Sacred Land

by

Jim Cheney

for the

"Environment, Ethics & Education Colloquium"

Whitehorse, Yukon Territory

14-16 July 1995

Prologue: The Journey North

As I flew north along the Coast Range of British Columbia toward Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory, the awesome presence of this land overwhelmed not so much my ability to describe it but rather my desire to describe it. Language in this awesome country was, for me, mainly a language of silence, long, deep pools of silence, like the lakes of this watery and mountainous land. Words, when they came, were not so much descriptions as ethically considered responses to a world that demanded mindfulness-mindful behavior, but also mindfulness in the realms of perception and language. I was reminded with renewed force of veracity of Nietzsche's claim that "All experiences are moral experiences, even in the realm of sense perception."

Language, when well-wrought and mindful, gracious, is at once a distillation of experience and the creation of a delicate and ceremonial world, a human world within the larger and defining dimensions of a more-than-human world. Commenting on the autobiographical narrative of Iron Teeth, a Northern Cheyenne woman, Peter Nabokov says that "her testimony seemed to exemplify how a lifetime of taking spoken words as seriously as breaking horses or scraping hides might economize the memory toward some transcendent narrative clarity." The second feature of well-wrought and mindful language-the creation of a delicate and ceremonial world-is touched on in Henry Sharp's comments on Chipewyan language:

July 24 brought an unwelcome surprise in the form of a [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] visit....We are now conditioned to accept that the symbols, ideas, and language of alien cultures are ways of knowing the environment within which they dwell, but we have conveniently managed to subordinate the significance of that understanding to our quest for objectivity. These things are not passive ways of perceiving a determined positivist reality but a mode of interaction shared between the Dene and their environment. All animate life interacts and, to a greater or lesser degree, affects the life and behavior of all other animate forms. In their deliberate and splendid isolation, the Chipewyan interact with all life in accordance with their understanding, and the animate universe responds. White Canada does not come silently and openly into the bush in search of understanding or communion, it sojourns briefly in the full glory of its colonial power to exploit and regulate all animate being and foremost of all, the Dene. It comes asserting a clashing causal certainty in the fundamentalist exercise of the power of its belief. It talks too loudly, its posture is wrong, its movement harsh and graceless; it does not know what to see and it hears nothing. Its presence brings a stunning confusion heard deafeningly in a growing circle of silence created by a confused and disordered animate universe.

At one time I had a language, or the possibility of one, a mode of perception at any rate, a home within, or defined by, the more-than-human-a delicate and ceremonial world, which, though delicate, was more substantial and more robust than the rarified academic vocabularies I have come to inhabit. On the banks and in the waters of the St. Croix River I was graced with its presence, my words spoke it, my perception was infused with it.

It should have happened that my knowledge, my language, my perception continued to grow and mature with that gracious and thoughtful river. But I was somehow pulled away from its thoughtfulness, attracted to the glittering gems, the disconnected discourses of the university. They were beautiful, to be sure, these human fabrications, intricate, alluring; but they were not ethically considered responses to a world that demanded mindfulness, they did not speak the St. Croix, they did not articulate a "knowing with" that arose in mindful conversation with the more-than-human context of my life. Even this way of stating the matter supposes a greater distinction between myself and the river than I experienced at the time, and a greater "nouning" of the world, as it were.

My return to the St. Croix was a long time coming and was seemingly the result of a gathering of fortuitous accidents. In any case, the return is far from complete; language and perception have not yet returned in any full way to their earlier conversation with the more-than-human. I dream of an education designed to deepen rather than sever those conversations.

I only began to realize, fully and consciously, as I flew north and was swept up in the dynamics of a fine conference that unfolded with grace, power, and delicate mindfulness, that stories-the subject, really, of my paper-are actions, practices within, and generative of, ceremonial (cultural) worlds. Current educational practice emphasizes the information content of language and story and hence an understanding of language as mirror of the world. But language is primarily action, it is generative of the worlds within which we live, breathe, and have our being, our identity. In this sense, at least, matters of etiquette and comportment come to the fore-rather than issues of Truth, as this term has been understood in the West. We must take care what worlds we generate.

Diamond Jenness reports a Carrier Indian of the Bulkley River as saying: "The white man writes everything down in a book so that it might not be forgotten; but our ancestors married the animals, learned their ways, and passed on the knowledge from one generation to another." What does "knowledge" mean here? Carrier Indians passed down the means of creating, or recreating, the worlds, the ceremonial worlds, within which the ancestors lived-the stories, the ceremonies, the rituals. They passed down modes of action, which when written down come to be understood as information. The white man wants to know what beliefs are encoded in the utterances of First Nations people, he wants to treat these utterances as mirrors of Indian worlds. But the utterances function primarily to produce these worlds. The white man is concerned with ontology, correct descriptions of First Nations worlds. The Indian, on the other hand, is concerned with right relationship to those beings that populate the ceremonial world, is concerned with mindfulness and grace.

It is in light of these thoughts that I would like the following remarks to be understood, informed, as it were, by my journey north.

Introduction

An elder telling Papago origin stories at a meeting about educational programs for First Nations peoples constructs a world in which discussion can meaningfully proceed; a Hopi traditionalist begins his argument for why Hopi children shouldn't attend white schools by "speaking within the framework of the Hopi origin saga and its prophecies."

In contrast, although we recent immigrants to this continent know that theories are deeply (though implicitly) shaped by personal and cultural values and that these values are deeply (though again implicitly) shaped by stories-carried and propagated by the stories that define us as individuals and define the cultures within which we live and come to understand ourselves-this understanding is not often (or often enough) reflected in our educational policy and practice; nor is it reflected in our meta-level analyses of educational policy and practice. My paper is no exception. I did not begin with an origin myth; I did not first invoke a world within which discussion might meaningfully proceed. I pointed to the practice of First Nations people who do begin in this way, but this pointing did not proceed from a set of stories that clearly defined a world. All too often the implicit assumption underlying our discussions of educational policy is that we can profitably discuss these matters without defining and locating the world (the stories) within which our discussions proceed. We speak as though from no world at all; and we presumptuously speak for all worlds.

I would like to recommend that, as environmental ethicists and educators, we recent immigrants begin to explicitly discover and acknowledge the stories within which we think about environmental ethics and education. Only then can we begin to tell (and live within) better stories, stories that lead us away from the human centeredness that defines Western culture. Only then can we begin to live "in the presence of the more-than-human...to awake and go to sleep with it, to take its rhythms and cycles for the rhythms and cycles of [our own lives], until the two finally merge into one stream"-as Anthony Weston has so eloquently put it in his recent book, Back to Earth, making use of David Abram's fine term, "more-than-human," in referring to nonhuman nature.

In this matter of story telling, we recent immigrants need edification-that is, moral and (dare I say it?) religious instruction. This we can find, I believe, in the cultural worlds of First Nations peoples. The stories that define First Nations cultures intertwine the sacred, the natural, and the personal (as Robert Redfield has noted); they mediate the paradoxes of existence. The real world is a ceremonial world in which animals are kin, food and knowledge come as gifts from powers beyond us, and the human role in the scheme of things is ceremonial. If we were to refract our thought concerning environmental ethics through the lens of such worlds, we would come to understand that environmental ethics is really a religious concern. That is to say, environmental ethics would be understood as concerned with our relationship to a world understood as more-than-human and as enjoining a certain kind of mindfulness that can be called "walking in a sacred manner."

My point, here, is similar to that made by Annette Baier in her critique of the types of moral theories usually constructed by men in Western culture. She argued that theories of rights, for example, cannot effectively be put into practice unless they are built upon a very different kind of moral infrastructure within the culture-a moral infrastructure of defining relationships among the members of the moral community held together by an ethic of care based on warranted trust, founded, ultimately, on love. We can augment Annette Baier's analysis-and move closer to the worlds of First Nations peoples-by drawing on the psychiatrist Robert Coles' work on what he calls "the call of stories." Coles argues that mental healing cannot properly begin until individuals tell their stories, give their lives narrative form. However useful the categories and concepts of the discipline of psychology might be to the psychiatrist-and, in fact, they are often disabling, both to psychiatrist and patient, according to Coles-the fundamental understanding of self which makes health possible is a narrative achievement. The 'ceremonials' of psychiatric practice are effective only in relation to the individual's 'myth of origin'. Similarly, an abstract environmental ethic must be grounded in a community-based ethic of care; and this ethic must, in turn, be grounded in the community's narrative understanding of itself. My suggestion is that we recent immigrants refract our reflection on environmental ethics through the narrative understandings of self and culture of First Nations peoples.

Sacred Land

The Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday says, "It seems to me that in a certain sense we are all made of words; that our most essential being consists in language. It is the element in which we think and dream and act, in which we live our daily lives. There is no way in which we can exist apart from the morality of a verbal dimension."

We are all made of words; and we have our existence within stories, the sacred and profane stories that constitute our cultural and personal identities. For recent immigrants, most of these stories (these actions that create and sustain our worlds) touch on our biological and ecological existence only incidentally. But our existence is deeply ecological, and our cultural identities should reflect this.

Conrad Aiken adds a dimension to Momaday's thought that we are all made of words in the only two lines of his poetry that I know:

The landscape and the language are the same.

And we ourselves are language and are land.

The landscapes that shape the identities of recent immigrants are mostly human landscapes, however, landscapes of human culture and humanly transformed nature-broken landscapes that mirror our own brokenness.

This has not always been so and is even now not so for many First Nations peoples. The deepest sources of personal and cultural identity were once (as they are even now for some) the ecological and geological landscapes that shape and sustain us. This, and our present loss, are given voice in what are surely Scott Momaday's most memorable words:

East of my grandmother's house the sun rises out of the plain. Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.

These unbroken landscapes are characterized by their integrity. As Barry Lopez put it: "The...landscape is organized according to principles or laws or tendencies beyond human control. It is understood to contain an integrity that is beyond human analysis and unimpeachable."

It is this integrity, beyond human analysis and unimpeachable, that marks the land as sacred for most First Nations peoples. The "sacred" (for example, the Lakota wakan tanka, the great mysterious) is the more-than-human quality of the world, not a being transcendent to the world.

In this sense of "sacred," evolutionary biology and ecosystem ecology can provide recent immigrants with perhaps our deepest and most sacred myths of origin, for they portray the world as more-than-human and evoke a deep, inclusive, and sacred sense of kinship with the world around us. Nature's complexity, its generosity, and its communicative ability make it possible for us to once again experience the deep unity of the personal, the sacred, and the natural.

But all this is quite abstract, and although it might satisfy the theologian that lurks in the heart of the evolutionary biologist, and although it may come to capture the imagination of the theologian, this abstract argument from evolutionary biology doesn't speak to us of the particularities of our homes, our places on earth. Within many First Nations cultures, myths of origin and other stories are ceremonial creations and renewals of worlds that tie cultural identity to very specific landscapes. Barry Lopez writes:

Among the Navajo and, as far as I know, many other native peoples, the land is thought to exhibit a sacred order. That order is the basis of ritual. The rituals themselves reveal the power in that order. Art, architecture, vocabulary, and costume, as well as ritual, are derived from the perceived natural order of the universe-from observations and meditations on the exterior landscape. An indigenous philosophy...may also be derived from a people's continuous attentiveness to both the obvious...and ineffable...orders of the local landscape. Each individual, further, undertakes to order his interior [psychological] landscape according to the exterior landscape. To succeed in this means to achieve a balanced state of mental health.

I think of the Navajo for a specific reason. Among the various sung ceremonies of this people...is one called Beautyway. In the Navajo view, the elements of one's interior life-one's psychological makeup and moral bearing-are subject to a persistent principle of disarray. Beautyway is, in part, a spiritual invocation of the order of the exterior universe, that irreducible, holy complexity that manifests itself as all things changing through time....The purpose of this invocation is to create in the individual who is the subject of the Beautyway ceremony that same order, to make the individual again a reflection of the myriad enduring relationships of the landscape.

I believe story functions in a similar way. A story draws on relationships in the exterior landscape and projects them onto the interior landscape. The purpose of storytelling is to achieve harmony between the two landscapes, to use all the elements of story...in a harmonious way to reproduce the harmony of the land in the individual's interior. Inherent in story is the power to reorder a state of psychological confusion through contact with the pervasive truth of those relationships we call "land."

Recent immigrants, too, have such stories, stories that define us in relationship to the land. One such tale is Aldo Leopold's "Marshland Elegy," in his A Sand County Almanac.

A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh. With almost imperceptible slowness it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass. Like the white ghost of a glacier the mists advance, riding over phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across bogmeadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon.

Out of some far recess of the sky a tinkling of little bells falls soft upon the listening land. Then again silence....

....At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.

A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place. Yearly since the ice age it has awakened each spring to the clangor of cranes. The peat layers that comprise the bog are laid down in the basin of an ancient lake. The cranes stand, as it were, upon the sodden pages of their own history. These peats are the compressed remains of the mosses that clogged the pools, of the tamaracks that spread over the moss, of the cranes that bugled over the tamaracks since the retreat of the ice sheet. An endless caravan of generations has built of its own bones this bridge into the future, this habitat where the oncoming host again may live and breed and die.

To what end? Out on the bog a crane, gulping some luckless frog, springs his ungainly hulk into the air and flails the morning sun with mighty wings. The tamaracks re-echo with his bugled certitude. He seems to know.

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words.

This much, though, can be said: our appreciation of the crane grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history. His tribe, we now know, stems out of the remote Eocene. The other members of the fauna in which he originated are long since entombed within the hills. When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.

And so they live and have their being-these cranes-not in the constricted present, but in the wider reaches of evolutionary time. Their annual return is the ticking of the geologic clock. Upon the place of their return they confer a peculiar distinction. Amid the endless mediocrity of the commonplace, a crane marsh holds a paleontological patent of nobility, won in the march of eons....The sadness discernible in some marshes arises, perhaps, from their once having harbored cranes. Now they stand humbled, adrift in history.

This story helps define me and my neighbors in southeastern Wisconsin, in relationship to the geologic and ecosystemic legacy of the last Wisconsin Ice, as a prairie/wetland people. The elegy also haunts us-it is a story of loss. This fits our recent immigrant religious temper as a post-neolithic culture, with its religions of alienation and redemption.

It is a fair question whether our religions of loss and redemption are in some way tied to the mutual estrangement of the natural, the personal, and the sacred in post-neolithic cultures.

I think of spirituality as, in part, a particular kind of epistemological relationship to the world; that is, I think of spirituality as a particular understanding of what knowledge is and of the way in which knowledge is constituted. A wholesale despiritualization of the natural world occurred, I believe, when we in the West began to understand knowledge both as representation of the structure of the world and as a human construct-that is, when we lost faith in knowledge as power and practice and in the natural world as active agent in the genesis of knowledge, when we ceased viewing knowledge as a gift conferred upon us by the more-than-human world. On an older understanding, our human part in the construction of knowledge is, in its most essential aspect, to prepare ourselves spiritually (ethically) for the reception of knowledge, power.

We in the West are beginning to understand that knowledge has an ethical component. Knowledge, I have said, is contextual-it is situated within stories, world-creating stories, myths really, within which we exist and have our identity. Objectivity comes only when we invite all the participants of these worlds into the generation of knowledge. We have learned this in the study of other human cultures. We must now come to understand that this is also the case with respect to knowledge of the more-than-human world. The dominant conception of objectivity in the West has been one which, in effect, defines objective knowledge as knowledge that enables domination or control of the object of knowledge. Such knowledge is, of course, highly selective, defining objective knowledge in relation to the instrumental ends of the knowledge producer, and breeds a skewed perception and conceptual organization of the world. In contrast, research in the human sciences, at least in certain quarters, has produced a conception of objectivity that understands an objective account to be one which the researcher and person or persons researched mutually agree to and mutually construct and take responsibility for, an account which is mutually empowering, particularly with respect to the person or persons researched. The story of our human place within the more-than-human world must also be co-constructed, with the more-than-human world playing an active role-the main role, really-in the construction of knowledge. The acquisition of knowledge-and hence knowledge and objectivity themselves-has an ethical component.

First Nations peoples' understandings of the unity of the sacred, the natural, and the personal can help us appreciate these dimensions of knowledge. For many First Nations peoples, more-than-human nature is personal and kin, and humans are bound to the more-than-human in a reciprocal gift exchange economy. Knowledge is an empowering gift from the more-than-human that (in the words of Evelyn Fox Keller) "simultaneously reflects and affirms our connection to [the] world."

Do we in the West have stories that have the potential to articulate the natural as the sacred, to afford us an understanding of the more-than-human as active agent in the construction of knowledge and thereby help us articulate the ethical dimension of objectivity? Yes, we do: the stories told by evolutionary biology and ecosystem ecology, as I have said, can provide us with our deepest and most sacred myths of origin, for they can portray the world around us as more-than-human and evoke a deep, inclusive, and sacred sense of kinship with the world around us. This sense of the sacred-and our kinship with everything in our world along evolutionary and ecosystemic axes-brings with it an etiquette, a sense of reciprocity, respect, and attentiveness that leads to a new epistemological relationship to the natural world, a sense of the natural world as active agent in the co-creation of knowledge, knowledge grounded in etiquette.

An etiquette of knowledge acquisition,and of knowledge itself, provides us with a way of understanding objectivity that bypasses the false dilemma of choosing between a conception of value-free science and an anything goes adherence to compelling stories. This epistemology is neither modern nor postmodern; it is, to use Robin Ridington's term, "neo-premodern."

I would like to think that, should we recent immigrants once again come to experience-genuinely experience-the sacred order of the land that might define us culturally and personally, that redemption, in one of its aspects at least, would be closer to hand than it has been in the redemptive religions of the West and the Orient, precisely because the sacred would be closer to hand. Alienation would not be experienced as a cosmic sundering of God and his people, but rather as it is for the Navajo, according to Barry Lopez, a "persistent principle of disarray" checked by ceremonies of renewal that once again "make the individual...a reflection of the myriad enduring relationships of the landscape."

As an example of such ceremonial renewal and regeneration, I want to speak some of the prairie restoration project my family is involved with at the Waterville Prairie, University of Wisconsin Biological Field Station.

In 1978 Fran and I returned to Wisconsin from a year on a salt marsh on Long Island Sound to two important and enduring changes in our lives: the adoption of our son, Carlos, and our involvement in the Waterville Prairie restoration project.

Twice in the Autumn-late September and late October-we gather with other friends of the field station to gather seeds from remnants of the tallgrass prairies that covered significant portions of southeastern Wisconsin before the plow. In April, we burn the prairie, something formerly accomplished by natural wildfires and fires deliberately set by First Nations peoples to prevent the encroachment of forests, thereby keeping the land open for game. Our prairie burns accomplish several things: they prevent the spread of forests onto the prairie, as I have said; they set back the growth of cool-weather European grasses and forbs, providing the native prairie species a place in the sun; they release nutrients into the soil; and they warm the soil, encouraging the warm-weather native grasses and forbs. In May, we plant new sections of prairie, setting out seedlings and raking seeds into the rich prairie soil.

The activities of these four days have become important ceremonials in our lives. The scale of this restoration project is ceremonial, it is culturally and personally regenerative. These are world-renewal ceremonies-in some measure they define and shape our community, our world-and they are healing ceremonies, in the Navajo sense-they realign us with a landscape that in some measure defines us personally. Our relationship to this place is a defining relationship. It is a powerful place of intersection for Fran's work as artist, my work as teacher and our personal, family, and community lives. It is a place that orients us, morally and spiritually, in this world. The Waterville Prairie is at the ceremonial center of my work as teacher and environmental ethicist. The prairie ceremonials are enactments of fundamental principles of moral attentiveness to all that exists. The biological myths of origin of which I have spoken give broad philosophical direction and content to these acts of mindfulness.

I would like to share some reflections concerning sacred land by the poet Gary Snyder, whose chosen place on earth is on the west slope of the Sierra Nevada range in northern California. I appreciate his remarks because they strike the right tone, I think, for recent immigrants. They articulate nicely the sense of the word "sacred" as I have been using it.

These foothill ridges are not striking in any special way, no postcard scenery, but...the fact that my neighbors and I and all of our children have learned so much by taking our place in these Sierra foothills-logged-over land now come back, burned-over land recovering, considered worthless for decades-begins to make this land a teacher to us. It is the place on earth we work with, struggle with, and where we stick out the summers and winters. It has shown us a little of its beauty.

And sacred? One could indulge in a bit of woo-woo and say, yes, there are newly discovered sacred places in our reinhabited landscape. I know my children (like kids everywhere) have some secret spots in the woods. There is a local hill where many people walk for the view, the broad night sky, moon-viewing, and to blow a conch at dawn on Bodhi Day. There are miles of mined-over gravels where we have held ceremonies to apologize for the stripping of trees and soil and to help speed the plant-succession recovery. There are some deep groves where people got married.

Even this much connection with the place is enough to inspire the local community to hold on: renewed gold mining and stepped-up logging press in on us. People volunteer to be on committees to study the mining proposals, critique the environmental impact reports, challenge the sloppy assumptions of the corporations, and stand up to certain county officials who would sell out the inhabitants and hand over the whole area to any glamorous project. It is hard, unpaid, frustrating work for people who already have to work full time to support their families. The same work goes on with forestry issues-exposing the scandalous favoritism shown the timber industry by our nearby national forest, as its managers try to pacify the public with sweet words and frivolous statistics. Any lightly populated area with "resources" is exploited like a Third World country, even within the United States. We are defending our own space, and we are trying to protect the commons. More than the logic of self-interest inspires this: a true and selfless love of the land is the source of the undaunted spirit of my neighbors.

There's no rush about calling things sacred. I think we should be patient, and give the land a lot of time to tell us or the people of the future. The cry of a Flicker, the funny urgent chatter of a Grey Squirrel, the acorn whack on a barn roof-are signs enough.

Here I think of images nested in Fran's baskets and necklaces: Autumn sky and Big Bluestem; Summer Cooper's Hawks nested in the woods; Canada Geese flying in low; Autumn seed gathering-these, too, are signs enough.

More than one First Nations tradition relates that our human purpose in this world is to tell stories. The animal and plant people decided that they would provide what we humans need so that we may tell the stories needed to create and continually renew this sacred world. This tradition is the source of a recent Winter Solstice message Fran and I sent to friends and family:

The stories we tell during the great sweep of holidays from Halloween through the Solstice season give courage to the sun for its northward journey, cheer the animals, and hearten the humans-who sometimes despair of having any purpose in this world and are heartened to know that the more-than-humans around the campfire (the animals, the shaggy Autumn prairie, Scuppernong Creek) like to listen to the stories we tell. We promise to tell them often and well.