The gift of stories
Letter from Away — May 28, 2024
I am away on another adventure this week, returning home about the time this story hits the streets.
Right now I am engaged in a wonderful juxtaposition of books that encourage me to pay attention to the world that exist without our help — a world that, if we pay close attention and keep our fingers out of the gears, can provide everything we need.
My daughter in Vermont finally got me to pick up Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer — 2013), a book that has been suggested many times over the decade and more since it was written. I read about a chapter a day, essays that fill in the spaces between the author’s training in ecology and plant biology and her heritage and study as an Indigenous person and enrolled tribal member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Kimmerer was raised in New York State and now teaches environmental science at SUNY Syracuse.
Including the Citizen Potawatomi Nation there are 11 sovereign Potawatomi Nations today, four in Canada and seven the U.S. (most of these descend from victims of a forced Removal that began in 1833 and continued for 34 years, first from the places we call Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin and Illinois, then Iowa and Missouri, Kansas, then Oklahoma). Some Potawatomi people successfully resisted expulsion and remained on their ancestral lands.
The Bodwewadmimwen language (what many non-natives refer to as Potawatomi, is part of the Algonquian language family, as is the Maliseet-Passamaquoddy language spoken here in Maine, connected in much the same way French and Portuguese are.* Bodwewadmimwen is known by fewer than 10 percent of the 30,000 Potowatomi people currently enrolled in the tribe. In her work of nonfiction, Kimmerer describes the place, in her life and understanding, where language and culture meet in story and action.
As usual, there is also an audiobook in my current rotation. The Lowering Days (2021) is a novel by Gregory Brown. There’s not as much information about Brown on the interwebs, but the “about” page at gregory-brown.com tells me the Maine-based writer lives “on unceded Wabanaki territory, where he grew up and lives with his daughter, amazingly talented spouse, and many dogs.” The short biography also says he believes, “mycelium might save the world, ecology is inherently queer, and that most things are better done bare foot.”
The season for doing things unshod has arrived in the Dawnland. Yesterday I walked along a meadow trail and, in spite of careful attention, picked up a couple of nettle spines from plants just emerging into the light.
In The Lowering Days, Reggie, a white man, tells about a period in his life when he dreamed in a language he did not know. At first he resisted these nighttime messages, but after learning that one of his own ancestors had two children with a Maliseet woman, he became reconciled to the dreams and even came to think the language was the Algonquian spoken by those children, a language related to that of Kimmerer’s Potawatomi ancestors.
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“Things got better,” Reggie says to his nephew, a child of mixed, part native, blood. “I think our ancestors give us gifts we’re supposed to keep safe. Sometimes it’s a trait, or a tradition passed down by a parent. Sometimes it’s really clear.” Reggie says these gifts may not always make sense to us in our lifetimes. “The point of the gift is to hang onto them for future generations … maybe those kids needed someone to leave something with.”
We white folks, here on Turtle Island, are the people who left our ancestors behind on purpose. For all sorts of reasons we, or our parents or grandparents or great-something-parents, walked, ran, sailed, rowed, or flew west to find a better life. We came to this generous land from crowded cities, dirt-poor lands, religious tyranny, and, economic hardship.
Once here, we took what we liked and changed what we didn’t. We built cabins and mansions and tenements, made roads and bridges, and set about to expand our footprint until our access was limited only by imagination. Along the way we forgot — if we ever knew it — that the land was not ours, not a stockpile of resources for us to plunder, but rather an interconnected and almost unending ecology of gifts, conveyed to us, not by our ancestors but by the planet itself.
When they got here our white, mostly European ancestors found what looked to them like an abundance of more. There were more beings they had never seen — more wildlife in great profusion on land, in the air, in the life-rich Gulf of Maine and along all the shores from here to Florida and beyond. There was a wealth of creatures in the air, known and unknown, and plant life edible and useful and just plain mysterious.
And there were human folks to teach our great-something-parents how to eat those plants and hunt those critters and they were generous with us, because that was their way and they did not imagine how many hungry souls we had left behind, in the old country, or how much those “back home” would pay for the things of this land. They did not know how greedy we could be for things beyond food and shelter, for the comfort and convenience of still more stuff. I doubt they comprehended the extent to which fellow humans could, and would, commodify the fish and plants and birds — the very rivers, fields, and skies — that feed the bodies and souls of all that exists.
I hobbled home the other day with the nettle in my foot and was grateful for Epsom salts, for the foot bath I had found in my last house, and for my tick tweezers. Some folks would call for an herbicide to eradicate the plant that stung me. In doing so, they would harm a gift that can be used to treat muscle and joint pain, eczema, arthritis, gout, anemia, and urinary problems at the early stages of an enlarged prostate. I will continue to walk barefoot when opportunities arise and maybe also learn more about how Epsom salts are sourced and made.
Some folks believe in an afterlife that will reward or punish our actions here on earth. I was raised to think that what we do here and how we experience this existence is all the payment or retribution we deserve. Either way, this white woman is grateful for what the world offers and for the wisdom of those who have spent generations observing and interacting with life’s natural mechanisms. Every inch of this universe is alive.
“From the viewpoint of a private property economy,” Kimmerer writes, “the ‘gift’ is deemed to be ‘free’ because we obtain it free of charge … in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a ‘bundle of rights,’ whereas in a gift economy property has a ‘bundle of responsibilities’ attached.”
I went back to the meadow today. It was cool and I kept my shoes on. Good thing; the place was busy with slugs and stepping on one of those might have shaken me up more than nettle spines. I am glad the field belongs to the slugs and nettles and is stewarded by folks who value the life that is there, even after we humans have all driven home to eat heated food and take warm showers.
I thank the reader who caught errors that appeared in the version of this column first published in The Free Press and have included them here.
Shlomit Auciello is an award-winning writer, photographer, and human ecologist who has lived in Midcoast Maine since 1988. Letter from Away has appeared online and in print, on and off since 1992.
