Children in Nature January 2019
We have been hit with our first ice storm here in Southern New England and I am eager to get outside and explore the transformed landscape with the children. The whole world is new and the children’s play takes on the intensity of encountering the world for the first time, again. Certain points of interest, as always, naturally suggest themselves like the geometry of snowflakes, the physics of frozen water, and the slipperiness of ice. Winter is also an excellent time to investigate animal signage ( tracks, scat, food remains, homes, etc.) What are the other animals doing during winter? How are they dealing with the cold? How do people deal with the cold? What is happening outside during the winter?
The Full Wolf Moon is/was January 20th, and there was also a lunar eclipse that night. The sky, space, the earth, the moon and the sun, the other planets, the stars, and the star dust that became the earth make an excellent “theme” to explore with the children as long as we follow their interests, questions and energies and make things as “hands on” as possible. We also take science and nature inside. We take advantage of the necessity of staying indoors more by exploring chemistry with baking powder and vinegar, making natural paints and dyes, and doing different “experiments” with the stuff we can find in the kitchen. We plant seeds,bulbs and grafts indoors and watch them grow. We find things out about the human body and its various systems through stories, songs, dance, art projects, experiments, yoga, and physical exercise.
We start out on, and continue with, the fundamental work of orienting ourselves in relation to the earth and each other. We continue to explore the fundamental compass of the six directions: east, west, north, south, earth (below), sky (above). And we discover that “this life has many dangers/it is more fragile than a bubble blowing in the wind/It is a great marvel to have time to live/To breath in and out and to wake up from sleep.”(Najaruna’s (Buddhist philosopher) Letter to a Friend , quoted in the Jewel Ornament of Liberation by Gampopa) We find out who we are, who we want to be, and what we want to do with our lives.
As an advocate of place based, outdoor education and nature study for children, I approach it with the zeal of a true believer, and once I get going you might well leave with the impression that I think it is the answer to all of our societal ills. And in the sense that most children just don’t spend enough time outside, a first and necessary step, the “call to arms” for outdoor education folks is, “GET THE KIDS OUTSIDE!” And if you spend any time perusing my children in nature section you will see that time and time again I point to the salutary effects on children ( and their caretakers) when they get to spend large swathes of time outdoors, that there is a utopian energy and a progressive edge to the wide-ranging calls for a total restructuring of the educational system around place-based, outdoor education. This does not mean however that invocations and experiences of the “outdoors” and “Nature” unproblematically pave the way to a coherent, ethical educational system and a utopian future for our diverse communities and communal sojourn on planet Earth.
A friend of mine recently made a pointed comment that “love is not enough, that it is not the whole answer” because you have to address “systems” too. I believe he specifically had patriarchy, racism and capitalism in mind. I could argue with him that he is typecasting love in terms that are too psychological, too emotional and too interpersonal, and that if he could summon the intellectual, political and spiritual rigor with which Dr. Martin Luther King used “love” it is indeed a potent answer to just about everything. But then I would be arguing with him rather than listening to him, and when I listen what I hear him saying is, don’t soften all the jagged ideological sharp edges with a cotton candy mentality, don’t butter up politics with historical platitudes and a sentimental, nostalgic haze, and don’t cover up the stench of death, murder and violence of our national and human history with spiritual Febreeze.
I was reminded of all this while being captivated and appalled by a still image and then a video of a teenager with a MAGA cap ( Make America Great Again) smirking ( or seemingly smirking) in the face of an older Native American man ( who also turned out to be a United States veteran), who was drumming and singing outside of the Lincoln memorial. I later found out that the kid, along with a group of his friends and fellow students (presumably chaperoned) were part of a Right to Life March, and the man was part of an entirely different Indigenous People’s March. ( If you look further on the inter-webs there is more and more video, the omnipresent, bizarre, inflammatory presence of a small group of “Black Hebrews,” and one kid from the high school that says, “what is going on here?”).
The whole incident reminded me of the stark contrast between the natural beauty and bounty of the land here in New England, in New Haven, Connecticut where I teach (my italics!), and the violence saturated history and continuing conflict and environmental degradation that marks, mars and destroys this land and culture. Violence that led the historian Richard Slotkin in his book, Regeneration through Violence: the mythology of the american frontier 1600-1860, to describe United States society as built on a pyramid of bones. Curiously, overheard at the protests was this exchange: The high school kids: “Build a wall, build a wall, build a wall.” Another man says, “you are on stolen land,” and then another kid from the same high school as the kid blocking Nathan Phillips ( the Native American veteran) says, “Land gets stolen. That’s how it works. It’s the way of the world.” (Buzzfeed)
But is that the way of the world and does it have to be that way? Lisa Brooks, in The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast, reminds us that Native Peoples are not all dead and have continuously, since the invasion of this land and Amero-European colonization, argued for, fought for and worked toward an entirely different understanding of land, community, law and culture than the one elaborated by the United States government and various groups of people. This different understanding sees the natural world as “the common pot” and as a source of life and abundance, a reason for gratitude and reverence. From this perspective air, water, fire and earth cannot be “owned,” and people need to figure out how to live together, share the bountiful but limited resources that sustain life, and, with each new generation, transform the material conditions of life into opportunities for exchange, communication, growth and community.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFLy8eGtSYo
( Jimi Hendrix, whose grandmother was a Cherokee Indian, playing the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock)
So the turn toward nature is not a naive, uncritical escape from culture, but an intentional re-immersion in the natural world to revitalize our cultural aspirations and understanding of sustainable communities. I don’t have any illusions that I will simply give the kids quaint spirit animal names, the kids will form deep, authentic connections with the natural world, and consequently we will all learn how to treat each other with dignity and respect and become wise stewards of the earth. No, nothing is that easy. But I do believe that outdoor, place-based, nature study, education and learning must be a central tenet of the radical reconstruction of schools. And how to respectfully and skillfully draw on and adopt (appropriate and be altered by at the same time) Native American traditions and culture in doing “environmental education” is a challenging and necessary foundation of this work. We have a choice, we must make a choice, whether our schools are going to be places where we learn how to live together on the planet in sustainable, just, peaceful, happy communities, or we allow them to become holding tanks, social sorting machines, entitlement factories, finishing schools for the privileged, prisons for the poor and disenfranchised, and the ideological veneer of a corrupt, violent anti-democratic society ruled by greed, fear and confusion.
I have to say that I was turned off by much of the commentary, criticism, and debate, on Facebook and the news media in response to the issues raised by the videotape and events that unfolded on January 19th in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The whole problem is framed within the context of judgement, blame and punishment. How young people treat their elders is necessarily an educational problem. How adults treat children and young people is an educational problem. As Nelson Mandela said, and Barack Obama famously tweeted in response to the Charlottesville killing, “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Kids start learning early who to hate and who to love. Let’s get to work. Let’s get bundled up for winter. Let’s get outside. Let’s go outside the violent ruts of our shared history and do what it takes to learn how to live together in peace, between the wide open sky and the good, beneficent earth .
Read this “letter to America” by Kitcki Carroll, the Executive Director for United South and Eastern Tribes, Inc. to get social and historical context for some of the recent “examples of the persistent and deep seeded ignorance and disrespect towards indigenous peoples that you have allowed to exist.”
https://nativenewsonline.net/opinion/dear-america/
