TENDING LAND FOR CULTURAL AND
ECOLOGICAL
REGENERATION
Current Opportunities To Join us In Learning and Community Land-Tending Gatherings
If you feel called into tending Land as part of Tending Ancestral threads and Soul, this offering at River's Bend might speak to you- May 2-7, 2024 Into the Heart and Soul with Our Ancestors: Remembering Ourselves into Earth's Dreaming
More Musing on the relationship between Land Regeneration, Ancestral Relations and Deep Culture Repair
Writing the Land of My Bones
July 23, 2023
So many of us know . . . it's time to turn towards Fire, to learn to live with this essential, powerful element of life. We feel our desire to deepen intimacy with the places we live and embrace the unknown future rather than hope we can seal ourselves off.
Our River’s Bend team has begun a powerful process of returning to relationship with a fire cycle on this land and in our lives, as the Indigenous peoples of California did for thousands of years, including the Coastal Pomo (Thabatay in this particular part of the Navarro watershed), until this kind of cultural burn was outlawed by the US in 1911. Luckily, that knowledge and wisdom is making a resurgence in Mendocino County and around the state.
70 + humans came up to RB over 3 Winter weekends of land-tending, ceremony, feasting and music during the Winter moon cycles - Winter Solstice, Imbolc and Spring Equinox. We stepped into a visceral relationship with fire, dirt, trees, water - thanks to blessed winter rains - and one another and the other beings here.
What are we learning? Here’s a first installment of stories and photos we want to share with you who love this place (and might be inspired to join us! ). There's a lot more to say - this is just the beginning!
A beginning . . .
In Fall 2021, after years of watching our Tan oaks struggle and wanting to contribute to a healthier forest ecology here, I reached out to Roy Arthur Blodgett (whom we know from Weaving Earth, which has a long relationship with RB). My curiosity caught "fire" as Roy helped us "read" this landscape to understand the significance and struggles of Oak trees on this land. I felt literally ecstatic to understand the relationships between them and the other beings here: Douglas Firs, fire, deer, predators, and humans - and hundreds of other interwoven relations. Here's a little of what we learned in that initial conversation:
The Oaks are a "Keystone" species, providing shelter and food for literally hundreds of species. Our Oaks, like those throughout the region, are in trouble due to a number of big human changes in the ecology of this place over the last 100 years.
-Fewer large predators like mountain lions and bear due to hunting and smaller wild ranges mean the deer population has boomed. Deer love to eat the young oak leaves. This keeps the next generation of oaks stunted for decades - they grow slowly outwards, like a bush, in order to protect a single stem in the middle. In the meantime, since deer don't eat the Douglas fir trees, the firs quickly outpace the young oaks, taking space and sun the Oaks need to thrive and defend themselves against SOD (Sudden Oak Death).
-The absence of "Cool" fire on the ground every few years in a healthy fire cycle also means the absence of a disturbance regime that is healthy for Oaks in at least 2 ways: ash and a supportive soil ph and Fir trees, which are highly flammable, burning and leaving room for Oaks.
Spring of 2022 we held our first "Oak Liberation" weekend, honoring the live of the fir trees we needed to cut down and amazed at the results: We could SEE the Oak trees, their beautiful shape, and we could feel them finally getting the sun and air that they need to survive and thrive.
Then, in 2022, our friend Carin McKay introduced us to Jason Courtis who has been training with TERA (Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance/www.tribalecorestoration.org) - a Lake county nonprofit that was born as a cross-cultural collaboration to strengthen and return indigenous knowledge and practice of cultural burning in land stewardship, as well as create pathways to meaningful livelihood for tribal members. More about TERA and the relationship with Indigenous cultural burns in our next installment)
Jason hails from England, but has been growing roots in Mendocino County for several years and is dedicated to reviving the ecological and cultural relationship with fire in a way that honors indigenous knowledge as well as supports forest health and reduces the chance of catastrophic wildfire in places like River's Bend.
With Jason's leadership, wit and spunk, help from our friends Carin McKay, David Franklin and Tara Marchant, as well as long time tenders of this place - Daphne and Jim Macneil, Annie Bacon and her father, Peter, Elizabeth Long, Winona Wagner, Anne and Maya Ben Shalom - and folks who arrived for this very first time to join us - we made friends, music, feasted and deepened our love and longing for connection to land.
-We learned which firs and underbrush to clear so the land can support a "cool" burn this Fall and we open the Oak canopy to sky, sun, air. We cut and laid the firs and underbrush on the forest floor in "lop and scatter" style to fuel a low burning fire this Fall.
-We burned some of the brush in a hot fire to create Biochar that sequesters the carbon and, once inoculated with bacteria, will create a rich addition to our wild lands and our garden.
-We added to our many "shields" around the baby Oaks, Madrones, and Manzanitas to give them a head start against the voracious deer.
-We learned the different kinds of oaks we have here, white, black, coast live oak . . and how "promiscuous" (Jason) oaks are, making identification of all the hybrids . . .well, challenging.
-We also tended our the more domesticated places on this land that support the interface between the wild, beauty and humans.
In the ecstatic faces of the photos below (I'm adding more over the coming days) you can sense how collective work with land taps our own ancient, ancestral roots, and feeds a deep hunger we have almost forgotten. . .
Laurie- RB Steward
If you feel called into tending Land as part of Tending Ancestral threads and Soul, this offering at River's Bend might speak to you- May 2-7, 2024 Into the Heart and Soul with Our Ancestors: Remembering Ourselves into Earth's Dreaming
More Musing on the relationship between Land Regeneration, Ancestral Relations and Deep Culture Repair
Writing the Land of My Bones
July 23, 2023
So many of us know . . . it's time to turn towards Fire, to learn to live with this essential, powerful element of life. We feel our desire to deepen intimacy with the places we live and embrace the unknown future rather than hope we can seal ourselves off.
Our River’s Bend team has begun a powerful process of returning to relationship with a fire cycle on this land and in our lives, as the Indigenous peoples of California did for thousands of years, including the Coastal Pomo (Thabatay in this particular part of the Navarro watershed), until this kind of cultural burn was outlawed by the US in 1911. Luckily, that knowledge and wisdom is making a resurgence in Mendocino County and around the state.
70 + humans came up to RB over 3 Winter weekends of land-tending, ceremony, feasting and music during the Winter moon cycles - Winter Solstice, Imbolc and Spring Equinox. We stepped into a visceral relationship with fire, dirt, trees, water - thanks to blessed winter rains - and one another and the other beings here.
What are we learning? Here’s a first installment of stories and photos we want to share with you who love this place (and might be inspired to join us! ). There's a lot more to say - this is just the beginning!
A beginning . . .
In Fall 2021, after years of watching our Tan oaks struggle and wanting to contribute to a healthier forest ecology here, I reached out to Roy Arthur Blodgett (whom we know from Weaving Earth, which has a long relationship with RB). My curiosity caught "fire" as Roy helped us "read" this landscape to understand the significance and struggles of Oak trees on this land. I felt literally ecstatic to understand the relationships between them and the other beings here: Douglas Firs, fire, deer, predators, and humans - and hundreds of other interwoven relations. Here's a little of what we learned in that initial conversation:
The Oaks are a "Keystone" species, providing shelter and food for literally hundreds of species. Our Oaks, like those throughout the region, are in trouble due to a number of big human changes in the ecology of this place over the last 100 years.
-Fewer large predators like mountain lions and bear due to hunting and smaller wild ranges mean the deer population has boomed. Deer love to eat the young oak leaves. This keeps the next generation of oaks stunted for decades - they grow slowly outwards, like a bush, in order to protect a single stem in the middle. In the meantime, since deer don't eat the Douglas fir trees, the firs quickly outpace the young oaks, taking space and sun the Oaks need to thrive and defend themselves against SOD (Sudden Oak Death).
-The absence of "Cool" fire on the ground every few years in a healthy fire cycle also means the absence of a disturbance regime that is healthy for Oaks in at least 2 ways: ash and a supportive soil ph and Fir trees, which are highly flammable, burning and leaving room for Oaks.
Spring of 2022 we held our first "Oak Liberation" weekend, honoring the live of the fir trees we needed to cut down and amazed at the results: We could SEE the Oak trees, their beautiful shape, and we could feel them finally getting the sun and air that they need to survive and thrive.
Then, in 2022, our friend Carin McKay introduced us to Jason Courtis who has been training with TERA (Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance/www.tribalecorestoration.org) - a Lake county nonprofit that was born as a cross-cultural collaboration to strengthen and return indigenous knowledge and practice of cultural burning in land stewardship, as well as create pathways to meaningful livelihood for tribal members. More about TERA and the relationship with Indigenous cultural burns in our next installment)
Jason hails from England, but has been growing roots in Mendocino County for several years and is dedicated to reviving the ecological and cultural relationship with fire in a way that honors indigenous knowledge as well as supports forest health and reduces the chance of catastrophic wildfire in places like River's Bend.
With Jason's leadership, wit and spunk, help from our friends Carin McKay, David Franklin and Tara Marchant, as well as long time tenders of this place - Daphne and Jim Macneil, Annie Bacon and her father, Peter, Elizabeth Long, Winona Wagner, Anne and Maya Ben Shalom - and folks who arrived for this very first time to join us - we made friends, music, feasted and deepened our love and longing for connection to land.
-We learned which firs and underbrush to clear so the land can support a "cool" burn this Fall and we open the Oak canopy to sky, sun, air. We cut and laid the firs and underbrush on the forest floor in "lop and scatter" style to fuel a low burning fire this Fall.
-We burned some of the brush in a hot fire to create Biochar that sequesters the carbon and, once inoculated with bacteria, will create a rich addition to our wild lands and our garden.
-We added to our many "shields" around the baby Oaks, Madrones, and Manzanitas to give them a head start against the voracious deer.
-We learned the different kinds of oaks we have here, white, black, coast live oak . . and how "promiscuous" (Jason) oaks are, making identification of all the hybrids . . .well, challenging.
-We also tended our the more domesticated places on this land that support the interface between the wild, beauty and humans.
In the ecstatic faces of the photos below (I'm adding more over the coming days) you can sense how collective work with land taps our own ancient, ancestral roots, and feeds a deep hunger we have almost forgotten. . .
Laurie- RB Steward