In The Berry Patch

Lessons from the Long Haul

The road out is gravel, and the car swerves left and right to miss the biggest divots. Four of us cousins bump along in the back, shoulder against shoulder, the smallest ones sharing seatbelts, everyone wiggling forward or back for a little more room. Up front my mother and aunt chatter the whole way. When we finally reach the right spot, we tumble out of the open doors into a cool wind, the bustle of “city” life traded for a quiet stretch of rolling hillside.

Wind rustles the narrow willow as we pick our way past scraggly black spruce, kept small and spare by the permafrost underneath them, until the road drops out of sight. We look for low bushes we can easily step through. Crouch down, run a hand over the oval leaves, and there they are. Small, matte, gray-blue orbs that burst purple at the gentlest touch, staining fingertips, tongues, and the seat of your pants.

The only rule is to make some noise. Bears love berries too. All around me, voices trade news from downriver, how so-and-so is doing and whether they need anything, then drift into stories of past summer, the good hauls and the mishaps. The present folds into the past. Silver bracelets jingle, stacked on both of Aunt Dot’s wrists, the sleeves of her bubblegum pink sweatshirt rolled up so her hands can move freely among the branches. Mosquitos hum a steady white noise, broken only by laughter or someone shifting to find a better patch. All that squatting turns picking into a full-body workout, the kind that aches in your legs and back for days. This hillside was where the aunties gathered their strength, in body and in mind.

As kids we’d flit from relative to relative, more berries landing in our mouths than into our buckets. When my tsook’al and her friends came along, the talk ran as a flood of Denaakk’e with English words tumbling through it, and we’d soak up whatever stray words fell from the stream flowing above our heads.

In the berry patch, your place is something you build over time. You earn it by returning to the same hillside year after year, making noise so the bears know you’re there, learning how the ground has shifted since last season, sitting with the same people as the talk moves between this summer’s rain and summers long past. You show up and you pay attention.

The relationships in your own work ask the same of you. Learn the land’s story, move at its pace, and keep showing up.

Field-Tested: Grounding your work in place

Before a new project gets moving, work through these five practices.

Know whose land you work on and from. Use a tool like native-land.ca to learn the Indigenous Peoples of the places your work touches, including the ones far from your desk. Get to know land ownership, public lands, governance, and key players that you may cross paths with along the way.

Learn the land's story before the project's. Find out what has happened on and to a place across time. Its history, and who has been there, will shape your interactions. A place holds knowledge because people have returned to it across generations.

Notice who else is connected to this place. In every project, pay attention to whose relationships to a place are missing from a room, and what it would take to include them well.

Let the season set the pace. Community rhythms, harvest cycles, and decision-making processes vary and shift with the weather or season. Plan for extra time and leave room to adjust when things change.

Set clear expectations, then follow through. When a community invites you in, be clear about what you can and cannot do or support. Then do what you said you would.

Treat these as starting points. The real work is ongoing, rooted in the places and people your work touches.

Signals & Shifts

Mary Hostetter helps run the Bristol Bay Guardians program (The Nature Conservancy), monitoring berries, salmon, and snow across the homeland her community, Igiugig, has stewarded for over 320 generations. As she puts it: "This isn't the middle of nowhere. This is the middle of my everywhere."

Tahltan comic artist Cole Pauls, whose comic books I discovered years ago, talks about his work in this interview on CBC's The Exhibitionist. His shop carries an "I bend over for berries" shirt that anyone who has filled a bucket will recognize.

Question for reflection: What is one place or relationship in your work that you keep returning to, and what has returning taught you that a single visit never could? Hit reply and tell me.

Take good care of yourself and the work that's yours to do. Both matter more than you know.

Nikoosh

Work That Lasts arrives every other Wednesday. Forward to a colleague who might need these tools, or reply and let me know what's working in your own practice.

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