storied food

stories become prayerswhen we eat the storied food

and know the garden that the beets are from
the hands that planted the seed and
those that saved the seed

and know the fish's stories of nets and hooks
the deer's fate and the tired hands that brought it home

...

it's only since industrialization
that we've become isolated and our prayers necessarily anonymized
to give thanks to those who've prepared this food is to forget those people

so let's define local in social and spiritual terms - of experience -
so that our prayers can be expressed as stories once more

as we know our food we become more able to know the land
and with that embodied knowledge we become more ready
for our own death, knowing that throughout our embodied life
we consume the land
and in death, the land consumes these bodies

thoughts on resistance and human-ness

Resistance towards destructive industrial projects is most effective when considered an actualization of human responsibility. The story told by media (industrial society) splits resistance into racial groups of 'First Nations' and 'Settler peoples' that are usually described as 'Environmentalists' and 'Terrorists'.

But here we stand, together, in a Responsibility forgotten/suppressed by those designing and guiding projects adverse to human and ecological well being.

This Resistance to socially and ecologically disruptive projects that further concentrate wealth and power while degrading the places that we live in nuanced terms. Decentralized power is possible when diverse peoples work from their unique places (ie. the goal is not to 'become one/the same') creating poly-politic. That is, a politic suspended within and between a diversity of peoples organizing from a shared human responsibility to maintain the ecosystems that support our life, and to nurture this world to become better for those yet to come.

here is a short video showing what this can look like on the ground from Friday April 25th 2014
http://vimeo.com/92986130

It is my experience that neither Aboriginal or Settler communities share homogenous political views. Resistance transcends race and becomes the friction between (1) a worldview of profit motivated by greed and (2) a worldview of meaningful work, stewardship of place, and enjoyment of life.

A common argument seems to be 'well what about jobs? do you expect us to all live on welfare?'

I acknowledge that I experience privilege, however we're not stopping at resisting pipelines and mines. These individual projects are symptoms of the dominant political/financial systems that profit from human suffering and environmental degradation. The goal is not to return to a past, but to move from where we are towards systems that reward human and ecological well being. A society positioned to create thriving places.

The lifeline of the pipelines, from fracked aquifers, transportation, liquidification, and eventual consumption are symptomatic of a profit driven worldview at odds with the good life that people in this area know. My hope is that articulating the over arching project of cultural change - from profit at the expense of people and place to responsibility for people and place - we are better able to actualize the joy of being alive as we resist the archaic profit driven way of being at odds with our social and ecological communities.

In this one life that we have - let us live joy and responsibility. We have all been born into a human responsibility for this world we will leave to those yet unborn. May our resistance to the immediate industrial threats to place inoculate ourselves, our communities towards creating systems that support, maintain, and deepen the good life where we are able to live out our existence on the land in the best ways that we know.

there are many opportunities to come out on the land. It's beautiful out here!!
Here are links to background video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5x6k5yvq5k

and action camp
http://unistotencamp.com/

Contact me for details

learning from Trickster

Joe Migwans told me a great Trickster story today.

It got me thinking, as I walked home along the Yukon river, how important it is to learn from Trickster, how to laugh at Trickster, how to understand the Trickster in myself, and the society I live in.

This particular Trickster story involved berry juice and bear soup, a birch tree and a feast, muskrat and cooling a pot down.

This story got me thinking how it might be possible to be tricked so badly that it could become normal to work jobs that have no meaning, to pursue things we don't care about, escape reality and fail to live up to our responsibilities. If we don't have the opportunity to have Trickster show us reflections of ourselves than the Trickster in each of us will win out. From my brief walk home, it seems like we're tricking ourselves into systems that don's serve us to live full of joy/grief, which trick our thinking and affect us emotionally.

I was thinking about the land, and that the ways we are living are hard on the soil, water, and air. And that to be a well adjusted person in a society unhealthy for the earth is not a sign of individual health. It makes sense for individuals to feel dis-ease in themselves if our collective being is hurting.

Maybe it's time for us to tell/listen to Trickster stories, so that we can see ourselves in new ways.
So ask somebody who knows a story about Trickster and then once you know that story, tell it to others.

Thoughts on imperfection

I've been hard on myself for not being thorough, for publishing unpolished writing on this blog.

Today I was cycling in paradise. The deep cold autumn air biting my sun warmed face under these dramatic mountains alongside the Skeena and I realized how I love imperfection, especially with writing, because it forces the reader to engage in ways that cause the text to come alive. Disjointed thoughts, akward word choice, or unusual argumentation can all give rise to “well I think what he means is..” or “why didn’t he say …”

The written word risks an authority as a result of being written

Part of the challenge for those who write, in my opinion, is to bring words alive, and I think that imperfection may

where I'm from

We are each from places
We are all part of families that connect us to the beginning.

We are also alive in geographies
Though the sustenance of our living may be more widespread as
the food that I eat is from Hazelton, Saskatchewan, California,
the clothes I wear from new zealand wool, woven in the united states
natural gas from alberta heats my house
electricity from ... bakes my potatoes and powers this computer...

I am largely ignorant of the places and people that sustain my life

I honour the living places of my life and accept the responsibilities to worship the earth through my living. I feel a praise/grief in my living relations - for this is where I'm from - and this may be more significant than tracing one's heritage.

It's time we deepen into relationship with the actual stuff of our lives so as to exhibit what others will describe as culture, emerging from the ways that we relate with life

Michale Stone suggests this as a deepening materialism in this short ted talk.

Social Compost

I've left a couple gardens behind as I move from place to place.
Although I find it difficult to move as much as I have, it's the compost that I find particularly difficult to walk away from.

Compost isn't really anything - this  noun describes an active, regenerative process that sustains soil based life, which is our life as omnivores.
Compost describes the digestion, the reconstitution, of refuse into the stuff of next year's garden.
Compost requires certain simple care - including more carbon than nitrogen, moisture (but not too much), turning (once or twice), and time.
The mass of a compost pile will insulate itself throughout the winter - I've seen compost steam when opened, I've found charred mass from too much heat in the belly of a compost pile. Digestion.

I can see that I've been born into a history - a time and place - that is impoverished, social cycles that haven't been renewing - something disrupted. Great harms of the past scattered through our collective (un)consciousness unable to compost.
I first noticed this from the outside, finding myself in other cultures around the world where cultural legacies were active capital for new friends of my generation - rice paddies built and maintained by families for hundreds of years. What is it that I inherit, born into an erosive time characterized by assumptions that we are individuals - a strange idea that has become a norm.

I can imagine a social compost - a process by which we live through the legacies we have been born into, rather than avoid, pretend, deny, or react to.
What could a social compost look like? With appropriate mass and composition to create the fertility for the next generation - how do we reconcile whatever is there for us to live this life with deep tranquility and reverence? For this is what I believe we describe with the word peace. And for me this is the goal.

this life is to take part in that which is bigger than our self
and so I carry this body to these places to exercise gratitude by realizing the shrinking difference between myself and place as this body exchanges oxygen with carbon dioxide and tree breath.

Walking over land helps my body accept that which I find difficult to acknowledge.
My heritage and cultural legacy - the questions I have about colonization and the way those who have come before me had assumed a dominance - that continues today largely unquestioned.
I try to walk often - along roads, up mountains, down to water - to find myself in the places I call home, because it allows me the time to arrive when I get to where I'm going.

Today I asked,
"How do I introduce myself in a good way?"
And we laughed, and laughed, because nobody had ever asked that question before.

I think it has to do with walking. It's a human speed and helps conversation. It's also an earth speed, and allows for mushroom finding and berry eating.
Today I can't decide which I enjoy more. Thimble berries or blue huckleberries. Life is good.

Roche de Boule trail, Hazelton B.C.
click for larger view

story myth philosophy

The stories we tell - or believe - create the world we experience

would you believe me if I told you that the trees in the forest help each other, that there is a story of symbiosis that surrounds us, that through the pavement emergent life patiently reclaims her relationship with the son.

Philosophy is hypothesis
and it's time for us each to bring our philosophy into awareness so that we can test them in our gardens and relations.
tend the soil and the plants with these emerging, living philosophies hidden in your thoughts and actions, relations and words and adjust them until your grandchildren's grandchildren can continue to garden in that way

don't rush
this life is a series of perpetual begins
so begin now with the humus of life that we find ourselves in with the words and actions of parents and billboards, memories and dreams,
grow a garden in the process of refining your philosophies
so that our living increasingly sustains and promotes life

there is a way
a way for us each to live appropriately within our lives governed by the natural laws that we are able to learn through all that sustains our life. As we listen to our gardens the waters, plants, animals, wind, and sun become teachers that draw out the philosophy embedded in our living so that we may become better to decide

find patience
slow yourself
and listen

giving up hope

I've given up trying to save the salmon and the trees
as I've decided to fight for sustenance and breath
cause in the grief of the moment I've seen the forest mirror my lungs
and the salmon's body become my own expressed through my living

I've given up trying to save anything
by coming alive to the inseparable existence of being

Fox asked

I woke
having dreamt of a fox
and I needed to tell a friend.

conveniently I knew a married man who had been wed by a fox so I sent him an email.


I recounted to him that

i had found her near water
in a quiet spot
of what felt like a national park.

it was daytime
and i was carrying this black fox
with grey/white flecks
around in both my arms.

she seemed calm and content
i remember her slow breathing
as her body pressed into mine

I passed by people paddleboarding
down a steep river, akin to a waterfall,
and was amazed.

i met up with some other people
and a man told me that
the fox i was holding was an old female.

I realized she was a grandmother

there were other foxes socializing
with each other near where we were talking.

i put the fox down
and became worried
so we caught her
even though
she wasn't running away

As i held her again
i realized that it was crazy
to be holding this fox
as she is alive
in her own life

i put her down
and she asked me
'how are you guys running?'
to which i responded
"not enough"

it was a neat way to start the day

goose barley soup

The healing qualities of this meal
exist in the time between planting and harvest
the care and concern for those plants.

I'm reminded of September winds
The ones that winnowed the chaff from the seed

I'm reminded of the last warmth of fall sunshine
as we killed those geese, carefully plucking the down

The world is a better place
as I maintain a sensitivity to time and place
holding my own mortality in the passing life of a goose

The healing qualities of this meal
can be calculated by protein and nutrient
but far more significant is the closeness
this meal has brought me to life.

In very real ways I become the sunshine
captured by barley and the life force of the goose.

The hills covering the potatoes and careful
hoeing around the onions.

All of these actions
A part of
the regular healing
of being alive.

tree twigs and forests

You want me to tell you about a part
of this tree, as if it's not part of the
wind and the forest, the clouds
huckleberries and me.

you want to know about a part
without the stuff of significance.
what is a branch without the sun?
what of the sun without story and
song?

'tree' is only the combination
of everything
breathing into existence

atmosphere, soil and
starlight of the sun

automatically intergalactic

we can't not be connected
cause 'tree's' cellulose is the
celofane around this sandwich

i'll try to tell you about just this one part
and we'll start from the beginning...

Both the United Nations and Amnesty International have commented on current politics between the colonial Canadian state and Aboriginal peoples.

What I find especially interesting within the coverage of these events is the inability of commentators to differentiate between the imposed political systems, that being the band council and AFN, and traditional leadership.

Conversations within the western, imposed, democratic structures are a part of the divisive project of the colonial state. It is within the limited scope of engagement that is the problem.

An ethical space of engagement is at stake here. It is time for political business to take place in the lodges and long houses across this land. I was proud to see Nathan Cullen seated at a feast I attended as a guest in Massett last year.

We are not talking about 'Canada's first nations'.
It is the numerous nations across this continent that host Canada.

let's redraw the maps in our minds and imagine a radically new ways of being with each other. The goal is of diversity, though our systems are of homogeneity.

Imagine an expectation that Canadian leaders inherit their leadership names through feasting and holding potlatch, or by being selected by their grandmothers and aunties who had watched them since infancy. Imagine having a political system imposed on us - it might just look a bit like things used to across the pond before the knowledge carriers were killed (witch hunt) and the land subdivided (enclosure) and god institutionalized (within the adopted eastern christianity).

what are our roots
when we dig in our gardens?

what are our roots
when we look at the old ways?

we've been disrupted from the places we've lived for a long time now.
and the archeologists can see it in the ruins.

our own earth based past is smiling at us
and the prayers of our ancestors remain largely unoticed

prayers of healing
that we live in good ways for our own
grandchildren's grandchildren

may the rivers always flow
and the grass always grow

beyond our years

a story of thoughts

a small thought of being
'better than'

a seed of disconnection

an innocent perception of being
'better than'

denies one's self - and the other -
of their own unique existance
through comparison

what of co-existing, of one's
distinctness within
all of creation?

not realizing that we can only be
who we are and therefor

can there be comparison? or
only 'difference' and to
accept an inevitable plurality.

...
everything makes sense from everything
...

to transcend duality and dichotomy
which blend diversity into
assimilation

to be one's self is to shine
to reveal a piece of clarity from
deep within

words buoyant from within
one's being
to emerge as light as
one speaks one's truth

to be one's self is the
distinct power of co-being
co-creating
existing
...
'better than'
an obsolete concept when
we become sensitive to the
ways that

I am the only me
and you -
you are the only you

now let's get on with
being

Alive

Cotton mills

1802

Those first cities found orphaned children

Kept them in poor houses of London

Only a little more than 2oo years ago

Those children were moved up stream to the cotton mills – fuel of industrialization.

Where I’m from

It was those boys

9 years old, younger

12 hour days

6 inches from the ground

Little fingers sorting

Tying - Trying to be human in

The laboring heart of an inhuman

Industrial way of being.

I wonder if Gandhi knew this

When he spoke of home spun

a century later.

non-cooperation

swadeshi boycott of foreign goods

Non-violence

Khadi – home spun thread

Home made clothe - the old way.

Despite the cost of time

in comparison to British clothe

Swadeshi

non-violence

non-cooperation

Did he know that

Where I’m from

It was the boys

9 years old, younger

the one’s who needed to be loved most

12 hour days

little fingers

tying

and for the first time

wearing clothes made by

strangers

Swadeshi

Non-cooperation

To make these clothes for my

Family, with my son playing at

My loom is

Swadeshi

Non-violence

“and like a slave

her feeble helpless pow’rs

are doom’d to work

at least for thirteen hours”

it was 1802 when

those doctors said

“wait”

it took them 17 years

To legislate a work day from

5am through 9pm with

1½  hours for meals

5am through 9pm

Except if

there was drought

or the mill broke –

And they had to catch up on

the orders.

By 1835 there was some

1 000 cotton mills in England

135 in Scotland

29 in Ireland

237 000 people they estimated

½ were women older than 13

13.2% were children younger than that

“and like a slave,

her feeble helpless pow’rs

are doom’d to work at least

for thirteen hours”

Did Africa know then

That bundles of used clothes

Would dress a continent

Out pricing those hand made

Fabrics

Hand died fabrics

Colors of home

Where I’m from

They used to work those kids

To the bone

“and like a slave,

her feeble helpless pow’rs

are doom’d to work at least

for thirteen hours”

No wonder my people bet their lives

By getting on those boats to

Reach a shore only to discover

People wearing royal buckskin clothes

Because where I’m from

The kings family owned the

Forest and the deer

1785

King George the third

“No man henceforth shall be in possession of …”

“Imprisoned a year and a day…”

“And after that expires

He shall abjure the realm of England”

While we worked 5 – 9

Fed tea

And fish and chips

From oceans already become

Thread bare.

Between 1755 and 1773

2 601 152 lbs of deerskin

were shipped to England from

savannah, Georgia

“and like a slave,

her feeble helpless pow’rs

are doom’d to work at least

for thirteen hours”

The children who needed love the most

Were trapped in the heart of an

Industrial machine

Abused by a society lost to

Itself –

And those boys became fathers

And those girls became mothers

Of generations of cultural orphans

Spiritually lost within

A machine driven world

Where god became an idea

Packaged by religion

And the machine keeps

Chugging along

…

Inform yourself from

A time when the most

In need were nurtured

Identify with a time

When your people

Acted from love

Towards each other

And the planet

Nov. 25^th, 2012

Fire broke out in a Bangladeshi factory killing 112 workers who couldn’t escape as there was no fire escapes.

The clothes we wear today are not much different than 200 years ago.

Speak to the silence in the weave of our clothes.

We may think that

200 years looks differently

but is it not just a wolf in sheep’s clothes?

Find the time when Your people Acted from love towards each other and the planet, own that history, we’ve been fighting all along.


...  ...  ...

here's a rare color video of
1927 London england

Ben's Academic Work

The author locates the field of social work within an emerging literature surrounding the role of non-aboriginal people in decolonization. Locating assimilative thinking in the assumptions (#3 Figure 1) and obliviousness (#4 Figure 1) this paper explores Settler ontology – reflected in individual thoughts, social structures, and policy.

(( Figure 1 ))

	+	-
+	( 1 ) Know that I Know	( 2 ) Know that I don’t know
_	( 3 ) Don’t know I Know	( 4 ) Don’t know that I don’t know

Making use of three cultural examples of Indigenous concepts of self from Okanagan, Haudenashonee, and Lebanese traditions, the author questions a lack of guiding principles for Settler society. Focus is then turned towards an emerging ‘trauma informed’ literature that synthesizes the effects of adverse experiences on individual, family, and community developmental trajectories. From within these fields of neurobiology and psychology the author distills principles of respect, agency, the ability to love and be loved, as relational principles for healthy children.

Substantiated from within western thought, the author provides a framework to challenge the thoughts, service delivery design, and policy embedded within Canadian society to prioritize children and the generations to come. Without the future in mind our society is lost. Within this focus based on principles based in human need exists the possibility to live in a pluralist society described by Ermin (2007) as ethical space.

participate

It's a recent thing
the choice to participate in
one's own life

it used to just be 'the way'

...

now,
we have false choices.

we can eat at a resteraunt where somebody we never meet cooks vegetables and meat we've never known, served to us by somebody we've just met all powered with energy from a damned river we've never heard of with spices from places we've never been.
and it's normal.

to participate is to engage with the seeds that remember how to grow when we plant them in earth that becomes our body as we realize it is the infinite mystery of soil and sun that sustains our life.
how humbling.

we can drive thousands of kilometres in vehicles hewn from seams of minerals held by the earth, tooled precisely to perform the exact function of 3000 rpm's that propel the vehicle through the explosion of a fuel made from the decay of an ancient past.

life is amazing!
though

we are external to the majority of our lives.
to become sensitive to life
is the path by which we become
better able to know ourselves

it also happens to be the way
that we can collectively govern
these greedy brains with
our hearts that are able to
clearly see
that we are home in this world
and we need to love her as
we need to love ourselves.

keep the seeds alive

Imagine archeologists finding clay pots of seeds saved by your ancestors.

800 years they tell you.

Imagine taking those seeds and planting them, the grief/joy of letting go, as all farmers experience when we release the past so that a future may be born.

And those plants come alive, strong.

...

plant the seeds, the fertile teachings, into your life so that they will grow into vibrant plants, ways of being, worthy of harvest.

May your descendants celebrate in another 800 years as the seeds continue to grow strong bearing delicious fruit.

when...

when my grandchildren ask

'what was it like when you could drink from the skeena?'

I'll have to tell them how the sun felt
and that sweet balsam breeze
and how drinking that water
was a prayer of belonging - of worship

and my heart will be heavy when they ask

'what did you do, when all that happened,
the agreements, and the pipelines, and the tankers,
when it all started...'

and i'll tell them about giving $5 dollars to help people organize for talks
and i'll tell them about facebook, sharing news articles, and poems
and i'll tell them about feeling too busy at school, and gardening, and hunting
and i'll tell them it was all so overwhelming

and i'm scared that they'll ask

'why did that stop you, didn't you know?'

'we wanted to drink from the rivers
to be able to swim'

'we wanted to live as if we belong, to eat salmon
we heard they use to spawn here'

wind

standing at the birth place of this watershed

mountain whispered wind ()
and that
consciousness materialized like a thunderhead birthed by breath

boots on august snow
gifting that mountain eloquence wrapped in beautiful words
i found the task as light as a feather
and just as powerful

for the winds of gratitude can lift stones from earth
just as winter wind freezes water in a crevice causing a crack

and that's how it was
thanking mountain for being
brought my gratitude to wind
as alive as she is on my skin

and her traumatic breaking power
patiently reducing mountain into that
periodic table of the elements

elements

carried by water over landscapes
to forests and gardens that
nourish this body
that carried me to say
- thanks -

...

Do that everyday
First Thing
she would say

...

we would gather in that frigid blackness before dawn
in ceremony, in preparation
creating beauty
to help him rise

eloquence

it was years before i realized that ceremony is what you do.
ceremony is no one thing, but the wind inside our voices when we speak eloquence
our words of gratitude

...

do that everyday
First Thing
she would say

...

that mountain whispered wind into
consciousness and I watched these thoughts closely
to catch them on this page

Robson Glacier 2012