Seasonal Work, Festivals and Forestry on the Ecological Calendar
by Tomi Hazel (aka Tom Ward), Little Wolf Gulch, Southern Oregon
Let's start by cherishing the goal for us all to deeply realize that we are natural beings on this landscape and that we belong here. That is a big healing for everyone; we’re not necessarily only making messes. We have work to do here and the land misses us because co-evolution is deeply embedded in our genetics and there have been First Nations peoples working on Turtle Island for anything from 13,000 to 250,000 years depending on who you talk to. It’s only very recently, 150-200 years ago that a regular cycle of seasonal stewardship got broken here in the Siskiyous. We can still see the remnants of that ethnobotanical work as we walk around landscapes and find what the First Nations peoples were doing. So it’s not that big a jump to get back into the game.
Paul Shepherd, author of Nature and Madness, and Coming Home to the Pleistocene, says to make sure that the children have full support when they’re infants, full body contact at all times—it’s called continuum parenting. Then from 3-9 years old they should have plenty unsupervised nature immersion. As a child in nature, the brain picks up the metaphors for thinking: the fox, the mud, the lichen, the dark, the light, the rain, the cold, the seasonal flavors, the template for all those symbols is genetically built into our brains. If we have that full complement of natural symbology in our metaphoric repertoire then we have a chance of becoming adults, growing up and being useful. A lot of us are missing parts of that vocabulary.
Way out west near Ashland, Oregon, we have a cohort of three friends who had magical childhoods in the Adirondacks, upstate New York. We all experienced children's pilgrimages. In our early teens, we took each other to our childhood pilgrimage places, “Oh you’ve got to meet this tree; oh you’ve got to see this rock, you’ve got to climb this hill, you’ve got to jump in this ice cold lake, you’ve got to squish in this mud.” Now that we’re grandparents we think that kids are cute. This is the sequence of the seasons of maturation. We learn how Nature works, we share with new friends, we raise our own children and we care for parents as they move on. As we experience wonder, nurturance and loss, we mature and as the brain ages it can make faster connections and see patterns that help us contribute as elders to the community stewardship.
One vision that fits re-indigenation is a series of cultural festivals through the year. In early February in the Siskiyous, it’s the Manzanita festival because the Manzanita is in bloom and there are all kinds of products that are associated: Manzanita flower wine, Manzanita berry powder (used in a lot of culinary applications), the carved wood of the Manzanita. We can imagine seasonal festivals that are market opportunities for the forest workers’ culture in towns or cities. At these seasonal festivals, many things transpire that help the people remember who they are and remember that they are embedded in a forested landscape. This is the sequence of a re-emerging culture.