It’s plush but it’s another windowless conference center room with the same carpeting, the same furniture, the same color schemes, the same soulless fluorescent light and the same corporate feel. My industry’s interests overlap those of Wisconsin’s native peoples and this meeting is a summit to rally us all to greater collaborations and greater understanding. As these things often do, it feels a bit contrived starting out. I am also a bit sheepish. My own little plot of suburban bliss once belonged to the Ho-Chunk nation under a model of collective ownership that my settler predecessors didn’t understand but were happy to exploit – resulting in a chain of transactions leading to the deed attached to my mortgage.
There’s a drum circle in the front off to one side and three men are drumming and singing in the Ho-Chunk language. Theirs’ are men’s voices – mature, but high-pitched, loud, and unconstrained – and utterly alien to this corporate setting. And while I don’t understand the language, the rise and fall in pitch and the rhythm sounds at once plaintive and insistent. I’ve lived in the Great Lakes region long enough that I don’t recall when I first heard a drum circle but I remember when I first began listening. It was at the Bear River traditional pow-wow near Lac Du Flambeau now many years ago. We had seen a poster in the grocery store saying “all were welcome” and we took our kids so that their developing sense of place in Wisconsin could be informed by her native cultures but I was wary about entering a world where we were the obvious minority. We watched the dancing, the beautiful grand entrance, the young men’s whirling dervish competition, the elders’ stately step-dancing – and we were welcomed to join at one point which is (as I understand) tradition. We were welcomed…and I began listening for differences in the drumming and singing that accompanied the different dances. And as a reward for deciding to listen, I began to hear. Among the singing and drumming was subtleness and complexity. Later on the midway of food and craft vendors I bought some creamy wild rice and venison stew dished in a Styrofoam bowl and delivered with a plastic spoon a warm smile. I wish I could duplicate it. Ask me about the best venison dish I’ve ever had and this is where my memory immediately would take me.
The drummers pause and an elder invites us to stand and asks the spirits to bless this meeting. He speaks a blessing and describes his actions for us and then the drummers begin again. He burns some herbs in a smudge pot and then stops in front of each of the tribal leaders and directs the purifying smoke towards them with a fan of eagle feathers. The elder’s invocations are rich with the imagery of wild Wisconsin – her plants and animals, her forests and rivers and not the least of it, her position tucked under the benevolent embrace of the Great Lakes Superior and Michigan. The conference hosts exchange a nervous glance. The tribal leaders receive the smoke with hand motions conveying it into their faces and over their heads. The language and imagery are far removed from this corporate setting. When we in the audience are smudged, many of us make the same motions – receiving the blessing. I am praying (figuratively) that this doesn’t set off the fire alarm. I wouldn't want the mundane to intrude. The drummers stop and the elder blesses us again and waves a staff over us. The staff has an eagle claw on its end and the shaft is adorned with eagle feathers. He proclaims this a good meeting. The spirits are honored. The drummers start again – with a quicker cadence and louder more insistent singing. Looking around the room, we are a mix of native and non-native professionals. A few women are subtly step-dancing in place. There is generosity. Magnanimity. This feels powerful.
As many readers here know, news from Wisconsin has been unrelentingly bad. Wisconsin has become the poster child for political dysfunction in recent years and for many of us it is exhausting and often discouraging. I’ve never experienced the now signature sense of dread I feel in anticipation of more news of mischief from our legislators. But here, here in front of me now, are Ho-Chunk drums and Ho-Chunk drummers. Their voices fill the space in this room and the space in my head. Like thunder, a drum circle is a tactile experience as much as an aural one. Without access to the language, I am caught up in the insistent rhythm. I feel the drums in my chest and the singing presses me in a way that have difficulty describing. I wonder about the physiology of this, whether the rhythm is really an echo of a human heartbeat racing and whether the voices speak to me out of a shared evolutionary sense for what is important and what is immediate and whether this tightness in my chest and this flush in my face is an internal voice that I don’t listen to very often telling me to just give in already and understand that something vital is being communicated. I would not denigrate the drum circle by calling it primitive because it is not. It is, however, ancient. And I think how this landscape that I love has absorbed these sounds over the millennia. My imagination is pounding at the door and demanding to be let in. I relent and in my mind I am transported to another Wisconsin, one where anvil-headed thunderstorms stalk the driftless hills like feral, angry monsters screaming out their furies in cacophonies of thunder and lightning; one of remote and trackless forests where lichen-bound spruces stand in garishly green carpets of club mosses looking as fantastic as anything Dr. Seuss ever dreamed up, one where wolves stalk deer during winter nights and silent powdery snows absorb the bloody aftermath of an ancient ecological dance that, more than anything else, defines the essence of them both. That Wisconsin is still there.
I must be careful here. A tribal leader reminds us that we should not romanticize native culture. The tribes simply ask respect for their culture and their treaty rights. Seated off to the side is another tribal leader whom I recognize as the one who gave the “State-of-the-tribes” address to the assembled government of the state of Wisconsin in the capitol some months ago. I streamed it live on my computer. He spoke earlier and displayed the same soft-spokeness and unassuming manner. His address occurred while an out-of-state mining firm was moving towards establishing a 4-mile long strip mine in the Bad River watershed – gouging a jagged toxic wound through the wild heart of Wisconsin upslope from Bad River reservation and her internationally significant wild rice beds. In our ornate legislative chamber, lately and sadly more often associated with incendiary rhetoric and anger, he spoke quietly to our assembled government. The tribes are the underdogs by far in the government to government relationship specified by treaty. Yet, nobody could mistake his steely stubborn resolve he when informed them that “…there will be no mine in the Penokees.”
At least in the short-term, he was prophetic. The mining corporation announced in February that they were abandoning operations in the Penokee mountains. Even so, a particularly nasty piece of legislative malpractice remains on the books – written by mining company interests to facilitate their assault. If ore markets demand it, we likely will resume the battle. The lesson here is one of constant vigilance and creative resolute resistance. Already news is filtering out of Iron county of another mining firm quietly beginning to talk to local administrators. Storm clouds gather on the horizon and the hollow rumble of distant thunder.
The tribal leaders speak to us in sequence and I am struck by how frequently they refer to their communities. Native communities face daunting and immediate challenges from under-employment, poverty, substance abuse and discrimination. And while their leaders bear these burdens, they also speak naturally of community that embraces ancestors and children yet unborn and the animals and plants and even rivers, rocks, and lakes. The battles against the mine were rooted in that community vision. Sunny promises of mining jobs in the short term are not worth a poisoned watershed and a degraded Penokee range. One tribal leader described how he is a seventh-generation descendant of a leader who signed the 1836 treaty securing hunting and gathering rights in the north and how humbling it is for him to be deciding on policies such that will honor his ancestors while serving his community seven generations hence. I wish I could vote for him.
There is irony in that I am sitting in the dark finishing this essay on battery power since I am prevented from doing my work. A massive summer thunderstorm has knocked out power over several counties and I am cut off from internet, phone service, cell communication, convenient lighting and clean water at the tap. I had to set aside my self-important annoyance and impatience at being cut off from my conveniences but I am starting to enjoy my enforced exile. I met neighbors whom I didn’t know when we pitched in to clear a blown down tree on the road. I am soothed by the post-storm breeze in the leaves and a loon calling, but all around me are broken branches and a surprising number of blown-over trees. Windthrow, despite it’s violence, is an important driver of the cycles of renewal and regrowth in these forests. Light hitting the ground will stimulate what will be the big old trees long after I die. With a year or two of softening up the broken trees will be home to flying squirrels and summer roosts for bats. Woodpeckers and bears will forage in and under them for insects. Some will be fed into woodstoves and fireplaces to warm a home. Storms pass and community rebuilds and remakes itself. Wisconsin is alive and vibrant. But there is work to be done.
I think I hear drumming…
Website of the Ho-Chunk Nation
Dancer Photo: by CamillE, Source, License
Blackjack springs wilderness photo: by MDuchek, Source, License: Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Wolf photo: by Tracy Brooks - USFWS, Source, License: Public Domain
Edit 9/5/2015 6:50CST: Big Thanks to the Rescue Rangers!