Ask not “who am I?”, But “who might I become?”

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  Nature is the marvellous that the surrealist seeks

By Shaun Day-Woods

One of the most ubiquitous expressions in surrealist writing is the word ‘marvellous’, a term which harkens back to Andre Breton’s original declaration. In the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, the founder of the movement wrote ‘Let us not mince words, the marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful.’

With this in mind, what does the aphorism “Nature is the marvellous that the surrealist seeks”, from my book “Dancing and Digging, proverbs on freedom and nature,” mean? Most of the adages in the book were intended to be provocative and not have a single correct answer. And I must admit that my own use of the word marvellous, as a surrealist term, might be considered idiosyncratic, or even, a misuse. But let me thread a weird little web that might capture your interest and help you understand the maxim.

The surrealists have typically expressed themselves artistically - in paintings and poetry, etc. And while there are deep political, philosophical and psychoanalytic roots to their explorations, beliefs and experiments, they tend therefore to be largely situated within the art and literary milieus. This makes a lot of sense for a number of reasons. One of them being that surrealism rejects the notion that humans are uniquely and essentially rational beings in a rational cosmos. And what better spaces to look for the non-rational than within artistic ones?

But if Breton wanted to help us escape the prison camp of reason as the defining characteristic of human selfhood, then advocating for a reconnection with a landscape-as-home, for an embrace of the natural world in all its chaotic, convulsive beauty, seems like the best place to start, rather than in the universities and art galleries of cities. Because in my view, and, apparently, in the view of many surrealists, the non-civilized have the easiest and most direct access to the marvellous. Breton believed for instance that the lifeways of 19th century Caribbean peoples led to a natural contact with the extraordinary by virtue of their implicit rejection of rationalist belief systems in favour of a surrealist utopia of a constant and organic immersion of the senses in their magical landscape of occult religion, mystical beings and thriving flora and fauna.

Throughout its history there have been many observations made by surrealists that note how the non-industrialized “colonised”, “the primitive”, etc, lived lives unencumbered by the constraints of bourgeois life, by the cages of rationality and belief in a simplistic cosmology based around monotheism and causality.

Breton’s personal collection included many ethnographic artefacts he considered strange and wondrous originating from cultures outside of modernity and capitalism, for example North American indigenous masks, a small statue from New Guinea, Aboriginal markings on bark parchments and an amulet from the Solomon Islands, all indicative that being embedded in nature leads to cultures that are filled with expressions of the marvellous.

The surrealist of history was an activist wanting to overthrow the regimes of order, obedience and alienation, and the resulting boredom and miserabilism, that rule the lives of the modern citizen, regimes that have sovereignty not only over entire countries, but over cities, neighbourhoods and individual bodies. The subconscious became a source of an unfettered, raw and authentic reality. A single person could use techniques like automatic writing or drawing to access the subconscious and discover a truer, freer aspect of one’s Self and to explore suppressed or latent landscapes that were out of reach from the long repressive arms of the law and morality.

As the overthrow of capitalism, or modernity, became less and less likely, surrealism focused on artistic experimentation and convivial nights among comrades as the means to access the marvellous. Creative processes and art shows, games, experiments, drugs...I've personally explored all of these myself, some in excess, as part of my personal tactic of survival and resistance against the police and priests in and out of my head. But what I have rarely come across were exhortations and attempts to not simply withdraw your psyche, for limited time periods, from urban civilization, but to withdraw your body as well. As Breton and others clearly pointed out, the so called primitive, the un-modern, the one who still lives among gods and spirits, who obeys no political authority, who has no banks or landlords or police or bosses, who lives embedded in a habitat, they are the ones who experience the marvellous the easiest and, in fact, seem to be perpetually immersed in the wonderments that the surrealist seeks. Therefore it would make sense if surrealists were more vocal in advocating a withdrawal from city living and its domesticated culture and be fierce advocates of various primitivisms in order to live existences that are filled with the marvellous.

It is my view that the less domesticated we are, the more marvellous we become. Let me rephrase a now famous slogan - “beneath the pavement is the marvellous”. In other words it is in tearing up and destroying cities, with their massified, repressed lives, utterly disconnected from nature, that the marvellous - the spirits, the monsters, the unknowns and the dreamlands will have space in which to return. Cities intrinsically crush and erase the marvellous, not make space for it. In this sense, a rediscovery of our kinship with nature is the easiest path to lives filled with the singular and fantastic, not merely a passing art exhibit, evening with friends or artefacts on our wall, not that this is the surrealist practice or vision, I am speaking here to all of us who reject the precepts of modernity, who seek raw truth and more beauty.

We need to see ourselves as marvels within habitats of marvels, for this is the gift of the cosmos we have been given. Every aspect of nature is a breathtaking wonder. I seek a world in which we delight in the uniqueness of each other and of every iota of the planet we live on, not only of specific creations of human culture. We can move in this direction by withdrawing from civilization’s stunted world and forming unions of imaginative beings embedded in landscapes in which we daily interact with all of its marvels.

I've often noted how boring humans seem to think we are compared to other creatures, and yet we are as wondrous as any of the myriad other curious and bizarre beings that populate our landscapes.

Many surrealists have been enamoured with insects, leading one commentator to describe them as “totemic” within Surrealism. This is another example of how nature has always been viewed by surrealists as inherently marvellous and the primary place we should be seeking it. Cities are boring, civilization is boring, work is boring, school is boring...but what the earth has birthed is anything but. Who can deny the awesomeness of bear claws, of the scent of pine needles, the shriek of eaglets, the snake hissing nearby, the flavour of maple syrup...if one seeks a cabinet of curiosities, one need only walk along any shoreline or through any woodland.

 Un-domesticating ourselves will lead to our renewed ability to experience what is marvellous about each separate aspect of the planet and cosmos we inhabit...its flora and fauna, its sun and towering mountains, its hurricane funnels...dreams, sexual encounters, psychedelic adventures...the clouds, the stars, the galaxies...even darkness and light and the foggy unknowns in between. Embracing the chaos, with its surprises and mysteries, of undomesticated realms, including our own inner ones, will lead us to lives populated by the marvellous at every turn. Un-domesticating ourselves helps us see the miraculous improbability and singularity of every moment.

Even the marvellous needs a habitat. I speak of nature not as a place that one would seek out in order to temporarily experience the marvellous only to return to the planetary work-machine refreshed, but to destroy the planetary work-machine so that the marvellous can expand, can find new places to take root, can once again be as much a part of daily life as drinking water is. In fact the simple act of drinking water, and the sensation of water itself, can return to us as supernatural experiences.

The marvellous is most easily found where the a-rational resides and in sensual wisdom, by having such deep connections to a habitat that we can commune with its spirits, ghosts, hidden secrets and secret languages; it is accessed by being free to self-create and explore without constraints.

We can resist the tyranny of the belief systems that crush and deny and render extinct the intangible marvels of our landscapes. Let us heed the Surrealist call to demand the impossible, and let us do so by adapting to nature rather than capitalism, and in so doing, make ourselves marvellous, for it is in the realm of the undomesticated and organic where the unfettered spirit of Surrealism flourishes the easiest.

This essay recently appeared in The Oystercatcher

On Parks

 On Parks

Anyone who enjoys mountaineering, hiking, camping or exploring valleys, caves and canyons, is grateful that parks exist. They are a welcome respite from the hustle and bustle of urban living, an opportunity to delight in the slower rhythms, fresher air and greater diversity ofplant and animal life. Parks are refuges, oases of green in the otherwise dreary grey of concrete and pavement. The local and federal land areas put aside to a large degree for conservation and public enjoyment exist not only to provide a cherished escape from civilization, but a sanctuary for wildlife, whose habitats are fast disappearing under the guns of housing developments and industrialism. Parks, it would seem, leave little to complain about.

Recently, however, it came to my attention that some folk, particularly indigenous peoples, did have some complaints. And, as I did a little research, it didn’t take long for me to discover that these complaints weren’t frivolous. In fact, there are many real concerns around these seemingly benign oases. There is even a largely unknown history behind them, one whose basis continues to this day.

Indigenous peoples and parks

Most federal parks, not only in the US, but in Canada and indeed throughout the world, were once part of traditional indigenous territory. Following their introduction, millions of indigenous peoples around the world were forced out of their habitats.

Why has the public accepted this? First and foremost because parks have been viewed as necessary, benevolent tools for the conservation of nature. Secondly, many people have a personal stake in their existence, providing their only possible escape from urban living. And finally, most people simply aren’t aware of the displacement of those millions that was necessary for their establishment. And so activists, radicals, reformers, and green minded people have accepted them without much critical thought.

Parks seem to be bulwarks against continuing encroachment into wilderness, and thus storehouses of flora and fauna for a future regenerating nature. However, perhaps its time to reconsider whether parks and conservation areas, as we know them, are a significant, long-term solution to the destructive madness of industrialism and to look more closely at what wilderness is and the impact parks have had and continue to have, on indigenous peoples everywhere.

America’s, and the world’s, First Park

In 1864 Abraham Lincoln signed a Land Grant bill giving nearly 40,000 acres of federal land “encompassing Yosemite Valley to the state of California for public enjoyment and preservation.” The grant deeded both Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias. This was the basis for the creation of state parks as we know them today: setting aside “scenic” lands simply to protect them and to allow for their enjoyment by the public.

On October 1, 1890, the U.S. Congress set aside more than 1,500 square miles of ‘reserved forest lands’ soon to be known as Yosemite National Park. But where did this land come from? Twelve years earlier, it was taken from a people known as the Miwok. The Mariposa Indian War, a territorial grab and an effort to subdue Indian autonomy, was the necessary precedent that led to the possibility of that first park being created.

Indigenous people have lived in the Yosemite region for about 8,000 years. By the mid-nineteenth century they were primarily of Southern Miwok ancestry. However, trade with the Mono Paiutes from the East side of the Sierra for pinyon pine nuts, obsidian, and other materials resulted in many alliances between the two tribes. There were plenty of acorns there and deer were abundant, making this a desirable place to settle. In fact, it had one of the highest densities of aboriginal peoples on the West Coast.

After the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills in 1848, thousands of miners came to the Yosemite area to seek their fortune. Naturally, the local First Nations fought to protect their homelands. In December 1850, a trading post was destroyed at Fresno Crossing, and three settler men were killed. Later, a force under Sheriff Burney clashed with the Indians on January 11, 1851. As a result of this opposition to the invaders, the Mariposa Battalion was organized as a punitive expedition under the authority of the state to bring an end to the resistance.

The Battalion entered Yosemite Valley on March 27, 1851. Dr. Lafayette Bunnell, the company physician, who later wrote about his awestruck impressions of the valley in The Discovery of the Yosemite, wanted to “sweep the territory of any scattered bands that might infest it.” He is also known to have had a take-no-pris- oners approach to the conflict.

Three companies were formed and launched several campaigns. Indian food stores and even some villages were destroyed and tribal peoples pursued into the mountains through snow and slush. “Expulsion from the Park deprived the Miwok of their traditional hunting grounds, grazing areas, fish runs and nut collecting groves. When they tried to take anything back from the whites, they were resisted with guns and then hounded out of the area again by the Mariposa Battalion.

Ironically the veryword ‘Yosemite’ is, according to Simon Schama, a term of abuse used by the Miwok to describe the Americans who were assaulting them and actually means “some among them are killers[2].” Eventually all of the associated tribes were defeated and were forced to accept reservation life. Military units administered the park while the state continued to govern the area covered by the original 1864 grant. Civilian park rangers didn’t take over from the military until 1914.

The extraordinary landscapes that made Yosemite desirable from a scenic point of view were actually the result of the Miwok’s land use practices, primarily a direct outcome of the intentional burning of underbrush. After their expulsion, the activities of early entrepreneurs, tourists and settlers, (the construction of hotels and residences, livestock grazed in meadows, orchards were planted, etc,) wreaked great damage on the eco-systems, painstakingly and properly tended for so long by the Miwok and their ancestors.

We find this pattern of outlook and events recurring over and over again in the creation of parks in many places: a) the notion of wilderness as a place that doesn’t include people living there b) the recognition that an area has exceptional scenic, wilderness or industrial resource value c) the area is protected by being turned into a park d) the expulsion and dispossession of its inhabitants who were often largely responsible for creating and/or protecting its beauty/resources in the first place.

The Miwok petitioned the U.S. government in 1890. They called for compensation for their losses and denounced the managers of the park. “The valley is cut up completely with dusty, sandy roads leading from the hotels of the white in every direction... All seem to come only to hunt money... The valley has been taken away from us ...or ... a pleasure ground...” Their pleas were ignored and further evictions of remnant Miwok settlements were made in 1906, 1929 and as late as 1969.[3]

Canada’s first national park

In 1871, AS A CONDITION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA JOINING Canada, the Canadian Government had to agree to build a transcontinental railroad linking BC to the rest of the country. Of course, the construction of a transcontinental railroad also established a claim to the remaining parts of British North America not yet integrated into either the Canadian or America nation-states. It comes as no surprise that Banff National Park was created in 1885, the year of the defeat of the Metis Rebellion, which cleared and opened the west for settlement, tourists and capital investment.

The official story goes that in 1882, Tom Wilson, a surveyor for the Canadian Pacific Railway, “discovered” Lake Louise, the most accessible centerpiece of the park, on the way through the Rockies. A year later the Cave and Basin Hot springs were discovered by three railway construction workers. People began to flock to the site, hotels went up and the town of Banff was born.

The truth, however, is that it was people from the Nakodah First Nation that guided Wilson to the Lake. In fact, they already had a name for it, they called it “The Lake of the Little Fish.” The Nakodah (also known as Stoney) are descendants of the Dakota and Lakota nations of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, part of the large Sioux Nation.

The name “Stoney” was given them by white explorers because of their technique of using fire-heated rocks to boil broth in rawhide bowls. The Nakodah were familiar with the area, having lived throughout it for at least several hundred years. They knew the trails and passes as part of their hunting grounds. There is archaeological evidence pointing to human occupation going back at least ten thousand years, but apparently the Nakodah came from somewhere around the Mississippi after an outbreak of smallpox in the 1600’s.

In any case, by the time the Railroad was being built, the mountains were part of their home. I’m not aware of any uprisings to protect their homelands, however the “Stoney” were signatories to Treaty 7. (In order for the transcontinental railroad to make its way across Canada, it had to go through what were recognized as the traditional lands of different aboriginal peoples. So it was important for the Canadian State to negotiate Treaties with the distinct tribes living along the route to allow the railroad to be built.) Regardless, the whole territory was evidence of long term harmonious human occupation, much like Yellowstone.

Sadly, during the first decades, park managers would do regular predator hunts, believing that mountain lions, coyotes and wolves, for instance, should be killed to save deer and elk. And now, only a hundred and thirty years later, many of the Park’s eco-systems are threatened, as are several of the animals who live within it, and the Nakodah live on a reservation.

In its 2007 annual report the Parks Canada web site states: “Parks Canada continued to work with the Siksika Nation and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada to resolve the outstanding specific claim in the park.” The claim is by the Siksika First Nation. Furthermore, in May 2000 the Siksika threatened “ to occupy Castle Mountain in Banff National Park to pressure the federal government into handing it over. The Siksika, who live east of Calgary near Gleichen, say they’ve been trying since 1960 to gain control of a 68-square-kilometre parcel that was used by their ancestors for rituals.[4]”

The Siksika are part of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which consists of four different tribes, the Pikuni/Peigan, North Peigan Pikuni, Blood/Kainai, and Blackfoot/Siksika. Banff is the most heavily developed national park in North America, entertaining more than five million visitors a year and has been the site of fights between environmentalists and developers. Environmentalists claim that added development “will put added stress on a fragile lake region where grizzly bears, lynx and wolverines are already threatened by the presence of as many as 20,000 tourists a day.[5]”

Closer to home

In 1989, I WENT TO THE SAVE THE STEIN VALLEY GATHERING. I joined with many others and climbed to alpine elevations in the Valley, near Lytton in southwestern British Columbia. I spent a couple of days listening to First Nations elders and activists and scientists from near and far. The non-native activists spoke primarily of helping to preserve an intact and unlogged watershed, a “pristine wilderness.” The First Nation elders spoke of protecting their traditional territory and of a hope of regenerating traditional ways.

The U.S. Wilderness Act states that parks are places “where man himself is a visitor who doesn’t remain.” But isn’t it industrial modes of living that threaten the organic world? Isn’t it how we live, and not simply our presence, which really makes the difference? From an essay by Marcus Colchester:

Many indigenous peoples remain perplexed by western views of what conservation means. “My Dad used to say: ‘that’s our pantry.’ We knew about all the plants and animals, when to pick, when to hunt,” remarked Ruby Dunstan of the Nl’aka’ -pamux people, who have been trying to prevent the logging of their ancestral lands around Stein Valley in Western Canada. “But some of the white environmentalists seemed to think if something was declared a wilderness, no-one was allowed inside because it was so fragile. So they have put a fence around it, or maybe around themselves.[6]”

The fact is that humans, like every living species, need a habitat. Call it a territory if you will, but we need a place that we know intimately, that creates us as we create it. And because indigenous peoples in North America had this intimacy, it was incumbent on them to protect their land bases from incursion and invasions, especially destructive ones. After all, as Ruby Dunstan pointed out, these were their “pantry”, land bases that were part of their sustenance and their lives in myriad ways.

The lands weren’t untouched by humans. In fact, humans lived within most of the “wilderness areas” that became parks. To an outsider they appeared “pristine’, “untouched”, “wild”, but, in fact, they were closer to a type of permaculture on a grand scale. Humans had inhabited many of these “wilderness areas” for lit rally thousands of years. That they were so rich in their abundance as well as appealing in their natural beauty is really a testimony to the organic ways of their human inhabitants who were determined not to spoil their pantries but to respect and understand them.

The Stein Valley, like Yosemite and Banff, was a living example of harmonious human occupation. The valley had been significant to the Nlaka’pamux people for thousands of years. It provided for them. There are a large number of pictographs still visible today throughout the valley, from small single symbols to one of the largest pictograph sites in Canada. At Asking Rock near Stryen Creek, the Nlaka’pamux can stop to pray and ask permission to travel the valley safely.

According to the organization BC Spaces for Nature

Evidence of the Nlaka’pamux’s inhabitancy is found throughout the valley. Where the Indians once wintered in gigantic pithouses at the confluence of the Fraser shallow depressions of their winter storehouses can still be found. Numerous culturally modified trees, cedar trees with large, rectangular strips of bark missing, can be found near Teaspoon Creek. This small grove of cedars provided an important source of fibre for cord, clothing, roofing, basketry, and insulating materials.[7]

In 1993-1994, protests in Clayoquot Sound, also in British Columbia, reached a climax with nearly 800 environmental protestors arrested. This was the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. Needing to heal the fracture between itself and many environmentalists, the government at the time doubled the provincial park land-base in BC. As a result the Stein Valley Provincial Park was created as an area to be co-managed by the Lytton First Nation and BC government. There is allowance for the Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux Heritage Park to be used for “spiritual” activities, but I don’t know at this time whether the Stein is also being used for subsistence activities or not.

Asia, Africa, India and Latin America

While we have been focusing on North America, the park model was actually exported throughout the world, forcing millions of tribal peoples out of their habitats/territories. The practice continues to this day in Asia, Africa and India, for example, where non-profit foundations and United Nations sponsored organizations are eagerly trying to protect what little land is left that hasn’t been destroyed by industrial modes of living.

Unfortunately, be it the Twa peoples expulsion from Congo’s Kahuzi-Biega National Park, the Maasai from the Amboseli National Park in Kenya or tribal people in southern India forced out of the Indira Gandhi National Park as part of an “eco-development” scheme funded by the Global Environment Facility, parks and conservation lands remain one more force which dispossesses tribal peoples. In Africa alone, one million square kilometers of land has been expropriated for conservation over the past one hundred years. Estimates in India range around three-quarters of a million people pushed off their traditional lands for conservation, in Africa the number is likely in the millions. Unfortunately, and ironically, land that has long been occupied and protected by indigenous peoples continues to be deemed “wild” and therefore suitable for “conservation” primarily by having them declared parks, thus making them out of bounds for the indigenous peoples who maintained them in the first place.

What happens to the people who once lived rich, meaningful lives within these habitats? They become like you and I. Dispossession leads to rootlessness, discouragement, depression, inability to be self-reliant, bad nutrition, broken communities, severed kinship ties, and anger, too often turned inward or directed to the nearest person.

I think we need to realize that dedication to creating parkland and conservation areas does not necessarily coincide with helping regenerate ways of living harmoniously with a habitat. More often than not it promotes a misanthropic outlook that posits intact, healthy land areas being by definition “human-free’’, rather than capitalism-free. We tend to ignore the fact that indigenous peoples seeking to maintain or renew their traditional life ways need to have access tothese areas, especially if the parkland in question was actually part of their traditional territory.

Even liberal organizations like UNESCO have begun to realize that there has been a negative social impact associated with many protected areas. In some places in Asia, Africa and Latin America, provisions have been made for local control so that traditional lifestyles might continue. But these tend to be limited “buffer zones”, where the original inhabitants can control “development projects”. These attempts have not succeeded.

Apparently coalitions of indigenous peoples have had some success in forcing international bodies to recognize their inherent right to manage their traditional territories. “In the 1990s, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), the World Conservation Congress and the World Commission on Protected Areas all adopted new policies and resolutions which strongly endorse indigenous peoples’ rights and promote the co-management of protected areas, based on negotiated agreements.[8]” However, these organizations aren’t arguing for free access to one’s habitat, but to “negotiated agreements” with outsiders and centralized authority, and land bases integrated into the scheme of state regulations and subject to the pressures of politics and the market.

Regardless of some recognition, many parks and conservation areas, especially in impoverished countries, remain part of the greater theft of traditional homelands by arrogant, powerful outsiders who impose their views of what constitutes healthy habitats. It isn’t parks and conservation areas that will help stem the tide of destruction and plunder, but recognition that new ways of living are required. And these new ways can be informed by the old ways ofland based people.

Traditional Habitats and territories

In several parts of the world and in some parts of Canada many of the old ways have been lost, or nearly so. In the Pacific Northwest, however, this isn’t the case. It seems sensible to promote a return to the traditional ways of the people of the land, because, as we have seen, the empirical proof is there for long-term harmonious occupation. Naturally, in some countries, there could be real challenges for some peoples regaining control of these parks in order to live according to ecologically harmonious principles because it would mean reawakening and re-learning buried systems of subsistence and self-organization. There are also new environmental limits that might conflict with traditional life ways. But the simple fact remains; if it is their land, it must be returned.

Backhome, in Canada, in the Pacific Northwest, radicals can focus on protecting areas from industrialism and capitalism, while also arguing for the free access to those lands by the people whose territories they have always been, rather than for the creation of parks. And, if the lands aren’t under claim by an indigenous nation, why not consider making them your own home, regardless of what the authorities and misanthropes have to say?