A Native Son?

In the politics of cultural identity, I used to bristle a little at referring to our Haudenosaunee brothers and sisters as "Native Americans", because it implies I'm not.  I used to ask myself "Don't I know these lands and waters pretty well?"  "Am I not a native son, nourished by this place, of this place, as much as anyone?  Am I not a creature, somewhat knowledgeable in his biome, as much as anyone else here?" "Don't we all have to think of ourselves as Native Americans, treading on the bones of our ancestors, in order to love this place appropriately?"

 I can read rivers and creeks and soils and forests and see a little into the story of landscapes.  I can identify most of the trees and find some edible, medicinal, and utility plants in any season here.  I love this region, the Finger Lakes of Western New York, deeply.  I've been arrested trying to protect it.  It has fed and watered my children.  Am I not a Native son? 

I came to learn last fall that the answer is still probably "no".  The humbling reason I came to that conclusion has to do with relationship over time. 


Picking a plant and trying to capture a moment.

I bend down next to a lake and pick a stem of wood sorrel.  I look at it's heart shaped leaves and closed yellow flower before I place it in my gaping maw and chew it thoughtfully, thankfully, feeling the nutrients of this lakeside go into me, my stomach happy, I warm a little bit at being thus nourished.  Let's freeze right there.

That moment is pregnant with meaning for me.  In that moment, I am flooded with tiny stories connected to wood sorrel.  Learning the plant for the first time from my friend, sketching it, learning to harvest it properly from a Mohawk woman, the joy of teaching the plant to Hindu campers, making salads from woodland greens with middle schoolers, remembering how happy I am to find it every spring.  All this is present to me in an instant.  So I have warm regards for the plant, experience it as a gift and a miracle, and smile with affection like seeing an old friend.

These experiences over time form a connection for me that I can only call a kind of relationship. Experience over time = relationship.   In this way I've come to understand, I'm guessing, what the Haudenosaunee are referring to when the talk about "All my relations".

Let's Do Some Math

I did not learn wood sorrel from my parents.  But what if I did?  What if I inherited some of their relationship with this plant?  What if they inherited some of my grandparents and then I inherited some of theirs too?  What if my people had lived in this place a thousand years?  What a truckload of relationship I would inherit for this one small plant?  Multiply  a thousand years of relationship (which I don't have)with hundreds of plants (which I don't know),  and you get a true capital 'N' Native.

I think I wanted to dismiss some of this as simple romantic mystique of native peoples.  I think I wanted to because I wanted so much to be a native son myself, to know a place well and belong to it, to teach my children to love it and care for it as much as I do.  And while that's all worthwhile, pretty do-able, and maybe even necessary, I don't kid myself anymore that I'm as "Native American" as anyone.

What led me to this was an afternoon in September of 2016 with a Mohawk elder.  I was learning to sew deer hide from him and someone asked about medicine bundles for children.  As the seemingly blithely cheerful elder began to answer, I slowed my sewing and eventually put it down.  While people were assiduously writing notes, I became slack jawed as he began to talk about plants I thought I knew.  Sure you could eat them or cure ailments from them, I knew some of that, but he had stories imbued with spirit about the plant.  It became evident immediately that he was speaking of a relationship to that plant that went beyond his time on Earth, that he had inherited a knowledge and lore of these plants from a people who had lived here for millennia.  

I wasn't even going to try to write it all down.  There's no pen fast enough to go back in time.  I just sat in awe, listening to those ancient relationships being made manifest in the moment. 

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To walk in the woods, carrying past knowledge and pleasurable experiences into the present moment of perceiving plants, trees, birds, soils, animals, is to be in relationship with all these.  Smells, touch, textures, sensations in the body, all familiar, triggering memories.

I have relationships now that I did not have 27 years ago on the Appalachian Trail.  I experienced so much then as phenomena, with what Buddhists call "beginner's mind". Now, having learned a little in the intervening years,   those relationships/stories with landscape are woven with people I love.  In this way I will be thinking of you constantly while I paddle, camp, build fires, wander again in the woods.  This is my "Tintern Abbey".