Why do we live here? Archives

A mantra for Discovery naturalists

Since our founding in the late 1980s, several expressions have served our naturalists, leaders and members as pithy summarizers, reminders, mantras, or mission statements. The earliest, maybe, was Everything is a track! Another, invented by a Merli-protegé, was Keep your space, save your face, a devil’s-club-mindfulness chant. Also important to our early evolution was Northrup Frye’s advice: Don’t ask who am I; ask where is here? Not sure that’s a direct quote, but something ‘writerly’ like that

Always eschewing statements when a good query’s handy, we more recently adopted Why do we live here? I first used this to title a 20-minute presentation to a 2012 teachers’ conference on place-based education. At that point, it was primarily a natural historian’s quest, beginning with emplacement of gold in the early Age of Mammals, and not including much about precontact Northwest Coast culture. But that changed when Discovery began assisting in classes by Goldbelt Heritage Foundation and Sealaska Heritage Institute.

Why do we live here? Our 63-page Goldbelt/Discovery course manual by this name describes a ground-breaking synthesis of natural and cultural history in 2013. Our semester class for highschool students was an early collaboration between Goldbelt Heritage, Discovery Southeast, and UAS.

Why did Áak’w Kwáan live here in the depths of the Little Ice Age? Why do we continue to live here in the age of Costco and electric cars? Why (and when) did Aangóon, isthmus town (thumbnail, upper right) become established on the spit enclosing Xunyéi, northwind tidal current (Mitchell Bay)?

Page from my Habitats workshop journal, summer 2018. We’re standing at what was probably a serially occupied storm berm near Kaalahéenak’u, inside a person’s mouth (Peterson Creek at Outer Point). At peak Little Ice Age, none of these trees had sprouted except the old hemlock on right. Photo by Floyd Dryden teacher John Wade.

Since 2013, that guiding question, Why do we live here, underlies almost everything I do these days. For example, in June 2018, Steve Merli and I taught 2 complementary courses for teachers on local landforms, and on habitats and succession. Throughout, we kept bringing attentions back to the human connections to these classic natural history studies. So, not only what geologic forces created this place, or what biotic trends led to this unique forest or wetland habitat—-but who lived or foraged here, and why?