How do we learn to read the land? What stories are there to tell? In our second block of the fall semester, I had the privilege to guide our group of students alongside co-instructor Jacob Hundt to explore the human and environmental histories of the Driftless Region. Together, we honed our observational and descriptive skills to explore and express the ongoing stories playing out on the land.
First we explored the role of stories and language in shaping our relationship to and place in the ecological world, reading a variety of storytellers from the North American continent such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Wendell Berry, and Ursula Le Guinn to reflect on storytelling’s power and purpose. We also questioned the tool we’re working with––language itself––discussing some of the limits of the English language to express and describe the earth and challenging ourselves to put into practice a “grammar of animacy”, as Robin Wall Kimmerer describes it. We began to ask, “Who is this?” instead of “What is this?” as we walked through the forest, “Maple? Elm? Oak?” Kimmerer’s work also highlighted the importance of Indigenous language preservation and revitalization across the North American continent––these languages carry different ways of seeing the world, different ways of being, hold the culture and worldviews of people and places.
Students began to deepen their own skills of observation, description, and storytelling throughout the block by selecting a sit spot around Viroqua to go to with weekly writing assignments aimed at deepening our ability to observe and creatively engage with a place. Authors such as Annie Dillard and Henry David Thoreau served as guides to deeply observe and write about place, while Ursula Le Guinn and Kanaka Maoli and Anishinaabe traditional stories inspired us to see the world through the perception of other beings too––beavers, mountains, coyotes, squirrels.
As students returned to their sit spots each week, they returned with another layer to observe––the role of history in shaping the human and ecological communities we now see. We rooted our understanding of this place first through the culture, environmental management, and legacies of the Ho-Chunk Nation, our first storytellers and land shapers here, and then the later histories of the settlers of this region. By engaging with the history of changing communities and land use over the past 200 years of colonization and settlement, we grew our ability to recognize and observe how these stories can still be read in the landscape today, and reflected on how they shape the stories we want to tell and the ways we want to exist in these communities.
All the while, our course was deepened with the knowledge and skill sets of visiting local teachers––Martha Buche taught us how a rock from Lake Superior can shape a flat piece of copper into a bowl, Liandra Skenandore showed us the way water turns sturdy black ash into a material that we can bend and shape, and Henning Garvin shared with us his knowledge of linguistics and the efforts of Ho-Chunk language revitalization with the Ho-Chunk Nation.
Using these new tools of observation, awareness, storytelling, and history, we completed this block with a blustery and exciting afternoon of storytelling. Students created stories to share with the Thoreau College community that told us about their sit spot. Students shared songs, rituals, poems, academic papers, and short stories that invited us into what they’ve learned and guided us into deeper connection with the living histories of the Driftless Region.
