Walking onto the dock in the early light of a shimmering June morning, I can see a great blue heron standing in the marshy grasses about twenty feet away. As I settle into my prayers and daily journaling, heron gradually moves from the water onto the neighboring dock almost parallel to me. Every once in a while, I stop to notice her deliberate presence. The way heron moves ever so slowly as they stretch out their wings to clean their feathers is like a marsh yoga. Neck straightened, then drawn in, coiling under wing; one leg with one wing slowly stretched out; beak to each feather preening in a way that almost seems absent of movement. Then for a moment I notice her staring at me before returning to their grooming and fishing.
For over an hour, there was beauty, practicality, rhythm and patient stillness in this dance as grooming effortlessly shifted to the attention of fishing from a wooden platform suspended above water. With the slides and water toys of cottage country mostly quiet at this early hour, heron went about her business. Despite standing on a human creation, she seemed as comfortable there as on the shoreline, perhaps more so. Over time, it dawned on me that heron had appropriated this modern Canadian symbol of summer life on a lake to its ways of being.
Around the June solstice, the new growth of so much life edges up to and overtakes our modern realities with a greening vitality, viriditas. Though this life will recede when winter brings an emptiness that is as encompassing in its grey cold tones, summer brings a sun-filled warmth that much of life loves to bask in, including on this fine morning heron and myself. Sitting with all this abundance, I recall the prayer-filled words of Thomas Merton as he honours the spiritual origin of life:
There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans… There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being… This is at once my own being, my own nature… speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.
There is a mysterious ever-moving energy that is Nature not as object, resource or recreational backdrop to our modern lives, but as an ever-moving sacred impulse that Merton refers to as natura naturans. While he honours this growing life as Hagia Sophia, Holy Sister Wisdom, I hear a similar spirit of gratitude being expressed by Gae Ho Hwako Norma Jacobs as she honours the many gifts of Mother Earth, E tinoha ongwesidage’dra gwe’, in her Cayuga Thanksgiving:
The sun’s warmth enlivens them [the people] to open their arms to receive the love emitted in this sacred dance of intimacy, and in that moment, it feels like a shawl is being draped around the shoulders of our precious Mother Earth. In this embrace, she feels appreciated and acknowledged for her many ways of gifting and receiving – reciprocity!... Her sacred territory needs and wants to be respected, and so she requests that we visit her places of pristine bountiful meadows and view the fine stitches of the decorative lace that adorns her dress. She asks us to take time to appreciate the stories sewn into every knoll and rolling hill as she dances and celebrates in honour of those who continue to hold up the responsibilities of her family.
On other occasions, I can hear Norma connecting Mother Earth’s living dress to the flower-adorned skirt that is worn by her and other women in their Indigenous ceremonies. It is a way of affirming through dress and practice the intricate weaving of people within the being of Mother Earth; of a dock within the life-world of heron; of my modern urban life within the natura naturans of Hagia Sophia.
After working for five years as editor in the publication of Norma’s book on Two Row relations, Ǫ da gaho dḛ:s: Reflecting on our Journeys, I received a box in the mail from her while in the midst of Covid-19’s isolation. I had no idea of its contents as I slowly unwrapped the gift and saw an embroidered heron come into view, standing gloriously amongst green-golden reeds and a deep blue background of vine-like paisley designs. I had been gifted a blue ribbon shirt that was inspired by heron’s relational influence in one of my book chapters. As I write in a teaching for my daughter Iona: “Like heron, we stand rooted in the mud around us, and from this position, we …are called to deconstruct, destabilize, and prune the ship, starting in the place where we work and live. But that is not all, for in the living spaces that open up, we need to begin naturalizing those viable seeds from our Canadien-Celtic ancestry that can take root here.”
Deeply moved and not knowing much about the cultural importance of ribbon shirts, I called Norma to express gratitude and learn more about the gift. After describing some of the unique symbolism like heron, she explained that the paisley pattern often used for these shirts and skirts is of European origin. There is something about this seed-shape design that spirals out, fractal-like, into an intricate growth of repeating vine-seeds that her Indigenous culture connects with the beautiful adornments of Mother Earth. For me, this connection resonate with these words of Norma: “The plants hold hands beneath her grass skirt, at times changing various colours, represented by the many florals and medicines. Every aspect of this land is healing and cleansing, and we are on this human journey to understand our relationship, interconnectedness.”
At the time of receiving the gift, I said to Norma it may take me years to grow into this shirt. My primary difficulty was with how to wear the blue ribbon shirt without feeling like I was appropriating someone else’s culture. It is a challenge that I spoke to in a more general way in her book when I state “that I cannot pick up a Haudenosaunee teaching like the Great Law as an object to be possessed and appropriated, but I will follow Gae Ho Hwako’s [Norma’s] guidance to our own roots so as to come to the learning of ǫ da gaho dḛ:s.” As I contemplate the challenge of growing into this gift, it seems like a good place to start is with how this pattern arrived on these lands in the nineteenth-century via colonials wearing the paisley fashion.
The design was manufactured during the eighteenth century in the Scottish town of Paisley, just west of Glasgow and south-east of the sacred isle my daughter Iona was named after. A 2003 British newspaper article describes the pattern as being developed by weavers in that town two centuries ago. It became a popular eighteenth-century design on shawls, and has had many revivals including on cowboy bandanas, the 1960s hippy movement, and in various modern fashions. The 2003 article was partially about how a Japanese fashion company had bought the rights to use this design that “is very popular in Japan because it means high quality, … historical accuracy and authenticity.” Affirming this view, an official from the Paisley Museum said this “Pattern is very important to Paisley’s economic and cultural history and it’s wonderful to think that the patterns developed here 200 years ago by the Paisley weavers still attract international attention.”
The irony is that paisley’s origin is much older and derives from cultures far east of Europe. It came to Scotland through the silk routes of the colonial era, with paisley’s origin stretching back centuries in Persia and India. In these cultures the design was known as buteh (boteh, buta) and symbolically pointed to the mysterious energy from which life emerges, not unlike that which brings the abundance growing all around us at this summer solstice. As a recent BBC article states, the “Persian droplet-like motif – the boteh or buta – is thought to have been a representation of a floral spray combined with a cypress tree, a Zoroastrian symbol of life and eternity. The seed-like shape is also thought to represent fertility.”
There is much in these origins and symbolism that can teach us about growing beyond appropriation; more than I can fully unpack here. We can start with the beautiful connection Norma makes between the buteh-paisley design and Mother Earth’s finely adorned dress, but in a context where this old pattern is connected to the colonial history of appropriation. In a general sense, this is a process by which the practice and/or symbols of another culture are taken up without recognition and, often, profited from. In the case of buteh-paisley, the forgetting of its Eastern origins was clearly at play in the 2003 Paisley Museum statement, and the profit represented in the waves of global fashions coupled with the 2017 bid by the town to brand, copyright and license the pattern.
Appropriation is primarily critiqued today as an external violation of another culture by which those in a power-position can profit. But there are other dimensions that the writing of Sioux author Vine Deloria, Jr. on the thought of Carl Jung can help us with. While bringing Jung into a dialogue with his cultural grounding, Deloria highlights how the external violation of appropriation is knotted with an internal devaluing of one’s own grounding. As part of this discussion, he quotes the following statement by Jung: “the more limited a man’s field of consciousness is, the more numerous the psychic contents (images) which meet him.” This sense of “a discrete system of thought” as valuable to self-awareness is for Deloria important, though he also sees a need to open Jung’s modern and colonial view to an Indigenous relational approach. Rather than “psychic contents”, Deloria explains that natural and spiritual relations are not approached in his culture as “mental images projected outwards but have real power in the physical world.”
Cultural ceremonies like a vision quest in his Sioux culture, Norma’s Thanksgiving Address or wearing a ribbon shirt are ways of donning a “discrete” cultural way of being. They are ways of weaving people into a living relation with the Earth. From this perspective, appropriation also speaks to a disrespect for the mystery from which ceremonies arise in an evolving cultural relation with land and spirit. Looking at a Western culture where people were starting to pick-up Eastern spiritual practices such as meditation and yoga, Jung critically asked whether it is possible to “put on, like a new suit of clothes, ready-made symbols grown on foreign soil […] We are surely the rightful heirs of Christian symbolism, but somehow we have squandered this heritage.” While Jung came to describe an integral healing process that included one’s cultural roots in the term individuation, Deloria translates this healing process into an Indigenous cultural context as being about land-based ceremony.
Acts of appropriation actively sever one’s fullness of self from a sense of cultural roots and, on a deeper level, spiritual origin. These experiential and internal dimensions are almost totally absent in the discussion of the buteh-paisley history, though it is highly likely there is also an experiential dimension to this old “Zoroastrian symbol of life and eternity.” And it is in recognizing this potential path that another way opens for us to reflect on Norma’s cultural approach to wearing buteh-paisley as being different in spirit from appropriation. A sense of foreign cultural origin is recalled, but in a context where a connection is made to an internal cultural intention – the buteh-paisley design is the living dress of E tinoha ongwesidage’dra gwe’.
There is a changeability, natura naturans, to this Indigenous approach that I can see unfolding with my French ancestors at the 1701 Montreal Tree of Peace when Miskouensa, Chief of the Fox Nation, approached the French leadership donning a white powdered European wig. As with other Indigenous leaders who wove various European fashions into their regalia, Miskouensa had, in the words of the Jesuits, “made himself an ornament of it to follow the French manner … and, wanting to show that he knew how to act, he saluted the Chevalier de Callière with it.” The intention, as French historian Gilles Havard explains, was “to appropriate otherness in order to eradicate it”; to enact ways of “adopting them [colonials] as their own.” To adopt colonials and their cultural habits to the ways of these lands.
So many relational potentialities are simply bypassed through acts of appropriation that wipe clean the living feel of one’s cultural connection to this sacred life. A few decades after Jung and in a context of intensifying interfaith dialogues with Zen Buddhist monks and Sufi Muslims on the experiential practice of spirituality, Merton offers a similar critical view on the modern tendency to appropriate while also affirming the value of relational communion. As he writes: “The more I am able to affirm others, to say “yes” to them in myself… discovering them in myself and myself in them, the more real I am… I will be a better Catholic.” The affirmation of shared relations under the Montreal Tree of Peace or on the Two Row can deepen our unique grounding, even while opening up vistas on our unique responsibilities in the mysterious buteh-paisley life of Hagia Sophia, Mother Earth.
It is with such a grounded relational sensibility that another option becomes apparent for Paisley. What if, in the same spirit as Norma, the town of Paisley honoured the origins of buteh and then made a viable connection to their own Celtic and Christian sensibilities? For example, the rock Celtic crosses found throughout Scotland and that I write in relation to Iona are marked with spiraling curves of “vinework”, a design reminiscent of buteh-paisley that similarly speaks to the relational interconnectedness of all life. As I discussed in the previous blog, it was this sacred approach to an interwoven creation that led Merton to ancestrally connect his hermit practice to the Celtic Christian ways represented in such vinework, in the buteh-paisley-vines of the one he called Hagia Sophia.
A recognition of origins coupled with relational dialogue across cultures offers a way to respect diversity while fostering that common spirit which can be felt in the sacred space Norma calls ǫ da gaho dḛ:s. To renew relations in the spirit of the Two Row or Montreal Tree of Peace requires remembering and then replanting cultural teachings that can be adopted into a living relation with Indigenous peoples and Mother Earth, Hagia Sophia. In contrast, appropriation extends the violation of land and spirit through taking that which already has a living context, isolating natura naturans into a resource object that is profited from and then discarded once used up; left wasted like a clear-cut or polluted lake.
In contrast to that weave of self and culture into Mother Earth, such objectifying acts stir up a violence that, not surprisingly, has some particularly stark impacts. As Norma teaches:
Our mother’s skirt of beautiful colours has been torn and dirtied by the violations of her sacred space… Our relations no longer have a nurturing and fulfilling habitat where they can raise their offspring because of the corruption, violence, abuse, and rape of the land.
In chorus with this outrage I can hear the complementary tune of Merton:
I worry about both birds and people. We are in the world and part of it and we are destroying everything because we are destroying ourselves, spiritually, morally and in every way. It is all part of the same sickness, and it all hangs together.
On the few occasions when I have worked up the courage to wear the heron shirt, I have felt a need to begin positioning myself within it by giving thanks to Norma for the gift and for our work on renewing Two Row relations. In that context, I then clarify that I am not wearing this shirt as a Haudenosaunee, Indigenous or Metis person, and to emphasize this I tie the shirt on with a French canadien coureur de bois sash. It is the stories of coureur de bois like my son’s namesake Etienne Brule and catholic missionaries that I tie onto this shirt with the sash, and it is through those mixed stories that I reflect on my cultural responsibilities as modeled by heron’s stance.
There are many times when all I want to do is stand, like heron, with a clear sense of myself as French canadien, and stand that way regardless of where I am in this modern world: a dock in cottage country, a marsh shoreline in Toronto, a classroom in the university, a book that writes me. As I describe in my Iona chapter, I am French canadien in my maternal origin and those are the dominant roots of my family ancestry, and so these are my default stories when teaching and writing. But then I find myself back home at a family funeral on my mom’s side, experience a ceremony fly by me in a French language I barely understand. After the formal event, the casual conversations shift from Francais to Franglais (French-English blend) to the unique French-accented English of my St. Lawrence river upbringing in eastern Ontario. It is then that I remember the many reasons I cannot speak Francais. Just as with the foreign feel of stepping into an Indigenous cultural context, such trips clarify that taking on a French Canadian identity feels like a pretension, a fantasy that I have no linguistic or cultural interest in.
The only way I can truly wear this heron shirt is as a small “c” canadien catholic, for in these threads there are so many stories that help sew me into the marshes, forests and rivers of Mother Earth, Hagia Sophia, the one I learned in my 2016 book A Canadian Climate of Mind to call Notre Dame de Turtle Island. On the blue waters of this lake where heron grooms and I write, the buteh-paisley growth of Notre Dame takes on the garments of these lake shores that I have such gratitude for. Each place I frequent has its unique colours that change with the seasons. Each place and season has a natura naturans that is of one common tapestry and yet made of diverse coloured threads, and I am woven into that viriditas.
Arising in my memories is a visit to the cliff grotto statue of Notre Dame du Lac, just north of Notre Dame du Portage where the St. Lawrence River begins opening out to the gulf and ocean pulse. On the surface she looks like Mary in all her cultural habits, but for me the rocks, evergreens, flowers and lake below speaks of these lands. Here is a cultural symbol for appreciating the felt presence of Mother Earth, though the catholic clothing needs to be held lightly for that sensibility to shine through. That is for me Notre Dame du “wherever I am,” and that is how I understand Merton’s experience of Hagia Sophia around his Kentucky hermitage; and Norma’s gratitude for E tinoha ongwesidage’dra gwe’ around her Grand River community of Six Nations. It is in this spirit that the watery blue buteh-paisley design of my heron shirt sews me into Notre Dame.
Up to this point in time, I have only wore this gift a handful of times, and only while co-teaching with Norma. That continues to make sense as I find ways of weaving myself into this sacred gift. The colonial legacy of my canadien catholic traditions means it is difficult for me to engage directly in Indigenous cultural contexts without leaving too much of myself unspoken. I may do so in collaboration with Norma and in a way that is culturally reserved and rooted in our Two Row commitment, but my primary orientation is toward working with Canadians on relational changes; to, in the spirit of Merton’s words, “be a better catholic canadien.” And yet my apprehension continues not out of disrespect for Norma’s gift or due to my confusion, but because of the confusion it can evoke in others.
What has become apparent as I have witnessed heron frequent this particular dock and others, is that she prefers those that are closer to the water. Those are particularly conducive to their fishing, while offering them firm footing to groom. They are a particularly valued shoreline of Notre Dame du Lac, and that is how she relates with these human creations. While modern Canadians made these docks for boarding their boats, fishing, and playing in summer waters, heron clearly has no interest in imitating such ways of being. They have appropriated this cultural form for its own unique way of being.
The hour or so that I spent with heron that June morning continues to have a special feel, like I had been seen by her across our docks as another intricate thread in Notre Dame’s skirt. There is a wonderful journal entry by Merton when he similarly reflects on being seen by a deer who “even came down the field towards me!” On many occasions he journaled about an evolving relation with the deer around his hermitage, often evoking prayer for the teachings carried by the graceful spirit of this being. Reflecting on the importance of Merton’s experience of being seen, one commentator states: “Because they [deer or heron] have the ability to read our involuntary tics and scents, we’re transparent to them and thus exposed – we’re finally ourselves.”
Later in the same journal, Merton goes on to say how sane and authentic he feels in this “new solitude of the ordinary.” This solitude is deeply relation and like a unique coloured thread in the blue tapestry of Notre Dame du Lac. Perhaps the almost fifteen years of spending time with my marsh relations and, gradually, learning with patient heron has had some good effect on me. At times, it feels like I am approaching “a silence that”, in Merton’s words, “is a fount of action and joy… This is at once my own being, my own nature… speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.”
Growing Beyond Appropriation: Heron's Key Give-Aways
1) Honour with gratitude the relational origin by which buteh-paisley (or other cultural presence, not object) comes into your personal and/or cultural way of being.
[Do not forget to honour origins and the living spirit of those origins. If like in the buteh-paisley case those origins have been forgotten, then dig for leads that take us toward their original spirit.]
2) Reflect on potential cultural and/or local natura naturans (nature beyond object) connections to the buteh-paisley (or other cultural presence) so as to foster its adoption into new relations.
[Do not pick-up or imitate other cultural ways of coming into relation with this life-world, but rather make it real to your roots.]
3) Weave the fullness of yourself (personal, familial, cultural/ancestral, natura naturans, spiritual) into the relations carried by buteh-paisley (or other cultural presence), and allow yourself to be transformed by the creative responsibilities carried in such an act.
[Do not be static, fundamental or objectified, and yet allow the natura naturans to flow from your Notre Dame grounding.]
On this summer day, Notre Dame’s wisdom is speaking through heron’s every way of being about the beautiful challenge of growing beyond appropriation; a challenge as intricate as the buteh-paisley design. This great interweaving draws from me prayers that acknowledge the beautiful intimacy of my life with heron on the deep blue waters of Notre Dame du Lac. Following the Indigenous protocols which is the first language of these lands, I tie my gratitude into tobacco and sage smoke as it rises in the air. I have tried to foster a personal and familial relation with these medicines that are important to Norma’s culture and these lands by growing and harvesting them, but ultimately I understand they are not my primary cultural medicines. And so I also weave into the smoke frankincense in honour of my canadien catholic roots, and this act gives me one more reminder of how I must sew myself into this sacred life.
Despite being on this Two Row learning path for three decades now, I have really only just started down this summer solstice path of growing beyond appropriation. I am humbled by how much more there is for me to learn from beautiful teachers like Norma Jacobs, Thomas Merton and heron. In the best way I can, I will continue to honour all the relations that are carried in the gift that is my life in Mother Earth, Hagia Sophia, the blue waters of Notre Dame du Lac. Merci and Mercy for this season of sun-inspired growth!
Some Books that Inspired these Summer Solstice Reflections
Deloria, Jr., Vine (2016). C. G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions: Dreams, Visions, Nature, and the Primitive. New Orleans, LO: Spring Journal Books.
Jacobs, Norma Gaehowako, edited by Leduc, T. B. (2022). Ǫ da gaho dḛ:s: Reflecting on our Journeys. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. https://www.odagahodhes.com/
Merton, Thomas (1962). Hagia Sophia. Lexington, KY: Stamperia del Santuccio.
Pramuk, Chrisopher (2009). Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.
Weis, Monica (2011). The Environmental Vision of Thomas Merton. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.
Online articles about buteh-paisley design:
Comments