This worked for a number of decades. It worked until the migrant-card rules relaxed, after the geese became so desiccated they were no longer perceived as a threat. There was a downside, though. The decades of cycling seeped into our guts. Resident populations had a different set of needs than the migrants. Words got mixed up.
“Weweni,” those old ones whispered and no one heard.
“Weweni.”
They meant, Be careful. Be very careful with your words. Your thoughts. Your actions. Think it through.
Then think it through again.
Think it ahead through time.
Think it backwards through time.
Find seven alternate ways to fix the problem.
Make sure it is a problem.
Make sure it needs to be fixed.
Think about the network as the first line of defence.
Think think think before you speak, type, post. Each syllable is a log you put on a fire. The fire can uplift or destroy.
Weweni.
Weweni.
Protect individual hearts from hurt, because the processing of hurt is necessary and it takes energy from the group. The supports needed to process trauma and to regenerate are costly.
Remember that words carry the ability to impact the chemistry of brains and the beating of hearts.
Calls should be whispers. The only one you can hold accountable is yourself. That really is your only job.
Asin
Asin is waiting for the first ones to arrive.
There are signs in the ice if you can read ice code. Asin cannot.
There are signs in the position of the sun, and the time of dawn and dusk, if you can read sun code. Asin cannot.
There are signs in the positioning of stars, if you can read star code. Asin cannot.
There are signs because there are ones that come just before, and this Asin has a chance at reading, but not this year. Not this time.
Instead, Asin relies on eBird and when the first watchers report sightings on the south side of Lake Ontario.
Asin has spent the winter with residents in Tommy Thompson Park. They sit, like the meaning of their name, and watch. The geese certainly know Asin is there and they are somewhat interested in this one, this one with a notebook but no camera. This one that spends hours just watching.
Shkaabewis
Shkaabewis’s position is on the left side, facing south, second from the back. It’s considered one of the easier spots — those holding this position draft off of the ones in front and don’t have to navigate. There is a monotony, though, in simply following the one ahead, beating wing after beating wing. That presents its own challenge, like being stuck on the vinyl back seat of a car in 1976 during the smugness of late July.
Shkaabewis
It is the perfect fall day for travelling and the plan is to get to the gathering point on the big lake to rest, visit with our relatives and wait for the thermoclines. The maples are radiating orange brazen hope burning away the night moisture. The sky is bright endless blue. The easy weather is a good sign, like maybe this isn’t a mistake or an unnecessary risk.
Shkaabewis
The three old ones, siblings, out front, know the way. This is their twentieth, twenty-first and twenty-second trip, respectively. Their three families, both genetic and chosen, make up the rest of the squad. The sky brings out both the best and the worst of everyone, as it is with all families, but the three siblings are resolute in their commitment to this way of life, at least in front of the rest. Their quiet insecurities are kept among them in the angle between each arm of the formation.
Shkaabewis
Every year, fewer folks choose to make the journey and more choose to stay and become year-round residents. It is a different life for sure. For the siblings, the justifications of the residents fall short — it’s less dangerous, it’s a different time, a break from tradition, there’s enough food so there is no need, the trip is just too demanding, it’s too hard to take that much time off.
Shkaabewis
To the oldest sibling, Mandaminaakoog, these excuses can be summed up by one word: complacency. Mandaminaakoog cannot imagine life without movement, without the continuous work that brings about equal parts paralyzing exhaustion and the sweetness of uncomplicated fulfillment. Mandaminaakoog cannot imagine life without the task of one’s existence being dependent upon continual remembering. Life as an economy of meaning. An actual good life.
Shkaabewis
Mashkodiisiminag and Kosimaanan are less sure, and less vocal. Mashkodiisiminag thinks less philosophically than Mandaminaakoog. They like the change of scenery and being in a different place every night. They like the freedom of flight, hours and hours of quiet. They like never being alone. They like the synergy of moving through waves of air like a body much larger than the sum of its parts. They like the accomplishment of being in a different place every night.
Shkaabewis
Kosimaanan is in it for the odd set of circumstances and the happenstance of travel. The poetry hidden in the space between left and leaving. The infusion of stories and joking pulsing through the formation. The time Nanabush came too. The time that crazy zhaganash took some resident tourists to Virginia in an ultralight. Kosimaanan will tell the stories at the right time, maybe at a gathering spot as the sun sets. Maybe when breast muscles are screaming and wings are numb with exertion. Maybe when corticosterone is as high as it gets and thyroid hormones have peaked. Maybe whispered between the sentinels at night when everyone else is asleep on the water. Maybe just to the first-timers at the back, the ones that never take the lead.
Shkaabewis
The night before they left, they sat in council with the residents. Mandaminaakoog resented the circle. This is supposed to be ceremony. This is supposed to be a celebration, not an ordeal; a coming together, not a dividing line between resident and migrant, between an old order and a new order that should not exist. A new order built on shortcuts and self-interest rather than service and excellence.
Shkaabewis
Mandaminaakoog knows that their resentment was not helpful. They know that unity is more important, they know that the ethic of influence is through action, not talking. But in their core they simply could not understand or respect the decision of the residents to stay, and they judge them. It is easy. It is lazy. It is the antithesis of their collective existence. The cost, the character of meaning. The silent sacrifice found in the quality of the weave, creating the very fabric of formation after formation.
Shkaabewis
By all accounts, this nation and all of our formations are doing well — one of the few expected to survive. We’ve learned to thrive in urban places humans have utterly ruined. We’ve adjusted our flight paths to avoid twenty-four hours of artificial light, planes and the windows of high-rises. Our medicines have contained H5N1. We’ve outrun culling, the salinity-induced mortality of our babies and new arrhythmic weather. We’ve witnessed the loss of so many of our relations. We’ve made flyways through the grief.
Shkaabewis
One could therefore go as far as to say this is a privileged conflict between residents and migrants, because first of all, it is a decision we have some control over, it isn’t something that’s been blindly done to us while the bodies piled up, like with buffalo or the caribou or the eel. This is precisely what pushes Mandaminaakoog’s resentment into angry. It simply does not have to be this way. We could collectively choose different. Mandaminaakoog stores will in the hollow of their feathers. They release it through the flock after 750 miles at forty miles per hour. They fan it through wingspans until it falls back to aki and lands on the soil like seeds.
Shkaabewis
Shkaabewis understands all that, and that’s why Shkaabewis is here instead of with their own family. It matters to them how they live. They need to have the lightning of adrenaline coded into their veins when the c
onstellations shift and the time for preparing is done. They need to read time through thermoclines. They need to look down from three thousand metres above earth level.
Not everyone needs to do this.
Not everyone is lucky enough to find the thing that gives them purpose, and that makes most everything else seem meaningless.
Shkaabewis
Mandaminaakoog does not hold anger for very long. They remember it matters more that some are going than that some are staying. They sing the songs that map the route. They read the stars. They hold all the ones that have come before. They think about which young ones to rotate into the lead. They wonder which old ones have passed and won’t make it to the gathering spot on the north side of the big lake.
Shkaabewis
The three siblings sleep until first light. They breathe light in, rouse us with gentle “ambe maajaadaa’s”, and then we take off from the river, encouraging each other, saying “until later” to the residents, love lifting our beating wings up.
Mashkodiisiminag
Lecture One:
Mashkodiisiminag counsels the younger ones before the start date, primarily about bringing nothing. In the old days, there was nothing to bring, but the young resident geese are used to having things and keeping things and relying, well, on things. Mashkodiisiminag over and over says: “Pack it in your bones, find it along the way, and every thing gets left.”
Mashkodiisiminag
Lecture Two:
Mashkodiisiminag counsels the younger ones on what to say out loud and what to put in their do-not-say bins. These ones are used to typing and posting every thought with few consequences and so Mashkodiisiminag is lecturing on thinking it through. Thinking of the formation above oneself. Think of everything that could possibly happen if you say “I hate the smell of Bezhig’s ass feathers” out loud. Think of the ones that will laugh and feel affirmed, having followed Bezhig’s ass across the continent. Think of the positive energy that generates. Think of the ones that will worry their ass feathers smell as well and who will look over their wing to the back of the formation the next chance they get and for a fraction of a second slow the whole thing down. Think of those that will feel irritated at the very sound of your voice for reasons you can’t possibly know or predict. Think of those that have been taught to feel shame about their asses and their feathers and who have been robbed of their sovereignty around both. Think of Bezhig themselves and whether or not they have enough in their emotional reserve to ride out the teasing. Think about what kind of log the fire needs.
Think about why you feel the need to say it. Turn it in on yourself.
Mashkodiisiminag
Lecture Three:
“Don’t think too much and don’t worry too much.”
Mashkodiisiminag
Each year, the conversation requires more and more counsel and more and more support. There are those young ones that see it as the ultimate challenge and there are those that see it as a ridiculous and unnecessary throwback to something that might have served formations well in the past, but whose time has expired. There are squads that have ground support carrying things, and this makes it a different thing altogether. Folks pack books and nesting materials, favourite snacks and comfort items. Things to rely on.
Mandaminaakoog sees things differently. The practice of formation above all else. “Pack it in your bones, find it along the way, every thing gets left.” The formation must find hope, faith and the wherewithal to continue. The formation must find it in themselves or the ones they meet along the way. They must nurture and find comfort. They must take care of the need of everyone in position all the time. They must practice being an ear of corn, not a kernel.
Mashkodiisiminag
Lecture Four:
By lecture four, Mashkodiisiminag has weeded most of the tourists out, or rather, the tourists have weeded themselves out, having properly assessed this mission as not the end-of-adolescence backpacking trip to Europe they were looking for. That’s why this lecture is entitled “What to Do When You Hate Everyone around You and You’re Stuck with Them for Several More Months.”
Mashkodiisiminag
Lecture Five:
Lecture Five (which inevitably stems from the real-life failure of Lecture Four), is called “What to Do When You’re Done and You No Longer See the Value in Migration, Your Peers, the Formation and Being a Goose.” Kosimaanan rides the line between the value of figuring out something important about yourself and changing one’s actions accordingly, and the real need to just continue the journey by any means. The act of not quitting. The practice of recognizing depletion in oneself and not getting tripped up by it. They teach the students, knowing that some will succumb anyway, to disconnect one’s mind from those thoughts, speaking back to them and engaging in a singular focus. The failure of Lecture Five inevitably leads to Lecture Six.
Mashkodiisiminag
Lecture Six:
Lecture Six is on performance-enhancing drugs, like caffeine and sparkly water and sugar and the internet. Mashkodiisiminag begins with the usual angle, “There are no performance-enhancing drugs that are useful on this journey, because it is too long and too real and the temporary benefits one might achieve through use will always pale in comparison to the consequence.” It isn’t that it is cheating. It is that cheating then transfers a bigger load of work to others in formation around you. It is that the formation pays for the individual benefit.
This is the most difficult of the conversations. It never goes well. Mashkodiisiminag always comes out feeling like a cult leader or worse. They find it nearly impossible to convince this next generation that playing with internal chemistry fucks it up. They find it nearly impossible to convince these goslings that it is important to train your neuropathways to cope with crisis, trauma and danger on their own. That feeling is something one must have sovereignty over. That this is a gift and an asset.
This is the biggest difference between resident and migratory life. This creates the judgements, the resentments, the authenticity debates, the debates around who is privileged and who is not.
Kosimaanan
Lecture Seven:
Work harder than you thought possible.
Believe.
Sign the waiver.
The art of . . . well . . .
The art of getting to know someone.
Mashkodiisiminag
Mashkodiisiminag takes the most hits amongst the residents. On summer nights, they gather in Tommy Thompson Park and recount the stories from the migration before. When they first get back, it is the most recent journey. By midsummer, it is the highlight reels of the past twenty-one journeys, mixed with the classics. When Minomiin Giizis appears, Mashkodiisiminag descends into formation theory, the history of flight and the first migration.
Kosimaanan
Kosimaanan’s stories were also lectures, but sneak lectures so the youth of the flock thought it was entertainment, not education. The nightly gatherings were also supposed to strengthen the ties between the residents and the migrants, and the residents had their own history to tell. The practice of staying was also difficult. The practice of staying was also dangerous.
Kosimaanan
Story One: On Why We Do This, Anyway
Long, long time ago birds didn’t migrate. We were one of many nations in formation under one sky. But then there was a fight because there is always a fight. It matters not what the fight was about but in this case let’s say it was somewhat legitimate in that there simply wasn’t enough food to support all the residents even though the white people had yet to come here and fuck absolutely everything up. We split into two teams. Sometimes people say birds versus animals some people say birds versus birds. I’m saying birds versus birds because that carries more meaning for an all-goose audience. A lacrosse game. And now the losers, or the winners, depending upon perspective, fly south in the fall, all the way to Florida,
and then north in the spring, all the way to not-Florida. You’d think after founding a cult and holding lectures and all the governance and logistics meetings and all the sermons about faith and excellence and commitment, we’d get someplace better than Florida. The guns. The old whites. The flip-flops. The humidity.
Kosimaanan
Story Two: On Why We Don’t Take Tourists With Us
Oh of course Nanabush begged and begged to come. And of course we resisted and resisted until they drove us goddamn crazy nuts and it was easier to just carry them all the way to Florida in formation than listen to one more second of begging. We gave them rules, primarily to preserve what was left of our own sanity, and they broke them. We were compassionate and then we weren’t and we dropped them and that was that. No more tourists.
Kosimaanan
Story Three: The Humble Origins of the V-formation
Noopiming Page 8