Ben C. Davis

In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place

Walk as original man. Today we act as the colonists: with one foot on land and one in the boat. A homeless past. Can we become native to a land? Can we walk through the land and name the plants and animals? Avoid the concept known as species isolation. To be indigenous is to care for land. Walk the land with humility, seeking balance. Don’t give into the arrogance is power, who seeks growth at all cost. To become naturalised to land is to protect the land for our children.

The Sound of Silverbells

She goes on an ecological field trip with her students. She talks about how Christian’s didn’t care for the land. As it wasn’t related to humans. She was in despair. She had worn a lab coat into the wildness. Explaining what was there but not what it meant. But they started singing amazing Grace. She realised their appreciation to a different form. Mindfulness is all that matters. Awareness. Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the natural world. Receiving the gift with open arms.

Sitting in a Circle

In the Apache language, the word for mind is the same for land. The smell of humus releases a physiological effect on humans: it stimulates the release of oxytocin - the same hormone as between mother and child. The nature of education is to learn of your own gifts and explore how they may do good in the world.

Burning Cascade Head

Ceremony focuses attention, so that attention becomes intention. Makes you accountable to the land. The ceremonies of indiginuous communities magnify life. Ceremonies in modern life only focus on ourselves: birthdays, weddings, funerals. In colonist culture, the ceremonies that survive are those that are transportable: the ones that focus on people and the culture.

Putting Down Roots

All things come in twos. She talks about the Mohawk people and how they were forcibly removed from their land, only to find home in a new place that was quickly industrialised. She also talks about Carlisle school for native children. The theme is one of a cycle of death and rebirth - all things in twos. In the destruction of one home, a new on can be built. Reconciliation through rebirth. Destruction and creation. Like the baskets made my Mohawk woman from braided sweetgrass, fragments of death rewoven into a new whole. Grief comforted with creation.

Umbilicaria: The belly Button of the World

Lichen is a symbiotic with fungi. Like a marriage. One provides by growing, the other by destroying. A constant back and forth. The algae provides photosynthesis, the fungi provides minerals. They only become symbiotic when resources are scarce.

Old-Growth Children

A man replants an old growth forest. Old growth cultures live around these trees. The cedars provide life. Some cultures name for cedar reflect this. One named it the tree of life. It’s anti microbial. Provides canoes, coffins - the cycle of life. Old growth cultures of reciprocity live on.

Witness to the Rain

When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not in going somewhere, but being where you are. She describes walking through a forest during the rain. Noticing all the little details. How there’s no difference between the raindrops and the rivers. As we spend before the world, open to all that’s happening, the boundaries between us and it start to blur, until we are one.

Windigo Footprints

The mythical monsters created by a culture mirror its values, their aspirations, their fears. The windigo is a cannibal human - one who succumbed to hunger during the winter. They forever walk along, always hungry, never sated. Self-destruction is alive today, in addiction to alcohol, to consumption, etc. When one gives into indulgence. Windigo legend grew from a commons society - where individual greed was a threat to the entire community. What Windigo myth warn against is a now an actively encouraged and sanctioned greed. An era of Windigo economics. As if we’ve been invited to feast, but the table is laid with food that nourishes only emptiness. The black hole of the stomach that never fills.

The Sacred and the Superfund

Onondaga lake is the ceremonial place that contains the tree of peace - a tree signifying the peace that came between the Onondaga people and other tribes and the creation of the Haudenosaunee confederacy. Now it is an industrial wasteland. The outflow of industrial waste from factories along the lake. Until we can grieve for our planet, we cannot love. But even a wounded world still loves us. We only hear about how the world suffered, not how we can nurture it. Despair rather than an inspiration for action. Environmental despair leads to paralysis. Robs us of agency. It’s an every bit as destructive as the mercury at the bottom of Onondaga lake. Restoration is an antidote. But if the land we restore is just property, it doesn’t have the meaning of restoration of a spiritual home. Restoration is often done with an engineering mindset, where the land is a machine and the human the driver. But the indigenous worldview treats the land as a community of sovereign beings. The land hasn’t been broken, our relationship to it has been. Restoring a land is not just about the land, but our relationship to it too. A sign stands in the end of the lake that reads “land as home”.

People of Corn, People of Light

She talks about creation myths, specifically the Mayan one. The world came to exist by the gods simply speaking its name. They then made people from mud. But they were unable to talk and were ugly. Then they made them from light, but they were arrogant. Then they made them from corn. Those people understood they were made from the earth. Gratitude. Our gift is our responsibility. The bird was given the gift of song, so its responsibility is to sing each morning.

Collateral Damage

Naturalists live in a world of wounds only they can see. She tells the story of salamanders having to cross a highway to make it to a pond. So many die. She compares it to the bombings of Baghdad. Just more collateral damage. If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are beaming apart, so we can love it back to wholeness again.

Shkitagen: People of the Seventh Fire

Prophets of the anishinaabee spoke of seven fires, each of which marks an ending of an epoch in the timeline of the world spoken by a different prophet. One foretold the arrival of the light skinned people. The seventh fire is a cross road at a time of destruction wrought by the light skinned people: the light skinned people will have to choose between two roads: the green and lush road and the other black and charred. If they choose green, an eighth fire will emerge, a time of peace, love, and brotherhood. If they choose the black road, then the destruction they brought upon turtle island will cause all of the earth’s people to suffer.

Defeating Windigo

The Windigo is at its strongest in the winter, during times of hunger. The need to overindulge comes from a fear of scarcity. So in the legend the warrior defeated the Windigo during the summer. The time of plenty. Capitalist societies thrive by creating uneven plenty. Scarcity fuels desire and growth, and with it, the overindulgence of Windigo. Capitalist society artificially creates scarcity by blocking the way between the source and the consumer. Grain may rot while people starve due to an inability to pay. Famine for some, disease of excess for others. The fix: one bowl, one spoon. The economy of the commons. The gifts of the earth are given in one bowl, eaten with one spoon by all the peoples of the earth. The resources of the earth fundamental to our wellbeing should not be own by an individual, but commonly held. We bid maintains abundance, not scarcity. The earth is not private property. But we also need to change the heart: gratitude plants the seed for abundance. Each of us comes from an indigenous people - a people with gratitude for the earth. Wealth is having enough to share. She tells a tale of feeding the Windigo a yea of buckthorn, a poison and laxative. It empties your bowels and makes you throw up your insides, but only if you’re greedy enough to drink it all. The Windigo heaves in a trail of its insides, covers in a thick oil slick. It rots and dies, but still there, waiting for hunger to rise up to fill the hole of loneliness. But in this state she feeds it gifts of the earth. Of witch hazel, maple, of cedar. You can’t know reciprocity until you’ve known the gift of the earth. She fell like a maple seed, pirouetting from the autumn sky.

Epilogue

In a culture of gratitude, everyone knows that gifts will follow the circle of reciprocity, and flow back to you again. This time you give, next time you receive. The honour of giving, the humility of receiving. We dance in a circle (in a ceremony of gift giving she’s describing), not in a line. A gift asks more from you than the item itself. A call to honour and respect it. We are all fed from the same bowl of gifts from the earth. But every bowl has a limit, eventually it will go empty. How to refill? Remember that all flourishing is mutual. We eat berries, and beyond gratitude, we give back the gift of spreading their seed. We sow richness. But nowadays we don’t, we finish the possibilities for the future at every turn. The native Americans speak of the the land as “that which has been given to us”. We speak of it as “natural resources” or “ecosystem services”. As if the earth wasn’t a bowl of berries with a spoon we all share, but a mine with shovel as the spoon. The earth is a constant dancing of giving and receiving, of grass and fire, of light and day, of cold and warmth. We must remember this. We are not apart from it. Whatever our gift, we are called to give it to the earth, and dance for the renewal of the world. In return, for the privilege of breath.

“The moral covenant of reciprocity calls us to honor our responsibilities for all we have been given, for all that we have taken. It’s our turn now, long overdue. Let us hold a giveaway for Mother Earth, spread our blankets out for her and pile them high with gifts of our own making. Imagine the books, the paintings, the poems, the clever machines, the compassionate acts, the transcendent ideas, the perfect tools. The fierce defense of all that has been given. Gifts of mind, hands, heart, voice, and vision all offered up on behalf of the earth. Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world. In return for the privilege of breath.”