Popular culture tends to describe spring in terms of weather and its effects: blustery days, April showers, May flowers. For some parts of this land, such imagery holds true, even now. In this place, our wildest weather has always been a child of summer.
Until now.
Climate change is now accelerating at such a rapid rate that seems immune to the normal constraints of time, able to cross the future’s boundary and drag its extreme events forcibly backward into the present.
Yesterday was a monsoonal day, one whose hours ticked past beneath a vortex of tornadic skies. We were fortunate — the worst of the storm passed us by, forced to route itself around the peaks that protect us here — but it robbed our world of the light before fleeing for the plains to the east where it could wreak havoc unimpeded.
This morning, though, Father Sun has risen bright and strong, his golden yellow light radiating around the banks of clouds that already are beginning to amass into solid form. If our new pattern holds, he will disappear for a time in the latter part of the day, but he will show his face again once more just before he retires for the night.
Our altered weather patterns are, for peoples like us, an earth-shaking phenomenon, one that rattles our world to its very foundations and beyond. Our daily lives still revolve around, are defined by, the land here to a degree that would astonish even those who live a few miles away in what is undeniably a small town. For those in more urban areas? Truly, ours is a whole other world.
This unsettledness moves, it spreads and sprawls, like tendrils of smoke reaching into every area of our lives. It’s difficult enough to hold onto the old ways to the extent possible in this colonized and occupied land; now, season, weather, climate, and elements seem determined to test our grip on a daily basis.
Indeed, it was climate change that took from us the tipi in the photo: a sudden windstorm, one that a few years ago would have been nothing more than an irritating dust devil, but within the last decade has been granted by climate change a newly destructive force and power. It barreled through the land, taking a sudden turn that ripped the poles apart like a a collection of dropped pick-up sticks, then tore down the arbor ladder before racing for the peaks.
The tipi is a part of our cultures, past and present alike. In the lands where I was born, it was shelter, lodging and ceremony alike. Here, it was incorporated ceremonially, as a part of the Tipi Way, what in a deeper past was also known variously by other names but now falls under the broader rubric of the Native American Church. Wings’s father and uncle were both Road men in this tradition, and while the tipi may be gone now, the spirit it embodied remains strong here on this land.
After all these years, I can still catch a glimpse of it at sunset, flared body and strong poles silhouetted, strong and sharp, against a bright yellow sky. There is nothing there, of course, no substance to touch or hold, only a shimmer of memory in the mind’s eye. But it reminds me how strong our ways still are in the face of constant change, whether from the outer world’s culture or from the very climate itself (and, indeed, the two cannot be separated, since the former birthed the latter).
No matter the change in the world around us, we hold the ways in our hearts. All I need do is summon the memory of our tipi silhouetted against a sunset sky to remember that we have survived much more than this. We will adapt to this, too, safe in the shelter of ceremony and the sustaining light of a warm yellow sun.
~ Aji
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