, redwood forests covered more than half of what is now the United States. Following subsequent ice ages, most redwood forests were replaced by prairies and hardwood and evergreen forests. Fortunately, the redwoods were still able to grow along a five hundred mile stretch of the west coast, from the San Francisco Bay to the mouth of the Rogue River in Southern Oregon. For the last ten thousand years, the California redwood forests flourished in harmony with the hunter-gatherer cultures of Native Americans living amidst them.
When Europeans came to settle the northern California coast during the nineteenth century, they found themselves transported into a magical world. They were surrounded by the largest plants on earth. Shrubs and giant ferns formed a moist groundcover beneath the trees. Delicate plants grew here too--the pastel redwood orchid; redwood sorrel; twisting wax myrtle, and countless other beautiful species.
The fog shrouded coastal forests stood like giants over the land, sheltering hundreds of varieties of birds and mammals. The ethereal blue heron seemed like a messenger from another world. The marbled murrelet "flew" underwater while pursuing fish, and built nests in the crowns of old-growth trees. High above the earth, the canopy floated like a green cloud, cradling these nests far from sight. The red-headed, pileated wood-pecker poked the trunks of old trees for its food. Coho and steelhead salmon filled the rivers and streams. The California red-backed vole feasted only on underground forest truffles. Roosevelt elk, bobcats, and black bears filled the forests with life.
How did the settlers respond to these glorious redwood forests? The only value they recognized was the economic value of the wood. A terrible holocaust befell these magnificent trees, as they were cut in large swathes and great numbers. After over one hundred years of intensive logging, more than ninety-six percent of the redwood forests are gone--and with them, the plants and animals that lived there.
And what has been fashioned out of these towering redwood trees? While I have not heard of and cannot cite a scientific study of the "use cycle" of redwood manufactured products by Americans, I can share my own observations of the general trend. Nearly forty years ago, I moved to Long Island, New York. It was a newly built suburban community, part of the post World War II home building boom growing mushroom-like around cities throughout the country. We kids were occupied by fads like hoola hoops and yo-yos, while our parents had fads of their own, like big automobiles with giant tailfins and redwood patio furniture. Every family in my neighborhood, including ours, purchased a redwood picnic table and benches. Those with higher incomes displayed their wealth in that era of conspicuous consumption by buying even more redwood objects, such as matched sets of redwood lawn chairs and adjustable lounges with redwood wheels, and charcoal grills with redwood trim. Many families, including both of my neighbors on either side of my house, even erected redwood fences which ran clear around their one-quarter acre properties.
And what has become of our national investment in redwood bric-a-brac? After all, redwood lumber is famed for its resistance to rot. Surely, one might suppose, these fences, chairs, and tables will last hundreds of years, perhaps giving some utilitarian justification for cutting down these thousand year old redwood trees. If one looks in my neighborhood to see how well the redwood items are holding up, the search will be in vain, because there is almost no redwood to be seen. Look in every backyard on my block, or for miles around, (and I know because I have looked), and you will find virtually no redwood where only twenty years ago there was redwood everywhere. Where did it all go? I know exactly where most of it is.
A mile from my home lies the infamous Old Bethpage Garbage Dump and Incinerator Complex. Winning distinction as one of the most toxic landfills in New York State, it was closed years ago. There is concern of infiltration of toxic liquid into our Long Island ground water aquifer. That dump is the resting place for thousands of pieces of redwood furniture thrown out by homeowners and collected by the town on garbage pick-up day over many years during the 1970s and 1980s. Furniture I saw heaped on the curb in decaying pieces would have been first burned in the incinerators and then deposited as ash in the landfill. On weekends, homeowners were allowed to drive their cars up the manmade mountain of garbage and dump their own trash, which often included whole pieces of redwood furniture, directly into the landfill. So, there it is, hundreds of millions of years of evolution, hundreds of thousands of years of standing redwood forests, individual redwood trees over one thousand years of age, entire redwood forests, buried in the municipal garbage dump.
That is how we Americans have treated the gift of the redwood forests with which nature has blessed our country. We chopped ninety-six percent of them down, used the manufactured redwood items for perhaps twenty years, and then tossed them out. How could people have been so callous with such a precious, finite resource as old growth redwood? Did they think it would last forever? The problem is, people did not think; they simply consumed, certain in the feeling that there would always be more furniture or fence material when they were through with the redwood. In that they were correct, for my neighbors have now erected chain link and cedar fences to replace the discarded redwood