They pull and they paw me
They’re seeking to draw me
Away from the roundness
of the life
-from “I Pity the Country” by Willie Dunn
I picture a fine, woven silver web that begins and ends inside a spider. The spider begins and ends in a web of life that has no beginning or end because it is a circle. Our social and blood relationships are intertwined as webs, beginning and ending in each of us, who in turn begin and end in the circle.
The Indigenous Peoples of this place seem to have a sense of the world as circular and revolving, always turning and returning to the same places and seasons. Some of my ancestors must have seen the world the same way—they were shepherds, fishers and farmers who lived from season to season, year to year, on the land. But today, to our science-based, settler minds, the circle is an inconvenient mystery—we can’t find its beginning or end. Circles don’t stretch out across the land as straight lines do, pinning down life with sharp edges.
The circle curls up into itself and spreads out, getting in the way of our complicated systems: our electrical grids, roads and bridges, telecommunications lines strung out over the earth. Our straight lines are hard and flat, pressed down over mystery and disturbance, onto a land we don’t understand, despite how we try to measure and parcel it out, square it away.
We have a straight, flat gaze that freezes in place tracks of wild animals weaving through forests, running through backyards in the middle of the night, stopping in mid-air all the wings that ride the wind above our houses at dusk. We would hold it all there, tight in our grasp.
This is the place we call Canada, a place of science and industry, connected from Victoria to St John’s by the world’s longest highway, settled in cities and towns. But the older place, the one to which this modern nation clings, tenuously, sees Canada and laughs. The very idea. As if. That place stretches out endlessly. Within it, our highways are only fading lines on the landscape, our cities small outposts of flickering light. I am small in this place and can’t see the beginning or the end.
We settlers draw our lines, measure our property, make up rules. But we’re lost inside the circle. The circle is outside of our outer world, beyond our imagination. It makes up the sky that holds our sky. All our rivers and oceans flow within its ancient roots and stones. And it keeps spreading out every time we think we’ve touched it, taking us further into the wild.
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