Audubon Expedition Institute

Adirondack Semester Fall 2007- Faculty Journal

It's a bit before 9:00 and we're sliding into our third night on the island here at Akwesasne. Yesterday was a pretty full day, but today has been a very full day. Yesterday we had our official opening with Jake Swamp who has traveled to almost every country in the world working for peace. He has made appearances with the Dalai Lama on several occasions. He spoke the traditional words of thanksgiving first in Mohawk and then in English. He gave us the short version, it probably lasted only forty minutes. Sitting on this island listening to the wind in the trees and the hypnotic rhythm of the Mohawk language I had only to close my eyes to remove all evidence of the twenty-first century or the twentieth century or the nineteenth century or any other century of the last millennium.

That was our morning.

In the afternoon we were joined by Henry Lickers who has been working in environmental protection on the reservation for thirty years. He told us how the Reynolds Aluminum factory had released so much fluoride into the environment on the reservation that the cows' teeth had become brittle and shattered. It was the first big environmental battle he fought. He won in the end, but the settlement was puny. Justice was not truly served, a pattern that persists to this day.
 

That was our afternoon.

During supper we sat in Bob's new cabin and talked informally with Bob and with Lionel LaCroix, a trapper who lives near Verendrye Park. Lionel told us of the wolves chasing his little beagle dog back to his trapper's cabin and then singing from the forest all around with his little dog howling in reply from beneath the bed. He told us many other stories from the bush as well, including the best way to prepare beaver meat. After supper we collected around the campfire where the stories continued, songs were sung and a guitar was passed around the circle. Lionel took a turn on the guitar and shared some of the songs he knew from his days in a country & western band many years ago.
 

That was our evening.

Today began with Lionel making his formal presentation on trapping, trap-lines and the ecology of fur-bearing mammals. The wealth of knowledge he brings to his trapping is extraordinary. He also brought samples of the fur of all the animals he traps. We ran our fingers through the pelts of fox, mink, ermine, marten, beaver, muskrat, otter, coyote and wolf. Then Lionel tossed a piece of fake fur on the table. He said his point was to show us just how poor an imitation is made from non-renewable petroleum. The contrast was quite stark, Lionel's renewable furs are vastly superior to the "fur" that comes out of an oil well. He told us that next year he could bring a beaver and show us how it's skinned and prepared for cooking.

 By the time Lionel had finished we had been joined by Joyce King who works for the Haudenosonee Environmental Task Force. She told us of how Onondaga Lake is so horribly polluted that it's not even safe for swimming, much less for eating its fish or drinking its water. She also told us that Onondaga Lake is where the council was held that led to the creation of the Haudenosonee, the Iroquois Confederacy. And since the U.S. government is modeled after the Iroquois Confederacy it can rightfully be claimed that Onondaga Lake is the birthplace of democracy. And still its waters are foul. The Onondaga are in land claims court pursuing not acreage, but clean water. They are willing to forgo getting any of their traditional lands back if the government will just clean up Onondaga Lake. So far it's not working. Joyce shared many other things with us as well. One of them was a simple list of four things that should govern the way we live within the environment that supports us. The first is to always give thanks. The second is that when you are taking anything from the environment you should never take the first one. The third is to take only what you need. And the fourth is to leave some for future generations.

That was this morning.

After lunch we went on a medicinal plants walk with Cecilia Mitchell, known simply as Ce-Ce. She spoke of both traditional foods and traditional medicines. At times it wasn't clear if the plant she had chosen was a food or a medicine but it gradually became clear that some plants were both. When eaten regularly these plants maintain health rather than remedy a particular disease. Ce-Ce spoke in a rambling non-specific way that was filled with little stories and information about the many plants we were seeing. It would be impossible to prepare any of the medicines she described from the the zig-zag narrative she provided during our walk. Had we been walking through the aisles of a well-stocked pharmacy on a tour led by the druggist we would have had much greater clarity, much greater precision. But we had not entered a pharmacy, we were peeking into a way of life through a small side window covered with a single murky pane of glass. We could tell quite easily that there were great riches on the other side of the glass, but we could not see them clearly enough to know all their details. A lifetime of cultural knowledge is not absorbed in a few hours. And that's probably for the best.

Shortly after our medicine walk a few of us spent some time talking with several people from Parks Canada who had joined us on the walk. They told us of the work they were doing to inventory different habitat types in the St Lawrence Islands as part of their work to protect both species at risk and species that have traditionally been used for medicine. Working together with local First Nations people to protect these species while allowing continued harvest is a new direction for Parks Canada. The people we spoke with were quite excited about it. They seemed to be part of a new generation in Parks Canada that didn't doubt for an instant that what they were doing was right.

We had a bit of time between that conversation and our last pre-supper activity. We were joined by four women from Akwesasne who sing new and traditional songs in their native language. They sang in beautiful harmony as we sat in the circle under a cloudless early evening sky. We heard about how the songs were written, or how they were learned from other nations. After listening to a few songs we got up to dance. We were led in a simple stomp dance and then in the ducks-and-hunters dance by four young people from the Akwesasne Freedom School. They ranged in age from perhaps 10 to 15 and danced with the distracted ease of children their age. We did our best to follow their steps and move with the rhythms of the music.

The beating of the drum helped, the shaking of the rattles helped, but we still tripped over our own feet. One of the singers, a woman named Bear Fox, sang some of her own songs in Mohawk and English. We knew that she was a well known local artist and after hearing her we understood why.

That was our afternoon.

After supper we said goodbye to our host Bob Stevenson. He was leaving to attend a meeting of a national wildlife management committee. He was flying to the Inuit village of Kuujuaq the next morning.He left us with our heads spinning from all the new experiences of the past 48 hours. We'll be a while processing and reflecting on all we've done here. Our last full day on the island was filled with service projects and food. In the morning we completed a project that Bob had laid out for us as well as finishing the composting outhouse that we had brought. During the morning CeCe returned to the island with food. She had all the help she wanted in the kitchen as she made us traditional corn soup with deer meat and fiddle-heads, fry bread, fried fiddle-heads with bacon and fried moose meat. It was a little different from our usual bus food.

The next day was our last morning on the island. We stood in a circle of thanksgiving with our two remaining hosts, Stan and Scott. Both are young Mohawk men doing biological inventory work. The moose meat we had eaten the day before was a gift from Stan. We offered thanks for the many experiences and the extraordinary generosity we had experienced during our stay. Stan and Scott thanked us for coming to learn and wished us well as we moved on. Too soon it was over. A couple of quick boat trips to the mainland and we were back on the bus and headed south across the border with heads still spinning from our visit with the land and people of Akwesasne.

Bruce