Taking Bold Action
To create a better world for all of us
Boozhoo, indinawemaaganidog! Aaniin! That is to say hello, all of my relatives! Welcome to another edition of An Irritable Métis. This is the final edition of 2023, in fact, and if you are expecting some kind of meaningful reflection on the year just gasping through its final stagger across the finish line you’ll be disappointed. I have a hard enough time remembering what I did last week let alone come up with any kind of retrospective covering an entire year. I’d like to say it’s because I’m a forward thinking kind of guy but I’m mostly just too lazy to be bothered with it. When it comes to goings-on around here, though, I can say that it’s been a great year writing this newsletter and I appreciate each and every one of you readers who have stuck it out with me. I think there are going to be a lot of big things happening in 2024 and I hope you choose to keep reading. I’m so very, very grateful.
The other night during the full moon I sat outside in the cold for the better part of three hours and burned up all of my wood. During that time Nookomis, enormous and impossibly bright – looking not so much lit from the outside by a hidden sun but moreso as an amplifier of pulsating inner light – rose high in the east and began Her slow arc across the sky. The next morning, when I bundled up and took my coffee onto my front porch, She was still there, hanging just over the horizon, like She was waiting for me. We spent more than an hour together then too. I revel in her company, especially during these colder, darker months.
If it wasn’t for shorter days it would hardly feel like winter yet. Out my window this morning there are little crusts of snow remnants here and there but it isn’t snowy, though everything is coated in a thick frost. It’s been chilly, with morning temperatures in the teens, but it hasn’t been cold cold yet.1 I’ve only seen a sub-zero temperature once, and that was on the thermometer in Yellowstone the first morning there. That didn’t stop a couple of us from bundling up and taking our coffee outside, or the whole crew from climbing in a little bus for four hours of rumbling up and down the Lamar Valley. The nail on my left index finger is finally recovering after breaking the heck out of it wrestling with one of those damnable bus windows! It turned out to be a “three dog day” as someone later mentioned, because we saw, among other relatives, a red fox, a couple coyotes, and about eight wolves2. The day was bright and sunny – and frigid – and no one complained even once.
Biboon is the Anishinaabe name for the Spirit of the North Wind, and means “Winter.” So of course we call this cold season after them. It is the time of Biboonkeonini, the Wintermaker, the constellation encompassing what most of us know as Orion, who is so bright this time of year. As Anishinaabe people, we spend this season as a season of quiet, of introspection, of withdrawal. It is also a time for stories. Stories that explain the world, that teach us how to live among our myriad relatives, and sometimes stories to entertain and poke fun. Winters are long in Anishinaabe territory and stories are the best way possible to spend that time.
Many of these stories involve interactions with animals and – like the Coyote stories of my Salish relatives – could only be told during winter. This is serious business! You don’t want to haul off and start talking about an unpredictable Animal spirit when they might be awake and listening to you and get a burr under their ruff on account of your gossip. That leads to mischief and aggravating impishness, or worse! In winter, at least, with snow on the ground you can see the tracks of who is up and about and choose your words accordingly. Or they might be asleep, preferably. It’s rude to talk about others and their foibles anyway, even though we all do it; best to accomplish such when the subject is in no way going to hear about it.
I love winter. The darkness, the candles, the Solstice. I love how beautiful the cold makes the world. I love the dedication to reflection and drawing inward. I’ve enjoyed a number of newsletter reflections from people about this season but I’m also a little troubled. It seems like such a solitary practice for so many, and I include myself in this assessment. This hasn’t been a solitary season for so many of our cultures for millennia, especially among the Anishinaabe. We weren’t scattered around the village in solitary lodges and teepees staring at our moccasins. We were gathered for these stories, for these interactions, learning about our world and about each other. We gathered closely together, in our slowing down, because we needed to to survive. To stay warm. To look out for one another. Do we really do this anymore?
How many of us even so much as gather regularly around the family hearth? How many of us have one, when comfort can come with the twist of a knob that blows heat throughout and allows us to be in our own individual worlds, passing the time waiting for warmer weather? Is the television our hearth now? Or has that changed too, since we all carry little televisions in the palms of our hands we can while away hours and hours, oblivious even to the people we share a roof with? I miss having a hearth. I miss having a wood stove. I’m telling you you really haven’t lived until you’ve endured the aftermath of big dogs passing gas in front of a hot stove. You really haven’t lived until you’ve dedicated part of a summer or two preparing for winter.
For all the talk of it, how many of us are actually allowed to slow down anyway? It feels like every year the gears shift around Halloween and things are hell bent until January, when it picks up again right out of the gate. Maybe I’m just paying closer attention this year or resisting harder but it has seemed particularly bad this time around. We try and force ourselves to maintain the same schedules we commit to during the months of longer days and higher energy levels. We aren’t built for this. It’s not how I want to live my winter, and with a number of people demanding responses from me – particularly over these holiday-designated weekends – I’m digging in my heels to take a friggin’ break in service to something greater: Rest. And being quiet for a while.
All this is a long way to suggest I think the community aspect of what winter can be – I mean slow community, quiet community, not parties and commitments and all the hubbub around how we typically gather – seems on the wane, just like the community aspect of everything else in this hyper-individualist culture. That marketed individuality is a wedge the cruel manipulators of our world seek to drive between us because they know we are stronger as a bundle than as a collection of singles, so the distractions keep coming and coming and coming. Just look at the holidays: by the time the actual days of celebration arrive we are all so frazzled with the input of Everything that the last thing we want to do is be around each other. That’s tragic.
I didn’t set out to write an intentions piece yet here I am, sort of making one. I’d like to handle this differently in the coming year, figure out a way to be more in community than I have been … just a quieter, more relaxed, grateful kind of community, not a rambunctious and overwrought one, or one constantly based on planning projects or organizing more busy-ness. Ugh, it sounds awfully hard, though. If anyone has ideas, or examples of things you are doing, I’d love to hear them. I know this reads like a lot of rambling nonsense. I’m trying to figure out what to do too – I’m a guy who can count on one hand the number of visitors I’ve had at my house in ten years of living here – and I don’t have any answers. Perhaps you do.
Meanwhile, please take good care of everyone you can. There are a lot of relatives in our community who need us. We can do better at this.
“Across Turtle Island and Indigenous lands of the northern hemisphere, we settle in to the winter season– a time of slowing down, reflection, and ceremony. At NDN Collective, we also take a moment to pause and acknowledge the winter solstice– a spiritual time for many, a time to reset, check in with ourselves and our loved ones, and to align our values with our actions for the year ahead. There is no shortage of relatives who still need our support this winter, so remember to keep our struggling relatives in prayer while also taking bold action to create a better world for all of us.”
NDN Collective, November/December 2023 Newsletter
State of the Arts
The Montana Arts Council puts out a quarterly newsletter – more like a newspaper – called “State of the Arts.” One of my only official duties (that I know of) as poet laureate is to provide a little column, or a poem, for each issue. I’ve only done one so far, which was the Fall 2023 issue, which you may read (and subscribe to) HERE. Two things pleased me about this. First, my debut issue was also the first issue under the auspices of their new executive director, my good friend, Krys Holmes. The second cool thing arrived in the mail: they send hardcopies out! I love print and I loved when it showed up. Who knew?! I’m thinking about this because I have another column due (checks watch) last week, so I’ll spend some of my new year’s day working on that. I realize I never shared what I wrote last time, so here that is too, if you care to read this kind of thing….
Concerning New Year’s Day
I was out prowling around at Council Grove the other day and ran into my friend Michael Kustudia, who manages the place for Montana FWP3. He invited me back to CG for a “First Day Hike” on Monday, January 1st, and I said I’d be there. Then this came in my email so I thought I’d share in the event any Missoula folks might also be interested. It will be lovely.
And Finally….
The other day, December 29, marked the ninth anniversary of the day I picked Bernard, the Big Dog, up and carried him to the emergency vet and sat with him while he crossed over to the other side. I feel like he doesn’t get enough recognition for how precious he was. I know Darla loved him and clearly missed him when he left us. I think she was grieving too when the two of us began spending so much time together. Bernard was the fourth person I loved who I lost over just a couple months beginning in the fall of 2014; first was my grandmother, then my father, then Velcro (another dog), and then Bernard. He was gentle and loyal and I lived with him almost two decades and sometimes worry, at least early in our relationship, that I wasn’t good enough to him to deserve his abundant love. That changed over time, just like I did, and I’m grateful he saw something in me that I was missing to see in myself for a long, long time. I appreciate his patience with me and I look forward to seeing him again. He was a very, very good boy.
Miigwech, and Happy New Year, my friends. I appreciate all of you.
Cold enough though that any morning where the thermometer is above about 21° actually feels balmy.
Four dogs, if we consider little Wild Umber, the Ranch Inspector.
He also manages, among other parks, Frenchtown Pond, which puts him in charge of taking care of two of my absolute favorite places on earth.
Just like you, I'm still working at being the man my dog thinks I am.
Splendid photo poems and last day of the year reflections, Chris. I'm feeling deeply grateful looking at Sidney Perched On a Rock Overlooking the Lamar River Poem, Buff’lo Poem, and Best Dog Poem and reading your words at 3 a.m. which is an hour after my usual wake-up time, unemployed and fully employed. I'm a winter person. Savoring the darkness and the winter light and the relative cold outside and warm inside. The Trumpeter swans are here now, along with Orion rising in the early evening and accompanying us through the night. Of course, here in the Pacific Northwest we have rain and a heavy cloud cover much of the winter time. Perfect weather for the cedar trees and those of us who are like cedar trees.
Appreciate your thoughts about community in winter. I live alone (yet keep thinking about sharing my limited space with a cat again). On a daily basis throughout the year, I get together with a small group of friends, women and men, at 7:00 or 7:30 a.m. We are a diverse group of unemployed, fully employed people who support each other and welcome anyone who wishes to join us. Our gatherings are especially dear to me in the dark winter months.
All the best to you and your many loved ones in 2024.