Kimmerer - Indigenous Wisdom/Science

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

         Robin Wall Kimmerer says of humans: “Our job is to remember, to heal the relationship to the land,” synthesizing Western, ecological and Indigenous sciences where “land, animals and plants work together…are one in flourishing.” Abandon or completely retool the Western paradigm of a “one way flow from nature to humans” in order to return to “restoration” “re-storyation,” reacculturation that “envisions embodied reciprocity” and “access and use as part of a shared cultural landscape.”
       

“The danger of monocultures is that they are inherently unstable. Human exceptionalism is at the root of much white exceptionalism, ‘othering’ and diminishment,” a false sense of being “outside of nature,” outside of “land, peoples and ‘natural resources’” in a way that denies the value and “animacy of us all.” “Through an Indigenous lens, land is our identity, our sustainer, home for MORE than human relatives and ancestors.” Land as Mother Earth or Turtle Island is “healer…inspirited, sacred…connection.”
         By stepping out of the “colonial framework,” “all lands here are Indigenous lands,” where “only two percent of these original homelands” are owned and managed by Indigenous people. We need to ask ourselves how we can “enact (th)our moral responsibility to the land,” “focus not on the offense” or “wrongdoing” but on an “illness to be healed;” working on “rematriation, restorative justice,” as “partners, combining our gifts and responsibilities.” “Conserve the remnants AND heal the damage.”
       

Sponsored by the Muwekma Ohlone Preservation Foundation in partnership with Peninsula Open Space Trust, Kimmerer planned to speak about “a roadmap for how people can come into relationship and care for the land where they live, honoring the past and planning for a sustainable future,” but she and Greg Sarris, author and Chaiperson for the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, both broadened it to a “rethinking how all of us can be home and safe again, and where, in fact, we see that all of life and all of culture is sacred and worthy of profound respect.”

         “Sustainability” as in “dense plantations of young Doug Fir like sections of manicured lawn” is not “rough textured and multihued from a distance, the signature of the (multilayered and diversified, healthy) old-growth forest, the forest that used to be.”

 

“In five hundred years we exterminated old-growth cultures and old-growth ecosystems, replacing them with opportunistic culture…. If we are looking for models of self-sustaining communities, we need look no further than an old-growth forest. Or the old-growth cultures they raised in symbiosis with them.”  

 

        Another systemic conundrum, brought about by human heedlessness, truth be told.

         In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Kimmerer tells stories of her life as a Mom, and as an Associate Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology of Potawatomi heritage, tells stories that move us toward understanding what a respectful, reciprocal relationship with the “animate” “beings” (of ourselves, Mother Earth, communities and the cosmos) would be like.
       

"The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world. Individuality is cherished and nurtured, because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared... (The way of the Three Sisters is a) basic teaching of our people... provides a visible manifestation of what a community can become when members understand and share thour gifts." 

 

        We haven’t quite got this ecology thing figured out yet, 

do we?

        In 1997, in News from Native California, Gail Kulhavy, Project Manager for the California Gold Discovery to Statehood Sesquicentennial, wrote in “A Time to Share,” “Among non-Indians, what the California Indian people went through hasn’t been told, hasn’t been learned, and hasn’t had a forum,” but since then, Indians could “share a history garnered from history, experience, elders, legend, and stories,”
        Kulhavy wrote also that in sharing stories now, “This is a time of truth – not to affect blame, but to inspire change.” Now, doesn’t that “ring a bell?”

View all my reviews

Greg Sarris: Becoming Story, Heyday Books

What if we moved over to a sense of time which is seeking and passing on what Sarris called a “blueprint for the future” in this present moment, describing to each other “how to use ethics, aesthetics to create stories, models for grandchildren” when a particular writer speaks, photographs, or puts pen to paper, seven generations into the future, resting on just as much ancestral knowledge into the past? Can it be done? Maybe it has to. Maybe it’s the humans’ task in what’s left of the reciprocal gift culture of thOur remaining abundant, resourceful world…

I’m learning another “deep ecology” story. World history “independent of its instrumental benefits for human use.”  What a concept!

Sarris’ Becoming Story: A Journey among Seasons, Places, Trees and Ancestors, another gem from Berkeley’s Heyday Books, is about just that – the stories that knit together his own life with his Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok, Filipino and white foster parent community and ancestors with the land as living being: the happenings in that fabric with the “history,” song and story of earth, water, wind, ocean, fire, flora, fauna, birds, reptiles, insects and the relative latecomers known as human beings.

Redwoods, rivers and ospreys, however, “contain a longer memory of the forest. ” "For Coast Miwok people, like all indigenous peoples of central California, the landscape was nothing less than a richly layered text, a sacred book; each ocean cove, even the smallest seemingly unassuming rock or tract of open grassland--each feature of the natural world was a mnemonic peg on which individuals could see a story connected to other stories and thus know and find themselves home."  The values, practices, culture, memories and languages woven together of what became Sonoma and Marin Counties in the present day.

"...Believing that everything in nature is alive---and has power---you have to be careful not to mistreat or insult even the smallest pebble on your path. Likewise, people have power, often secret power…If you have to physically assault another person, you reveal that you have no secret power…it suggests that you possess no spiritual power and can therefore be attacked without worry of retribution…the culture was predicated on profound respect: you had to be mindful of all life, reminded always that you were not the center of the universe but just a part of it." 

When Sarris lamented to elder Mabel McKay “If everything’s going to burn, what do I do?” as they drove through the desiccated landscape of Sonoma County, she replied, “You live the best way you know how, what else?” and laughed. (Photo is Julia Parker Kashia Coast Miwok Pomo Basketmaker *)

They declare "You must remember the plant’s (animal’s or place’s) name, or it will forget you,” with an ominous, sincere, ceremonial and sacred sense of responsibility, “consequence” and reciprocity.

Extinction happens. Built in to the stories and language, “You are,” (unlike Descartes, Popes, Kings, Deists, heroes, celebrities and the Enlightenment scientists,) “not the center of the universe.” If you don’t have and show “respect, you get corrected.”

Wonderful book. Very fine writer. Moving life experiences. Healing visions. Possible futures. What more could you ask for?

* Julia Parker “Grandmothers Prayer: Native American Basketry,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBhOuRY7h4M    (2 July 2022) Teaching the Story of Basketry – a few quotes from the transcript:

“We teach you from the heart.” “These plants have only been touched by nature, and you have the privilege of learning about these plants, and you listen to the stories when they say ‘wait for the leaves to turn yellow’ and they talk to them, you know. ‘Scrape the willow til it sings to you’ ‘The first basket you give away, you’ll be a weaver’”

“The first class before we start, we like to give a blessing because this is the home of our Coast Miwok people and we like to pay respect to the people that were here, my people, Linda’s people, Marcia’s’ people and of course your people, too. We (who) have learned by looking, looking at baskets and looking at the things that I make, trying to make my work look like theirs.”

“All of us who teach the story of basketry, that we’re all looking for the same thing. We want the people to have a greater understanding of what their own lives are like. And that the plants and the animals; that the earth is important, and we take care of it the way they did.”

Berkeley Tuolumne Camp: The Way Back

11 August 2022 The Berkeley Times published an article in the Knox Book Beat titled "Real Treasures" reviewing Phil Coffin's The Way Back: A Journey along the Tuolomne River and the Berkeley Camp that Rose from the Ashes of the Rim Fire, which  mostly narrated selected details of a long phone conversation he and I had about the camp, his attachment to it, why he wrote the book, and some of both his and my thoughts about camp community life, diversity, forest management, choices made about rebuilding after the Rim Fire of 2013 and the influences of the Indigenous people of the area. (Photo is Phil, man of many talents.)

An expanded version of that review is on my LinkedIn page, referenced at the end of this blog post, because I want this blog piece to be mostly "before, during and after" photos of the Camp itself, with only minor comments from the review. I just think it's a place, a few people and viewpoints that need to be seen, rather than discussed or thought about abstractly, so it's more of a photo album than a review.

(Photo - rafting high up along the South Fork of the river.) 

Phil's book begins with a wonderful bike ride along the Tuolomne River from Camp to Oakland, with commentary on the the histories, landscape and communities he traveled through.

(The name Tuolumne Pronunciation: (Too WAH lahm nee)  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/En-us-tuolumne.ogg   () is of Native American origin and has been given different meanings, such as Many Stone Houses, The Land of Mountain Lions, and Straight Up Steep, the latter an interpretation of William Fuller, a native Chief. Mariano Vallejo, in his report to the first California State Legislature, said that the word is "a corruption of the Native American word talmalamne which signifies 'cluster of stone wigwams.'’ The name may mean "people who dwell in stone houses," i.e., in caves.) (Wikipedia)

The second part is many beautiful and heartfelt stories about being a camper, staff person and "community member" at Berkeley Tuolumne Camp himself  -- 

and then a good-sized portion on the fire, forestry and rebuilding of the Camp, with ideas and questions about how to rebuild the community and spirit of the Camp as well. It's well written, has many pictures, maps and good stories -- an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

You can pick up a hard copy of The Berkeley Times review at local independent bookstores or East Bay Media Center on Addison between Milvia and Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Berkeley, or through The Berkeley Times, P O Box 559, Berkeley, CA, 94701-0559. It's the 9th Annual Poetry Edition, too, so there are lots of other things to read and art in it as well. Thank you, Wyndy Knox Carr

“I just had to write this book,” Phil Coffin said of The Way Back: A Journey along the Tuolomne River and the Berkeley Camp that Rose from the Ashes of the Rim Fire. He worked there in the ‘90s, and “It was a real gift for me as a kid.” “It’s a Berkeley institution; like Peet’s, Saul’s and the Ashby Market.”

(A lot of the high resolution photographs of the Camp are from Rick Williams Studios - thanks for posting!) 

 

 

          2012 - Cabin, "green cart," firewood and volleyball. Coffin wrote a history and nature guide to the Camp in 2001 as an Environmental Studies project while at Santa Cruz, the last year he was on Tuolumne staff, then worked in environmental education, wrote outdoor science curriculum for elementary and middle schools, built school gardens, led weekend bike trips, “served disadvantaged youth in tough neighborhoods” in New York City and the Berkshires before managing Berkeley’s Echo Lake Camp and now working for East Bay Regional Park District on conservation and planning.

Mighty nice trees, and many campers and staffpeople commented on how wonderful the shade was on hot days.

 

 

 Another Rick Williams photo of the river and walkway. Beauty!

“Looking back on those summers, ‘the playing field was so equal in terms of the hierarchy in our community. Race, class, and socioeconomic status didn’t matter as much as in the outside world,’ says Rachel Amare, who worked on Rec Staff and started attending Camp again with her own family years later as the Camp Nurse. Because the work environment was mostly free from racist, sexist and homophobic barriers, staff could be themselves and flourish creatively…We represented Berkeley.” 

And then... Summer of 2013 -- Rim Fire. First smoke in the distance, minor alarm, then -- evacuation and emergency personnel took over. (Some of the most dramatic photos are from Berkeleyside, who don't allow reproduction, 

but here are a few of the fire and destruction. This one on Harden Flat road is pretty brutal, and they don't get a whole lot better...

This was one of the ones a lot of us saw "back home," but others you can't even tell what they were or where they are / were on the grounds. :-( 

      

 

 

 

 

 

 Wah, again.

 

:-(

 

The loss of so many trees and the surrounding forest is a really hard part.

 

The bridge was "saved" but smouldering.

 

 

Once an assessment had taken place and money raised to rebuild from the Friends Of Berkeley Tuolomne Camp (FOTC) and the City of Berkeley, design and building began and over 2000 trees were planted by volunteers. <3  

The tent cabins look pretty bare in this 2021 picture, but at least they're there and welcoming campers, after a lot of new walkways, hiking paths and facilities were put in! 

A lot of the following photos are from the FOTC website, with details about events. Rigel Robinson cutting the ribbon, play area and amphitheater, stairs to the small falls, green chairs under a ramada thingy, lifeguard and beaverhead rocks

et cetera! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“It will be up to the new staff and campers to make it funky again… incorporate influences from Green Day to Chez Panisse to Blondie’s Pizza to Tower of Power and bring that ‘East Bay Grease’” Phil said.

It was “devastating,” but also a “renewal and opportunity.” “The Camp community has the responsibility of embracing new staff and campers.” “I’m inspired (by the) rebuilding.” “One of the most accessible camps in the nation.” “Check it out. It’s incredible.”    

“It brings out the best in people and the best in Berkeley.” “On the river and walking the trails (you) fall in love with the earth.” I’m ready. Let’s go!

 

If you're interested in the Camp or any of the aforementioned issues concerning it, I encourage you to contact Phil or purchase a copy of The Way Back at

philipcoffin@gmail.com for $20 and $5 shipping, although it is also available on ebay and at Pegasus Solano and downtown.

 

Long version of "Real Treasures," Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, Berkeley, CA, USA. (13 August 2022)  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/real-treasures-tuolumne-camp-wyndy-knox-carr?trk=portfolio_article-card_title  (13 August 2022)