Month: December 2020

The CSKT water compact and dealing with (or bypassing) ideology

“Elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations. . . . in ways that do not change the underlying economic system that has allowed the winners to win and fostered many of the problems they seek to solve.” —Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Tucked into the Covid-19 relief bill recently (finally) signed by the U.S. president are a couple of items that are probably unknown outside of the area of northwest Montana I live in, or at least largely unknown outside of Montana. Forwarded by all 3 members of the state’s congressional delegation is the completion of a water compact between the state and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes—one that resolves almost all water claims by the tribe, and in which the CSKT gave up many of those claims in order to reach an agreement with the state legislature—and at the same time returns the National Bison Range to tribal ownership.

This compact was passed by the state legislature in 2015 and is a huge win for the state and, I hope, a relief for the tribe in finalizing their water rights—this despite the fact that they gave up significant water claims to which they were entitled under the Winters Doctrine (the 1908 U.S. Supreme Court case Winters v. United States that determined reservations that relied on agriculture automatically had first right to water sources). Transfer of the National Bison Range had also already been approved, but Ryan Zinke nixed it when he became Secretary of the Interior (for absolutely no good reason except he thought it would win him political points, but don’t get me started on Zinke because I have almost nothing nice to say).

As Montana-based national journalist and one of my favorite writers Anne Helen Petersen said on her Twitter account, this is going to royally piss off the far right in the Flathead Valley. She’s right. But she’s also right that the only things that make them angrier than the water compact are mask mandates (or even being asked to wear a mask) and refugees. Also liberals, gun control legislation, and the idea of a county-wide bike trail. So there’s that. And at this point it’s hard to care too much. Some of these conservatives have become such rigid ideologues that they object to even the idea of working with fellow legislators in the Democratic Party. Brad Tschida, one of the 18 Republican legislators (8 of whom are from Flathead County, where I live) who signed a letter in opposition to the water compact was quoted as saying in my local paper:

“When you have members on the other side of the aisle that are acknowledging and favorably responding to that decision, then I think there’s something wrong with that, . . . So, to me, that smacks in the face of the citizens of the state of Montana that sent 67 Republicans to the Legislature this year.” (Emphasis added.)

He also literally said that this legislation must be wrong because some Democrats approved of it. Which is one of the now countless examples of the fact that many in the foundation of the Republican Party simply believe that any Democrat having any influence, power, or even winning a vote, is flat-out illegitimate.

I know many people who associate with that thinking, and they have become so entrenched in propaganda that it’s hard to reach for any kind of mutual sympathy. When the bipartisan water compact was passed by the state legislature and approved by the Republican attorney general, some of these objecting legislators were part of a group that launched a competing “People’s Compact” that had very little real support outside their ideological bubble and no political or legal legitimacy. But they tried hard, paying for billboards and a booklet insert in newspapers across the state, and claiming that the legislature had had no time to review or understand the CSKT compact despite also acknowledging the it had been worked on and negotiated for 8 years. They also tried to agitate against transferring the National Bison Range back to tribal ownership by complaining that a public resource was being given to a private entity, but aside from the fact that that doesn’t seem to stop them from wanting to privatize all other public lands plus public education, it ignores the reality that that Flathead Valley land had been set aside for a reservation when the Salish tribe was forced out of their lands in Bitterroot Valley, and that the CSKT then had to give up their nascent buffalo herd when being forced to open the reservation up to white settlement. Aside from ignoring the initial reality of all of this being on stolen land anyway. And that the CSKT has committed to keeping the Bison Range open to the public.

I realize I’m getting a bit lost in the weeds here, but I’ve been following this issue closely since I moved back to my hometown and am absolutely exhausted and annoyed with this group of people that keeps claiming to be the menders of fences while at the same time refusing to acknowledge any reality beyond the ones they’ve defined. You can’t reach mutual understanding over an issue that people believe in completely different realities about, though you can still hold out hope of building connections and understanding in other ways. But someone’s inability to perceive reality or their own prejudices doesn’t justify forcing other people to continue living with those injustices. Some people have a really hard time with change; that doesn’t mean everyone else has to sit around until Doomsday waiting for them to grow up.

These objectors are some of the same people who, when the CSKT paid millions of dollars for full ownership of a dam down-valley that they’d been co-managing, freaked out, insisted that the tribe would mismanage the resource, and then hired a lawyer who tried to claim in court that the tribal dam ownership was somehow linked to the Turkish government and the U.N.’s Agenda 21. (I am not kidding.) I don’t want to give up on people, but there comes a certain point when giving up on trying to help them see facts is the sensible thing to do.

I am incredibly relieved about the water compact and National Bison Range because I was worried that the federal end of the process might have to start over with the new Senate and presidential administration, and the CSKT has waited long enough for those issues to be resolved. It’s something that a lot of good people have been working on for a long time, and with Montana’s recent election of many harder-right conservatives, might be one of the last examples we get of the state’s supposed ability to look beyond party and work together on real issues that affect real people. But I credit the legislature with this win less than I credit the CSKT, who on this issue and many others (I believe they were the first local government in Montana to have a strategic climate change plan, which they wrote and passed in 2013) have shown an example of governance that other communities would be well to look up to.

If I owe you an email, apologies! I’m not always fast at responding to email, but holiday weeks tend to shut down my inbox for a while.

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• Newsletter reader Timothy shared this incredible essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer (whose Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss are books I keep returning to) on serviceberries and the struggle of commodification versus the promises of an economy based on reciprocity, reflecting the generosity and abundance of nature. (It also never occurred to me that serviceberries would be attractive enough for farming.)

• Did you know there’s been a transcontinental bike and pedestrian trail in the works in the U.S.? The Rails-to-Trails Coalition, among other organizations, has been piecing it together and it’ll take a while—longer than many of us would like—but the the trail already has 2,000 miles.

• I’ve never read Raynor Winn’s books, but I’m going to after listening to this interview with her on the Scotland Outdoors podcast. Her description of her husband’s illness and the 600-mile walk they took after becoming homeless sound beautiful, and I’m keenly interested in their experience of his neurological health improving during this intensive journey. I wrote a fair bit about neurological health and walking in my book, but of course science is always finding out more.

Droughts and wandering

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself.” —Fyodr Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I’ve been out of words recently. Lost in wondering what the point of words on pages is. I believe in stories and the power of narrative, but not every word thought by every person needs to be out in the world or amplified, including mine. The world is a noise, which is so different from a sound.

This feeling, however, is also a familiar one, what I call a dry spell. There are writers who never seem to hit these droughts, and I envy them, but I also know this will pass. The first time it ever happened to me I was working on a mystery novel that I’d revised umpteen times, and I suddenly lost interest in it so completely that even picking up printed chapters to try to revise again resulted in itchy skin and my throat swelling up. I literally seemed to be developing an allergy to writing. I wrote a friend of mine, Becky Hagenston, who is one of the best short story writers I’ve ever read, and asked if she’d ever experienced this. She wrote something so funny back to me that I keep it on my desk at all times, and it made me realize that dry spells are just something I have to accept.

This time it’s mostly a wondering and feeling of pointlessness, probably triggered in part by the state of the world and the formlessness of my own days. Now, as I think of the funny thing Becky said to me, and how much I enjoy and admire her short stories, my mind wanders off to when we met, that writing conference in St. Petersburg the year before I got pregnant with my first child, walking the city’s canals for hours and hours, drinking vodka in the bar late at night when the sun never set, watching the World Cup with my uncle and cousin at their apartment across town, looking for the story points of my father’s childhood when the city was still Leningrad and the communal apartment his family shared wasn’t upstaged by a Lexus dealership next door. The strange tour that a faculty member gave of how St. Petersburg’s architecture and corners was reflected in Dostoevsky’s portrayal of his main character in Crime and Punishment.

I’ll just have to wait for whatever passes for a muse in my brain/mind/self to come back from vacation. In the meantime, I’ve got a big pile of research books to dig into, pictured below. The stack on the right are books I’ve read; the two on the left are waiting to be opened (there are more on the way but this is what I have right now). If you were curious about private property, the commons, and the history of ownership, where would you start?

(Thanks to Dr. Greg Davis for pointing me to Nick Hayes’s The Book of Trespass! I hope it’ll be published in the U.S. soon.)

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Some stuff to read (no podcasts! I’ve been bingeing on the “Tides of History” podcast, so the rest are just piling up):

• “Hi Ho Cherry-O,” by Becky Hagenston, in Witness. Just one of her many excellent, eerie stories.

• I keep going back to reread Chris La Tray’s lovely essay “Ulm Pishkun” (published in High Desert Journal), about visiting First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park, and trying to excavate the vague memory I have of visiting the place for the first time as a child. Was it a school trip? Or did my grandmother take me when I was visiting her in Great Falls? I can’t remember. This essay evokes so much sensory memory, though. We are all, indeed, a little lost.

• I’ve been reading through my backlog of magazines, and had the delight this week of reading Will Hunt’s essay “A Pilgrimage on the Sacred Road,” about looking for and walking an ancient Mayan sacbe, in the Winter 2019 issue of Orion.

• Shannon Mattern on a cultural history of Plexiglass, its role in a pandemic and its reflection of our expectations about a world where our safety and ease are paramount, in Places Journal.

Jan Morris and the art of kindness

“Be kind.” — Jan Morris, A Writer’s World: Travels and Reportage 1950-2000

A long time ago now, at least within the span of my own life, I was deeply immersed in the travel and travel writing world. Among my favorites to read, the giants of travel writing literature at the time, were Colin Thubron, Pico Iyer, and of course the incomparable Jan Morris, who I was very sad to hear died on November 20.

Of the writers I was introduced to at the time, Morris was probably the last, at least among those who are well-known in that genre. Her book A Writer’s World, a collection of essays that spans five decades, sat on my shelves for a long time before I finally cracked the binding.

Inside, I found myself delighted by life’s many variations through the eyes of a skilled writer who never seemed to shake a love for the world no matter what she witnessed. It opens when Jan was still James Morris, emerging from a tent with ice in a beard, on the way to acclaim as the only journalist member of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Everest; and ends with an essay that was a defining read of my life. After interactions with people all over the world who see humanity and reality in black-and-white, us-or-them, and striving to make meaning of it, Jan arrives at the only things that matters: be kind.

This was, it seems, an exhortation she lived by. Simon Winchester’s tribute to her in The American Scholar is filled with memories of her generosity to him as an aspiring writer. In that same magazine, senior editor Bruce Falconer writes of her as living by kindness, always kindness, quoting one of her columns for the magazine:

“I simply believe that everything one does in life can be measured against a scale of kindness. None of us can ever achieve full marks on the scale, and kindness itself must sometimes be weighed in the balance—is it ever kind to be cruel?—yet it seems to me that if there is any ultimate judge out there beyond the Milky Way, we can hardly be faulted if we have done our kindly best.”

After months of intentional government neglect, worry and fear, the loss of loved ones and the loss of connection, the unraveling of communities and relationships, our ability to be kind to ourselves, must less to one another, has been seriously strained. Let’s not forget that there are people with enormous power who have taken our taxes and our votes but refused to govern, and that whatever struggles we or our neighbors are facing are not—mostly—the fault of the people closest to us. Let’s do our kindly best by one another.

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Some stuff to read or listen to:

• On the Sapiens podcast, an interview with one of the scientists who found a link between a higher percentage of Neanderthal DNA and worse Covid outcomes. I had no idea how widely Neanderthal DNA varies across the world.

• A compelling piece on how detrimental Biden’s pick for the head of the USDA, Tom Vilsack, will be for the Democratic Party’s hopes of garnering more support among rural voters. People I know who work or have worked in the Forest Service are happy with the choice, but I’ll be curious to see if Vilsack shifts USDA policy to start supporting smaller farms—and actual food—as well as dealing with food insecurity.

• Civil Eats published an op-ed that is more optimistic about Vilsack and the chances he has to make this country’s farms more sustainable (and, again, helping to restructure the system so that it rewards people for growing actual food!), but the very fact that they had to lay out a roadmap for improvement in an op-ed makes me nervous about its chances. On the other hand, it’s a comprehensive vision that takes into account the fact that food access and land ownership play a huge role in many issues of injustice.

• If you have any interest in the (Imaginary) West and its issues, I highly recommend listening to all eight episodes of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Timber Wars podcast. I have long thought that areas like the one I live in can trace their anti-environmental, anti-government, and anti-progressive attitudes to the timber wars of the late 1980s-early 1990s. Timber Wars does a great job of untangling the issues.

• FUN AND MORE FUN! Our local theater up here in northwest Montana recently launched their new production, “Your Musical is CANCELLED! The Musical,” available to rent from Vimeo. These are among the funniest and most talented people I know and they are the invisible connectors that hold this community together. They are absolute stardust. Rent it, watch it, laugh, cry, and then send it to all your favorite friends. (There’s a 6-minute sneak peak at the bottom of the page you can watch first if you’re unsure.)

Years ago I shared an apartment with a guy who used to take a month-long vow of silence whenever the mood struck him. He was the night cleaner at the coffee shop where I worked and played in a band (or sang? I can’t remember now). The apartment was absolutely frigid—my room was a kind of closed-in former second-story sun room and it was the middle of a Minnesota winter—but it was cheap and we got along fine.

I often worked the morning shift at the coffee shop, and would arrive slightly after 5:30 a.m. when my flatmate was still there cleaning. That job taught me to love the quiet of an early morning. The shift started at 6 but if I got there a bit earlier I’d have time to read the paper with a hot, fresh cup of coffee and quiet before we opened at 6:30.

There was a quality of entering the empty coffee shop when this guy was doing his silent month that I found soothing. When you know a person isn’t going to answer you with words, the social pressure to make small talk falls away. My own mind tended to rest more easily on those days, even if the rest of it was crowded with noise and chatter.

I was reminded of that experience when reading Jane Brox’s book Silence recently. The book was really more about time than silence, about modern life and what happens when the pace of it all, the demands on our time, are removed, either by choice, as in the case of Thomas Merton and the monastic life; or by law, as in the cases of the earliest inmates of the Eastern State Penitentiary, a prison designed by Benjamin Rush to keep all inmates in both total silence and total isolation because it would reform their souls.

The prisoners, Brox wrote, usually craved the work they were assigned (shoemaking in the early days) because it gave a point and structure to their days. The monastic life is likewise full of meaningful work and prayer. Both lives in her book had a minimum of verbal communication, but Merton still struggled against the invasion of time that the renown of his writings brought to the contemplative life he’d chosen.

None of us can truly shape our days any way we’d like. Attending writing residencies in the past showed me what my days would look like if I weren’t responsible for childcare, had little reliable phone service, and never had to cook or do dishes. It’s unbelievably productive and feels wonderful, in part because I don’t have to give or receive conversation unless I choose to and can dedicate all my prime hours to writing, but that’s not my life. Nor is it most people’s. We all have demands and obligations, many with far less control over their time than others.

I don’t know that I would want to take my old flatmate’s vows of silence (though sometimes I wish everyone else would for a while), but I do miss the quality of walking into a space where talking was not expected and I felt, even for half an hour, that I owned my own time.

Meditation, like silence, seeks to hush the cluttered audiosphere that keeps us from focusing on the existence of existence and marveling at it all, inside and out of ourselves. The stillness and aliveness and interconnectedness. They both serve to clear away the distractions that demand attention for the fleeting and irritating.

I would have thought that a pandemic semi-quarantine (whatever all of this is called where the U.S. has no national response and we’re trying to protect one another as best we can) would be a perfect time to really dedicate myself to building a meditation practice and rediscovering the peace of those half hours. But no. I’ve found the opposite.

I’ve been struggling with a strong aversion to my Headspace meditation app and meditation in general over the past few months. It’s partly that I loathe the moment when I first turn on my phone in the morning, but the pandemic has added another layer: the formlessness of the days. I’ve worked freelance from home for over twenty years, so that wasn’t an adjustment, but now my spouse, who has spent our twenty-year-plus marriage traveling more than half the year, is also home all the time mostly on conference calls, and our kids are homeschooling. The days have this godawful sameness that feels like it should be wonderfully malleable but somehow isn’t. It’s just formless, even with a routine to keep the days running. Forget meditation and mindfulness, it’s a struggle for me not to slide into living on beer and potato chips.

Trying to meditate with an app that’s loaded with hundreds of choose-your-own pre-recorded guided meditations feels weirdly horrifying. There’s a yawning maliciousness to it that grins at the meaninglessness of it all.

So I haven’t been meditating. I could do it without using an app but realized early on that I should have formed a robust practice years ago if I wanted to be able to keep meditating in this situation. My “practice” is haphazard at best. I have better luck with yoga or walking in the woods, or just walking out of the house, but even that’s a struggle—I hadn’t realized how much I rely on walking my kids to school to start my days. (I also miss being alone so, so much.)

An essay titled “Mindfulness is useless in a pandemic,” from 1843 Magazine (a publication of The Economist; it looks like it might be need a login but not a subscription to read) popped up on my Curio app last week. I’m not sure the arguments all made sense to me, but the point that expectation of future events is vital to survival and part of our evolution is well taken: “The pandemic has reminded us that the joy we take in planning is as valid as the event itself. . . . When the present is crushing, and when lives and economies are being ruined, our imagination offers us a welcome escape.” It was nice to hear that I’m not alone in a current aversion to mindfulness.

For some reason, right now the Headspace app makes me feel like I’m being dragged into a Black Mirror episode; and meditating on my own, without a guide, makes me feel like walking to Canada. Instead of trying to do meditation each day, I’ve been grateful for the reset from Pondercast, where host Laurie Brown has been doing a twenty-minute guided meditation each Monday and a grounding thought on Fridays. Each one is new and explorative.

Maybe it helps to be reminded that, if you have someone guiding your meditation, they’re not just sitting out the pandemic on a higher plane of perfect mindfulness or with the comfortable safety of a Silicon Valley executive’s income. They’re trying to walk through this year, too. The Pondercast meditations keep me anchored in time, reminding me that Earth is still moving and me along with it, and that every day is unique even if it all feels the same, and that however we find or form silence for ourselves, it’s likewise unique. As my flatmate wordlessly taught me all those years ago, every half-hour of silence can be its own world to explore.

In memorium

“We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.”
—Derrick Jensen quoting a friend in Endgame, volume 2

A few days ago I intentionally caused the death of another living being. (I won’t be graphic but stop reading if you’d rather not hear about this.) I am of the belief that we cause the deaths of other living beings every moment that we’re alive, but it feels different to do it with intention.

The hunting community in general refers to this act as “harvesting.” People “harvest” elk, deer, moose, and all sorts of other animals. I have a strong reaction against this word applied to animals that I’ve spent many hours observing and whose world I’ve tried to understand. Which makes me wonder if “harvest” is too life-denying for other things too, like carrots and kale and wheat. Certainly for trees. Collect? Gather? It’s always death-causing, no matter how we refer to the action. I pick kale and cause its death. I kill it in order to care for others, to live. Same for the deer I shot last week.

All of those words sound brutal. But after three years and countless hours I haven’t yet found hunting to be brutal. I find industrial agriculture brutal, whether of cows or of kale, but those long hours spent slow-walking in the woods, smelling snow, looking for signs, being scolded by squirrels and becoming weirdly obsessed with crows and the liquid call that I didn’t know they possessed—the end purpose of all of it is, yes, final, but the process is an act of building relationship. Even this particular endpoint, which involved a friend’s field rather than public woods, was integral with that community ecosystem, as the friend was the person who’s spent an enormous amount of time teaching and guiding me in this lifeway.

I know it doesn’t sound like it. It sounds like . . . something else. Hatred maybe. Cold-heartedness.

To depend entirely on your local ecosystem for your food (which, to be clear, I don’t, though as far as protein goes we’re pretty close) requires you to both know that ecosystem and to care for it. Derrick Jensen, quoted above, has said that, though you can’t help taking from the world in order to live, what that obligates you to is not guilt but care. I believe he said it initially of salmon, that if he takes a salmon from the river near him, it obligates him to care for the rest of that salmon’s community, including the water and the wider ecosystem on which it survives.

Reciprocity is clarifying; it gives purpose and meaning. When I look inside my freezer now it feels good in a complex kind of way. Good to provide for my family but good also because I have a clear vision of where my obligations lie: with caring for what it is in this world, especially where I live, that allowed that animal to flourish.