Opinion: Columbus Day?

Today the banks are closed, the mail is not being delivered, and some people will watch a news story about a statue of some Genoan who sailed for Spain looking for China a long time ago.  Some other people, generally more uppity about these sorts of things, will cite that today we celebrate half a millennium of genocide, cultural and physical enslavement, and all the other bad things that have happened since 1492.  These people regret that Europeans ever made contact with the West Indies that year.

I am not one of them.

What happened in 1492 did not destroy the New World.  The will and actions of individuals did that.  Did the discovery of a pair of continents with exploitable resources and peoples open up the gateways to domination by these people?  Yes, absolutely.  All the same though, Europeans, as with ALL humans, were pretty good at these things even before they made contact with the New World.  Let's be honest here, on that note: Native Americans are hardly innocent noble savages, no matter how much we would want them to be as a part of our common imagination.  Aztecs, Mayans, Incas, Haudenausonee, Crow, Commanches, etc... they were pretty rough cultures to be a part of, or worse, to be a neighbour to.  No one is entirely innocent.

Did some truly terrible things happen?  Yes, they certainly did.  I dare anyone to visit Washita in Oklahoma and not feel some sort of compassion, dread, or sorrow.  While away from the battlefield and in the comforts of one's armchair, Washita and other such slaughters of North America's first born can be rationalized away in the greater context of history and circumstance, witnessing the places where elders and children were mercilessly killed and horses shot simply for being beloved animals of the Cheyenne... I have problems even just typing this... well let's just say that the heart is moved.

All the same, I noted that such people were the first born of this continent.  Regardless of the actions of others, we must not fall into logical fallacy and blame entire peoples for atrocities.  The fact of the matter is that North America is now home to so many peoples.  This continent is a very diverse place; it was even before European contact.  There is no such thing as an "Indian", namely because there are so many different cultures and language groups present among the first born here.  Now that new generations have come, should we ask them all to go back to the rest of the world simply because they wanted to live in harmony and peace in a land where origins contribute to destiny, rather than dominate it?

I am a North American, even if my roots are European.  I think I first really came to know this when I returned home from living in London back in 2003 and looked down onto the shores of Labrador from my plane.  I saw the waves of the cold northwestern Atlantic beating down on the ancient granite of the Canadian Shield, and I knew then that I was home.  When I spent six weeks in Mexico refreshing my Spanish language skills back in 2008, I still felt at home among the pine-covered mountains of Morelos.  When I have traveled out into the truly divine wonders of the West, I have still felt at home.  Should we condemn the second child for the sake of the first?  I am sorry that the first born was screwed out of an inheritance.  That was wrong.  But I am just as much in love with my homeland, from the jungles to the tundra, as my brothers and sisters of a different mother are.

Today is a day for reflection, for all the good and ill that has come of life here in this New World since that year (even if Basques, Celts, Norse, and East Asians probably had been here before then).  Think about discovery, think about atrocity, think about a new chapter in the history of humanity.  Think about so many of the peoples of the earth making a destiny for themselves set apart from their accident of birth and instead built around what they can make of themselves.  Such are the hopes and dreams of Canadians, Americans, and Mexicans, no matter what their last name might be.  Columbus Day is a good thing.  

Oh, and by the way, today is also Canadian Thanksgiving.  Yes, we have one too, and yes, it is largely about the same reason: thankfulness for the bounty of the land.  While we don't have an iconography dominated by puritans and scantily clad native stereotypes, we do have turkey and stuffing.  If this blog makes it to next year, count on an extended history of it then.

"I Never Imagined I Would See a Land Like This"

Part one of our adventure can be found here:

http://americanvoyages.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-land-of-our-savage-paradise.html

When the two other major European powers, the English and Spanish, came to North America, they largely did so out of an interest in conquest and settlement.  The spoils of conquest were initially a great prize and purpose for the Spanish in heading deeper into the lands of Mexico and Florida, but conquest, largely a means to an end of empire building rather than outright pillaging and piracy, took a back seat to establishing a thriving "New Spain".  The English, content to commit their piracy against the Spanish who had already done the primary work for them, took part in building a thriving "New England" in a series of colonies less telling of empire than of a transplanting of domestic hopes and dreams.  While many of her colonists came to plant tobacco and have a nicer estate than they could ever afford on Sheepshire-on-the-Thames, just as many came for a chance at a quiet life, free to live it how they chose, usually as dissenting Protestants.  The French, however, considered both conquest and colonization secondary to opening up a very lucrative commercial trade with the native peoples they encountered.  (That trade would be because of an encounter between the French and the Beaver, one of the most fascinating relationships between man and beast ever made).  Guess which system the locals liked more?

That said, 1608 was a very cautious year among both French and Algonquin alike.  Samuel de Champlain and his men arrived on the shores of what would become Quebec City with guns in hand, and the Algonkin and Montagnais were no less at the ready to come to blows over what looked to be a matter of potential battle.  Gestures were exchanged, the French gave "gifts" of trinkets to their new-found neighbors, and battle was deferred while both sides kept one eye on the other even asleep that night.  Houses and buildings of all sorts started being constructed almost immediately in order to allow the French to survive what Champlain knew would be an incredibly brutal winter.  As the men would later shiver and wish they had never left France, much less Tadoussac, Samuel kept to himself, making maps and looking outside his window wanting something more than just a crazed hunt for the Beaver.  Like so many North Americans before and after him, he looked west.

For a man who had never been to the Great Lakes nor even heard much about their existence, Champlain was incredibly accurate about his predictions regarding Canada's most attractive feature, extensive watersheds connected by easily portaged heights of land that permitted canoe travel clear to the Gulf of Mexico, the Arctic Ocean, and the Rockies.  With Quebec profiting off his successful gamble that the Algonkin and their trading partners would come to his new "inland" trading post first, Champlain was able to set out for western lands at his leisure.  By 1611, he found Lake Ontario, the great lake that kept the Haudenausonee and Algonkin apart from one another.  By 1622, thanks to the Mattawa portage, he found Lake Superior.  In his travels, he lived and worked with his Algonkin guides as an equal (albeit with the French necessity/penchant of elaborate dress).

Public Domain, 

While his grand objectives and military exploits against the Haudenausonee are known quite well, and the modern image of the man largely amounts to just another imperialist, we would do well to remember that he did not view the native peoples nearly as brutally as did men such as Cortez, or with the fear deep in the hearts of the early American colonists.  While certainly not a saint, Champlain was definitely an explorer, and probably took more than a passing glance up the various tributaries of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence as he made his way inland.  He almost certainly took a few side trips up rivers such as the Madawaska, Petawawa, and Amable du Fond, even if only for a short while.  This was a man so completely enthralled by the people and land he had come across, a man who stood in silent awe when he saw the Laurentians towering above the mouth of the Mattawa river or the waters of deep blue Lake Superior which went far off to the horizon.  This was not a land of conquest or even commerce, but, as it had been for so many before him and so many to come after him, a land of wild beauty and a power of nature that would bring pause to the plow and axe alike.

He was also a man on a mission, however, and had to document the better known routes before he could explore rivers of his own desire.  Fortunately, he could live somewhat vicariously through a man he considered a son, Etienne Brule.

Public Domain

Brule was given a mission by Champlain: Travel with the Algonkin to the land of the Wendat and then live among them and learn their language and their way of life.  Between the years 1611 and 1629, he would spend much of his summer among both peoples, and while his voyages with them have never been deeply chronicled, spending summers with the Algonkin meant that he most certainly visited and stayed on the shores of the larger lakes of Algonquin that were situated on the paths of the largest waterways, notably Opeongo, Grand, and the great meeting point of the pine and maple forests as well as the Nippissing and Petawawa rivers, Cedar.  He was probably distracted enough by what he saw, as well as by the bountiful fishing, to ignore the huge concentration of Beaver that inhabited the mountain lakes and streams.  He is documented to have shared his experiences of the area with Champlain, apparently in detail and reverence, and even as he would continue to return to the shores of Georgian and Nottawasaga Bay to be with the Wendat, the fact that he returned to be with the Algonkin year after year and came home with less than an abundance of pelts meant that he was constantly drawn back to Algonquin.

Now this is definitely conjecture... Commercial ventures of the voyageurs reached deep into the heart of western Quebec and northern Ontario, but largely avoided Algonquin.  The area is extremely rugged in places, but no less accessible than the rivers of the rest of the lands around it.  It is quite possible that Brule and Champlain respected Algonquin and the sacred summer home of the Algonkin enough to leave it off the map.  Don't believe me?  The purpose of this blog and the purpose of these posts in the next two weeks is to share with my readers not only what our continent is all about, what there is to discover, but what sort of majesty can be found on our shores.  This objective is furthered by encouraging travel to the places we visit here in the blog, because nothing can substitute for a full blessing of the senses in experiencing the land for ourselves.  My friends, there is no place like Algonquin on this entire earth.  I dare say these men thought so.

Many after them would agree.  Some would leave it alone, some would embrace it as a cause to be championed, and some would see it as a land to be exploited beyond recognition.  Stop by tomorrow as we continue the story of Algonquin.

"The Land of Our Savage Paradise"

One can only imagine what the scene would look like: A huge face of ice stretching as far as eye can see, melting into great bodies of water drained by what would become the great rivers of our continent.  Hunting at the edge of the ice, as they had been ever since their ancestors had ventured into this land from another far to the north and west, generations of people noticed as the ice would keep melting away until new lands would be uncovered and slowly advancing spruce forests would encroach upon their open tundra hunting grounds.  Some would follow the ice, some would stay in the forests but then move north as the woods changed, and some still would remain in the changed forests and warmer climes, joined still by newcomers from further south who favored something a bit less warm themselves.  In truth, we really do not know what life was like so far back even into the history of lands where records were easier to come by.  We really do not have a great idea about what life would be like in the Ottawa and Petawawa valleys as the ice gradually melted further north.

The evidence we do have, however, gives us pieces of a story of a nation of people whom the French and those who came after them would call the Algonkins (Algonquins).

Taken from Francis Vachon's blog.  Monsieur Vachon is a photographer in Quebec with a bi-lingual blog that can be found at  http://www.francisvachon.com/blog/.

 By 7000 BC or so, these people came to a land that was already establishing itself into great forests of spruce and fir, but also for the first time pines, birches, maples, and hemlocks.  The land they came to was rugged, very hard to live in come wintertime, and in some places more rock than soil, which was often sand anyway.  Golden waters poured down mountainsides to fill large sandy basins and remaining pools of meltwaters which were as black as the night.  Little in the way of crops could grow here well, which would later be the salvation of the forests.  Wolves howled, bears roamed the woods, and the cry of the loon pierced the cool air of the land, a powerful reminder to the people that this land was the relic of something far more ancient, majestic, and mysterious than themselves.  The people did not stay.

Courtesy of Bob and Diana McElroy:  http://www.mcelroy.ca/view/v20070729.shtml.

They did, however, gather here in the summer months, often in large numbers.  Families put aside differences, often to fish the deep black lakes that were full of trout and eel.  The people would discuss the movements of the Moose and the feeling they felt in the cool winds, and they would also keep track of the people who dwelled to their south, on the far shores of a vast lake, people they considered enemies.  More often, they gathered simply for companionship.  In the winter, they would set apart from one another into smaller groups of families that stuck together in the harsher months, floating down the rivers out of the mountains and into the valleys of two great rivers, one of which flowed to the ocean.  The land would be wild again, as it had been at the time of creation, until the people would return when the snows melted and the lakes were free once more.

Courtesy of Bob and Diana McElory:  http://www.mcelroy.ca/view/v20071117.shtml.  The valley of the first great river, the Ottawa, near Deep River, Ontario.

Now and then, the people to the south of the Algonkin, various nations who spoke one language and would come to be called the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), would venture north of their mountains and the blue waters of their great lakes.  They found the land of the Algonkin desirable, if a little different and not the best place to grow corn.  They were aggressive people, and they might have easily taken the land for themselves had the Algonkin not been as ferocious in defending their land as the attackers were in trying to seize it.  At times, control of the valleys leading into the mountains seemed to be quite contested.  The Algonkin prevailed time and again, however, and even found an ally in one of the nations of the Haudenosaunee, a people known as the Wendat (Hurons).  For that matter, the people not only loved their land enough to be willing to die to the last warrior for it, but the land of the mountains was a great bulwark protecting something just as valuable, a great meeting of waters that connected various nations far beyond their lands.  Even if the Algonkins would lose their land, they would most likely get it back quickly, for the nations of the western lakes and northern forests would not tolerate the passage being controlled by a hostile people.

The great power and determination of the defenders and their allies aside, the Haudenosaunee found the land  of black water, granite outcrops, and powerfully brutal winters was lacking what they loved about their own blue waters, towering deciduous forests, and limestone cliffs.  They would fight the Algonkins for centuries, even forming a great council of six of their nations, but would never come close to seizing the meeting of waters or the majestic mountains that protected them.  The Algonkin would continue returning to their blessed land every spring, and leave it to the spirits and ancient forests every winter.

Things would go on like this for some time.  The nations would move about, some heading into the vast lands of the west, some retreating from the advance of another, but for the most part, nothing grand or catastrophic happened to change the ancient ways of life.  500 years ago, however, news started traveling up from the distant south beyond the mountains of the Haudenosaunee, news of men very different from the nations of the people.  Along with news ventured trade which slowly passed between the nations and the newcomers.  Finally, some newcomers of a different nation made a small settlement for themselves at the fringe of the lands of the relatives of the Algonkin, the Montagnais at a place they called Tadoussac.  Though this was a mysterious new nation that had landed on the eastern shores, little changed other than the fate of the beaver.  One summer though, in 1608, as the people were in the blessed lands, a man sailed further inland along the great river that lead to the ocean, a man who would change their lives and their land forever.

Courtesy of Library and Archives of Canada, C-011016, Artist: George Reid, 1908.

Finding the Wendat (Huron) Civilization

Popular imagination tends to portray Native American existence before European contact as a peaceful, primitive situation replete with tepees and elaborate headdresses, but little in the way of any sort of settled, complex civilization.  Popular imagination, of course, is sorely lacking.  Not including the advanced civilization of the Aztecs (who, yes, had a pretty glaring dark side too) and other cultures in central Mexico and further south, there were a great deal of peoples in lands as diverse as the Rio Grande Valley to the Great Lakes area that raised great cities and engaged in extensive agriculture to feed large populations.  The finest remains of such civilizations can be seen in the American southwest, but impressive mounds and fragments of cities can be found in key locations throughout the eastern part of North America, particularly in Illinois, Ohio, and Ontario.  Disease and European involvement in already viscous warfare between various peoples would finish off these great, yes, urban cultures that had already begun to decline due to climactic shifts in rainfall patterns.

While we are fairly certain of conditions that have existed since the 1500s, however, we still know relatively little about what settled life was like for our true first-families, and exciting discoveries keep popping up on a regular basis.  Such is the case of ongoing discoveries made at the "Mantle Site", a Wendat (Huron) where as many as 2,000 people might have lived in a large settlement of permanent structures laid out in a meaningful urban design.  Some news about this can be found here:

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/1222889--how-did-huron-wendat-get-cursed-european-axe-a-century-before-european-contact

So who were the Wendat (Hurons) and why is this a big deal?  Well, that funny thing called popular imagination labels them as a weak people who lovingly embraced the French and Christianity when it was offered to them.  As such, they became scattered to the winds by the other nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) attacked them in their weakened state, who had it coming anyway because they sided with the newcomers.  In truth, the Wendat were no weaker than any individual nation of the Haudenosaunee and actually controlled a series of trade routes and contacts because of their strategic position located in the heart of territory that had long been contested by various Algonquin and Haudenosaunee nations.  Settled on the northern shores of Lake Ontario and the eastern and southern shores of Lake Huron (essentially southern Ontario and parts of Michigan), the Wendat saw passage of goods and peoples from the Algonquins, Ojibwa, Potawatamis, Illinois, Ottawas, Chippewas, Senecas, Cayugas, Onandagas, Oneidas, Mohawks, the nations which surrounded them.  Furthermore, as they were such a vital link between so many nations of two major cultural groups, they also had extensive contact with nations further afield such as the Cree, various nations of the Sioux, Shawnees, Delawares, Mahicans, and the various nations who lived further down the Mississippi and Atlantic corridors.  The Wendat were big news, as they were not afraid to facilitate the passage of a lot of economy through their land.

So what else would such a nation do when in such a prestigious and dangerous position of being in contact with so many other nations?  They dug in, made a pretty big city, and instead of fighting everyone else or making peace with them, opened up an exchange of commerce and ideas with them.  The recent find of a Basque axe at the Mantle Site has only furthered proof that the Wendat drew in a lot of distant exchanges of various sorts.  Even before they had seen a Basque or any other European, the Wendat were busy trading some stuff Europeans had traded to nations on the margins of the continent.  Now this might be stretching, but it seems plausible that one of the reasons why the French were so eager to seek out contact, trade, and evangelistic efforts with the Wendat were because other nations, such as the Algonquins, told them that this was a people who were interested in working with others and freely moving around goods both material and intellectual.  While the French found the other Haudenosaunee to be less than friendly towards them, and the Algonquins amicable but also largely ambivalent about helping a people that had set up camp right on their doorstep, they found the Wendat to be very willing to help them trade and explore in a mysterious land of pines, moose, and very cold winters.

In time, this would come to a very beautiful, and very tragic, sharing that would become one of the great marriages of culture that our Canada would be born from.  That, of course, is a passionate story for me to tell you on another day.

On the Concept of Native Gardening, Part One.

One of the great ways to experience some of what one's own backyard has to offer is to brighten up said backyard with some local flora.  This is known in landscaping and gardening circles as working with natives, that is to say flowers, herbaceous plants, shrubs, trees, cacti, and even grasses which are indigenous to the local area.  Ever since I made American Voyages, I wanted to post about the joys and benefits of native gardening, but as I survey my own domain, I find that I happen to like not-so-local things in the yard as much as the next person.  Instead of trying to create an oak-savanna or a beech-maple forest (both are found in remnants within the same few square miles around here), the latter of which might be frowned upon in our suburban fantasy world of golf-course trim lawns, I have some roses, azaleas, morning-glories, and heck, even a Bald Cypress growing.  Last night I even found a hardy cultivar of the lovely evergreen Southern Magnolia (Magnolia Grandiflora) for sale, adapted for outdoor planting in lower Michigan.  At this point, staring at the native elements in the lawn, a slight grimace came over my face as they reminded me how they were surrounded by exotics, and I realized my eco-hypocrisy.  

My horticultural sins put to light then, what types of things can we plant, what do they qualify as, and what are their benefits and/or drawbacks?

Native Plants.

Native plants, as noted, are things that are indigenous to the local ecosystem.  The term indigenous can be difficult to define, especially when we consider time parameters as one criterion.  Something that seems to belong to a place these days might have only found their way there within a few thousand years or so, true.  The global climate does change without human assistance over gradual periods of time, barring a natural disaster of planetary scale (such as a big old space rock hitting us).  Technically speaking, under a vast scale, things like moose and humans are not indigenous to North America because they migrated here over the Bering Land Bridge during the last ice age.  That said, we can pretty much claim that both Bullwinkle and our native peoples are, well, native, as both person and moose naturally found their way here, the moose no doubt being chased by a band of hunters across the dry Bering, neither knowing what they were getting into.  Examples of native plants would be Live Oaks (Quercus Virginiana) in Florida or Black Spruce (Picea Mariana) in Ontario.  Having a native plant in your landscape and garden is almost always a good thing, though this depends on the condition in which the plant is expected to grow.  While a fern might be native to one's area, planting it in full sun requires it to get watered really frequently, which is an inefficient use of water.  This said, here we have two sub-categories of native plants:

Native Plants in and out of Habitat.  

The fern example stands out well, but flowers work even better.  In the yard I have a single Purple Coneflower (Echinacea Purpurea, which has to be one of the most poetic scientific names out there), which is indeed native to Michigan and can be found in savannas and prairies in the state.  Right beside it I have a Wild Columbine (Aquilegia Canadensis), which is native to Michigan and grows on the margins of forests and along similar clearings like river banks (and is also the flower on the blog header).  In the foreground is a sprouting Rough Blazing-Star (Liatris Aspera), native to Michigan, and another prairie and savanna species.  They are all planted beneath a charming Northern Pin Oak (trunk pictured, Quercus Ellipsoidalis), which just so happens to have an isolated native population here in Livingston and neighboring counties.  

Yes, I plant flowers directly into the lawn.

Now the coneflower is not extremely out of place here (though it does not have a record of being native to this exact county, but does right next door, which I dispute, which means I need to hunt some down).  The field across from the subdivision actually is reverting to type into a savanna, and remnants can be found across the main roads adjacent to this field.  The columbine is sort of out place, but as the savanna is surrounded by forests, not terribly so either.  The blazing star is about at home as the coneflower, perhaps more so because they definitely occur in the area, and less so because they like a little bit moister of a setting than the local prairie/savanna.  The oak, though planted by developers solely as a pretty landscape thing, is right at home.  All of these being together naturally, however, is improbable.  Sure, the yard could have once been one of the edges of the savanna grading into the forest and a columbine could be next to a coneflower as such, but... well in any event I suppose this is being overly technical.  The point is, some of these are slightly out of habitat, and some might be in habitat, minus being grown in a lawn of non-native grass.  

How is this good?   Well, I have planted things that belong here, more or less.  Insects get a chance to pollinate something that would otherwise not exist in a developed area, and a semblance of the native ecosystem is restored, albeit by introduction, native but introduced.  The butterflies in the yard are plentiful and the whole scene is thus rather idyllic.  How is this bad?  Well, it happens to be a bit fake, but nature will not complain even if a botanical purist might.  On that note, it would be a bit improper if this were not a lawn  but a prairie remnant trying to be rejuvenated.  In any case, this is the best I can do at making a nice little reminder of what was here without getting a citation for growing a prairie instead of a lawn, which in my opinion is sad, but people like their lawns.  

Anyway, in the same vein, another good example of an introduced native, the Eastern Redbud (Cercis Canadensis).  I apologize for the poor lighting quality of the image, but I only recently learned about the magic of light control on cameras.  

Taken at St. John's golf course in Plymouth, MI.

Redbuds are indeed native to southern Michigan and are often a very striking part of our moister forests.  They are so lovely that they tend to get planted a whole heck of a lot.  They serve as an excellent example of "good plants" we see in our landscapes that would not have been here without human intervention, at least not in quantity, but are not entirely foreign elements of the local area, just the particular ecosystem in which they have been introduced.  This means they might not have popped up here by themselves, but they also blend rather well with the local environment.  Many plants reproduce by seed, and often the seed is carried to new places by animals, animals which sometimes also create new ideal conditions for the plant to flourish (browsing, den and nest creation, etc.).  You know what?  A guy finding a nice iris in a nearby marsh then planting it in his garden is sort of doing the same thing, albeit for aesthetics rather than as a matter of survival.  

So why all the fuss about what belongs and what does not?  Find out in two days and four days for parts two and three of this rant, as well as tomorrow when I do a little Q and A.