The Native Road to the Deep North VI

June 22

From Anchorage, we disembark again and begin the long journey up to Denali. At a stop by the side of the road, we catch our first view of its looming visage and the march of the Alaskan range across a sky obscured by clouds. Directly above us, a wide nimbus and the filigree of a rainbow surround the sun. They’re ice crystals, Ken tells us: a sign of high winds come to blow the clouds away. We wait and hold our breath.

Frozen rainbow—
a halo for the high one:
Denali

Indeed, within a few minutes of our stopping, the horizon begins to clear, and we can see its white, snow-capped peaks beyond the cloud cover. Refreshed, we eat our lunch to this majestic view before continuing northward

*      *      *

At Denali, we set up camp in a clearing between the evergreens. Our tents in place, we start walking south. The wilderness is vast here, and there is no trail where we’re going. The midnight sun and the twilight leave little sense of time, and no night will come to extinguish the sky. How easy it would be to lose oneself out here! The trees give way to a river below, and beyond that, vast rolling hills of green that run into mountains. We follow the river for a while, and then take off our shoes and roll up our pants and cross at a shallow spot. The cold water washes over our feet and rushes against our ankles up to our knees. The river stones are wet and smooth and slick. Moose tracks litter the mud. Back on dry land, we trek across overgrown hills, and the bush reaches higher and higher until it covers our heads and we’re forced to turn back. For dinner back at camp, we have Kim’s and Wai’s stir fry vegetables and reindeer sausage. We dry wood for fire. Finally, around midnight, we put the fire out and climb into our tents to sleep. The sun is still crawling across the world behind the mountains.

Lost inside
this deep wilderness—
a red heartbeat

Cold feet
from glacial waters warmed
by the summer sun

(reblogged from here)

The Native Road to the Deep North V

June 21

Last night, it thunderstormed. It’s still raining when we set out in the morning to the college under dark and screaming skies. Today, we ferry nearly seventy native high school students to the Castle Mountain fault we visited yesterday, to set their fingers on this wide jutting teeth of rocks where the earth has cracked apart. This is where the earth has moved, swallowing itself like an ouroboros, and lain bare the parts of its body that didn’t want to go under.

The members of our party who can speak geology bring them out here to the fault and translate the land. They point at the granite boulders in the river below us and they point at the conglomerate of rocks in the fault, and they show us how this terrain has evolved since the raven delivered light to the people long ago, and how it will continue to change.

Rock whispers—
whose hot knives in the earth
cut out the continents?

Other members of our party stay at the buses and talk to the students about everything they can be and everything they can do if they only imagine it. We are here to share dreams, after all, and while theirs spill out before us in every part of the landscape and the living memory of this part of the world, we can only try to convey ours in the spoken tales we tell of science and technology and engineering and mathematics and that convoluted world of academics. It takes a strong heart to walk in two worlds, but I know, someday, it will put a smile on our faces to see them engineer an even better dream than what little glimpses we can show them.

(reblogged from here)

The Native Road to the Deep North IV

June 20

The Castle Mountain air is clear. We left Seward in the morning, and arrived in the Chugach mountains toward noon. We washed our fingers and faces in the river at Hatcher Pass, and then drove up the mountain. Now we stretch our legs and inhale deeply.

The breeze is fresh and cool. These mountainsides are deep green with foliage amidst the black rock peaks and the brown loamy soil. These are the colors of Alaska, and from this pallette is painted one of its masterpieces. Across the hazy horizon, more mountains reach up toward the sky, and glaciers creep between their snow-strewn slopes.

I remember the last time I was here, we’d come earlier in the year, and these mountainsides were still completely covered in snow and ice. Now the trees and bushes have sprouted, the grass has grown, and the bears are awake and moving. Up higher, the remaining snow is melting away, transmuting into streams to breathe more life into the valley below.

On green slopes,
a cozy summer home:
mother bear’s den

We drive back down the mountain into the valley, and hike along the river.

The calm stream:
a beaver swims across
engineering ripples

(reblogged from here)

The Native Road to the Deep North III

July 19

The night raven
eclipsing the twilight sun
steals our food

We sleep and wake to the cry of ravens and magpies in the twilight. When the sun climbs again over the mountains, it glitters radiant on the water. Blue waves scatter into daylight. So we fill our bodies with coffee and good spirits. We stretch our legs and prepare them for the sea.

*   *   *

At Seward, we take a boat through Kenai fjords. We stand on the bow and face the sea spray as our captain drives us through the chop up to Northwestern fjord, where
the tidewater turns to ice. He navigates us through the frozen waters toward the glacial wall that extends before us. Even this has receded against the relentless onslaught of the world changing. It no longer stretches so far into the fjord as it did only a few years ago, Ken tells us. This is a member of an endangered species. Perhaps Edward Curtis was photographing the wrong vanishing race.

The captain shuts off our engine and we are adrift in the ice water. The passengers hush, and the glacier comes to life. The only sound is the creek of ice. It splinters, cracks, shakes, and shudders in the deep rumbling voice of a timeless giant. Now a thick sheet breaks off and crumbles and tumbles into the sea with a great crash of water smashing against itself in different forms. The wave spreads out. This is the sleep talk of a frozen titan raging against the dying of the light.

Icy war cry:
“No, I will not go extinct”—
the ancient glacier

No, no, Alaska will not go gentle into that good night. The captain restarts the engine.

*   *   *

And on the way back, as if to cheer our hearts, a humpback whale finds us and plays with us. It lies on its thick back in the ocean, waving its pectoral fins, and slapping them against the water, making a ruckus. I’m smiling. Twice, it breaches, emerging spectacularly from the water, before diving back down again. We have entered upon its road, and the unspoken question is “How do you pass your days, humpback whale, our daughter, our mother?” “Happily, my parents, my children,” the whale answers. It slaps the water again, and waves goodbye.

A humpback whale
playing hide and seek:
the world rebalanced

So today is a happy day. These whales, too, once slaughtered to near extinction, shall continue. Their children, too, will learn to sing the old songs. And as we return to shore, porpoises join our boat, and dart along the bow. A family of orcas swim in the distance. Their dorsal fins stand tall. The sunlight stays strong, and the rain passes swiftly. We sleep well in our tents tonight.

(reblogged from here)

The Native Road to the Deep North II

June 18

We head to Seward. On the road, we stop at Exit glacier. The hike to the base of the glacier is less than a mile, but along the way, we walk through time. We pass where it used to be centuries ago. Signs mark the path with dates from years long past, from when ice still covered the land here, and rinsed it fresh with water. But as the forest path gives way to a younger trail of rock and stone, the dates become too recent. Ken remembers when you could walk right up to the glacier hundreds of feet beneath the gray precipice on which we arrive and look down. Far below us, the glacial ice is melting, dripping, retreating little by little. What will happen to the rivers below when it disappears? This is a living behemoth of pleistocene memory, and like the memories of our human elders, it is slowly fading away. What happens to the memory of ice when it turns into water, I wonder? Does it remember, like blood and bones?

The old ice
reawakens and starts
to disappear

We walk back, and continue on the road to Seward. When we arrive, we set up camp, and after a dinner of Wai’s campfire fajitas and beans, we fall asleep under the night sunlight. In our dreams, the gray dusk finally fades to black, and the sun falls behind the mountains.

(reblogged from here)

The Native Road to the Deep North I

June 17

The midnight sun is a companion to the people. It rises and sets to the heartbeat of a different kind of time: one set by the creep of ice and the break of earth. The black mountains that rise from the roiling seas and turn green with grass and forests and white with snow caps before they etch themselves across the sky: these are the rhythms of a dream. Long have we sought to share this world dreamt and lived by our brothers and sisters in the deep north where all of us once tread, long ago, on our many long journeys home. Even for us, this sojourn is a kind of homecoming. Because this is their home: the Athabascans and the Yup’ik and the Tlingit and the Unangan and the Haida, and so many others. We are here to hear their stories and their readings of the land they’ve known since the beginning, in this time as the earth is changing, and its shape is still a vision waiting to be imagined.

Summer mountains breathe
time streams of ancient water—
Alaska’s children

We step into Alaska from the airport in Anchorage, and the road into that world stretches so deep and wide before us. We sleep in the city tonight, before heading into the wild.

(reblogged from here)

Words to live by

". . . in western novels one finds oneself by leaving home, while in Native American storytelling one finds oneself by returning home."

— Gerry William (Spallumcheen Indian Band)

Words to live by

" 'Even though they have never seen me, they will remember me. Their bodies will remember me down to the smallest structures of their flesh. You cannot know how well people's bodies remember their ancestors.' "

— Octavia Butler, Wild Seed

Haiku

lone wolf
never really alone
speaks all night

Elegy

The temperature was 9F. I'm surprised so many people came.

Every inch of my skin was cold before I arrived at the center of campus. My thighs were frozen as I walked. I didn't expect to see many people there in such weather, but it was like an exodus. People kept joining out of nowhere. Everyone walking in the same direction. No one said anything.

When I decided to go, I found a candle on my bookshelf, and tested it, but it was too old and the rim was too high and the wick was too short. I took out a knife and cut out the wax around the wick, so I could pull it out and light it, and then set the flame back inside. I found had no k'yawe a:we, so I took a pouch of tobacco I'd been given as a gift. Not my own tribe's tradition, but an offering close enough.

There were so many of us, so many more than I expected: probably a thousand or more, that even standing apart, I didn't feel the cold. I took off my gloves and lit the candle I'd brought.

They sang on the steps of Hovde, the administration building, in front of the engineering fountain. Probably Christian songs. I couldn't hear. But that's okay. So many people stood together. The specifics didn't matter.

When it was over, I sprinkled the tobacco over the flame. I made a fist and breathed in the breath of those who were there who couldn't be seen, like I was taught to do by tradition, even if my offering was wrong.

The provost said it was over. Told us good night. And thank you. And the people dispersed. I walked to the electrical engineering building. EE was still surrounded by police. Flashing red and blue lights. I walked as close as I dared to one of the other entrances, and saw even there, someone stood guard inside.

So I approached a planter, and set my candle down there on its cement rim. And left.

A black woman with big hair approached me with a white man with a bigger camera.

"I saw you," she said, "with the candle. What did you think of the vigil?"

"It was... nice."

"Did you know either—"

"No," I said.

I walked away.

I broke deshkwi. When we Zuni aren't supposed to buy or sell. I stopped at a bar on the way home and ordered several beers after another. Before coming back home and posting this.

Is it a big deal? Maybe it isn't a big deal. Compared to other things. Maybe it isn't. Lots of other, much bigger atrocities happen. Every day. But maybe it should be a big deal. Maybe it should be a big deal. If we don't make it a big deal, what does that mean? It deserves to be a big deal.

Not because I condemn the shooter. Not because it's another shooting on a college campus in America. Not because it's just the latest news story.

Because the world deserves a little less hopelessness.

Because it was so much warmer, standing there, than I expected, in the middle of the freezing cold. All of us standing, come together, for the sake of someone so many of us didn't know. Because even in the cold, cold, dark of the night, in the icy snow, in the below-freezing temperature, so many people came, and stayed, and stood.

So somehow, despite the last 24 hours, I feel a little bit more hopeful. So I say, Andrew, you didn't die in vain.

And you definitely
didn't die alone.

Godspeed.