Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place

by Daniel Coleman, Michael Gallant (Illustrator)

Overview

How can you truly belong to a place? What does being at home mean in a society that has always celebrated the search for greener pastures? And can a newcomer ever acquire the deep understanding of the land that comes from being part of a culture that has lived there for centuries?

When Daniel Coleman came to Hamilton to take a position at McMaster University, he began to ask himself these kinds of questions, and Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place is his answer. In this exploration of his garden – which Coleman deftly situates in the complicated history of Cootes Paradise, off of Hamilton Harbour – the author pays close attention to his small plot of land sheltered by the Niagara Escarpment. Coleman chronicles enchanting omnivorous deer, the secret life of water and the ongoing tension between human needs and the environment. These, along with his careful attention to the perspectives and history of the Six Nations, create a beguiling portrait of a beloved space.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781928088516
Publisher:	James Street North Books
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Sold by:	PUBLISHDRIVE KFT
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Daniel Coleman was born and raised the child of Canadian missionary parents in Ethiopia, an experience he has written about in The Scent of Eucalyptus: A Missionary Childhood in Ethiopia. He moved to the Canadian prairies in the 1980s and completed his PhD in Canadian Literature at the University of Alberta in 1995. He went on to publish scholarly books on Canadian immigrant writing and on how Canada became a white, British place. Since 1997, he has lived in Hamilton, Ontario, where he teaches Canadian Literature at McMaster University. Daniel Coleman was born and raised the child of Canadian missionary parents in Ethiopia, an experience he has written about in The Scent of Eucalyptus: A Missionary Childhood in Ethiopia. He moved to the Canadian prairies in the 1980s and completed his PhD in Canadian Literature at the University of Alberta in 1995. He went on to publish scholarly books on Canadian immigrant writing and on how Canada became a white, British place. Since 1997, he has lived in Hamilton, Ontario, where he teaches Canadian Literature at McMaster University.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Holy Land

The earth is sacred. Everything on the earth is sacred. Every spot on earth is sacred, not just certain places that are regarded as sacred sites because something happened there. Something happened all over this earth.

– Audrey Shenandoah (Onondaga, Eel Clan)

THE CAROLINA WREN IS rinsing the air with her song, a truck's alarm is beep-beep-beeping as it backs up in the maintenance yard below our place, and, despite the disturbance, my cup is running over. I am a morning person. I tend to wake up cheerful, so it's not difficult for me to feel joy standing on the back step at this early hour. But I want to do something more in this yard than simply admire its beauty. I want to pay a more focused attention to this exact, little place: to listen, to learn its manners, to register its hidden wonders.

I can't claim any particular expertise. I'm not especially well informed about the environment, though, like many, I'm slowly waking up to the ways in which all things – from the needles on the pine trees to the earthworms under the lawn to the very breath in my lungs – are interdependent and connected. But I know that I need them to stay alive, and they need me. I'm not a scientist or a botanist; I like birds, flowers and bees, but I'm not an expert on any of them. I'm not a historian or a landscape architect. Nonetheless, I want to learn about the layers of story and soil, to be more than just a cheerful visitor who compliments the pleasant views. I want to dig in, to hunker down and figure out where I am. I want to connect with where I've ended up.

Take for instance the cricket that's taken over from the Carolina wren, throwing its vibrating song into the tangy air from somewhere down in the wild ginger we planted beside the stairs. Aren't crickets supposed to make their sounds at night? Maybe this one is late to bed. And why doesn't his song ever pause? I watched a YouTube video showing how crickets make their sound by rasping one wing over the barbs on the other, like running a thumb across the teeth of a comb. Their upraised wings form membranes that amplify the chirp. The YouTube crickets had wings only half an inch long that created a rhythmic pause while they flipped the wing back down to the bottom to start the upward rasp. Chirr. Chirr. Chirr. But this cricket in the ginger never pauses. Why? How does he make this continuous, unbroken sound? Maybe he's faster than most. Maybe he whips that wing from the end to the beginning so fast I don't hear a pause.

I have no idea.

It's just male crickets who sing, by the way. They have a whole songbook from which to sing: a loud song to catch a female's attention, a quiet one for courting them when they come close, a sharp one to warn off other males and another to celebrate the joy of union. Entomologists call crickets' rasping action stridulation, and they say there's a relationship between the rate of stridulation and temperature. Crickets are cold-blooded, like all insects, so they stridulate faster when it's warm and slower when the antifreeze gets thick in their veins. An American scientist named Amos Dolbear in 1897 came up with a way to tell the temperature from cricket chirps. He counted the number of chirps a snowy tree cricket made in fourteen seconds and added forty to that number to come up with the temperature in Fahrenheit. This formula is known as Dolbear's Law.

My cricket doesn't seem to have heard of Dolbear's Law. The morning is plenty warm, twenty-five degrees, and it's only seven a.m. The cricket's song is non-stop. I can't count Dolbear units, because all I hear is one unending chirp. Maybe crickets here in the city of Hamilton don't stridulate like snowy tree crickets did for Dolbear.

That's the thing about the livingness of things: by paying attention, by learning the manners of a place, you can learn a whole lot. Enough even to make a law. But then shift locations, listen to a different story, pay attention to a different cricket in a different backyard in a different place, and nature changes the rules.

But you have to notice in the first place to even begin to wonder. Here in this city, the traffic's either too loud or I'm too busy to stop and notice minor details. The world goes on right beside me every day. Mornings like this one, however, make me want to stop and take note. They make me want to fend off my ever-present busyness, dampen the outside noise and focus in. They call me to do some yardwork.

SO WHY NOT START at the beginning? With this morning's first light sparking the fire in the maple, it's easy to think of first things. Beginnings, however, are difficult. Where exactly should a person start? "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," from the book of Genesis? The universe started with a big bang? And what existed before the beginning? Most stories posit a murky and shapeless dark before the quickening of light and life. "And the earth was without form, and void," says the Bible, "darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Without form and void – that's a way of saying that whatever existed at the start, we just don't know. It's we who are in the dark.

Here in this morning light, dewdrops tremble on blades of grass, within earshot of transport trucks groaning up the highway to the top of the escarpment that curves around the city. In the rumble of nearby traffic, anyone might find it hard to imagine that dark and formless time, to picture how things were then. The even grade of the neighbourhood's sidewalks, the level lawns around each house on this street, the web of utility, TV and fibre-optic lines – none of these conjure up formlessness and void. None of these link us to a time when only dark water rippled below, only black sky spread above and in between, just wind – the living, breathing air. No ground, no trees, no sun or moon. Genesis insists that the Spirit of God – some kind of sentience, some kind of presence – hovered over the waters. So the void wasn't exactly void, but our language for what animated the scene is vague and abstract.

The story of beginnings told closer to here is more concrete, has more detail. This is the story told by the Six Nations, the People Who Build the Longhouse – which is what their name, Hodinöhsö:ni', means. Their story of beginnings says the Guardian of the Tree with Lights in It, Hodä:he', had woken from a dark dream saying the people should uproot the tree under his care. After carrying out these strange instructions, Hodä:he' and his wife, Atsi'tsiaká:ion, sat eating a ceremonial meal at the rim of the hole in the Sky Dome, where the roots had been unearthed.

I'm afraid of heights and don't like to think about their legs dangling out over the null and void below, ocean or lake smell wafting up from the absolute black beneath their heels.

Another version has Atsi'tsiaká:ion sending her husband to scrape bark shavings from the briny roots of the sacred tree. She was pregnant, and the tree had power in it – so much power that it glowed. Everyone knew the tree was sacred, something not to be touched. Hodä:he' was nervous and slow. But Atsi'tsiaká:ion was heavy with child; she wanted medicine and didn't have patience for a hesitant husband, so she brushed him aside, stepped to the edge and ... slipped. Some of the longhouse people say she fell through the hole in the sky by accident; others say that Hodä:he' pushed her. Maybe he was angry with her for telling him to disregard taboo and touch the sacred tree. Maybe her supercharged hormones blinded her to how close she was to the edge of the hole.

It's not for us to comment on the behaviour of sky people.

So the woman fell, and as she did, she grabbed desperately for a handhold. All she could grasp was a fistful of little plants and roots, not enough to hold her. Some waterfowl, floating on the black water below, saw the falling woman and decided to fly up and ease her landing.

So, according to this story, the world was not really null and void at the beginning. There's a backstory before the Beginning, a kind of prequel that has bird and animal nations living on earth's water before the sky people arrived. This beginning before the beginning only mentions water creatures – no crickets. Perhaps that's because there wasn't any land yet, no place where the nonstop crickets of Hamilton could stridulate.

The waterfowl conferred, as they carried the falling woman on their wings, about where they could put her down. Some flew down and held council with the animals living in the water below. What to do? Finally, A'nó:wara the turtle, the most solid and dependable of all, volunteered to let the woman land on the hard shell of her back. Atsi'tsiaká:ion was thankful for the firm place to settle, but she looked around and saw it was hard and bare. She showed her new neighbours the plants and roots she had grabbed as she fell and explained that she needed to plant them in soil. She needed a yard to live in, a place to tend her few roots and seeds, strawberries and medicines, if she was going to survive.

The humblest of all the creatures, Hano'gyeh Muskrat, volunteered to dive to the bottom of the deep and bring up some earth for Atsi'tsiaká:ion to plant her fistful of baby plants. Different layers of the story tell this part differently: some say that other beings, such as Beaver and Otter, dove down first, and that the water was so deep they came up empty handed. Empty pawed. Some versions even say they died in the attempt. Another version has Hano'gyeh diving alone and being down there for a long time, while everybody waited anxiously. It is said that his body finally floated, lifeless, to the surface. Beaver looked closer, though, and was surprised to find mud clutched in his paws. This mud from the sea floor dried on Turtle's back, the brine of lake weed evaporated and Muskrat's mud smelled more and more like earth. Atsi'tsiaká:ion danced in circles of gratitude, and as she did, the soil spread out like pie dough until it covered all of Turtle Island.

She danced out the place where I now live, including this yard, where I stand today.

MUCH OF WHAT I just said is full of loaded words and mixed up names. I've hardly begun to tell the earliest story from this area, and already I've stumbled into controversial territory.

The longhouse of the Hodinöhsö:ni' people is made up of a series of rafters or nations. Officially, there are six of them, each with its own language: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora – although others, such as small groups of Delawares, Tutelos and Nanticokes, also adhere to the longhouse. The names I'm using are a mix of longhouse languages. The name Atsi'tsiaká:ion comes from Mohawk, while Hodä:he' comes from Onondaga. Hano'gyeh is an Onondaga spelling for muskrat, while it's spelled Anò:kien in Mohawk. Say them both out loud and you'll hear the echo. Different names and spellings indicate where different versions of the story originate. I've used the version of Atsi'tsiaká:ion's name from the Mohawk storyteller Sakokweniónkwas, also known as Tom Porter, who learned it from his grandmother, among others. And I've used the version of the husband's name from a long line of tellers and retellers. Sotsisowah, also known as John Mohawk, a Seneca professor at the University of Buffalo, updated a transcript of the story originally written down by the Tuscarora scholar J.N.B. Hewitt, who worked at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. Around 1889, Hewitt came to the Six Nations of the Grand River – today just a half hour's drive south of here – and heard the story from Seneca elder and chief John Arthur Gibson.

Given these inter-linguistic, inter-national sources, it's understandable that the names I'm using might get confusing.

Professor Mohawk, now deceased, was not Mohawk but Seneca. He re-edited the story from a transcript made by a Tuscarora ethnographer, who heard it from a Seneca chief who told the story in the Onondaga language. The point is that it's an old story that's been passed from tongue to tongue, language to language, generation to generation, reserve to museum to university and back. It's as layered as the limestone cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment that outline this end of the lake. At least all these tellers have something in common: all are members of the longhouse builders of the Iroquoian Confederacy.

But there's a history of bad blood in the name Iroquois. The Mohawk writer and language teacher Brian Maracle says the French may have heard the name Iroquois four hundred years ago from the Algonquians, who were rivals of the Hodinöhsö:ni' and called them "Irinakhoiw," meaning "real snakes" or "rattlesnakes." The Algonquian Confederacy rivalled the Iroquoian one for trade, and their epithet would have pleased the French, who disliked those "snakes" for preferring to deal with the Dutch and the British. So they spread the word.

But I just called Maracle a Mohawk, another Algonquian insult meaning "cannibal." The Mohawks' name for themselves is actually Kanien'kehá:ka, which means "people of the flinty ground," after the rocky terrain in eastern New York, along the waterway known today as the Mohawk River. But they've had so many years swimming in English, whether they wanted to or not, that the old language has mostly been washed out. I've heard Hodinöhsö:ni' people use the old curses to name themselves today, often with a chuckle and a shrug.

These names grow out of ground that is contested and shifting. I have cobbled them together from books by Hodinöhsö:ni' people who speak different languages, from outsiders, from the internet and from the beginner's class in Mohawk language I took a few years ago. I offer you fair warning: take my words with a grain of salt, because they are as mixed up as the sand and cobble of the ridge upon which this yard is built.

Even putting the story of Atsi'tsiaká:ion and Hodä:he' at the front of this book raises problems, because creation stories are sacred to the people who hold them. Over the years, these sacred Hodinöhsö:ni' stories have been raided by anthropologists and museum collectors who don't practice the everyday duties and ceremonies of the people to whom they belong. They don't wake in the morning to utter the Words That Come Before All Else, known as the Thanksgiving Address, which recognizes the order of Creation that welcomed Sky Woman into a world that provided everything we humans need. They don't perform the Four Sacred Ceremonies that re-enact the agreements between people and the more-than-human world that keep nature's cycles turning. Those of us foreign to these practices don't know what it means to bring these stories to life in our everyday world. Treating them as legends, myths or academic curiosities kills their vitality, like taking a butterfly fluttering in the coralbells here in the yard and pinning it to a board in a glass box. Not something you want to do with Sky Woman.

I'm caught, therefore, because a settler society like ours is built on both erasing and glass-boxing the stories of the people who were here before us. Without an active awareness of First Peoples and their stories, it's easier to think of our ocean-crossing founders as peaceful settlers and to ignore the culture killing that was part and parcel of land theft. If we act like there aren't any stories of those who lived here before our ancestors arrived, we take over without memory or conscience.

The longhouse stories grew out of this land, out of this part of northeastern America. Out of this territory of Great Lakes, limestone cliffs and Carolinian forests. They were passed on by generations of people who had watched and listened to this particular habitat for thousands of years. Well, not exactly this habitat, at least not any more, since ninety percent of what's growing here in my yard – the Japanese maples, the Russian sage, the hybrid tea roses – are imports and hybrids from Europe, Africa and Asia. Our ideas of flower gardens, lawns and city streets have changed this place dramatically. But all around and underneath these newcomers, the foundation of the ancient habitat remains. And longhouse stories help us attend to that ongoing, living foundation on which everything else – all the new imports – depends. These stories reconnect us to the laws and agreements by which the natural system works. "The primary law of Indian government is the spiritual law," writes Syracuse University professor and Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons:

It has been the mandate of our people to look after the welfare of the land and its life. Central to this responsibility is the recognition and respect for the equality of all of the elements of life on this land. ... If all life is considered equal, then we are no more or no less than anything else. Therefore, all life must be respected. Whether it is a tree, a deer, a fish, or a bird, it must be respected because it is equal. We believe it is equal because we are spiritual people. (5–6)

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Yardwork"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Daniel Coleman.
Excerpted by permission of Wolsak and Wyn Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Prologue 7

Holy Land 13

This Actual Ground 41

Watershed 91

Broken Pine 135

Deer in Their Own Coats 163

Traffic 197

Yardwork 233

Acknowledgements 251

Glossary 255

Bibliography 263

Editorial Reviews

"In Coleman's work, paying close attention to the ground we stand on becomes a spiritual act. He reminds readers too that the more we focus in on a small space, the bigger it grows—and the more it can tell us about the larger world, the global network of which the one small place and all of its inhabitants are a part. The book will encourage all readers to engage in this kind of intensive "Place Thought" as a way to connect with the natural world to which they belong." - Hamilton Review of Books

From the Publisher