Started; 8th February 2024
Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.
Preface. ... the sweet smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you remember things you didn't know you'd forgotten.
But it is not mine to give or yours to take. Wiingaashk belongs to herself.
(p.7) (talking about Eve) In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast.
(On the contrast between the story of Eve versus Skywoman) 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.
(p.8) (On belonging) It is good to remember that the original woman was herself an immigrant.
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.
(p.9) ... 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, depend on it.
(p.22) "The Gift of Strawberries" My strawberries are mulberries and figs, lettuce and sweetcorn, the nectar from that orange flower...
(p.27) The fundamental nature of gifts; they move, and their value increases with their passage. ... The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes.
(p.28) ... gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity..
(p.345) The very facts of the world are a poem. Light is turned to sugar. Salamanders find their way to ancestral ponds following magnetic lines radiating from the earth. The saliva of grazing buffalo causes the grass to grow taller. Tobacco seeds germinate when they smell smoke. Microbes in industrial waste can destroy mercury. Aren't these stories we all should know?
Finished; 6th April 2024
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