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Langscape Magazine is a Terralingua Publication

Terralingua thanks the Reva and David Logan and the Kalliopeia Foundations for their generous support.

Editor: Luisa MaffiEditorial Assistant: Christine Arpita

Graphic Design: Imagine That Graphics

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ISSN 2371-3291 (print) ISSN 2371-3305 (digital)

© Terralingua 2016

Langscape Magazine is an extension of the voice of Terralingua. It supports our mission by educating the minds and hearts

about the importance and value of biocultural diversity.

We aim to promote a paradigm shift by illustrating biocultural diversity through scientific and traditional knowledge, within an appealing

sensory context of articles, stories and art.

ABOUT THE COVER PHOTOS

Front: Caleta Douglas, Navarino Island, Chile.

Cristina Calderón collecting mapi (rushes) for traditional basketry.

Photo: Oliver Vogel, 2015

Back: North Pindos, Greece

The return of the shepherds and their flocks.

Photo: Stamos Abatis, 2015

LANGSCAPE MAGAZINE

VOLUME 5, ISSUE 1,

Summer 2016

Voices of the Earth, Part 1

Table of Contents

. n a t u r e . l a n g u a g e . c u l t u r e .

Contributors ............................ 4

Editorial ...................................... 6

Special Feature: Biocultural Diversity at 20Biocultural Diversity: Reason, Ethics, and EmotionDavid Harmon ..........................................10

IdeasWhen Grasshopper Means Lightning:How Ecological Knowledge Is Encoded in Endangered LanguagesDavid Stringer ..........................................14

Naming the Dragonfly: Why Indigenous Languages Matter in the 21st CenturyJames D. Nations .....................................20

ReflectionsMelquiades’s Garden: Exploring the Cultivated Nature of Mexico’s Chinantla RegionAran Shetterly ..........................................25

Mother Tongues: Two Writers Explore the Words and Cultures that Shape their Connection to PlaceDawn Wink and Susan J. Tweit ................30

Wild Speech: Listening Through the Portal of ImaginationGeneen Marie Haugen .............................35

Freeway CoyoteLee Beavington ........................................40

DispatchesDe Prima: Stories of the Old Days in Umbria, the Green Heart of ItalyAnna Maffi ...............................................42

Cristina Calderón: Memories of My Yagan Grandmother in Tierra del Fuego, ChileCristina Zárraga .......................................48

A Blossoming Time at ÁLEṈENEȻ (Homeland): Reclaiming W̱SÁNEĆ (Saanich) Place Names on the West Coast of CanadaAlice Meyers in conversation with Earl Claxton Jr. (Thuh-thay-tun Kapilano) ...52

Rough Waves and Remembered Names in Haida GwaiiGraham Richard .......................................57

Louder Than Words IPintando La Raya: Indigenous Resistance and Biocultural Conservation Through Participatory VideoThor Edmundo Morales ............................63

ActionIt Takes Millennia to Make Ciccimmaretati: Cilento, Italy, as a Master of Biocultural WisdomDario Ciccarelli ........................................67

Louder Than Words IIOn the Move: Reawakening the Common Language of the Mediterranean’s Mobile PastoralistsDiverseEarth: Liza Zogib, Divya Venkatesh, and Sandra Spissinger .............................74

Volume 5 Issue 1 | 3

Lee BeavingtonLee Beavington is a doctoral student in Philosophy of Education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. He is also an author, photographer, and instructor for Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Amazon Field School. His research explores wonder in science education, poetic inquiry, and arts-based learning across the curriculum.

Dario CiccarelliDario Ciccarelli hails from Napoli, Italy. He has been a senior public servant since 2000. In 2003-2007 he was member of Italy’s Permanent Mission to the UN and the World Trade Organization in Geneva. He published Bioarchitettura Istituzionale (“Institutional Bioarchitecture”) in 2002 and Il Bandolo dell’Euromatassa (“Unraveling the Euro-tangle”) in 2014.

Earl Claxton Jr.Earl Claxton Jr. (Thuh-thay-tun Kapilano) is a celebrated Elder, storyteller and educator from the SȾÁ,UTW̱ (Tsawout) First Nation. Raised with deep respect for the land by his parents and grandparents, Earl inspires awe in his students and is looked upon fondly by all those who know him.

DiversEarthLiza Zogib, Sandra Spissinger and Divya Venkatesh are the principal co-creators of DiversEarth, an international NGO working at the special interface of nature, culture and spirit. As well as working to support local communities and their practices that benefit nature, DiversEarth also focuses on the protection, management and restoration of sacred natural sites.

David HarmonDavid Harmon is one of the co-founders of Terralingua and currently serves as executive director of the George Wright Society. He is the author of In Light of Our Differences: How Diversity in Nature and Culture Makes Us Human and co-authored Sharing a World of Difference with Luisa Maffi and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas.

Geneen Marie HaugenGeneen Marie Haugen, PhD, grew up a little wild, with a run-amok imagination. She guides experiential immersions toward the terrain of nature and psyche with Animas Valley Institute (www.animas.org). Her writing appears in Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth; Parabola Journal; Thomas Berry: Dreamer of the Earth, and numerous other publications.

Anna MaffiAnna Maffi teaches photography and graphic design in Rome, Italy. She has done freelance photography and participated in collective photo exhibits. She is drawn to nature and to the “signs” of human presence, of which she seeks to portray the more poetic or intriguing aspects. Anna has a special interest in peasant culture.

Alice MeyersAlice Meyers is a PhD candidate in the Language and Literacies Education program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Of Scottish, English, and German background, Alice is passionate about the links between nature, languages, and education. She enjoys spending time with her grandfather.

Contributors

4 | langscape magazIne summer 2016

Thor Edmundo MoralesThor Morales is a tireless traveler and photographer committed to biocultural conservation. During the last 4 years he has used media to unleash his passion for telling stories that contribute to a more diverse world. He facilitates participatory video workshops with indigenous communities, so that more stories are told independently and locally.

James D. NationsJames D. Nations, PhD, has spent 30 years establishing protected areas in Latin America and the United States. He is the author of The Maya Tropical Forest: People, Parks, and Ancient Cities (University of Texas Press, 2006) and the forthcoming Maya Lacandón: A Field Guide to the Language and Environment.

Graham Richard Graham Richard is a matrilineal descendant of K’ayts’aaw Naay of the Kyaanuuslii Kayxal (Star House of the Codfish People from Yan, Ravens), who are descendants of SGuuluu Jaad (Foam Woman). He resides in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Canada, where he works as a full-time writer for Haida Laas, the official publication of the Council of the Haida Nation.

Aran ShetterlyAran Shetterly is a writer and editor who has lived in Mexico since 2005. He founded an English-language magazine in Mexico and is the author of The Americano, a book about the Cuban Revolution. Currently, he is working on a book about the Chinantla region in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.

David StringerDavid Stringer is an associate professor of Second Language Studies at Indiana University in the USA. His main research area is the acquisition of lexical semantics and syntax, with a focus on universals of language and cognition. Other areas of research activity include multilingualism in postcolonial societies and biocultural diversity conservation.

Susan J. TweitA plant biologist in love with life, Susan J. Tweit is the author of twelve books, as well as essays and articles featured in publications including High Country News, Audubon, the Los Angeles Times, and Popular Mechanics. Her writing “melds the passion of a poet with the precision of a scientist,” and has won numerous awards.

Dawn WinkDawn is a writer and educator whose work explores the beauty and tensions of language, culture, and place. Author of Meadowlark, Teaching Passionately: What’s Love Got To Do With It? (with Joan Wink), and “Raven’s Time: Critical Literacy in the American Southwest,” Dawn is Director and Associate Professor of the Department of Education at Santa Fe Community College.

Cristina ZárragaCristina Zárraga was born in Chile and lives in Germany. The grand-daughter of Cristina Calderón, last native speaker of the Yagan language of Tierra del Fuego in southern Chile, she has been documenting her ancestral Yagan culture, mostly based on her grandmother’s knowledge. She is writing her grandmother’s biography, Cristina Calderón: Memorias de Mi Abuela Yagan.


It’s 2016, and that makes it two decades since Terralingua came into existence,

with a unique (back then, some might have said “quaint”) mission: to sustain biocultural diversity—the interconnected and interdependent diversity of life in nature and culture. Hard to believe, but true: it was 1996 when we were registered as a nonprofit, so this year we officially turn 20! And, while to us it may still seem like yesterday when we were taking our first baby steps in the world, we do feel as if we have now come of age.

“Biocultural diversity” may not be a household name quite yet, but the term and the concept it stands for have certainly penetrated not only academic discourse but also the ways in which many of us act in the “real world”. The idea of biocultural diversity is helping transform how we view our place in the world: we are part of nature, not separate from it, and our cultural and linguistic diversity is as crucial to Earth’s vitality and resilience as our planet’s diversity of plant and animal species and variety of ecosystems. Increasingly, we think of the web of life

as a biocultural web, in which biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity are mutually supportive and act synergistically to sustain the life systems that sustain us and all other life forms. When the biocultural bond is strong, the Earth is healthy, and so are we. When we lose that bond, the Earth is weakened, and we are weakened with her.

That also gives us a profoundly different and inescapable view of our responsibilities toward the web of life of which we are a part: if we do care for our future and the future of all life, we must radically rethink our activities, which have become so destructive of biocultural diversity, and redirect our energies toward supporting and enhancing our life-giving systems, in both nature and culture.

Terralingua co-founder David Harmon reflects on these very issues in his article for the Special Feature “Biocultural Diversity at Twenty”, with which we celebrate our “big birthday”. Looking back at our serendipitous (or call them fated) beginnings, Dave ponders the intellectual,

Editorial

Luisa Maffi

Voices of th e Earth

LISTENING TO THE

Voices of th e Earth


emotional, and ethical implications of the biocultural perspective. Among the achievements of that perspective he cites the fact that, by its very nature, it provides a framework in which people “can come to their own understandings about the significance of diversity in nature and culture” and to their own recognition that “a thriving interplay between nature and culture is essential to a good and vibrant life.” In his trademark philosophical mode, Dave also poses some thought-provoking questions about biocultural diversity as an “elemental gauge of the livingness of earth—the amount of life that we feel to be around us.” Life in both nature and culture, he muses, is an amazing paradox: the emergence and persistence of an always fragile and precarious order in a universe that tends toward increasing disorder. To recognize this paradox is to become aware that destroying diversity in nature and culture means disabling life at its very core. In many ways, and from many sources, we are learning to be wiser than that.

Another way in which we are marking our twentieth is by “going back to our roots” with this issue’s theme: “Voices of the Earth”. In 1996, we chose the name Terralingua to suggest two things at once: the language of the Earth—the voice of Mother Nature; and the languages of the Earth—the many voices of the world’s diverse peoples, which have evolved through intimate interaction with the Earth in each specific place. We wanted to hear from and about the Voices of the Earth, and so we did! Without a doubt, that’s one of the things that make my task as editor so deeply satisfying: to find myself immersed in a chorus of voices from all over the globe—all singing the same song, but in many different languages and with many local variations. A song of praise and reverence for life, a song of connectedness and reconnection, a song of reaffirmation and reclamation of our unity in biocultural diversity. That song runs like a musical thread through all of this issue’s articles, tightly binding together the intellectual, the emotional, and the ethical—the dimensions of biocultural diversity that Dave Harmon identifies.

In the “Ideas” section, a linguist and budding biocultural conservationist and an anthropologist and long-time biocultural conservationist offer

complementary perspectives on a crucial issue for our understanding of biocultural diversity: how language and the environment are connected through the expression of traditional ecological knowledge, and why that link matters. The linguist, David Stringer, guides us through the ways in which different languages encode local knowledge in their “mental lexicon”, as well as through myth, story, and song. He belongs to the vanguard of linguists who “are coming to realize that the revitalization of languages is intimately bound up with the preservation of the environments in which they are spoken”—and he is taking action on that realization. Together with his students, he is bringing the message to elementary school children, and the children are taking the message to heart. That gives him, and all of us, reason for hoping that our “current social apathy can be overcome.”

From his vantage point in the lush rainforest of southeastern Mexico, the anthropologist, James D. Nations, delves into the social and ecological changes that are threatening the Lacandon Maya’s way of life and putting their language at risk of slipping away. While working to help maintain the language and the cultural knowledge it embodies, Jim reflects on why keeping this (and any other) indigenous language alive does matter: as an inherent right of the speakers; as a reminder that there are many diverse ways of looking at the world that we should all respect and learn from; and as a way of preserving an invaluable store of knowledge about the forest and how to live sustainably in it. That is knowledge that the Lacandones themselves and the world at large can benefit from for the conservation of this remaining richly diverse corner of tropical forest that the Lacandones call home.

But how do we, in our busy everyday lives, develop and nurture this primordial awareness of our inextricable link with nature? How do we learn to filter out the noise and hear the voice of the Earth speaking to us in its multifarious place-based tongues? The writers in the “Reflections” section all establish or renew that bond and attune their ears to listening by moving deliberately through the land, or by reminiscing about times past in which moving through the


land gave them the language to connect with place. Aran Shetterly travels along remote paths in the Chinantla region of Mexico in search of “unspoiled” nature, only to discover that nature is with and within the Chinantec people every step of the way. Linguist Dawn Wink and biologist Susan J. Tweit converse about the ways in which both languages and plants are the “native tongues” of place—tongues that early immersion in their places of home taught them to understand and speak. Geneen Marie Haugen walks through the landscape opening herself up to “the images that arise unbidden when we are wholly present to the wilder world”. In so doing, she seeks to reawaken the language of imagination—the language, she muses (and rightly so, I think!), “whose disappearance may have greatest consequence for the human relationship with Earth.” And, through his poetry, Lee Beavington invites us to “embrace a contemplative receptivity” that alone can allow us to receive “other-than-human words”—including the words of the “last vestiges of urban nature”, words we can hear if, in the midst of urban commotion, we only still ourselves long enough to pay attention.

And then there are those human voices that are so connected to the other-than-human as to make the human/non-human distinction melt away—something increasingly rare in this brave new world of ever-growing human-to-human and human-machine electronic connectivity and mounting disconnect from nature. Which makes it all the more precious and touching to hear such timeless voices in the first two stories in “Dispatches”. Rarely, in fact, have I myself met people who are more intimately “of the Earth” than Marcello and Emma, an elderly farmer couple from the central Italian region of Umbria. My photographer sister Anna Maffi is their neighbor, and in a loving tribute in words and images she gathered their memories of de prima—a time gone by in which the farming life was hard-won, yet humanly rich and full of love and respect for the land that nourished you. Rooted in the land like their old olive trees, Marcello and Emma are living reminders that a place-connected life is not only possible; it is indispensable.

From the “green heart of Italy” to the wind-swept reaches of Tierra del Fuego in southern Chile, Cristina Zárraga introduces us to the moving life and words of her beloved grandmother, Cristina Calderón, known around the world as the last fluent speaker of the Yagan language. But granddaughter Cristina refuses to accept the self-fulfilling prophecy that when Grandma goes, the language (and much of the place-based Yagan culture) will go with her. Together, the two women are hard at work to document Yagan and the cultural knowledge the language conveys—bearing in mind, the granddaughter says, that “if a language can die, many times it can also be re-born in generations down the line.”

Language revitalization is indeed what we see at work in the next two “Dispatches” stories. Both stories focus on the remarkable revitalization experiences of First Nations in British Columbia, Canada, and both point to the power of reclaiming indigenous place names to reconnect people with the land and with the lived experience and ancestral knowledge that place names inscribe on the land. Ask “what’s in a name?” and indigenous peoples will tell you “a lot”. Alice Meyers and Earl Claxton Jr. introduce us to the renaming of home—“home”, in this case, being the traditional territory of the W̱SÁNEĆ Coast Salish people of southern Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, including Salt Spring Island from which I am writing this. Their article teaches us the central importance of revitalizing the language and renaming culturally important places for indigenous self-determination and for intergenerational transmission through place-based learning.

We see that very process in action in Graham Richard’s account of an eventful three-day sea voyage that a Haida-language team undertakes around the northwestern edge of Haida Gwaii, the magnificent archipelago off the north coast of British Columbia that is the Haida people’s homeland. Armed with the traditional knowledge stored in the minds of expert elders, they brave the turbulent waters their ancestors once plied with large sea-faring canoes to match up those mental maps with the actual lay of the land (and sea), and to then translate those matches into the contemporary high-tech language of geo-


referencing. Land and sea teach them about place names, and place names teach them about land and sea. Thus, concludes Graham, “each renders a more complete version of the other, and both are teachers.”

That and similar conclusions about the link between people and the land would resonate with the authors of the last three pieces in this issue. In the first of two “Louder Than Words” photo essays, Thor Edmundo Morales introduces us to the experience of two indigenous groups of northwestern Mexico, the Yaqui and the Seri, who learn to use and then teach participatory video techniques to address with film what matters to indigenous peoples the most: territory—“a simple word that embraces culture, nature, history, dignity, land, food, dreams, landscapes, mindsets.” Their story is another uplifting example of how indigenous peoples are taking charge to reclaim their identities, their languages, and their connection with place.

“Place as teacher” is the central theme of Dario Ciccarelli’s essay for the “Action” section. Dario’s visceral love for his own territory, Cilento in southern Italy, transpires as he takes us on a bold cavalcade through several millennia of history of this area of Magna Graecia, the region of Italy that was deeply influenced by Hellenic civilization. Along the way, we learn what the illustrious Magna Graecian philosopher Parmenides has to do with the traditional Cilentan farmers’ dish known as ciccimmaretati—the link going back to place as a master of biocultural wisdom. Viewing some “persistent connection to place” as an essential “seed” of civilization, Dario laments the disconnection that has arisen from and is fueled by place-less academic, political, and economic institutions. He envisions alliances among place-based and place-sensitive institutions to reverse the “business-driven and technology-driven processes [that] threaten to irreversibly devastate, in only one generation, an outstanding diversity ‘menu’ compiled over millennia.”

A “persistent connection to place”, the second “Louder Than Words” photo essay reminds us, doesn’t have to be a sedentary one. Drawing from the internationally acclaimed photography exhibition On the Move, Liza Zogib, Divya Venkatesh, and Sandra Spissinger celebrate the lives of mobile pastoralists in the Mediterranean, who in their diversity share a common language: the language of the landscapes through which they move with their animals over the seasons, and whose diversity they consciously maintain and enrich. Their mobile ways of life are threatened by the same forces that threaten the nature through which they move, and the authors wish for a future in which the rights of pastoralists will be valued, respected, and protected.

Will we see a diversity-friendly future for these and all other Voices of the Earth? Here a word I learned from Thor Morales comes into play: marabunta. Marabunta refers to army ants that swarm in the millions, unstoppably taking over the land. It also is the name that the Seri and Yaqui participatory video team gives to the army of indigenous filmmakers they aim to train. In my more hopeful (or perhaps more subversive) moments, I see a marabunta of diverse place-connected peoples forming, and unstoppably taking back the Earth.

Bioculturally yours,

Luisa MaffiLangscape Magazine Editor

Co-founder and Director,Terralingua


Not long ago, Luisa Maffi shared an email with me. It was from a writer, well-traveled and worldly, with a

background in both anthropology and biology. He had spent considerable time in Mexico walking the countryside, thinking in the open air, trying to unlock aspects of his experience that were eluding his understanding. “I was looking,” he said, “for some link between human culture and biodiversity when I came across your work. It was something of a revelation.”* This is not the first time that one of us has heard from someone struggling with a deeply felt but inchoate sense that there is a basic interconnectedness which defines existence. Someone who was looking, looking, looking for a way to bring the bewildering variety of life on earth into clear focus. To me, Terralingua’s highest achievement in its first two decades is having developed a vocabulary—of both words and ideas—that helps people speak to themselves and others about these sorts of feelings. Terralingua offers people a framework in which they can come to their own understandings about the significance of diversity in nature and culture.

The framework is not just intellectual and emotional, but ethical. Around the world, Terralingua has inspired discussion of the intrinsic value of biocultural diversity and why we should work to ensure its continuation. People are reaffirming—or realizing for the first time—that a thriving interplay between nature and culture is essential to a good and vibrant life. The worth of this flourishing, this benevolent abundance, goes far deeper than whatever monetary or other practical value it may have.[*Editor’s note: That was Aran Shetterly, whose article also appears in this issue.]

David Harmon

DiversityBIOCULTURAL

Reason, Ethics, and Emotion


Such lofty accomplishments were not what I imagined back in 1995, when I responded to a call for papers for a Symposium on Language Loss and Public Policy to be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I had been interested in the parallels and intersections between the natural world and human culture for some years, and had worked up some rather rudimentary data showing that the well-known latitudinal species gradient—the pattern in which biodiversity, or species richness, increases as you move away from the poles and towards the tropics—is similar, often remarkably similar, to the distribution of linguistic diversity. My aim was simply to share these data, and some tentative ideas explaining them, with a professional meeting of linguists to see if the arguments would fly. Fortunately for me, the organizers accepted my proposal. So I went and gave a paper called “Losing Species, Losing Languages: Connections Between Linguistic and Biological Diversity.” It was, if memory serves, pretty well received by the audience—although, as I expected, there were some skeptics who didn’t like the comparison.

After the session was over I was sitting in the lecture hall when an audience member came up to me, practically bursting with excitement. My life was about to change, because it was Luisa Maffi. From her training in anthropology and ethnobiology she was well aware (as I was not) of the foundational work of the International Society of Ethnobiology and its declaration of an “inextricable link between cultural and biological diversity.” She had been looking for facts and figures to support the worldview embodied by that declaration, and my tables comparing species and language richness country-by-country, and cross-mappings of them, had fired her enthusiasm—which was as contagious as it was unquenchable. Before we left Albuquerque the idea for Terralingua had been born.

Now, twenty years on, and thanks in great part to Terralingua and its supporters and collaborators, the concept of biocultural diversity is solidly embedded in the world of academic research and debate. But more important than that, it is also the focus of a community of stewards, “the individuals, institutions and small communities whose role and passion is to care for, embody, perform and explain knowledge, relationship, lands, species, art forms and indeed all manner of beautiful unusual biocultural things across the generations.” These words, from another leading light of the biocultural diversity movement, the Christensen Fund, emphasize the strong strain of self-reliance that animates practitioners. Around the globe there are growing numbers of people who “actively maintain what they care for alive in the world as well as in the human imagination.”

Darrell Kipp was one of them. Kipp, who died in 2013 at the age of 69, co-founded the Piegan Institute, which is dedicated to preserving the language of his people, the indigenous Blackfeet Nation of Canada and the USA. In a guidebook widely used by other Native American language activists, Kipp hammered home that the only obstacle to setting forth was one’s own feelings of inadequacy and helplessness:

Don’t ask permission. Go ahead and get started, don’t wait even five minutes. Don’t

wait for a grant. Don’t wait, even if you can’t speak the language. Even if you have

only ten words. Get started. Teach those ten words to someone who knows another ten

words. In the beginning, I knew thirty words, then fifty, then sixty. One day I woke up and

realized I was dreaming in Blackfeet.

Kipp knew that anyone can contribute to the continuing flourishing of biocultural diversity. No credentials necessary; the only prerequisite is that you must care. A common respect for the value of diversity is what allows people from divergent viewpoints to work together, even if their viewpoints represent understandings and truth-claims about the world that are at odds with one another.

“...anyone can contribute to the continuing flourishing of

biocultural diversity. No credentials necessary; the only prerequisite is

that you must care.”


Here’s a personal example. My own orientation to the world is pretty much a conventional Western scientific/rationalist stance. I interpret things through a neo-Darwinian evolutionary lens, and I take a physicalist view of what constitutes reality. That’s my framework for understanding things. It certainly runs counter to the orientations of many of the friends and colleagues I’ve met over the years. To some, my views are nothing short of anathema because they consider them reductionist. However, because I recognize that my way of thinking is not the only valid way, or the only worthwhile way, I am able to work with and learn from people even though we may disagree, sometimes fundamentally so, over what constitutes “the facts”—not to mention their significance.

To me, a large part of the significance of biocultural diversity is that it is an elemental gauge of the livingness of earth—the amount of life that we feel to be around us. Let me try to explain what I mean, from my rationalist perspective.

When we look out upon our planet—no matter where, including the most desolate environments imaginable—we see a veritable carpet of living things, a blossoming, buzzing profusion of beings, each busily engaged in the business of going on. This primal struggle to continue, this ur-impetus, is how the eminent physicist Erwin Schrödinger defined life itself. “What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive?” he asked. And then, in answer: “When it goes on ‘doing something,’ moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, and that for a much longer period than we would expect an inanimate piece of matter to ‘keep going’ under similar circumstances.” This unceasing striving is necessary to maintain a fundamental level of physical order, which is the core condition of life itself.

If we restrict our gaze to one set of earth’s beings, the ones we call human beings, we find that much of what we do is the same: laboring to stay alive. But on top of this routine work our species is distinguished by a proliferation, an almost wanton profligacy, of creativity. An urge to create that is the hallmark of the human life trajectory. Our creativity is registered in what my collaborator Jonathan Loh

has called the “second flowering of the tree of life”—the emergence of human cultural evolution. Other species have culture, and we need to recognize that. But ours is the only one to have created such an astonishing variety of culture, embodied in languages, beliefs, behaviors, and more.

So life, and the order its variety represents, is a ground truth of existence. But working against this biocultural generative power there is a countervailing truth: death—the ultimate disordering— comes in many varieties, too. Whether by disease or accident or senescence, it bursts forth from every nook and cranny of earthly existence, striking all alike without reference to justice or timeliness. The reason why stems from the ironclad Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in a closed system entropy either remains constant or—what is overwhelmingly more likely—increases over time. Entropy is not a force, like gravity. It is a measure, a measure of disorder in the overall physical universe or a portion thereof, and is stated as a quantity: the higher the entropy, the more the disorder.

In fact, the inexorable fate of any individual organism is to reach a point where it is no longer capable expending energy (which it must constantly extract from the surrounding environment) in order to stave off the natural tendency for entropy to increase. At that point, the organism reaches thermal equilibrium with its surroundings—which is to say, it goes stone-cold dead. Indeed, such a state of thermodynamic quiescence is how Schrödinger defined death from the standpoint of physics. Life, then, is simply the temporary preservation of order against the universe’s tendency towards increasing disorder, as measured by entropy.

Similarly, human culture can be thought of as the intentional creation of order. This act of creation is not free-floating and generalized. Rather, it’s the product of a specific group of people who are situated in a temporal flow of evolutionary change. Human beings need to make culture in order to fend

“The more we come to appreciate the variety of life in nature and culture, the

deeper this feeling of livingness goes.”


off cosmic disorder. The alternative, as Yeats famously lamented, is to descend into “mere anarchy” where “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Still, the cultures we make are not immutable: they are handed down to our descendants who recalibrate them according to their own understanding of what constitutes the order they need. That understanding, while not unchallengeable, ought to be at its core autonomous. Every culture and language community ultimately has the right to self-determination, while at the same time being open to critique from other cultural viewpoints.

So then, biocultural diversity—the evolutionary marriage of nature’s fecundity with human creativity—is self-evidently a badge of existential success. All of the “beautiful unusual biocultural things” are rare—no, very rare—examples of things in the world that are in the world precisely because they have so far managed to stave off the ultimate disorder that is death.

My conjecture is that we, on some deep level, sense this success and register it as a feeling of joyfulness at being alive. The more we come to appreciate the variety of life in nature and culture, the deeper this feeling of livingness goes. I think this feeling, or something very much akin to it, is what motivates biocultural stewards.

Now, I realize that someone could be dubious about my arriving at such a conclusion through, as they might see it, a rationalistic totting-up of a cosmic ledger book where entropy is in one column and biocultural diversity is in another. I hope I will be understood as meaning that the process is nothing so simple as that. But equally I hope that defenders of biocultural diversity will always be open to the fertile interchange of perspectives that comes when Western science and other ways of understanding encounter one another.

And—literally as I sat down to finish off this essay—my inbox thudded with the receipt of a perfect example of what I mean. I was sent an interesting academic paper, exploring whether cultural relativism is impeding nature conservation (as practiced from a Western scientific perspective). It was published along with a vigorous response from a biocultural perspective, citing Luisa Maffi among others. The authors of these papers are in deep disagreement, yet they have produced a respectful, useful exchange of views.

As I was reading the biocultural response, it occurred to me that twenty years ago such a thing might not even have been possible. The fact that it now is—that the perspective of biocultural diversity is necessarily part of the discussion—is, I think, something we can credit in no small measure to Terralingua. And for that, we all ought to be grateful, no matter what our orientation to the world may be.

Further Reading Dickman, A., et al. (2015). The moral basis for conservation: How is it affected by culture? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 13(6), 325–331.

Dickman, A., et al. (2016). The authors’ reply. doi:10.1002/fee.1223.

Shiel, D., et al. (2016). The moral basis for conservation—reflections on Dickman et al. doi:10.1002/fee.1224.

Schrödinger, E. (1946). What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Ye a t s , W. B . ( 1 9 1 9 ) . T h e S e co n d Coming [poem], Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989). Poetry Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172062


Endangered Languages and Biocultural Diversity Conservation

Just over twenty years ago, many linguists were shocked into a new sense of urgency

when Michael Krauss wrote his classic short article on the status of the world’s languages, in which he lamented that linguistics was about to “go down in history as the only science that presided obliviously over the disappearance of 90% of the very field to which it is dedicated”. A few years later, Krauss played a role in the founding of Terralingua with Luisa Maffi and David Harmon, and during the last two decades, there has been a welcome surge of involvement by linguists in the movement to support endangered traditional communities as they strive to maintain their ancestral languages. Just as the field of biodiversity conservation has shifted focus from the protection of individual species to the protection of ecosystems, more linguists are coming to realize that the revitalization of languages is intimately bound up with the preservation of the environments in which they are spoken, and are starting to share in a more unified vision of biocultural diversity conservation.

The current mass extinction of both languages and species has given rise to a vibrant, interdisciplinary movement with the goal of maintaining and revitalizing linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity on the only planet we will ever call home. One key question in this endeavor, from a global perspective, is how ecological knowledge is encoded in endangered languages. Secrets of local ecosystems can often be unlocked if communities are supported in their efforts to maintain their languages, as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) has been shown time and again to be linguistically shaped and organized. It is worth pausing to consider how exactly this is achieved, so that we may meaningfully ask what is lost when a language is lost, and what is gained when language use is rekindled. Pursuing these questions leads us to appreciate the beauty and ingenuity of human language, as a finite set of tools gives rise to an almost infinite range of expressions of biocultural knowledge.

The Mental Lexicon as a Storehouse of Traditional Ecological Knowledge

In mainstream linguistics, the mental lexicon is generally considered to be more than just a list of vocabulary in memory: it contains free morphemes (both content words like book and function words like some), bound morphemes (elements like un- or -able in unbelievable), constructions (the more [I read], the more [I understand]), and idioms (to spill the beans). The most obvious linguistic

How Ecological Knowledge is Encoded in Endangered Languages

When Grasshopper Means Lightning

David Stringer


encoding of TEK is in vocabulary that refers to objects, substances, events, processes, and states in the natural world. For example, the Kayapó of Brazil distinguish 56 types of bees, grouped in 15 families, as described by ethnobiologist Darrell Posey. Following scientific examination, these 56 types were subsequently divided into 66 species, in terms of genetic taxonomy. However,

in many ways the Kayapó folk classification system is richer in ecological information. While scientific taxonomy gives us broad anatomical description and information about species relatedness, Kayapó classification tells us much more about how different bees behave, about their role in the local environment, and about human interaction with them. This kind of system, which all languages have in one form or another, is called a folk taxonomy. In this case, names can depend on behavioral characteristics (e.g., flight

patterns, aggression, sound in flight, places typically visited), nest geometry and ecological niche (preferred nest site, position of entrance, characteristics of the entrance structure, whether found in flood forest, humid forest, or savannah), physical characteristics (e.g., shape, color, smell, markings, type of wings, secretions), or use to humans (e.g., quality and quantity of honey, quality of resins or wax, edibility of pollen or larvae). Such classification, based on observation in ecological context, is arguably more relevant to conservation efforts than scientific typology.

Less evident to non-linguists is the fact that ecological knowledge can also be encoded in grammatical morphemes that often cannot stand alone as vocabulary items. For example, languages use various kinds of functional morphemes to classify nouns referring to things in the world. In English, objects and substances can be differentiated by articles, quantifiers, and plural marking (e.g., I saw {chicken / a chicken / some chicken / chickens} on the table).

“Linguists are coming to realize that the revitalization of languages

is intimately bound up with the preservation of the environments

in which they are spoken.”

Above: Kayapó women in the Amazon rainforest. Photo: Cristina Mittermeier, 2007


This system does not even approach the complexity of noun classification that some languages display. As documented by Laurence Krute and Stanford Zent, the Piaroa language (Venezuela) has over 100 noun classifiers, about 75 of which are used with nouns referring to plants or plant parts, specifying botanical or ecological information. Immediately following the noun there is a classifier position that must be obligatorily filled, with few exceptions. For example, the addition of –rœ classifies the object as a kind of hanging, branching-stemmed fruit bunch; if –k’œ is used, the object is understood to be a rosette-shaped herbaceous plant; and if –ya is added, the substance is categorized as a thin, free-flowing sap.

Sometimes the classification of nouns is not marked directly on the noun itself, but on numerals only when things are counted, or on possessives when ownership comes into play. Thus in Minangkabau (Indonesia), numerical classifiers are used to differentiate between seed-like objects (marked with incek), flowers or leaves with stalks (tangkai), and clumps of plants (kalupah), while Baniwa (Northwest Amazonia) has a special numerical classifier (-ʃa) for types of

excrement, because of the importance of identifying animal droppings when hunting game. The linguistics of possession can also be revealing. In the Tinrin language (New Caledonia), we cannot simply say “my” or “your”, but must specify the type of thing possessed, e.g., my-plantable thing, my-burnable thing, my-chewable thing, or my-edible-fruit thing. In Hawaiian,

classifiers of possession indicate whether the noun is alienable (separable from the speaker, possessed by choice) or inalienable (inseparable). Thus parents and body parts are inalienable because we do not choose to be born or to have a nose; however, we do choose whether or not to have a spouse or children, so these are alienable. Interestingly, land, as in many other Pacific languages, is inalienable.

“The current mass extinction of both languages and species has given rise to a

vibrant, interdisciplinary movement with the goal of maintaining and revitalizing

linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity on the only planet we will ever call home.”


Which other components of the language faculty might be relevant for the encoding and transmission of TEK? While the notion that TEK can be encoded in the grammar of languages is quite widespread, many linguists consider syntax and phonology to be largely independent of culture and environment. For example, so-called V2-languages (which require the second constituent of a sentence to be a finite verb) are found in both the cities of the Netherlands and the high mountain villages of Kashmir. Serial verb constructions (e.g., Jojo take flowers give Ama, meaning something like Jojo gives Ama flowers) can be found in the forests of Upper Amazonia, the sands of the Kalahari Desert, and the busy streets of Beijing. Similarly in phonology, use of paired, or “geminate”, consonants is found from Italy to Japan; stress-timed languages are found from the Faroe Islands to Thailand; and attempts to tie tone languages to climate have foundered when examined more closely. As linguist John McWhorter puts it, grammar is like a slow-moving, ever-changing lava lamp, with grammatical phenomena from the same universal language faculty disappearing and emerging in particular languages over time. From this perspective, biocultural knowledge is encoded not in the rules of grammar, but in free and bound morphemes in the mental lexicon.

Transmission of TEK Through Myth, Story, and Song

As we have seen, the mental lexicon can be extremely culture-specific and incredibly sophisticated. However, equally important in many cultures for the linguistic transmission of ecological knowledge are the narratives found in stories, myths and ceremonial recitation. Children often begin developing TEK even before they actually participate in hunting, fishing, or gathering sustenance, through immersion in oral culture. David Harrison discusses several examples drawn from anthropological research in his book When Languages Die. According to a transcription by Katherin van Winkle Palmer, the god Honné told the Chehalis people of Washington State USA, exactly how far up the river different types of salmon would swim, and when they would spawn. All those listening to the creation myth would hear how Squawahee, the steelhead salmon, would swim the furthest up the river

and live longer than other species; he would ascend in fall, stay all winter, and then spawn in springtime when the drumming of the pheasant could be heard.

The Wayampi people of the Upper Amazon encode ecological knowledge in song. As related by Allen Jensen, in the course of festivals held at specific times of year, participants evoke in great detail, through dance, music, and recitation, the behavior of particular birds, mammals, fish, insects, reptiles, and plants, sometimes tying such observations to their agricultural calendar. In the festival of the tarutaru (Dark-billed Cuckoo), when a breeze blows at the beginning of the dry season, and the stars of the Pleiades appear in the early morning, the tarutaru drinks fermented manioc and

Facing Page: Ramly, a Minangkabau man, gazing high into the forest canopy. Photo: J.J. Kohler, 2015

Above: The White-Throated Toucan, chief of the toucans (and of one fruit-eating falcon). Photo: Ingrid Macedo, 2010


starts to sing; he continues singing until the sweet potatoes begin to sprout, and the Pleiades appear in the evening sky. Bird families in the Wayampi language may diverge from scientific groupings, but just as in the case of Kayapó bee classification, folk taxonomy encodes information that might otherwise slip through the net. For example, the White-throated Toucan is the chief, or prototypical member, of a group that includes not only other toucans, but also a certain type of falcon. This bird differs from the others in appearance, but corresponds in terms of shared behavior, because, unusually for a falcon, it is a fruit-eater, or frugivore.

An example fusing both lexical and narrative encoding of ecological knowledge is found in the Bininj Gunwok group of languages in Western

Arnhem Land (Australia), as described by Nicholas Evans. In these languages, the term alyurr is used to describe beautiful orange and blue grasshoppers, known as the children of the lightning; the term is also used for the bush where the creatures can be found, and sometimes for the lightning itself. They come out to seek their father, Namarrgon, the Lightning Man, thus heralding the coming of the

rains, at the time of year when wild red apples, green plums and black plums can be gathered. In this case, the lexicon encodes the relationship between the insect, the plant, and the weather; the ancient lore provides a sign for the changing seasons; and the appearance of the grasshoppers is linked to the availability of a reliable food source.

While the encoding of ecological knowledge in the mental lexicon of a given language is obviously crucial in understanding the relationship between peoples and places, the oral transmission of biocultural knowledge through story and song appears to be of equal importance in many cultures.

The Biocultural Diversity Community of Practice as a Folk Taxonomy

As more linguists answer the call to participate in efforts to stem the tide of language death and shore up biocultural diversity, it is worth asking what contribution newcomers can make to this interdisciplinary undertaking. Clearly, fieldwork is paramount. Secondly, linguistic analysis can supplement primary fieldwork. Thirdly, most indigenous languages are found in multilingual contexts, and where schools are involved, bilingual education programs must be carefully managed so as to preserve original languages and respect linguistic human

rights. A further educational challenge is to cultivate consciousness in society in general, especially in younger generations.

A community outreach project of this type was initiated last year at Indiana University, as undergraduate students presented slides and interacted with over 600 elementary school children, mostly aged between eight and ten years old. Some children expressed wonder at the beauty of diversity: “I’m so happy… I didn’t know about all these animals and people. The world is so colorful. I’m too amazed.” Others expressed horror at

Above: Alyurr, child of the lightning, whose appearance signals the coming of the rains and the availability of several kinds

of wild fruit. Photo: Jutta Pryor, 2010


the wholesale destruction of habitat: “If people know that cutting down the forest means they will kill all these animals and force the people to leave, why do they do it anyway... Why don’t they care? Why?” They recognized the need for global support of indigenous communities: “I never really thought about this, but humans are endangering humans”; and many felt motivated to action: “Maybe we could fund a project for replanting so many trees and eventually grow a forest.” That these children readily understood supposedly complex issues of biocultural diversity was evident from their heartfelt comments, and gives reason for hope that current social apathy can be overcome.

A final consideration for linguists entering this growing community of practice is that we must all be prepared to step out of the narrow confines of our particular fields and adopt an interdisciplinary mindset, being open to new ideas and allowing for different perspectives. In order to be maximally effective, the biocultural diversity movement must be welcoming. Like Wayampi birds, we should define ourselves not only in terms of (intellectual) ancestry, but also in terms of contemporary behavior and ecological niches, with perches in the tree for both toucans and fruit-eating falcons.

Further ReadingEvans, N. (2009). Dying words: Endangered languages and what they have to tell us. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Krauss, M. (1992). The world’s languages in crisis. Language, 68 (1), 4-10.

Harrison, K. D. (2007). When languages die: The extinction of the world’s languages and the erosion of human knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press.

Nettle, D. & Romaine, S. (2000). Vanishing voices: The extinction of the world’s languages. New York: Oxford University Press.

Posey, D. A. & Plenderleith, K. (2002). Kayapó ethnoecology and culture. New York: Routledge.

Zent, S. (2009). Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and biocultural diversity: A close-up look at linkages, delearning trends and changing patterns of transmission. In P. Bates, M. Chiba, S. Kube & D. Nakashima (Eds.), Learning and Knowing in Indigenous Societies Today (pp. 39-57). Paris: UNESCO.

Above: David Stringer’s students from Indiana University discuss biocultural diversity with 10-year old elementary school children

in November 2015. Photo: David Stringer, 2015


Chiapas, Mexico, 2015

I spent the morning learning the names of dozens of dragonflies and

skippers, the translucent-winged insects that flit along the edges of the crystalline-blue lakes where the Lacandón Maya live in the rainforest of southeastern Mexico. Chan K’in José Valenzuela, my 80-year old Lacandón friend, has been teaching me about rainforest animals and plants since I first came here in 1974. He also taught me to speak northern Lacandón, and now decades later, he’s helping me finalize a field guide to the language and environment.

Worn out from recording insect names, I said goodbye to Chan K’in at noon and walked down the dirt road toward the rest of the settlement with his 11-year-old grandson, Yuk—“Brocket Deer” in Lacandón. Yuk’s long, black hair flowed to his waist over a white, cotton tunic that extended to his knees. Dressed as he was, walking in the shadow of the rainforest, he would have looked at home here on any day during the past several centuries.

But Yuk and his grandfather live in a community in the midst of a wrenching transition, with older Lacandones gripping the

old ways with determined tenacity, and some of the young ones rushing bewildered into the confusion of the 21st century. The tension comes in the form of roads, electricity, missionaries, and a dominant society that communicates in Spanish. Meanwhile, the forest grows in the background as it has for a thousand years.

On a bush by the side of the road, I spotted a diaphanous dragonfly with dazzling, turquoise-blue wing tips. I turned to Yuk and asked, Ba’ax u k’aaba lati’? “What’s the name of that one?”

James D. Nations

Why Indigenous Languages Matter in the 21st Century

Naming the Dragonfly

Above Left: Chan K'in José Valenzuela uses a machete to carve a bird bolt arrow. Photo: James D. Nations, 1975

Above Right: Atenacio and his wife, Nuk, pause during a trip to buy kerosene in the years before roads and

electricity reached their Lacandón community. Photo: James D. Nations, 1977


Without hesitating he said, Chan mejen avión, “Little bitty airplane,” using the Spanish word for airplane, avión.

His grandfather Chan K’in can name 281 plants, 185 birds, and 114 insects on sight, but he doesn’t have a word for airplane. He calls them ku tal ka’anan, “they come from up high.”

But his grandson Yuk is growing up in a world punctuated by Spanish classes in a government-built school and afternoons on the floor of the community president’s house, watching the Disney channel on Spanish-language TV.

“Little bitty airplane,” he said. And I’m thinking, this is how native languages slip away.

Lacandones are skilled at creating new words as their environment changes around them. Kulubi, which means “it comes down,” became the word for helicopter the first time that one landed in a Lacandón settlement. Even as the children learn these new words, though, some of them are not learning the old ones. This is hardly their fault—more an indication that the world around them is changing. Less nature, more television, fewer dragonflies, more airplanes.

What does it matter that an 11-year-old Maya boy is failing to learn the words of his grandfather? What good is an indigenous language in a world of national economies, cell phones, and airplanes?

The answers to those questions are many. The real question is: where to begin?

PracticalityBegin with the people and what they know. When

Classic Maya civilization disintegrated 1,200 years ago, the Maya left behind hundreds of stone cities to be slowly absorbed by the forest. The millions of people who died during the collapse were joined centuries later by millions more who fell victim to pandemics introduced by European invaders.

But the Maya held on. When Spanish missionaries and soldiers probed Maya territory for slaves and converts during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, remnant groups retreated farther into the forest, blending into wilderness to remain unconquered and alive. The Spaniards called one of these groups “Lacandones.” But the people called themselves Jach Winik, “Real People,” and they still live today in the rainforest that carries their adopted name, the Lacandón Rainforest of southeastern Mexico.

The Lacandones are heirs to a wealth of traditional knowledge gleaned by their ancestors from a thousand years of daily life in a humid, hostile world. Most of their forest is gone now, transformed into cattle pastures and re-growth by invading ranchers and farmers, but they’ve preserved a language rich in oral history and awareness of nature.

Numbering 1,100 women, men, and children, the Lacandón Maya live in dispersed communities—Mensäbäk, Naja, and Lacanja’ Chan Sayab/Betél—inside three protected patches of tropical forest. Although their population is growing, the Lacandones’ native language

Above: Pepe Castillo and Chan K'in José Valenzuela sculpt a canoe from a mahogany tree using axes, an adze, and machetes.

Photo: James D. Nations, 1976


is endangered by the arrival of television, intermarriage with Tseltal Maya and Spanish-speaking women and men from neighboring migrant communities, and the education of Lacandón children, in Spanish, in primary schools built by the Mexican government.

Basic point: The families live within the forest, rather than replacing the forest in order to live. Among other things, they are consummate tropical forest farmers. Many farmers in the tropics practice destructive slash-and-burn agriculture that eradicates forest, produces meager yields, and leaves devastation in its wake. By

contrast, the Lacandón Maya produce abundant crops while still conserving the ecosystems that surround their fields and sustain their lives. A sophisticated form of agroforestry, Lacandón farming produces large harvests of maize, beans, squash, and tree crops—simultaneously—on the same plot of land.

The secrets to their success are preserved in their native language. Even the term for a garden plot at the point of being “abandoned”—pak che’ kol, “planted tree garden”—conveys the recipe for its continuing bounty. Rather than leave behind a garden plot after five to seven years of food crops, the family plants it in trees—cacao, rubber, fruit, avocados, and balsa—and continues to harvest food and fiber for another five to 15 years, while the area regrows in forest. Meanwhile, they clear a previous pak che’ kol to grow their beans and corn. When that plot begins to sprout weeds, the family returns to the first site—now overtaken by forest—and begins the cycle anew. Using this

patterned rotation, a Lacandón family can grow the food they need on 10 hectares of land during an entire agricultural career.

Agronomists worried about population growth and deforestation have begun to transmit Lacandón ecological knowledge to farmers in other regions of the tropics—with the Lacandones’ permission. The first investigation of Lacandón agriculture prompted a flurry of new research that analyzes Lacandón ecological knowledge to advance developments in agroforestry, restoration ecology, and ethnobiology. One promising study focused on the planting of

fast-growing balsa trees (Ochroma pyramidale) to subvert the growth of invasive species that are plaguing other farmers trying to grow crops in rainforest environments.

Among the reasons native languages matter is this: Native languages crystallize the lessons of centuries of daily trial and error. Lose the language, lose the knowledge. Forget the past, forego a better future.

ConservationIn 2012, research on the overlap of endangered

languages and endangered environments revealed that the biologically richest and most threatened locations on the planet are also the most diverse and most seriously

Above Left: Koj, Northern Lacandón woman, spins cotton thread for a bracelet she will give to a new mother and baby as a gesture

of good will. Photo: James D. Nations, 1977

Above Centre: Mari Gutiérrez López, Tseltal Maya, toasting cacao beans, married a Lacandón Maya man. They speak to their

children in Tseltal and Spanish. Photo: James D. Nations, 2014

Facing Page: Armando Valenzuela, Lacandón Maya, earned an associate’s degree in forestry with the aid of Amado Seis, right,

who teaches him rainforest ecology. Photo: James D. Nations, 2015


threatened for native languages. In the 35 global biodiversity hotspots—the Lacandón Rainforest among them—researchers counted 3,202 languages, almost half the languages still spoken on Earth. They concluded that “Losing these languages can lead to the loss of environmental information that becomes inaccessible as the words, culture, and language disappear. In many cases, it appears that the conditions that wipe out species also wipe out languages.”

The Lacandones live surrounded by ecosystems vibrant with plants, animals, and the interactions between them. Not surprisingly, this is reflected in their language. The Lacandón language was born from the environment—the words come from the sounds that animals make, from the colors of the forest at a distance, from the murmur of the wind on a tropical lake. To learn Lacandón is to immerse yourself in ecology. Language captures the environment that it lives in, and we see the environment through the words the land gave birth to.

The Lacandón language also transmits the moral rules for human life in the forest—how to avoid cruelty when hunting animals and be aware that trees have souls and suffer when they’re felled. Corn is alive and, as a gift from

the gods, must not be wasted. There are areas in the forest and on the cliffs around the lakes that are the homes of gods, and woe be the person who violates them.

I worked for several years with a Lacandón farmer named José Camino Viejo, who had been farming the same three-hectare plot of land for 12 years. Off the edge of his weedless garden, his wife, Koj, washed their cotton tunics in a small lake they shared with a single crocodile. “Otsi ayim,” he said to me once. “Poor crocodile. I would never kill it.”

When I pressed him, he said: “Outsiders come into the forest, and they cut the mahogany and kill the birds and burn everything. Then they bring in cattle, and the cattle eat the forest. I think they don’t listen to the forest. I just plant my crops and weed them and watch the birds, and I watch the forest to know when to plant my corn. When the mahogany tree flowers in the spring, I seed the corn and wait for the rains to come. As for me, I guard the forest.”

The traditional Lacandón god, K’anank’ax, “the Guardian of the Forest,” speaks to Lacandones of the 21st century through a battery-powered walkie-talkie. In 2001, Mexico established a new policy that allows indigenous groups with communal territory to protect their land as Flora and Fauna Protection Areas. Communities are required to determine their goals, agree on the rules, and hire an attorney to file

official documents. Working with Mexican and U.S. conservationists, the northern Lacandones completed these steps to create today’s Área de Protección de Flora y Fauna Mensäbäk and Área de Protección de Flora y Fauna Naja. The third Lacandón community, Lacanja’ Chan Sayab/Betel, already was protected in the federally-created Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve.

Together, the two northern Lacandón communities, Mensäbäk and Naja, are responsible for 72 square kilometers of Mexico’s last remaining tropical rainforest. Add in Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve and protection extends to 3,384 square kilometers.

“Like the people themselves, indigenous languages have an

inherent right to exist.”


As a result, the Lacandones have legal and moral authority to patrol their forest lands, evict squatters and poachers, and confiscate resources such as floral palms and timber that are illegally harvested. Every morning in the community of Mensäbäk, nine Lacandón forest rangers spread out through the forest, talking with each other via walkie-talkie in their native language. They carry no weapons, but if they run into trouble, they call radio community-based state police—also Lacandones—who rush to the scene with rifles and pistols that they are well-trained to use.

The result: Wildlife populations are higher today on Lacandón lands than at any time since I first went there 40 years ago. The Lacandones have even reintroduced one species, the white-tailed deer, which had been wiped out in the area.

A corollary benefit of the Lacandones’ conservation ethic comes in the form of cash-bearing ecotourists, the vast majority of them Mexican, who visit their communities to row across shimmering blue lakes in a dugout canoe with the original inhabitants of the rainforest who, as they row, call across the waves to one another in their native tongue.

Inherent RightOne more reason why indigenous languages matter:

Like the people themselves, indigenous languages have an inherent right to exist. They grace the world with diversity, with spiritual meaning, with views of the universe that extend beyond our world of buildings and finance and have the power to teach us how to be better people in a

better world. Who among us, of rational mind, would willingly give that up? Or sit by and watch it die?

We already know some ways to help indigenous people keep their languages alive. They know additional ways, if we’re willing to help put them into effect.

The planet’s indigenous families are reaching out to us in their many native voices. What they’re saying speaks of survival, resilience, respect for the natural world, and respect for one another.

It is not enough to simply listen. We should be standing beside them letting them lead us forward.

Further ReadingCONANP (2006a). Programa de Conservación y Manejo Área de Protección de Flora y Fauna Metzabok. México, D.F.: Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas. Retrieved from http://www.conanp.gob.mx/que_hacemos/pdf/programas_manejo/metzabok_final.pdf

CONANP (2006b). Programa de Conservación y Manejo Área de Protección de Flora y Fauna Nahá. México, D.F.: Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas. Retrieved from http://www.conanp.gob.mx/que_hacemos/pdf/programas_manejo/naha_final.pdf

Douterlungne, D., Levy-Tacher, S., Golicher, D., & Danobeytia, F. (2011). Applying Indigenous Knowledge to the Restoration of Degraded Tropical Rain Forest Clearing Dominated by Bracken Fern. Restoration Ecology, 18, 322-329.

Gorenflo, L., Romaine, S., Mittermeier, R., & Walker-Painemilla, K. (2012). Co-occurrence of Linguistic and Biological Diversity in Biodiversity Hotspots and High Biodiversity Wilderness Areas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(21), 8032–8037. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1117511109.

Nations, J. D. (2006). The Maya Tropical Forest: People, Parks, and Ancient Cities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Nations, J. D. & Nigh, R. (1980). The Evolutionary Potential of Lacandón Maya Sustained-Yield Tropical Forest Agriculture. Journal of Anthropological Research, 36(1), 1-30.

Above: Chan K'in stands on the hilltop used by Lacandón forest guards to prevent wildlife poaching and land encroachments in his

family's community. Photo: James D. Nations, 2008


Melquiades’s GardenA taxi collected me at my hotel in Oaxaca at

3:30 AM and whisked me through the silent streets of the Mexican city to the office of a small conservation NGO. A van pulled up and I squeezed on, wedging myself and a bulky backpack between half-asleep passengers on the back seat. I was the last aboard, joining ten people returning from the capital to their home in the state’s remote Chinantla region. The Chinantecs carried with them a bounty of hundreds of pounds of cheese, yogurt, bread, toilet paper and soft drinks, which the driver had lashed to the two middle seats. Atop the heap of store-bought goods, a bright orange plastic Bambi, no doubt a gift for someone’s child, watched over us with glow-in-the-dark eyes.

As the million twinkling lights of the central valley receded below us, we climbed into the Sierra Madre mountains, shivering our way along the twisting roads into an icy dawn drizzle.

My destination was the town of Santa Cruz Tepetotutla, on Mexico’s Gulf Slope. Difficult geography accounts for the region’s isolation. Some believe that the names “Chinantla” and “Chinantec” were derived from the Aztec word chinamitl, which means “an enclosed place”. Correct or not, the

description is certainly apt. Only in the last decade or so have roads begun to burrow into what are some of the largest and best preserved swaths of tropical montane cloud and rain forest left in North America. The ecosystems here, ranging from 3,000 meters to just above sea level, are home to more than 4,000 species of identified plants—who knows how many have yet to be described by science—and nearly 1,000 species of animals. The Chinantec culture mirrors the natural diversity: residents of the forest communities speak at least fourteen variants of the root language.

By choosing to protect the carbon-absorbing diversity inhabiting their slice of the 460,000 square kilometers of the Papaloapan River watershed, the Chinantecs have found themselves on the frontlines of the struggle to slow the progress of climate change. I hoped to see what they had saved and to understand how they had done it.

Seven hours after leaving Oaxaca City, the van pulled to a stop. It was with no small relief that I unfolded myself from the seat and stepped onto the cement of Santa Cruz Tepetotutla’s municipal plaza.

Waiting for me under a large, black umbrella was Pedro Osorio, who would be my guide for the next ten days. Pedro, whom I had met the year before on my first hike through the Chinantla, greeted me and led me to his home for a breakfast of blue corn tortillas hot off the comal and black beans from his milpa.

Exploring the Cultivated Nature of Mexico’s Chinantla Region

Aran Shetterly

Bottom Banner: Milpas beyond town, making a patchwork of the mountain slopes. Residents walk up to two hours from Santa Cruz

Tepetotutla to land designated for cultivation. Photo: Aran Shetterly, 2016


On this visit, my idea was to walk with him along the thousand-year-old footpaths that snaked scores of kilometers through the territory the Chinantec communities guard from the voracious reach of national and international logging, mining, and energy companies. There, I believed, far beyond the cluster of tidy cement and board homes that give shelter to the 700 or so Tepetotutla residents, I would witness the delicate but sustainable interface between what was human and what pertained to nature.

As I ate, Pedro told me that he had recently been named director of trails and tourism for the community. The following day, instead of setting out on a week-long trek, he wanted me first to experience the walks he’d created for weekend visitors.

That next morning the sun rose, bathing the western slopes above Tepetotutla in golden light and sucking water out of the pale mud. In the banana grove just outside the rustic guest house where I slept, tanagers, thrushes, social flycatchers, and bananaquits began their morning forage. After my own breakfast of wild greens collected from the forest and the deliciously bitter, “edible inflorescence” of the pacaya palm or tepejilote prepared by Pedro’s wife and daughters, Pedro and I walked south toward the stone Catholic church. He told me how it had been built by the townspeople fifty years before the road reached Tepetotutla in 2004.

He pointed to a school. The municipal buildings. Sheet metal roofs. Concrete homes. A cement basketball court where teenagers dribbled and shot. The cement and metal had been borne on the backs of people and mules as many as sixty kilometers over pitched forest trails.

Leading me to a dirt path that veered from the concrete walkway, Pedro stopped before a large metal sign, partially obscured by vines. It announced the way to the “Cancha de Pelota”, or ball court, evidence that the sacred, pre-colonial, Mesoamerican game had been played here. Among the government agency and environmental non-profit sponsors whose logos decorated the placard, I spotted the beer keg that identifies Grupo Modelo, Mexico’s largest beer manufacturer.

To me the multinational sponsor seemed like an intruder here, but it offered Pedro, who had held a variety of positions in the local government, a glimmer of hope. Serving as town mayor and then the territory commissioner, he had used his savvy

“The Chinantec culture mirrors the natural diversity: residents of the forest communities speak

at least fourteen variants of the root language.”


to push the state of Oaxaca to complete the road that connects them with the outside world, and he encouraged village residents to embrace national and international agreements that certify their commitment to the conservation of the 24,000 acres of wild lands under their control. Now, Pedro has promised his community he would try to boost the local economy by attracting eco-tourists to explore the Chinantla’s ecology. He needed all the help he could get.

“If we can make ecotourism work,” says Pedro, “it will help us ensure the conservation of our land, maintain our language and culture, and keep our children from migrating.”

Apart from meager remittances sent by family members who have already left the town for work in the United States or one of Mexico’s major cities, coffee had been Santa Cruz’s only cash crop. Since 2013, a coffee rust fungus has devastated as much as 75 percent of the coffee crops across southern Mexico and Central America.

Meanwhile, the federal government is pushing to commercialize the Chinantla’s forests, rivers, and minerals. So far, the pueblos with the help of state and national NGOs have thwarted the efforts of big business to enter their territory. Most recently this meant blocking an industrial hydroelectric project. But the cash from the sale of natural resources is tempting and, as the fungus continues to desiccate

coffee plants, Pedro worries that the people’s will to preserve their autonomy may wither.

Starting along the trail, I asked Pedro if the path had a name in Chinantec, supposing that the “Ball Court” title had been invented for tourists.

“Each section of the trail, each rise and descent has its own name,” he said. “This part,” he continued as we started down a rocky stretch, “is called, in our language, Piedras Entre Bejucos.” What Pedro translated from Chinantec to Spanish, in English means “stones between vines”.

Up ahead, we spotted a man standing beneath a banana palm. As Pedro introduced me to Melquiades, I peered behind him into a snarl of jungle and wondered what he was doing. And then Melquiades began to give me a tour of his garden, his gray head bobbing along like a giant moth under the shadowy canopy.

Below Left: Pedro Osorio hopes that ecotourism can bring economic stability to the isolated communities of the Chinantla

and offer an alternative for young people who migrate to the United States. Photo: Aran Shetterly, 2016

Below Centre: Grilled, wrapped in a tortilla, and doused with salsa, pacaya palm blossoms, tepejilote, will make

a delicious breakfast. Photo: Aran Shetterly, 2016

Below Right: Pedro Osorio stands in the footpath between Santa Cruz Tepetotutla and San Pedro Tlatepusco. Centuries of continuous human use have worn a groove into the earth.

Photo: Aran Shetterly, 2016


He showed me guahamol, a palm that gives a red fruit prized for its chicken-flavored, yellow pulp. Vanilla vines were trellised over a dying coffee plant. In addition to the bananas there were chiles, at least two different kinds of beans, yucca, wild greens that could be eaten raw or cooked, squash vines, and the tepejilote flower that I had eaten for breakfast.

Melquiades’s garden was an edible riot, a chaos of nutritious growth that supplemented the corn and beans he harvested in his milpa. Where I had at first seen only shades of green, I now began to see a dozen edible plants.

Melquiades joined us as we continued along the trail, following it down to a rivulet shaded by enormous, shiny leaves of the elephant ear plant. “This area is called Cleared Stream,” announced Pedro. But the area certainly isn’t cleared, I observed. “Our abuelitos told us, ‘Sow your water’,” Pedro told me. I wondered what he meant. He explained that the people of Tepetotutla had to relearn some lessons that had been lost along the way. When they cleared the trees and plants from around this spring and the stream that flows from it, the spring went dry. Now a community rule forbids clearing or planting crops within one hundred meters of a spring. The name of this section of the path has become, therefore, something of a cautionary tale and a reminder of ancestral wisdom.

Beyond the stream, we climbed a ridge, making our way toward a dense thicket, past milpas where

electric green corn plants grew. We came to a stretch of path called Cross of Blood and then suddenly we were standing in an enclosure that measured nearly 50 meters in length and 15 meters wide. Pedro and Melquiades pointed their machetes at the perfectly square, cut stones set along the edge of a tree-covered wall. This was an unexcavated ball court larger than the one found at the ancient—and much visited—Mayan city of Uxmal.

“We don’t know who made this,” said Pedro. He’s not alone. The site is not even registered with Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). “Whether they were our forefathers, or other people,” Pedro continued. “No one can tell us. And our abuelitos didn’t know. But they say the path is called Cross of Blood because the people who built this performed sacrifices.”

Down from the ruin, we came to a wide stretch of ridge. This, said Pedro, had been an airstrip. Back in the 1980s when the coffee harvest fetched a high price on the international market and there also was a demand for barbasco, a wild yam used to produce progesterone for birth control pills, Cessna planes zipped in and out of Tepetotutla to carry away the harvest. The grass on the strip is still short, kept neat by a small herd of cows.

“As I had walked Pedro’s trail, the line that separated what is human from

nature had begun to blur.”

Left: Melquiades holds a barbasco vine. In the 1980s, wild yam from the Chinantla was purchased by pharmaceutical companies

and used in the manufacture of birth control pills. Photo: Aran Shetterly, 2016

Right: Pedro Osorio scrapes vegetation from an unexcavated ruin just a mile from the center of Santa Cruz Tepetotutla. He is not sure who built these impressive structures. Photo: Aran Shetterly, 2016

Facing Page: A way of life: A young girl returns with her family from a day of work clearing and gathering firewood in the milpa.

Photo: Aran Shetterly, 2016


At first it appeared that a plane could still land there. But when I turned to look south, I saw that a massive landslide had carried away half the runway along with at least twenty hectares of ridge. As we stood contemplating the brown gash that swept away toward the sound of the rushing Perfume River somewhere far below us, my mind wrestled with the idea of airplanes taxiing in and out of this remote town.

Melquiades said something in a low voice. I leaned closer to hear him. “Some think the malos did this.”

I was puzzled.

“The people with double spirits,” he explained, referencing the Chinantec cosmology that says some people are born with both a human and an animal spirit, or even the spirit of a lightning bolt or a rainbow. These powers can be used for either good or bad and explain significant events in the lives and environment of the Chinantecs, like landslides that destroy runways.

From the ridge where we stood I could see the tin roofs of the town two kilometers away, shining white in the sun. As I had walked Pedro’s trail, the line that separated what is human from nature had begun to blur. Anthropologist Daniel Oliveras de Ita divides the Chinantla into three sections, lower, middle, and high—categories determined by both the altitude above sea level and the ethnographic data, suggesting an inextricable relationship between environment and human culture. Now I had seen this relationship up close. Melquiades’s garden was the jungle and the jungle was the garden.

I thought I had to get away from the town to see nature. But nature enveloped the town, was everywhere along the paths. It permeated Pedro and Melquiades’s lives. And this, it seemed to me, was what gave them the strength to save their forests, yet accept some help from a multinational corporation, or Cessna planes, to laugh at a plastic deer, and still stay true to the spirit—or spirits—of their place.

Further ReadingBartolomé, M. y Barabas, A. (1990). La presa Cerro de Oro y el Ingeniero el Gran Dios. México: Instituto Nacional Indigenista.

Bevan, B. (1938). The Chinantec: Report on the Central and South-Eastern Chinantec Region. Vol. 1. Publication 24. Mexico City: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia.

Davis, W. (2010). One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Oliveras de Ita, D. (2010). Soplando mundos dobles: algunas notas sobre la cosmovisión chinanteca. In A. Barabas y M. Bartolomé (Eds.). Dinámicas Culturales: Religiones y Migración en Oaxaca. Mexico: Culturas Populares, INAH-Oaxaca.

Weitlaner, R. J., Castro G. & Antonio C. (1973). Usila: Morada de Colibries. Papeles de la Chinantla 7. (Serie Científica, 11.) México: Museo Nacional de Antropología.

Yetman, D. (Reporter) & Sicoli, M. (Linguist). Whistles in the Mist: Whistled Speech in Oaxaca. [Video file] In Duncan, D. & Yetman, D. (Producers). (2015) In the Americas. Retrieved from http://intheamericas.org/works/210-whistles-in-the-mist-whistled-speech-in-oaxaca/


Of all the arts and sciences made by man, none equals a language, for only a language in its living entirety can describe a unique and irreplaceable world. I saw this once, in the forest in southern Mexico, when a butterfly settled beside me. The color of it was a blue unlike any I had ever seen… There are nine different words in Maya for the color blue in the comprehensive Porrúa Spanish-Maya Dictionary, but just three Spanish translations, leaving six butterflies that can be seen only by the Maya, proving beyond doubt that when a language dies six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth.

--Earl Shorris

“When you talk about plants, I think languages.”

“When you talk languages, my mind goes to the land.”

We sat propped up against pillows in our hotel beds, laptops open, preparing for our conference workshop “Soul of the Land: Place as Character and Inspiration.”

As we each scribbled presenter’s notes, our conversation returned again and again to plants and languages.

That hotel-room conversation evolved into an ongoing dialogue about what we call “mother tongues,” the critical importance of biological, linguistic, and cultural diversity to the health of whole landscapes and human survival. The more we exchanged stories and learnings—drawing on our respective backgrounds (Susan’s in plant biology, Dawn’s in multilingualism)—the more we focused on the diversity of plants and the diversity of languages as intertwined symbols of biological and cultural richness. Just as native plants “speak” of the diverse genetic adaptations and sustainability of the ecosystems they create—each individual species representing a set of relationships and adjustments that help the whole system survive disruption—so do native languages carry the unique stories and knowledge about the places and people where they evolved. Both are, in essence, the mother tongues of place: the plants of the biological realm, the languages of the cultural realm.

Dawn: What I find amazing is all of this research about the correlation between diversity and vibrancy of plants, animals, and languages. As the diversity of the land, plants, and animals deteriorates, so too does the diversity of languages and their cultures. We are exterminating languages faster than at any other time in human history. For example,

Mother TonguesTwo Writers Explore the Words & Cultures that Shape their Connection to Place

Dawn Wink & Susan J. Tweit


many of the Indigenous languages of the Americas are now endangered. This is true of Indigenous languages around the world. If we keep going at the same rate we’re losing languages now, 90 percent of the world’s languages will be extinct within the next 100 years. Tens of thousands of years of wisdom, lost.

Susan: Plants speak the mother tongue of the landscapes I call home. I first understood these rooted beings as the living vocabulary of the North American West in my childhood, long before I claimed science as my second language or had any notion I would spend a career and a life listening to plants, parsing their relationships to each other and to us oxygen-breathing beings. My initial inkling about plants’ role and parlance came on a sunny morning in late June, at the beginning of one of my family’s weeks-long camping, hiking, and nature-study expeditions through the West.

My father was driving, gas-pedal to the floor, reveling in the open road of brand-new Interstate 80 west of Laramie, Wyoming. My mother, as chief navigator, sat in the front passenger seat; my brother was perched between them, scanning the landscape for birds new to his life list. I sat in the dinette in the back, head down, absorbed in a book.

The van engine knocked hard on a steep grade. Dad pressed the clutch pedal and shifted down. I looked up. Elk Mountain, its top still splotched with snow, rose out of the expanse of shrub desert like a massive ship, its prow cresting wave after wave of sagebrush, silver-green and spangled with spring moisture.

Lupine exploded in purple flower spikes between the flat-topped shrubs, and the air pouring in through the open windows bore a fragrance that has always spoken to me: a mix of turpentine and piney resin touched with honey and orange blossoms.

Sagebrush, I said to myself, rolling on my tongue the name I had recently learned for the shrub. Years later, with a new degree in Botany, I would identify the plant that is the inland West’s most common shrub by its scientific name, Artemisia tridentata, the plant with the three-toothed (tri-dentate) leaves, named for the Greek goddess Artemis, feminist, hunter, and herbalist. I would detail the plant’s relationship with hundreds of other species of animals and plants that depend on its sheltering over-story to thrive in these harsh landscapes. But that June day, I only knew what the shrub and its fragrance said to me: Home.

My heart swelled with feelings my nine-year-old self could not explain. I went back to my book.

Dawn: Diversity can be fostered, encouraged, and expanded. Homogenization of a landscape—reducing a biological community to a single type of grass, for instance—reflects the ill-health of a landscape, just as

“Homogenization of a landscape … reflects the ill-

health of a landscape, just as the homogenization of language

diversity … reflects the weakened health of a culture and people.”

Facing Page Banner: Prairie grasses. Photo: Jodene Shaw, 2015

Above: Sagebrush country. Photo: Susan J. Tweit, 2011


the homogenization of language diversity—a single language replacing multiple languages, for example—reflects the weakened health of a culture and people.

When my dad walks the land of our family ranch on the Great Plains of North America, his eyes scan the ground to pick up the different grasses. One summer my mom picked as many different types of grass as she found on our ranch and taped them to a sheet of white paper. One piece of paper became two and two became three. The Great Plains and its grasses were new to me then, as I was raised on a ranch in the Sonoran Desert in the North American Southwest. I studied and memorized the grasses of the body of this new world. Now, it was just a matter of learning them.

I held the pieces of paper with the grasses in my hands and walked out onto the prairie. The endless prairie wind whipped the sheets between my fingers. I watched for the bluish tinge that Big Bluestem casts on the prairie. Wild Rye bobbed above many of the grasses, its flowering spikes curving to the ground. Side-oats Grama, its oat-like seeds sprinkling downward from the stem. Prairie Brome, Blue Grama, and Buffalograss grew in small clusters under Bottlebrush that cast its sprays skyward. While the grasses were new to me, the focus on their diversity was not. In our family, we knew: the more types of grasses, the better.

To many of us, it has become clear that multiplicity of languages is as vital to the land and her people as the necessity of diversity of plants and animals. Without diversity of language and culture taking center stage, along with plants and animals, the potential conversation remains limited. Biologists look to the diversity of plants and animals as a reflection of the land’s health. A single type of grass reflects a monoculture inherently limited in potential. So it is with languages and cultures. A monolingual, monocultural state weakens all inhabitants.

Susan: I was born to a small tribe—my parents are both only children, and their brood numbered just two, boy first, and then me, the girl. In the 1950s of my childhood, our country’s culture was envisioned as a huge pot that melted away individual cultures and languages, leaving English as our home tongue. Still, my family spoke a second language: science, our lexicon bursting with the names of plants, animals, rocks, stars. Nature-study was our shared culture.

Drawers in the basement cabinets of my childhood home held neatly labeled collections of seashells and rock specimens, plus a black light for identifying minerals. TV dinners in our kitchen freezer were stacked side-by-side with roadkill for study; my mother’s tidy garden borders included

one lively section devoted to wildflowers rescued from development sites. Our family “car” was a tradesman’s van converted for camping, our conversations peppered with the names of wild birds and plants. My suburban schoolmates’ heads were filled with G.I. Joes, Barbie Dolls, and the opening bars of “Goldfinger”. Mine held the courting songs of robins, the habitat of ladies’ tresses orchids, and the geology of glacial valleys. Other families’ vacations took them to Disneyland or the beach; ours took us on hikes and backpacking trips into the wild reaches of state and national parks and wildlife refuges.

“Multiple languages, multiple cultural understandings,

rhythms, and ways of walking through this world reflect

healthy linguistic landscapes and cultural landscapes expressed in languages of every place, spoken

with freedom in all spaces.”


I learned how to focus binoculars and read nature field guides before I learned arithmetic and cursive in school. I began to look for patterns in nature and the relationships that create them—plant to soil and rock, plant to plant to plant, creating whole interwoven communities; mushroom to tree root, bird to prairie or mountain forest, frog to lily pad, wolf to elk, grizzly bear to spring flower bulbs—the way other kids learned baseball statistics and players’ names, or movies and movie stars.

As I grew older, my family’s language of nature split on taxonomic lines: my father and brother spoke bird, while plants gave my mother and me a shared vocabulary. Even after a lifetime of studying and writing about plants and their patterns and relationships on the land, I still cannot entirely articulate why it is sagebrush, a shrub so ubiquitous many never notice it at all, that to me speaks for the region I call home. I do know that it is the culture of plants—those seemingly mute beings rooted in place but so much more attuned to their environment than us wandering verbal creatures—that gives me the words to explore my species’ role on this living planet.

Dawn: In Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith Basso writes of how to the White Mountain Apache, the land speaks in languages that span time, their messages pooled and embedded within the earth to become place-worlds. Basso cites Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) and his observation that most American Indian tribes “embrace ‘spatial conceptions of history,’ in which places and their names—and all that these may symbolize—are accorded central importance… Knowledge of places is therefore closely linked to knowledge of the self, to grasping one’s position in the larger scheme of things, including one’s own community, and to securing a confident sense of who one is as a person.” With the loss of language comes the loss of place-worlds; with the loss of place-worlds comes the loss of the sense of self.

Facing Page Banner: Prairie grasslands. Photo: Dawn Wink, 2013

Left: Two-Tailed Swallowtail Butterfly on a native Rocky Mountain Bee Plant. Photo: Susan J. Tweit, 2014

Above: Yucca Plants and Echinacea on the Great Plains. Photo: Dawn Wink, 2013


These messages extend into distinct languages through each distinct plant and animal, each unique and integral. Grasses and plants and languages and cultures—the more diversity, the healthier the land, the healthier the people.

We often see photos of an unhealthy environment side-by-side with a healthy environment, a fence-line the divider. A healthy environment is reflected in a multiplicity of grasses, plants, and animals, while in the other photo a barren monoculture reflects that land’s lack of health. Birdsong of unique trills, chirps, and caws float on the winds, above the varying textures of the grasses and plants, the flaxen, the bluish-gray, the emerald, among ochre.

Multiple languages, multiple cultural understandings, rhythms, and ways of walking through this world reflect healthy linguistic landscapes and cultural landscapes expressed in languages of every place, spoken with freedom in all spaces.

Susan: I call plants the living vocabulary of landscapes; they are the lives that restore the structure and function of healthy ecosystems. They provide the basic food all life on earth depends on, complex carbohydrates made using the sun’s energy and carbon dioxide plus minerals from the soil; they grow the structure that supports nests and burrows and homes for other species; they synthesize a wide vocabulary of aromatic chemical compounds which they use to communicate with other species. Native plants are the vernacular, the dialect of individual places. Like unique human languages, these local plant-voices connect humanity—breath, story, and soul—to each other and to place.

Dawn and Susan: We know that plants benefit us in many ways—as food, as fiber, as raw materials, and as beauty to nurture our spirits. But our connection with these rooted, photosynthesizing beings goes deeper. They are our “breathing buddies,” as the poet Clifford Burke writes, inhaling and fixing the carbon dioxide that we and our industrial processes exhale as a waste gas, and exhaling the very oxygen we require, the breath we depend on. Language and culture root us individually and collectively to the earth and to Place. With the loss of each language, so go generations of wisdom, belonging, and identity. So goes peace. These mother tongues of plant and language carry the critical stores of knowledge—genetic and cultural—that we need in order to continue to thrive on this singular, living planet.

Further ReadingBasso, K. (1996). Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.

Moore, K.D. (2010). Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature. Boston, MA: Trumpeter Books.

Skutnabb-Kangas, T., Maffi, L., & Harmon, D. (2003). Sharing a World of Difference: the Earth’s linguistic, cultural and biological diversity. Paris: UNESCO.

Tallamy, D. (2009). Bringing Nature Home. Portland, OR: Timber Press.

White, C. (2015). The Age of Consequences: A Chronicle of Concern and Hope. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press.

Wilson, E.O. (2006). The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc.

“The mother tongues of plant and language carry the critical stores of knowledge—genetic and cultural—that we need in order to continue to

thrive on this singular, living planet.”

Below: Sunflowers on the Great Plains. Photo: Dawn Wink, 2013


The second cougar-kill I’ve encountered in three days smells fresh: a sweetish,

iron-tinged musk. The ribcage is red-stained and bare of meat; the neck has a tremendous bite mark. The deer is only partially covered with leaf litter and brush. I had not been expecting a carcass when I set off to praise and sing for the wilder Ones.

Recently returned from travel, I now crave a medicinal dose of this Southern Utah land, a reconnection with fragrant pinyon and sage, pale sandstone mesas and canyons. Offering elaborate praise to each being is a kind of ceremony of the wild—a ceremony that almost always unsticks humdrum psychic habits as attention and imagination are turned toward the splendor of the world rather than the hamster wheel of the everyday mind.

Above: Slickrock, skeleton and sky. Photo: Bruce Howatt, 2009

Geneen Marie Haugen

Listening Through the Portal of Imaginationspeech

Wild


This is a practice, always beginning as an intentional act of imagination: I go forth as the Others are listening, as if they may be receptive. I go forth as if my capacity to perceive the animate nature of the Others—as well as their willingness to be witnessed—depends on the manner of my approach.

This kill is so recent the body has not been dismembered. I sing a blessing for the deer, another for the cougar—and for coyotes, eagles, ravens and the other creatures who share this flesh. My voice is scratchy and dry from lack of use; I sing anyway. It doesn’t occur to me to be afraid; I lived for a long time in the habitat of grizzlies and wolves, mountain lions and moose and learned something of their habits. Where I live now, in the sandstone labyrinth, there are few predators but plenty of deer. The cougar who took down this deer is not hungry.

Downcanyon, I call to the Others as I pass, singing directly to them of my gladness to be among them again. I honor them as not only alive—even sandstone, even water—but also intelligent, participatory, and saturated with psychic depths. In this way, I honor the temple of the holy Earth.

I wonder if the lion-whose-belly-is-full-of-deer hears me. I sing steadily, with enough volume that I can’t hear anything beyond my voice and the rhythm

of a water bottle shifting with my steps. It occurs to me that I would never register the padding or loping of any other feet but my own. It occurs to me, as it has on other occasions, to wonder if I have ever obliviously walked beneath a mountain lion watching me from an overhead Ponderosa limb.

After a while, when I have passed by most of the sizable potholes where I might dip in monsoon season, I sit on a small ledge, in silence now rather than singing. The silence is vast, except for infrequent flock-flitters of juncos, raven caws, and the aum of a distant jet. The silence is deep enough to sense the rippling crackle and zings in

the psychic field—a field in which all beings are entangled. The outer silence is immense, but the psychic field trembles and hums. Except for slow breathing, I am quiet, receptive to whatever might come in the phenomenal or imaginal worlds. Sandstone undulates softly, curvaceous as a body. Dark basalt boulders crouch in small herds.

A lion, eyes locked on mine, vividly springs into my imagination, accompanied by a visceral sense that I have invaded her private winter world. No surprise to be overtaken by an image of cougar in this place, yet the suddenness of the appearance startles, as well as the bodily sense that I may not be welcome on this short pilgrimage today. The guard

“The anima mundi is nearby, very near, if the doors of perception

wobble and open. Engaging with the world as if rain and moss, cacti and

scorpion, lightning and cloud witness and participate is a consciousness-

changing act of imagination. The act itself helps open the perceptual portal to experience of an animate world.”

Below: Track of a ghost. Photo: Bruce Howatt, 2012


hairs on the back of my neck prickle. Unless she chooses to show herself, to distinguish herself from the tawny slickrock, I will not see her, though there is a feeling that she is near in body as well as image. She blinks and turns away.

“Imagination,” writes Harold Goddard, “is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two. ... Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets.”

When my own imagination has gone dim, dulled by the ever-press of daily obligations, it’s especially important to wander onto the land in a practice of conversation with the wilder Others. The anima mundi is nearby, very near, if the doors of perception wobble and open. Engaging with the world as if rain and moss, cacti and scorpion, lightning and cloud witness and participate is a consciousness-changing act of imagination. The act itself helps open the perceptual portal to experience of an animate world.

If my mind is on taxes or politics while I walk, there is little opening or space for events and beings beyond my own skin—the normal state of awareness for most contemporary people. But when my attention is turned outward, to the other lives with whom we share Earth, it’s as if a green gateway opens and wilder images or impressions might blow in. I believe that sometimes the images are sent forth by the world psyche, or by the other presences—cougar, stone, lichen—with whom my own being is entangled.

The language whose disappearance may have greatest consequence for the human relationship with Earth is that of imagination or image—particularly, the images that arise unbidden when we are wholly present to the wilder world, a state of awareness that once was, perhaps, the everyday consciousness of human beings, and perhaps is still the steady-state consciousness for more traditional or nature-based peoples for whom the world is yet animate, filled with intelligent presences in the form of grasses or winged ones.

Above: Raven brothers. Photo: Bruce Howatt, 2012


In Western consumer culture, the universe is largely regarded as dead (if it’s regarded at all), and very few of our Earthly companions are held as sentient except for human beings—and maybe not even all of us. (Consider an unconscious Western view regarding “primitive” or very poor people, for example.) We have lost the enchanted universe, and we have also lost intimacy with imagination. Science, for all its revelation and wisdom, cannot bring the world alive for us; facts cannot bring the world alive. For that, we need radically regenerative acts of imagination.

In contemporary culture, the images we respond to are largely provided by commercial advertising, political strategists, and news media; our imaginations have been hijacked and filled with desires, fears, and ideas created by others. Most

of us are not accustomed to attending the images (which include felt-sense or other perceptions) that emerge spontaneously into our awareness, and the significance of our own deep imagining is scarcely considered except by depth psychologists.

It was not always so. The great Sufi scholar, Henri Corbin, noted the three worlds of medieval times: the world of pure spirit, the world of matter, and the mundus imaginalis, or imaginal world. The imaginal dimension—the terrain of image—occupies the realm between matter and spirit. Each of these worlds is believed to be entirely, equally real. The importance of the imaginal world diminished and largely vanished from Western consciousness centuries ago, yet the imaginal is still present with us in the landscape of dreams, which most of us visit nightly.


Goethe identified imagination as a primary sense, even as an “organ of perception.” For Jung, James Hillman, and others, image is a primary way of knowing ourselves and the world. Ecopsychologist Per Epson Stoknes and others regard images that suddenly present themselves as the world, speaking.

When we miss the unexpected flood of images in wildish places, we may miss the world’s speech; we may miss conversation with the wilder Others. Recovering the capacity to hear the Others and Earth is possible, and perhaps essential for Western people whose power to either strengthen or extinguish Earth’s life-support systems is unprecedented.

I make Earth pilgrimages in part to excite my imagination, to exercise an organ of perception, and to disrupt the ordinary thought train so that some other impressions might emerge. When I approach the Others as if all are alive, intelligent, and suffused with psyche or subjectivity, the world—sometimes—palpably breathes and trembles, as if in response. Sometimes my imagination ignites with possibilities that seem sourced in a psyche or mind far greater than my own, as if I have momentarily become, as poet A.R. Ammons writes, “available / to any shape that may be / summoning itself / through me / from a self not mine but ours.”

And sometimes it seems I am summoned for something small, as when I sit with a basalt boulder and suddenly “see” an image of the stone facing a different direction. Since I could not know if rock speaks to me in this way, nor could I know for sure it does not, I do my best to turn the stone accordingly, apologizing if I have misheard or mishandled. Then, sometimes it seems all the nearby boulders long for touching and adoration.

The world comes alive in response to our imaginative attention.

One lives differently in a world of presences. No casual, unthinking demolishment of “weeds” or gophers. More curious engagement with stars, Jupiter, and Moon. Bodily recognition of the unspeakable miracle of life, of our lives, of the cosmos.

I return slowly to the place I began my wandering song of praise. No large creatures move away from the deer carcass as I approach, though the great cat could be very near, waiting for my departure. Almost certainly, she knows where I am. We both know she is not hungry. I praise her again, continually, and the deer who feed her, and all the other lives—eagles, ravens, coyotes, flies, eventually maggots—involved in this red dance.

On a pale expanse of slickrock, dark basalt boulders of all sizes crouch and huddle, wearing their coats of green lichen. I turn my head slightly and the boulders suddenly shift positions, scuttling this way and that before settling again. I laugh out loud, and turn aslant again. The basalt herd moves once more, like small dark bison bedding down for the night. I sing praises for the stone. I sing gratitude for glimpsing the secret lives of wilder Ones.

Further ReadingCheetham, T. (2003). The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism. Woodstock: Spring Journal Books.

Corbin, H. (1997). Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hillman, J. (1992). The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World. Dallas: Spring Publications.

Seamon, D. and Zajonc, A. (Eds). (1998). Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature. New York: State University of New York Press.

Stoknes, Per Espen. (n.d.).“Earth’s Imagination: Rooting the Expressive Arts in the Elemental Creativity of the Biosphere,” in Alliance for Wild Ethics. Retrieved from http://www.wildethics.org/essays/eairths-imagination.html#_ednref9

Above Left: Cougar habitat. Photo: Bruce Howatt, 2012

“Science, for all its revelation and wisdom, cannot bring the world alive

for us; facts cannot bring the world alive. For that, we need radically regenerative acts of imagination.”


I watch coyote cross the freewaytrickster weaves amid wheeled godsher belly droops with gaunt lactationsurvivor of west coast wildabides two-legged rules of concrete hasteceaseless in her search

The bald eagle roosts in the Hydro tower her nest threaded by power line feathers that once soared rot in landfill beak buried in Big Mac shreds of styrofoam this refuse no match for her regal spirit leftovers from her last supper

A mother wails on highway’s edgebegs for a break in trafficher cat lost nine lives in one crossingshe retrieves the flattened felinestretched three times in lengthtoo slow for the human race

Fat raccoon bumbles along my fence his bloated gut a sign of excess nocturnal bandit caught under a full moon too civilized to flee from my presence too clever to flee from trashcan chatter too crafty to flee from me

I watch the woman park at the forest entrancepull her 4-year-old from the carhe shivers by her sideshe smokes a long cigarettesixty seconds on Nature’s peripherysome fix to forget what she has lost

I circle a deer in the cloverleaf on-ramp still in her fear never stops no space between townhouses asphalt ebbs into her island of grass I honk as if that will save her my car’s only choice the freeway

I ask coyote What do you think of this place?her shrewd eyes take me for morsel or menacematernity leaves no optionceaseless in her searchno time to answer my urgent questionshe slips between worlds again

Freeway


The ecology of our existence is utterly dependent upon our relationship with the more-than-human world. Our bodies are living and breathing ecosystems, a collective of tens of thousands of interrelated species too easily forgotten in our anthropocentric society. When our bond with the earth is eroded, we lose the ability to hear the ecologies that surround us, we lose a part of ourselves. The voice of nature is heard by those who pay attention to the language of birds, those who hear the cries of clear-cut trees. For these other-than-human words to be wholly received, we must embrace a contemplative receptivity.

This is where my poem “Freeway Coyote” comes in. As I waited for a bus outside Vancouver, in a rare moment of stillness, I watched a mother coyote slip past me and trot across six lanes of traffic. I realized that her world was like mine: ceaseless movement, surrounded by municipal noise, and in many ways human-centered. Roads, houses, power lines, and

parking lots are so predominant as to make human habitat replace all others, leaving nonhuman species little choice of where and how to live.

“Freeway Coyote” is my personal journey in listening for and remembering the last vestiges of urban nature. The coyote who crosses freeways to feed her young, the eagle who feasts on our garbage, the deer swallowed by the language of cars, the raccoon whose behavior has become almost too human. The primal voice of the earth is wild in its ancient song, while our urbanization of the world has rendered it mute and tame. This poem voices the tragedy of nature’s linguistic genocide.

To find out more about Lee’s work, visit www.leebeavington.com.

Lee Beavington

Coyote

Facing Page: Freeway Driftwood. The lines on this driftwood curve away like a freeway to the unknown. Photo: Lee Beavington, 2015

Above: Salal in Drought. The early autumnal drought starts to erase the interconnected leaf veins. Photo: Lee Beavington, 2015


Olives, grapes, barley, alfalfa, and a few fruit trees are the main crops grown in the valley of San

Giacomo, a tiny rural hamlet of perhaps fifty souls in Umbria, the green heart of Italy. Its dwellers consider the valley “golden” for its fertility. South-facing exposure, sandy loams, and relative humidity of both air and soil all play a favorable role for agriculture.

What humans planted goes to join oak and elm, blackberry and wild asparagus, chicory and borage, hawthorn and broom. As the seasons unfold, the valley’s gentle slopes are an ever-changing kaleidoscope of colors and sights. At times, it’s the brown furrows of newly ploughed earth. At others, it’s the yellow-orange splashes of autumn leaves. At other times yet, it’s the green waves of tall spikes bending in the wind. Beside fertile, the valley is utterly enchanting.

Small and wispy, Marcello stands at the edge of his vegetable garden overlooking the valley. He glances down, pointing to a piece of land bathed in sunset light. “Look! See how beautiful that field of orzola (barley) is! It really is a beautiful field!”

He didn’t go to school—“I didn’t even finish Grade 1, I can’t read or write, but I can far di conto (count)!”—

yet he sure can recognize and appreciate the beauty of the land, of his land. He contemplates it with love and respect, and now that he’s 83 and in failing health, he’s a bit upset that he’s no longer able to tend it all. It’s a lot of land—the land that Marcello and his wife Emma own, eight whole hectares acquired bit by bit, literally with the sweat of their brows. From being mezzadri (sharecroppers), with

De Prima Stories of the Old Days in Umbria, the Green Heart of Italy

Anna Maffi


patience and hope they became owners of those same fields they had once worked for the padrone (landowner).

“De prima (in the old days), we planted wheat, too. In June it was harvest time, and what a feast harvest was! We were all out working in the middle of the spikes, but if opportunity struck…” Marcello smiles, with a glint of gentle mischief in his eyes, “…maybe you would throw yourself down somewhere in the fields with one of the girls! We harvested by hand with a serrecchio (scythe), and had to sharpen it often: we would stick this sort of anvil in the ground and hit the blade with the hammer to sharpen the edge.” He looks at his left hand, the finger that is missing a phalanx, and smiles again: “It’s with that blade that I cut my finger, I was a bardascio (kid) of thirteen… Some of the men, when they used the scythe, would protect their hands with reeds. They would choose a reed of the right size, cut it into pieces, and slide their fingers into the little tubes. Sometimes they would tie the little tubes together with a piece of rope, so it became a sort of glove.”

Not to be outdone, Emma likes to tell stories, too, having found ears that are eager to listen… “At seventeen, I was first-time pregnant. I was in my ninth month with a huge belly, but de prima you would work in the fields all the same. So you know what I would do? Since I couldn’t bend over, I would go to work in the steepest fields, so

standing up lower down I could do what I needed to do,” she says with a clever smile. “I always did everything up to the last minute, and more than once I went into labor right there were I was!” She is tireless, Emma who after all learned to toil early on. “As a child, perhaps by the age of six, I was

“Marcello didn’t go to school… yet he sure can recognize and

appreciate the beauty of the land, of his land.”

Facing Page Top: Warm winter light over the San Giacomo valley. Photo: Anna Maffi, 2014

Facing Page Bottom: Wood ladder, leather boots, as always. Photo: Anna Maffi, 2015

Right: The spontaneous ease of one’s trade. Photo: Anna Maffi, 2015

already doing everything. With my aunts and grandma there were five of us women, and we would take turns: one day house work, one day in the fields, one day tending the sheep…”

As for her, she did manage to finish Grade 1 and learn to read and write, with merely a touch of hesitation. In revisiting her


memories, age-old peasant beliefs come back to her mind. “You know the broom? De prima, if you had warts on your hands, they said that to make them go

away you had to tie knots in the broom, in the branches, one for each wart… What can I tell you, they would disappear…”

Of what the land has to offer, Emma and Marcello know how to use everything—as one does with the porchetto, the pig, of which nothing is discarded, from head to zampetti (feet).

At winter’s end, Emma cuts and gathers the reeds that grow wild in the valley. In so doing, not only does she

clear the land; she also readies her supply of props for the tomatoes that will ripen in summer. Branches cut when tree-pruning become bundles to light the fire in the large oven where she and her daughters bake bread and focaccia, the schiacciata, as they call it here.

“You know, to tie the grapevines, the branches of salce (willow) work really well. See what great knots come out?” With expert hands, Marcello ties, tightens, turns, and then cuts off the extra bit. While pruning and tending the vineyard, he keeps the willow branches slung over his shoulder, bound together with a piece of string, and selects them rapidly. At his waist, secured to his belt with wire, he carries a scissor-holder fashioned out of a dish soap bottle— a spontaneous and genial act of recycling…

Together, Marcello and Emma want to explain how, in the days before tractors, one managed to take the

“Of what the land has to offer, Emma and Marcello know how to use everything.”


harvest or firewood up the land’s steep slopes. “De prima there was a thing called traia, with some pieces of wood placed this way and others placed that way. It had no wheels—it slid on the ground and wouldn’t topple.” Emma, though, is not satisfied with the explanation. She cuts off a piece of cardboard from a pie box and on it, with great precision, draws a sketch of the traia. Initially skeptical, Marcello now looks intently and approvingly at his wife’s finished drawing. Then he looks at me and affirms: “I was doubtful, but she did it real well—the traia, that’s exactly how it is!”

The memory unfolds, expanding slowly. “In the fields there was a kind of grass that healed wounds. For small wounds, you would wrap it around the wound like a bandage.” I ask whether anything has changed, over time, in the variety of plants in the valley. “Ah, yes, take the poppies, for example: de prima, in June there

were many more! And then, there was another grass, we called it the love plant: that one, too, is not there anymore. That grass, if you chewed it and put it on your skin, it would give you blisters—if they came out big it meant that your girlfriend loved you”, recounts Marcello. Emma nods: “It’s all those chemicals that have killed certain plants, I think!”

They do not know the word “biodiversity”, nor could they explain what “sustainable agriculture” is. For them,

“Emma is tireless… After all she learned to toil early on.”

Facing Page Bottom: Marcello and the anvil. Photo: Anna Maffi, 2015

Facing Page Top & Middle: The beauty of work tools. Photos: Anna Maffi, 2015

Top: Emma and the bread oven. Photo: Anna Maffi, 2016

Right: Behind Emma, the valley. Photo: Anna Maffi, 2016


Top Left, Bottom Left & Bottom Right: Competent and skilful gestures. Photos: Anna Maffi, 2015

Middle Right: Hands that say it all. Photo: Anna Maffi, 2015

Top Right: The traia: like ancient graffiti on a pie box. Photo: Anna Maffi, 2016


Top Left: Glances, smiles, hands. Photo: Anna Maffi, 2015

Top Right: Arms, legs, fronds. Photo: Anna Maffi, 2016

Bottom: Summer morning mist over the valley. Photo: Anna Maffi, 2014

who have known how to live, and have lived, a life in balance and harmony with nature, these difficult words become, much more simply, everyday facts and practices.

Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Emma and Marcello Orsini and the other people of San Giacomo, a hamlet of Calvi dell’ Umbria, for the memories and stories they chose to share with me—a rare and precious human experience.

(Translated from Italian by Luisa Maffi)

Further Reading Comune di Calvi dell’Umbria. (2016). Retrieved from http://www.calviturismo.it/ Covino, R. (1995). L’invenzione di una regione. L’Umbria dall’Ottocento a oggi. Perugia, Italia: Quattroemme.

Desplanques, H. (1975; 2006). Campagne umbre. Contributo allo studio dei paesaggi rurali dell’Italia centrale. Perugia, Italia: Quattroemme.Touring Editore. Guida Rossa dell’Umbria (2008). Milano, Italia: Touring Club Italiano.Milani, P. (2015). Guida di Calvi dell’Umbria. Terni, Italia: Comune di Calvi Dell’Umbria.Torquati, B. (2007). Agricoltura e paesaggio in Umbria e Lazio (1st ed.). Milano, Italia: Franco Angeli.


“I was born in Róbalo, on the 24th of May. And they say, so tells me my aunt, that when I was born

during the night, there was a storm from the south. And I was born in an akali. My dad built an akali, and my aunt attended my mom so I would come into the world. They say there was a big storm from the south, with snow, and that night I was born, on the 24th at night…”

On the 24th of May, 1928, during a night of ilan tashata (storm from the south), my grandmother Cristina Calderón came into the world in an akali, the traditional Yagan hut. She was delivered by Granny Gertie, the midwife of the old days, in Caleta Róbalo, on the north coast of Navarino Island in Tierra del Fuego, Chile.

Her parents were Akačexaninčis (Juan Calderón) and Lanixweliskipa (Carmen Harban). They belonged to the last generation that went through the Čiaxaus, the Yagan initiation ceremony—the generation that was documented by ethnologist Martin Gusinde between 1918 and 1923.

Her father Juan Calderón died in 1931 in Mejillones, Navarino Island, and her mother Carmen Harban passed away three years later, in 1934. That set the difficult life path that my grandmother would be bound to follow, orphaned at an early age, and witness to the cultural

and material breakdown of our ancestral Yamana culture [Ed.: Yamana is another name for the Yagan culture]. The struggle to survive, first in the face of the overwhelming presence of alcohol, then under the thumb of the Chilean military authorities.

“When my mom died in Mejillones and I was left orphaned, I went to live with my grandfather and Granny Julia, Karpakolikipa…”

After losing her parents, my grandmother was left under the tutelage of her grandfather Halnpensh, but he died in a fight that same year, on the 18th of September 1934, having been hit in the stomach by a Spaniard. Following that event, she was taken in by her godmother, Granny Gertie. Living with Gertie’s family, she was also cared for by her uncle Felipe and her cousin Clara.

“My godmother took me away, Granny Gertie did, she took me to her home, and I was crying... ̒ Stop crying,̓ she told me, ̒ your grandpa is just fine, Watauinéiwa [God] took him and has him in his presence... ̓ He was a good man, my grandpa, he was never mean.”

Cristina Zárraga

Memories of My Yagan Grandmother

in Tierra del Fuego, Chile

Cristina Calderón Cristina Calderón


Up to the age of nine, by grandmother only spoke Yagan, the language of her parents. She was also learning words and phrases from other dialects, such as that spoken by Granny Julia, Karpakolikipa, who came from the Wollaston Islands (a group of small islands one of which forms Cape Horn, and which was home to one of the five groups of the Yagan people, with its own dialect). In addition, she picked up a little English from Granny Gertie, who, while staying at an Anglican Mission, along with learning to spin and weave, like many Yagan women, also learned English.

“When I was little, I spoke Yagan only. I learned to speak Spanish from a girl, Ema Lawrence, of the Lawrences who were owners of the Róbalo Ranch. I would get together with Ema to play. The first few days I didn̕ t understand a word, but little by little I started learning the language with her. I would also listen to Chacón, Granny Gertie̕ s husband, and that̕ s how I learned Spanish...”

In those days, many young Yagan died from lung disease, and each time fewer and fewer people spoke Yagan. And furthermore, because of discrimination the mothers would no longer pass the language on to their children. That’s how the language started shrinking rapidly, replaced by Spanish.

My grandmother’s life unfolded as that of a nomad, moving from place to place, traveling freely, as her ancestors had done on canoes—except that in her time one traveled by boats with ores and sails. But one could say that people still lived a nomadic life that granted them a certain degree of freedom.

Summertime, sheep-shearing time. Families would converge on the ranches where they could get sheep-shearing work, such as Remolino and Harberton on the Argentinean side, and Róbalo on Navarino Island, on the Chilean side. Wintertime, back in Mejillones, or off to hunt for otters. In the old days, there were no borders across Onaašáka, the Beagle Channel. My grandmother was able to live at the tail-end of this time of freedom. Today, Onaašáka is divided up between Chile and Argentina.

“While I was living with my grandpa, we would get out on the water, we would go to Punta Lobo [in the east of Navarino Island] to eat guanaco meat [Ed.: guanaco: the wild ancestor of llamas and alpacas], we went island to island looking for birds’ eggs, and that’s what we ate. And so I went, along with my grandpa.”

At age fifteen, her family situation forced her to get married—with a man much older than her, Felipe Garay, perhaps fifty years old. With no other options, Garay was her first partner. Together, they lived in Puerto Eugenia, in the east of Navarino Island. They had three boys, and when she was pregnant with the third one, Felipe became ill and died.

“I didn’t like that, when they told me I had to get together with him. ‘He’s a good man, he’ll take care of you, you’ll have enough to eat, you’ll have clothes, you’ll have everything you need and will be in peace,’ my aunt would tell me. ‘You won’t be going around like your sister and her mate, those two who go for the otters, who go around with no shoes and no clothes.’ There I was, forced

Facing Page Background: Landscape of Bahía Mejillones, Onaašáka (Beagle Channel). Photo: Oliver Vogel, 2014

Facing Page: A Čiaxaus initiation ceremony, Bahía Mejillones, 1922. The picture shows among others, Cristina Calderón’s father Akačexaninčis (Juan Calderón), the man standing on the extreme right, and her godmother Gertie, sitting to the right of him. Photo:

Martin Gusinde,1922

Above: House of the Sarmiento family in Bahía Mejillones, Navarino Island. Last remaining house from the times of Cristina Calderón’s

childhood in Bahía Mejillones. Photo: Oliver Vogel, 2014


to say yes. I was maybe fifteen years old, and I was thinking, it can’t be!, because he was so much older. It can’t be!, I would say—but then I would start thinking…”

After Garay՚s death, it was disenfranchisement all over again, it was poverty―and now with her children in tow. In those days, a woman couldn՚t remain alone. That՚s when my grandfather Lucho Zárraga came into the picture. He was a Selknam, of the indigenous group from the other side of the channel (now the Argentinean side). He worked at the Harberton Ranch, and offered to take her with him to the other side and take care of her.

“…Well, when I got together with your grandpa Lucho, we lived in peace in Harberton—how long, how many years… I had to go with him, I told him: ‘I have three children and you’re not going to like that…’ But he did take care of me, and of the children too, the three little ones, he was like a father to them… We stayed in Harberton from 1949 to 1959. Lucho was foreman of the shepherds, and I spent a happy time with him…”

In 1962 Lucho Zárraga died. “Lucho was always coughing and coughing, until he got lung disease… He died in hospital in Punta Arenas…”

After my grandfather Lucho’s death, Teodosio Gonzales showed up. My grandmother had known him from the time of her youth. He came from the city of Ushuaia to work on Navarino.

“…Which year it was I can’t quite remember, but it had to be around 1964. He came, Teodosio did, he talked to me and, well, that’s how it went…”

From then on they lived together until 2009—her last life companion, whom she somehow chose, for they had been attracted to each other from the days of their youth. But fate had separated them, forging different paths for them, until they finally met again as adults. From this union her only daughter was born.

******

This text is a short summary of the biography of my Yagan grandmother, with whom I lived more than ten years, reconnecting with my roots, in the land that my father left one day—and where I set off on a journey toward the past, delving into my ancient Yamana culture.

Today, Cristina Calderón is well known around the world as the last living member of the Yagan or Yamana people of Tierra del Fuego, the last fluent speaker of her native language—she who embodies the direct link with our ancestors, those who experienced ceremonies such as the Čiaxaus, the puberty initiation ceremony, or the kina, a male ritual, or the loima yakamush, the shamanic school.

Knowledge and heritage that were handed down from generation to generation until they came to my grandmother, and from her to us.

That’s why she cannot be the last of the Yagan. The last of a generation, maybe. But the fact is that there is a vast progeny belonging to this people, which today lives mostly in Ukika, on Navarino Island.

In hearing the story of my grandmother, the story of her parents, in those days and farther back, we get a palpable sense of the cultural breakdown the Yagan underwent because of the arrival of white people—the gold prospectors, the sea lion hunters, the missionaries, and later the Chileans and Argentineans who appropriated and divided up those lands, which didn’t even belong to them.

“People still lived a nomadic life that granted them a

certain degree of freedom.”

Above: Cristina Calderón collecting mapi (rushes) for traditional basketry in Caleta Douglas, Navarino Island. Photo: Oliver Vogel, 2015


Losing their cultural roots, their language, their cultural traditions, and their freedom, being invaded by epidemics and by customs that were utterly foreign to their nature, such as alcohol, all that brought forth the decline and collapse of their culture. Their spiritual strength, which had connected them with nature and with God, rapidly started to wane, and in that way they lost their identity.

Yet today Cristina Calderón, my Yagan grandmother, is the carrier of the ancestral voices that belong to the collective soul of this ancient race. Her memory and her language infuse us with that original strength, from those remote times at this southernmost tip of the earth. Today, she transmits her knowledge, her wisdom, her memories, and her language to those who are closest to her, as well as to those others who are interested in this culture and seek her out.

We have compiled a great deal of existing material on this language, and for a number of years we have been working with my grandmother, making audio recordings, giving language workshops in the community, and transcribing Yagan stories (with the help of linguist Yoram Meroz, a friend and collaborator in this endeavor). All this with the goal of one day attaining the revitalization of this language—bearing in mind that, if a language can die, many times it can also be re-born in generations down the line.

In recognizing our roots and recovering the language, we reclaim part of our identity, too. We won’t be the same as in the old days, but with the new energy of hybridity, we will be able to recreate our history in the present and into the future.

(Translated from Spanish by Luisa Maffi)

Further ReadingAnrique, Macarena (2014). “La escritora yagán”. Revista de Libros. Retrieved from http://www.livre.cl/cristinazarraga.htmlChapman, A. (2012). Yaganes del Cabo de Hornos. Encuentros con los europeos antes y después de Darwin. Santiago de Chile: Pehuén Editores.Gusinde, Martin (1986). Los Indios de Tierra del Fuego, Tomo II, Los Yámana. Buenos Aires: Centro Argentino de Etnología Americana. [Translation of the 1937 original Die Feuerlandindianer, Band II, Die Yámana. Mödling, Austria: Anthropos]Vogel, O. & Zárraga, C. (2010). Yágankuta: Pequeño Diccionario Yagan [Digital Book, in collaboration with Cristina Calderón, Yoram Meroz and Anna Kölle, and illustrated by children from the Yagan community]. Retrieved from https://issuu.com/annakoelle/docs/y_gankuta__independiente_Zárraga, C. (2007). Hai kur mamashu chis - Quiero contarte un cuento. Ukika: Ediciones Pix.Zárraga, C. (2013). Hai kur mamashu chis: I want to tell you a story. (Translated by Jacqueline Windh). Ukika: Ediciones Pix. Retrieved from www.amazon.com/Hai-kur-mamashu-chis-story/dp/1492180599

Above: Cristina Zárraga and Cristina Calderón working in Ukika, Navarino Island. Photo: Oliver Vogel, 2014

Right: Grandmother, granddaughter and great-granddaughter in Bahía Mejillones, Navarino Island. From left to right: Loimuška

Vogel, Cristina Zárraga, and Cristina Calderón. Photo: Oliver Vogel, 2014


This is the story of my friendship with Earl Claxton Jr., a SȾÁ,UTW̱ (Tsawout) Elder

and respected botanical knowledge holder from the W̱SÁNEĆ (Saanich) Coast Salish First Nation on the territory known as Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Anglicized from his SENĆOŦEN language, his names are Thuh-thay-tun and Kapilano. As I dip a canoe paddle into deep, cool waters, I reflect on the first day Earl and I met at ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱ Tribal School, drawn together by a shared desire to tend Indigenous trees and plants awaiting homes at habitat restoration sites. With Earl grieving the loss of his father, Dr. Earl Claxton Sr. (YELЌÁTŦE), a celebrated teacher, storyteller and language keeper, I grieve the loss of both my grandmothers, Lorna and Helen. We find ourselves sharing stories in a place of joy at PEPÁḴEṈ HÁUTW̱ (“The Blossoming Place”), the Tribal School’s native plant nursery and garden, watching plants grow under the shining sun as a chorus of children’s laughter fills the air. Students at ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱ Tribal School learn the SENĆOŦEN language while harvesting KEXMIN (a W̱SÁNEĆ medicinal plant), feasting on tenderly planted vegetables, and shrieking with happiness at the annual wet-leaved “bedding down” of the garden. In this sacred space, Earl’s stories find their grounded place, echoing in my ears as I write.

Alice Meyers in conversation with Earl Claxton Jr. (Thuh-thay-tun Kapilano)

Reclaiming W̱SÁNEĆ (Saanich) Place Names on the West Coast of Canada

A Blossoming TimeA Blossoming Time

An accomplished dancer, storyteller, ethnobotanist, chef, educator, and now a friend, Earl has become an important part of my life over the last year. Earl’s mother and grandmother were well-known community knowledge holders, respected for expertise about plants as foods and medicines. His mother, Joanne, a founder of the W̱SÁNEĆ School Board, asks Earl to tell students about respecting one another and respecting education. Earl’s father, Dr. Earl Claxton Sr., continued the foundational legacy of SENĆOŦEN language resources initiated by Dave Elliott Sr. in the 1970s. My analogy of the canoe journey

at ÁLEṈENEȻ (Homeland)


comes from Earl’s father, who viewed life as a paddling journey, telling Earl: “The swirls that you leave behind are something to think about.” Earl’s grandmother, Elsie Claxton, collaborated with ethnobotanist Dr. Nancy Turner, who affirmed in her book The Earth’s Blanket: “First Nations’ spiritual life is completely tied to… home places.”

Having acknowledged Earl’s family history, I now locate myself. I am of Scottish, English, and German ancestry, and the canoe played a symbolic role in my growing up. My ethnobotanical journey began in childhood as I canoed with my grandmother Lorna, looking up to passionate ecologist parents. As I paddled through university as a linguist in Toronto, spending time with Anishinaabe language resurgence communities, an element of spiritual exploration entered my journey. It is this quest that brought me to Coast Salish territory. My interests lie in SENĆOŦEN and Hul’qu’minum language resurgence, celebrating multiple literacies (eco-, heart, community, and language literacies) enabled through reconnection with ancestral languages. At this point in my “canoe journey,” as the WEXES (frog) moon rises, I feel the ripple effect of the deep sorrow for the state of the environment. I want to celebrate W̱SÁNEĆ culture by honoring ancient knowledges carried by Elders, like Earl Jr., while also contributing to ecological restoration.

Reclamation of ancestral language and re-naming of sacred sites is vital to Coast Salish self-determination today. As we bear witness to increasing evidence that Indigenous language revitalization positively influences social determinants of health, it is time to celebrate ancient wisdoms living on in Elders, like Earl Jr. Furthermore, the importance of connecting language transmission with nature is confirmed by the rise in land-based pedagogies, where learning takes place on the land, forming what, in the words of the Tribal School’s ÁLEṈENEȻ program, is a “central strategy for the indigenization of education.”

SENĆOŦEN, the language of the W̱SÁNEĆ people, is one of 34 unique languages found in the territories known as British Columbia, the richly diverse home to 60 percent of First Nations languages in Canada. At ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱ Tribal School on the W̱JOȽEȽP (Tsartlip) reserve, students engage in learning-by-doing at PEPÁḴEṈ HÁUTW̱, the native plant nursery and garden

“Reclamation of ancestral language and re-naming of sacred sites is vital to Coast

Salish self-determination today.”

Facing Page: Alice and Earl. Photo: Anonymous, 2016 Above Left: PEPÁḴEṈ HÁUTW̱ (The Blossoming Place), the native plant nursery and garden at ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱ (Place of Refuge) Tribal School.

Photo: Alice Meyers, 2015Above Right: KEXMIN (Indian Consumption Plant) growing

at PEPÁḴEṈ HÁUTW̱. Photo: Alice Meyers, 2015


program, coordinated by local ethnoecologist Judith Lyn Arney. Workshops teach garden skills and SENĆOŦEN plant names, and language resurgence weaves into land-based, experiential learning.

The W̱SÁNEĆ people have lived on this land for millennia, forming intimate relationships with local keystone species such as salmon and cedar. Known as the

“salt water people,” the W̱SÁNEĆ “used the channels around our Island territories [as their] rivers,” as an ÁLEṈENEȻ program report puts it. They live today on four reserves at the location of original winter village sites, W̱JOȽEȽP (Tsartlip), SȾÁ,UTW̱ (Tsawout), W̱SÍKEM (Tseycum) and BOḰEĆEN (Pauquachin). In his book The Salt Water People, Dave Elliott Sr. describes W̱SÁNEĆ interconnectedness with nature as “so much a part of nature, we were just like the birds, the animals, the fish.”

W̱SÁNEĆ linguistic traditions are centered around this deep bond to the land and the sea. Earl told me stories of SENĆOŦEN place names tied to geographical formations on W̱SÁNEĆ territory. As Dave Elliott Sr. related in his book, “every bay, every stream, every village, every island, every mountain, every lake had a name in our language.” Place name stories underscore the significance of reclaiming local sites on Vancouver Island, such as PKOLS (Mt. Douglas), ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱ (Mt. Newton), and SṈIDĆEȽ (Tod Inlet), a practice Earl views as important for healing from residential

schools, conveying that “we all need to heal together.” Similarly, in the ÁLEṈENEȻ report John Elliott Sr., Dave Elliott’s son, expresses: “The teachings from this traditional place… are useful today in reconciling the relations between the W̱SÁNEĆ people, traditional places such as SṈITĆEȽ [sic], and others who currently live on or use these traditional territories.” The SENĆOŦEN names open a window onto understanding

another worldview, intrinsically linked to this land for thousands of years. In his book The Caretakers, W̱SÁNEĆ poet Philip Kevin Paul notes that the basic difference between English and SENĆOŦEN is “perspective,” as English “creates observers whereas the SENĆOŦEN language creates participants.”

In contrast to the deep reciprocal bond that W̱SÁNEĆ people hold with the earth, settler relationships with land shifted from respecting the land to viewing it as terra nullius (no-man’s land) through the lens of economic profitability. Conversely, the W̱SÁNEĆ honor the earth and her cycles, ensuring sustainability and displaying deep respect through ceremony, celebrating the arrival of each plant or animal that grows, each insect that buzzes by, and each tree that buds.

Sacred sites are known to be places where we communicate with creation, and their re-naming from European to Indigenous monikers is an act of reconciliation, contributing to a global movement to restore Indigenous rights. Earl tells me stories about SENĆOŦEN place names, originally told by his father, Earl Claxton Sr. Together, we present five elaborations on W̱SÁNEĆ sacred sites.

The first site is adjacent to the famed Butchart Gardens. Like the gardens, it rests on land reclaimed from a former

Above: Earl teaching W̱SÁNEĆ (Saanich) schoolchildren from ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱ Tribal School about traditional salmon fishing and preparation, and building respectful relationships of reciprocity.

Photo: Alice Meyers, 2015 Facing Page Left: The sign raised by the W̱SÁNEĆ (Saanich)

community during the 2013 re-naming of PKOLS (Mt. Douglas/White Head). Photo: Alice Meyers, 2015

Facing Page Right: ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱ (Place of Refuge) Tribal School, W̱JOȽEȽP (Tsartlip) on West Saanich Road, Vancouver Island,

British Columbia. Photo: Alice Meyers, 2016


cement factory at what has been called “Tod Inlet” on the Saanich Peninsula of Vancouver Island. Earl explains that this habitat restoration site for students at ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱ Tribal School is called SṈIDĆEȽ, meaning “Place of the Blue Grouse.” With sadness in his voice, Earl told me he believed the blue grouse might never return because of human interference with the land. As an indicator species, it was understood by the W̱SÁNEĆ people that “the

blue grouse would only occupy a place if the land was very rich,” as Philip Kevin Paul put it. SṈIDĆEȽ is the original W̱SÁNEĆ village site and an important fishing and hunting area—the only one, adds Paul, “within my people’s winter movements that offered protection from the southwest wind, the most vicious wind in Saanich.”

The second and third sacred sites have entered public consciousness through community-based movements to rename them as ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱ (Mt. Newton) and PKOLS (Mt. Douglas) on Vancouver Island. As heard in the film The Renaming of PKOLS, W̱SÁNEĆ Elder and master carver Charles Elliott refers to the renaming as a small act of decolonization, in which “we are honoring something that our ancestors had put into place thousands of years ago.” In 2013, actions to re-name PKOLS were organized by Earl’s community of SȾÁ,UTW̱ (Tsawout), supported by other W̱SÁNEĆ nations and the Songhee First Nation. PKOLS translates as “White Head,” reflecting Indigenous oral history, supported by geological findings, that it was the last place from which glaciers receded on southern Vancouver Island. PKOLS is sacred to the W̱SÁNEĆ as it represents their nation’s

birthplace. The reclaiming of ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱ followed in 2014. This mountain, after which ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱ Tribal School is named, is known as “The Place of Refuge,” referencing the great flood that forms part of W̱SÁNEĆ identity. Earl explains that a 10-15 minute hike past the parking lot at John Dean Provincial Park on Vancouver Island reveals “a sign up there that says ȽÁU,WELṈEW̱.” As recorded by Nancy Turner, the late Philip Paul, a well-known leader and former chief of the Tsartlip Band, and son of W̱SÁNEĆ Elder Christopher Paul (the latter being Turner’s “first ethnobotany teacher”) says the mountain evokes “reverence, a special emotional sense of awe and wonder similar to that a cathedral inspires… and an equivalent respect and wish to protect it from harm.”

The fourth site, known in English as McKenzie Bight, is what the W̱SÁNEĆ call W̱MÍYEŦEṈ, translated as “People of the Deer”. Using a phonetically based, anglicized spelling of the word for deer (smi-uth), Earl tells me “that’s where Smi-uth was transformed from a human to a deer.” As Smi-uth the human ran to escape XÁLS (the creator), he carried two arrows and two deep-sea mussel shells. XÁLS caught him and transformed Smi-uth into a deer, throwing the mussel shells into his head to become distinctive peaked ears, and sticking the arrows down each ankle to produce the bow-legged march of the deer. Earl often pointed out W̱MÍYEŦEṈ to me across the water. It is a formative story for my understanding of connections between people, language, and place.

The fifth site, W̱EN,NÁ,NEĆ (“Facing Towards Saanich”), is the W̱SÁNEĆ traditional territory near Fulford Harbor on Salt Spring Island. Earl’s translation of “your rear end facing the wind” depicts the extent of winter’s cold, as “you feel like the wind is traveling right through you.” Earl says at an original longhouse site are huge clam middens, proving the long occupation of the W̱SÁNEĆ people.

“Place name stories underscore the significance of reclaiming local sites … a practice … important for healing from residential schools.”


I see that each of these stories demonstrates the bond that W̱SÁNEĆ peoples have with their land, represented through the SENĆOŦEN language. Considering we all come from the earth, live from the earth, and go back to the earth, it is time to work together to honor the land around us and uphold First Peoples’ knowledges. Supporting SENĆOŦEN names for sacred sites is important to the W̱SÁNEĆ people

as an act of self-determination. As Earl asserts, it forms part of a healing process we all need to go through together. For local people seeking to respect Indigenous wisdoms, the name changes honor the desires of Elders. Globally, the reclaiming contributes to the linking of linguistic diversity with biodiversity, enriching universal soul consciousness.

As I watch the cedar branches dancing along the shore from my canoe, I reflect on the fact that the garden at PEPÁḴEṈ HÁUTW̱ provides a grounded, earthy place from which to learn these names and stories. As camas flowers and fawn

lilies begin to bloom with the arrival of a new growing season, Earl and the program coordinator prepare for sessions on canning, making berry jam and planting seeds, while the laughter of children resonates through the garden.

Further ReadingDavies, S. (Director). (2015). The Renaming of PKOLS. [Short film]. Canada.

Elliott, D. Sr. (1990). The Salt Water People: A Resource Book for the Saanich Native Studies Program. Native Education: School District 63 (Saanich).

Paul, P.K. (1995). The Caretakers: The Reemergence of the Saanich Indian Map. Sidney, BC: Institute of Ocean Sciences.

PEPÁḴEṈ HÁUTW̱. (2015). PEPÁḴEṈ HÁUTW̱: Native Plant Nursery & Garden. [Website]. Retrieved from www.pepakenhautw.com.

Swallow, T. (Ed.). (2008). ÁLEṈENEȻ: Learnings From Homeland. Brentwood Bay: W̱SÁNEĆ School Board & Saanich Adult Education Centre.

Turner, N. (2005). The Earth’s Blanket: Traditional Teachings for Sustainable Living. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

“Sacred sites are known to be places where we communicate

with creation, and their re-naming from European to

Indigenous monikers is an act of reconciliation, contributing to a global movement to restore

Indigenous rights.”

Above: W̱SÁNEĆ (Saanich) Elder STOLȻEȽ (John Elliott) with the younger generation on the Tsawout First Nation Reserve on Salt

Spring Island. Photo: Terralingua, 2011


On August 11, 2015 a Haida-language team set forth from G̱aaw on a three-day journey to survey the

north and west coasts of Haida Gwaii (the archipelago off the north coast of British Columbia, Canada that is the Haida people’s homeland). Guided by elders’ teachings, the Haida language, historical records, and century-old maps, they learned and confirmed a selection of the ancestral place names that cover Haida Gwaii. Haida speaker HlG̱awangdlii Skilaa (Lawrence Bell) and language consultant K’aayhltla Xuhl (Rhonda Bell) joined linguistics professor Gulḵiihlgad (Dr. Marianne Ignace) and language learner Jaalen Edenshaw aboard the vessel Highlander under the command of skipper Meredith Adams.

DAY ONEAs we round K’waayandaas Kun (Cape Knox), we

are struck by the ambling swell and driving chop that rolls forth from Tang.gx̱wang, the open sea. The Haida language, X̱aayda Kil, identifies over 40 different kinds of waves with their own particular names. Today I think Highlander is sampling most of them.

“You had to be tough to live on the west coast,” says HlG̱awangdlii Skilaa as the crowded waves shoulder the boat back and forth. Haida Gwaii balances on the edge of submarine cliffs two kilometers high. These plummet into the ocean depths below, connecting to expansive underwater plains that stretch on and on until they reach

Kamchatka Krai, on the eastern edge of Russia. Across the top of this ocean, winds combine with currents and tides creating waves that reach over 25 meters high and lumber along through gales that gust to 118 kilometers per hour.

Duu Guusd (the west coast of Haida Gwaii) is a tough and dynamic environment. After a long time traveling south, the thick, chilly mist lifts a little and then gives way to heavy showers. The mountain ranges of Haida Gwaii fade in and out of view through curtains of rain. Their very existence seems to depend on the whim of the clouds.

Some hours later, about 25 nautical miles south of K’waayandaas Kun, we pass between the shadows of Ts’al Yáalaas and Sk’aa, two large rocky reefs, and turn shoreward towards our first stop, thevillage of Tiiaan.

in Haida Gwaii

Graham RichardRough Waves Rough Waves and Remembered Names and Remembered Names

Duu

Guu

sd

Tang

.Gw

ang •

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Gamadiis LlnagaayPort Clements

T’aahl Kaahlii

GaawHlgat’at’aas

Yan

Hlgam Gwaayas

K’iis Gwaay

K’waayandaas kun

Kwaa Xiilas, Diigun, Diigun Jaahl

K’yuusda HlGaa Tl’ljiwas

Kang

Del Kaahlii

Yaagun GandleeJuus Gwaay

Aayan GandleeGalgam Tladaaw

SGaan Gandlee

Juus K’aahlii

Tiian

Gaaw Kaahlii

Sk’aa

Yaakw

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•

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•

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Gamadiis LlnagaayPort Clements

T’aahl Kaahlii

Yaagun GandleeJuus Gwaay

Aayan GandleeGalgam Tladaaw

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••••

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• Kwaa K’iijuuwas

Ts’al Y’aalaas

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Above: Map of the X̱aad Kil voyage along the north-west coast of Haida Gwaii. Map: Council of the Haida Nation, 2016


“Oh, someone should dance for our arrival,” quips HlG̱awangdlii Skilaa with veiled humor, in reference to an ancestral story from the ancient village. He steps down onto the pebbly beach and clambers over a gnarled overhang of giant hemlock roots to reach the village site above. “It’s a little more than hlkyaansii (bushy)” he says slyly while biting into a salmon sandwich.

Tiiaan is a name derived from the Tlingit language, meaning “yellow-cedar bark”. Many stories from this village are well remembered. The wind whisks through dripping bunch grass while Jaalen, Gulḵiihlgad, and the rest of our team search for features noted in these historical records—like a healing pool, da’áay (house pits), and fallen gin gy’aa.angs (monumental poles). As we compare the old stories to the village site today we learn not only the names of this place, but also the history of those names and their relationship with Haida Gwaii. Our language traveled with Haida Gwaii throughout the ages. Without X̱aad Kil we cannot understand Haida Gwaii in its fullness. Without Haida Gwaii, X̱aad Kil is placeless.

Learning and investigation characterize the three days that follow. As we explore the coast, we stop at landmarks that elders and anthropological records have described. So many diverse features dot the sea and land. Moss-capped reef rocks, bunched blocky pillars punching through the waves, and angular mash-ups of trapezoidal boulders that look like they grew from the dreams of a brilliant cubist painter. Each of these features holds a prominent name, and each name deepens our relationship with the land, sea and sky.

Among them, the cliffy island of T’uuj Ḵing Ḵaatl’aagangs (Fortress Where You See Who Is Arriving) stands away from the rocky coastline. From a stronghold on top, defenders could see and repel invaders. A “moat” of reef-rocks that “leap” through heaving waves would endanger approaching canoes. Here rollers from the open ocean wrestle into a central pool before rushing up slender channels of toothy rocks. From the bow of a war canoe, this cove may have felt like a pit surrounded by walls of gulping halibuts’ mouths. The buckling sea would test an archer’s skill as they trained arrows on firm-footed targets atop the cliffs. Today the clamor of battles has faded, leaving the craggy fortress to loom silently in fog.

The waves subside to the north as we round the reef in front of K’yuusda. Between large boulders situated onshore, Captain Adams navigates the shallow “runway” cleared for canoes long ago. We climb up to the cozy longhouse where Haida Watchmen Kihl Ḵwyaas (Blake Williams) and Sguunaman (Matthew Brown) greet us.

The two watchmen have spent many summers caring for K’yuusda, and take us to see the many distinctive,

Top: The X̱aad Kil crew disembarks at Tiiaan. Photo: Graham Richard, 2015

Centre: The X̱aad Kil crew sets out in search of a storied healing pool. Photo: Graham Richard, 2015

Bottom: T’uuj Ḵing Ḵaatl’aagangs (Fortress Where You See Who is Arriving) is a gnarled glacial fortress that stands out like a fang

from the bared teeth of surrounding reef-rocks. Photo: Graham Richard, 2015


and sometimes enormous, da’áay that dot the site. Each da’áay was dug in a single day, after which it could not be deepened. Because of this ancestral law, the depth and breadth of a da’áay is a sign of a family’s influence. Greater influence brings more helpers, deepening the da’áay. Some of the da’áay at K’yuusda appear big enough to fit a house inside, let alone around them.

We skirt below the crumbling monumental beams that once supported these massive cedar houses. On the fringes of the pits, these beams still seem to mark a boundary, like each house still has an “inside” and an “outside”, and to step within the threshold would disturb the home’s family members. Their memories are still palpable, and at the western edge of the village, one family’s crests are vividly depicted. At over one hundred years old, the three enormous gin gy’aa.angs stand strong in a line together.

Walking still further west, past K’yuusda’s edge, we pass mysterious petroglyphs carved in stone that mark the way to the village of Yaakw. This village also derives its name from a Tlingit word, meaning “canoe”. Here the village’s gin gy’aa.angs are returning to the soil. A Hawk pole now lays face down, nuzzling the earth. Without touching it, Jaalen tucks himself beneath it to glean what knowledge he can from its fading memory. The young carver fashions poles like this, and is careful to study every old carving that he can.

As the day’s last light grows tired, we lapse into silence and saunter back towards the longhouse at K’yuusda. Among the hemlocks and pines, memories of Haida ancestors seem more vivid in the dark. In the longhouse everyone gathers around the table to pour over the riddles our elders have left us, untangling the words of old worlds, stretching back to places well remembered and times newly imagined.

DAY TWOThe chilly light of our second morning pushes through

clouds that hang like cold breath above the cedars. We quickly load Highlander and push away from shore. The dull drone of the motors begins again, pulling the boat away from harbor and into hilly waves.

To the north, the cliffs of Cox Island smash the rollers apart with ease. The island’s unhurried sculptors, glaciers, vanished into the sea long ago, but today their tireless successor, the ocean, continues to wear away the stone. After eons of carving, the violent contours of this island unfold like wings as the crew searches for ancestral landmarks. Cox Island nests among reefs, whose serrated edges gleam with breaking waves. Behind it, the much larger Ḵ’iis Gwaay (Langara Island) wraps around the cove like a motherly arm.

Top Left: An enormous da’áay (house pit), K’yuusda. Top Right: Jaalen Edenshaw with three giant gin gy’aa.angs. Lower Left: An ancient petroglyph gazes with stone eyes.

Photos: Graham Richard, 2015Centre: Haida Watchman Kihl Ḵwyaas (Blake Williams) graciously hosts the crew and joins in to discuss the intricacies of Haida

anthologies. Photo: Graham Richard, 2015 Bottom: A rainy start on the second day aboard Highlander.

Photo: Graham Richard, 2015


As HlG̱awangdlii Skilaa said, “you had to be tough to live on the west coast”, yet these crushing breakers are perfect habitat for a host of plump sea birds. From the cliff-sides, ḵwaanaa (tufted puffins) plunge and zip about nipping at darting fish. Once full, they retire to cold cliff-edges, where they are quite comfortable exposed to the wind and rain, perched high above the boulder-strewn shore.

As the crew passes in front of Cox Island, a tall fin of rock seems to peel away, revealing it is pierced through with a hole. The crew is excited to realize they have identified Ḵwaa X̱iilas (Pierced Rock). Stories say a husband and wife living close by would venture out to make slaves of anyone who came to collect sea-bird eggs there. Their work came to an end when, as they ran from angry pursuers, they were instantaneously petrified. As we round the northern tip of Cox Island, the wife and husband come into view, standing close to one another in pillars of stone. These stones are called Diigun and Diigun Jaahl.

We continue along the south and east coasts of Ḵ’iis Gwaay, where the shore proliferates with landmarks. Outlandish stones jut forth inconceivably into the sky, hang delicately on slim buttresses, and lean lazily to one side like windblown pines.

Along the south shore, we find Tsiihlans G̱unaay (Devil’s Club’s Burial), a bulbous stone with a lopsided head lolling on a tapering neck, like stan (geoduck) standing upside down on its tongue. Next comes Tiidaldaang (Small Waves), perhaps so named because here the water calms significantly. After this Ḵwaa Tl’ajuwaas (Slanting Rock) appears, leaning diagonally and loosely cross-hatched as if by a carver’s hasty apprentice. From here, looking north, the hazy shadow of Ḵwaa Ḵ’iijuuwas (Heavy Stone) appears like a dark doorway.

“Ḵ’iijuu is something heavy and ‘huh!’, ” Gulḵiihlgad explains, widening her arms and hefting them down as if she were setting a boulder in the sand. “You can also call a person that.” Suddenly a jet of kun’s (humpback whale) hot breath rockets through a flock of hllgwaats’I (rhinoceros auklets). The shrouds of rain begin to evaporate, and with just a smudge of sunlight, the waves’ orange crests topple over their dark blue bellies. Highlander skirts around fields of kelp as we zip towards Needan (Naden Harbor).

In front of the entrance to Needan, Hlgam Gwaayas is a cozy spot for x̱uud (seal), k’yaaluu (cormorant), and sḵ’in (seagull), who all rest there together. Among the x̱uud, a vigilant mother watches us pensively, shifting from flipper to flipper. The many nests that sea-birds scatter throughout the area have made this an important food-gathering spot.

Beyond it, giant hemlock at the village of Ḵang totter in the wind. The name Ḵang is so old that its meaning is unknown. The only structure that remains standing is an orderly Watchman longhouse. Nearby the longhouse, two sgaan (orca) house-beams lie on the ground side-by-side, their faces nearly wrinkled beyond recognition. Young hemlocks grow from them, arching strong roots around them and into the soil below. A little farther a house beam has completely disappeared, leaving behind an archway of empty hemlock roots. Beside it a few corner posts and house frontal planks still stand upright. One, close to the farthest point on the site, shows the monumental size of the houses that once stood here.

As Captain Adams points Highlander’s bow back towards Gaaw, the crew relaxes a little, and again falls to swapping jokes and telling stories. Since yesterday, the crew has had many chances to show initiative and skill while navigating dangerous waters, clambering through forests, and investigating the many Haida-language clues left to them by elders.

Below Left & Right: All kinds of animals find rest and refuge on the rocks close to Hlgam Gwaayas. With the sun out, HlGawangdlii Skilaa (Lawrence Bell) and Gulkiihlgad (Dr. Marianne Ignace) can see the animals in the teeming summer waters. Photos: Graham Richard 2015


“All these k’aaláagaa people,” HlG̱awangdlii Skilaa remarks. I hesitate for a moment, then ask: “What does k’aaláagaa mean? You’ve been calling us that for two days”. “It’s like the opposite of lazy, worthless, good-for-nothing,” he replies. “A k’aaláagaa person always brings a knife with them, so they can be useful. K’aaláagaa women used to carry a taakadaaw (hand-made fish-knife) with them.”

“K’aaláagaa, k’aaláagaa… ” I begin repeating the word to memorize it. Every new word replenishes our understanding of Haida Gwaii—every word memorized teaches us what is important now and what was important to our ancestors. So much is wrapped up, not only in the forest and sea, but in the language too. With the Haida language, we can see not only Haida Gwaii in its fullness, but also ourselves.

DAY THREELong ago, G̱aaw Ḵaahlii (Massett Inlet) formed from

a slender river pouring forth from a glacial lake. Since then, rising sea levels have flooded the riverbed, and today a long inlet has formed with a large bay at its end. When the sun and moon pull on this heavy body of water, tidal currents rush forth from the large bay into the narrow channel. The heavy body of water spills downwards to the ocean, like the force of a spindle-whorl concentrating all its energy into a slender thread, creating a fast, strong tidal river.

The flanks of G̱aaw Ḵaahlii are littered with landmarks. Many are the remnants of Taaw’s (Tow Hill) journey through Juus Káahlii (Juskatla Inlet) from the mountains at the heart of Haida Gwaii above. In the story, Taaw walks away from his family to settle on the coast at Hl’yaalang G̱andlee (Hiellen River).

At the mouth of G̱aaw Ḵaahlii lie the scattered pieces of Hlgat’at’áas (Stone Broken by Foot). When Taaw passed

in front of G̱aaw Llnagaay (Old Massett), Yaahl (Raven) came out of the house and jumped and shouted on top of the rock, crushing it underfoot.

Before that, Taaw had been trapped in the mud of Del Ḵaahlii (Delkatla Slough), where today geese and herons share the rich waters of the sanctuary with the boats moored at the Massett docks. As Highlander casts away I imagine how Del Ḵaahlii would have looked in the shadow of a supernatural being formed in a volcano’s throat. I imagine an entire mountain wading down G̱aaw Ḵaahlii, sliding through the forest with a watery trail, looming like a gigantic sea snail.

Pushing against G̱aaw Ḵaahlii’s ebbing tide, our attention turns towards the sea floor which is dotted with xaguu ḵ’ujuus (halibut houses). These holes are ideal lairs for xaguu, who wait inside and pounce on prey that encroaches along the thresholds of their homes. On Haida Gwaii, xaguu ḵ’ujuus are treasured food-gathering spots.

As the tide grows stronger, we approach a low, flat area strewn with boulders and colored a deep algae-green. A convenient ledge of miniature mud-cliffs hems in this flat intertidal meadow. It’s a bonus for Jaalen as Captain Adams brings us close enough for him to bound ashore. But it takes us two attempts, as the tidal current pushes Highlander sideways and into muddy, rock-strewn shallows. These dangerous currents that grapple with Highlander come from the massive quantities of water situated at the top of G̱aaw Ḵaahlii near Yaagun G̱andlee (Yakoun River). As these waters yield to the moon’s pull, currents converge, surging through G̱aaw Ḵaahlii’s long and relatively narrow neck with enormous force. As Highlander approaches the meadow, our efforts to make headway remind me of an eagle attempting to alight in a bitter crosswind.

Safe ashore, Jaalen passes through a field of furrowed stones to inspect Ḵwaa G̱adaas, a distinct, bright, and large boulder. Ḵwaa G̱adaas is a moraine deposit, part of a

Above Left: Taaw is a massive volcanic plug now located on the northern shore of Haida Gwaii. Its seaward face has since eroded into the sea leaving behind a striking cliff-side. Photo: Graham Richard, 2015Above Right: Jaalen compares his notes to the shoreline as he scans

it for landmarks. Photo: Graham Richard, 2015


mountainside heaved and carried away by glaciers. As the glaciers melted, they lowered Ḵwaa G̱adaas gently to the shore where currents polished its glossy faces.

As Highlander continues south, we pass the place where T’aahl Ḵaahlii (Kamdis Slough) rejoins G̱aaw Ḵaahlii from behind Kamdis Island. Taaw blazed this pathway as he moved from the large bay into the side channel. From Highlander’s deck, the small inlets, creeks, and islands are indistinguishable to the inexperienced. Until one consults a map, all of these hidden features blend with the forests.

As we leave G̱aaw Ḵaahlii’s narrow channel and enter the vast bay above, our guides are Moses Ingram and Adolfous (Fussy) Marks. We are listening to their voices recorded many years ago. They recite the places in order from memory as we pass by. HlG̱awangdlii Skilaa smiles affectionately at the familiarity of their voices and laughter. “I can see them talking,” he says with a grin.

We continue along G̱aaw Ḵaahlii’s northwest shore, and eventually come to Aayan G̱andlee (Ain River). Here the crew disembarks for lunch. This place is home to a large salmon population, which has provided thousands of years of food for Haida. For now, only the fat geese have returned. They watch us skittishly as they nibble on carpets of sea asparagus. A few cabins stand here, as empty as the river, in wait of the next salmon run when they will spring to life again. High above us thrushes call, their songs carrying from tree to tree inflated by the hot August air and punctured by the lethargic creak of a lazy fir leaning on its neighbor.

Farther down the shore, we come to SG̱aan G̱ándlee (Killer Whale Creek). Here, springs of freshwater gush forth from a curved cliff and fall straight into the sea. When families of SG̱aan (killer whales) chase the home-coming salmon up G̱aaw Ḵaahlii, they often make a stop below the cliffs to sweeten their tongues in the waterfall. For now, dry weather has parched the fall’s chalked face with an orange stain that marks the waterfall’s path.

We can see G̱algam Tladaaw (McKay Range) from here, where some Haida seek solitude and go in search of visions. In stories, Skil Jaadee comes to bestow fortune and wealth on those who persevere, and somewhere high above us Ḵ’aalangt’als, a rock wall covered in petroglyphs, is concealed in the forest awaiting its next student. I consider the drought-parched cliffs at Sgaan G̱ándlee, and how the thrushes’ song echoed through the leaf-bare understory at Aayan G̱andlee, and think about what kind of wisdom Ḵ’aalangt’als might offer.

The farthest corner of G̱aaw Ḵaahlii is distinguished by the “claw marks” of Stl’aadaa Gaaywaa (With-Fingernail-

Caused-Sloped Bank). It is easy to imagine the white “fingernails” of glaciers scraping away the mountain range as they were dragged into the sea.

As we move across the water along the south shore to Juu K’iijee (Juskatla Narrows), upwelling currents swallow each other, clambering onto one another’s shoulders. The ebbing tide is forcing thousands of tonnes of seawater through Juu K’iijee by the minute. Whirlpools make contorted reflections of the sky and darkened back-eddies obscure the wealth of sea-life that supported the numerous nearby villages. Three of these villages are located on the small island of Juus Gwaay alone, including K’iinya ’Lngee and Tsiij ’Llgee.

From Juu K’iijee, we can see where Taaw walked down from the mountains. There his mother and brother still stand at Taaw Linuwée (Half of Taaw). As we reach the starting point of Taaw’s journey, so we reach the end of our own. Captain Adams turns around to steer Highlander back through Juu K’iijee and heads for Gaaw. HlG̱awangdlii Skilaa, K’aayhltla Xuhl, and Gulḵiihlgad settle down in the forecastle, and quickly fall to joking and chattering. Jaalen and I sit amidships, enjoying the warm wind.

The three-day journey has shown how X̱aad Kil and Haida Gwaii are intertwined. The sea and land revealed subtleties about the place names. Similarly, the place names revealed secrets about the sea and land. Thus, each renders a more complete version of the other, and both are teachers. As I ponder the many lessons of the three-day trip, I begin again to wonder about the wisdom that a cliff might impart.

Further ReadingBlackman, Margaret B. (1982). During My Time: Florence Edenshaw Davidson, A Haida Woman. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Gill, Ian. (2009). All That We Say Is Ours: Guujaaw and the Reawakening of the Haida Nation. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre.Council of the Haida Nation. (2016) Haida Laas Archives. Retrieved from http://www.haidanation.ca/Pages/haida_laas/hl_archives.htmlStearns, M.L. (1981). Haida Culture in Custody: The Masset Band. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Steedman, Scott and Jisgang (Nika Collison) (Eds.)( 2011). That Which Makes Us Haida. Skidegate, Haida Gwaii: Haida Gwaii Museum Press.Swanton, J.R. (John Reed). (1905). Reprinted (1975). Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida. New York: AMS Press.

HlG̱aa Tl'ljiwas (Pillar Rock), a storied feature of Haida Gwaii’s northern coast. Photo: Graham Richard, 2015


Indigenous Resistance

and Biocultural Conservation

Through Participatory Video

Thor Edmundo Morales

Pintando La Raya

At the onset of this decade, members of three ethnic groups gathered in the state of Sonora,

northwestern Mexico. Seri (Comcaac), Rarámuri, and Yaqui participants went to the Yaqui village of Vicam to get their first exposure to participatory video (PV), with training provided by the UK-based organization InsightShare. Three facilitators, 16 participants, five different languages, and 12 days of intensive intercultural exchange around cameras, culture, and indigenous voices on climate change. It was a success. Everyone loved the participatory approach and enjoyed using cameras, had fun filming, and learned what it feels like to be filmed. Communities got involved in the process through night-

time screenings and word-of-mouth communication. The power of video was unveiled and participants’ creativity unleashed. This is how Pintando La Raya was born, although at that stage I didn’t even imagine the outcomes and surprises this PV journey would yield. My expectations have been far exceeded.

After this first gathering, the newly formed PV teams started to produce their own documentary films, mostly based on biocultural knowledge, with an emphasis on foodways and nature conservation. Every film required several screenings in order to be finished and approved by the community. Video acted as a “third party” in the relationship between filmmakers and community. It opened the door to a new form of communication within villages. Through interviews with neglected and forgotten cultural groups and persons such as elders, youngsters, and women, PV allowed for their voices to be heard. People regained confidence and exerted their prerogative to speak their minds and share ideas on issues they felt needed to be visualized and, above all, changed. Speaking on camera allowed everyone to find a way to express themselves and overcome discrimination, fear, or shyness. Soon, PV filmmakers noticed that everyone was interested in this new form of communication (and in their films). Communities took pride in their participation in endogenously produced movies. They no longer needed to depend on foreign media to speak for them. PV provided the key to true and real, culturally relevant, freedom of expression.

Both Seri and Yaqui, in particular, became aware of video’s potential for community building, problem

Top Left: Eusebia Flores (L) and Romelia Barnett practice filming during the early stages of the Participatory Video (PV) adventure. Photo: Thor Morales, 2012

Middle Left: José Ramón Torres interviews a local dweller about climate change, fisheries and hunting. Photo: Thor Morales, 2010


solving, biocultural documentation, and engagement of marginalized groups. Then in 2015 they decided that making PV films for these purposes was not enough. While they were enjoying it and were getting results within their communities, the seasoned Yaqui and Seri filmmakers were ready to go further. This gift had to be shared with

The intent of Pintando La Raya is not to separate the indigenous from the non-indigenous.

It is a community-based initiative that seeks to empower rural communities.

Top Left: Rarámuri women watch indigenous films during a community screening in Sojahuachi, Rarámuri territory. Photo: Thor Morales, 2013

2nd Left:: José Luis Bajeca, Samuel Cupis & Eusebia Flores get a laugh while reviewing their footage during their training to become facilitators. Photo: Thor Morales, 2014

3rd Left:: Romelia Barnett (R) & Anabela Carlon with Soledad Muñiz (InsightShare Senior facilitator) during a training workshop in Loma de Bacum, Yaqui Territory. Photo: Thor

Morales, 2015Bottom Left:: Participants working on a storyboard as part of the PV facilitator training.

Photo: Thor Morales, 2015

Top Right: Valentina Barnett (right) has fun while teaching her older sisters (Susana and Mina) the art of PV. Photo: Thor Morales, 2015Middle Right: Valentina Barnett & Imelda Morales record the sunset during a PV training in the community of El Desemboque, Seri Territory. Photo: Thor Morales, 2015Bottom Right: Seri participants film sound effects at Punta Chueca, Seri Territory, for their film on language loss. Photo: Thor Morales, 2015


other communities within and outside their ethnic groups. Commitment, solidarity, and recognition of shared issues affecting indigenous peoples sparked a new ideal: becoming PV facilitators, with an aim to disseminate PV to all indigenous communities in northwestern Mexico (just as a starting point!). The use of cameras, they felt, should have a social impact. Video, they realized, has the power to confront issues affecting what matters most to Native peoples: territory—a simple word that embraces culture, nature, history, dignity, land, food, dreams, landscapes, mindsets. It’s home, often sacred and venerated.

Based on this idea of territory, Pintando la Raya was born. This is a Mexican-Spanish expression meaning “stay off ” (literally “drawing the line”). It is a metaphorical warning to outsiders seeking to illegally and aggressively take over indigenous lands and resources and exploit culture and nature without giving any benefits back to Native peoples.

The intent of Pintando La Raya is not to separate the indigenous from the non-indigenous. It is a community-based initiative that seeks to empower rural communities and bridge the gap between Native peoples and urban centers, regionally, nationally, and worldwide. Local problems need solidarity from outsiders. Indigenous peoples need to form networks of support and resistance to face challenges that threaten their territories. Native communities need to be able to speak for themselves, portray and share their stories in a way that is genuine and reflects local points of view. The overall goal is to train an “army” of PV filmmakers, using the tool of video according to the community’s concerns and desires. The advantage of video is that it emulates the traditional oral way of passing on knowledge as well as the experiential learning process common in most indigenous communities. It is a modern tool that can be implemented to revitalize ancient cultural ways. The participatory approach ensures video is equally accessible and all voices have their say.

First steps have been taken. As of this writing, PV filmmakers from the Guarijío and Yoreme indigenous communities have received training from mixed teams of Yaqui and Seri delivered the trainings. At least four communities in Sonora can now use video to support their struggles and share their ideas, messages, and issues with other Native peoples and a wider audience, in addition to documenting their own traditions, strengthening their language, and creating media in a culturally appropriate manner.

Right: Valentina García is trained in tripod and camera use during her first approach to PV. Photo: Thor Morales, 2015

Top Background: Ben Hadad Comito, a young Seri participant, films the last lights and colors right after sunset. Photo: Thor Morales, 2015

Top Left: The author with indigenous facilitators and trainees at the outskirts of the Sierra Madre, Guarijío Territory. Photo: Thor Morales, 2015

Middle Left: Seri and Yaqui participants during an editing session. This is what PV editing looks like: many heads, many hands, many points of view mingling to create one film. Photo: Thor Morales, 2015

Bottom Left: Community screening of the first video produced through a training conducted by indigenous facilitators. Photo: Thor Morales, 2015


Many people have been involved in this process, but current members of Pintando La Raya include: Anabela Carlon, Eusebia Flores, Valentina García, and Samuel Cupis from the Yaqui tribe, and Romelia Barnett, Valentina Barnett, Samuel Romero, and Jose Ramón Torres from the Seri tribe. They believe indigenous-to-indigenous PV training allows for immediate trust and solidarity between fellow Native peoples. Their initiative builds on their 4-year experience as PV practitioners and the training delivered by InsightShare, through which they

have become PV facilitators. Their story is one full of commitment, responsibility, compassion, hard work, fun, delight, and laughter. The main pillars of this project are: community cinema and screenings, to share powerful and inspiring Native peoples’ stories from all over the world; PV trainings, to create a marabunta (a word that refers to nomadic ants that gather in high numbers, often in the millions) of PV filmmakers; documentary filmmaking, to express their own ideas and address issues that affect biocultural continuity and territorial sovereignty.

Pintando La Raya is an initiative created by Native Mexicans for Native Mexicans. Yet, it will surely lead the way for other marginalized groups to use PV as a powerful tool to protect nature, culture, dignity, and human rights in general. The Yaqui and Seri are pioneering a trail that will take them to unimagined places, literally and metaphorically.

Further Reading / Viewing Goodsmith, L., & Acosta, A. (2011). Community Video for Social Change: A Toolkit. Minneapolis, MN: American Refugee Committee International.

La Marabunta Filmadora. (2015). [YouTube Channel]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/user/LaMarabuntaFilmadora

Lunch, N., & Lunch, C. (2006). Insights into Participatory Video, a handbook for the field. InsightShare. Retrieved from http://www.insightshare.org/sites/insightshare.org/files/file/Insights%20into%20Participatory%20Video%20-%20A%20Handbook%20for%20the%20Field%20(English) (1).pdf

Muniz, S. (2012). Participatory development communication (PDC): rhetoric or reality? The analysis of community-based level interventions in Latin America and Africa with dialogue and empowerment as intended outcomes. (M.Sc. Dissertation). University of Reading, London, UK.

Top: Coastal landscape of the Seri territory. Photo: Thor Morales, 2014

Middle Left: Romelia Barnett sharing footage with Guarijío children during a PV training. Photo: Thor Morales, 2015

Bottom Left: Wilderness landscape surrounding the Guarijío community near San Bernardo, Sonora, Mexico. Photo: Thor Morales, 2015


Since January 1, 1995, when the World Trade Organization came into existence, the winds

of globalization have picked up the world over, blowing local roofs off. As in the Biblical story of the merchants selling in the temple, companies don’t self-regulate—they don’t see any limits to business. As a consequence, a vast heritage of biocultural diversity is being destroyed by the unfettered economic activities of a global army of corporations. Someone else should set limits and provide direction, counterbalancing the culture, interests, and actions of corporations. But who that someone else should be remains an open question.

Public institutions often believe they serve the national interest by serving the interests of national and transnational corporations. They

do so because they usually see their main role as one of fostering economic growth and jobs in the short term and at all costs. European nations in particular, because of their economic wealth and cultural traditions, should have been at the forefront of the global effort in defense of biocultural diversity. On the contrary, they allowed the merchants (read European Union and European Central Bank) to become the lords of the temple.

Who else, then, should be taking the lead to stop the bleeding and ensure that the energies of corporations are re-routed toward the common interests of Nations (seen as Places, or as systems of Places)? In my view, this role falls upon educational institutions, and upon place-

Cilento, Italy, as a Master of Biocultural Wisdom

Dario Ciccarelli to Make Ciccimmaretati It Takes Millennia

Bottom: View of the town of Pollica in Cilento, Italy. Photo: Giuseppe Cucco, 2006

based alliances between educational and public institutions. Public institutions certainly do have a duty to defend Places across the globe against the destructive voraciousness of industry. The problem is that educational institutions have so far failed to provide public institutions with the tools they need in order to deal with this vital task. Academic scholars—and this is especially true in Europe—continue to carry out their research and teaching in an antiquated way, seemingly unconcerned with and indifferent to the winds of global business.

Educational institutions rarely look out of the window to see the real world, and mostly don’t believe it is up to them to promote social processes aimed at preserving the real world out there from further devastation. They continue to myopically pursue the growth of knowledge in a vacuum, while ignoring real life. They study the world, but do not seem to care about its well-being and survival; even less do they seem to be committed to the fate of any specific place. As a consequence, they fail to train place-sensitive students and a place-sensitive ruling class. Economists, jurists, engineers, and even historians and philosophers, continue to look at the world in an abstract and affectless manner, with eyes that are as place-insensitive as those of global business. So,

Places—and the world, as a system of Places—are defenseless. In this disconnected worldview, nobody seems to want to take responsibility for preventing lush biocultural landscapes from becoming arid ecological and social deserts at the hand of profit-seeking corporations. From this perspective, educational paradigms ought to be radically revised and transformed, if those who should be on the frontlines of protecting and fostering our global biocultural heritage are to be fully prepared and able to play that crucial role.

Over the centuries, Wise Places have s p o n t a n e o u s ly c a re d fo r “ s u s t a i n a b l e

development” and local biocultural diversity, ensuring an overall coherence among the various dimensions of life. The map drawn by the Wisdom of Places is a colorful patchwork of local traditions, vocations and archetypes. Take the case of Italy: “made in Italy” products, place-based entities such as Industrial Districts, Geographical Indications, and the Mediterranean Diet constitute not only the essence of the country’s economic wealth, but also the essence of its cultural heritage and its social structure. Preserving such specificity for the benefit of the world, rather than establishing a powerful but placeless economic alliance (such as the European Union), seems to be the historic task facing Italy at this time—and a compelling social responsibility for every country the world over in this globalization era.

Across the globe today, however, the colorful map created by origin-sensitive Wise Places is at risk of turning into a black-and-white catalog of stereotypes. And the place-insensitive, rationalistic approach of the so-called human and social sciences has not been very helpful in this regard. Scholars have intellectually (and bureaucratically) dissected Place into component parts assigned to different disciplines, while missing the vital unity of Place itself, its experience, its lessons. By doing so, they have failed to fulfill their de facto mission in the era of globalization: if not they, then who? Often unconsciously, they have ended up embracing the paradigms of corporations and serving their interests.

The Wisdom of Places can have the power to turn the tide, affirming itself over the superficiality of the intellectualized visions and approaches of the current generation of scholars. To achieve that goal, place-sensitive and place-responsible educational institutions must break down the theoretical barriers among disciplines, bringing transdisciplinary knowledge to bear on the defense of the Wisdom of Places. In such a place-caring approach, the human and social sciences would contribute to setting up new forms of place-based and tradition-based cooperation that will protect local biocultural diversity from the ravages of industry and government. And locally focused educational institutions would feel a compelling

“Nobody seems to want to take responsibility for preventing lush biocultural landscapes from becoming arid ecological

and social deserts at the hand of profit-seeking corporations.”


mandate arising from their specific location. It seems perfectly reasonable, for instance, that universities in Magna Graecia—the historic area of southern Italy that has been deeply influenced by Hellenic civilization—should embrace a strong responsibility toward the historical and cultural specificity of the region where they are located.

Consider this. Magna Gaecia was home to the great pre-Socratic philosophers Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Philolaus, Parmenides, Zeno, and particularly to the Eleatic School, founded by Parmenides in the 5th Century BC in Elea, a Greek colony in what is now the Cilento area of Campania, in southern Italy. Were these philosophers place-independent thinkers? Or were they rather the expression of a specific territory? Would it be irrational to look at Elea—the specific Place itself—as the foundation of the Eleatic School? Far from that, it seems entirely reasonable to view that Place as the fertile ground from which this rich culture gradually sprung up. Rather, what seems irrational is scholars’ current lack of interest in “getting inside” Cilento and

other Wise Places—no matter what recognition they may get elsewhere, such as being included in the UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites. “The Cilento,” says UNESCO, “is an outstanding cultural landscape… The Cilento was also the boundary between the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia and the indigenous Etruscan and Lucanian peoples.

And Cilento is also the home of ciccimmaretati, a quintessentially traditional peasant dish made by cooking a variety of legumes and grains (cicci), which are then mmaretati (“married”, that is mixed) together in a pot to make a hearty soup. Similar dishes are made in different villages of Cilento, with local variations in preparation and naming. Ciccimmaretati is the name of the dish in Stio, Castel San Lorenzo, and other villages; in Cicerale it is called cicciata; in other parts of Cilento, it is named cuccia. Some of these highly localized recipes may include up to 20 different sorts of legumes and grains. Places are careful in handling every detail, including the ceremonial occasions in which the dish is made. In Casaletto Spartano, for example, it is on the first day of

Theater at Elea in Cilento, the site of the ancient Greek philosophical school. Photo: Martin Boesch, 2014 (Wikimedia Commons)


May that young boys and girls go from house to house asking for every kind of legumes and grains, to be cooked separately and then “married” (mixed) in a large pot in the village’s main square. Villagers take a portion of the soup as a good omen for prosperity and abundance of crops. In Castellabate, instead, the cicci are cooked on the Day of the Dead.

Such celebrations strikingly remind us of ancient Greek offerings of all varieties of seeds to the gods, as a part of fertility rituals. As explained by some of the greatest among Greek philosophers

(such as Heraclitus and Plato), the art of mixing various legumes (seen as seeds of the Earth) in a tasty soup is a good image of the gentle universal harmony that the world can achieve if biodiversity is slowly fostered and cultivated.

So now we might ask: what is the tie that binds Parmenides and ciccimmaretati? What do Cilentan farmers have in common with the illustrious Magna Graecian philosopher? What they have in common is Place, the Wisdom of Place. Both Parmenides and the farmers respond to the uniqueness of Place, and that uniqueness resides

The cicciata ciceralese is one of the numerous highly localized versions of the Cilento dish also known as ciccimmaretati. This version hails from Cicerale, the “chickpea village”, a Slow Food Presidium. Recipe from: Giovanna Voria (2008). Cucinare con i Ceci [Cooking with Chickpeas]. Sarno, Italy: Edizioni dell’ Ippogrifo. (Reproduced with permission.)*

Of peasant origin, this soup was traditionally prepared on May 1st, once sowing was done, to propitiate a new and abundant harvest. As a good omen, people would offer a bowl of the soup to their neighbors. All the leftover seeds from the previous harvest—about twenty different kinds between legumes and grains—would be soaked and cooked separately. Once each type was fully cooked, they would be mixed all together to make the authentic cicciata. Even today, in spite of the lengthy and elaborate preparation, cicciata remains one of the tastiest dishes in the cuisine of the Cilento region of Italy.

Ingredients for four people:

20 grams for each of the following seeds: Cicerale chickpeas, cicerchia (chickling vetch), fava beans, borlotti beans, cannellini beans, Controne beans, fagiolini di maggese (“fallow beans”), red beans, fagioli a pisello (“pea-like beans”), fagioli d’acqua (“water beans”), fagioli striati (“striped beans”), fagioli dell’occhio

(black-eyed beans), farro, oats, barley, three types of Cilento wheat, dried peas, lentils.

For the soffritto: extravirgin olive oil DOP (“Protected Designation of Origin”) from Cilento, half an onion, one garlic clove, one sprig of parsley and one of celery (chopped), salt, chili pepper (optional).

Separately soak the various legumes and grains overnight, then cook, also separately. Once each is done, mix in a single pot, adding salt as needed, and continue to cook on low heat. Place the oil in a pan and prepare the soffritto with the onion, garlic,

parsley, celery, and chili pepper (if using). Pour the soffritto into the soup, continuing to cook for a few minutes to bring out the flavor. Serve hot with croutons of crusty bread.

* Translated from Italian by Luisa Maffi. Some of the bean varieties mentioned in this recipe are highly local and lack common names in English. Literal translations are provided in those cases.

Giovanna Voria’s cicciata. Photo: Luigi Savini 2016.

How to Make Cicciata Ciceralese


in its specific art of blending. And it is the Wisdom of Place, maintained and imparted over millennia, that ensures that certain experiences survive over time in the local culture, morphing into customary ways of thinking, feeling, behaving, cooking. All along, whenever farmers in Cilento have “married” legumes and grains to make ciccimmaretati, that has happened because, in that particular situation, such is the will of that special and enduring Place. It is Place that retains the archetypal ingredients and turns them into dishes that generation after generation makes its own. And Parmenides, also a fruit of that Place, has certainly always been, and still is, “there” in spirit.

So the cicci must be mmaretati, and the manner in which they are put together is absolutely crucial. Places have an incomparable mastery because they promote and maintain relationships. Places ensure a slow and wise evolution of the nature of interactions among cicci. Each simple human gesture is part of a complex and dynamic framework (a “pot”) that normally is under the fair rule of Place. Each aspect of a Place is an ingredient in the civilizational “dish”, and each is a vital “seed”, harmonized in the “pot” without losing its distinctive identity. And of course this way in which Place teaches its wisdom applies not only to ciccimmaretati, but also to any other aspect of local traditions, in Cilento and all around the world.

Who would imagine that to look at a pot of ciccimmaretati is to look at such an extraordinary and delicate image of biocultural diversity, of cosmic harmony and unity in diversity? And, of course, Magna Graecia doesn’t eat ciccimmaretati

only. She also fancies salella ammaccate olives, Controne beans and menaica anchovies—some of the other marvels of the Mediterranean Diet, which in 2013 UNESCO inscribed in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The truth is that, through ciccimmaretati and the Mediterranean Diet, Wise Cilento and Magna Graecia are preserving—as well as revealing—the spiritus loci (spirit of Place), in which all is simple and everything becomes One. The etymology says it all: diet comes from the Greek diaita, which means “way of life”. In a sense, by expressing the local worldview, Magna Graecia and the Mediterranean Diet do become a single cultural unity—a cultural unity that, so far, has been utterly ignored by Italy’s bureaucratic institutions.

Compared with such slow and wise place-based evolution, fast and disruptive accelerations currently imposed by business-driven and technology-driven processes threaten to irreversibly devastate, in only one generation, an outstanding diversity “menu” compiled over millennia. Business and its supporters promote mobility. But those who stay where their ancestors once were offer themselves to the service of the Place and its virtues (language, culture, wisdom, worldview). In essence, some “persistent connection to place” is an indispensable “seed” of civilization.

Now back to the merchants in the temple and the role of International Organizations. When the

Below Left & Right: Faces of Cilento. Photos: Giuseppe Cucco, 2007 & 2009


World Trade Organization (WTO) was established in 1995, who was the first to come knocking at its gilded doors? It certainly wasn’t the Wise Place, walking at its innately slow pace. Neither was the academic system. The one who arrived there first was the nimble CEO, ready to jump on the “deal”—and maybe to quickly replace ciccimmaretati with standardized junk food. And,

because nobody has yet shed light on what new role governments should play in the global market era, national political institutions are still at a loss in finding their mission and function. So, short of any counter-balancing mechanisms, the temple is

still full of merchants, and young place-insensitive CEOs of multinational corporations continue—whether knowingly or unknowingly—to wreak havoc around the world.

Yet, the structure of the WTO legal system does aim to pursue sustainable development and to establish a balance between trade interests and non-trade interests. The WTO rules on Marks of Origin, technical barriers to trade, and consumer protection do provide fundamental tools to preserve biocultural diversity and to deliver the “Made in” according to genius loci (genius of Place), spiritus loci (spirit of Place), and fama loci (reputation of Place). The Agreement on Intellectual Property does set crucial rules on Geographical Indications. Article XX of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) does allow nations to take measures to protect “public morals”, “human, animal, or plant life or health”, as well as “national treasures of artistic, historic,

“Fast and disruptive accelerations currently imposed by business-driven

and technology-driven processes threaten to irreversibly devastate …

an outstanding diversity 'menu' compiled over millennia.”

Top Left: Spollichini beans. Photo: Giuseppe Cucco, 2011

Top Right: Salella ammaccata olives. Photo: Giuseppe Cucco, 2011

Btm Right: Salted menaica anchovies with menaica fishing net. Photo: Giuseppe Cucco, 2005


or archaeological value”, and to “ensure the conservation of exhaustible natural resources”. All of these tools are just waiting for capable hands to pick them up and use them for the common good. The problem is that a whole army of players in this game develops extensive know-how in support of private profit, but precious few players in the game do the same in support of the common good and of biocultural diversity.

Perhaps it is time for educational institutions to also start playing the game. Organizing themselves with a place-based unifying focus, academic communities can enter the fray of the market, bringing much needed awareness and prudence. And a new place-sensitive alliance between scientists and public institutions can play its proper role inside the temple—that is, within the framework of international law and International Organizations. Working together in defense of Places, educational and public institutions can ensure that the heritage of humanity is not only included in UNESCO’s registers as in souvenir scrapbooks, but also protected in real life and through Place-fair competition.

Further ReadingKeys, A & M. (1975). How to Eat Well and Stay Well, the Mediterranean Way. New York: Doubleday Inc.

Ciccarelli, D. (2014). Il Bandolo dell’Euromatassa. Napoli: Il Giglio.

Lamy, P. (2006). The Place and Role of the WTO (WTO Law) in the International Legal Order. Speech to the European Society of International Law at Sorbonne, Paris. Retrieved from https://www.wto.org/english/news_e/sppl_e/sppl26_e.htm

Marceau, G. (1999). A Call for coherence in International Law – Praises for the Prohibition Against ‘Clinical Isolation’ in WTO Dispute Settlement. Journal of World Trade 33(5).

Pescatore, P. (1999). Opinion 1/94 on ‘Conclusion’ of the WTO Agreement: Is there an Escape from a Programmed Disaster’?, Common Market Law Review 36(2), 387-388.

UNESCO World Heritage Centre. (n.d.). Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park with the Archeological Sites of Paestum and Velia, and the Certosa di Padula. Retrieved from http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/842

On the town square in Cannalonga, Cilento. Photo: Giuseppe Cucco, 2006

Reawakening the Common Language of the Mediterranean’s Mobile Pastoralists

Mobile and nomadic pastoralists the world over share a common language—the language of the

landscape, of the changing seasons, of the plants, of their animals. And a common ability to read the land and be part of it, maintaining and enriching its diversity. They also face many common obstacles, and the very same pressures that threaten nature also threaten their ways of life. The voice of the mobile pastoralist is little heard in the cacophony of modern existence, intensive agriculture, and general discord with the natural world.

With this photo essay, we wish to honor the mobile and nomadic pastoralists of the Mediterranean Basin. Drawing from the internationally renowned photography

exhibition, On the Move, we showcase fifteen of the sixty photographs from six photographers in six Mediterranean countries. They portray vividly that common language of movement through the landscape. The essay is a celebration of mobile and nomadic pastoralists as keepers of ecological knowledge, who despite the hardships of their lifestyle, have a strong will to maintain their culture in a fast-changing world.

On the Move

Text: Liza Zogib, Divya Venkatesh, & Sandra SpissingerPhotographs: Stamos Abatis (Greece), Gema Arugaetta (Spain), Wassim Ghozlani (Tunisia), Bariş Koca (Turkey),

Asaad Saleh (Lebanon), Younes Tazi (Morocco)

In all of the countries of the Mediterranean Basin, mobile pastoralists take to the road with herds of animals on their seasonal migrations. These migrations take many shapes and forms: some moving over hundreds of kilometres, others crossing country boundaries, many more covering shorter distances. All of them opening up the landscape and making way for an opulent diversity of plant and animal species.

The migration routes of the mobile pastoralists form on-land rivers of richly biodiverse corridors that move as effortlessly through the landscape as they do, creating links between different areas of high biodiversity; preventing the spread of wildfires; enriching the soils; and dispersing seeds of countless varieties. Whether over deserts, through forests, over open plains or

snowy mountain passes, mobile pastoralists in the Mediterranean today form a unique community, speaking the very same language of the landscape. It is a silent but powerful language that in many places has replaced the movement of large herbivores that once roamed the countries of the Mediterranean, preventing the homogenization of the landscape and ensuring the continuation of a prosperous biological diversity.

Yet, despite the many benefits of mobile pastoralism, migration routes in most Mediterranean countries are being fragmented, degraded, or lost entirely, making movement difficult and often stressful. This, along with ill-conceived policies, water shortages, and climate change to name a few, is making the hard lifestyle of the mobile pastoralist even less attractive to younger generations.

Top Left: The return of the shepherds and their flocks. North Pindos, Greece. Photo: Stamos Abatis, 20141st Bottom Row: Arritzaga: Slicing through the mountain. Basque Country, Spain. Photo: Gema Arugaetta, 20142nd Bottom Row: Just before the return of the shepherds & their flocks. North Pindos, Greece. Photo: Stamos Abatis, 20143rd Bottom Row: On the move in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. Photo: Asaad Saleh, 2014

4th Bottom Row: In the absence of men, it’s the women who take charge. Morocco. Photo: Younes Tazi, 20145th Bottom Row: Sarıkeçililer nomads know how to communicate with their goats and sheep so that the long journey is harmonious. Turkey. Photo: Bariş Koca, 2014Top Right: Camel herder leading his herd into the desert. Tataouine, Tunisia. Photo: Wassim Ghozlani, 2014

Movement: The Language of the Landscape

In early human existence people were entirely dependent on nature, and that vital connection was both acknowledged and worshipped. Over time this dependency has been slowly fading, and today it seems that many societies are disconnected from nature altogether. The world’s mobile pastoralists are living examples of how some people have remained connected with the land and have been able to adapt to changing conditions for the past 10,000 years. It is a rare thing these days to meet with men, women, and children so connected with their lands and waters, so connected with their animals, and so inspired by traditions past. Our photos convey and celebrate these connections.

We urgently need to help the rest of society reconnect with nature, and sometimes looking to the past can help inform a future that is more sustainable, more resilient, and more in tune with nature’s harmony.

The Future of Mobile Pastoralism in the Mediterranean Basin

The practice of mobile pastoralism may be ancient, but it is not a thing of the past. In fact it is as pertinent now as ever before. Mobile pastoralists are moving within the 21st Century, and while threats to their lifestyles are mounting, pastoralists are adapting—but for how much longer? And how much longer will it take us to realize that harmonious practices such as these are the very key to a sustainable future?

Connected for 10,000 Years

What does the future hold for the Mediterranean’s nomadic and mobile pastoralists? Is it further fragmentation of migration routes and rangelands, marginalization, sedentarization, economic ousting, and climate extremes? Or could we foresee a future where the rights of mobile and nomadic pastoralists are respected; where they are celebrated as important keepers of the landscape; and where they are supported by policymakers, consumers, and society at large?

In many ways the choice is ours. Will we choose to let such a beautiful and critically useful practice die out, or will we help reawaken the common language of the Mediterranean’s mobile pastoralists?

About DiversEarthDiversEarth (www.diversearth.org) is coordinator

of a Mediterranean Consortium for Nature and Culture

project to support cultural practices that benefit nature. The On the Move photography exhibition was developed within the scope of this project, with funding from the MAVA Foundation. The exhibition will be shown at IUCN’s World Conservation Congress in Hawaii in September 2016. The members of Mediterranean Consortium for Nature and Culture are: DiversEarth; WWF North Africa; Med-INA, Greece; SPNL, Lebanon; Yolda Initiative, Turkey; Trashumancia y Naturaleza, Spain. We are working in the Mediterranean to support ordinary people who make a difference for nature—just by the way they live their lives.

Further ReadingHatfield, R. & Davies J. (Eds.). (2006). Global review of the economics of pastoralism. Nairobi: IUCN.Herrera, P.M., Davies J. & Manzano Baena P. (Eds). (2014). The Governance of Rangelands: Collective action for sustainable pastoralism. Oxon and New York: Routledge.

Top Left: Our livestock are like our children. Morocco. Photo: Younes Tazi, 2014Facing Page Bottom Left: Milking is an important and painstaking activity. North Pindos, Greece. Stamos Abatis, 2014Facing Page Bottom Right: Mother: White Merino sheep with newborn lamb. Extremadura, Spain. Photo: Gema Arugaetta, 2014Above: Some nights during the migration there is no need to put up the tent. Nomads are happiest under the stars. Turkey. Photo: Bariş Koca, 2014Bottom Left: A television inside the herder’s tent. Tataouine, Tunisia. Photo: Wassim Ghozlani, 2014

McGahey, D., Davies, J., Hagelberg, N., and Ouedraogo, R., 2014. Pastoralism and the Green Economy – a natural nexus? Nairobi: IUCN and UNEP.Zogib, L. (Ed.) (2013). A rapid assessment of cultural practices in the Mediterranean. Switzerland: DiversEarth & Mediterranean Consortium for Nature and Culture.Zogib, L. (Ed.) (2014). On the Move for 10,000 years: Biodiversity conservation through transhumance and nomadic pastoralism in the Mediterranean. Switzerland: DiversEarth & Mediterranean Consortium for Nature and Culture.

Bottom: Mobile phones and mobile pastoralists—traditional practice with modern technology! Morocco. Photo: Younes Tazi, 2014Top Left: The beauty and harshness of the outdoor life reflected in the face of a child. Lebanon. Photo: Asaad Saleh, 2014Top Right: Will she always be a nomad? Turkey. Bariş Koca, 2014

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