A Northwoods Almanac
for 12/25/15 – 1/7/16
Around Christmas and into the New
Year, we are asked to think more deeply about what really matters to us, what
it is we wish to honor, and then to commit ourselves to actions. I wrote the following
essay while thinking about how blessed we are to live in this area, and what
our obligations are to reciprocate that blessing.
Landcestors
Scottish, Welsh, English, German, French, Dutch – McPherson,
Montgomery, Baetz, Suydam, Dugdale, Holcombe, Michaux, and a blizzard of other
names – that’s me. Basically, I’m a mutt. To be sure, such thorough blending in
America isn’t unusual, but it can leave one feeling not without a country, but
like someone without a culture. I’m continually envious of those who can trace
their lineage back along a relatively clear path (though there’s always a rogue
uncle or aunt who went “off course”). I’ve no clear ancestral celebrations or
festivals that I can attend every year, no cultural songs to sing, dances to
dance, art to make, architecture to visit, recipes to repeat. All in all, I
have little to reconnect to and no real cultural values to embrace. Unless, of
course, I wish to follow them all, in which case I would be a
multi-house-divided and not home much.
To add further sand to my cultural desert, I have no
particularly strong religious lines – I’m not Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu,
or even Christian – so I can’t honor Ramadan, have a bar mitzvah, revel in
Buddha Day, or even truly appreciate Easter with a sense of “those are my
people.” We went to four different churches when I was young, and by the time I
left for college, we ended up in the fifth – agnostic. I now define myself as
“spiritual,” which offers, like my ancestry, traditions galore, but no binding
path.
I fell into the American melting pot, or at least all of my
ancestors did. I’m diced into so many pieces that I’m like a conglomerate rock,
a bunch of cultural debris loosely cemented together. The choice from there is
whether I wish to continue to be randomly stuck together with other cultural
bits in a disharmony, a jumble of fractured pieces, or if I want to find a way
to become a fusion, an integration of those pieces.
For that integration to happen, however, we mutts need a
touchstone, a way to connect to a personal lineage.
I think I’ve found a way. In a conversation, Tim Fox, an
archaeological technician in the Oregon Cascades, called himself a “landescendant”
of the area in which the Kalapuya
Indians lived near his home in McKenzie Bridge, Oregon. I was struck
powerfully by the term. Tim felt the way I did as a European mutt – he
described himself as a culturally lost soul. But he believed there was another
way to be personally connected to the past which didn’t require a bloodline
linkage to the people who had lived there. His love of his home ground, his
fascination with the historic use of the land, gave him what he called the
sense of being a “landescendant.” He was linked to the past, and all the
ancestral people who had lived there, via his reverence for the land itself.
They all shared a common home and an honoring of the land.
Tim said this while we were standing at the junction of two
creeks on an ancient campsite of the Kalapuya, a fact he discerned by the
evidence on the ground – shards of jet black obsidian. The chips came from
someone who had made tools from the obsidian, a volcanic glass that can be
fractured into exceptionally sharp blades, a material so valued that the
various tribes traded for it up and down the West Coast and even into the
Midwest. Why the flakes were there and not somewhere else was historical
speculation, but by reading topographical maps, Tim knew that an obsidian
cliff-face was twenty miles away. The easiest way for the Indians to get there
from their home in the Willamette Valley would have been to follow these creeks
up to the ridgelines where the trees would be thinner and walking more
effortless. He held the chips out to us and said, “Hold an artifact in your
hand, you have a short story. Leave it on the ground, you have an epic novel – you
have the interaction of people and place.”
He then went
on to explain many of those interactions – what the Kalapuya ate, how they
hunted, what they wore, how they collected plants.
We all want
to be part of such an epic novel. We want connections to a line of people, as
well as to the contours of land and water. As a mutt, my blended past may have
its own epic qualities, but my story lacks a binding thread, an overall weave. Giving
yourself to a place, marrying it, pledging your life to it, brings one into a
long line of people who enacted their love for the same land. One joins a circling
tradition of storytellers and explorers, seekers and seers, believers and
doers.
Tim’s work in
the archaeology of the McKenzie River area places him in that circle, as I hope
does my work as a naturalist in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. I try to live as
closely as I can to the traditions of knowing the plants and animals, their
habits, life histories, interconnections, interdependencies, and future
possibilities. While Tim and I don’t directly depend on these species for
sustaining our lives’ physical needs as our landcestors did, we still feel a
powerful connection to the land and a profound desire to be a part of the natural
community of life.
I belong here, tied to Wisconsin’s Northwoods, because of
the relationships I have tried to create with the land and the water, the
plants and the animals. Though an Ojibwe or Sioux may still have very mixed
emotions about my European presence on what was their ancestral land and water,
I hope they can see me instead as a “landescendant,” by dint of my love for
this place, too. I work every day to honor this place and all those who came
before me on this land, a fact I don’t think is lost on the ancestors of this
site.
The Native tribes and I may not share a bloodline, but we
share a landline, a riverline, a birdline, a treeline, a deerline.
I joyfully
jump into this melting pot of landescendants, and bid all others who live in a
place they love, too, to make their leap. To love a place deeply, peacefully,
consciously, as intertwined and integrated as we can be whatever our genetics,
can be a tradition that we begin now and can carry on. While our bloodlines may
appear to separate us, there are other lines by which we can live in unity,
lines by which we can find common ground as humans tossed together in a time
and place.
As a mutt, the
landescendant line avails itself to me if I invest the time and love to earn
it. Then, perhaps, I may be someone who becomes a worthy ancestor to
generations of landescendants to come.
