Season of their loss

A poem by James Welch

Thanksgiving at Snake Butte

In time we rode that trail
up the Butte, as far as time
would let us. The answer to our time
lay hidden in the long grasses
on the top. Antelope scattered

through the rocks before us, clattered
unseen down the easy slope to the west.
Our horses balked, stiff legged,
their nostrils flared at something unseen
gliding smoothly through the brush away.

On top, our horses broke, loped through
a small stand of stunted pine, then jolted
to a nervous walk. Before us lay
the smooth stones our ancestors, the fish,
the lizard, snake and bent-kneed

bowman – – etched by something crude,
by a wandering race, driven by their names
for time: its winds, its rain, its snow
and the cold moon tugging at the crude figures
in this, the season of their loss.  

..........................................................................

Lauren Bridgeman and Maria Zedeno describe Snake Butte as "a sacred landscape, home to powerful traditional snake medicine, religious areas for fasting, environmental resources for collecting, and cultural features that convey the living and remembered traditions of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine peoples."

James Welch (1940-2002) as a child attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations. Snake Butte is located within the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, homeland to the Assiniboine (Nakoda) and Gros Ventre (Aaniiih) Tribes. Welch became famous as a western regional and Native American writer beginning with Winter in the Blood, 1974.  Previously, in 1971, he published his only collection of poetry: Riding the Earthboy 40, which includes the poem Thanksgiving at Snake Butte. 

Upon reflection we consider again (and again) the answer to our time. An echo in the season of loss.  We may recall how the some of the rock mass of Snake Butte was mined in the 1930s for the massive Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River.  A tangible loss also fractures spirit.  This continues at full thrust on and in many sacred lands and places.  Where will wisdom sit?

The neocapitalist crush and craze for all things that can be extracted -- Lithium, for example -- continues unabated. Thacker Pass, a sacred landscape on federal lands in northern Nevada near the Oregon border, is on the brink of devastation. 

To follow the evolving situation at Thacker Pass, in the McDermitt Caldera lapping into Oregon, check these links and sources:  — Protect Thacker Pass https://www.protectthackerpass.org/blog/
On December 5th, 2023, In Reno NV, following a federal judge’s dismissal of their latest lawsuit, the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony (RSIC) will hold a press conference on their court cases against the Thacker Pass lithium mine.
— Judge again rules against tribes’ effort to stop lithium mine
November 21, 2023  https://www.nevadacurrent.com/2023/11/21/judge-again-rules-against-tribes-effort-to-stop-lithium-mine/
— Previously on RockArtOregon
https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/03/center-of-earth.html
https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/06/center-of-earth-2.html

Military-Industrial in Paradise

Petroglyph located within Paradise North, a Special Use Airspace (SUA) of Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. Paradise North — also known as Owyhee Canyonlands in Malheur County, Oregon.

Map indicates SUA sectors of the Military Operations Area (MOA) in Oregon, idaho and Nevada. BLUE star locates petroglyphs and canyonlands in all photos (DB) click to enlarge.

The Department of the Air Force (DAF) produced thousands of pages as Final Environmental Impact Statement for Airspace Optimization for Readiness for Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho

Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA): “Air Force’s plan will increase the number of booming super-sonic flights over southeastern Oregon by 316 percent, to 6,894 flights per year, while allowing jets to fly just 100 feet off the ground!”  Threats to the Owyhee Canyonlands 

DAF: Jet flights 100 Feet above ground level (AGL): "No adverse effects to archaeological or architectural resources and ... no effect on traditional cultural properties" in the SUA. Executive Summary of Final EIS

 

Meanwhile, In Nevada just west of Paradise South: Thacker Pass Lithium Mine. RED star on map above.

General Motors (GM) and Lithium Americas (Canadian corp) will invest $650 million to develop "the largest known source of lithium in the United States and the third largest in the world."

Opposed by Protect Thacker Pass and  Paiute and Shoshone people of three Native Tribes:  Reno-Sparks Indian Colony; Burns Paiute Tribe; Winnemucca Indian Colony.

Remembering how President and former general Dwight Eisenhower, in this farewell address, January 17, 1961, warned against the establishment of a "military-industrial complex."

Clear enough. We've been warned. Complexes mutate, proliferate, optimize, establish as Military-Extraction-Capitalist readiness variants. 

Yet, these marked stones endure in deepening witness, as they have for thousands of turnings around the sun.

In sum, an encompassing scholarly perspective:

The desert exists at the complex intersection of nature, history, and power, though too often it has been imagined and imaged flatly: reduced to an instrument of the state that upholds political and economic power structures. Thinking more expansively about deserts requires a shift to epistemological and ontological frameworks that honor and prioritize a future for dry environments that is anti-colonial, socially and environmentally just, and multidimensional.

— Danika Cooper, from “Drawing Deserts, Making Worlds,” in Deserts Are Not Empty, Samia Henni, ed.(2022)

Indian Land

Lizard ex/claims Indian Land. 

A trace as tracing. 

Red Lizard becoming sign on sign. 

Bound up in space becoming place. 

Time hovers as ghost immemorial.

As longing, as stones and bones.  

Obverse of the sign:  Geology Oregon:Abert Rim.

Sign faces US Highway 395, looking west over Abert Lake

In 2011, sign on US Highway 395.

Two ways of imagining, of mattering...

Spirit guardians lean into Future, 

grounding Abert Rim, one of the highest fault scarps

in US and the longest exposed fault scarp

in North America.

Grinding slicks on basalt boulder overlook the ancient lake,

a salty terminal basin, remnant of Pleistocene Lake Chewaucan.

Translucent point, photoed and replaced

2012, a year later, chalked outline

and naming Indian Land erased.

Lizard abides...

... by 2015, sign disappeared,

Geology dismissed, Lizard displaced. 

Notes

— In recognition of Indigenous Peoples' Day

— Prints of the Indian Land and Oregon Geology photographs purchased from this writer by the University of  Oregon Law Library in 2017.  Two of eight purchased for permanent display in the Library’s main reading room at the Law School; the other six are photos of petroglyphs, Oregon Northern Great Basin aka Indian Land.

— The above Indian Land/Geology sign photos from 2011 appeared prior to the now popular Land Back movement which emerged in 2018. 

Land Back

All beings abide

Dry Desiring

They say whisperings

Heart entangled

Plank bridging Crooked River

They say remember

They glaze fire

They say paradise

They make tracks

Say sky before time

In Great Yearning

They do not say

In rapt desiring

They make ties to bind

Irrigation Gate wall

They say collateral damage

Bones they said

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are fewer enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittlebush in a dry wind. 

— Barbara Kingsolver from High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (1995)

NOTE

Photos Crook County Oregon, late March 2022, a filling-the-sky country entangled in "Exceptional" Drought. I wonder, how in our gage of things unfolding as Exceptional exceeds Extreme?  I wonder, how when do Words collapse under the gravity of unknowing? -DB

CODA:  Poem by Jaime de Angulo ((1887–1950) in Coyote's Bones:

Coyote, ululating on the hill,

is it my fire that distresses you so?

Or the memories of long ago

when you were a man roaming the hills.

By 2100

Was it that—a sense and beyond intelligence?

Could the future rest on a sense and be beyond

Intelligence?

On what does the present rest?

-Wallace Stevens, 1947

The distress is mine.

As to our troops returning, I have no news—

news to report if I got wind of it—

nor have I public business to propose;

only my need, and the trouble of my house—

The troubles.

-Homer, The Odyssey

… in the clear noon light

now as then

our eyes may rest

the primal world is still

only the sun burns

and the expanding moment

we know those ancient watchers

beneath the hill

-Frances Horovitz, 1970

As global heating oscillates, one signal among many of the accelerating bio-collapse, imagine: By 2100. Or, ease into it, By 2030?  By 2050? Or, Bye and bye in 2100…

Imagine: On what does the present rest?

CODA

The sea doesn't change as the earth changes;

It doesn't lie.

You ask the sea, what can you promise me

And it speaks the truth; it says erasure.

-Louise Glück, 2009

Tule Lake/Lava Beds photos Douglas Beauchamp 21st c. Click to enlarge

NOTES

-Wallace Stevens,from the poem The Pure Good of Theory, in Transport of Summer, 1947.

-Homer. The Odyssey, from Book II A Hero’s Son Awakens. trans. Robert Fitzgerald

(Homer tells when Telémakhos entered into the room, the grey-eyed “Athena lavished on him a sunlit grace that held the eye of the multitude.”)

-Frances Horovitz, from the poem Dunskeig (Hill of the Fort), in The High Tower, 1970 (and Collected Poems, 1985, Bloodaxe Books UK)

-Louise Glück. from the poem March, in A village life, 2009.

Drought and Unknowing

Boat ramp. Reservoir full pool elevation 3235'. Ramp extends down to 3210'. Level last week 3158'.  Vertical drop 48'. 

Tree cut down for reservoir; underwater since 1961.

All photos and data week of Sep 19-23 2021; click to enlarge.

Prineville Reservoir, Crook County, Oregon, impounds Upper Crooked River. Looking east from the dam. 21% full.

Spillway from dam. 

Ochoco Irrigation District operates the dam and Prineville reservoir, owned by the US Bureau of Reclamation, primarily for irrigation. OID, which set October 1 as the end of the 2021 water season, also operates the older and smaller Ochoco Reservoir, currently 12% full, inflow zero.

Past-Present-Future envisioned as Now.

A hazy Unknowing: changes in the watershed in the last 60 years: clear cutting, fires, diversions, expanded cattle grazing, plantings, etc. Unknown patterns will determine water availability and uses as we move deeper into the 21st century.

John Berger distinguishes between the unsaid and the unsayable.  Following him, we distinguish between unknown and unknowable. What is unknown can be known over time and within parameters yet to be determined.  What is unknowable cannot be known. We wonder, what times these in this prickly thicket of precarious negotiation?

How will Future emerge bearing a tenuous Present and a weighted Past? How similar; how differ? In this light, the expanse of a watershed and the life of a river becomes emblematic.

Crook County, in the center of Oregon, mapped as Exceptional Drought: Exceptional and widespread crop/pasture losses; Shortages of water in reservoirs, streams, and wells creating water emergencies. Assessment derives from: Drought severity, soil moisture, streamflow, and precipitation, with estimated short term and long term durations.

https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/About/AbouttheData/DroughtClassification.aspx

Center Of The Earth 2

Circle in Owyhee country

The traditional lands of the Northern Paiute and Shoshone peoples

Note:  Update of this blog’s March 28 2021 post 

From Protect Thacker Pass, June 1 2021: 

Daranda Hinkey, Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone tribal member and secretary of a group formed by Fort McDermitt tribal members to stop the mine, Atsa Koodakuh wyh Nuwu (People of Red Mountain), states: “From an indigenous perspective, removing burial sites or anything of that sort is bad medicine. Our tribe believes we risk sickness if we remove or take those things. We simply do not want any burial sites in Thacker Pass or anywhere in the surrounding area to be taken. The ones who passed on were prayed for and therefore should stay in their place, no matter what. We need to respect these places. The people at Lithium Nevada wouldn’t go and dig up their family gravesite because they found lithium there, so why are they trying to do that to ours?”

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/03/center-of-earth.html

Photo above: Douglas Beauchamp