Up-Down, Over-Under, Around & Through

"All Connected Now"*

¹

Our “school” over Memorial Day was courtesy of Fish - the astonishing salmon to be precise. We went up-river/down-stream near the headwaters of “The Great One” which we’d been privileged to visit previously. The Columbia River is what we Settlers call it. All were now welcome To Ceremony - a VERB - around “The Columbia River Salmon Reintroduction Initiative led by the Syilx Okanagan, Secwépemc, and Ktunaxa Nations”. We would, of course, be on their traditional and unceded territory, through which our trusty Prius carried us and on which we live.

These are, by their own telling, the Salmon People. While we’re told that all native peoples distinguish themselves as The People (as distinct from rocks, flowers, birds et al.), Salmon are the keystone to the vast reach of this mighty river and its sprawling basin. Think “Bison” on the Great Plains.

Did I articulate to myself my own hunger in this outing? Maybe. In the unrelenting tumult of our scary present, would I find what I sought in the dancing and singing and drumming and talk, battered by driving rain and gale force wind, we tiny creatures passively present to authentic giants on both sides of this valley? Were ancient acts of Ceremony-ing what had sustained these genuinely long-suffering People, all of whom my Settler predecessors - on both sides of the 49th parallel - were so intent on eliminating? Would I find HOPE here?

Perhaps I underestimate the effects of paying attention to the world’s uncompromising woes, feeling obliged to live by Arthur Miller’s admonition by way of another of my great teachers, Gay Talese: “Attention must be paid!” After all, we really ARE All Connected Now.

And yet, even though my (stuffed) playroom bookcase features David W. Orr’s book Hope Is an Imperative, too often I…droop. “Hope is a VERB!” David admonished me the third time he graced our Paula Gordon Show: Conversations with People at the Leading Edge"(sm).

Listen up, Paula! Am I ready to put in perspective the demise of the enormous cattail marsh bordering my childhood home, cherished by my 5-year old self as next-of-kin? Below I’m sharing it with visiting family friends.

Then as a budding teenager, I bore witness as the sole mourner when, one dump-truck load at a time, “the swamp” was murdered. Cheers for “progress” drowned me out. Myriad life-forms (of which I’d come to feel I was one) breathed their last. Yet, my own modest origin myth of “eco-awakening” fades to a distant whisper as I hear - first hand and in the faces of Elders - Indigenous realities.

When - and it was frequently - I heard the word “hope” this weekend, it was in an Indigenous language. Sound ordinary? The polar opposite!

There was no denial of the horrors Christianity and Colonialists rained on The People, targets for cultural genocide across Turtle Island (so-called North America). In America as well as Canada. Countless horrors awaited with the theft - literally - of Indigenous children, unjustly sentenced to years in the justly-infamous Residential Schools. Any “relapse” into the children’s mother-tongue was severely punished, this distinct from willful, pervasive physical, emotional and sexual abuse. So too, expressions of their mother-music. Or mother-dance. Or mother-drumming. “Take the Indian out of the Indian!” was the marching order in both nation states. Those infamous schools began in the 1600s, “civilized” Settlers unyielding in their official commitment to Cultural Genocide.

I felt we all were there to remember we are all one with each other - The People, yes, also with the salmon, the water, the daunting mountains and forests, the gale-force wind, Gaia - and with every oppressed People suffering in our violent and greedy world. Still.

To Ceremony is To HOPE!

Stuart Kauffman brings it all home when summing up Charles Darwin’s genius:

“All you can do is do your best, you can never know the outcome."

Next time, there will be pictures! Think: The Salmon Chief RETURNS “fry” (tiny baby salmon) to the The Great One’s headwaters. Until then, as I’ve done - sincerely and publicly - since 1996 …

… I wish you well!

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1. Walter Truett Anderson, PhD’s “All Connected Now” brought us together with this accessible, insightful author and teacher the year he published it, 2000. Dr. Anderson’s also known for his “The Truth About The Truth” and “The Next Enlightenment”. It’s with our great respect and admiration that we have embraced his title, intent on keeping his timely insights current and more widely appreciated.