Glamorous Mystery

When I encountered this florist-worthy flower on a bike ride through local prairie country, I was certain it must be a garden escapee, persisting on ground that was once a yard, or arriving more recently in a load of soil. A dozen-odd volunteers formed a loose colony, with random pioneers scattered along the trail beyond for perhaps a hundred yards.

I was so taken with the glamour – and mystified that I couldn't identify this, given moderately wide experience of garden blooms – that I emailed a few shots to a friend who's a recognised expert on the topic.

The mystery only deepened when she couldn't identify it, either.

At last, my friend worked her resources and reached a verdict: Clarkia amoena.

Thus was I thoroughly humbled, because not only does this eye-catching bloom turn out to be native – while in theory I'm Mr. Wild Plants Guy – it's a fêted member of the freakin' Lewis and Clark herbarium.

Named after William Clark, for God's sake! (Way to rub it in, karma.)

Clarkia amoena, also called farewell-to-spring, is an evening primrose relative, which accounts for another common name: satin flower. It prefers well-drained and –sunned soil, and as that first common name suggests, tends to burst into glorious blossom just as things start to hot up. Which is exactly the moment in which I passed that day.

Indigenous peoples made a staple of this plant's tiny, grain-like seeds, eating them toasted as-is, steamed into porridge, or brewed into a thick, nutritious drink. In addition, Clarkia was one of several field-forming flowers on the pre-settlement prairie that sustained multiple species of butterflies and other insects that have since become endangered.

Finally, it counts among the relatively few North American flowers to pivot to cultivation, thanks to a ready willingness to thrive anywhere that supplies its minimum requirements.

And also, of course, its magnificence.

So, why has this once-classic local suddenly (re)appeared? Well, the land on which grows is actually a reserve, donated to prairie preservation by former owners who'd run a horse-training facility on it. As such it's undergone incremental restoration, some of which might recently have included inoculation with Clarkia seed.

The reserve trust has also taken to conducting controlled burns on their property, as fire is important to prairie health – among other things, nudging Clarkia seeds to germinate.

Whatever the reason, I'm glad it's back.

Sarsarpkin

(This passage, drawn from my manuscript Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, refers to the Sinlahekin Valley, a region of northeastern Washington that's one of my favourite places on Earth.)

The ghosts of the Sinlahekin don't live in town. Wade into a blue-skied draw, far from roads and barbed wire, where wormwood and dry grass ripple in the mind, and there, in the earth's own cleavage, wait. They will come.

By the late 1800s, every indigenous civilisation in the Oregon Country was lost or losing. The Haida were decimated, the Modoc deported, the Palouse ground to dust between soldier and Shoshoni. Smohalla died of grief; his dream, of Homily and Moses. Leschi, great statesman of the Nisqually, the settlers studiously strangled, following due process of law.

In this time Sarsarpkin withdrew his tiny Sinkaietsk band to the upper Sinlahekin. Congress had once reserved the entire American Okanogan to the First Nations, but the whites had never respected this. When gold was discovered, even the pretence of treaty was dropped. In the idiom of the day, the reserve was "opened to the public", leaving Sarsarpkin with an ultimatum: abandon his home and join the nations already herded onto the Colville reserve, or accept what we, in our own idiom, call "privatisation". Sinkaietsk land would be "allotted" – parcelled out – to individuals, who would be empowered to sell it to strangers if they wished. This, the old man knew, would only defer his people's dispossession of, and expulsion from, the Sinlahekin.

Sarsarpkin had fought the occupiers in the canyons, and he had fought them in Congress. He had never won. And so he lived the remainder of his days on a Sinlahekin allotment, still the moral, if not political, leader of his people. He attended Mass, maintained relations with Colville and Canadian nations, and by all accounts practiced neighbourly acceptance of the usurpers. None of which convictions suffered from his equally well-documented addiction to alcohol.

Neither could they overcome it. In November 1887, Sarsarpkin's older son Peter, also drunk, pushed his father over a cliff and killed him. The following spring, younger son Jack bashed in Peter's skull in like circumstances. The other Sinkaietsk families fell to similar pressures, kicking their allotments one by one into foreign hands. The scant survivors straggled into Nespelem, their very name shattered like busted sod.

Sarsarpkin was buried, along with his widow and his children, on a low rise outside Loomis. Years later the town erected a high marble cross on the site, but even that eventually disappeared. This day, a wire enclosure and two headstones were the only clue that a nation slept there beneath the scrub and jumping cactus.

But Sarsarpkin's heart still spoke, in words those who stood beside his grave could hear. In the end, he'd had a single choice: die somewhere else, or die here.

(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Through Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson. Photo of the Sinlahekin Valley courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photographer.)

WW: Cedar bark harvest

(Encountered this cedar while walking along the bay a few weeks ago. The distinctive scar is symptomatic of bark collecting by local indigenous persons in search of raw material for making baskets, clothing, and other practical items. And this time, if you look closely, you'll also see that someone has sketched a rough cartoon of an aboriginal man in charcoal on the debarked surface. Perhaps a portrait of the bark-harvester himself?

I've happened upon cedars like this in remote places since I was a kid. Always gives me a certain satisfaction to know that the First Nations are still out there, still being themselves, in the face of everything.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Mystery tree

(Found this all alone in the middle of the swamp that has figured in many recent posts. The white trunk that so gleams 'midst the dead winter foliage and sulking North Pacific sky is none other than Betula papyrifera, the famous paper birch from which Eastern First Nations build their canoes.

Emblematic of the Eastern Woodlands and not uncommon in the Prairies and Rocky Mountains, canoe birch is perishing rare on the Pacific Slope. Hence Whatcom County's Birch Bay, whose endemic birches were noteworthy to early settlers.

But south of the Fraser Valley, B. papyrifera drips and drabs into scarcity, before disappearing entirely around Everett.

Which is 100 miles from here.

Nor is this the site of any disappeared habitation, which lets out persistent landscaping. So I'm flummoxed. I don't believe there are any other paper birches within five miles in any direction; probably a great deal further.

But I'll tell you this: when I saw it there - after I recovered from my disbelief - I almost cried. B. papyrifera covers the Laurentian Shield, and was the dominant species in the Québec hills that I lived in and loved, and where my Zen practice began. There I got to know it intimately, hiking under and through it, burning it in my woodstove through the winter, and meditating on all of its phases and stages.

This one may stand awkward and alone in this alien forest, but happening on it brought a kind of joy that is hard to explain.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Potsherd on the beach

(Because the North Coast has only been densely populated for the past two centuries, we have nothing like the glorious mudlarking they get in the UK. [On the other hand, we also don't need a licence to do it.] Generally, unless you stumble on something pre-contact, you're looking at a 20th century Euro-American artefact. Maybe 19th; very rarely 18th. The above probably falls in the first two categories. I still wonder how it comes to be there, and where in the bay it was lying before the tide fetched it up.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Aboriginal hole

(Found this giant old cedar stump on the beach some time ago. The hole has been a matter of conjecture ever since. It's clearly not the work of an animal; too clean and too conical.

But the clincher is that remnant of charcoal.

Only one culture I know around here did that, and they gave it up when they got steel. Until then, to determine whether a trunk was sound enough for construction, they gnawed a shallow pit in it with their knapped adzes, kindled a tiny fire inside, then deepened the test hole by pecking out the charred wood.

But the arrival of crosscut saws made it economical to fell first and ask questions later.

Is this stump old enough? Well, it's a stump, saturated with preservative resin, and has been pickling in a saline environment since it washed into the bay a long time ago.

And I haven’t come up with a better theory.)

WW: Camas

(Camas [Camassia quamash] is the clarion of spring where I grew up. Back in the day it covered hundreds of miles of open prairie, and its marble-sized, onion-shaped starchy bulbs were a pillar, along with salmon and salal, of the North Coast aboriginal diet. I used to gather it myself, until they put a shopping centre on top of my camas ground.

Thus I've been accustomed to view camas in a mostly utilitarian light, but lately I'm noting how beautiful a flower it is. Must've been something to see those vast prairies, rippling purple in the new-made sun, to the horizon.)

WW: Oak prairie

(When settlers first came here, most of the Puget Sound Basin was prairie, in two configurations: grassland, with few trees, and parkland, covered with Garry oak [Quercus garryana]. As I've mentioned elsewhere, oak trees are perishing rare on the West Coast of North America, and that, plus the fact that these oak-covered savannahs support greater biodiversity than any other ecosystem in the region, has garnered a lot of commentary over the years.

Prairie is not, however, a natural phenomenon in these parts; for millennia the entire 1000-mile habitat was maintained by the First Nations via strategic firing. When the newcomers prevented them from continuing, it largely vanished under an invasive forest dominated by Douglas fir [Pseudotsuga menziesii]. Post-war over-development has all but erased what remained.

So today very little of the oak prairie that once stretched unbroken from Central California into British Columbia is left; none, to my knowledge, is protected. Including this 40-to-80 acre example, on the plat of a massive new retirement estate.)

WW: The Blockhouse Wars

(On this site stood one of the first homesteads in the neck of Thurston County, Washington, where I grew up. During the Blockhouse Wars of the 1850s – a string of skirmishes touched off by settler abuse of First Nations treaties – the Eaton place hosted one of the tiny wooden stockades for which the era is named. I'm told the ruins of "Fort Eaton" endured well into the 20th century.

The marker was placed, not by any government organism, but by the Freedom Community, a Christian commune established nearby later in the l9th century. It too succumbed to entropy, but persisted as an ordinary village for decades thereafter.

When I was a kid this monument was all but lost under Scotch broom, baldhip rose, and Garry oak, beside a county highway that began life as the main wagon road between Oregon and Puget Sound. While reading history at university I found the plaque by the ancient oak beside it, which I was told was the local hangin' tree. [Oaks are rare on the North Coast; their presence on the Salish Prairie in great number was and remains much remarked.]

In the decades since someone has cleared a respectable little rest stop around the marker, rendering it much easier to find.)

WW: Drum log

(A hemlock recently fell across the trail and was cleared by someone with a chainsaw. Seeing the sections on the shoulder I felt a distinct uptick in heart rate; my dad taught me to call this a drum log, for the simple reason that you make a drum from it. This is a good one, too: two feet in diameter, well-rotted within and perfectly sound without. You thin this shell out with a chisel and even it up, then lace rawhide heads across both ends, and Bob's your uncle.

The remains of a large yellow jacket nest that occupied the cavity were also strewn about.)

WW: First Nations canoes

WW: Indian War veteran

(H.J. Cameron here served in Company C of the 2nd Washington Territory Volunteers, a settlers' militia of the 1850s Blockhouse Wars. The stone doesn't say whether he was a casualty, but the lack of birth and death stats suggests he was. If so, he was one of a select few; the Blockhouse Wars were famously more smoke than fire, at least on the Green Side. [And for white folks.])

Street Level Zen: Breaking the Trance

"Everybody grows up on their own reservation, and the quality of your life depends on how willing you are to get the hell away from it."

Sherman Alexie


(Photo of Chumash Tomol 'Elye'wun paddlers pulling hard for the Channel Islands courtesy of Robert Schwemmer, NOAA Photo Library, and Wikimedia Commons.)

Happy Las Casas Day!

This week I'm seconding a motion by The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman to see Columbus Day repurposed as Bartolomé de las Casas Day. Las Casas, originally a conquistador, repented of his horrific sins, became a Dominican friar, and evangelised Mesoamerican First Nations during the period of contact. Unfortunately for Power, he turned out to be a Christian Claude Anshin Thomas, decrying the mind-numbing brutality and utter lack of respect for human life that characterised the European invasion of the Americas. Worse yet he documented them, first in Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (also available in English) and then the more comprehensive Historia de Las Indias.

In the sordid history of colonialism, Las Casas stands out as one of the few Christians who practiced what he preached. (Literally.) He's a favourite of mine because he experienced (and again, documented) personal spiritual growth over his lifetime; convictions he adopted early on – such as supporting the African slave trade by way of avoiding the enslavement of his own flock – he soundly and publicly rejected after further meditation. I've found that this capacity to delve and change, even if it means admitting transgression, is the highest morality, and those who practice it are the most trustworthy of people.

Rather than repeat Matthew's case here, I'll just link to his own excellent and highly readable proposition. As a history nerd I can tell you that his characterisations of Christopher Columbus, the other conquistadores, and the good friar himself are historically accurate, as is his description of how Columbus Day became a thing in the United States and many Latin American countries. (Thanksgiving immunised us against it in Canada; one of the things I give thanks for on this day.)

Therefore, in emulation of Seattle and Minneapolis (though I don't much care for "Indigenous Peoples Day"; Las Casas Day is short, inclusive, and to the point), I encourage all jurisdictions to convert this holiday into a tribute to the courage and conviction of a man who stood against the tide and practiced his true religion in the face of overwhelming opposition.

May we follow in his footsteps.


(Photo of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, by Felix Parra, courtesy of Alejandro Linares Garcia and the Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City.)

WW: Aboriginal clam gun

(I recently found this well-used First Nations clam gun [right] in the surf. It's in fine shape; the tape is apparently just padding. I've no idea why it was discarded.

The blade is pitched much more steeply than the boston gun [left]; logical, since these shovels pry sand more than scoop it. And its heavy steel is welded up three ways from Sunday. The store-bought design, wielded by Old Settlers like me, is much lighter, but that's its sole advantage. The physics are clearly inferior, and the flimsy blade cracks after just a few outings.

Fifteen thousand years of experience will tell.)

Hermitcraft: Pumpkin Pickles

October is an odd time in North America: for these thirty-one days, you can buy a pumpkin here. Any other time, you get: "What, are you crazy?" (One of us must be.)

And it only gets weirder: virtually none of the pumpkins Canucks and Yanks buy by the metric tonne this month will be eaten. Come All Saints Day, they will be thrown in the garbage. Even the thousands that were never cut.

Why are overseas readers now aghast? Because on all other continents, people know pumpkin for excellent food. One of the most versatile vegetables on earth, useful in every course of a meal, it's both delicious and nutritious. I've no idea why North Americans have demoted it to a gourd, but if it weren't for that Druid holiday we dug up and transplanted across the sea, this First Nations masterpiece (utterly unknown to the Druids) would have gone extinct here a century ago. If the irony gets any thicker, we can carve our jack o' lanterns out of that instead.

Or you can; I pickle mine. Pickles – a staple of Japanese monasteries – anchor the flavour plates I build for sesshins. (It's an ancient Zen art intended to pique mindfulness with a shotgun blast to the senses). And the pumpkin ones are my favourite: marrowy, neon orange, and sweet spicy-sour, with just a hint of musky bitterness from the lime.

The recipe:

PUMPKIN SESSHIN PICKLES

(Makes about 3 1/2 pints. Note that after step 3, you will have to wait 24 hours before continuing.)

7 cups raw pumpkin, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes
2 sticks cinnamon, shredded
2 1/3 cups cider vinegar
2 1/3 cups sugar
15 whole cloves
1/2 teaspoon whole black pepper corns
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 teaspoons whole allspice
1 tablespoon whole coriander seeds
2 inches gingerroot, sliced thin
lime slices, 1/4 inch thick, one per jar
dried cranberries ("craisins")
canning jars and lids

1. Cover the pumpkin cubes with water, bring to a boil, reduce heat, and lightly blanch, about 10 minutes. (Not longer; they'll cook another three times before you're done.) Drain immediately to avoid overcooking.

2. Put all other ingredients except lime slices and cranberries in a large pot and bring to a boil. (Warning: hot syrup boils over very quickly; stay present and alert.) Turn heat down to lowest setting, cover the pot, and simmer for 15 minutes.

3. Add the pumpkin cubes and bring back to a boil. Then cover the pot, lower heat, and simmer for 3 minutes. Afterward, remove the pot from the burner and set it aside for 24 hours.

4.Next day: Sterilise jars in a water bath canner. Heat the pumpkin and syrup mixture to boiling, then lower heat and simmer for 5 minutes.

5. Remove the jars one at a time from the hot water, drop in four to five cranberries, and ladle in hot pickles to 1/2 inch from the rim. Be sure to include spices.

6. Slide a lime slice between the pickles and the jar's side, fit a sterilised lid, screw the band down tight, and return the sealed jar to the water bath. Repeat until all the pickles are packed.

7. Turn up the heat under the canner and process (cook) the jars for an additional 5 minutes after the water has returned to a boil.

10. Remove the jars from the water and allow them to cool naturally until the lids pop. Store in a cool dark place for at least a month before opening. (Any that don't pop should be stored in the fridge and eaten first.)

Specific points on pickling jack o' lanterns:

To insure fresh pickle stock, carve your jack o' lantern on Hallowe'en and refrigerate the scraps; if you light it with a candle, line the lid with aluminium foil. Make your pickles next day, peeling off any soot or scorched flesh with a vegetable peeler. Later, when you eat them, you'll recognise bits of eye and teeth on your plate.

Good Movie: Smoke Signals

"There are some children who aren't really children at all; they're just pillars of flame that burn everything they touch. And there are some children who are just pillars of ash, that fall apart when you touch them. Victor and me, we were children of flame and ash."

With an opener like that, you'd be forgiven for assuming this all-Native production is a heavy social justice film.

Psych!

Sherman Alexie's Smoke Signals is a modest miracle. Written by a Native, directed by a Native, starring Natives, it takes place in the present, a place where Natives are pointedly not welcome. (Take it from a Scot: The Man likes his tribals historical.) Yet for a' tha' it's a very sweet movie, wherein innocence is not so much lost, as worked into whatever comes next.

Thomas Builds-the-Fire (allegory intended) and Victor are frenemies from Idaho's Cœur d'Alêne reserve. Their destinies, like their pasts, are intricately intertwined, though they appear diametric opposites. Thomas is perennial odd man out: a fumbling nerd who seems to live in a world that's not there. Maybe he's a shaman. Maybe he's autistic. Could be he's both; each one of director Chris Eyre's scenes encode about twelve concurrent realities, any one of which is liable to surface at any time. And Thomas is his translator. He's the seer in Coke bottle glasses; the good son without parents; the helpless hero.

Meanwhile, Victor is too anchored in the physical, too distracted by hard-cold to understand how weak that can make you. To borrow Thomas's image, Victor is a pillar of fire, permanently glowering over iniquities by no means trivial, though compared to those of his congenitally happy companion they can seem so. Shackled together -- to Victor's enduring annoyance -- they will make a long, winding

journey, first through the lovingly-rendered homeland of their ancestors, and then the entire American West. (In a refreshing turnabout, the part of the Southwest is played by the Martian landscape of Washington's coulee country; just an hour and change west, it is in fact as different from the lush Palouse as Arizona.)

Throughout, rezgeist eddies and froths like the Spokane River. In the very first scene, a doomed couple hurl their newborn from a burning house, into the steady arms of a feckless drunk with the heart of a warrior. The power of that metaphor, and its accuracy, are breath-taking. And the beat goes on: basketball; frybread; mothers; fathers; automobiles; water; hair. The entire film crackles with aboriginal touchstones. You could write an MFA thesis on The Symbology of Sherman Alexie's "Smoke Signals". (Send me a link if you do.)

There's also a lot of (coincidental?) Zen in Eyres' world, where nothing is what it appears, yet everything is patently obvious if you can decide to see it. My favourite teaching: the boys voyage to the end of the earth with a jar of gold; come back with a jar of ashes. As Thomas points out, we all travel heavy with illusions.

But the greatest fun comes from the palpable glee with which director and writer lay waste to Hollywood "Indian" conventions. "Hey Victor!" says Thomas, "I'm sorry 'bout your dad." "How'd you hear about it?" Victor asks. "I heard it on the wind," says the spooky medicine-kid. "I heard it from the birds. I felt it in the sunlight. And your mom was just in here cryin'."

Later, having hitched a ride off-rez with two backward-driving contraries (another overlapping wink at First Nations tradition and politics), they're asked if they've got their passports. "But it's the United States," Thomas protests. "Damn right it is," says the driver. "That's as foreign as it gets." Anyone who has lived in a bush community will appreciate the sentiment. In fact, my own village once had a bootstrap radio station that broadcast traffic reports identical to those on KREZ: "Big truck just went by. Now it's gone."

The boys fall further down the highway, Thomas's old-school braids and pronounced aboriginal accent underscoring the sense of spacewalking, until they arrive at last… on another reserve. One that is simultaneously completely different from and exactly the same as the one they just left. (Cough*zen*cough.)

Canadian viewers will be forgiven for assuming Smoke Signals is one of ours; it's about aboriginals, and the cast is almost entirely Canadian. I guess that's both the good and the bad news. Good, because Evan Adams (a straight-up doctor in real life), and the more familiar Adam Beach, Gary Farmer, and Tantoo Cardinal, all act like they're not acting. And bad, because apparently there aren't enough experienced Native actors in the States to pull off such a film by themselves. Here's hoping that changes.

Also terrific is Tom Skerritt, whose sixty-odd screen seconds, as a weary, competent Arizona sheriff, would qualify him for token white guy, if the moment weren't one of the movie's most memorable.

And then there's Irene Bédard. Sigh. What can be said about this grossly under-signed actress that won't jeopardise one's monastic street cred? How about this: I esteem Ms. Bédard for her effortless performance, her deft, sensitive handling of a pivotal role, and her ability to imbue any scene with grace and immediacy. Contrary to rumour, my admiration of this accomplished thespian has nothing to do with the fact that she's, like, virulently beautiful, pulling down six to eight thousand millihelens on a grey Tuesday. I would further like to deny categorically that I originally watched this film, or any other of the every single ones she's ever made, just because she was in it.

The soundtrack here jacks up the property values as well. Most of it is the raw, powerful Colville musician Jim Boyd, singing lyrics by Alexie. A few others are chucked in for symmetry, notably the multi-layered Ulali masterpiece, All My Relations.

It may be true, as Thomas says, that "the only thing more pathetic than Indians on TV is Indians watching Indians on TV", but this production goes a long way toward making the world a better place in the best possible way: by simply giving genius and insight a platform. I don't know if Alexie and Eyre knew this, but their movie isn't really about aboriginals at all. It's about humanity, all of us, as manifested in one of our ten thousand hoops. (And I was chaffin' you before; no way they didn't know.)

So in the end, the most moving thing about Smoke Signals is how aboriginal it's not. Alexie nails the thing in a final disclaimer at credits' end: "Any similarity to actual persons, living, dead, or indigenous, is purely coincidental."

WW: My cowboy grandfather, Crooked River, 1918

(Far left, holding his horse.)

WW: First Nations fishing boat

Forgiving Our Fathers

The advent of Father's Day puts me in mind of Sherman Alexie's riff on Forgiving Our Fathers, a poem by Dick Lourie. This is something many of us must do, because, for reasons as complex as the culture itself, fatherhood is a controversial undertaking. Fortunate are those, child or parent, who come through unscathed.

The poem is hauntingly declaimed by nerd shaman Thomas Builds-the-Fire in Smoke Signals, one of the most undeservedly obscure movies of the last century. That performance, narrating the heart of a young Cœur d'Alêne man as he consigns the ashes of his own complicated father to his people's holy river, can be savoured in the video below:



Forgiving Our Fathers
(edited by Sherman Alexie from an original text by Dick Lourie)

How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream.
Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often or forever when we were little?
Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all?
Do we forgive our fathers for marrying or not marrying our mothers?
For divorcing or not divorcing our mothers?
And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness?
Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning?
For shutting doors?
For speaking through walls, or never speaking, or never being silent?
Do we forgive our fathers in our age or in theirs?
Or in their deaths?
Saying it to them or not saying it?
If we forgive our fathers, what is left?

(The Lourie original is here.)