- The Literary Arts expand the Conversation about "Sustainability"
- Preserving Ojibwe Treaty Rights
- Building Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic
- Reflections from Ruth Oppedahl, Northern Great Lakes Visitor Center, Ashland
- ON Beliefs: John Bates
- ON Beliefs: Anthony Bukoski
Broadening the discussion of sustainability to include Wisconsin's literary tradition, a series of community writing workshops, reading and discussions with authors, and a writer-in-residence were organized (Fall of 2008-Spring 2009) by UW-Barron County for community members in Washburn, Rusk, and Barron counties. The idea was to engage people in the literary arts as not only an academic study, but as a means of cultural connection with natural and human communities. The project culminates with a Local Lit Festival in April of 2010, which includes a poetry slam, open mic, and readings from the publication "Red Cedar."
This project was funded in part with a grant from the WHC. Learn more by contacting the Joel Friederich at UW-Barron County.
Preserving Ojibwe Treaty Rights
In 2009, the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission celebrated its 25th anniversary. In approaching this milestone, Tribal leaders acknowledged the importance of preserving the history of their tribe's efforts to reaffirm and implement Chippewa Treaty rights from an Ojibwe perspective. A WHC grant was used to fund a four-day symposium called Minwaajimo-Telling a Good Story: Preserving Ojibwe Treaty Rights, which took place in July 2009 on the Bad River Indian Reservation.
Building Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic
In August of 2009, the Cable Natural History Museum hosted a four-session learning experience, designed by the Telemark Educational Foundation, Inc., about the history of the northwoods, the natural resources unique to the area, and a growing interest in building a stronger regional community. Aldo Leopold's writing about the Land Ethic was used to guide a discussion throughout the series to help participants think about how they might find a deeper connection to the land on a personal level, and as a community.
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Responses from Ruth Oppedahl, Northern Great Lakes Visitor Center, Ashland
The Making it Home project brings people together from many walks of life. How would you describe the diversity in your community?
Our community is a diverse mixture of folks from backgrounds ranging from the working poor through professionals, liberals through conservatives, and everyone else in between, coexisting in a beautiful environment we all cherish in our own ways. The variety of opinions from these diverse backgrounds makes for a lively yet civil forum for discussion about how best to treat the world we share.
What do you love about the region where you live? Why is this important to you?
I moved here because I wanted to be near Lake Superior. There's something special about being near big water: it's calming, and I enjoy watching the lake change with the seasons; we can swim in it in the summer and ski across it in the winter, expanding our boundaries of space. The imprint of history is close to the surface here. Parts of the shoreline around Fish Creek Sloughs look the same as when Radisson and Groseilliers camped here 350 years ago. Our vibrant Native American communities link us to the past, and their customs help me understand our connection to the landscape. I've learned to consider how current actions will affect people seven generations from now. This powerful belief informs the personal philosophy of many people in our area.
Where (or when) do you feel most connected to the natural world? Is there a particular experience that you can recall?
I feel most connected to the natural world when I'm on the water, in a canoe or kayak. I look around and see a simple landscape of sky and water, maybe a fringe of dark pines lining the shore in the distance. The clean sparseness helps clear my mind of busy thoughts, and the rhythm of paddling becomes a meditation. Spending time on the water gives me room to recognize my place in the world. It reminds that I am one, small person on this huge planet, and all I can do is the best work I can, no more and no less. When I'm on the water, I notice small things like the wind ruffling the surface, or an insect taking refuge on the kayak's bow. On its surface, the natural world seems composed of simple elements; but the more time I spend in that environment, the more details are revealed as I slow down and take notice.
ON Beliefs
The 2010 Wisconsin Book Festival explores the theme of Beliefs. In the Festival's honor, we asked several authors, poets and other thinkers from across Wisconsin to reflect on the role beliefs have played in their lives. The multiplicity of perspectives you'll see here reflects one of the Wisconsin Humanities Council's deeply held beliefs: That when our beliefs get aired, shared and woven together, community life grows more vibrant and our individual lives are enriched.
See What Grows
by John Bates, writer, naturalist and educator, Mercer
I recently visited with an old friend who came from a family of ten kids. His siblings are scattered hither and yon, both geographically and professionally - a musician, a corporate executive, a biologist, a Marine colonel. All came from the same family DNA, yet they are as diverse as woodland flowers.
Soon after, I toured a number of northern lakes with several University limnologists. We visited shallow lakes full of wild rice, crystal-clear lakes with almost no plant life, lakes with fish species galore, and other lakes so different you might think they were found in different states. But they were close neighbors, sharing the same glacial history, same soils, same rain and wind and sun and seed sources and surrounding animal and human communities. The lesson was clear: Though they came from the same parentage, lakes live very diverse lives.
It struck me then how much humans are like the lake region where I live. Born within our own set of influences, humans and lakes are wildly, crazily and beautifully different. And while limnologists can tease out many of the variables that make each lake unique, and while psychologists can mine the source of many of the individual nuances in any family member, the synergy that ultimately fuses each lake and each human will always be just out of reach of our objective understanding, a mystery novel without a cohesively clear plot and without a foreseeable conclusion. How did we end up this way? Who knows? We come over time to allow certain things to grow within us, unique ways in which we come to perceive the world. And these finally become our beliefs, the ways in which we honor this life. Shaped by experiences that parents, teachers, friends and families tried to manage, our beliefs are ultimately out of everyone's control, much like the life within any lake, born from the lake's own remarkable shape, depth and sediments, and the wind that brought this seed but not that one. All these forces and lives mix and boil in a synergistic stew, until voila, a person or a lake comes alive, living in the world in a particular way.
Physicist George Thomson once said, "There is no truth. Seek it lovingly." So I toss seeds out with all the love I can, let the forces work, and then see what grows.
What A Seaman Believed
by Anthony Bukoski, UW-Superior Professor of English, Superior
Though my mother, sister and I endured his moodiness and anger for years, we tried loving my father. His behavior resulted from having to work a menial job to support us. Sweeping floors, oiling motors and running conduit in a dusty flour mill is unhealthy work for a man with emphysema. It is soul-sapping work for a man wanting to know about the world, an autodidact who, at home, studied electricity, economics and elocution. He knew elementary Latin. He knew Polish. He played the accordion. Yet he was bitter. How to improve his life both baffled and frightened my father, the King Midas flour-mill laborer.
Though often intolerant of things we did, he was tolerant and cared about people outside of our home. Enjoying a beer and a shot after work - my mother's pork hocks and sauerkraut cooking in the oven - he'd talk about Baltimore or other American ports he'd visited as a merchant seaman before he had a family to care for. He'd seen Jim Crow at work in these ports, where black shipmates could not enter the same taverns and cafes as he. This hurt him. Perplexed by a law that welcomed some, excluded others, he would bring up the subject even twenty years after leaving the sea. As a boy, I heard no comment in our Polish-Catholic home disparaging blacks, Jews or anyone else. Never.
In this way he shaped my beliefs. Imagine my surprise when, in the late 1960s, my father began complaining about blacks in less-than-charitable language. By now the Vietnam War raged, riots erupted in cities, and civil rights activist James Groppi led marchers and thugs into Milwaukee's Polish Southside neighborhood. With my father's health declining, his life and his son's future must have both appeared hopeless when, in February 1969, I went eagerly to hear Father Groppi speak in Superior.
Then Milwaukee quieted. The Vietnam War ended. The world calmed. What I remember about the man we tried loving were the times he'd spoken passionately in defense of, not against, others. I've been left with this memory. Once with the nation struggling, his beliefs faltered. After a lifetime of thinking fairly and justly, what does this mean, a few complaints, a few ugly words uttered in our home? Better to judge a man by what he's stood for longest.
How do we acquire beliefs? We do so partly from the models of reason and rectitude we are presented when young. If beliefs are woven firmly enough and early enough, sewn from good cloth, they don't change despite the perhaps inevitable doubting. My father offered us an example of honest, honorable behavior. The foundation he provided couldn't have been shaken by a few intemperate remarks. We knew by then where his heart lay. If I couldn't love him as much as I should have, I love and appreciate him for this at least.
To read more ON Beliefs essays from the across the state, please visit the Wisconsin Book Festival website.