Skywoman Falling
There is such tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you
love.Kindness and something more flow between the braider and
the braided, the two connected by the cord of the plait.Wiingaashk
waves in strands, long and shining like a woman’s freshly washed
hair.And so we say it is the flowing hair of Mother Earth.When we
braid sweetgrass, we are braiding the hair of Mother Earth, showing
her our loving attention, our care for her beauty and well-being, in
gratitude for all she has given us.Children hearing the Skywoman
story from birth know in their bones the responsibility that flows
between humans and the earth.
The story of Skywoman’s journey is so rich and glittering it feels
to me like a deep bowl of celestial blue from which I could drink
again and again.It holds our beliefs, our history, our relationships.
Looking into that starry bowl, I see images swirling so fluidly that
the past and the present become as one.Images of Skywoman
speak not just of where we came from, but also of how we can go
forward.
I have Bruce King’s portrait of Skywoman, Moment in Flight,
hanging in my lab.Floating to earth with her handful of seeds and
flowers, she looks down on my microscopes and data loggers.It
might seem an odd juxtaposition, but to me she belongs there.As a
writer, a scientist, and a carrier of Skywoman’s story, I sit at the
feet of my elder teachers listening for their songs.
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 9:35 a.m., I am
usually in a lecture hall at the university, expounding about botany
and ecology—trying, in short, to explain to my students how
Skywoman’s gardens, known by some as “global ecosystems,”
function.One otherwise unremarkable morning I gave the students
in my General Ecology class a survey.Among other things, they
were asked to rate their understanding of the negative interactions
between humans and the environment.Nearly every one of the two
hundred students said confidently that humans and nature are a
bad mix.These were third-year students who had selected a career
in environmental protection, so the response was, in a way, not
very surprising.They were well schooled in the mechanics of
climate change, toxins in the land and water, and the crisis of
habitat loss.Later in the survey, they were asked to rate their
knowledge of positive interactions between people and land.The
median response was “none.”
I was stunned.How is it possible that in twenty years of
education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between
people and the environment? Perhaps the negative examples they
see every day— brownfields, factory farms, suburban sprawl—
truncated their ability to see some good between humans and the
earth.As the land becomes impoverished, so too does the scope of
their vision.When we talked about this after class, I realized that
they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their
species and others might look like.How can we begin to move
toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even
imagine what the path feels like? If we can’t imagine the generosity
of geese? These students were not raised on the story of
Skywoman.
On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the
living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for
the well-being of all.On the other side was another woman with a
garden and a tree.But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from
the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her.That mother of
men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by
the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy
fruits that bend the branches low.In order to eat, she was
instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast.
Same species, same earth, different stories.Like Creation stories
everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to
the world.They tell us who we are.We are inevitably shaped by
them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness.
One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the
other to banishment.One woman is our ancestral gardener, a
cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her
descendants.The other was an exile, just passing through an alien
world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.
And then they met—the offspring of Skywoman and the children
of Eve—and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting,
the echoes of our stories.They say that hell hath no fury like a
woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between
Eve and Skywoman: “Sister, you got the short end of the stick …”
The Skywoman story, shared by the original peoples throughout the
Great Lakes, is a constant star in the constellation of teachings we
call the Original Instructions.These are not “instructions” like
commandments, though, or rules; rather, they are like a compass:
they provide an orientation but not a map.The work of living is
creating that map for yourself.How to follow the Original
Instructions will be different for each of us and different for every
era.
In their time, Skywoman’s first people lived by their
understanding of the Original Instructions, with ethical prescriptions
for respectful hunting, family life, ceremonies that made sense for
their world.Those measures for caring might not seem to fit in
today’s urban world, where “green” means an advertising slogan,
not a meadow.The
buffalo are gone and the world has moved on.I can’t return
salmon to the river, and my neighbors would raise the alarm if I set
fire to my yard to produce pasture for elk.
The earth was new then, when it welcomed the first human.It’s
old now, and some suspect that we have worn out our welcome by
casting the Original Instructions aside.From the very beginning of
the world, the other species were a lifeboat for the people.Now, we
must be theirs.But the stories that might guide us, if they are told
at all, grow dim in the memory.What meaning would they have
today? How can we translate from the stories at the world’s
beginning to this hour so much closer to its end? The landscape
has changed, but the story remains.And as I turn it over again and
again, Skywoman seems to look me in the eye and ask, in return
for this gift of a world on Turtle’s back, what will I give in return?
It is good to remember that the original woman was herself an
immigrant.She fell a long way from her home in the Skyworld,
leaving behind all who knew her and who held her dear.She could
never go back.Since 1492, most here are immigrants as well,
perhaps arriving on Ellis Island without even knowing that Turtle
Island rested beneath their feet.Some of my ancestors are
Skywoman’s people, and I belong to them.Some of my ancestors
were the newer kind of immigrants, too: a French fur trader, an
Irish carpenter, a Welsh farmer.And here we all are, on Turtle
Island, trying to make a home.Their stories, of arrivals with empty
pockets and nothing but hope, resonate with Skywoman’s.She
came here with nothing but a handful of seeds and the slimmest of
instructions to “use your gifts and dreams for good,” the same
instructions we all carry.She accepted the gifts from the other
beings with open hands and used them honorably.She shared the
gifts she brought from Skyworld as she set herself about the
business of flourishing, of making a home.
Perhaps the Skywoman story endures because we too are
always falling.Our lives, both personal and collective, share her
trajectory.Whether we jump or are pushed, or the edge of the
known world just crumbles at our feet, we fall, spinning into
someplace new and unexpected.Despite our fears of falling, the
gifts of the world stand by to catch us.
As we consider these instructions, it is also good to recall that,
when Skywoman arrived here, she did not come alone.She was
pregnant.Knowing her grandchildren would inherit the world she left
behind, she did not work for flourishing in her time only.It was
through her actions of reciprocity, the give and take with the land,
that the original immigrant became indigenous.For all of us,
becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s
future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both
material and spiritual, depended on it.
In the public arena, I’ve heard the Skywoman story told as a
bauble of colorful “folklore.” But, even when it is misunderstood,
there is power in the telling.Most of my students have never heard
the origin story of this land where they were born, but when I tell
them, something begins to kindle behind their eyes.Can they, can
we all, understand the Skywoman story not as an artifact from the
past but as instructions for the future? Can a nation of immigrants
once again follow her example to become native, to make a home?
Look at the legacy of poor Eve’s exile from Eden: the land shows
the bruises of an abusive relationship.It’s not just land that is
broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land.As Gary
Nabhan has written, we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing,
with restoration, without “re-story-ation.” In other words, our
relationship with land cannot heal until we hear its stories.But who
will tell them?
In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings,
with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution,
the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom.But in Native
ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the
younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least
experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must
look to our teachers among the other species for guidance.Their
wisdom is apparent in the way that they live.They teach us by
example.They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been,
and have had time to figure things out.They live both above and
below ground, joining Skyworld to the earth.Plants know how to
make food and medicine from light and water, and then they give it
away.
I like to imagine that when Skywoman scattered her handful of
seeds across Turtle Island, she was sowing sustenance for the
body and also for the mind, emotion, and spirit: she was leaving us
teachers.The plants can tell us her story; we need to learn to
listen.
The Council of Pecans
Heat waves shimmer above the grasses, the air heavy and white
and ringing with the buzz of cicadas.They’ve been shoeless all
summer long, but even so the dry September stubble of 1895
pricks their feet as they trot across the sunburned prairie, lifting
their heels like grass dancers.Just young willow whips in faded
dungarees and nothing else, their ribs showing beneath narrow
brown chests as they run.They veer off toward the shady grove
where the grass is soft and cool underfoot, flopping in the tall grass
with the loose-limbed abandon of boys.They rest for a few
moments in the shade and then spring to their feet, palming
grasshoppers for bait.
The fishing poles are right where they left them, leaning up
against an old cottonwood.They hook the grasshoppers through
the back and throw out a line while the silt of the creek bottom
oozes up cool between their toes.But the water hardly moves in
the paltry channel left by drought.Nothing’s biting but a few
mosquitoes.After a bit, the prospect of a fish dinner seem as thin
as their bellies, beneath faded denim pants held up with twine.
Looks like nothing but biscuits and redeye gravy for supper tonight.
Again.They hate to go home empty-handed and disappoint Mama,
but even a dry biscuit fills the belly.
The land here, along the Canadian River, smack in the middle of
Indian Territory, is a rolling savanna of grass with groves of trees in
the bottomlands.Much of it has never been plow broke, as no one
has a plow.The boys follow the stream from grove to grove back
up toward the home place on the allotment, hoping for a deep pool
somewhere, finding nothing.Until one boy stubs his toe on
something hard and round hidden in the long grass.
There’s one and then another, and then another—so many he
can hardly walk.He takes up a hard green ball from the ground and
whips it through the trees at his brother like a fastball as he yells,
“Piganek! Let’s bring ’em home!” The nuts have just begun to ripen
and fall and blanket the grass.The boys fill their pockets in no time
and then pile up a great heap more.Pecans are good eating but
hard to carry, like trying to carry a bushel of tennis balls: the more
you pick up, the more end up on the ground.They hate to go home
empty-handed, and Mama would be glad for these—but you can’t
carry more than a handful …
The heat eases a little as the sun sinks low and evening air
settles in the bottomland, cool enough for them to run home for
supper.Mama hollers for them and the boys come running, their
skinny legs pumping and their underpants flashing white in the
fading light.It looks like they’re each carrying a big forked log, hung
like a yoke over their shoulders.They throw them down at her feet
with grins of triumph: two pairs of worn-out pants, tied shut with
twine at the ankles and bulging with nuts.
