The past is another country…probably several other countries by the time we get there.
This belongs to yesterday’s view.
Well, I can’t seem to work out what the day is, whether it is the 5th today, or the the 6th… by the time I finish this entry it will definitely be the 7th, which is what I had thought it was in the first place. Hum… I really am in another place that is far away from yesterday and yesterday’s space. The weather is definitely distantly outside and I am living in a sealed capsule. I keep wanting to either open the windows or go outside just to breathe fresh air.
The areas around houses look very controlled and constructed spaces. Any wildness that might here is lost. It has all been manicured. Trees and flowers appear repressed. In some places the ground has lost all its natural cover and just looks dead. (It hasn’t kept the snow.)
I was trying to imagine what the larger area that we now think of as South & North Dakota, Manitoba, Ontario, Minnesota, Wisconsin, etc., looked like, before defined borders existed the way they do today. How did that world look in the last century? Fewer people, more trees, gardens, and smaller farms, more animals. Humans followed the animal paths and tracks when they traded and visited. Tracks were widened by humans into roads as they moved across the land. What are these stories ?
This is very evocative prose, Sister. It makes my first essay into the land of blogs a pleasant trip. It is an exercise of our imagination to move into the space of people who were so mobile over such scarcely settled landscapes. I feel only haltingly able to go there in my visual mind. There is one scene in the CBC/NFB film I worked on (The Cree of Paint Hills) where the cameraman pulls his telephoto zoom all the way back from two hunters looking for seals, along the coast of James Bay. My words are droned by a resonant CBC voice, to the effect of “It is hard to imagine anything ever changing in this vast land.” And I feel myself more settled than at any other time in my life, and am pretty content with that. Lots of love, Dick
Comment by Dick — November 7, 2007 @ 2:28 pm
Thank you! I’m glad that you enjoyed it. always lots of love to you…Jean
Comment by Jean — November 8, 2007 @ 1:04 am
Without joking - the last paragraph of this blog I’ve done literally thousands and thousands of times. I often think about that when there are conflicts between my children’s people and us (the non-aboriginal population).
Comment by Ryan — November 9, 2007 @ 5:25 pm