On August 17th, I found myself sitting next to one of my dearest friends in the world, Kakisimo Iskwew, sharing, as best we could, our thoughts on ‘culture making’ on the land of Nathalie Jackson for an event entitled Remembering the Village - The Revolution, Aug 17-20, 2023.
We were greeted by an old-time courtesy, long-forgotten in most places and rarely practiced even when remembered by the two wranglers of unlikely beauty and the motley crew assembled in that gorgeous, 30-foot yurt, Michelle Christine and Caroline Stewart (two locals worth paying attention to in the coming decades).
I opened with two poems.
One of them was this small beauty by Antonio Machado entitled ‘Thirst’
It is good knowing that glasses
Are to drink from;
The bad thing is not to know
What thirst is for.
Kakisimo Iskwew shared with everyone what she’s learned from an elder she’d studied with that culture was a set of instructions for living on the land in a good way. A particular piece of land.
And so there’s no globalized ‘culture’ because each place is different.
We delved into the role of the culture in the soil and in our guts of metabolizing the messes of the world into nourishment for the world.
Without the microbiome, we starve.
Without food, the microbiome starves.
And so what is the food for human culture? I proposed that it is our troubles and messes we make - all of the hellos and goodbyes, the frailties and limits that visit us, often seemingly too soon - their apparently earlier-than-needed arrival being a part of their style too. Our stupidities and selfishness, our clumsiness and blunders. Our often loudly clanging attempts at being ourselves. All our failures.
It’s all food, compost, for culture.
I shared the old traveller tale The Beatin’ Stick that I got from a book of Duncan Williamson’s which features the world tree withered and bearing no more of its life giving fruits.
We spoke of how strange it is to the modern mind that the center of the kingdom is not even human and how it might be fed and how what feeds that one might also be fed (or harmed) by our conduct.
It was a marvel to sit next to Kakisimo Iskwew, for whom my admiration is almost bottomless, and do our best to feed the people, offering them the smallest portion of sourdough starter that we had as a blessing for their time together over the weekend.
This is a woman who has committed herself to living off the land, studying as deeply as she can with her elders and going back to school to learn her ancestral language of Cree. She has sacrificed over and over in order to learn what she has learned that she might share it with others in a life of cultural activism.
If I’m a lucky man, it won’t be the last time that she and I sit together and share story with others, hungry in a way they don’t recognize for a thing they don’t know - hungry for culture - the very thing that would allow them to gain nourishment for what they ingest.
Stephen Jenkinson once said, “Food makes hunger.” It’s not the lack of food that makes us hungry alone. It’s the lack of food and then the appearance of food that brings the hunger. You can be hungry and forget you are - until that aroma wafts from the kitchen and hits your nose.
We sat before a people thirsty for… what? They didn’t know.
If we are lucky, we brought them some libation to quench some of their thirst.
If they are lucky, we brought them thirst that won't be so easily quenched.
Maybe by the end of their weekend, they had some sense of not only what they were thirsty for, but what the thirst itself, was for.
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Photos by the good Ron McHugh.
You can learn more about Kakisimo Iskwew’s work here.
To read my substack essay Culture Makes Food.
To read the story The Beatin’ Stick by Duncan Williamson go here.