All too quickly the end is near. I have four days remaining and three final interviews to do. I am somewhat surprised to understand at this point that none of what I thought I’d left undone 40 years ago actually remained for me to finish–it was all finished, I just didn’t like the way it turned out–at least I didn’t for much of that long time between visits. It seems obvious now, but ragged and damaged as I was when I left Lame Deer in 1976 (see my book, “The Road to Lame Deer”, Univ. of Nebraska Press), I had done all that I was capable of at the time. There was really no way for me to add or improve upon what I thought I was trying to do. I had to leave that work for others like Dick Littlebear who has managed to find ways to advance the cause and health of his people in ways that no well-intentioned white man could ever do.

The work I have just done will have to settle now and face the cataloging and editing process and the weathering of a little time so its value can be fairly assessed. I feel good about it. We have recorded 27 elders; their stories and images will now be a part of the ongoing history of the Cheyenne Nation.

The future of the people remains uncertain and more threatening than secure. But I am confident in the resiliance of a people who have survived more catastrophe and humiliation than any of us can imagine or comprehend.

I need to let it all settle in before I can write any more about it. I’m sure it will take shape as each portrait emerges in the darkroom and these amazing people speak to me again.

Here it is–another week has passed and I remain in a cultural spin; listened to a dozen life histories this week and each at once confirmed the richness of a tribal way of life that is fading quickly and the poverty of life that looms daily to replace it. Beneath the surface of the attempt to retain Cheyenne traditional identity are the stark realities that on the Rez there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. Education will get you out, but once out, most don’t want to return. And beyond the complexities of that denoument–not the least of which being that even though Reservation ex-pats don’t want to come back they ultimately find life in white society untenable–there remains the singular antidote to boredom and welfare; alcoholism. One in four are alcolholic and therefore every family is plagued by alcohol related death.

As I listen each day to elders tell their stories and I try to look back over our collective long disappointing history, I am reminded of something the novelist Salman Rushdie said; “a tragedy is when you break something and you can’t fix it”. I want to believe somehow it can be repaired but I don’t know how. Let the following story from one of last week’s interviews offer a metaphor for repair.

Dorothy’s grandfather had the following method for dealing with bad behavior in children. When he discovered she had committed an offence, he motioned for her to accompany him outside. There, he sat her down, and asked her what she had done. If she was unresponsive, he handed her a round stone about the size of a tennis ball that he had stored near the front step. He told her to sit there and hold the stone until she knew what she did and could tell him; no matter how long it took. When she thought she had an answer, she was to fetch him; if she gave the right answer (he knew what she had done), then he told her to sit and hold the stone again and think about what she should do to correct her mistake; if she didn’t get it, she had to sit and hold the stone and think some more. Then, when she came up with the right response she was told to go make that restitution; if not, she had to sit some more and think ’til she found it.

“When you hold the stone,’ he said, “you are reminded that you are connected to the earth; we are all connected to the earth and when we do harm we carry the burden of it until we make it right.”

Perhaps “holding the stone” might be a better way than all the white man’s beurocratic interventions that have thus far failed to improve the quality of life for Native Americans. It made all the difference for Dorothy. She has her grandfather’s stone in her kitchen to this day on a shelf near the stove.

Cheers!!

Well, it’s been over a week since the last post….frantic last minute prep for the trip….arrived in Lame Deer May 6 and fell immdediately into the beauty of springtime on the high plains. Everything is greening up, leafing out and my psyche immediately took flight over the horizon and was lost between earth and sky.

Lame Deer sent me once again into ‘culture-shock’; it is so much the same as it was 40 years ago (even in the ten since I was here last) and yet so different. The Northern Cheyenne are as they have been for centuries despite all their past and present hardships; generous of spirit, full of great wicked humor, devoted to family and tribe. I was welcomed and given the royal treatment; a new straw-built house to live in with all new modern appliances, solar power and more space than I would ever want; certainly more than I expected, but very welcome.

Next day we hit the ground running….Cheyenne time…The Cultural Center has been at work compiling a list of the oldest of the current group of Elders and had begun contacting each. As expected, it is a daunting task and happens slowly. My helpers are Mina Seminole and Linwood Tall Bull who do yeoman work and are a joy to be with.

Nonetheless, I managed two interviews and portrait sessions last week; Leroy White Man, age 74 and his sister, Theodora (Teddy) McMakin. They both have had amazing lives with wonderful stories to tell. Both brought up the ongoing plight of the tribe; 77% unemployment, the persisent scourge of substance abuse and the now real presence of coal development on their land.

And yet, the second night I was here I attended the Chief Dull Knife College graduation ceremony; 17 graduates and 30 honorary doctoral degrees for elders. The college has graduated 400 students in the 17 years my friend Dr. Richard Littlebear has been president.

Spent the weekend trying to recover my bearings. Last week was so emotionally exhausting I could do little at the end of each day but stare out the window, try to eat some dinner and fall into bed. Tomorrow we start again…theoretically have many people coming for interviews.

Later

Cheers!!

Forty years ago, my career as a photographer was just beginning. I lived in Missoula, MT then; it was the fall of 1971, I happened to see an elderly Native American woman sitting on my neighbor’s front porch directly across the street from my house. I didn’t know the woman or my neighbor for that matter, I just knew I had to make a photograph of her.

As it happened, the woman’s grandchildren were playing with my children and I asked one of them if she would ask her grandmother if I could take her picture. She said she would. Later that night, my neighbor appeared, introduced himself and after he’d seen my work, told me about his work with the Northern Cheyenne Nation in Lame Deer, MT. He then invited me to travel with him once a month to Lame Deer. He was working with the tribe on a writing project; traditional children’s stories for the shcools. What followed was a 5 year journey for me wherein I photographed 18 Cheyenne elders and had hopes for perhaps a book with life stories of them. It did not happen for various reasons, not the least the death of Henry Tall Bull who had been my guide and whose house guests Tom and I had been on all our visits. Twenty years later, I did manage to write a book, “The Road to Lame Deer”, University of Nebraska Press, 2001. It tells it all.

Now ten years after the book came out, I’m returning to Lame Deer where I will be working with the staff at Chief Dull Knife College to record the life stories of the current elder population and make portraits of each. It is a return to a cause I thought lost and a real chance at a “Do-Over” (as they say).

The Cheyenne people have resisted Anglo acculturation from the beginning of the reservation period and have kept their land and their language as well as many traditional ways. I hope this will help them continue with one of their primary concerns–preservartion of the Cheyenne language.

Wish me luck this time.

I spoke at the Transition Snoqualmie meeting last Sat. evening about what I liberally called “The Dynamics of Change”. Most of the material I offered was somewhat new to me; drawn largely from “Diffusion of Innovations” by Everett Rogers, Gregory Bateson’s “Steps to an Ecology of Mind” and Chialdini’s “Influence” (unlike Rogers, Batson and Chialdini are old friends to my thoughts on th4 topic). I was initially invited by Kari Carlson, manager of the Duvall Farmers Market who is also a member of the Transition group. I knew many of those in attendance and yet as a group, they presented a persona (genuine) I had not seen really since the 1960s and 1970s when the “Counter-Culture” was in vogue resistiing what we called then the “Establishment”. Back then, in 1974 I believe, I was part of a panel that lead a discussion session after a performance by the San Francisco Mime Troupe; a theater group who produced intensly political, Maoist/Marxist plays. Then as now I was an artist and politically ambivalent in the traditional sense but deeply committed to individualism and deeply suspicious about all groups, gangs, collectives, communes, etc., which seemed to me (as they still do) fundamentally alike–that is, exclusionary with orthodoxies unique to them only in the sense that the names of the faithful and the heretics were changed to suit the times. When I voiced my views, the “baiters” from the Troupe attacked me as an “Establlisment Elitist”. None of that stance was overtly demonstrated by the Transition group but I felt it lurking just below the surface anyway.

There is, nonetheless, an increasing proliferation of “resistance” gorups within the general “Globalization” of everything in our “Age of Information” as national boundaries and individual identities continue to dissolve or, at the least, are marginialized. The whole “localization” movement, of which Transition Snoqualmie is a part. is certainly representative. There is, mixed in with the effort to return to local economic practices like the ones which were certainly a part of the social organization of pre-WWII rural America, a palatable sense of impending and certain collapse of civilization as we know it–primarily in energy resources, food systems and climate. Population problems don’t seem to have as much play as economics. The plea from the locavores is, therefore for society to scale back and develop “sustainable” (a term so ubiquitous now that it really is meaningless) formats for a local economy–one which is essentailly self sufficient. The difference here between the Transition group and other models of “last times”, partiularly religious ones is the absence of an “other-worldly Paradise” opened to the survivors by a Messiah and this was part of that deeper undercurent I sensed as I spoke to them.

Rather than having a compelling outcome, one as compelling as a Heavenly Paradise crowned by the grace of he Christ for all eternity, the resitance groups have really no outcome at all beyond the declaration as to what they don’t want–the continuation of the political and economic practices central to our industrial/technological model which now dominates the planet. That is not quite the case here in that the major concept of the transition group is to preserve and restore the environment by scaling back from our tradition of endless growth to a model that aspires to “this much (i.e. enough) but no more”. My talk to them involved a deep reality check as to the complexity of the current industrial/corporate web connecting all of us and the inherant difficulties surrounding any sort of significant change and then an overview of how new societal ideas requiring a change in behavior have been successfully adpopted as well as those that failed.

Despite their interest and genuinely warm recpetion, I came away puzzled–uncertain as to the response I’d generated and with not a little uneasiness that I had said something heretical by not focusing in the usual ways upon the typical prophetic warning cry that tends to dominate calls for massive change within a society. I ended, as I’m ending here, by quoting the poet & painter William Blake: “He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, the flatterer and the hypocrite.”

This will cerrtainly be a continuing topic here and in a new Essay.

Cheers!!

Here is my answer to the question posted at the end of my last blog, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”

The question was, why will the child eat the carrots picked at the farm but reject them when offered at school for a snack? Luke thought it was because the carrots were all cut up at school while at the farm they still had the greens attached.

I think it is because at the farm all the kids ate carrots and when they actually grew them in the Children’s Garden at Oxbow, they couldn’t wait to eat them. The farm set the pleasure context for eating vegetables. At school, the child has no farm context at all and moreover, most kids at school don’t think it’s “cool” to eat veggies and no kid wants to be a “nerd”. There is, of course a wider issue here and the bigger question–”how do we transfer the joy at the farm into the home and school?”

When I eat my meals now, something entirely new happens to me because of my work documenting the lives of the farmers in this valley for my book, “Saving the Soil–The New American Farmer.” I now can say that 60 to 75 percernt of my diet comes from my local farmers. When I sit down to eat, every bite I take brings with it the images of the farmers, the smell of the ground, the air, the sounds of workers, birds, the river…….all of it. Each morning, blueberries from Blue Dog farm grace my granola and the faces of Scott and Amy Turner and the taste of the earth from their farm is there with the fruit. I can now identify the farm of origin just from tasting–the carrots from Oxbow taste different than those from Full Circle. What a delightful bonus to come with the food that sustains me–a complete ring of connection from farmer to soil to my health. That, I beleive is what the child needs to experience and he ain’t gonna get it at Safeway.

Cheers!!

Last night was the final meeting (until Nov.) of the Sno-Valley Tilth and I cannot say how excited I am about our guest speaker.

Kristen Knox of Woodinville Primary Care and Integrative Medicine began her talk with the quote from Hippocrates I’ve used for the title of this post. She and her collegue, Angela Pifer, certified nutritionist trained at Bastyr University, came to the meeting at the urging of Erick Haakensen of Jubilee Biodynamic Farm (see last post).

Kristen is an MD, an epidemiologist, and a Board Certified Practitioner of ‘Integrative Medicine’ (the brain child of Dr. Andrew Weil). As the name implies this form of medical practice involves the fusion of many approaches and treatment methods from many sources, cultural and ethnic, into a multifacited approach for diagnosis and treatment. These are; traditional Western medicine, oriental/herbal remidies, accupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy and psychologcial treatments. Kristen realized in one of those “A-Hah!!!” moments that what was missing from the mix was a concentrated nutritional approach based on the formulation of dietary regimens derived from the use of fresh, organic food. Therefore she had come to the Tilth to begin the dialogue with our farmers to find ways to join with their existing CSA (Community Supported Agriculture Programs) to provide weekly food boxes as dietary “prescriptions” for her patients. She and her collegue, Angela, are in the process of setting up a Primary Integrative Medicine Clinic in Woodinville, WA (the same community where Claire Thomas has “The Root Connecrtion Farm”–see the “Bright Lights” post below).

Much discussion followed and eventually came to the problem of dietary change in general and specifically changing the habits of children and low income folks, especially those in poverty. Luke Woodward, manager of the Oxbow Center which is a non-profit organic farm and environmental education organization, mentioned how difficult it is to fight the established medical-drug-processed food system that dominates and continues to “feed” off itself; people eat food that causes major health issues and go to doctors who treat it with pharmacuticals and send them back to the food system that poisoned them in the first place–all without recongition that a change in nutrition was a prerequisite and not just in food types but food source–i.e. where that food comes from, how it is grown, etc.

The dynamics of change are, I think the real issue; a topic I’ll be addressing on April 14 at the Transition Snoqualmie meeting and blogging about in the weeks to come. Let me close with this observation for you to ponder. Across the board, when children come to any of the farms that offer education programs that include a children’s garden, the kids readily, and with delight, eat what they grow. But, as Luke pointed out, if those same kids are given the same carrots at school as a “healthy snack”, they refuse them!

Think about it………I will.

“Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgement difficult.”–Hippocrates

Cheers!!!

Had an amazing morning. It began a 7:30–coffee and croissant with Erick Haakensen, owner of Jubilee farm, our resident philosopher/farmer (Masters in Philosophy). We invariably talk about ideas (I was a double major in college–Philosophy and Music composition). Our talk this morning was about a video I sent him–a Charlie Rose program–interviews with Edward Wilson, Eric Kandel and Steven Pinker (it’s in the PBS archives if you’dlike to see it). Wilson is one of my favorites and his new book about the origins of social behavior in humans was one of the topics of the show. Wilson’s revision of natural selection is that altruism was evolved via group selection, i.e., the social groups that demonstrated sacrifice for others in the group suvived whereas those whose members practiced self interest only, did not. He also uses the premise of ‘group’ selection for fitness to explain the ultimate dominance of social species on the planet today. Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, is a statistical analysis of the decline in violence over the course of history from the beginnings of Western Civilization to now. Kandel’s book is about the neurology of visual perception in art.

And then we talked about Erick’s delayed spring planting—it’s been unseasonably cold for the Pacific Norhtwest and he’s had seedlings waiting in greenhouses for days and days wih heaters on over night. Today was the day he said–andwe did get up to 60 degrees.

And then we talked about age and his aches and pains–20 years as a fisherman, 20 years farming have taken their toll on his back and knees. And, inevitably our mortality, ageing and how to become old men. In light of Wilson, the insiginificance of humans in the grand scheme of things seems clear and tragic—why should we be preserved at the expense of everything else?

I guess it is the juxtaposition of philosophical talk about evolution and perception and what these have to do with our current relationsip to farming, food, the environment and our role as the dominant species who has become dominant at the expense of all other species and, indeed the planet itself that got to me. Erick is a new kind of farmer. One who is literally creating a farm out of the “idea” of what an ideal, self organizing, self sustianing farm could be…..as he likes to say, and I paraphrase, “the farm is a living organism that can, via my stewardship, sustian itself in perpetuity”.

There’s more to say, but I’m tired……I’ll continue on Monday.

Cheers!!

This article from WSU Green Times is worth consdidering as an introduction to the complexities involved with turning away from our current agricultural practicice toward a sustainable organic method for producing staple commodities like wheat. The topic here is the wheat growing area in Eastern Washington State, the Palouse Plateau (after the river of the same name) which is a major part of State grain production and subject to massive amounts of erosion (higher than the average) caused by wind and runoff. From 1939 to 1979 cropland erosion on the Palouse averaged more than nine tons per acre per year and more than 100 tons per acre per year on steep slopes. Erosion on unplowed rangeland and forested land averaged one ton per acre per year. Plowing the loess increased erosion rates by a factor of ten to one hundred–most of it caused by runoff from newly plowed ground. One hopes that the “transition” efforts documented below will include conservation measures, i.e. regular crop rotation with green manure on fallow feilds.

Green Times – April 5, 2012

Failing for Success: Transitioning to Organic Grain on the Palouse

What choices do Palouse farmers have when they want to convert conventional agricultural land into organic grain production in order to earn the premium price on organic grain? Many, as it turns out, and the choices will have a significant effect on a farmer’s success, Washington State University researchers have found. Grain is notoriously difficult to raise as an organic crop, as weeds and pests can easily get out of hand without pesticides, and grain protein content and yields can be low without synthetic fertilizers. But even without artificial inputs, choices made during transition will significantly influence weed prevalence, grain yield, and grain protein content when the land enters certified organic grain production.

Farmers wishing to convert land to grow organic crops need to go through a three-year transitional period where they must avoid non-organic inputs, and yet cannot market their crop as organic. How can they best manage their land during this economically challenging transitional period and during subsequent organic production?

WSU Masters student Misha Manuchehri and Ph.D. student Kristy Ott-Borrelli, working with Ian Burke, an associate professor, and Pat Fuerst, an assistant research professor in the WSU Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, set out to answer this question, continuing a study initiated in 2002 by Robert Gallagher. To make the study relevant to the Palouse, they chose constraints likely to be faced by local farmers. Because the Palouse has very little animal husbandry, animal manures were avoided. “As a weed management issue, it would be very nice to plow,” said Fuerst, but they also avoided this practice due to concerns with fuel costs and erosion on the steep Palouse slopes. They decided to test different crop rotations at the Boyd Farm, a site leased by WSU for organic farming research, outside Pullman.

How successful were they? Many of their rotations were not at all successful. “We fail, so you don’t have to,” Ian Burke told farmers at a recent Tilth Producers Conference. Since researchers determined that granular organic fertilizers can cost ten times as much as synthetic fertilizer for the same amount of nitrogen, they tried legume green manures, a category of cover crop grown mainly to add organic matter and nitrogen to the soil. They also tried different spring crops in rotation with winter wheat. Spring green manures, including spring peas, did not fare well, due to pressures from insects and weeds. Bell beans (fava beans) didn’t work as green manure, either, since they weren’t suited to regional conditions. Winter peas, however, added nitrogen while competing better with weeds. But farmers looking for profitability during transition might choose three straight years of alfalfa. “Forage was a great crop for the transition,” Ott-Borrelli said.

When testing the competitiveness of six spring crops that can be rotated with winter wheat, broadleaves such as lentils, garbanzos, and canola fared poorly. “Barley does a pretty good job, from what I’ve seen,” said Manuchehri. Since barley emerges relatively early, it has a head start against weeds. Researchers planted the barley about two inches deep, rather than the typical one to 1.5 inches. When it emerged, it was better established, and more able to stand up against the next weapon in weed control: the rotary hoe. This tillage instrument uses an array of spikes to puncture the soil without turning it. Delicate, sprouting weeds are vulnerable to these rolling daggers, but the barley is well enough established that it is not harmed, according to field technician Dennis Pittmann, who drove the tractor that pulled the rotary hoe. Wet spring weather, however, can be an impediment to using heavy tractors and tillage instruments. “The earlier we can get in the field to control weeds,” said Manuchehri, “the better off we are.”

Another technique involved using higher seeding rates. To improve competition against weeds, organic grain growers might seed with 1.5 times as much grain as conventional growers. Manuchehri found that barley competed well with weeds when seeded at twice the normal rate, but this still wasn’t a magic bullet in particularly weedy areas. Her recommendation to organic farmers? “Go off local grower planting rates and adjust from there.”

Ott-Borrelli focused on nitrogen dynamics during transition. Both legume green manures and alfalfa boost soil nitrogen levels, so how did transitional rotations affect subsequent organic grain yield? Since nitrogen from alfalfa is more quickly available, forage systems gave the highest grain yield the first year of organic certification. But the second year, yields fell somewhat. Wheat crops that followed a green manure rotation, however, showed the opposite effect. Yields lagged the alfalfa rotation during the first year of organic production, but as nitrogen from the green manure became more available in the second year, yields surpassed that of the post-alfalfa wheat.

Yield obviously translates to profitability, but so does the protein content of the wheat, as hard wheat needs to reach sufficient protein levels to be suitable for bread. Conventional agriculture frequently adds synthetic fertilizer to boost soil nitrogen and therefore protein levels in wheat. Without the use of expensive organic fertilizers or the availability of animal manure, careful crop rotation was the only option for boosting protein content. The three-year alfalfa transition did well with boosting protein in subsequent wheat crops, but green manure showed a slight advantage.

Through careful crop rotation, farmers wanting to transition their land in order to grow organic grain can have an impact on weed control and soil nitrogen levels, although economic challenges may persist. One of the most important tools, according to Fuerst, is flexibility. Farmers need to start small and be ready to abandon unproductive practices and alter seeding dates and varieties to improve results.

Following their own advice, WSU scientists are changing parameters and exploring new techniques to advance the science of organic grain production. Ian Burke is developing an inter-row cultivator with precision guidance, allowing it to control weeds between rows while sparing the wheat. Researchers have also started finding local sources of animal manure for fertilizer. “Livestock integration with organic grain production makes a lot of sense,” noted Pat Fuerst.

Learn more about CSANR’s efforts in organic agriculture at http://csanr.wsu.edu/Organic/.

–Bob Hoffmann

I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about this “movement” (?)–if it is one. There are a lot of presupositions–many erronious, I think–about our threatened energy system, dwindling fuel, water, global warming–the whole smorgasboard of potentially world crippling problems and an impending collapse of civilization as we know it. The erronious parts seem to me attached to how ‘collapse’ itself is imagined in various doomsday scenarios. I think we forget history and the records we do have about how previous complex societies fell into disarray and then disappeared–Rome, for example. The Roman collapse didn’t happen over night, rather it took 3 1/2 to 4 centuries to finally dissolve and descend into the “Dark Ages”. The point is, apart from unmitigated catastrophe, complex systems take time, often a very long time to unravel. The Population Explosion, as characterized by Paul Erlich in the 1960s, predicted that by the year 2000 the human population would be unsustainable–the earth simply could not provide enough food to handle the projected billions. It is now the year 2012, and we have reached 6.5 billion and the catastrophe has yet to appear. What has appeared is the emergance of more and more populations in the Global South who are either at the precipice of famine or fully in it. Many more areas are close to water and soil depletion and, steadily, we see the appearance of more failed states, like Somalia, whose infrastructure has completely broken down and anarchy is in full swing. It is very hard to predict how all of this will play out even if there were massive efforts made by the wealthy nations to restore some form of equilibrium. What all of it tells me is that we still have a poor comprehension of the dynamics of complex systems. Agian from the Roman collase; Byzantium, the last portion of the Empire finally was decemated by the black plague–Justinian’s plague– which so crippled the already tenuous political structure that the Eastern Empire could not hold against invaders any longer. The transition movement, for all its value and good intentions, has a lot of 1950s “Bomb Shelter” quality which assumed then that a good store of canned goods and water in an underground bunker would allow the wise to survive the impending nuclear holocaust everyone feared could happen at any time. It is true, our economic processes need to change, but I think, in the end humans will not be toast, but rather, in the worst case, may face a return to a 22nd or 23d Century version of the ‘dark ages’ The issues demand, first, a real understanding of the dynamics of change within large, complex living systems. Now there’s a topic I want to explore.