Reflections 1
1. I thought it was interesting how Keeping it Living identified the four general areas of the Northwest Coast by the predominant trees located in each area. I also like thinking of the area as NW Coast rather than just Western Washington or Western Canada since the description is based off continuity of natural features rather than some irrelevant human property division line.
2. Natural systems and indigenous cultural systems in the Northwest biologically mirror one another. The indigenous cultural perspective of the NW is in harmony with the natural world, so that the way humans interact with nature is counterpoint to the way nature interacts with itself. There is no discernable difference between nature and the indigenous peoples of our area. They use resources of the Earth in sustainable ways, acting as a fiber in the overall weaving of the ecological web and not presuming to be more important than any other segment. Where they take, they then give back, respecting the internal harmonies of the land. They see the Earth as a being (as well as a home and a gift) and interact with the world around them on this basis, with respect, wonder, and love. To them, the world is complete as it is, a holy Creation made total from the start, totality being tantamount in their eyes to the wondrous harmony produced by the symbiotic interaction of plant, insect, animal, and human. Everything they need is provided; Creator has left it here for them to gather and use.
3. Douglas Fir, Western Red Cedar, Bracken Fern, Salal, Cattail, and Stinging Nettle.
4. Mulching and transplanting
Reflections 2
1. I often feel sad that I don’t have an ancestral tradition to call my own, a deep connection to the natural world borne of my human social climate. I pine to be so deep in the societal dream of my people that the dimensions of the collective cultural life utterly permeate my soul. As it is, I have little common ground with the ideals of the culture I was born into here in the USA. I love the land here -- it is a beautiful place to live -- but our connection to it through collective cultural tradition is non-existent. For perhaps the first time in human history, I and many others are not specifically part of anything remotely close to an indigenous culture, and for those who can see through the cheap thrills and terrible costs of modern life, there is no comparable substitute, no instant recourse back to the folkways that once connected our ancestors so deeply to the land.
Such being the case, I have chosen to encode the seed of a solution directly into my persona. As part of my identity, I choose to be a healing agent in this world, one who seeks renewed connection to the land through neo-archaic cultural interaction and direct experience of nature. I choose to be a rebel-hearted American, driven to bring change and to create a space for humanity’s resurgence into the natural world. This is my heart’s intention, my life’s passion, and I will settle for nothing less.
This resurgence is our destiny and our right, our ancestral inheritance and our duty. No one can take this from us unless we let them. In our hearts, at our essence, we are wild and free, essential ingredients of nature, children of the Earth. If ever there is going to be a positive change for our future, we must return to Earth-centered ways, reclaim our primeval intensity of being, and throw off the yoke of materialism, the meaninglessness of a life lived in the pursuit of aims inflicted on us by the sociopathic, schizophrenic norms of modern society. Such a change happens little by little but we make the decisions every day that bring us into or out of alignment with the real world, which is that of holistic interaction with our natural landscape.
2. None new
3. None thus far
Reflections 3
At the beginning of the quarter, when I found out that we would be reading an anthology of women’s writings, I was a little disconcerted because the reading seemed out of place being that Healing Gardens is not a class for women only (with all due respect to the fact that 90% of the class roster are female). I decided not to say anything and just go with the flow, thinking that a little feminism wouldn’t hurt me and perhaps I’d learn something valuable from it. Sure enough, the book is great. It’s about the Feminine (rather than feminism persay) and at times is almost like a sneak peek into the mind of a female -- which is of course terribly intriguing! My favorite chapter was Susan Orlean’s about orchids. I had no idea orchids were so goddamn interesting! A week or two after reading that chapter in the book, a friend lent me the movie Adaptation, which was about a book called The Orchid Thief. I was engrossed by the movie and thought the link between the subject of the movie and what I had just read in Sweet Breathing of Plants was pretty interesting. But it wasn’t until a line of the movie was almost word for word out of that chapter about orchids in our book that I realized Susan Orlean, writer of The Orchid Thief, was one and the same as the writer of the orchid chapter in our book! Far out. Anyway, great flick, a new favorite of mine. The only thing that would have made it better would have been if John Laroche played himself in the movie, as the character who played him suggested he should. It would have added yet another level to the blending of reality and surreality of the movie. If you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I mean.
I have not gotten too attached to Keeping It Living yet, but I’m keeping an open-mind and treading on. I loved Earth’s Blanket for its native wisdom and simple writing style and Keeping it Living is not following suit, with more scientific analysis than anything else. So I am trying to let go of my expectations and enjoy it for what it is. We’ll see how that goes.
I really enjoyed the prairie planting event last Saturday, it’s awesome to see that place covered with fescue, which is a plant I really love. However, my favorite event of the quarter thus far has been the liberal arts forum. I felt like I got to know people in the class a little better through our discussion of identity and there was such a nice fellowship and vibration to the community event that you just can’t get anywhere else. There’s just something about lots of people working passionately together toward a common goal that's really great.
Reflections 4
1. I see winter manifesting in 3 realms of my life: my social connections, my career, and my personal growth. In the social realm, I have made a number of new friends this winter and hope to see our relationships burgeon forth into new forms. In the business world, I see door after door of opportunity open to me and yet not much has taken off yet. It isn’t that these opportunities are stunted, it’s just a matter of timing; none of them have started yet but all of them are scheduled to go full tilt in the next 2-4 weeks, with more opportunities promised in the months to follow. The design has been laid and now the budding process is readying each new segment for bursts of activity. My personal growth is my most exciting winter time development (inner transformation always is for me) and as I look back now at the many varieties of self-knowledge that I have tasted this Winter but not fully engaged, it again makes me think of the metaphor of buds on a tree: Tiny little pods that are little by little preparing themselves for a vast burst of new growth. With all that has happened, it makes me realize that I’m likely coming to a really special time in my life!
2. My relationship to my journal is fair, not amazing, though there are times when I feel more connected to it than others. Any lack of connection is mostly due to a lack of time, otherwise known as the multitude of tasks piled up in front of me everyday which the journal is just one of. I start feeling that inorganic relationship of “I HAVE to get this done OR ELSE,” when really there are other things I’d rather be doing. But contrarily, I appreciate the onus of journaling every week in as much as I can let myself go and think of the activity as an excuse to have to go sit outside and be with Nature for a few minutes a day. Even if I don’t feel I have time for the activity, I always feel more connected after sitting down and quietly journaling what I see. And so to improve my relationship with my journal, I think I just need to stop and focus more on what I am gaining, which is one free pass to let the city and all its concerns fade away for a minute or two of my day.
3. Medicine is that which heals, whether the healing comes from a plant, a joke, a hug, or a romantic evening with your significant other (Happy Valentine’s day). A garden is a cultivated group of plants that provide nourishment, beauty, or medicine. As I have said in other reflections, I see the world as a garden, cultivated by God in the form of the reciprocal natural relationships that tie together the ecological web. We sort of create that situation in microcosm in our backyards.
Reflections 5
Summary of Keeping it Living: Chapter 3
Ames starts off by defining intensification and announcing that this chapter will examine intensification practices on the NW Coast among complex hunter-gatherer societies. Questions surrounding NW Coast “non-farming” peoples are discussed, such as how could these people have such complex art and also be sedentists, without also having agricultural practices. Sedentism is defined and Ames proposes that this trait has always been a feature around the world of social complexity. He then states that this chapter’s intent is to prove that assumptions archaeology has long believed are in fact incorrect, specifically the assumption that NW Coast peoples subsided on animals much more than plants. He discusses the idea of there being a continuum between hunter-gatherer and agriculturalists and offers that perhaps there should be a field with 3 points, including those who are pure farmers, those who are pure foragers, and those who are something else entirely. He establishes various people’s definitions of what a hunter-gatherer is, including his own from another book, and then gives definitions of intensification and the anthropological requisites of intensification, some of which he believes to be accurate and others inaccurate. Intensification bears 2 questions: “How is more food produced and what happens to it then?” (page 77) And a 3rd question is, why intensify? Ames believes there is only one model that accurately represents what intensification of production may have looked like on the NW Coast and all others assume that intensification will be “indicated by ancient subsistence economics becoming increasingly like those of the Early Modern Period.” (pg 78) Three models of intensification are then presented. The first one is a general model of intensification and domestication, while models two and three are focused on causes and effects of root harvesting in specific areas. Reasons for intensification are discussed, such as risk of dearth in naturally occurring resources. This seems to be the main reason in fact. Reasons for intensification that create this risk factor include climate change and demographic change. The models presented try to predict how NW Coast societies evolved. Specific information on geophytes and evidence for plant exploitation in specific areas are then listed. He concludes with some points he thinks should be taken into consideration when looking at the problem of evaluating intensification practices.
Response for Keeping it Living: Chapter 3
I don’t have much of a response to this chapter, it was pretty boring and I had a hard time following the academese. I think he probably did a good job writing about the topic and I hope it helps the indigenous rights movement but I personally have very little interest in reading about this sort of research.
On pg. 71, Ames made an interesting comment about continuums and how we use language. He explained that we might say “I am a bit damp” but we would never say “I am a bit dry.” You are either dry or not, but you can be varying degrees of wet. We could just as easily set dryness as the benchmark and say you are either soaked or you are some degree of dry. It kind of reminds me of the anthropological urban legend that Eskimos have 28 different words for snow because to them there are 28 different types of it. I have heard this idea is the fault of good ole Franz Boas’, who casually and inaccurately mentioned in a text that Inuits/Eskimos have 4 different words for snow, and then the whole thing only escalated from there. It’s a disputed point so not for sure on this one.
It would be neat to learn how to pit cook food, such as the geophytes Ames mentions at the end of the chapter. I bet it is a lot of work but it would be cool to do for a special occasion.
Connections to the LHG for Keeping it Living: Chapter 3
I think it would be awesome if we could make a pit cooking area at the Longhouse Garden for special events. We could grow a lot of camas and balsamroot and other traditional vegetables and then cook them in a traditional fashion. I wonder how big a cooking pit is? And how big of a fire is required to heat the stones? Does a cooking pit need tending during the cooking or do you just cover it up and come back when the timer dings 3 days later?
Not sure what else connects to the Longhouse Garden from this chapter since it was mostly about sedentism, differences and similarities between foragers and agriculturalists, and questions surrounding what intensification is and why it is done. Perhaps we could intensify the berry bushes in the LHG by burying fish carcasses around the plants? Then again, the facilities crew might not like that … Setting up a good pruning regimen would be a definite step toward intensification, as would regular watering of new plants and weeding the area of volunteer plants.
Reflections 6
Winter is ending finally, this was a long one for me.
A long, difficult road covered in gray fog and stretching on and on into the distance.
The fog might clear any day now and so the fool’s parade marches on,
Down the path, entertaining a crowd that isn’t even there.
Or perhaps the crowd is fey, invisible in their hidden world alongside our own,
Mixed in with this shroud coalescing across the path.
Fey beings listening intently, laughing at a pitch only they can hear
As I tap, tap away down the cobbled walk through slatey-thick atmosphere,
In search of some new horizon.
I breathe in and taste the gray matter;
It coats my lungs and stains my jacket with scent of plants and earth.
I carry on and lift my foot in front of its mate, taking stock of time on this errand,
Thinking how labor breathes easy in an environment laden with feeling.
Take that away and nothing seems as likely anymore.
I cancel written claims that don’t seek my saturated soul center
And lift off from the great, wide ground a branch or leaf that calls fancy from the heart or
flame from the filigree.
Settle for steady laughter on this course, heard or not.
Settle for a breath, a heart-beat drum and a dreaming deliverance that must yet come.
Sing to the scent of loam building in nostril and touching tip of tongue.
Taste, taste, taste that delicacy of inspiration,
Mythology within, filtered through one man’s search for solace.
Here lives the rich tasty torrent of meaning built into such a familiar frame.
The plan in ovum, the egg in season, the call and the denial, the tip of a terrifying
tablature that’s crescendo yet sings of mystery unveiled.
These things accompany me on the road, these things sing sweetly from the fog,
These things mirror my own intentions and lift them to the sky:.
Reflections 7
1. The peoples of the NW coast area were simple folk in the modern sense but they had a complex understanding of ecology. I would argue that this was more of an emotional understanding than an intellectual one and that this is the sort of relationship we need to cultivate in the modern world in order to set things right again. Our scales have tipped far into the realm of intellect over feeling and the neglect for our emotions has created a powerfully caustic element in both our outer and inner worlds, which can be seen in the form of environmental devastation and the rampant interpersonal problems that plague the world today.
Emotional understanding knows that we are all one force underneath. Emotional understanding recognizes that all beings feel and that this is the common bond that binds us. We all have the same emotions, no matter how disparate our intellectual, philosophical, sociological, or biological makeup may be, and if we relate ourselves to one another and the environment on this basis (rather than making value judgments that raise or lower the importance of any given element and hence negating the importance of any given creature or biological element’s emotional connection to us) then we will be one step closer to living the indigenous truth: being in love with our land.
The book, Keeping It Living, is an attempt to fight the powers that be with a little of their own medicine, a thorough academic analysis. Though it seems backward to fix the imbalance with more of the same, perhaps it will prove homeopathic in the end, as the only revelations the modern world will accept are cold hard facts, unbreakable theses, and the force of singular truth that science alone has unveiled. Defending these emotional creatures and their land use practices with complicated academic language seems an odd undertaking but since it’s the only thing academia will hear, I applaud the authors of the volume for their work in the field. Hopefully, it will have some positive effect on the regeneration of native land use.
2. For my personal presentation I will probably read a poem I wrote and talk about my transplanted lineage. I lived in Georgia and Alabama for 7 years or so and that had a large effect on who I am now. I’m not sure how to relate this to my personal garden yet but I’ll think of something …
Reflections 8
Reading Sweet Breathing of Plants has been an adventure. Sometimes sad, sometimes exhilarating, this book has taken me from the Midwest to Maine, from California to Canada, from the Amazon rainforest to my backyard, and all in the company of some amazing women. I learned a lot from reading this book and piqued my interest in subjects I had no idea were so fascinating, such as the topic of orchids which are perhaps the most amazingly diverse plant species in the world. I learned a lot about environmental devastation from the book too, which is a difficult topic to take in but one that awareness of is sorely needed. I think more important than facts however is that people change the way they think about plants and this book offers many holistic approaches to having relationship with the plant kingdom. A good example of this is in the chapter, Dreaming of Trees, in which the writer’s husband talks about having to kill a tree they loved because it was crowding a basement wall: “My husband says that destroying that tree still makes him sad, that he imagined it to be like killing an elephant, something larger, wiser, and more mysterious than himself.” (212) Another powerful chapter is Killing Our Elders, in which the writer describes old growth trees as the grandparents of the forest, the memory keepers of the earth. She really hammers this point home by giving a timeline of a 3800 year old tree, which is a living being almost twice as old as the religion of Christianity. Another beautiful point from this chapter was the story of the Nez Perce Indian woman whose people recognized the bond of the ancient with the ancient by entombing their dead elders in great trees and then grafting the bark back on so that the person would be back in the womb of the world. So much significance here, and what a beautiful, sacred bond to create with the forest! This is the type of thinking we need to have concerning trees and other plants. It isn’t thinking at all in fact, it’s feeling, being in relationship with our companion beings in this Earth realm.