A Deep Walk in the Snow

I used to live for snow days in the winters when I was a kid. A day off school that was unplanned meant that nothing could be there ahead of time waiting to gobble the day up. It was a day to just enjoy being alive, always in the snow with friends and family.

That was farther north than where we live now. When rare days of snow come here, we treasure them. After work emails this afternoon, I got to walk around the farm for a while, taking in the gorgeous land in the snow. I know how blessed we are to just walk out the door and be on a native landscape. I know most people don't get to do that. So, as I was getting ready to head out, I took my camera with me and made plans to put this post together to share with anyone who might want to experience it.

Last night, I had stumbled across a beautiful song from my favorite artist. Somehow, I'd never heard it in all these years. It fit the day and the land. The song played in my head the whole walk. Listen to it too, if you want.

I headed out the back door .

The rib cage from a buffalo bull, harvested and picked clean by a small Choctaw hunting party last week. Later, they'll return to make some of these into flintknapping tools..

This is my final week to add content to the Choctaw Food book's second edition. It's been a time to reflect on where things have gone in the five years since the first edition came out. This is where my mind is as I walk.

The Choctaw community has been doing some amazing things when it comes to culture and food. The Cultural Center has opened. The Language Department is training apprentices. Thousands of community growers have planted traditional crops. Ancient seeds have been returned. Traditional knowledge is being re-learned. (Hey that rhymed!)

This small patch of remnant prairie right by our house is one of our most successful rehabilitations to date. Last week, I planted a bunch of goldenrod seeds from Amy's family allotment land. Hopefully they'll become a permanent part of this little hill.

This is what this spot looked like this summer when the temp was 100 degrees.

Unfortunately, the past 5 years have also underscored not just the importance but also the urgency of cultural preservation work.  COVID hit the Choctaw community mercilessly hard. We lost too family members, elders, friends, mentors, knowledge-keepers, and first language speakers. Others have gone on since. We've lost five elders/family members who helped directly with the book.

The dormant stalks of the little bluestem and switchgrass turn bright red in the winter when they get a little damp. It makes a nice contrast with the snow. They also provide cover for the birds and small animals.

The deeper I go into cultural revitalization work, the more I realize that this continent's native landscapes and Tribal traditional cultures are really just two sides of the same coin. They support each other and one struggles to exist without the other. If traditional land management stops, most native landscapes turn into something else. If a community can't access a certain type of landscape that parts of their culture are based on (tallgrass prairie, for example) , then they can't practice those parts of their culture. Within a few generations, people forget those types of landscapes even existed, and that part of culture goes to sleep. Revitalization then means rehabilitating landscape and culture, both. The work is doubled, but so is the potential for healing.

The hills across the draw are zig-zagged with fresh deer tracks. Here, they stopped to dig for some acorns, maybe about the time I was photographing the buffalo bones.

The very last place I'm working in the book is looking at how the lasting legacies of colonization shape the human experience today. This is the section that always comes close to breaking my hope.

Colonization is many things. For one, it represents the largest transfer of wealth and well-being in human history.  Most of North America's diverse Native communities are pretty egalitarian by nature, meaning people tend to share with each other. Did you know that the globe’s ten top companies hold more wealth than GDPs of the entire continents of South America and Africa combined? I just learned that yesterday.   Did you know that the three richest Americans have as much wealth as the bottom 160 million Americans combined?  I had no idea until this week. If wealth were equally distributed in the US, each household would have half a million dollars. The legacy of colonization is an alchemy of many things, but the strongest component is greed..  

In two months, these sandplums will be covered in blooms for the next crop.

Greed. - It seems that it seeks out and takes away some of the very best things in life - humanity, decency, beauty, contentedness. Genius and talent are not beyond its clutches. If you're listening to the sound track, greed took away the person who gave this music to the world too - at age 27. Driven into the ground by the music industry.

This acid seep down in the lowlands is home to a number of rare plants and animals.

Greed - Humanity is now consuming 1.5 times the resources than this planet can sustain. Said another way, wealthy nations and individuals are sacrificing the quality of life of generations unborn. Collectively, humanity now has 5 years left to bring our way of living back into balance or risk destabilizing the planet's natural systems to the point of no return. Those who stand to gain the most from continuing the status quo, use their vast resources to prevent the necessary action.  

The news this week- LA is on fire and there's talk of us invading Panama and Greenland. I didn't feel this way yesterday. I may not feel this way tomorrow, but reflecting on this in the minutes of walking around the land, I came to the absolute, dead certainty that greed is going to burn down absolutely everything that is good in this world.

A part of the seep we've rehabilitated.

Same spot, slightly different angle in early October.

Greed - There are almost no native landscapes left in the central US. How many more years does the landscape of this farm have left before it's destroyed through a direct action of greed, or through something like neglect or climate change?

Over almost the entire walk, I wanted to hold onto every moment that I was there on this vibrant land in the snow, to remember what it was like. I wanted to bottle it up to share with anyone else who wants the experience, and preserve it digitally so that maybe someday when we're gone, a wiser lifeform will see the beautiful things we gave up to greed.

I ran into Ninak, a Choctaw pony. He comes from the main Choctaw pony herd once slated for destruction, and saved by the actions of a few, including Bryant Rickman.

The thing that always brings me back from the brink of giving up - Giving up would greedy too.

When Native ancestors lost 90% of their population, had their lands taken, watched ecosystems collapse right before their eyes, they didn't give up. They endured every hardship imaginable sending prayers into the future for generations unborn. They showed us that love for others over self is what trumps greed.

Bull, the buffalo. He's a member of a species that once sat on the knife edge of extinction, but was saved by the actions of a few dedicated people including several Natives.

Right now may be the most pivotal period in the long journey of this hemisphere’s Indigenous communities. The damage inflicted by the colonial process is real and continuing. Odds are that, within this century, the majority of Tribes living in the United States will lose our unique living languages. Odds are the most of the few surviving native landscapes in the central US will be gone and will take crucial parts of traditional culture with them. Then, there will be no alternatives to the dominant society' way of doing things left for anyone to see.

.On the other hand, the Nation-rebuilding process also represents a tremendous opportunity to find effective ways to adapt living languages, traditional knowledge, and worldviews to today’s realities, in a way that can restore the health of our lands and of our communities. We are choosing our future by our actions right now.