Ayaangwaamizin and Ayaangwaami’idizo: Or; Why Paul Bunyan Does Not Tread Carefully !Permit me to open this paper with a story about my home, the Keweenaw Peninsula; the

northernmost thumb of the in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that juts out into Lake Superior. There

is only one easily accessible point on the Keweenaw from which one can see both the eastern and

western shores of the Peninsula—i.e., Lake Superior on both sides. The Ojibwe Anishinaabe - the

indigenous people who inhabit this region of the Upper Midwest and tribe to which I belong - call this

site Zazegaa’iganig, which translates roughly as ‘beautiful lake place.’ Located a few hundred yards

beyond the exceptionally tiny Bumbletown, this hill is referred to by the locals in the present day as

Antenna Hill. It has earned this charming name as it now houses an FAA communications tower. From

my family’s camp in Big Traverse Bay, one can see all of the cables that traverse the Keweenaw spilling

downwards from this point; the views from which, needless to say, are spectacular. I was on a walk with

my mother a few years ago, talking about Antenna Hill—and using it as an example of how Heidegger

describes the Rhine becoming a power station in his Question Concerning Technology; what better

example could there be of people internalizing presencing through the domain and domination of

technology than referring to this beautiful locale as Antenna Hill? The fact that the presence of a

communications tower on Zazegaa’iganig has transformed the way in which locals name this site is

disturbing in and of itself—they see the hill, a special and peculiar place, as the power source, and their

naming of it shows that.

In and of itself, this anecdote exhibits a relatively basic philosophical point: unstated ontological

or axiological commitments are often times made manifest by the way we speak - and moreover, in the

way in which the world appears to us. But as this conversation went forward, much more fascinating, if

not down right disturbing information came to the fore. My mother recalled that when she was a kid,

there was a gigantic wood-carved, rocking chair on this hill. Paul Bunyan’s rocking chair. You could

climb into the chair and sit where Paul had sat when surveying the Keweenaw, choosing which swath of

forest to clear-cut next. Permit me to provide some context for this claim which could appear to be

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hyperbolic. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is a very large swath of land - 16,377 square miles - with

a relatively small population - according to the 2010 census, only 311,000 people - and a vast wealth of

what we unthinkingly refer to as “natural resources.” While this area of Michigan is most famous for the

vast quantities of copper that were mined during the first three-quarters of the 20th century, the 19th

century saw an entirely different boom, one in which Paul Bunyan played a major role.

The lumber boom in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula commenced in the mid-19th century and

picked up steam as industrialization increased in the nascent automative industries in Detroit. By the

boom’s end, logging had stripped 19.5 million acres, none of which - at the time - was replanted, leaving

vast tracts of barren wasteland. The lumber barons attempted to unload the now worthless land by

setting up demonstration farms, using large amounts of fertilizer to convince unsuspecting buyers that

the soil was suitable for farming. Many small plots were sold to people who put up their life savings, only

to find out after a couple of unproductive growing seasons that they had been cheated. Most of the

barren land couldn’t be sold under any circumstances and it reverted to state ownership as the former

heads of these lumber companies defaulted on their taxes. The situation with regards to Michigan’s

lumber looks much different today on paper - we shall return to this in a moment. Regardless, the

memory of the original logging era looms large. Evidence of this is seen in my mother’s memory of the

aforementioned seat of Paul Bunyan. By her memory, on the back of the chair was written something

like, “Here sat Paul Bunyan, a symbol for the greatness of humanity in his dominion over nature. From

this vantage point, he surveyed all the timber that he will soon be able to forest for the betterment of all

humanity.” This was shocking to me, as at the time I was beginning to do some research on Paul Bunyan

myths. Here is an example of what I had found. In an introduction to an extended epic poem on Paul

Bunyan, Harold Pickering writes:

Paul Bunyan is not an historical character. He is history itself. He was and is, a lumberjack—every lumberjack that ever lived. His life is their lives. His self is their selves. It was the lumberjack who felled the timber of a continent, and in felling it enacted a chapter of history as adventurous, as thrilling and as colorful as any that is chronicled (Alvord, 1935: ix). !

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Pickering’s assertion at the beginning of this collection of stories about Paul Bunyan is extraordinarily

provocative, to say the least, particularly in light of Winona LaDuke’s account of the impact that

logging has had on tribal life in the Upper Midwest. She explains that after some legal chicanery at the

hands of the Weyerhauser Pine Tree Lumber Company and the U.S. government at the turn of the

century:

…just 14 percent of the original White Earth [reservation] land was still in Indian hands. The newly acquired land [acquired by the logging companies] was a bonanza to the border towns and the timber industry. Land companies emerged overnight, fly-by-night mortgage outfits held deeds for thousands of acres of land, and timber companies closed in on leases to clearcut almost a third of the reservation. “There is a myth, which was created at that time,” Bob Shimek, a local Native harvester turned forest activist, reminds me. “It was this Paul Bunyan myth, Paul and Babe, and their ability to change the landscape. That myth is in the center of America, and that myth is what we are dealing with today (LaDuke, 1999: 119). !The objective of this paper is to note what the story of Paul Bunyan can tell us about the

relationship to the world that was present—and continues to be present—in the minds of many

residents of the Upper Midwest. I will also attempt to show, via a brief description of the activity of a

gatherer of wild rice, a Manoominkewag—how differently the Ojibwe Anishinaabe relate to what is in

this same place. Both the Anishinaabe language and stories offer a radically contradictory view to the

world of Paul Bunyan. My hope is that with careful attention to the language and stories of the Ojibwe

a new manner of relating to the world can come to light to serve as a counterbalance to the dominance

of our way of accessing things as natural resources - and moreover to grant a voice to the philosophical

experience of a long silenced people. While these Anishinaabe stories offer no preconceived limit in

terms of a normative set of ethical mandates, they do offer a limit insofar as the base level conception of

human identity and belonging hinges upon our relationship to the world around us. This relationship

will be investigated through careful consideration of a number of words from the Anishinaabe language

and with the aid of a number of central figures in contemporary Native American Philosophy as well as

thinkers from other traditions.

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Section I: Paul Bunyan’s Plaything In an astonishing article entitled, “Michigan, Mistress of the Lakes” from the March 1928 issue

of National Geographic, we find the following extended description about how Paul Bunyan would

think about the state of Michigan.

It was the early Jesuits who published one of the first maps of the Lakes region. It was some much-later geographer who has stirred the imagination of millions of school children by announcing that Michigan’s Lower Peninsula is mitten-shaped, and that her Upper Peninsula resembles an arrow set on a bow.

Symbols suggest snows, loggers, trappers, and Indians convey sharp profiles of the State’s pioneer era. But it occurs to the present-day visitor, who finds Michigan’s log jams a memory, her few Indians undiscernible among an estimated population of four and a half million, her forests largely replaced by farms, her early industries obliterated by factory systems, that the State needs a new symbol, something which conveys her emergence as an industrial power.

Applying Michigan’s actual dimensions to the two familiar symbols would add a couple of Gargantuan tales to those told in logging camps about Paul Bunyan, the lumberjacks’ mythical hero. The “mitten,” which by motorcar travel measures more than 1,000 miles in circumference, would just about suit Paul’s wife, Carrie, who used “thirteen Hudson Bay blankets and the sails of a full-rigged ship to make her a waist and skirt.”

As for the “bow-and-arrow,” the circling of which adds 800 more miles to your speedometer, Paul would certainly have given it to Teeny, his gigantic youngster, as a toy. And if Teeny had ever inquired, “Pa, how did Michigan get bust off into two pieces?” Paul would probably have explained, “Log jams was so big in them days that I had to kick a hole through it so as to get them from Lake Michigan into Lake Huron” (Chater, 1928: 271). !

After pausing to catch our breath - after all, my home was just referred to as a toy for a mythical child to

rape, pillage and plunder - I would ask us to consider that in this pre-Depression description of the state

of Michigan, the author is clearly pointing to a tension: are the old stories that explained the

meaningfulness of the land that is Michigan still operative? There is a sense that the old stories of Paul

Bunyan do not work anymore, as we have now moved onto the world of factories, to the world of power

stations and FAA communication towers. So should we assume that the sheer force and control over

the land that is exhibited and encouraged in Paul Bunyan stories insofar as they drove the life of

lumberjacks have lost their sway? Such a conclusion would simultaneously seem to be given and

revoked by the description of Michigan as the site of factories, Zazegaa’iganig as the site of a

communications uplink. Approaching the land itself as the resource to be used as a means to an end and

using the land as the site of exploitation, e.g., building factories on land where there was once a swath of

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white pines, amount to essentially the same bearing towards being: instrumentality. In both cases, the

world is interpreted with the same axiological demands in hand.

Paul Bunyan stories govern, determine, and guide an exploitative relationship to nature in the

case of capitalistic lumber barons and others and their echoes continue to be heard in present day

mechanization. The stories exemplify what Sandy Grande refers to as the “deep structures of colonialist

consciousness,” particularly “belief in progress as change and change as progress [where] both progress and

change are measured in terms of material gains … to be acquired through economic and technological

growth, and to which there is no preconceived limit” (Grande, 2004: 69). This lack of a limit is

exhibited precisely in Chater’s description of Michigan having advanced from the pre-industrial to the

industrial. The forests have been felled. We can now take our next step; all the while, the question ‘step

to where?,’ is never being asked. One can see this sense of the need to ‘progress’ without any obvious

normative sense of what that term should mean in his astonishing and bizarre chastisement of the

Ojibwe Anishinaabe. Chater writes, “As for the Ojibways, what with inexhaustible supplies of metal and

canoe materials at hand and the world’s greatest fresh-water body at their doors, they might have

founded a lake empire” (Chater, 1928: 274). This same sense of the failure of the Ojibwe to engage in

the proper practice of human relations toward the land from a Euro-American perspective is further

exhibited by Albert Jenks analysis of Anishinaabe relations towards manoomin, wild rice. In 1900, he

wrote, “The primitive Indians do not take production very seriously….In the case of wild rice,…they

could gather more ‘if they did not spend so much time feasting and dancing every day and night during

the time they are here for the purposes of gathering” (LaDuke, 2005: 170). One can only conclude

from the assertions of both Chater and Jenks that Paul Bunyan certainly would have founded an empire;

Paul Bunyan would have industrialized the process of harvesting wild rice—or at the very least he would

have taken it seriously. And moreover, he ought to have.

All of these insights and tensions, I think, are contained implicitly in the example with which I

began this paper. The transformation of Zazegaa’iganig into first the seat of Paul Bunyan, and then into

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Antenna Hill represent two different but related relationships to the world: one wherein the world is

treated as matter first to be carved up and put to use, another that takes this sense of use and utility and

pushes it even further, to the point wherein there may no longer be any measure and any end in sight,

but only means to more means. Both of these views require understanding the world in terms of what

Grande calls “ontological individualism;” it enables, if not even demands, the kind of parceling up of the

world into reified, quantified units that is required by either reframing Zazegaa’iganig as Paul Bunyan’s

seat or Antenna Hill.

Paul Bunyan is still at work in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan today. There has been a debate

raging for many years now as whether or not to permit sulfide mining in the Yellow Dog Plains, land

that is ceded territory of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community immediately to the east and north of

the towns of L’Anse and Skanee. It should be noted that this land is also near the high point of the

Upper Peninsula in the Huron Mountains, and thus at the acme of a variety of watersheds. As Susan

LaFernier, President of the KBIC writes:

It is a fundamental fact that when sulfide mining occurs in areas where water is abundant, discharge of acid mine drainage into the adjacent water resources is the end result. This is a well-known and established fact in every state where sulfide mining has occurred in areas that have lakes and streams as natural resources. The water that surrounds and exists within the Upper Peninsula is essential to the Upper Peninsula’s economy, its environment, and the well being of its inhabitants. While a mining company may have legal rights to extract the minerals from their land, they do not have the right to degrade or destroy the environment and natural resources in the process of extracting those minerals. The legacy of sulfide mining is, and will continue to be, one that primarily consists of the degradation and destruction of water resources, and ecosystems that depend on the waters. !

LaFernier speaks here on behalf of the tribe, but also on behalf of the whole in which that tribe belongs.

Kennecott Eagle Minerals, the company that owns the land, has perpetually argued that its ownership

trumps all concern so long as Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality verifies and certifies its

proposals. Here, economic concerns have been deemed trump. Michigan’s former governor Jennifer

Granholm, in the face of rapid economic downturn in the state, refused to speak out against the mining.

On February 17th, 2007, Michigan’s DEQ granted permission for Kennecott Eagle Minerals to begin

mining, this led to a complex chain of suits and countersuits from Indigenous and Environmental

groups which halted Kennecott from being able to begin mining. This culminated with multiple acts of

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civil disobedience, many by members of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community leading to the arrest of

Cynthia Pryor in 2010 at Eagle Rock. All of these acts of civil disobedience and legal obstruction have

thus far prevented the sulfide mining from getting under way.  There are astonishing similarities on 1

both sides of this conflict in the Upper Peninsula with what is currently happing - as of October 2013 -

with the both violent and non-violent conflicts between the Mi’kmaq First Nation in Elsipogtog, New

Brunswick, Canada and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police over shale fracking. In both instances the

indigenous populations are doing what they can to not have their home destroyed. And in both

instances they have made amazing headway in doing so. Yet, I’m sure If you were to listen carefully you

could probably hear a Bunyanite somewhere saying, “why didn’t those Indians ever figure out how to get

these resources out of the ground?” All of this reminds me of a terrifying for Bank of America that I saw

once that went as follows: “This is America. Do what the let sun just shine or the wind just blow? No.

We put it to work.”

Section II: Tread Carefully In a How It Is, Viola Cordova describes a conversation she had with an Anishinaabe man who

spoke the language fluently. She explains that she “spent the better part of an afternoon discussing the

implications of a single term”—ayaangwaamizin. She was given the literal translation of the term,

“tread carefully.” Her partner in dialogue said, “some…interpreted this as “be careful,” but he pointed

out, it means much more than that. Unspoken, but understood, in that term is a whole worldview

having to do with man’s place in and effect on the universe” (Cordova, 2007: 59). What is this “much

more” and where might it come to light? My contention, in brief, is that we can see it in language,

stories and actions of the Anishinaabe, and this “much more” is really a deep-seated sense about the

character of things understood as happenings - auwiwin, the character of Kitchi Manitou - what you

have probably heard translated as Great Spirit, but we maybe ought to think about as great mystery - or

the manitou of manitou.

��� Much of my information regarding the disputes in Yellow Dog Plains has come first hand from discussions with 1

friends and family who are involved in these disputes. But for more information, visit, h t t p : / /www.yellowdogwatershed.org.

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In his invaluable Living Our Language, Anton Treuer offers a translation of the word

ayaangwaami’idizo - which bears obvious syntactical similarities to central concept of this paper - as “to

take care of one’s self ” (Treuer, 2001: 249). It is a provocative question to consider the relationship

between ayaangwaamizin, “tread carefully,” and what may sound an awful lot like Socrates’ concern for

‘care of the self ’, epimeleia heautou , as discussed in Alcibiades. Though this connection may seem

tendentious at first glance, I hope to make the case in brief that a brief excursus through this Socratic

insight - with the help of Foucault - may shed light on the issue at hand. Can the “much more” that is

contained in the ethical mandate ayaangwaamizin be thought through more fully if we attend to its

similarity with the word ayaangwaami’idizo? My suggestion is yes.

In Foucault’s The Hermeneutics of the Subject, he writes, “It seemed to me that modern

philosophy - for reasons which I tried to identify in what I called, as a bit of a joke although it is not

funny, the ‘Cartesian moment’ - was led to put all the emphasis on the gnothi seauton (knowledge of the

self )” (Foucault, 2005: 68). Foucault suggests here that in modernity, the emphasis which falls upon

self-knowledge can in part be understood insofar as within a Cartesian framework, while one may not

know oneself, the grounding function that the self serves as transcendental subject doesn’t stand in

doubt. To wit, the ‘work’ of the self as the foundation of coherence both epistemological and

ontological doesn’t require that one cares for, or attends to, oneself in any particular way. The self that

one would come to know in modernity functions as a ground whether we care for it or not. Where as in

the Platonic context in question, ones access to truth and knowledge is entirely dependent on ones

capacity to recognize the ‘truth’ of the self, to cultivate the self in a particular manner, to be in accord

with that to which one is attempting to gain exposure. Here then, having the capacity to know yourself

is entirely dependent on the cultivation of a certain kind what Foucault terms “spirituality” - in this case,

a certain condition of the soul, a certain kind of comportment. He writes, “knowledge of the self and

knowledge of the truth (the activity of knowledge, the movement and method of knowledge in general)

absorb, as it were, or reabsorb, the requirements of spirituality” (Foucault, 2005: 77).

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If Foucault is right that there is an inextricable relationship between the gnothi seauton of the

Delphic oracle and the epimeleia heautou in Socratic practice, i.e., self-knowledge and care for the soul

are interdependent, how might we understand the command, “tread carefully” as a kind of call for, or a

call that is always already dependent on, self-knowledge? And to ask a properly Foucauldian question:

what self is this? Insofar as the call to tread carefully does not crop up in Anishinaabe stories in the

simple terms of tending to one’s own self-possessed character, we must first be clear that what is at stake

in the self in the understanding of Anishinaabemowin is no simple ipseity, no isolated ‘Cartesian

moment,’ whose work is done insofar as it exists.

As was already explained, those who find guidance in Paul Bunyan relate to the world as raw

material: matter for forming, matter for making, means to be put to work for some end that is dictated

by humanity. Talking to Treuer, Melvin Eagle—an elder from the Mille Lacs Reservation in Minnesota

—explains, “We don’t own this land. You can never own it. We only take care of it” (Treuer, 2001:

111). This caring for aki, which is both land and earth, is one aspect of what is meant by

ayaangwaamizin. On first glance, any interpreter of the traditional, but radically multifarious,

Anishinaabe creation story may be justified in feeling that the variance from dominion to stewardship is

quite small, maybe even non-existent on an ontological level. After all, the standard reason why humans

are considered to be caretakers in Anishinaabe culture is because humans are created last after all other

plants and animals and are thus dependent upon them for their survival. Thus, is it not the case that the

reason one must “tread carefully” is for the sake of self-preservation? ‘Don’t overhunt, don’t harvest

manoomin too early, don’t pollute your water sources, or you’ll die.’ This is a plausible interpretation of

such a claim, and if it were true, there would be no reason why Anishinaabe culture would not fall back

into the ontological individualism that Grande critiques. The more-than-human world would become

nothing but a means again; the only difference between the Anishinaabe and the acolytes of Paul

Bunyan would be that one group recognized more clearly that they better take care of their

surroundings if they want to continue to be able to preserve them for future generations to exploit them.

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This interpretation, I believe, is mistaken. One could certainly suggest that the relationship

between caring for one’s self and treading carefully ought to be heard in the way outlined in my

preceding statement, this would, however, miss the point. I would like to highlight what I think is

erroneous here in two different manners. First, following in line with insights from Cordova - here she

is treating the manner in which the image of ‘Mother Earth’ has been taken up into modern Western

environmental practices - I would like to suggest that stewardship and dependency are fundamentally at

odds with one another. While, on the one hand, Cordova clearly holds that human beings have a

creative capacity in the world - that we are “cocreators” of the present (Cordova, 2007: 118) - she also

argues that what dependency at the level of creation amounts to is a certain kind of weakness, just as a

child - insofar as it remains a child - relates to its mother. When we attempt to assert ourselves as

mature, independent of our mother, we find ourselves in a position wherein we lose our capacity to act

intelligently precisely because we lose track of who and how we are. As it is articulated by Simon

Critchley, “Mastery opens onto slavery, grasping gives way to receiving that over which one has no

power. Action in the world requires an acknowledgment of weakness” (Critchley, 2012: 194). Only in

those moments when we recognize that we are fully and fundamentally dependent upon a plurivocal

alterity that exists in excess of our attempts to dominate the world do we have the capacity to act; only

here do we have the capacity to inhabit the world Only when we recognize that we are not functional

centers, not a transcendental subjects, but rather fields, where “a field is a vortex of Wind, a whirlpool, a

whirlwind” (Cordova, 2007: 89), do we have the capacity to navigate the world carefully. Only here do

we have the capacity to practice ayaangwaamizin.

The second moment that I am employing to suggest that for the Anishinaabe the more-than-

human world always exists as more than a means, lies in another key concept already mentioned. In

Anishinaabemowin, manitou is one of the most important terms when it comes to ritual practice,

spiritual life, and basic navigation of the world. Basil Johnston offers this list of terms as possible ways to

translate this word: “mystery, essence, substance, matter, supernatural spirit, anima, quiddity, attribute,

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property, God, deity, godlike, mystical, incorporeal, transcendental, invisible reality” ( Johnston, 1995:

242). How could Johnston have derived this massive list, which in many ways seems to defy the logic of

family resemblance, from this one term in Anishinaabe? One need only look to the ways in which the

term is used in a few specific instances to get a sense of why Johnston has good reason to give this word

such a wide semantic range in translation. The central term in Anishinaabe cosmology and ontology is

Kitchi Manitou, a name for the unnameable that is often misleadingly translated as “Great Spirit.” I

think that Viola Cordova is correct in suggesting that only those who are too trapped in onto-

theological narratives will insist on labeling this term univocally as the name of a being. Johnston

explains, “Manitou refers to realities other than the physical ones of rock, fire, water, air, wood and flesh

—to the unseen realities of individual beings and places and events that are beyond human

understanding but are still clearly real” ( Johnston, 1995: xxii).

So beyond the idea of Kitchi Manitou, where else does this word crop up and how is it

employed? Based on the description presented by Basil Johnston above it sounds as if manitou is to be

understood as the intelligible half of a properly metaphysical split between sensibility and intelligibility.

Yet, my suggestion here - following Cordova - is that Anishinaabe culture possesses an ontology that is

profoundly immanent and monistic. So how are we to understand the character of manitou as described

so that it doesn’t reinstate some kind of transcendence? And particularly a transcendence that is also a

reification? The term manitou is also used to describe the character, the nature, the essence, the manner

of existing of any particular entity - any auwiwin. It is in the simultaneity of the notion of essence and

manner of existing that I believe we can start to see how manitou does not force us back into an account

of metaphysical transcendence; instead we are left with a form of expressionism which Cordova

associates with Spinoza (Cordova, 2007: 110). Let’s look at an example of this at the level of a specific

being.

The manitou of a bear (mukwa) is manifold, but one fundamental way of being of a mukwa is

contained in its name. The manitou of a bear is in part to hibernate, to box itself in. The Anishinaabe

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word for box is mukak, which is intimately related etymologically to mukwa. Why bothering pointing

this out? The manitou of a bear is given to it by Kitchi Manitou, which manifests itself in the manitou of

the bear, without exhausting itself therein. In this context, asking which term came first, which way of

describing came first, would be mistaken. We learn something about the animate noun mukwa by

looking at the inanimate noun mukak, and vice versa. The sense of participation articulated here implies

a much greater sense of proximity to the kind of plurivocal monism that Cordova insists all indigenous

people affirm (Cordova, 2007:114). Here the measure of identity and meaning is always beyond the

immediate presence of the box or the bear. A full and rich knowledge of each individual entity requires

that one has a sense for how the unseen manitou of that entity extends beyond any sense of meaning or

identity in isolation. This moment, and this realization, is key. With this in mind, attempting to know

oneself so as to care for oneself, to engage in the practice of ayaangwaami’idizo, will then require that

one treads carefully, as oneself is always bound up with the relations in which one exists, knowingly or

unknowingly. In fact, the common ethos of indigenous knowledge systems—openness to the

extraordinary such that the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary becomes fuzzy, at

best—is thereby explained.  One cannot live well unless one cares for oneself. And one cannot care for 2

oneself unless one knows who he or she is. Yet the infinite array of possible relations makes any such

exhaustive account impossible at any point in time. As Cordova says, “in the dynamic model of the

universe, something is always happening without an agent having to cause anything, because that is what

the universe, by its very nature, does” (Cordova, 2007: 111). These happenings, these connections, these

unfoldings, these relatings, happen well outside of the control of the human. Yet we are perpetually

relating to them. Perhaps this is why there is the stringent emphasis in both Treuer and Johnston’s

analysis that manitou always also needs to be heard as ‘mystery.’ Any individual is unquestionably weak,

! Deloria addresses this specifically when he writes, “The world is constantly creating itself because everything is alive 2

and making choices that determine the future. There cannot be such a thing as an anomaly in this kind of framework. […] Ordinary and extraordinary must come together in one coherent comprehensive story line” (Deloria, 1999: 46). Burkhart echoes this point when he writes, “Anomalies are only possible once we have finished the picture and claim that this picture represents something about the world” (Burkhart, 2003: 25).

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in the sense Critchley describes above, when it comes to fully understanding, controlling or

manipulating the mystery. But one gains intelligent access to make connections and work within this

unfolding insofar as the proper comportment towards the mystery is maintained. Accordingly, one must

always tread carefully.

How does all of this bear itself out in cultural practice? The very stories we hear about the

origins of wild rice, manoomin, are telling with regards to this sense of awareness and relation. A

traditional story of the discovery of wild rice goes as follows:

One evening Nanaboozhoo returned from hunting, but he had no game. As he came towards his fire, he saw a duck sitting on the edge of his kettle boiling water. After the duck flew away, Nanaboozhoo looked into the kettle and found wild rice floating upon the water, but he did not know what it was. He ate his supper from the kettle, and it was the best soup he had ever tasted. So he followed in the direction the duck had taken, and came to a lake full of manoomin. He saw all kinds of duck and geese and mudhens, and all the other water birds eating the grain. After that, when Nanaboozhoo did not kill a deer, he knew where to find his food to eat. (LaDuke, 2005: 168) !

As LaDuke explains, the Ojibwe Anishinaabe populations of the Upper Midwest are entirely too aware

of the threats that the mindset of the world’s Paul Bunyan acolytes—today in the form of Monsanto,

DuPont, and NorCal—pose towards the carefully cultivated populations of manoomin that exist on

ancestral lands. The awareness of the fact that wild rice, like corn, requires cross-fertilization from plant

to plant—often with the help of water fowl, such as the duck who first showed Nanaboozhoo

manoomin—are present in the mind of the modern day Ojibwe. This awareness and the central place of

the Manoominikewag in Ojibwe life exhibit the pride of place given to relation. The dancing and

feasting that Jenks saw as a sign of a lack of seriousness is, in fact, the highest form of seriousness: a

prayer and a thanksgiving to the Anishinaabe Akiing as an expression of Kitchi Manitou for continuing

through all the contingencies of relation to yield manoomin. While Monsanto and those who, for

example, want to open Sulfide Mines on the Yellowdog Flats in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula have

forgotten the stories that undergird their relationship to the world, such prayer and thanksgiving serves

as an opportunity tell stories, under the Manoominike Giizis, that remind the Anishinaabe of the

mandate, ayaangwaamizin.

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Here I think that many indigenous communities—contrary to the Paul Bunyans and the

Monsantos of the world—exhibit an awareness of a truth that Slavoj Zizek describes as follows: “There

is […] no Nature qua balanced order of self-reproduction whose homeostasis is disturbed, nudged off

course, by unbalanced human interventions” (Zizek, 2008: 442); he vindicates this claim with reference

to modern evolutionary science:

Consequently, the first lesson to be drawn is the one repeatedly made by Stephen Jay Gould: the utter contingency of our existence. There is no Evolution: catastrophes, broken equilibria, are part of natural history; at numerous points in the past, life could have taken a turn in an entirely different direction. The main source of our energy (oil) is the result of a past cataclysm of unimaginable dimensions. (Zizek, 2008: 442). !

For Zizek, the idea of Nature (with a capital ‘N’) and Evolution (with a capital ‘E’—thus implying

Progress with a capital ‘P’) are forms of the big Other—“self-contained symbolic order as the ultimate

guarantee of Meaning”—that ensure that we ignore the need for humans to recognize their role in what

is so as to ensure that continued equilibrium of things. Nature, Evolution, and Progress all dupe us at

the common sense level, “which, habituated as it is to our ordinary life-world, finds it difficult to really

accept that the flow of everyday life can be perturbed” (Zizek, 2008: 445). The emphasis upon the need

to seek out stability and equilibrium in a fragile and chaotic world is echoed, if not primarily asserted in

thinkers like Viola Cordova. She writes, “Our survival depends on maintaining a certain degree of

stability, which we know more familiarly as ‘balance.’ ‘Stability’ in the West is synonymous with stasis, a

state in which ‘nothing happens.’ Stability, however, is something that can be achieved only with

tremendous effort” (Cordova, 2007: 120). Insofar as Cordova situates us as co-creators of ‘nature,’

conceived as a process, as an unfolding, that has no ‘laws’ which govern it in isolation from human

activity, we can note the absence of any notion of Nature writ large here. What this means is that the

world, in all of its wild contingency, requires the respect of our treading lightly.

The lack of a distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the sensitivity to the

constancy of change in transformation in being and the need to attend to it, leads Greg Cajete to say,

“we cannot mis-experience anything, we can only mis-interpret what we experience” (Cajete, 1999: 76);

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implying that any approach the world that assumes in advance that the world will be constant or would

be constant without human intervention must be rejected in advance, as much as such views tend not to

be able account for anomalies. Accordingly, Cajete explains the nature of the compacts made between

indigenous peoples and the more-than-human as follows: “As compacts are never static and a cyclic

process exists in their making and evolution, there are traditions of communal and environmental

renewal” (Cajete, 1999: 81). This task here is that of what Cajete calls “creative participation”—the

kind of participation that an Ojibwe Anishinaabe Manoomin gatherer engages in when both harvesting

and celebrating before and after the act.

Permit to close with Cajete—hearing him speak in sharp contradistinction to all those who treat

what is as a plaything while continuing to neglect their role in the process of co-creating nature while

silently and passively relying on the presence of Nature, as Big Other: “As we experience the world, so we

are also experienced by the world. Maintaining relationships through continual participation with the

natural creative process of nature is the hallmark of Native science” (Cajete, 1999: 21).

!Bibliography !Alvord, Thomas and Harold Pickering. 1935. Paul Bunyan: A Legendary Hero Of the Northwoods. New York: Albert & Charles Boni Publishers Burkhart, Brian Yazzie. 2003. “What Coyote and Thales Can Teach Us: An Outline of American Indian Epistemology” in American Indian Thought. Edited by Anne Waters. London: Wiley- Blackwell. Cajete, Gregory. 1999. Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. Santa Fe: Clear Light. Chater, Melville. 1928. “Michigan, Mistress of the Lake,” in The National Geographic Magazine. March, 1928: 269-325. Cordova, VF. 2007. How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of VF Cordova. Edited by Kathleen Dean Moore, Kurt Peters, Ted Jojola, and Amber Lacy. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Critchley, Simon. 2012. The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments In Political Theology. London: Verso. Deloria, Jr., Vine. 1999. Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader. Boulder: Fulcrum Publishing. Foucault, Michel. 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador. Grande, Sandy. 2004. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. Basic Writings. New York: Harper & Row. Johnston, Basil. 1995. The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibways. New York: HarperCollins.

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LaDuke, Winona. 1999. All Our Relations: Native Struggles For Land and Life. Cambridge: South End Press. ———-. 2005. Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming. Cambridge: South End Press. Plato. 1997. Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett. Treuer, Anton. 2001. Living Our Language: Ojibwe Tales and Oral Histories. Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society Press Zizek, Slavoj. 2008. In Defense Of Lost Causes. London: Verso.