Blogs

This website provides information about and a map for events in Alberta and Canada that you can attend on November 16th, targetted at MPs’ offices. (I see there is one in Camrose at Kevin Sorenson’s office). In some cases, there are rallies and speakers. You can find the website here.

What a beautiful video!  The images, as well as the sentiments on the connectedness of nature and how to live a good day.

I hope everyone has had the chance to spill their gratitude into blessings today.

After those inspiring talks at the conference last week, I tweeted that I couldn’t believe that it had been a year since INM had transformed my sense of my own relationship with Canada, indigenous peoples, and the land I have settled on, migrated to. You may have seen this invitation from Idle No More asking all of us to celebrate its birthday on November 10th at a webinar with Winona LaDuke, well-known for her work on land recovery and for her organization Honor the Earth, now in its 20th year.  CBC also recently featured a new website, Indigenous Nationhood Movement, which builds on the work of Idle No More. The blog, resources and media sections are very engaging. You will find there the wonderful work of Leanne Simpson who writes about Anishinaabe concepts of language, nationhood, land and family with the phrase “an ecology of intimacy”:

Kina Gchi Nishnaabeg-ogamig is an ecology of intimacy.

It is an ecology of relationships in the absence of coercion, hierarchy or authoritarian power.

Kina Gchi Nishnaabeg-ogamig is connectivity based on the sanctity of the land, the love we have for our families, our language, our way of life.  It is relationships based on deep reciprocity, respect, non-interference, self-determination and freedom. . . .

(Leanne Simpson, “I Am Not a Nation-State”)

Carmelle returned to her Alma Mater this evening to share her recent experiences in Peru with DIACONIA.  You can access more of her reflections on her blog from her time there, The Peruvian Square.  Carmelle put us in touch with the stories of not only the place she visited, but with the people who welcomed her into the rhythm of their lives.  The most important thing to do, they say, is to have a potluck with the people and share conversation.  This is how we will address the pressing issues we are facing.

In addition, Rajan led us in a contemplative exercise to properly situate our hearts and minds for Carmelle’s talk.

Rajan was present for our class this week and addressed the inspiration behind designing the class with a contemplative aspect.  It is not until we can address and quell the agitation and dis-ease that lives within us that we can find the stillness needed to address the relationship with the natural world.  The subtle, slow movements of the Earth and her systems does not easily penetrate our human-centered busyness.  Through contemplative exercises, we can cultivate the ability to listen.

Recording Part 2 is a contemplative exercise you can follow along with.

My friend Duncan, who has been spending time gold-mining up in the Yukon, read our blog and was inspired to write a post:

The Yukon, Canada’s best kept secret. More land than you could shake a stick at but try to buy some? A place where the land is still wild. Man has claimed part of her for himself, but there are still so many places left to be tamed. Mother nature is often cruel and with out mercy. Winters I am told can make it near impossible to leave your home and madness to attempt a road trip. Yet I am more comfortable here then I have been anywhere else I have ever been in my life.

I came up here this July on a by chance job through a high school cook. I new little about the man I was going to work for and I knew even less about mining. I had got a job in a Klondike Gold Mine. It was a 3 day drive and bang on 2700km from doorstep to doorstep. I pulled my camper trailer all the way from Alberta with enough clean cloths to go a month, work cloths ready for anything from 20 above to 30 below. I was ready… or so I thought.

The first night when I showed up, there was a wide array of people sitting around having some rum after work. People from all up and down the valley. An old boy Gregg who had been coming here since he was a kid with his dad, he has been running the show for a few years now. Two employees of a very large outfit up the creek and my new boss and some of my co workers. The first thing my boss said to me was “ Welcome to our living hell! What do you think?” with out even hesitation I said “It feels like home already”

We were up and working by 7am…ish. (I like this already) I had been warned that the first few days were going to tough but it was the way it had to be. They were repairing the undercarriage on an older D9 dozer. Tracks were off and it was sitting at an odd angle on top of some large timbers. I was given the grinder, pry bar and hammer and was explained that I was going to be pulling all these old track pads off and installing them on the new rails, ten feet away. Each pad new ways well over 125lbs. These weren’t, thank god they only weighed a whopping 110lbs. There were 86 in total and each one had 4 bolts that had to be hand torque to 1200ft/lb. I started at a sprint and by noon I was making no sweet time and I was gassed. Completely out of work form from last 3 months of traveling and the double fisting that goes with that.  It took me 3 full days to get them done. Everything else has been easier since then.

Since I have been here my tasks have not gotten that much easier really, it’s all grunt work and I love it. It doesn’t really matter who you are when you come here, everyone does their time, gives the needed effort, meets the given demands or you just won’t earn the better paying, less stressful jobs.  The Yukon itself is somewhat like that, reward out for effort in. It’s just a matter of do you have what it takes or not. I don’t even know if I do.  Keeping in mind less people have tamed the riverbeds then the Yukon has eroded away and washed them away as if they were never here. The old camps and machinery left as if they were ready for the next shift that never came. Sluice boxes still sitting where they were, how many years ago when their masters took the mats out for the last time. One more cleanup, just one more, I know we’ll find the pay again. To walk away with pockets turned inside out. The few that have done the jig and came out with a fortune in the fall.

In the Yukon you can still stake land claims. I don’t know all the details nor will I try to sound like I do. But I will say what I know. You can stake land claims for different kinds of development. There is placer mine, which is deposited soil from erosion down to a set depth of the bedrock. Another is hard rock where the bedrock is the gem and ore rich material uneroded and undisturbed. You can also stake timber claims and agriculture claims. The catch is that you have to do the work. Easier said than done. Roads are not provided, they must be pioneered to get to areas that are not staked and developed. Work claimed must be proven and a certain on the dollar amount of work must be done each year to hold the claim title or it can be staked again. You cannot re-stake unworked claims two years in a row in the same name. If you are going for rich land that someone else is interested in, then you better be there at midnight when the claim becomes available because it might not be in the morning.

This is what I want to learn about this winter. I had wanted to stay here this winter but it has not worked out that way. This will be my winter project. I want to learn about and ponder the idea of staking my own claim one day, and maybe the land will embrace me, or erode and wash me away like it has so many others up here. Either way I want to try

In the early 1980s I worked for the Government of the Northwest Territories and served as the Superintendent of Social Services on Baffin Island. We ran a complete range of services: social assistance, child welfare services, correctional services including a correctional center and various other services. The delivery of all of these services was guided by laws, regulations and policies.

I would often travel to the thirteen small communities scattered across the High Arctic to explain our services and get feedback. Often, during the community meetings, one or several Inuit elders would get up and say,” Learn from the land.” This happened time and time again. I respected their comments as a cultural statement but considered them irrelevant. The elders simply didn’t understand the rules and regulations we operated under. Besides, I was a “Kadluna” (a white man), was a city boy, and had no experience on the land—especially their land.

And I was also a slow learner. However, as I heard this mantra repeated time and time again I gradually realized that they were not talking about learning from experience on the land—though this was important. They were trying to tell me that the land was living, it was a teacher, it had a law, and we must be guided by this law.

In the days leading up to the creation of Nunavut there were constant discussions in communities about law. At one community meeting an elder got up and said, “You Kadluna think that we Inuit don’t have laws. You’re wrong. We do have laws. But they are different from your laws. Your laws are written down in a book and can be thrown in the fire and burned up. Our laws are here,” and he placed his hand over his heart.

Long before there was written law—Roman Law, Church Law, The Magna Carta and English Common Law, the Napoleonic Code—there was only one law—the law of nature. And it has not ceased to exist just because folks decided to write things down in books.

The law of the land (also referred to as Wild Law, the Law of Nature and Earth Jurisprudence) recognizes honours and protects the rights of planet earth as a living reality and the rights of all its species, including the human species, to fulfill mutual self-supporting destinies.
As Thomas Berry has noted, every component of the Earth community has three rights: 1) the right to exist, 2) the right to habitat, and 3) the right to fulfill its role in the ever-renewing process of the earth community.

Rivers have river rights, birds have bird rights, insects have insect rights. These are not human rights. They are analogous to human rights and must be seen within the laws of nature which includes such things as predator-prey relationships. Just because they are analogous doesn’t mean they are not real.

A fundamental principle of the law of the land is what we might describe as nature’s Hypocratic Oath: DO NO HARM—TO THE ECOSYSTEMS THAT YOU DEPEND UPON FOR YOUR EXISTENCE.

So how can we rediscover and implement Law of the Land?

We can’t do it by trying to extend human laws to include nature. By its very definition, jurisprudence is the study and practice of human law. And, because human laws depend upon the government in power, they can be removed for political expediency—as we are now experiencing in the area of resource developments on both a federal and provincial level.

We have to learn to step outside our traditional approach of trying to extend human laws and realize that the Law of the Land is the primordial law. It is the first law which must guide the development of human laws. Fortunately in some parts of the world this is beginning to happen.

Ecuador and Bolivia have enshrined the rights of nature in their constitutions. Some local governments, particularly in the United States, have adopted this approach regardless of whether state and local governments consider it “legal.” And there is a growing body of literature in science and even in law that is exploring this option.

Meanwhile, for those of us dealing with local development, we might “Learn from the Land” and adopt Aldo Leopold’s principle: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, the stability, and beauty of the land. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Mike Bell
Comox B.C.