cc
Foundation. >> We are very pleased to beds.
a sponsor of the "Colors
The Aldo Leopold Foundation, of Nature" panel tonight.
we're located up in Baraboo. for those that don't know us,
historic shack, and the We osurrounding landscape.old
We also do educational
and his ideas, and work to weave programming about Aldo Leopold.
the fabric of our society. his idea of a land ethic into
The beauty of what Leopold But what is a land ethic anyway?
"The Land Ethic," was he left it did in his 1948 essay,
He himself refused to define open to our interpretation.
nothing so important as an ethic what a land ethic is, saying
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
community in conversation with to include all of our human
richness that each of us brings each otto the table.all the
That's why I was so excited when
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
be here tonight. Alison Deming, who could not
contributing authors here with We have several of the
from Milkweed Editions, us, as wthe publisher. Thomas,
I will introduce you
First, Lauret Savoy is to each of them.
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
contribute to the stories we geologic-natural history
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
the chapbook "Base Pairs," three collections of poetry,
"How Long She'll Last and the in This World,"lections
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,
aof Pilgrimage magazine.blisher
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.
member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, and grew up
on the White Earth Reservation. She is currently an Associate
Professor of English
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she teaches courses
in Native American Literature,
and American Nature Writing. Creative Writing,
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
that she helped to found. And Patrick Thomas is the
non-fiction editor
a non-profit publisher at Milkweed Editions,
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.
bit of reading, and then we'll Each of them will do a little
and questions at the end.
Lauret Savoy: Good evening, everyone.
We want this to be a dialogue.
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
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.
really speak a lot about this. It's very important that we
I am the co-editor As Jeannine mentioned,
I'm very lucky to be here, of "The Colors of Nature."
Foundation invited us, but also pvery largely because Milkweedd
Editions believed enough in the project to see it through to be
in our hands and in the public
Milkweed Editions is a eye.
steward and promote notransformative literature.to
They believe that "The Colors of
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.
more participants there, and There were about a hundred or
of people of color, and only one I was one of just a handful
I was asked at that conference, and I've been asked many times
since, two very problematic questions.
Question one is, why don't
about the environment? African Americans care more
Question two, why isn't there more writing about nature
by people of color? Often, "people of color" is
substituted with "minorities."
problematic, not because there's Now, the questions are
there's limited writing. a lack of care, or because
and there's a lot of writing. But they're problematic, because
they point to the limited frames
as a genre, of the publishing ocommunity, and of theng
environmental movement. The frame is limited such that
it has to date, largely excluded
culturally rich and ethnically the very diverse voices that are
Diverse voices that speak to rich.
relationships between humans and life in America and
post-racial world, that's not the enpost-racial. this
We may hear that in pundits and on the news, or by intellectuals
speaking, but America is far
It's important to remember that. from post-racial.
noticing that the events of our Slives take place, recognizingas
that each of us lives within
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
much more than global climate we polchange or wildernessnt is
preservation, but environment also consists of relationships
of place that are degraded and
exiled, that are urban and toxic, that are migrant and
That was the starting point for dithe book.d.
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
I have to say, though, that Toni Morrison did decline us.
[laughter]
We were very grateful for the But manresponse.did not.
We're very lucky tonight to have
read from their work and also tspeak about their work, andre
again, engage in a dialogue with you.
Now, the essays in this book
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,
their voices together weave a very, very textured cloth that
is multi-hued, a cloth that goes
vision of American nature fwriting to date, or of thec
environmental movement. So what I'd to do to start us
off is to begin by reading
the introduction. Then I will turn it over to my
wonderful colleagues, my friends
editor, Patrick Thomas. and wrWe begin the booky great
with "Widening the Frame."
Despite countless claims to the contrary in recent newscasts and
articles, the United States is
In fact, each day offers new not a "post-racial" society.
reveal a society determined to examples of injustice that
nation's founding and growth. avoidConsider New Orleans.of our
Years after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29,
2005, the wake of levee failure still points to long-embedded
practices of de jure
For those who lacked access to and de facto apartheid.
for those who received little forewarning or relief aid, their
disproportionate suffering was
centuries-old pattern. only another surge in a
Americans were forced to live in After the Civil War, African
areas of New Orleans. Lawful segregation of the city's
public housing and
mid-1960s only further transportation before the
poverty and race. When Hurricane Katrina arrived,
then, it should have hardly been
primarily on low-income people a surprise that the burden fell
broke the majority of homes that of color: Weeks after the levees
rented by African Americans. remained submerged were owned or
recovered significantly. By some measures New Orleans has
reported in late 2010 that the The Brookings Institution
three-quarters the pre-Katrina city's population had exceeded
rebuilding efforts had boosted numbers, that large-scale
local unemployment rate was lower than national statistics.
But who has moved back and who
Even though most of those living is being counted?
of 2005 were renters and in the Crescent City in August
programs have favored property low-income residents, recovery
Thousands of displaced families still, years later, live in
"temporary" housing, trailers and tents, or are homeless, many
"squatting" in abandoned
Thousands more, particularly buildings.
public housing residents, have low-income, former, renters and
city as rents there climb out of not been able to return to the
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
aside or subsidized for those small with little means.s set
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
With investment goals focused on color.
footprint, redevelopment is a stargeting areas where thecity
economically poor did not, or could not, live.
Reconstruction is changing the
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
Do you know what it means in to miss New Orleans? "
And miss it each
These lyrics, first sung by Louis Armstrong and Billie
Holiday in 1947, might very well
generation of New Orleanians be the anthem of a whole
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.
Today, as so much of "nature They stem from the same force.
crucial challenges including writing" details, we face many
and ecosystem fragmentation; losses of biological diversity
atmosphere's composition; anthropdeforestation; to the
and desertification.
The same human institutions and values that have fostered this
marginalization of the natural
of a black farmer in the South world also marginalize the life
enslaved or as free men, worked and knew the land with an
intense generational intimacy.
have a place in our Tnature 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
in a ghetto, in a barrio, the or on a reservation.ised
But the compromising of nature
beings by "racial" separatism anand the inequities in thean
past-to-present destroy both
for the future. What then, is Earth to American
people of color?
simple answer. Of course there is no single or
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
new beginnings or a place of place migrated to in search of
oppression. Today motion, dislocation,
migration, and loss have come to
as groups or communities in the define nUnited States.ur lives
But for people of color who do
mainstream structure of Euro-America, such motion can
involve cultural erasure over time.
What is left for too many is
even that. artifact, and for others, not
a simplistic scene of victims Ouand aggressors, with singlent
proximate factors of cause and
the complexities and ambiguities effect, but to recognize that
past and present, and the ways of this nations's multicultural
fused or impacted the Earth can not be separated from underlying
values that promote racism and
This is a stark and a sad systemreality.ality.
But it suggests a hopeful possibility.
If the ignorance of stories can lead to ruin, perhaps the
seeking out and understanding of
in New Orleans, and everywhere stories can lead to rebuilding,
So, I'd like to turn else.
to M[applause]dez.
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,
Culture, Identity, "Colors of Nature:
This book, for me, when I first encountered it, when I first
encountered the First Edition,
third of the writers are new. Half of the writers are new in
the Second Edition, so it didn't
you'll see in the book you're no include half of the writers
after our panel. doubt going to race to pick up
was still, despite the fact that When I first encountered it, it
only work out there in print I wasn't in it, it was still the
outer expression of an inward that I ctruth for me.t was an
It was an outer expression of an
And all credit to Milkweed Press inward truth.
readers. for having brought this to
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
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
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.
my essay that's included here. That'll kind of track you into
most influential to me is by So one of the pieces that was
He's a Chicano poet in Francisco Alarcón.
He includes some excerpts from a book of his called
"Snake Poems."
versions and Nahuatl versions of "Snake Poems" includes English
pre-Columbian Mexico that had cbeen delivered in Nahuatl.m
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.
then. Francisco Alarcón is one of the
first to bring us the English versions.
They were transformational
So we'll start him..
His contribution is called
Reclaiming America." "Reclaiming Ourselves,
at the University of California He was in Davis. mentors
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
Since I was a groupie of his, frI wouldy.
attend reading after reading
intone these words. It was so formative for me.
This is the incantation called
I'll read some of the Nahuatl that begins the poem,
and then I'll continue
For Planting Corn. into the English translation.
nitlamacazqui tla xihualhuaian
Tlalteuctli tla xihualhuaian
nohueltiuh
tla xihualhuaian Tonacacihuatl
nocotlalia ye momacpalco
Tonacacihuatl nI myselfh
Spirit in Flesh:
elder sister hear me, Tonacacihuatl
hear me, Tlalteuctli Lady of Our Flesh
on your open hand I'm setting down
my elder sister Tonacacihuatl
don't shame yourself
don't laugh at us dontomorrowle
or the day after
the face of my elder sister I wTonacacihuatlain
let her stand on the ground
I shall greet I shall honor
my elder sister Tonacacihuatl
At the same time
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
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
the transgenic contamination been the first one to discover
That's the phrase that you of maize.
means, or you right away think, eithe"What the holy...?"hat it
So, the essay picks up where I
explain why it was of some kind of explain that concept and
I'll read you just a little excerpt from my contribution.
Then we'll go on
to Dexcerpt from the book.ther
So my essay that's contributed
"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
Today the mountains and valleys of the state of Oaxaca bear the
world's greatest maize
That's true, I'll add, even to diversity.
discovered races of corn that thare specialized to a singleve
hillside, a variety that's been developed for a single hillside.
Those types of varieties recur
In 2001, the world's first and recur throughout the state.
contamination of a native race instance of transgenic
University of California, Berkeley, researchers Ignacio
Chapela and David Quist, in Oaxaca.
They found "transgenes," meaning
cauliflower bacteria, in this case, introgressed into the DNA
of native corn. So this is not just muddying the
genetic waters with a single
This is genes from another species.
Though a smear campaign brought their methodology into question,
the researchers' data indicating
native varieties of corn was not the presence of transgenes in
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
wind-pollinated and the native contamination, because corn is
pollen from transgenic US corn species in question "caught"
Well, the corn that flies into imported under NAFTA.
transgene, this cauliflower bacteria, and it becomes part of
the gene of the native races
cultivated and carefully that have been selectively
And by the way, as it floods cultivated over the years.
genetically modified. Because the Oaxaca region could
be considered the evolutionary
the state itself has been bi"ground zero" for transgenice
contamination issues, I wanted
the implications, for women's to dolives, of transgenich on
contamination of maize. As a Chicana poet, I'd been
reading contemporary Chicana
shared themes, and had noticed poetry with an eye toward
in poetry by Chicanas from powerful images of corn
It seemed logical to me that all over the United States.
to corn might represent the ruhistorical and psychologicalon
roots of urban and suburban Chicana poets' and writers' and
readers' connections to corn. When Ignacio Chapela presented,
the risks of this transgenic
idea that the traits that come contamination, he included the
genetically modified corn, are with the TG or GM, for
desirable. not necessarily traits that are
smaller ears so that they're not For example, they may have
Or they may not grow a certain that great for tamale wrapping.
is called corn smut, fungus, which in the US
The fungus is culinary delicacy. which in Mexico is a delicacy.
selective cultivation of corn varieties that has been taking
place in Mexico.
intellectual quest. I was going to Mexico.
I'm going to learn about the
women. impacts of transgenic corn on
[laughs] That's a very abstract goal.
an organic market in the capital When I sat down with the head of
"I'm here to learn more about citythe relationshipaid,
between women and corn,"
tortillas..." he sai[laughter]u mean
...in which this relationship lives!"
Yes!
fixation on concept, In my abstract, academic
of someone to point me toward the "things" that embody ideas.
So off I go into the mountains
about tortilla making, which is wa part of rural women's livese
in Mexico to this day.
hut, a small wooden building As I entered the tortilla-making
Oaxaca, of María Antonieta Gigón common to rural households in
mountains, she asked to see my in the Sierra de Juárez
The request was startling and vaguely alarming to me; as a
mixed-race Chicana, I'm very
encounters in the US, but in the experienced with intercultural
gringa as gringa could be, and rural pueblos of Oaxaca I was as
warned travelers never to trelinquish their passports.d
I thought about it for a minute,
noting how unthreatening the taking in my surroundings and
early 40s, wearing a modest hnavy-blue circle skirt, intent
on baking her tortillas, and
in exchange for her allowing me oto try and bake a tortilla ort
two.
attempts to move the sticky, As we laughed together at my
prensa, a metal press which dcoverts a mound of masa into ae
flat circle, to the comal, a
hot plate where tortillas are baked, she told me more about
why the passport fascinated her.
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
voice when she asked how much a passport cost, pointed to an
unspeakable sense of loss.
through again and again as women This same sense of loss came
in the United States. sBy flooding the Mexican markets
with grossly over-subsidized
trade" has displaced millions of US corn, NAFTA's "liberalized
Mexico, causing increased male commercial corn growers in
increase in women's poverty, immigration, and a tandem
de facto heads of households. Today, impoverished Mexican and
Central American women make the dangerous journey north "across
the line" in increasing numbers,
send home will make up for the in hopes that the money they'll
the absence of husbands, economic hardship suffered in
These women carry memories of wrenching goodbyes with their
children. The domino effect of their
poverty falls hardest on the
new generation of child immigrants who ride the tops of
trains through Mexico and risk
to find their mothers. their lives crossing into the US
enough to determine if NAFTA Although I never deeply probed
the emigration accounts from could have been at the root of
knowledge that an agreement tpushed along by the United
States led to increases in
poverty should weigh heavily on ffurther considerations of the's
expansion of trade
So the rest of the essay goes on liberalization in the Americas.
unfolding awareness of how to chronicle my sort of
through families and international policy ripples
I sort of reached the conclusion ripples through women's lives.
bringing our minds and our that we need to work more on
awareness into these hearts and our stories and our
cross-border ecological issues. croWe so much think of our are
cross-border issues as being
people, but they're about also about migration, or being about
The land and the people as the land.
So with that, I will just say that what's next for "Colors of
Nature" is really up to all of
We hope, Lauret, that it's the us.
conversations with all of us start of many ongoing
Much thanks to the Aldo Leopold Foundation for being a real
catalyst for some of those
Thank you very much. conversations.
I'm very happy to present Debra Kang Dean.
I need the podium.
I want to begin with a poem by Thank you all for being here.
experience and values it Pos Moua, a poem I love for the
"Spokane Washington, 1980." 1980, you may recall is when
the Refugee Act was passed
in the wake of the Vietnam War. Spokane, Washington, 1980.
The first time
on an Indian Reservation, looking from inside
an apartment window the cold, melting clouds
fell onto the grass outside borderless, white.
Going outside,
puffs from the sky there in the plain whiteness,
he loved the way landing on his face,
But this place was haunting to him, because the people
who lived there sold coats
he was used to, where neighbors ashared what they possessede
when they could.
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
the selling of hearts a fire and bodies.burn out
But he knew that to burn these things
is to be alien
It's interesting that I should to winter and people.
the associate editor for his be reading after Maria, who was
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.
Washington, in 1976. My son was born in Spokane,
that my history, my story, I think this fact suggests
Asian America. is a different one within
others call "paradise," my view of nature has been colored by
tourism.
plantations of the world into Touriswhich I was born.neapple
Before she married my father, my mother had worked picking
pineapple, and later packing it.
at least one summer packing My siblinpineapple.ad spent
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
to full consciousness that had process by which a poet brought
all along. been implicit in his work
grandfathers, laborers who were Ipart of the first wave ofy
immigrants from East Asia,
for the land whisper the consequence
In a letter to H.G.O. Blake and thdated May 20, 1860,there.
Henry David Thoreau wrote,
if you haven't got a tolerable "What's the use of a fine house
And there's a dash. "If you cannot tolerate
the planet that it is on."
often, but with the second part I have seen erased.ntence quoted
I think it needs to be restored in the interest of true economy
and ecology.
Seeker," edited by my late husband, Bradley P. Dean,
the letter in which Thoreau wrote this sentence follows one
written on October 31, 1859,
he had spoken the previous where Thoreau tells Blake that
Concord, Massachusetts, on the evening to the townspeople of
These too, are interesting character of Captain John Brown.
And I think that increasingly, times, as the Chinese say.
move beyond the subjective my task as a human being is to
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
the end. start, then the other is near
Don't waste. Too expensive.
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
feeling like I could afford to only buying things, but also
Before it became fashionable, my throw things away.
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
[laughter] Chinese take-out containers.
also power savers, continually Needless to say, my parents were
and clustering errands to save telling us to turn off lights
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,
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
In our yard, were three mango trees, two plumeria trees,
a lychee tree, an avocado tree
from seed, and a tangerine tree. that my grandmother had planted
raking and cleaning up after the I had outside chores, mostly
fruit. dogs, and picking up fallen
my sister, a few neighbors and I When I was in elementary school,
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.
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,
And I'm jumping to a later part a scent,of the essay.leasant.
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,
on a speedy take-off. There are three large oak trees
on the property.
reached us, I remember wondering When news of Hurricane Katrina
knocked branches off the trees whether the wind that had
did so much damage elsewhere. wHere in Bloomington, Indiana,at
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,
But also to be withered by it, is to be stricken by great loss.
to be awakened and alert at least for a short while,
Soon enough, though, the racket of 21st century --,
those private bubbles that are
rootless lives turn me back inward as I moved from climate
controlled room to car
Pressing back against it, my to office.
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
Brad's death. convIn "Song and Story," of
Ellen Bryant Voigt writes,
"Pain is a story." "Pain has no music."
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.
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
connected me with my neighbors. Through them and the care they
extended out beyond the limits
learning something about larger ofcircles of connection.s
In this way, nature made its way
It was not larger than life, but back into my life.
with nature that allowed me the greatest freedom to work and
to grieve.
in this sweat and chill, the I believe that it was precisely
without a screen to seal off scents and odors of the world,
release from language that all senses but sight, and in the
I was returning to a place nature could do its work.
I k[applause]l.
Good evening. I'm Kim Blaeser.
I want to start by reading
that is by Ofelia Zepeda. It is called "Birth Witness."
My mother gave birth to me
in the cotton field. in an old wooden row house
Around one in the afternoon. She remembers it was windy.
a piece uplifted The tin roof rattled,
quivered and flapped from the wooden frame,
She knew it was March. as she gave birth.
in the cotton fields of Arizona. A windy afternoon
I was baptized standing up. "It doesn't count,"y
the woman behind the
"if you were not baptized the same year you were born,
the baptismal certificate cannot be used to verify
your birth."
"Your older siblings, "Yoyou have some, don't you?aid.
They have to be old enough
of your birth. to have a memory
Who was there Cato witness my birth??"
Who was there with my mother? Was it my big sister?
Would my mother have let a
Was it my father? teenI can imagine my fatherirth?
assisting her with babies.
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 sun was there. The wind was there.
was floating The pollen of spring
They are silent witnesses. and sensed me being born.
they simply know. T"You need records," she said.,
"Are there doctor's receipts
Didn't your parents have from when you were a baby?
where births are recorded? a family Bible, you know,
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
much too civil for writing. is tIt is a languageuage
useful for pulling memory from the depths of the earth.
It is useful for praying
It is useful for singing songs with the earth and sky.
It is useful for calling rain. that pull down the clouds.
incantations that pull sickness Itfrom the minds and bodiesnd
of believers. It is a language too civil
for writing.
minor things like my birth. It is toThat is whatwriting
I really wanted to tell her.
Instead I take the forms But I don't.
I begin to account for myself. she hands me.
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.
pieces of it, which may not give I'm going to read just a couple
I've sketched. for you that whole picture that
there are a few sections to my But I'm going to just read,
little piece from each section. esThe middle section is aboutone
ice fishing.
places in the world where we can I know there are not many
people can understand us, but I guess Wisconsin is one of them.
[laughter]
I guess I will read So, the very opening.esia.
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.
Apologies to Blake, but last You recognize, of course, Blake.
southern hemisphere, I saw the summer, deep in the heat of the
More, standing in a dinner line, world in a banana leaf.
sheet, the evening feast holding the frond-like green
symbolic light. That August evening, a patchwork
of international writers, architects of voice and page,
we gathered as part of the
with regional Indonesian writers -- literary festival,
from a particularly and arsmoky reading....utside
You know, they still smoke
[laughter] in Indonesia.
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
You might know these. heThey involved a litanys.
of avoidance. Avoid anything but bottled
water.
been washed in water not boiled. Avoid anything that might have
Avoid uncooked meats, etc., etc. Avoid unpasteurized products.
boil it, cook it, or forget it. In simpBy this time,eel it,
I was craving a green salad.
the largess of the banana leaves And perhaps for this reason,
Over the previous week, we had visited various sites:
embassies, galleries, colleges, high schools, and had begun
to anticipate with trepidation
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.
utensils and several tasty The box contained plastic
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.
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
was not pleasant to smell pipes or to bathe in.r room
No one had to remind me not to
Several times on my journey, drink it.
critique I once heard from my fellow tribes woman
Winona LaDuke.
packaging and recycling, Speaking of garbage,
As in, "I'm going to throw it she asked, away." is away?"
[light laughter]
Americans, for a large part, I had now seen the "away" that
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
Then some local sweets followed, sauce, and vegetables.
or biodegradable. If some importance do reside in
the everyday, fortuitous markers
like the animal signs in which or nature's hieroglyphs,
that twilight encounter with I was instructed as a child,
as a symbol for the challenges the banana leaf shimmered
our fragile world. we face in sustaining
and give you a little bit So, Iof "Ice Fishing."ahead
I'm going to jump in, let's see,
in ice fishing, a lot of there's a lot of ritual involved
But we're going to arrive, okay? preparation, a lot of ritual.
from the cold and the excitement, set immediately to
preparing outside holes.
chiseling, lifting the heavy At first, we queue for turns at
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
Still, we each hope that it will to other hands.
thrust that the water arrives. be with our magical downward
always shout when the first moisture seeps up from the dark
spiral, pools, then in a gush,
the sides of the hole, gracing breaks through and splashes onto
water, with a fluid, wet rush of the frozen ice surfaces with
Skipping, skipping, skipping. I'm inside.
I am, let's see.
Now, this is inside the fish Inside, we will settle in.
We were doing the outside holes. house.
you can take turns. YYou can get warm, you can goo
out.
We settle in, darkness secured Okay, inside.
the door. Minutes tick into hours as we
sit crowded and hunch shouldered
floor of the fish house, cut over the rectangle cut into the
Water, the only light in our into the ice beneath.
We take turns puppeting the fish darkness.
lake world, make it swim, dip decoy throand dive.reen-tinted
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.
curious perch swim in and out of As schools of minnows and
like they were ancient our vision, we whisper stories
dipped your hand, rinsed and incantations, of how you once
smart snap of a muskrat might have taken your fingers for ae
fish. Of the lurker, the length of
your arm that Ike watched and finally out-waited
over the long days of January.
language pairs with the smooth The soft, slow leaking of
Motion told and repeated, or the lengthening swim of the decoy.
the edge of the ice, as it has four-pronged spear rests just on
another. for decades in one hand or
work their enchantment. Something always rises to thes
bait. The white belly of fish may
flash as it meets the quick spear thrust, or the northern
turning in a silk black bottom
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
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.
sudden cold, the startlingly We are thrust anew into the
mirages, flash before our eyes white winter, and fish spots,
tingling limbs. So, I'm going to skip again,
just to maybe the closing of
paragraph of the last section. this section, and then one more
how they go together, I guess, You have to try to figure out
we do as readers, huh? on your own, because that's what
Although I think there are more hints in the actual essay,
right?
that follows, we try our hands In the late night fish cleaning
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,
and the mysterious digestive sometimes a still beating heart
Opening the thin membranes, we sacks.
of which we are a part. seSometimes minnows are foundng,
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
And so, the essay actually talks these realities.
filleted bodies of fish, and about the banana leaf, the
with nature and our relationship other connections that we have
I kind of skipped a lot of the to nature.
I'm just going to read one philosophical part of that, but
hints at it, okay? paragraph that
than the fish, the rice, meat, What nourished us then was more
gathered foods. nutAnd the symbolismther
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.
deer, buried someplace in the gestures of every subsistence
activity beats belief,
intricate sects of relationship. belief that we live entwined in
gifts for food, tools, shelter, Bmedicine, we believe with ourl
bodies as well as our minds that
survival. weSome among us hold them asir
relatives to whom we owe a
What shimmers in my memory of that Indonesian night is a
certain kind of belonging, not
line consumerism, but belonging to a committed, native, local
economy.
[applause]
I'm the faker up here.
I have the easy job of being and [laughter]
with fascinating writing, like editor, because I get to work
what actually fills this book. what we've heard tonight, and
a little bit of a sense for why BuMilkweed Editions feels thatu
books like "Colors of Nature,"
Nature" are really important, ato give you a little bit of af
sense.
Okay. Milkweed Edition's mission is to
identify, nurture and publish transformative literature, and
build an engaged community
That sounds kind of abstract and around it.
real world meaning. wI hope that some of you have
kind of felt what a word like transformative might mean
tonight when you're listening to
I was lucky enough to be on another panel with Lauret and
Maria recently, where Maria read
the first time I had-- that Nahuatl poem, and it was
Okay, good. I'm going to mispronounce a lot
of things tonight.
heard Nahuatl read aloud. BIt literally sent shivers down
my spine, because I thought to
time I hear this read aloud. myself this might be the only
languages too civil for words, Listening to Maria talk about
forgotten-- Not Maria, sorry, Kim, talk
about languages too civil for words, I think that
one of the things that we really
reclaiming, not reclaiming, but underlining things that are at
risk for being forgotten, and forgotten at all of our great
peril.
woman named Robin Wall Kimmerer, So I want to read a piece by a
I'm going to get this out who iand put it right here.ors.
She is a member of
She is also a PhD biologist, the Citizen Band Potawatomi.
moss. whiShe has a very interestingies
hybrid existence, where she's a brilliant scientist and also an
indigenous woman who's coming to
history, and trying to relearn terms with her culture and her
been taken away. some of those elements that have
about that. SMy first taste of the missingt
language was the word puhpohwee.
the Anishinaabe ethnobotanist IKeewaydinoquay, a treatise ony
the traditional uses of fungi by
Puhpohwee, she explained, translates as "the force which
causes mushrooms to push up from
As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed.
In all its technical vocabulary,
term, no words to hold this Western scmystery.s no such
You'd think that biologists,
for life. of But I think in scientificrds
language, our terminology is used to define the boundaries
of our knowing. That which lies beyond our grasp
remains unnamed.
see an entire process of close In those three syllables I could
woods, of the mystery of their observation in the damp morning
of a theory for which English comhas no equivalent.on
The makers of this word understood a world of being,
full of unseen energies which animate the world.
I've cherished that word for
longed for the people who gave a many years, as a talisman, and
mushrooms. name to the life force of
puhpohwee is one that I wanted The language that holds
That word for rising, for emergence became a signpost for
me when I learned that it belonged to the language of my
ancestors.
I would today likely speak Had history been different,
an Anishinaabe dialect. Like many of the 350 indigenous
languages of the Americas,
The powers of assimilation have Potawdone their work.ned.
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
reservation; so even if I could speak the language, I would have
no one to talk to, except perhaps at our yearly tribal
gathering.
class was held there, so I A few summers ago, a language
There was a great deal of sliexcitement about the classen.
because for the first time, every single fluent speaker in
our tribe would be there as teachers.
When called forward to the
speakers moved slowly, with canes, walkers, and wheelchairs,
only a few under their own
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
The words that praised creation, chairs.
ancestors to sleep, rests today toin the tongues of nine verymy
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
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
language. The engines of assimilatione
worked well.
as he addresses us. "We're the end of the road,"
he says.
If you young people do not "We are all that is left.
The missionaries and the US legovernment will have their.
victory at last." A great-grandmother from the
circle pushes her walker
"It's not just the words that upwill 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
I thought of puhpohwee. Jim Thunder, the youngest of the
speakers at 75, is a sturdy,
who spoke only in Potawatomi. bHe began solemnly, but as he,
warmed to his subject, his voice
birch trees and his hands began lifteto tell the story. the
He became more and more animated, rising to his feet,
holding us rapt and silent
understood a single word. He paused as if reaching the
climax of his story and looked
twinkle of expectation. One of the grandmothers behind
him covered her mouth in a
suddenly broke into a smile so giggle, and his stern face
watermelon. He bent over laughing, and the
grandmas dabbed away tears of laughter, holding their sides
while the rest of us looked in
When the laughter had subsided, he spoke in English at last.
"What will happen to a joke when
How lonely those words will be, nwhen 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.
first time that I heard Maria But read that Nahuatl poem. the
This was something I thought
were at the Aldo Leopold about again this weekend, as we
were very happy to have been Foundation last night and we
to have this reading sponsored guests of theirs last night and
But I thought about what Aldo Leopold said about intelligent
tinkering, and that when you
just start throwing cogs away and figure you can still put it
back together again.
a perfect analogy, but I think I feel like, you know, it's not
culture is that because of the sort of what's happened in our
on a few very specific voices, powers that be, we've focused
been pushed out of the and a lot of other voices have
I think that if we don't have all of the voices in the
conversation of how we're living
trouble. in the world, we're in big
trouble, we're not going to know Because when we get into worse
When we don't know how to name where to go.
through the forest floor in the tmiddle of the night, you know,
as ridiculous as that might sound, I think we might be in
trouble.
Milkweed Editions wanted to publish this book, is that we
want everyone to be heard in
We think that it's actually vitally necessary, and we were
honored that this group of
involved in this anthology, and that Lauret and Alison were able
to put so much into it, blood,
So, thank you to them. sweat, tears.
out on a Friday. Thank you to you all for coming
to open it up to some questions. I think with that, we're going
minutes left. We'd love to hear what you guys
think about this. Before we launch into that
though, just know that I think
somewhere here tonight. And if it's not, I know that you
have great bookstores in town where you can buy it.