Leslie Patten Books: Wild Places, Sacred Spaces

You might say that I’m living a life many of my friends would call simple and rustic.  My cabin is small, I’m surrounded by rugged mountains, I hike and live around grizzlies and wolves.  The dangers I have to stay aware of are not car break-ins or being mugged on a dark street, but being stuck in a sudden snowstorm on a trail, or spraining an ankle in an area where no one ever comes bye, not just for days but for months or years.  Some might say ‘She’s living raw, close to the land’.

But frankly, even way out here in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, the wildest place in the lower 48, I feel inadequate, modern.  Sure I could probably survive for three or four days in a pinch out in the back country.  I take provisions and precautions for that.  I carry a satellite phone.  I bring bear spray.  I even know some wild foods that could tide me over.   But my upbringing and my life experiences have never prepared me for living like peoples here did hundreds of years ago.  That is cultural knowledge that was passed down generation to generation.  The Native Americans who overwintered for 5000 years at nearby Dead Indian Campground  passed on their life skills as well as their intimate relationship with the Land–lifestyles that have been lost forever.

Those skills are not learned by a single individual in a single lifetime.  Just as much as evolution is physical, those skills were a cultural evolution, breathed and lived by a community.  Larry Todd described to me that by even the very early 1800’s, the life skills and the community of the Native Americans at Dead Indian had already begun to dissolve.  Around here, that was about the time Lewis and Clark came to town.  Their expedition is still the best description of the land and the way things were ‘pre-white’ man.  The land may have not changed much, but the cultures were already disintegrating due to disease and other factors.

300 year old wikiup standing till 25 years ago when destroyed by cattle

You know how your grandparents or parents talk about the past, their past, in a longing way.  That is how I feel, but in a way that goes much farther back to an America that was ‘discovered’ long ago.  Long ago, in the 1800’s, an idea was floating around to give Native Americans the land west of the Missouri.  That, of course, was never Thomas Jefferson’s vision.

I must admit, I am weighted down with a longing for a past no longer present.  I envision the days when bison roamed freely here, when the beaver and the mink were so plentiful that people were able to trap them in the hundreds. When there were more animals than people. When animals whose mere presence in the landscape today is so controversial, such as wolves and bison, were sacred to the peoples.

In each new landscape I consider “What must this have looked like hundreds of years ago, before the white men made their mark here.  What were the native trails like?”  I walk what appear to be these pristine mountains and listen hard for ancient echoes of songs, murmurings of people long dead who knew the ways of living with the earth much better than I will ever know in my lifetime.  Their songs long gone, I wonder how we can learn the secrets it took so long for them to discover and pass on.

I am obsessed with the past and how that past might be brought into this present time. My friends tell me it will never be again and to move on.

I conjure up dreams of how to fit ‘wildness’ into the puzzle of modern existence.  Do we set aside large tracts of unmanaged lands with uncollared wildlife, leave them uncharted and unmapped, to enter at your own risk?  Or is our hope in the advocates of green renewable city living, where most of the population will live, work, and grow their own food, leaving the large acreage of rural unfettered areas?  Unfortunately, the politics of wilderness seems to always involve an uphill battle, with the needs of wildlife superseded by human needs and greed.

A mere 'blip' of the Bison there used to be

Sensitivity.  It is a attribute we must all strive to cultivate as human beings.  What we can do is walk lightly, live in wonder, become increasingly aware that all life is conscious, alive, and part of our connected existence.  If each one of us were to make that our task, then the earth might become renewed again, full of wild existence, of which we are a part.

Filed under: Indigenous cultures | Tagged: ancient united states, Dead Indian Campground, Native Americans |