Winter 2007

One sweltering afternoon last summer I stood on a ridge, peering down, through a growth of alder and birch, upon a small lake that remains unmarked on any conventional map. Six teenagers were with me, two probation officers, and a tribal member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community. We'd just finished hiking in off a gravel road, up a winding, overgrown path to a site where several of us had planted wild rice seed the previous September.

Swarms of mosquitoes were out that day, the humidity high. It was uncomfortable. Attention spans were short. Two thirteen-year-olds from our group, one known by adults as having an attitude problem, began pointing to a tree and shouting, "Bears! Bears!"

Sure enough, two little bear cubs were perched on a tree limb, fifteen feet above the ground, looking frightened and bewildered. A probation officer, alarmed, yelled, "Come back over here! It's dangerous!" The girls continued their inquisitive prance around the tree, pointing and laughing. Sensing the potential threat, I tried to encourage, without much luck, the two teenagers to move closer to the rest of us.

Then, echoing through the forest, my tribal friend, a colleague from one of our nearby Indian communities, bellowed, "Come back NOW! This is the bear's home! Their mother's nearby. We're visitors here! YOU'RE SHOWING NO RESPECT!" Without a second's hesitation, the two young teenage girls turned and meekly returned to join the group. Moments later, the ten of us slipped quietly down the path to return to our vehicles.

What made the difference between responses from these young girls? Pondering that question for some days, I've now come to believe it had nothing to do with obedience to external authority. It was a sudden awareness for them of connection, an empathetic link.

Our modern lives are threatened to be shaped increasingly by a sea of celebrity fixation and hi-tech pseudo-intimacy. Drugs and gambling are shamelessly marketed on our television sets, addictions ubiquitous. Much popular religion has become rigid, cold, small. Anxiety disorders are rampant. There's hunger for a deeper, more sacred way of looking at our lives, our landscapes, our neighbors. Indigenous perspectives, like my colleague's about the natural world, are dismissed for the sake of what many deem progress.

Hope is something longed for in the deepest recesses of the human heart. Once, in a Michigan forest, on the edge of a forgotten lake, in a single moment, two young, troubled girls awakened. I witnessed the healing begin.

-JWM

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