Finding the Mother Tree

 Suzanne Simard, "Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest," Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 

I spent the day writing up my planting reports before mailing my envelope of yellow needles to the government lab to have the nutrition levels analyzed and checking the office for reference volumes about mushrooms.  There were plenty of resources about logging, but books on biology were scarce as hen's teeth.  I called the town library, glad to learn that there was a mushroom reference guide on their shelves.  [p. 24]

...

I collected the mushroom book and filed my report on the plantation but vowed to keep my observations quiet and do my homework.  I often feared I'd been hired into the men's club as a token of changing times, and my goose would be cooked if I came up with a half-baked idea about how mushrooms or pink or yellow quilts of fungus on roots affected seedling growth. [p.24]

...

Then I discovered what I was looking for.  After days of searching journals in the university library, I happened upon a new article by a young Swedish researcher, Kristina Arnebrant, who'd just found that shared mycorrhizal fungal species could link alder with pine, delivering nitrogen directly.  I sped through the pages, stunned. [p.121]

...

I dashed out of the stacks and called Robyn from a phone in the foyer.  [p.121]

COMMENT

Simard describes instances where library materials offered answers to her forest observations.  The book is an excellent account of the progress of scientific research, describing a process of observation, literature research  and review and experimental design.  However, by the last chapter Simard says that the scientific method is too limited to fully understand the complexity of the world.  She writes

 I'd been taught in the university to take apart the ecosystem, to reduce it into its parts, to study the trees and plants and soils in isolation, so that I could look at the forest objectively.  This dissection, this control and categorization and cauterization were supposed to bring clarity, credibility, and validation to any findings.  When I followed these steps of taking the system apart to look at the pieces, I was able to publish my results, and I soon learned that it was almost impossible for a study of the diversity and connectivity of a whole ecosystem to get into print. [p. 283]

Simard finds that her "discoveries" were already part of indigenous knowledge, but of course there was no published record of this knowledge and even if there had been, forresters wouldn't have read it.   

 

 

 

New Poets of Native Nations

Heid E. Erdrich, ed. New Poets of Native Nations. Graywolf Press, 2018.

     Although a few poets of Native nations are now producing work within the mainstream of American literary publishing, very little poetry by Natives reaches a large audience-- few readers are exposed to multiple indigenous authors at a bookstore or library or even in an academic course. There's simply not enough of our poetry out there where readers can find it.  There is no current basis upon which others might understand what poetry by Native Americans is today, in the twenty-first century.  Consequently, I have witnessed editors and prize jurors choose poets they think are Native American. The result is that more often than you would imagine, what is selected is work by non-Natives.  This poetry not only misrepresents the lived realities of Native people, but it does our communities real harm by presenting another's views as our own. 

 COMMENT

     You'd think that someone, maybe academic librarians, would be working harder to collect Native American poets.  But poetry doesn't  tend to circulate much without encouragement and these days it's unfashionable to collect for the sake of bibliography.  In order to persuade my own library to buy such such poetry I've had to suggest a purchase for my own personal use, even for books by poets like Sherwin Bitsui or Orlando White who had recently been in town to give readings and workshops.

    Poetry is an especially weird genre. Everyone wants to be a poet, but nobody wants to read poetry. Well, I do. I even like to write reviews of poetry books. I think one barrier to poetry is that it's actually quite difficult to figure out which poetry to read. Poetry resists descriptive reviews so you have to experiment a bit to discover what you like.  There is a lot of truly dreadful poetry out there, so you also have to be confident to recognize it as dreadful and move on.

     That's why Heid Erdrich has performed such an important service to introduce us poetry readers to some Native American  poets she likes (she's a wonderful poet herself, BTW). [1]  Here's a book that we librarians can catalog and simply pull off the shelf when a student or professor is seeking Native American poets. It would be even better if we bought some of their books.  There's a bibliography of sources on pages 281-284 in case any librarians want to order some.

[1] Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Sceintific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2013.

To be heard you must speak the language of the one you want to listen. So, back at school I proposed the idea of a thesis project to my graduate student Laurie. Not content with purely academic questions, she had been looking for a research project that would, as she said, “mean something to someone” instead of just sitting on the shelf. [158]

COMMENT

The shelf is of course a library shelf. Grad students have to produce original research so they gravitate towards narrow, hyper-specialized ideas. Academic libraries collect student theses and dissertations which are seldom heavily used. They are listed in the library catalog and in specialized databases, which is to say, if you want to read them you have to go looking. Student work is usually considered a fairly marginal contribution to scholarship. I have heard of grad students slipping money into their dissertation as a reward for anyone who actually bothers to read it.  In fact, I recently helped a friend get an M.S. Thesis through Interlibrary Loan and when he opened it he found a ten dollar bill tucked into the pages. 

     Laurie decides to investigate Indigenous knowledge about picking sweetgrass. [1]  Members of one tribe say that you must pluck each blade and leave the roots.  Another tradition says you must pull up the whole bunch, but not take every bunch.  A white male dean calls the research “a waste of time” because everyone knows that if you disturb a plant it will damage the population.  

     Nevertheless, she persisted, pursuing the Indigenous idea that, “If we use a plant respectfully it will stay with us and flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away.”  When she presented the resaerch to a committee of white, male scientists, Laurie rephrased this idea as “if we remove 50 percent of the plant biomass, the stems are released from resource competition. The stimulus of compensatory growth causes an increase in population density and plant vigor.”  The scientists applaud.  

     As a librarian, I find that theses and dissertations are often useful sources for hyperlocal research.  One way to make  your research original is by deep focus on a very specific geographic place within the globalized geography of knowledge. 

[1] Laurie A. Reid. The Effects of Traditional Harvesting Practices on Restored Sweetgrass Populations. Thesis (M.S.), State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, 2005. 

Drumming at the Edge of Magic

 Mickey Hart, Jay Stevens, & Fredric Lieberman. Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey Into the Spirit of Percussion,  HarperSanFrancisco, 1990.

     For a long time I thought I would walk into a bookstore and come out with a book explaining all of this.  I finally sought guidance from several of my more learned friends who suggested I try a good research library.  Have you ever been to a major research library, like Harvard’s Widener or Berkeley’s Doe? They’re imposing stone structures, every inch of which hammers home the message that this is a very serious building.  The first time I went into the library at Berkeley I felt as if I had entered a strange kind of church that was both very busy and very quiet – a kind of hushed, scurrying place.  Everywhere you looked, serious people were praying over piles of books.

      I couldn’t wait to get my pile.  I felt the same excitement that I remembered feeling when my grandfather took me to see the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History – this was where the answers were kept.

     My guide was a brisk, no-nonsense type with a Ph.D. Astonished that I’d never been inside a big library before, she was enough of a teacher to be moved by my sudden and naïve eagerness for knowledge. Leading me over to a computer terminal, she punched in the topic – percussion—and scrolled quickly through the entries, jotting down numbers.  I was captivated by the process, particularly by the fact that inside this immense medieval stone building pulsed a heart of high technology.  In a minute we were trotting toward the stacks, zipping past aisles, checking numbers as we went.

     We made a right turn down between two of the stacks and halted in front of a squared-off section of maybe two dozen books.  The mother lode? I gazed at the titles.  Blades was there, of course, along with Curt Sachs’s History of Musical Instruments and John Chernoff’s African Rhythm and African Sensibility, but there were also a few volumes I had never seen before.  Eagerly I skimmed some of the tables of contents, my excitement fading as I went—there didn’t seem to be much here.

     Why were so many of the drum books so thin? And why, now that you mention it, were there so few? Why were there shelves full of books about the violin and walls full of books about the piano but only a dozen or so about drums, most of them monographs on obscurities like the gong in fourteenth-century Manchuria or gigantic tomes on narrow subjects like the mbira (the thumb piano in Zaire).

     I wheeled to question my guide, who nervously backed away murmuring something about there always being gaps in the scholarly record; if there weren’t gaps there’d be nothing for aspiring Ph.D.s to do.   [p. 29]

COMMENT

     This is my favorite library research story of all times.

     The drummer for the Grateful Dead walks into a library in Berkeley and... the librarian fails to recognize him. Then she gives him wrong advice.  Only in a moment of zen it turns out to be exactly the right advice.

     As things transpire, if you are Mickey Hart you have connections. Not long after this library incident, Hart's friends invited him to dinner with Joseph Campbell who literally wrote the book on The Power of Myth (1988). After chatting for a while about drums, Campbell (who like the librarian had also never heard of the Grateful Dead band, but knew the folktale)  offered the same advice  the librarian had given. He told Hart to write a book. 

   Micky Hart did what any respectable cult-band percussionist would do and hired a writer to help him write and a music professor to help with library research.  The book they wrote together is a marvel.

    It occurs to me that the reason that Hart failed to find books about shamanic drumming in the first place is because he was looking for indigenous knowledge.  The root problem is, most shamans don't write books.


 

Loss from Brazil Fire Felt Like 'New Genocide'

Manuela Andreoni and Ernesto Londono. Loss from Brazil Fire Felt Like ‘New Genocide,” New  York Times, September 14, 2018, p. A4. 

“It’s the museum that’s on fire!” Said Jose Urutau Guajajara, a member of the Tenetehara-Guajajara tribe who had been researching his people’s heritage in the archives of Brazil’s National Museum for more than a decade.  “We can still manage to put it out with buckets.”

    By the time they reached the centuries-old place , home to the world’s largest archive of indigenous Brazilian culture and history, flames had butted the building’s core and a dense column of smoke towered above it. 

…

“This is like a new genocide, as though they had slaughtered all these indigenous communities again,” Mr. Gajajara said. “Because that was where our memories resided.”

COMMENT:

The grief of cultural loss is unbearable.

Libraries and archives preserve textual information, which means they privilege textual cultures whether they mean to or not.  Artifacts and texts that describe pre-genocide indigenous cultures were often collected by cultural outsiders. Yet those scraps of information are often all that’s left to reconstruct cultural memory.

In the University of Utah Marriott Library there is a truly beautiful artwork [1] that incorporates textual excerpts from the library collection of  Mormon pioneer diaries. The library is justifiably proud to highlight this special collection.  Still, the diaries tell a one-sided text-based story. The Mormon pioneers didn't move into an inhabited place. They settled a cultural landscape that was already occupied by Ute, Goshute, Paiute, Shoshone and Navajo people. The diaries don't record non-textual cultural memory that is embedded in Utah’s desert landscape. That failure of information has real-world consequences. 

[1] Paul Housberg, Another Beautiful Day has Dawned Upon Us (2008). Handcrafted, kiln cast colored glass silvered on the back. Selected diary passages, from the Library’s private collection about the westward migration, are included in the four unique murals. The work was commissioned by the State of Utah as part of Utah’s Percent-for-Art Program, 2008.

Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects

"Guidelines for the Treatment of Sacred Objects," [poem] in Heid E. Erdrich. National Monuments. Michigan State University Press, 2008.

Guidelines for the treatment of sacred objects
That appear or disappear at will
Or that appear larger in rearview mirrors,
Include calling in spiritual leaders such as librarians,
Wellness-circuit speakers and financial aide officers.

COMMENT

Erdrich's poem refers to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990). It's not only delightful to see a poetic interpretation of a government publication, I also appreciate the tongue-in-cheek appearance of librarians in the role of spiritual leaders.  Libraries, wellness and financial aid are indeed useful support services, though let's be honest, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Much of Erdrich's poetic work references the role of cultural heritage organizations -- libraries, archives and museums-- and their treatment of Indigenous knowledge and artifacts. In National Monuments the theme is human remains presented as spectacle, as if there were no longer any living relatives of those mummies and bones, as if certain kinds of dead people weren't really people at all. 

I also recommend Erdrich's latest book of poems* for librarians who would like a poetic introduction to issues surrounding the collection of Indigenous knowledge. There are a lot of good scholarly articles, too, but they won't have the same emotional punch to the gut.

*Erdrich, Heid E. Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media. MSU Press, 2017.

Donald Trump Would Made a Terrible Navajo

Sierra Teller Ornelas, "Donald Trump Would Make A Terrible Navajo," New York Times (Dec. 2, 2017).

In elementary school, I wanted to do a report on them [Navajo Code Talkers], but when my dad took me to the library to do research we couldn’t find any books that covered their achievements. This was before the internet, and I didn’t have any code talkers in my family, so my search ended there. I remember how angry my dad got, driving us back home empty-handed. 

COMMENT

     I empathize with the anger of the father at finding nothing in the library about his heroes. In the 1990s I was a librarian at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado which offers free tuition for Native American students. As a a consequence, about 10% of students there were Indigenous people. The college is located close to  the Navajo Nation so a lot of students were from "The Rez." The library had a Southwest Room where we kept special collections of materials about the local area under lock and key. Anglo students (as we called them) would come into the library to research the usual undergraduate topics-- abortion, gun control, medical marijuana, doping in sports, and so on -- and we'd have plenty of material for them. But when Navajo students wanted to learn about code talkers, uranium mining, downwinders, the Long Walk, or what the heck was going on in complicated tribal politics they had to use the Southwest Room with it's shorter hours and non-circulating books. By categorizing certain materials as rare and valuable, we librarians were inadvertently forcing students who were already educationally disadvantaged [1] to do graduate level research just to write undergraduate papers about their own history and community 

[1] Ben Meyers, "Who Lives in an Education Deserts? More People than You Think," Chronicle of Higher Education (July 17, 2018). 

Our analysis showed that 29.5 percent of all Native Americans live more than 60 minutes’ drive from a college. Compared with white Americans, Native American adults are more than five times more likely to live in an education desert.