Last Thursday was the 51st anniversary of Earth Day, and it was fitting that I was reading Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), the collected essays of Robin Wall Kimmerer, a native Potawatomi, about ecology and right relationship to the land, inspired by her dual life as a Native American and as a university professor in botany.
She writes with passion and poignancy about how the nature-based wisdom of Indigenous People—who figured out over the course of centuries how humans could fit into the rhythms of Nature, rather than how we could control it for our implacable greed—has been systematically discounted and ignored by the dominating white, European-centric culture. As the realities of Climate Change and the limits of Earth's resources come into greater focus, this is tender stuff to read. We could have done so much better.
Especially powerful for me was the chapter entitled "People of Corn, People of Light," which relates the Mayan cosmology, taken from their ancient text, the Popul Vuh. It's a creation play in four acts:
I. The gods made the first humans from mud, but they were ugly and ill-formed. They were crumbly, could not reproduce, and melted in the rain.
II. Next they tried carving a man from wood and a woman from the pith of a reed. These were beautiful, lithe, and strong. They could talk, sing, and dance. They learned to use and make things. They had fine minds and bodies, and could reproduce, but their hearts were empty of compassion and love. All of the mis-used members of Creation rallied together and destroyed the people made of wood in self-defense.
III. The third time the gods made people out of pure light, the sacred energy of the Sun. These humans were dazzling to behold—beautiful, smart, and very powerful. They knew so much they thought they knew everything. Instead of being grateful, they believed themselves to be the gods' equals. Understanding the danger this posed, once again the gods arranged for their demise.
IV. On the fourth try, the gods fashioned people out of corn. From two baskets—one white and one yellow—they ground a fine meal, mixed it with water, and shaped a people made of corn. They could dance and sing, and they had words to tell stories and offer up prayers. Their hearts were filled with compassion for the rest of Creation. They were wise enough to be grateful. To protect the corn people from arrogance, the gods passed a veil over their eyes, clouding their vision as breath clouds a mirror. These people of corn are the ones who were grateful and respectful for the world that sustained them—so they were the ones who were sustained upon the earth.
Kimmerer goes on to challenge the reader with these paraphrased paragraphs:
Creation is an ongoing process and the story is not history alone—it is also prophecy. Have we become people of corn? Or are we still people made of wood? Are we people of light, in thrall to our own power? Are we not yet transformed by relationship to earth?
How can science, art, and story give us a new lens to understand the relationship that people of corn represent? Only when people understand the symbiotic relationships that sustain them can they become people of corn, capable of gratitude and reciprocity.
Science lets us see the dance of chromosomes, the leaves of moss, and the farthest galaxy. But is it a scared lens like the Popul Vuh? Does science allow us to perceive the sacred in the world, or does does it bend light in such a way as to obscure it? A lens that brings the material world into focus but blurs the spiritual is the lens of a people made of wood. It is not more data that we need for our transformation to people of corn, but more wisdom.
I dream of a world guided by the lens of stories rooted in the revelations of science and framed with an Indigenous worldview—stories in which matter and spirit are both given voice.
While scientists are among those who are privy to the intelligence of other species, many seem to believe that the intelligence they access is only their own. They lack the fundamental ingredient: humility. After the gods experimented with arrogance, they gave the people of corn humility, and it takes humility to learn from other species.
We may not have wings or leaves, but we humans do have words. Language is our gift and our responsibility. I think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land. Words to remember old stories, words to tell new ones, stories that bring science and spirit back together to nurture our becoming people of corn.
• • •
Inspired by what Kimmerer wrote, let me tell you a story.
I grew up in northern Illinois, which is territory that was home to the Potawatomi before the Europeans pushed them aside. While I had no contact with Native Americans growing up, I gradually developed a sense of place, and connection with the living land—which happened to coincide with Indigenous beliefs, as described in Braiding Sweetgrass. It started with my mother's sister, with whom I shared a birthday (albeit 42 years apart). She lived in the two-story homestead house that her grandparent's built on the windswept plains west of Chicago in 1899. Today that house is smack in the midst of Elmhurst, a well-established suburb, but when it was constructed more than a dozen decades ago there wasn't another house in sight.
Growing up in the 50s, it was always a treat to visit Aunt Hennie, and stroll through her well-tended backyard gardens, which included a well-tended birdbath, grape trellises, and an amazing mix of flowers and small fruits—especially raspberries and currants. I took cuttings of her black currants to establish a patch when I moved to northeast Missouri in 1974 and started Sandhill Farm.
Years later, the entire 2006 crop of those currants were consigned to fermentation, which was the featured adult libation at my wedding the following spring. In fact, there's are still a few bottles of that vintage in the basement of Susan's and my house in Duluth. I use it mainly as a secret ingredient when the recipe (or my inspiration) calls for cooking wine, and every time I pull the cork I think of Aunt Hennie and my ties to her homesteading roots.
I grew up as one of five children—a typical number in the 50s—and it happened that when my father was horsing around with us young 'uns he would (for reasons that are obscure to me) often threaten to send us "back to the Potawatomis" if we didn't straighten out. To be sure, this was done in jest and only when he was in a jocular mood. While I had no idea where that came from (or why it was a bad thing to have come from the Potawatomis, much less to go back there), here I am reading the wisdom of an actual Potawatomi, and it has all come back to me.
While my father was a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist and was never seen with his hands in the soil, I am pleased to recall that I grew up in the land of the Potawatomis, and have come—over the course of my 71 years—to understand the power of a respectful relationship to the earth, and the need to curb the acquisitive lifestyle that my father so uncritically embraced.
Sixty-five years after my father was tossing my sisters and me around on his double bed and threatening us with transportation—not to Australia, mind you, but back to the local Native Americans—I am humbled to take my inspiration for the way forward in these troubled times from a Potawatomi.