cc >> My name's Jeannine Richards.
I'm the communications coordinator of the Aldo Leopold
Foundation. We are very pleased to be
a sponsor of the "Colors of Nature" panel tonight.
The Aldo Leopold Foundation, for those that don't know us,
we're located up in Baraboo. We own and manage the Leopold
historic shack, and the surrounding landscape.
We also do educational programming about Aldo Leopold.
and his ideas, and work to weave his idea of a land ethic into
the fabric of our society. But what is a land ethic anyway?
The beauty of what Leopold did in his 1948 essay,
"The Land Ethic," was he left it open to our interpretation.
He himself refused to define what a land ethic is, saying
nothing so important as an ethic is ever written.
It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.
So today, as we look at the ecological challenges that we
face ahead of us, we need all kinds of solutions
to come from all corners. The thinking community that
Leopold talked about needs to include all of our human
community in conversation with each other, sharing all the
richness that each of us brings to the table.
That's why I was so excited when I met Lauret and Patrick and
Maria this summer and learned about their book,
"Colors of Nature." Because, in this book,
they ask and attempt to answer, "What is Earth to American
people of color?" Lauret Savoy is the editor
of this volume, along with Alison Deming, who could not
be here tonight. We have several of the
contributing authors here with us, as well as Patrick Thomas,
from Milkweed Editions, the publisher.
I will introduce you to each of them.
First, Lauret Savoy is a teacher, earth scientist,
writer, photographer and pilot. She is also a woman of mixed
African-American, Native American,
and Euro-American heritage. Her work considers how braided
strands of human history and geologic-natural history
contribute to the stories we tell of the land's origin and
history, and to the stories we tell of ourselves in the land
and of relational identity. She has a column appears in the
on-line journal Terrain.org as "A Stone's Throw."
She is the editor of "The Colors of Nature."
Maria Melendez has published three collections of poetry,
the chapbook "Base Pairs," and the full-length collections
"How Long She'll Last in This World,"
and "Flexible Bones." She's been a finalist for the
PEN Center USA Award in poetry. Her essays appear in
Ms. Magazine, Sojourns and online.
She lives in Pueblo, Colorado, and is the editor and publisher
of Pilgrimage magazine.
Debra Kang Dean has published three collections of poetry,
"Back to Back," which won the Harperprints Poetry
Chapbook Competition, judged by Ruth Stone.
"News of Home," which was the co-winner of the New England
Poetry Club Sheila Margaret Motton Award,
and "Precipitates." She's on the faculty
of Spaulding University Brief Residency Master of
Fine Arts in Writing program. She teaches online through
UCLA Extension School's Writers Program, and is contributing
editor for Tar River Poetry. Kim Blaeser is an enrolled
member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and grew up
on the White Earth Reservation. She is currently an Associate
Professor of English at the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she teaches courses
in Native American Literature, Creative Writing,
and American Nature Writing. Her publications include
three books and more than 60 appearances in anthologies
and journals. She is a past vice president
of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers,
and currently serves on two American Indian Literature
series boards for University presses.
At UW-Milwaukee, she is the faculty advisor for
Word Warriors, a multicultural writers' organization
that she helped to found. And Patrick Thomas is the
non-fiction editor at Milkweed Editions,
a non-profit publisher located in Minneapolis.
He focuses on environmental non-fiction, and he was the
editor for this book. I'm going to turn it over
to Lauret to start us off. Each of them will do a little
bit of reading, and then we'll have time for discussion
and questions at the end.
Lauret Savoy: Good evening, everyone.
We want this to be a dialogue. We will have a chance to speak
about what we're doing, the significance of the book to us
and to our lives, and read from the book.
But we very much want this to be an exchange, a give and take.
We hope that even though you're sitting in the back, you will
contribute. So, let me give you this
advanced organizer. I'm going to ask you to think of
some things you would like to ask about, to be prepared to
speak. It's very important that we
really speak a lot about this. As Jeannine mentioned,
I am the co-editor of "The Colors of Nature."
I'm very lucky to be here, partly because the Aldo Leopold
Foundation invited us, but also very largely because Milkweed
Editions believed enough in the project to see it through to be
in our hands and in the public eye.
Milkweed Editions is a non-profit press that tries to
steward and promote transformative literature.
They believe that "The Colors of Nature" would be that.
So, the book began as a conversation between my
co-editor, who is a fine poet essayist, Alison Hawthorne
Deming, between her and me at a conference on writing and
environment a few years ago. There were about a hundred or
more participants there, and I was one of just a handful
of people of color, and only one of two African Americans.
I was asked at that conference, and I've been asked many times
since, two very problematic questions.
Question one is, why don't African Americans care more
about the environment? That's one.
Question two, why isn't there more writing about nature
by people of color? Often, "people of color" is
substituted with "minorities." Now, the questions are
problematic, not because there's a lack of care, or because
there's limited writing. There's great care
and there's a lot of writing. But they're problematic, because
they point to the limited frames of environmental writing
as a genre, of the publishing community, and of the
environmental movement. The frame is limited such that
it has to date, largely excluded the very diverse voices that are
culturally rich and ethnically rich.
Diverse voices that speak to life in America and
relationships between humans and the environment in this
post-racial world, that's not post-racial.
We may hear that in pundits and on the news, or by intellectuals
speaking, but America is far from post-racial.
It's important to remember that. So, what the book began with was
noticing that the events of our lives take place, recognizing
that each of us lives within a context, a circumstance,
a condition that can be defined as "environment," and that
environment is much more than just the land, the water, the
air, that we depend on or that we pollute; that environment is
much more than global climate change or wilderness
preservation, but environment also consists of relationships
of place that are degraded and toxic, that are migrant and
exiled, that are urban and dispossessed.
That was the starting point for the book.
We wanted to include all of the experiences of place, of people
of color in this country. We sent out invitations to
almost 200 potential contributors.
I have to say, though, that Toni Morrison did decline us.
[laughter] But many others did not.
We were very grateful for the response.
We're very lucky tonight to have three of the contributors here
read from their work and also speak about their work, and
again, engage in a dialogue with you.
Now, the essays in this book really lie at the intersection
of cultural identity and memory on the one hand, and ecological
awareness on the other. More than 30 contributors who
were African American, Native American, Asian American,
Latino, Latina, Arab American, and of mixed heritage, all of
their voices together weave a very, very textured cloth that
is multi-hued, a cloth that goes far beyond the monochromatic
vision of American nature writing to date, or of the
environmental movement. So what I'd to do to start us
off is to begin by reading the first pages of the book,
the introduction. Then I will turn it over to my
wonderful colleagues, my friends and writers here, and my great
editor, Patrick Thomas. We begin the book
with "Widening the Frame."
Despite countless claims to the contrary in recent newscasts and
articles, the United States is not a "post-racial" society.
In fact, each day offers new examples of injustice that
reveal a society determined to avoid the troubled legacy of our
nation's founding and growth. Consider New Orleans.
Years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29,
2005, the wake of levee failure still points to long-embedded
practices of de jure and de facto apartheid.
For those who lacked access to shelter or higher ground, and
for those who received little forewarning or relief aid, their
disproportionate suffering was only another surge in a
centuries-old pattern. After the Civil War, African
Americans were forced to live in the least-desirable, flood-prone
areas of New Orleans. Lawful segregation of the city's
public housing and transportation before the
mid-1960s only further entrenched this geography of
poverty and race. When Hurricane Katrina arrived,
then, it should have hardly been a surprise that the burden fell
primarily on low-income people of color: Weeks after the levees
broke the majority of homes that remained submerged were owned or
rented by African Americans. By some measures New Orleans has
recovered significantly. The Brookings Institution
reported in late 2010 that the city's population had exceeded
three-quarters the pre-Katrina numbers, that large-scale
rebuilding efforts had boosted the economy there, and that the
local unemployment rate was lower than national statistics.
But who has moved back and who is being counted?
Even though most of those living in the Crescent City in August
of 2005 were renters and low-income residents, recovery
programs have favored property owners.
Thousands of displaced families still, years later, live in
"temporary" housing, trailers and tents, or are homeless, many
"squatting" in abandoned buildings.
Thousands more, particularly low-income, former, renters and
public housing residents, have not been able to return to the
city as rents there climb out of reach and as mixed-income homes
replace affordable housing. Those affordable public housing
projects that survived Katrina, more than 5,000 units, were
demolished by the housing authority, backed by HUD and the
city council, leaving only a small percentage of homes set
aside or subsidized for those with little means.
And corporate spending on rebuilding hasn't helped the
situation, giving priority to privatizing or reducing many
social services rather than ending the displacement and
homelessness of poor people of color.
With investment goals focused on a smaller but more affluent city
footprint, redevelopment is targeting areas where the
economically poor did not, or could not, live.
Reconstruction is changing the city's racial and economic
complexion, rather than restoring separated families,
communities, or the spiritual rootedness that made the city
so culturally rich. It harkens back to another
failed reconstruction of a century ago.
Yet, polled by Gallup and other organizations on whether
Hurricane Katrina and its impacts pointed to persistent
racial inequality, fewer than half of white Americans thought
so, while more than three-quarters
of African Americans in this country said "yes."
Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?
And miss it each night and day...
These lyrics, first sung by Louis Armstrong and Billie
Holiday in 1947, might very well be the anthem of a whole
generation of New Orleanians unlucky enough to be from
the wrong ward. Why do so many not see injustice
in a place like New Orleans when it so clear?
Why do so many not see nature literature by people of color
when it is written so well? These questions are not
unrelated. They stem from the same force.
Today, as so much of "nature writing" details, we face many
crucial challenges including losses of biological diversity
and ecosystem fragmentation; anthropogenic changes to the
atmosphere's composition; deforestation;
and desertification. Those are but a few.
The same human institutions and values that have fostered this
marginalization of the natural world also marginalize the life
of a black farmer in the South whose ancestors, whether
enslaved or as free men, worked and knew the land with an
intense generational intimacy. These stories, their stories,
have a place in our nature canon, but they have
been deleted by racist farm policies and by bigoted bankers
and ignored by scholars and publishers.
Their stories could give hope to the children born and raised
in a ghetto, in a barrio, or on a reservation.
But the compromising of nature and the compromising of human
beings by "racial" separatism and the inequities in the
past-to-present destroy both landscapes and stories of hope
for the future. What then, is Earth to American
people of color? Of course there is no single or
simple answer. For some, the land has been
origin and continuity for millennia; for others the land
holds the memory of those who worked it under a system of
bondage; and for many, this is a place migrated to in search of
new beginnings or a place of refuge from intolerable
oppression. Today motion, dislocation,
migration, and loss have come to define nearly all of our lives
as groups or communities in the United States.
But for people of color who do not fit easily into the
mainstream structure of Euro-America, such motion can
involve cultural erasure over time.
What is left for too many is artifact, and for others, not
even that. Our intent here is not to paint
a simplistic scene of victims and aggressors, with single
proximate factors of cause and effect, but to recognize that
the complexities and ambiguities of this nations's multicultural
past and present, and the ways in which American culture has
fused or impacted the Earth can not be separated from underlying
values that promote racism and systemic inequality.
This is a stark and a sad reality.
But it suggests a hopeful possibility.
If the ignorance of stories can lead to ruin, perhaps the
seeking out and understanding of stories can lead to rebuilding,
in New Orleans, and everywhere else.
So, I'd like to turn to Maria Melendez.
[applause]
Good evening. I'm just so thrilled to be here.
I'm very grateful to Milkweed Press for having published the
book that we're celebrating, "Colors of Nature:
Culture, Identity, and the Natural World."
This book, for me, when I first encountered it, when I first
encountered the First Edition, which didn't include, maybe a
third of the writers are new. Half of the writers are new in
the Second Edition, so it didn't include half of the writers
you'll see in the book you're no doubt going to race to pick up
after our panel. When I first encountered it, it
was still, despite the fact that I wasn't in it, it was still the
only work out there in print that I could find that was an
outer expression of an inward truth for me.
It was an outer expression of an inward truth.
And all credit to Milkweed Press for having brought this to
readers. The truth being, as Lauret so
well expressed, that writers of color have been contributing to
conversations about the environment, be that through
writing about food, be that through writing about family, or
culture, or heritage, or labor, or any other theme that is
connected, as most themes are one way or another to our source
and our sustenance, that that was something that was true.
For me, as a developing writer, I identify as Chicana, have been
sort of magnetically pulled toward this identity of being a
Chicana or a Latina writer, that magnetic pull was about
self-exploration, exploration of family, but it didn't really
factor in the picture of relationship to the Earth.
That's where my inclinations as a writer are, to write about the
human connection to the environment.
So to have this book exist was very important for me
as a developing writer. I'm so grateful to be part
of this next edition. One of the pieces that
influenced me most in the First Edition is something I'm going
to read to start us off. That'll kind of track you into
my essay that's included here. So one of the pieces that was
most influential to me is by Francisco Alarcón.
He's a Chicano poet in California.
He includes some excerpts from a book of his called
"Snake Poems." "Snake Poems" includes English
versions and Nahuatl versions of chants and incantations from
pre-Columbian Mexico that had been delivered in Nahuatl.
Nahuatl is a contemporary language, one of Mexico's many
contemporary indigenous languages today.
It's a language that had been recorded at the time of contact
in some of these incantations. Spells and chants were recorded
then. Francisco Alarcón is one of the
first to bring us the English versions.
They were transformational for me to encounter.
So we'll start him.
His contribution is called "Reclaiming Ourselves,
Reclaiming America." He was one of my mentors
at the University of California in Davis.
He would read this poem in Nahuatl and in English,
that is passed down from a very old lineage.
He would read it at readings frequently.
Since I was a groupie of his, I would
attend reading after reading after reading and hear him
intone these words. It was so formative for me.
This is the incantation called "For Planting Corn."
I'll read some of the Nahuatl that begins the poem,
and then I'll continue into the English translation.
For Planting Corn. nomatca nehuatl
nitlamacazqui tla xihualhuaian
Tlalteuctli tla xihualhuaian
nohueltiuh Tonacacihuatl
tla xihualhuaian ye momacpalco
nocotlalia nohueltiuh
Tonacacihuatl I myself
Spirit in Flesh: hear me, Tonacacihuatl
elder sister Lady of Our Flesh
hear me, Tlalteuctli Mother Earth
on your open hand I'm setting down
my elder sister Tonacacihuatl
don't shame yourself don't grumble
don't laugh at us tomorrow
or the day after I want to see again
the face of my elder sister Tonacacihuatl
let her stand on the ground
I shall greet I shall honor
my elder sister Tonacacihuatl
At the same time that I'm following around
Francisco Alarcón, to his readings and soaking in this
essence of, you know, damn, if that's not nature poetry,
I don't know what is, soaking in this essence of Chicano and
Mexicano nature poetry, I was also trying to connect with
scientists in the area around issues having to do with native
plants. So through that means,
I encountered Ignacio Chapela from the University of
California-Berkeley, who had been the first one to discover
the transgenic contamination of maize.
That's the phrase that you either right away know what it
means, or you right away think, "What the holy...?"
So, the essay picks up where I kind of explain that concept and
explain why it was of some interest to me.
I'll read you just a little excerpt from my contribution.
Then we'll go on to Debra Kang Dean for another
excerpt from the book.
So my essay that's contributed here was called
"Mujeres de Maíz: Women, Corn and Free Trade in the Americas."
Archaeologists have found the oldest known remains of maize
ears in a cave in the Oaxaca Valley.
Today the mountains and valleys of the state of Oaxaca bear the
world's greatest maize diversity.
That's true, I'll add, even to the point where scientists have
discovered races of corn that are specialized to a single
hillside, a variety that's been developed for a single hillside.
Those types of varieties recur and recur throughout the state.
In 2001, the world's first instance of transgenic
contamination of a native race of corn was discovered by
University of California, Berkeley, researchers Ignacio
Chapela and David Quist, in Oaxaca.
They found "transgenes," meaning genes from another species, a
cauliflower bacteria, in this case, introgressed into the DNA
of native corn. So this is not just muddying the
genetic waters with a single species.
This is genes from another species in the formal gene.
Though a smear campaign brought their methodology into question,
the researchers' data indicating the presence of transgenes in
native varieties of corn was not disputed.
Further studies by American and Mexican researchers have
verified additional instance of transgenic contamination in
native Mexican maize. In a sense, NAFTA can be seen as
the cause for this contamination, because corn is
wind-pollinated and the native species in question "caught"
pollen from transgenic US corn imported under NAFTA.
Well, the corn that flies into Mexico via NAFTA contains this
transgene, this cauliflower bacteria, and it becomes part of
the gene of the native races that have been selectively
cultivated and carefully cultivated over the years.
And by the way, as it floods into Mexico, it is unlabeled as
genetically modified. Because the Oaxaca region could
be considered the evolutionary birthplace of corn, and because
the state itself has been "ground zero" for transgenic
contamination issues, I wanted to do some poetic research on
the implications, for women's lives, of transgenic
contamination of maize. As a Chicana poet, I'd been
reading contemporary Chicana poetry with an eye toward
shared themes, and had noticed powerful images of corn
in poetry by Chicanas from all over the United States.
It seemed logical to me that rural Mexican women's connection
to corn might represent the historical and psychological
roots of urban and suburban Chicana poets' and writers' and
readers' connections to corn. When Ignacio Chapela presented,
the risks of this transgenic contamination, he included the
idea that the traits that come with the TG or GM, for
genetically modified corn, are not necessarily traits that are
desirable. For example, they may have
smaller ears so that they're not that great for tamale wrapping.
Or they may not grow a certain fungus, which in the US
is called corn smut, which in Mexico is a delicacy.
The fungus is culinary delicacy. It's erasing the sort of
selective cultivation of corn varieties that has been taking
place in Mexico. So I said I have this
intellectual quest. I was going to Mexico.
I'm going to learn about the impacts of transgenic corn on
women. That's a very abstract goal.
[laughs] When I sat down with the head of
an organic market in the capital city of Oaxaca and said,
"I'm here to learn more about the relationship
between women and corn," he said, "Oh, you mean
tortillas..." [laughter]
...in which this relationship lives!"
Yes! In my abstract, academic
fixation on concept, I had been sorely in need
of someone to point me toward the "things" that embody ideas.
So off I go into the mountains with my quest now to learn more
about tortilla making, which is a part of rural women's lives
in Mexico to this day. As I entered the tortilla-making
hut, a small wooden building common to rural households in
Oaxaca, of María Antonieta Gigón in the Sierra de Juárez
mountains, she asked to see my passport.
The request was startling and vaguely alarming to me; as a
mixed-race Chicana, I'm very experienced with intercultural
encounters in the US, but in the rural pueblos of Oaxaca I was as
gringa as gringa could be, and the "Lonely Planet" guide had
warned travelers never to relinquish their passports.
I thought about it for a minute, taking in my surroundings and
noting how unthreatening the hostess seemed, a mother in her
early 40s, wearing a modest navy-blue circle skirt, intent
on baking her tortillas, and offered to show her my passport
in exchange for her allowing me to try and bake a tortilla or
two. As we laughed together at my
attempts to move the sticky, delicate tortilla dough from the
prensa, a metal press which coverts a mound of masa into a
flat circle, to the comal, a pre-Columbian wood-heated
hot plate where tortillas are baked, she told me more about
why the passport fascinated her. She wanted to learn what they
looked like and how to obtain one, because she wanted to visit
her eldest son. He had been working in San Diego
for the last several years. The way she looked past me as
she told about her desire to see him, and the urgency in her
voice when she asked how much a passport cost, pointed to an
unspeakable sense of loss. This same sense of loss came
through again and again as women spoke of their sons and brothers
in the United States. By flooding the Mexican market
with grossly over-subsidized US corn, NAFTA's "liberalized
trade" has displaced millions of commercial corn growers in
Mexico, causing increased male immigration, and a tandem
increase in women's poverty, as women left behind acted as
de facto heads of households. Today, impoverished Mexican and
Central American women make the dangerous journey north "across
the line" in increasing numbers, in hopes that the money they'll
send home will make up for the economic hardship suffered in
the absence of husbands, fathers, brothers.
These women carry memories of wrenching goodbyes with their
children. The domino effect of their
poverty falls hardest on the children as demonstrated by a
new generation of child immigrants who ride the tops of
trains through Mexico and risk their lives crossing into the US
to find their mothers. Although I never deeply probed
enough to determine if NAFTA could have been at the root of
the emigration accounts from these particular women, the
knowledge that an agreement pushed along by the United
States led to increases in family fragmentation and women's
poverty should weigh heavily on further considerations of the
expansion of trade liberalization in the Americas.
So the rest of the essay goes on to chronicle my sort of
unfolding awareness of how international policy ripples
through families and ripples through women's lives.
I sort of reached the conclusion that we need to work more on
bringing our minds and our hearts and our stories and our
awareness into these cross-border issues, which are
cross-border ecological issues. We so much think of our
cross-border issues as being about migration, or being about
people, but they're about also the land.
The land and the people as integrated.
So with that, I will just say that what's next for "Colors of
Nature" is really up to all of us.
We hope, Lauret, that it's the start of many ongoing
conversations with all of us here together.
Much thanks to the Aldo Leopold Foundation for being a real
catalyst for some of those conversations.
Thank you very much. [applause]
I'm very happy to present Debra Kang Dean.
I need the podium. Thank you all for being here.
I want to begin with a poem by Pos Moua, a poem I love for the
experience and values it embodies.
"Spokane Washington, 1980." 1980, you may recall is when
the Refugee Act was passed and brought many refugees
in the wake of the Vietnam War. Spokane, Washington, 1980.
The first time in strange weather;
on an Indian Reservation, looking from inside
an apartment window the cold, melting clouds
fell onto the grass outside borderless, white.
Going outside, there in the plain whiteness,
puffs from the sky landing on his face,
he loved the way he was lost in white.
But this place was haunting to him, because the people
who lived there sold coats and gloves, unlike the place
he was used to, where neighbors shared what they possessed
when they could. Bordered inside their own
hearts, friends left other friends waiting,
or they themselves wait to be left alone, cold.
They were not happy the way they were lost.
He sometimes wanted to start a fire that would burn out
the selling of hearts and bodies.
But he knew that to burn these things
is to be alien to winter and people.
It's interesting that I should be reading after Maria, who was
the associate editor for his chapbook called "Where the
Torches are Running," in which this poem appears.
He is in fact reading this very evening in Fresno, California,
to celebrate the release of the first anthology of creative work
by Hmong Americans called "How Do I Begin: A Hmong
American Literary Anthology." So I think it's a pretty exiting
occasion. I wanted to say on a personal
level, one of the other reasons I connect with this poem
is because of the place. My son was born in Spokane,
Washington, in 1976. I think this fact suggests
that my history, my story, is a different one within
Asian America. Coming from Hawaii, a place
others call "paradise," my view of nature has been colored by
tourism. Tourism replaced the pineapple
plantations of the world into which I was born.
Before she married my father, my mother had worked picking
pineapple, and later packing it. My siblings and I had spent
at least one summer packing pineapple.
This backdrop has shaped my ambivalence about nature as it
has typically been constructed. In the first edition of
"The Colors of Nature," I saw a trace of myself in Yusef
Komunyakaa's "Dark Waters," an essay about growing up
in Bogalusa, Louisiana. When I first heard the essay,
what caught my attention was the process by which a poet brought
to full consciousness that had been implicit in his work
all along. It led me to think about my
grandfathers, laborers who were part of the first wave of
immigrants from East Asia, whisper the consequence
for the land and the native Hawaiians there.
In a letter to H.G.O. Blake dated May 20, 1860,
Henry David Thoreau wrote, "What's the use of a fine house
if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"
And there's a dash. "If you cannot tolerate
the planet that it is on." I have seen this sentence quoted
often, but with the second part erased.
I think it needs to be restored in the interest of true economy
and ecology. In "Letters to a Spiritual
Seeker," edited by my late husband, Bradley P. Dean,
the letter in which Thoreau wrote this sentence follows one
written on October 31, 1859, where Thoreau tells Blake that
he had spoken the previous evening to the townspeople of
Concord, Massachusetts, on the character of Captain John Brown.
These too, are interesting times, as the Chinese say.
And I think that increasingly, my task as a human being is to
move beyond the subjective limits of what I find tolerable.
My essay in this expanded edition of the anthology is, an
attempt to be both more and less "alien" to winter.
I'm just going to read to you two excerpts.
The first is from the very start, then the other is near
the end. Too expensive.
Don't waste. These were words that my
parents, generous as they were, used like mantras when I was
growing up. Their apparent linking of cost
and waste created in me the reactive desire for conspicuous
consumption, which meant not only buying things, but also
feeling like I could afford to throw things away.
Before it became fashionable, my parents were already recycling,
keeping any and everything that might be reused, glass bottles,
empty cans, milk cartons, plastic bags, aluminum foil,
Styrofoam, or plastic containers.
But they did throw out Chinese take-out containers.
[laughter] Needless to say, my parents were
also power savers, continually telling us to turn off lights
and clustering errands to save on fuel.
Living in Hawaii, climate control meant opening and
closing windows, so that at least, wasn't an issue.
We went to work, or to school, or to visit family.
But mostly, we stayed home. We lived on the slopes of
Punchbowl Crater and had, until I was about 12, a daily glimpse
of the sun sledding into the ocean.
In our yard, were three mango trees, two plumeria trees,
a lychee tree, an avocado tree that my grandmother had planted
from seed, and a tangerine tree. I had outside chores, mostly
raking and cleaning up after the dogs, and picking up fallen
fruit. When I was in elementary school,
my sister, a few neighbors and I might camp under a big piece of
canvas slung on the frame of an old swing set in the yard during
the summer. When I was in high school,
I took great pleasure in simply sitting in the yard after track
practice and listening to the clatter of leaves, my arm draped
on my dog. There had been summers at the
beach and summers on one of the outer islands with relatives.
But mostly when I was growing up, this yard was nature as I
knew it, a touch, a sound, a scent, not always pleasant.
And I'm jumping to a later part of the essay.
I rent a house on the corner of a busy intersection, where it is
not uncommon for my windowpanes to rattle when loud music blares
from cars stopped there, or loud engines roar
on a speedy take-off. There are three large oak trees
on the property. When news of Hurricane Katrina
reached us, I remember wondering whether the wind that had
knocked branches off the trees was connected with a system that
did so much damage elsewhere. Here in Bloomington, Indiana,
there's no view of mountains, and yet, gazing out over the
side yard in the wake of my husband's death, I witness
a sunset so vibrant my heart ached.
I could not say why my vision had changed, except that to be
touched by death, to touch it, is to be stricken by great loss.
But also to be withered by it, at least for a short while,
to be awakened and alert beyond words.
Soon enough, though, the racket of 21st century --,
those private bubbles that are emblematic of our increasingly
rootless lives turn me back inward as I moved from climate
controlled room to car to office.
Pressing back against it, my mind seeks the distant place
that is sensed more than known. It is difficult to express how
unnerving I found the fact that I could manage correspondence
via email, even though it was a rare occasion when I was not in
tears during a phone conversation in the wake of
Brad's death. In "Song and Story,"
Ellen Bryant Voigt writes, "Pain has no music."
"Pain is a story." Grief had broken my voice.
But how could, did, the brain manage to circumvent the heart
to get to the hand. Yet, also during this period,
I could practice Tai Chi, which is both imaginative act
and rhythmic movement. Pain has no music.
However, in the simple tasks of caring for a yard and the
contact with nature, such tasks afford, raking leaves, trimming
hedges, mowing, hauling branches, I found solace in the
work itself, and in the way such work, despite our differences,
connected me with my neighbors. Through them and the care they
extended out beyond the limits of their own yards, I was
learning something about larger circles of connection.
In this way, nature made its way back into my life.
It was not larger than life, but life itself, a steady contact
with nature that allowed me the greatest freedom to work and
to grieve. I believe that it was precisely
in this sweat and chill, the scents and odors of the world,
without a screen to seal off all senses but sight, and in the
release from language that nature could do its work.
I was returning to a place I knew by feel.
[applause]
Good evening. I'm Kim Blaeser.
I want to start by reading the poem that opens the book
that is by Ofelia Zepeda. It is called "Birth Witness."
My mother gave birth to me in an old wooden row house
in the cotton field. She remembers it was windy.
Around one in the afternoon. The tin roof rattled,
a piece uplifted from the wooden frame,
quivered and flapped as she gave birth.
She knew it was March. A windy afternoon
in the cotton fields of Arizona. She also used to say
I was baptized standing up. "It doesn't count,"
the woman behind the glass window tells me,
"if you were not baptized the same year you were born,
the baptismal certificate cannot be used to verify
your birth." "You need affidavits," she said.
"Your older siblings, you have some, don't you?
They have to be old enough to have a memory
of your birth. Can they vouch for you?"
Who was there to witness my birth?
Who was there with my mother? Was it my big sister?
Would my mother have let a teenager watch her giving birth?
Was it my father? I can imagine my father
assisting her with babies. My aunts?
Who was there when I breathed my first breath?
Took in those dry particles from the cotton fields.
Who knew then that I would need witnesses of my birth?
The stars were there in the sky. The wind was there.
The sun was there. The pollen of spring
was floating and sensed me being born.
They are silent witnesses. They do not know of affidavits,
they simply know. "You need records," she said.
"Are there doctor's receipts from when you were a baby?
Didn't your parents have a family Bible, you know,
where births are recorded? Were there letters?
Announcements of your birth?" I don't bother to explain
my parents are illiterate in the English language.
What I really wanted to tell her is they speak a language
much too civil for writing. It is a language
useful for pulling memory from the depths of the earth.
It is useful for praying with the earth and sky.
It is useful for singing songs that pull down the clouds.
It is useful for calling rain. It is useful for speeches and
incantations that pull sickness from the minds and bodies
of believers. It is a language too civil
for writing. It is too civil for writing
minor things like my birth. That is what
I really wanted to tell her. But I don't.
Instead I take the forms she hands me.
I begin to account for myself. That's Ofelia Zepeda.
My own piece in this volume has to do with the connections
between my own experience as an indigenous person and the many
global indigenous experiences of place, and displacement,
and dispossession, and survival. I'm going to read just a couple
pieces of it, which may not give for you that whole picture that
I've sketched. But I'm going to just read,
there are a few sections to my essay, and I'm going to read one
little piece from each section. The middle section is about
ice fishing. I know there are not many
places in the world where we can read about ice fishing, and
people can understand us, but I guess Wisconsin is one of them.
[laughter] So, it opens in Indonesia.
I guess I will read the very opening.
This is called "This Weight of Small Bodies."
To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven
in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour. You recognize, of course, Blake.
Apologies to Blake, but last summer, deep in the heat of the
southern hemisphere, I saw the world in a banana leaf.
More, standing in a dinner line, holding the frond-like green
sheet, the evening feast suddenly seemed touched with
symbolic light. That August evening, a patchwork
of international writers, architects of voice and page,
we gathered as part of the -- literary festival,
with regional Indonesian writers and artists, stepping outside
from a particularly smoky reading....
You know, they still smoke in Indonesia.
[laughter] ...and welcomed by the humid
megalon night, we mingled and moved, perhaps more quickly
than is strictly polite toward the drinks
and refreshments awaiting us. I repeated to myself the lengthy
food cautions meant to keep me healthy during my travels.
You might know these. They involved a litany
of avoidance. Avoid anything but bottled
water. Avoid anything that might have
been washed in water not boiled. Avoid unpasteurized products.
Avoid uncooked meats, etc., etc. In simplest terms, peel it,
boil it, cook it, or forget it. By this time,
I was craving a green salad. And perhaps for this reason,
the largess of the banana leaves immediately caught my eye.
Over the previous week, we had visited various sites:
embassies, galleries, colleges, high schools, and had begun
to anticipate with trepidation the arrival of our meals,
not for the foods themselves, which I invariably enjoyed,
but for their presentation. In a country with
no infrastructure for dealing with waste, the western
packaging influence had run amok.
Lunch at one of our stops was presented to us as a small
cardboard box on top of a paper plate with a paper napkin
accompanying it. The box contained plastic
utensils and several tasty cellophane-wrapped items.
As I ate, I watched the waste pile up, and remembered the view
from the back of my Jakarta hotel.
The front of the luxury hotel was landscaped, had elaborate
lights, fences and guards. A look out the back window
showed three-sided corrugated metal structures, shanties,
behind which lay piles of garbage, all the way down to the
river that was presumably the water source.
The water that flowed out of the pipes of my 12th floor room
was not pleasant to smell or to bathe in.
No one had to remind me not to drink it.
Several times on my journey, I recalled a smartly worded
critique I once heard from my fellow tribes woman
Winona LaDuke. Speaking of garbage,
packaging and recycling, she asked, "Where is away?"
As in, "I'm going to throw it away."
[light laughter] I had now seen the "away" that
Americans, for a large part, will never view up-close.
So the banana leaf, thick and smooth, it graced the palm of my
hand. And upon its emerald body,
I placed rice, meat and peanut sauce, and vegetables.
Then some local sweets followed, everything edible
or biodegradable. If some importance do reside in
the everyday, fortuitous markers or nature's hieroglyphs,
like the animal signs in which I was instructed as a child,
that twilight encounter with the banana leaf shimmered
as a symbol for the challenges we face in sustaining
our fragile world. So, I'm going to skip ahead
and give you a little bit of "Ice Fishing."
I'm going to jump in, let's see, there's a lot of ritual involved
in ice fishing, a lot of preparation, a lot of ritual.
But we're going to arrive, okay? We arrive slightly breathless
from the cold and the excitement, set immediately to
preparing outside holes. At first, we queue for turns at
chiseling, lifting the heavy tool and bringing it down to
chip away at the ice, in ever deepening and widening circles.
The repetitive motion gradually becomes hypnotic until the
fatigue of our still small arms breaks the rhythm, and
reluctantly we pass the chisel to other hands.
Still, we each hope that it will be with our magical downward
thrust that the water arrives. Miners after summer's gold, we
always shout when the first moisture seeps up from the dark
spiral, pools, then in a gush, breaks through and splashes onto
the sides of the hole, gracing the frozen ice surfaces with
water, with a fluid, wet rush of memory.
Skipping, skipping, skipping. I'm inside.
I am, let's see. Inside, we will settle in.
Now, this is inside the fish house.
We were doing the outside holes. You have to do both, right, so
you can take turns. You can get warm, you can go
out. Okay, inside.
We settle in, darkness secured by a tattered army blanket at
the door. Minutes tick into hours as we
sit crowded and hunch shouldered over the rectangle cut into the
floor of the fish house, cut into the ice beneath.
Water, the only light in our darkness.
We take turns puppeting the fish decoy through the green-tinted
lake world, make it swim, dip and dive.
We hope the flash of tin-fin, the lure of its painted scales
will call the fish from the weeds, from the edges of our
longing. As schools of minnows and
curious perch swim in and out of our vision, we whisper stories
like they were ancient incantations, of how you once
dipped your hand, rinsed and lifted only seconds before the
smart snap of a muskrat might have taken your fingers for a
fish. Of the lurker, the length of
your arm that Ike watched and finally out-waited
over the long days of January. The soft, slow leaking of
language pairs with the smooth lengthening swim of the decoy.
Motion told and repeated, or the four-pronged spear rests just on
the edge of the ice, as it has for decades in one hand or
another. Soon, patience and the stories
work their enchantment. Something always rises to the
bait. The white belly of fish may
flash as it meets the quick spear thrust, or the northern
turning in a silk black bottom that rutters just out of reach,
heightens our every hunger. The day wears on, dusk creeping,
inching toward its destiny, while we fished and dream.
Our stare now sees deeper into winter water, beyond fish,
beyond the dark edges of ice. Finally, as if in another age,
we emerge again from the fish house where we have been lulled
by the womb-like darkness. We are thrust anew into the
sudden cold, the startlingly white winter, and fish spots,
mirages, flash before our eyes as we stretch and shake away
tingling limbs. So, I'm going to skip again,
just to maybe the closing of this section, and then one more
paragraph of the last section. You have to try to figure out
how they go together, I guess, on your own, because that's what
we do as readers, huh? [laughter]
Although I think there are more hints in the actual essay,
right? In the late night fish cleaning
that follows, we try our hands at scaling and filleting.
Then, mesmerized by the mastery of our parents' knives, we watch
each deft move as the bellies spill their secrets, yellow
masses of eggs, air sacks, sometimes a still beating heart
and the mysterious digestive sacks.
Opening the thin membranes, we see again the cycles of feeding,
of which we are a part. Sometimes minnows are found
whole, as yet undigested within a larger fish.
Worlds within worlds. Cycles overlapping other cycles.
As children to the simple seasonal activities, we pressed
our noses against the windows to these realities.
And so, the essay actually talks about the banana leaf, the
filleted bodies of fish, and other connections that we have
with nature and our relationship to nature.
I kind of skipped a lot of the philosophical part of that, but
I'm just going to read one paragraph that
hints at it, okay? What nourished us then was more
than the fish, the rice, meat, nuts, berries, and other
gathered foods. And the symbolism
in the megalon night rose from the coalesce of more than
sugarbush camps and Javanese custom.
What should we fathom in regional ceremony
or a seasonal harvest ritual? What symbol of infinity is the
weight of these small bodies? The northern pike, the lotus,
the banana leaf. Deep in the skewered heart of
deer, buried someplace in the gestures of every subsistence
activity beats belief, belief that we live entwined in
intricate sects of relationship. Because we gather these natural
gifts for food, tools, shelter, medicine, we believe with our
bodies as well as our minds that we must pay attention to their
survival. Some among us hold them as
relatives to whom we owe a portion of our care.
What shimmers in my memory of that Indonesian night is a
certain kind of belonging, not belonging to a mass assembly
line consumerism, but belonging to a committed, native, local
economy. Meegwetch.
[applause]
I'm the faker up here. [laughter]
I have the easy job of being and editor, because I get to work
with fascinating writing, like what we've heard tonight, and
what actually fills this book. But I'll do my best to give you
a little bit of a sense for why Milkweed Editions feels that
books like "Colors of Nature," and specifically "The Colors of
Nature" are really important, to give you a little bit of a
sense. Am I too loud?
Okay. Milkweed Edition's mission is to
identify, nurture and publish transformative literature, and
build an engaged community around it.
That sounds kind of abstract and wonky, but it has real solid,
real world meaning. I hope that some of you have
kind of felt what a word like transformative might mean
tonight when you're listening to some of the readings.
I was lucky enough to be on another panel with Lauret and
Maria recently, where Maria read that Nahuatl poem, and it was
the first time I had-- Did I say that right?
Okay, good. I'm going to mispronounce a lot
of things tonight. But it was the first time I had
heard Nahuatl read aloud. It literally sent shivers down
my spine, because I thought to myself this might be the only
time I hear this read aloud. Listening to Maria talk about
languages too civil for words, languages that have been
forgotten-- Not Maria, sorry, Kim, talk
about languages too civil for words, I think that
one of the things that we really focused on in this book is
reclaiming, not reclaiming, but underlining things that are at
risk for being forgotten, and forgotten at all of our great
peril. So I want to read a piece by a
woman named Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is one of the contributors.
I'm going to get this out and put it right here.
She is a member of the Citizen Band Potawatomi.
She is also a PhD biologist, which is a biologist who studies
moss. She has a very interesting
hybrid existence, where she's a brilliant scientist and also an
indigenous woman who's coming to terms with her culture and her
history, and trying to relearn some of those elements that have
been taken away. So this passage is a little bit
about that. My first taste of the missing
language was the word puhpohwee. I stumbled upon it in a book by
the Anishinaabe ethnobotanist Keewaydinoquay, a treatise on
the traditional uses of fungi by our people.
Puhpohwee, she explained, translates as "the force which
causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight."
As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed.
In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such
term, no words to hold this mystery.
You'd think that biologists, of all people, would have words
for life. But I think in scientific
language, our terminology is used to define the boundaries
of our knowing. That which lies beyond our grasp
remains unnamed. In those three syllables I could
see an entire process of close observation in the damp morning
woods, of the mystery of their coming, the formulation
of a theory for which English has no equivalent.
The makers of this word understood a world of being,
full of unseen energies which animate the world.
I've cherished that word for many years, as a talisman, and
longed for the people who gave a name to the life force of
mushrooms. The language that holds
puhpohwee is one that I wanted to speak.
That word for rising, for emergence became a signpost for
me when I learned that it belonged to the language of my
ancestors. Had history been different,
I would today likely speak Bodéwadmimwen or Potawatomi,
an Anishinaabe dialect. Like many of the 350 indigenous
languages of the Americas, Potawatomi is threatened.
The powers of assimilation have done their work.
My chance of hearing that language, and yours too, was
washed from the mouths of children in Indian boarding
schools where speaking your native language was forbidden.
Children like my grandfather, who was taken from his family,
just a little boy of nine years old.
This history has scattered our people, and I live far from our
reservation; so even if I could speak the language, I would have
no one to talk to, except perhaps at our yearly tribal
gathering. A few summers ago, a language
class was held there, so I slipped into the tent to listen.
There was a great deal of excitement about the class
because for the first time, every single fluent speaker in
our tribe would be there as teachers.
When called forward to the circle of folding chairs, the
speakers moved slowly, with canes, walkers, and wheelchairs,
only a few under their own power.
I counted them as they filled the chairs.
Nine. Nine fluent speakers.
In the whole world. Our language, millennia in the
making, sits in those nine chairs.
The words that praised creation, told the old stories, lulled my
ancestors to sleep, rests today in the tongues of nine very
mortal men and women. Each takes their turn to address
the small group of would-be students.
A man with long gray braids tells of how his mother hid him
away when the Indian agents came to take the children.
He escaped boarding school by hiding under an overhung bank
where the sound of the stream covered his tears.
The others were all taken and had their mouths washed out with
soap, or were punished in worse ways, for "talking that dirty
Indian language." But, because he alone stayed
home and was raised calling the plants and animals by the names
the Creator gave them, he is here today, a carrier of the
language. The engines of assimilation
worked well. The speaker's eyes blaze
as he addresses us. "We're the end of the road,"
he says. "We are all that is left.
If you young people do not learn, the language will die.
The missionaries and the US government will have their
victory at last." A great-grandmother from the
circle pushes her walker up close to the microphone.
"It's not just the words that will be lost," she says.
"The language is the heart of our culture, it holds our
thoughts, our way of seeing the world.
It's too beautiful for English to explain."
I thought of puhpohwee. Jim Thunder, the youngest of the
speakers at 75, is a sturdy, brown man of serious demeanor,
who spoke only in Potawatomi. He began solemnly, but as he
warmed to his subject, his voice lifted like a breeze in the
birch trees and his hands began to tell the story.
He became more and more animated, rising to his feet,
holding us rapt and silent although almost no one
understood a single word. He paused as if reaching the
climax of his story and looked out at the audience with a
twinkle of expectation. One of the grandmothers behind
him covered her mouth in a giggle, and his stern face
suddenly broke into a smile so big and sweet as a cracked
watermelon. He bent over laughing, and the
grandmas dabbed away tears of laughter, holding their sides
while the rest of us looked in wonderment.
When the laughter had subsided, he spoke in English at last.
"What will happen to a joke when no one can hear it anymore?
How lonely those words will be, when their power is gone.
Where will they go? Off to join the stories that can
never be told again." Now, I love good jokes, so this
struck me really deeply. But this piece came to mind the
first time that I heard Maria read that Nahuatl poem.
This was something I thought about again this weekend, as we
were at the Aldo Leopold Foundation last night and we
were very happy to have been guests of theirs last night and
to have this reading sponsored by them.
But I thought about what Aldo Leopold said about intelligent
tinkering, and that when you take a watch apart, you don't
just start throwing cogs away and figure you can still put it
back together again. I feel like, you know, it's not
a perfect analogy, but I think sort of what's happened in our
culture is that because of the powers that be, we've focused
on a few very specific voices, and a lot of other voices have
been pushed out of the conversation.
I think that if we don't have all of the voices in the
conversation of how we're living in the world, we're in big
trouble. Because when we get into worse
trouble, we're not going to know where to go.
When we don't know how to name the sound of a mushroom pushing
through the forest floor in the middle of the night, you know,
as ridiculous as that might sound, I think we might be in
trouble. So, that's a good reason why
Milkweed Editions wanted to publish this book, is that we
want everyone to be heard in this conversation.
We think that it's actually vitally necessary, and we were
honored that this group of writers was willing to be
involved in this anthology, and that Lauret and Alison were able
to put so much into it, blood, sweat, tears.
So, thank you to them. Thank you to you all for coming
out on a Friday. I think with that, we're going
to open it up to some questions. I think we probably have 20-30
minutes left. We'd love to hear what you guys
think about this. Before we launch into that
though, just know that I think that this book is for sale
somewhere here tonight. And if it's not, I know that you
have great bookstores in town where you can buy it.