(Sherwin Bitsui, Cristina Eisenberg, Allison Hedge Coke, Travis Hedge Coke, Wang Ping, Laura Tohe) UNK hosts the Honoring the Sandhill Crane Migration Literary Retreat on the Platte Valley, naming participating writers as Literary Crane Fellows annually. Sandhill Cranes have migrated to this spring apex for sixty million years, thus, traditionally, numerous indigenous eco-philosophies and languages, including written, were justly influenced. The regional apex numbers 600,000 arriving birds. Each panelist will speak toward and share their work as a Crane Fellow in this unique regional miracle.

Published Date: September 24, 2010

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. You are now tuning into Honoring the Sandhill Crane Migration Annual Literary Tribute. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Denver on Friday April 9th, 2010. Now, you will hear Allison Hedge Coke provide introductions.

Allison Hedge Coke:

Hi, and welcome to our panel. We've been running a writer retreat for the past few years at the epicenter of the sandhill crane migration in North America. And it runs all the way over into Tibet. It is the largest migration epicenter in the world out of the water, so it's pretty phenomenal. It's been going on 45 to 60 million years in the exact same place to a time when it was an ocean. It happens now on about an 80-mile stretch of the Platte River, which is a very flat river, and has taken some critical damage. So the concentration at times has been down in like a 25-mile region, but it's supposed to extend over about 80 miles.

And what happens is the birds leave their wintering homes in throughout Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California and head north around Valentine's Day on the US calendar and arrive on the Platte River in between that time period and around maybe Easter on the US calendar and stay for two months and put on about 80% of their body weight. They arrive emaciated completely. And when they come to the river, they have their ground council.

So for the next year, all of the dynamics of the societies within each bunch of cranes, each group of cranes, is ordained. They're monogamous birds, and so they are also preparing to nest and to raise a clutch, which they will do in their northern migration after they live there. And they have callers. They have scouts. They send out the scouts to look for feeding locations and protection locations on the river. At night, they spend their time on the river standing in the water because it protects them from natural predators, including coyotes and such, who are up at night looking around for young cranes and other tasty items. And they don't really sleep while they're doing this. They stay up and they speak to one another.

And when you're there, they come in different groups at night and speak to each other, call, response, call, response, call, response, decide on locations, proper coordinates, everyone has to be in the right place, right time sort of thing, and take their place in the river. And it's an amazing thing to watch. It's called staging, for those of you that are interested in birds and terminology. And the staging process has to occur annually for these birds to exist as a specie. Without the staging process, without this grand council that they hold, they're unable to bear their young properly. They're unable to coordinate themselves in a smaller group entities that they split back out into and migrate north.

So around the 1940s, they were down to about five breeding pair, 20 or so birds, but five breeding pair at one time. They were made to fall into this level of extinction from millions and millions of birds that coexisted, and it was mostly done by plume hunters filling hats in Europe. So by the time they were down to this number, it was noted by several European descent people who were developing a European descent eco ethos, which of course had existed here for all eternity among indigenous people. When they first started to develop that here, they noticed that the diminishment of the extinction or near extinction of these birds and many other animals was critical to all of the environment.

And for some strange reason, and I will be forever grateful, the State of Nebraska decided to protect the Platte River to allow this staging to occur. And in doing so, in very short time, the birds began to rekindle themselves from the five breeding pair to now we have in between 500 and 600,000 cranes in a very short amount of time, just from humans getting out of the way and allowing the birds to do what they need to do. The whooping cranes were down to about the same amount at the same time in extinction. They've been unable to rekindle because their staging grounds are developed and lost. And again, without that ground council, they're unable to replenish themselves.

There is a long history amongst people along this flyway where language is very much impressed upon by these birds, by their movements, by their actions, by their coordination, physical and spiritual so that written languages have evolved from this migratory species. And there are six within this grouping that migrate to this epicenter, as well as songs, stories, and all the other important aspects of culture and, in particular, dance. Anytime you go to dances along this flyway, you're likely to recognize certain movements and certain adornments and also paint that replicates the sandhills in their natural state and the longevity of this specie.

So it's a great privilege and honor to be able to introduce to you some of the Crane Fellows today and bring their work to your attention. They're all known for their own poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and ecocritical work, including scientific work and including translation. One of our very first Crane Fellows is in the audience who has been a phenomenal asset to the programming since day one and is actually very critical to the hosting of this platform. And I would like her to stand and be recognized. It's LeAnne Howe, a Choctaw writer. So LeAnne, if you could stand for a moment and let them recognize you. Thank you.

LeAnne has been instrumental in gathering people and helping with the actual retreat and the follow-up. A book is being conceived from the first three years, and she's working with me on this project to... We're co-editing the book together from all of the different fellows that have been there. And with that, I'll begin to introduce some of the other fellows. I'm going to read their bios first and introduce them, and then I'll call them up one by one.

The first person over here to my right is Cristina Eisenberg. Cristina is a writer and a conservationist. She is a biologist by trade. She holds a master of arts degree in environmental writing from Prescott and is completing her PhD in forestry and wildlife at Oregon State University, where she is a Boone and Crockett Wildlife Fellow.

Her first book, The Wolf's Tooth: Keystone Predators, Trophic Cascades, and Biodiversity, published by Island Press in 2010, her scientific research focuses on how wolves affect ecosystems. This is a very humble bio that she submitted. Her work in wolf reclamation is known around the world, and she is one of the top wolf reclamation ist, in all of North America, having sites in Canada, the United States, and Mexico that are ongoing, and a very critical site in Colorado which is being contended here. So for anyone from this state that's attending today, we hope that you will listen to what she has to say and gain some fundamental insight into her work.

Next we have, let's see, Sherwin Bitsui, who will be the second speaker. And Sherwin is over here to my left, and he is originally from Whitecone, Arizona on the Navajo reservation. He currently lives in Tucson, Arizona. He's Diné, of the Bitter Water Clan and born for Many Goats Clan.

He holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program and completed his studies at the University of Arizona. He is a recipient of the 2001 Individual Poet Grant from Witter Bynner Fellowship, a Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship at IAIA, a Lannan Foundation, Marfa residency, and a 2006 Whiting Writers Award. His books include Shapeshift, University of Arizona Press, and a new book from Copper Canyon Press, Flood Song. It's amazing. You have to get a copy.

And to his right is Travis Hedge Coke, who's related to me a little bit. Just completed his MFA. He's teaching also at the same university, University of Nebraska at Kearney. He's a fiction writer, poet, and also a screenwriter, and just finished his MFA last December at the University of California in Palm Desert.

Let's see, Wang Ping will be the speaker afterwards. It's very easy to introduce them because we've all recently published them here. Let's see. Wang Ping was born in China and came to the US in 1985. Her publications include American Visa, Foreign Devil, Of Flesh & Spirit, The Magic Whip, The Last Communist Virgin, all from Coffee House Press. And New Generation: Poems from China Today, she edited and co-translated, and that volume is published by Hanging Loose. There's Aching for Beauty, which is foot binding and China, from the University of Minnesota Press. It won the Eugene Kayden Award for best book in the humanities. In 2002, Random House published its paperback.

She had two photography and multimedia exhibitions, Behind the Gate: After the Flood of the Three Gorges at Janet Fine Art Gallery in Macalester College and All Roads to Lhasa at Banfill-Locke Cultural Center. She's the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts, and a New York State Council of the Arts fellowship, as well as the Minnesota State Arts Board fellowship, a Bush artist fellowship, Lannan Foundation fellowship, McKnight Artist fellowship, and she is an associate professor in English at Macalester College.

And then we have, let's see, Laura Tohe, who is here. And Laura is Diné and was raised by her family and relatives on the Navajo reservation. She has written and co-authored four books. Her most recent book, Tséyi': Deep in the Rock, won the 2007 Glyph Award for best poetry and best book of the year by the Arizona Book Association. It is listed by the Southwest Book of the Year by the Tucson Pima Library. And she's currently working on a book of oral history on Navajo code talkers.

She is the 2006 Dan Shilling public scholar for the Arizona Humanities Council and was nominated for a 2009 arts award. She's also a librettist and has been receiving great acclaim for a wonderful libretto that she produced last year with the symphony there in Tempe. And with that, please give them a warm welcome, and I'll introduce them one at a time. So our first speaker is Cristina Eisenberg.

Cristina Eisenberg:

Hejira. Voices on the wind. A single clarion call followed by the clamor of a thousand crane voices heralded their arrival long before I saw them overhead, their soft, gray bodies gilded by the setting sun. Like souls on fire, they roared. They soared over dark furrowed swales of farmland in crooked wedges, looking for a safe place to land on sandbars. Every line of their bodies, every beat of their wings bespoke grace.

Ensconced in a riparian blind in south central Nebraska, I sat waiting for the 150,000 or so sandhill cranes that had been foraging in corn stubble and marshes all day to arrive to roost for the night. The turn of the season spurs great global hejiras of birds to breeding grounds. It was the climax of spring migration in the Platte River Valley which provides a critical staging ground where sandhill cranes pause in their 5,000-mile route to feed and put on weight so they can continue their journey.

These great birds have been coming here for eons on their annual migration from their wintering grounds in Mexico to summer breeding grounds as far north as the Arctic. Researchers found a 10-million-year-old fossilized crane bone in this valley. These cranes and their migration transcend human existence on earth and bear witness to miracles, beauty, and hope. Brought back from the brink of extinction, their recovery provides one of the most compelling conservation stories.

It was late March, a time of year when the prairie temperature can vary from minus zero to 80 degrees sometimes within a 24-hour span. The cranes were coming in on a chinook between cold fronts. I could see them arrowing in, wings outstretched, primary feathers in their wingtips extended like human fingers, each one visible, silhouetted against the setting sun. All the way to the horizon, I could see lines of cranes fading in shades of distance, their bodies dark smudges, their voices surprisingly loud: gruya, gruya, cries, rattles, moans, brays, purrs, rumbles, trumpet blares, all rising together in a cacophonous celebration of life. Wave upon wave of crane song came together rhythmically in a call and response pattern between incoming groups. Their vocal resonance results from an exceptionally long trachea which lies curled in their breasts like a french horn.

As I watched them land over a two-hour period, I saw and heard many other birds: snow geese, northern pintail ducks, Canada geese, and American wigeon, the cream-colored stripe on its green head glowing in the fading light. Other recent arrivals offered a sweeter counterpoint to the crane song: western meadowlarks, Harris's sparrows, song Sparrows, dark-eyed juncos, and red-winged blackbirds. The blind vouch saved me a front row center view into the beating heart of wildness that crane migration represents.

In the gloaming, the sun had turned the water a shimmering, opalescent blue and reduced land forms to inky shadows. My companions included writers from diverse cultures: Diné Quechua, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Chinese, and Mexican. We had gathered to bear witness with our languages to the sempiternal crane migration. As we waited for the rest of the cranes to arrive, we spoke in whispers, if at all, to avoid disturbing these extraordinarily skittish birds. The Quechua poet leaned closer and told me every fallen feather was a message from the creator.

I came to the Platte River country to learn from the cranes. As a scientist and writer who studies food webs in the effects of predation and other ecological processes, I wanted to understand how the primal force of migration shapes these relationships. In my own research, I had recently witnessed an 18-month-old radio-collared female wolf make a courageous 1000-mile dispersal from Yellowstone to Colorado. I had also been measuring how one of the last elk herds in North America was becoming increasingly non-migratory due to habitat loss. So many species need to move freely across landscapes to ensure survival of their kind. I hoped the cranes would teach me more about animal movements and how to conserve them.

Loss of migration represents one of the biggest conservation threats worldwide. We stand to lose so much species and the kind of elemental ecological processes that even today, with all our scientific knowledge, remain a mystery. These processes are not only essential to animals that migrate, but to us as humans to ensure our long-term survival as a species.

Two crane species inhabit the United States, the sandhill crane and the whooping crane. They winter on the Gulf Coast and come in on a flyway shaped like an hourglass, which converges at its center in the Platte Valley. They nest as far north as Siberia.

The Platte River, an inch deep in a mile wide, provides excellent habitat for cranes. However, in most places, this river is half as wide as it once was due to dam construction and agriculture. This has condensed crane presence during migration to a 60-mile long river corridor.

In the 1920s, a young forester named Aldo Leopold undertook a wildlife survey of the Midwestern United States. In 1929, he found only five breeding pairs of sandhill cranes. The fate of these relict species pressed heavily upon him.

In the mid-1930s when he purchased a depleted Wisconsin farm and began to restore it, the crane decline continued. This inspired him to write Marshland Elegy, one of the essays that formed A Sand County Almanac, a seminal work in the genre of environmental writing. Leopold penned this eulogy to American cranes at a time when there was little hope for their survival. Today, more than 700,000 sandhill cranes exist. What enabled their recovery?

Long before the modern era, humans worldwide have been attracted to crane's aesthetic and spiritual values, to their wildness, and to the primal spectacle of their migrations. They symbolize long life, wisdom, good luck, and marital happiness. Most indigenous people have revered them. The Ojibwe tribe admires the crane's oratorical abilities and calls it speaker for the clan, or echo maker. Among this tribe's animal clans, the sandhill crane sits in the place of honor. This deeply-rooted crane mythology, combined with the dedication of generations of ecologists, has enabled crane conservation to succeed.

Migration is as essential as breathing to many species, and has been shaped by evolution over millennia. The seasonal ebb and flow of creation links continents and ecosystems, forming symbiotic relationships between species. At its most fundamental level, the natural world is about relationships which enable an interchange of energy among organisms. Sunlight creates growth. The seasons provide opportunities to make use of this energy and to find optimal places for reproduction. These processes and patterns of movement intimately link species to one another in a vast web of life.

Human beings are but one component of this intricate beautiful web habitat destruction presents the biggest threat to migration and to these relationships. Awareness of these issues arose more than a century ago in the late 1800s, with crane decline mostly attributed to overharvest of birds by humans for food and for their feathers, which were used to adorn hats. Two laws enabled the recovery of migratory birds, the 1900 Lacey Act, which prohibited transport of illegally-harvested animal products across state lines, and the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which mandated federal protection for all birds except for a handful of game species. In the 1920s, Leopold helped create the National Refuge System to conserve migration and nesting habitat.

And so I stood in the blind in the company of writers, listening to crane song for hours, witnessing a phenomenon that repeats itself every dawn and dusk as the cranes fly off to forage in nearby marshes and return to roost for the night. The miracle here is that these cranes are back from the brink of extinction because we allowed them to recover. We opened our human hearts and enabled their return. Their songs fill me with hope. If we have been able to bring back the sandhills, think of what else we may be capable of accomplishing in the name of conservation. Think of the miracles and healing possible if we allow them to happen.

The crane voices intensified. They arrived in flocks, their calls and responses more urgent. I looked up from my field notebook and saw them coming in very fast now, flux converging into a vortex. Thousands of cranes spiraled down in this manner until they reached the silvery Platte waters, echelon upon echelon filling the air with their clamor and the mighty rush of wind from their wing beats. Down they soared with cupped wings and humped backs, legs dangling low. As more landed, their cries increased in volume, filled with the exigency of reaching the river. Gray crane bodies packed together a wing's breath apart. Later arrivals had to work hard to find spots in the shallow river, the wind so intense that some side-slipped and wavered as they landed. Eventually, their forms completely filled the riverbed, packed side by side from bank to bank. My companions and I stood silently, profoundly awed and humbled by this drama.

When the last crane had settled, we stood eyes shut, listening to this vast crane council continue to sing, speaking their truth to us. The longer I listened, the more elements of human language I heard, and I imagined how ancient humans must have felt sitting there, learning the lessons that our kind has more recently forgotten and which we so badly need to relearn if we are to survive much longer on this planet.

Language and cranes, what can their voices teach us? Don't lose hope. Raise your voices in celebration of life. We are legion, part of a collective wisdom as old as geologic time. We have endured. We have survived 10 million years of cataclysms. We have survived, and our will to live is strong.

After we had taken in all we could, we slipped silently from the blind, moving rapidly to increase the distance between us and the cranes. Their voices provided a vibrant backdrop for our leaving. That night, their rich songs resonated in my dreams more so than the images of their bodies falling from the sky. Theirs was a song of creation and eternity born by the wind, and their primordial cries told me stories about the soul of the river and the eternal mystery of life.

Allison Hedge Coke:

Sherwin Bitsui.

Sherwin Bitsui:

Hi. [foreign language 00:24:33]. My name is Sherwin Bitsui, and I am the author of Flood Song. I think we already know that.

I'm still in process. I just got back about... I left Nebraska on Sunday and I left the site on Sunday, so I'm still in process. I'm a poet who looks at this as a larger project than I could simply do in a poem immediately. I like to think of all the levels and all the layers that occur in the relationship I'm building with this site.

I've been a Crane Fellow for... This is my second time, and this time I got to spend a lot more time there. So I'm going to read a little poem from Flood Song that mentions the crane, and then I'm going to go into some really rough work that I feel like is related to my experience there. But though I'm not necessarily talking about cranes directly, I am more interested in the metaphor that is created by this space, which I'll talk to more of that after I finish just reading.

This is from Flood Song. Coyote howls canyons into windows painted on the floor with crushed turquoise. Captured cranes secrete radon in the epoxied tool shed. Leopard spots, ripe for drilling, ooze white gas when hung on a copper wire. I pull electricity from their softened bellies with loom yarn. I map a shrinking map.

The goat's bleeding drips into a field of coyote fur to hunt for moonlight, double parked and snow melt. Its oily scent flows downstream to pasture among foals dripping out of brick tunnels, where a search dog's white howls are lighted hills upon which a crown of blowing sand, silhouettes, teeth, nailing thick mud to thin mud. Cave paintings huff this chamber quiet then slip from its speech of clear water into a forest, whipping its hair over a grove of windows, nibbling on blades of wind with glass teeth.

This noon sun, aging in our backs, prized doors outward from a fever drying on the dashboard. It empties passengers from hands clamoring for lantern light, where the scraping is a smear facing another smear, where the skies blew bones, vein elk lard melting seaward from a woven sack, a trail of phosphorus islands glowing behind them. Wire-strapped deer eyes, freeze framed in afterglow, stutter awake. Ceramic ladles scoop forth snares, drinking our knees through our ankles. We wake, turn, then kneel our thoughts on ellipses evaporating from oils of wet clay.

What lies beneath this naming? I curl outward with wool scent. The landscape that formally chimed with a thousand birds now rustles in someone else's backyard. Its chopping blocks dark hum, [inaudible 00:27:56] hatchets handle, invisible. As teeth does, carpets children chasing moths down a spine of lightning toward a steering wheel, thawing in a house fire under the vernal eclipse clipped from view, clipped from view with body heat. Released by my shoes, I plunged through my closed mind with open hands, imagine grass blades foaming out of my chest. Ground shale and turquoise are sifted into the stems of a painting of a tree of birds on the earthen floor.

We close our eyes. See crows spiraling down, braids of world dust blowing every which way but home. The desert's eggs hatch on flatbed trucks chuckling west. It made me wonder which of these seasons will be the ochre yellow of a urine stain on a tattered floor mat or the crystalline yellow of sweat beads under amber light.

Hunched over a sleeping child, the story now pivots on a walking cane when it vespers through town. I slab horn marrow over a painting of thirst, then crushed ocotillo buds into a toothache. My needle of a pen thatches howls of breaths exhaled from an isthmus of drowned wolves. Its neighing drives fireflies to muzzle worms, pulsing where the arson begins to lather heat over his neck. Their coil silhouettes coil among the trees, sharpening their teeth with sandpaper.

It's a work in progress, and I apologize for reading something that is in process. But I think it's really important to know that my process as a poet is not to necessarily go there and take mental photographs and then recreate this for an audience. I really look at this area that is a sort of replication of a historical, natural environment, and it's been recreated. It's been altered by man. And it certainly reminds me of the reservation system. It reminds me of people that are trying to preserve languages, with looking into the face of linguicide among many native people.

And it also talks about migration. And there's so many levels here that when I was there in the blinds, I was intrigued by the patterns that the cranes were making in the sky. And some of the times when they would fly in late at night, they would look like lines of sentences slowly entering the sky, and the sky was this page that we looked at. Eventually, they would group up and they would form the shapes of a page in the sky.

And so I entered this space and over the past few years, this poem, this new work that I'm doing, really is an attempt to try to utilize the sound of the birds as I listened to them to try to create a meter that is reflected by the sound of the twirling of the cranes when they gather, when they start telling their stories. That's what I assume that they do. They probably don't do that.

But there was moments that when I was there that... When Laura and I were there, actually, one evening we were walking back from the cranes late at night. And eventually, all of them started to be in this huge conversation. And eventually, all the individual twirling became just one big mass. And eventually, if you listened enough, you could really hear into the songs. It really resembled to me walking away from a ceremony at home. I kept thinking... Remember I said that I said, "I feel like I'm walking away from a Yeibichai dance." And I could hear them back there. So in a way, I don't want to put that on them because they're doing their own thing. But I think as an artistic creative being, I can only attempt to see the layers in which this image exists for me, and to see that it's on a braided river and to see that I am somehow connected to the migration path.

And also to go home back to my grandmother's house on the reservation after I was there, after I got back from... and trying to explain my experience in Nebraska in this great migration and ask my grandmother, "What is the name? What do we call these birds in Navajo?" And then she was like... She gave me the name, then quickly I said it and she's like, "Shh. Don't say it. Don't say the name," which is curious. I don't know if we're talking about the same bird. But I was like, "Huh. Okay."

So I guess for me, I'm at the beginning of my process. And eventually, I would like to create a whole body of work that talks to... That somehow, I can maybe create a poetics of fear, I don't know, based on the ecology of fear. If I can create that kind of body of work that really introduces concepts that Cristina and I shared during our crane retreat. And I would really like to pursue that further, but as concept and not really as vehicle for visual or exotic interpretation. Thank you.

Allison Hedge Coke:

Travis Hedge Coke.

Travis Hedge Coke:

All right. How y'all people doing out there? Look very serious. Studious audience.

Well, I'll be honest with you guys. The poems I'm going to read for you today, they're all first draft. These were actually written on the back of receipts I realized I had in my coat while I was out in the blinds, so they're very rough.

When I first told somebody the other day that I was going to do this panel and that it was about how we were inspired by these cranes and we're out at the retreat, and they said, "Well, how many of the poems are going to start out, 'I am a bird'?" And I realized, no. I'm like, "You can't do that." There are two major reasons, well three, one of which I am a bird is a terrible opening line. And then two and three, you're not going to have either the lifestyle or even, and we forget about this a lot, the biology of those birds.

It's very human nature to anthropomorphize and want to take over these things. And I can stand in the water all night and probably get hypothermia, but I know I can get up and leave and a coyote or whatever's not going to get me. I can get up. I can walk out of that situation. There are human situations that I cannot get up and walk out of, but I am not stuck like a crane is stuck in that situation. That's what they do. And even if I stood in the water all night, I'm never going to know what it's like to stand in that water all night on crane legs. And I think we forget oftentimes that it's not just a behavioral issue, but an actual physiological, biological issue that we cannot understand these things in the way that a particular animal understands them or lives them. So my main form of inspiration with them was to try not to embarrass them, basically. So.

This first poem is called Touch. This way. It turns like a compass. She holds the cutting edge in the water. They pass through my pillowcase. Maybe it's cartilage. What holds the feathers onto them? The air won't darken. Corkscrew migrations from air to water at night.

It's called Castanets. Blue heron. Blue heron rolling dice. What you throw all that for? That's dot and dot, dot, dot. Ellipsis. Much as you count, you don't win. The same way you tally, you don't collect. God-and-pony show.

Back when the grasses were tall, I only saw a couple of you. Goddammit, this is important. This is flea market country, giveaway land, giving it all away when the grasses were tall.

Hey, blondie. Hey, yellow hair. We're dead in time. We're dead. Mild ill. Bang. We're dead. This is for wearing that shirt. This is for eating those bones, grinding grandfather's bones into shapes of imaginary men. Faces made for money or pawn shop portraits until we have no rhythms remaining, no reclamations come.

In the morning, they're dead, son. And they got up again in the morning. I said something. I may have said something like a voice from a thousand tongues, in a thousand unpaid bills, of a thousand amateur ducks, and less than a hundred dozen amateur drakes doing professional-grade work, putting in union dues, logging no vacation hours so I and you don't have to. All the while, the moon takes breaks like us, I might've said. Thank you.

Allison Hedge Coke:

Wang Ping.

Wang Ping:

Thank you, everybody, to be here on such a beautiful day and beautiful place. It's honor to be on the same panel. And thank you, Allison. I have been to the crane place twice, and it's really transforming, transcending experience in the blind at twilight. And this year I couldn't go, but I still hear them. And we exchanged some emails, and so I started writing a few haikus. So I opening this with four haikus and a tanka. And then I'll talk a little bit, then I'll end with a poem.

Winter's last ghost. It's April, and snow falls, falling on the prairie's grass. Snow, fallen, it's blood. Sisterhood. We speak through the cranes. Our spirits move with the wind. Behind clouds, a moon. What keeps us going? The hand that touches daily, the stillness within rain, faces of young spring. Crane memory. Our breasts hold it all, lands of stories, shores of time, rivers, fields, old nests.

The next is tanka, which is five, seven, five, seven, seven. [foreign language 00:40:14], Sky Earth Man. Each morning, the sun, hearts clear, renewed. Each night, dreams sail a blue sea in between sentient beings, cradled by heaven and earth. A twilight in the blind, things near become distant, and things distant become close. The birds flying in large flocks bring sky to earth, bring fields to river, bring south to north, north to south, bring memories to us and us to the beginning of the universe. The twilight at the fork of day and night, night and day, opens the gate to another world, a world invisible to most of us, blinded by our desires. And the birds are the guide if we allow ourselves to look, really look. And the birds are the gatekeepers if we bow our heads to our ancestors, listening to the teaching as old as salmons, sturgeons, ginkgos, and [inaudible 00:41:42] redwoods, glaciers, rocks.

As the world becomes crowded with trains, ships, airplanes, internet connections, and corporate greed, as we become postmodern nomads wandering from state to state, country to country, looking for jobs, food, shelter, as millions of people join in the rank of jobless, homeless, and hopeless in America and the world every day, what do we do to keep the integrity of home, language, identity, and the dignity of being alive? Is it possible to carry our ancestral land in our breasts, our home in our limbs, our dignity in our spine? The cranes have wings and the instincts for flight. And we have words, the fickle and sacred wings of poetry.

And The Birds Guide Us. That's the poem I wrote last year. A dew drop hangs on the lip of an orchid. A volcano rumbles in another ether. Something has hit us, and we don't know why. It's April. The prairie is brewing a new blizzard. Cornfields adrift in the whiteout wind. One-legged cranes darken the braided river. Rings of ice like shackles and the sky in a folded dream.

At the fork of the road, I stand. Lines of hexagrams, form of the formless. How can I walk them all at once and reach the destiny in blindfold? This is the choose to those who still trust. A thread so thin, unbreakable. This light and shadow, this right and wrong, it's all energy. Same difference in the field of perception. Every tomorrow has two handles. Every seed contains its own fortune.

Fire from the sea and into the sea, the big island mountain of ash from the womb of the earth. Children of rivers and mountains, we carry a dream as ancient as the crane sailing across the sky, ocean, and desert, uttering a cry that's almost too human. The birds have moved on, and the fields still aquiver with their spirits. They do not think. They live simply, each day a small gift. Thank you.

Allison Hedge Coke:

Laura Tohe.

Laura Tohe:

Good afternoon, everyone. I am Diné, and I was born and raised on the Navajo reservation and also spent 11 years living in Nebraska. And it was Allison and the cranes that brought me back to that place along the Platte River in March of 2009.

I traveled down that interstate road on my way sometimes to Colorado, but it never... And I used to hear talk of these birds, and there would be newspaper articles I would read. And I would sometimes hear people talking about them. But it wasn't till I actually went there that I really started to see these birds in a much different way than just someone traveling past on a highway or just living in the same state with these magnificent and beautiful birds.

So when I was there last year, I was one of the writers there. Spent some time out in the blinds. Took lot of photographs, which I'm going to show you. Just a few. And being there with them, it's very humbling because it's something that they've done for millions of years. And when something has been done for millions of years, and these animals, these birds, come to this place for millions of years, it means that we have to pay attention. It means that I had to pay attention.

So I started to think back on how did the Diné people, my people, see these birds. Because surely, the birds must have flown over the Navajo homeland at some point. So I was talking to some friends of mine and one of my friends told me that his great-grandmother used to put corn pollen down, corn pollen being something that's sacred to Navajo people, used in prayers and ceremonies. And when she saw the cranes coming over, she would put down corn pollen for them as a way of honoring them and this journey that they were taking that they had been taking for millions of years. And so I asked another friend of mine, and she lives in New Mexico, and she told me a similar story of these cranes landing in this river area near Shiprock and Farmington, New Mexico and also how the people would honor these birds.

And then as I was thinking more about it and I started... Snapped in my mind that these must be the same birds that were in the second world, in the Navajo stories of how humans came from previous worlds, and are now in this world we call the glittering world. These birds must have been in the second world, in the blue world. So I started writing this poem when I was up at the writer's retreat, and then I started... The pieces started to come together, hearing these stories of these birds and then remembering the story of the birds in the second world and then how these birds also, along with humans and insects and the four-leggeds and the other ones, eventually traveled and spiraled into the current world that we are in now. So these birds have a lot of history to tell us. And so I wrote this poem called Map Songs.

In Mexico, they laid open the maps again, written for them in the second world, under blue lights spoken with blue voices and sang songs that would guide them through all the worlds to come. Songs they placed in the spiral of their throats and called them map songs. In blue world, they danced with wind, wind like these beings with feathers, so wind molded and formed their bodies and taught them to ride on its breath.

When the fighting and quarreling broke the blue world apart, the cranes gathered their songs and dances and maps and flew into the twinkling stars, turned their bodies sideways, and broke through a hole in the sky into the glittering world where a grandmother sprinkles corn pollen for their return. The cranes find their way to the river that ribbons past cornfields and highways and electric wires. They are calling me now back to the land of the Moonshell River, so I follow their tracks to the river, where I stand in the cold wind in awe and humility with an open heart and mind because they have made this journey for me too.

So that was the poem that came out of that. And when I went back home, I have a Chinese acupuncturist and I was telling everyone that would listen to me about these stories of the cranes and this magnificent experience that I had just had. And my acupuncturist is from China, Dr. Zhou, and so I was telling him about this trip that I had made. And so he started telling me these stories about these crane lovers in China and how they made it. And he had this long story about it. It was a really very beautiful story that he told me. And so I was thinking, "They have stories in China about these same birds. And on the other side of the continent, we also have stories about them." And it was interesting that he was talking about a male and female mating. The way he was talking about it, almost like they were humanized.

So I was thinking about while we were up at this retreat and Sherwin and I were there one night and there was a bunch of us. And LeAnne and Allison and all of us, we were all sitting around just having a good time. And Sherwin and I started talking about these cranes, and this is something that's very... I think what native peoples do is they personify these animals. And in this case, the birds. They do things that we do. So I was telling Sherwin, "If you leave tonight, maybe you can go down to the river and go snag a couple of those lady cranes. And tomorrow morning, you'll wake up with your arms around them like this."

And we were just having a really good time thinking about what we would be doing with these birds if we could talk to them with their voices. And maybe they would invite us to sing with them or dance with them or whatever. But it was really fun to think about the birds like that and to know that they are truly something special and sacred, that they come and do this every year despite what humans have done to their homeland and things that we have now in our power to try to stop. So that was what I wanted to share with you, except for a couple of photos. I tend to like to do visual things.

So literally, this is just an image of the cranes along the Platte River. In my poem, I call this the Moonshell River because I had read somewhere when I was living in Nebraska that the tribes that lived in this area, the Pawnee and the Omaha and some of the Sioux tribes that live there, the Dakota, Lakota, Nakota people, named this river the Moonshell River because shells were brought up on this river, and they used it for trade. Whether that's really true or not, but I like that name, calling it Moonshell River. So there they are.

And one of the interesting things that was told, I remember, is that at night when they sleep, one of them I guess holds a rock in one of their hands or claws. And when there's danger approaching, an animal or something, maybe human, they'll drop the rock into the water and it creates a vibration. And it wakes up all the other cranes, and so they'll know that they have to be on the alert.

And then just a closeup image of them. Beautiful long leg. And then just some of that beautiful sky in Nebraska and the Midwest.

And this is where I really got into this idea of the birds puncturing a hole in the sky and making it into the next world, was this. And on the right you can... This was when I was in the blinds. Sherwin said that they're creating a sentence, but to me I thought they were creating an equation. To me, I was just visualizing that they were like this in the second world and then moved into the next world by being able to know where to make this hole into the sky. Thank you.

Allison Hedge Coke:

Thank you. Something Laura just brought up reminded me of our very first crane retreat three years ago this spring, and Wang Ping came for her first time. And the common Chinese crane does not come to North America at all. And the day she arrived, there was a common Chinese crane with the sandhills. So she said, "Oh, I was meant to be here." And of course, she was invited because there's a kinship with people along crane flyways for the impression on culture and the ideology, the results over many generations of emulating crane. So in some way, we're not necessarily personifying them, but they've personified us to a very deep level of cultural affect that some of us are unaware of today because we've come in with this, and this is our primary understanding of things and not really realizing that this was something that was taken from another species and endowed the culture.

This year, the first day of the migration retreat, Travis and Lee Ann Roripaugh, who's Japanese, came onto the retreat center and there was a whooping crane there, which was phenomenal, especially that time. And Lee Ann grew up with a belief that... As a small child, she thought her mother had come from Japan to marry her father, who was poet laureate of Wyoming, by riding a crane because there was a picture in the house of a goddess riding a crane. And she believed it was her mother. Her mother tried to straighten her out in this story. And in trying to straighten her out and tell the truth of how she got here, she showed her a Japan Airlines plane ticket, which of course is a woman on a crane, which validated Lee Ann's belief her mother had come on this crane. And she had a whooping crane, which was just like the picture on the old tickets. It was rather phenomenal.

Last year, we also had Linda Hogan in residence and we had Fredy Chicangana, who's Quechua, from the Cauca region of Colombia. The year before, we had Hugo Hemuay, who's from the Amazonia region of Colombia's Kamëntsá nation, who was weeping because he had never seen this large concentration of any animal. And he said, "And I am from the Amazon. I'm barely out of my village. I've never seen anything like this." And he was weeping. And Atti Jana, who came from the Sierra Nevada. We've had a wonderful group of people that have come each year and shared a lot of very good times together, relishing this moment of witnessing. And hopefully, it's in allowing them to come into a different configuration within their own purpose and place.

And this year, we were also graced with Lee Surdrick, who has actually been training for quite a while now with a [inaudible 00:57:54] woman from Rocky Boy, Montana to learn the written crane language. And it was her first year to ever see the epicenter of the migration, and she's just finished that mentorship. So rather phenomenal.

And we are open now to questions about migration. There is a very large concentration in Colorado. It's the last stopping point on this end before the Platte. And so even while driving here from the last edge of the retreat, we saw lots of cranes that were still coming in, latecomers from Colorado. So all of the panelists, I'm sure, are open to questions. If anybody has any questions or comments, it's a good time to raise your voice. Yes?

Speaker 8:

I would like to experience at least once in my lifetime the coming of the cranes to the [inaudible 00:58:45]. Are there tours or...

Allison Hedge Coke:

Yes there are, actually. The same time we're doing this, the writers go into retreat. And it's on private land. It's the International Crane Foundation site. It's the Platte River Whooping Crane Maintenance Trust. Traditionally, they've only had biologists. It's mostly the feds and us because the federal government sends out people to tag cranes, take soil and water samples during the migration. And we were the first group outside of that, the first group from humanities and the first writers ever invited into that place.

Before, we were using the tour location, the Audubon site which is right down the road, the Rowe Sanctuary. And that is open to general public. There is a charge for tours through there. There's also through our university, the University of Nebraska at Kearney, we have a elder hostel. And we take people on tours through the elder hostel as well.

Where the writers stay and retreat, it's completely blocked off. And so they have private blinds and they have lodging there that's provided by the International Crane Foundation through the Whooping Crane Maintenance trust. And so they're sequestered with the cranes and out there alone with them, which is a very unusual situation during crane migration. But there are very generous tours. She was interested in if this is something other people could do.

Speaker 9:

In Colorado, they have a cranes festival in Monte Vista, Colorado.

Allison Hedge Coke:

Yes.

Speaker 9:

It's not as elaborate and I don't think the sites are as good what you have, but they do winter in Colorado [inaudible 01:00:19]-

Allison Hedge Coke:

Of course.

Speaker 9:

... as they come to Nebraska [inaudible 01:00:22].

Allison Hedge Coke:

Exactly. And the state lines weren't drawn for the cranes, neither were the country lines. Right? It's all migratory pathway. Uh-huh?

Speaker 10:

So I'm curious, the questions about personification, kinship, then there's the science. So what do the scientists think about your presence there, and how does that interact?

Allison Hedge Coke:

I might let Cristina field that. From my perspective, at first there is a little distrust, especially when someone identifies as poet, which is rather interesting because there's a lot of great scientists that turn poet over the year. So it's interesting, but there's a lot of distrust, even to the point of when there's whooping crane sightings, they will often come in and try to explain to us that we surely have not seen whooping cranes.

And this year, Margaret Porter Troupe and Quincy Troupe were there. And when we had whooping cranes in front of us, there were five of them. And I went to each of the writers to explain along the tree line where to look in the grass to see where the whooping cranes were. And then, of course, you had to use scopes because they were not in the river. They were further out across from us. And Margaret had used her telephoto and so had captured them. So while they were explaining to us we could not have possibly seen the whooping cranes because they had not seen the whooping cranes, she whipped out the camera and said, "Well, I think these are whooping cranes." And of course, they are.

So it's been interesting. They've become much more tolerant over time. And this last residency, a lot of the scientists started sharing apps with me on our computers and phones and such so that we can locate things quicker. And now, we're in their programming and so we're able to access the tagging that they have where they can follow them. We've been allowed to go on those URLs and follow along with them so we can see flight patterns and see what's happening. So it's becoming a very shared process. The director of the Crane Sanctuary, who's also a scientist, has been very open to us. But the federal government people, the GSBS who come out, those guys, not necessarily always sure of what's happening there, although they did try to send me in the field this year to collect crane excrement.

They had a little chart and told me where I would be all night. And it was rather funny. And a couple of the other scientists were in the room and they were looking at me, and one of them leaned forward and said, "Did you take another job?" And I said, "No, I don't think he knows who I am." So he was sending me out. Oh, I should have taken it and just see what... I don't think the other guys would've outed me. But they thought I was one of the helpers that was there with them, and I was not. So Cristina might better for the question.

Cristina Eisenberg:

I want to add that science has, well the disciplines, the arts and the sciences, have been quite separate for a long time. And there's a movement now, a cross-pollination movement, and it has a lot to do with how we're struggling to find answers to create sustainability of both ecosystems and the human spirit and realizing that we can't find those answers on our own, in our own disciplines. I am a person who has one foot firmly planted in the fine arts and the other one firmly planted in mind-bending science. And I'm considered pretty radical for that, but I'm also finding that there are more and more scientists, people very high in their fields, who are encouraging this interdisciplinary exchange.

And so the home that Allison has found for this retreat at the Crane Center is... The scientists there are hungry. When we're there, they want to hear about our poetic experiences and the inspiration that we draw from those cranes. And if you scratch the surface of any scientist, what you find is somebody who is generally really emotionally engaged and really loves and is passionate about what they're studying. And so all it takes is a little nudge to create these openings, and Allison has done a phenomenal job at that.

Speaker 11:

Would you repeat the part about the whooping cranes don't have that staging process going? Is that what you said?

Allison Hedge Coke:

Yes. When the Platte was protected, the sandhills had their staging grounds protected. They're hunted everywhere else. So when they were protected there, they were able to rekindle themselves because they have to have that organizational structure, that time of the migration period. The whooping crane site is totally developed, and so there is no rekindling that at this point in time.

I think they should use eminent domain and take it back, personally. And under federal law, they could. But I also think that about mound cities and many other sites in North America that are totally ignored, and there are a lot of species that exist within what are referred to as sacred sites because they became known that way for certain reasons, oftentimes because of certain species that existed there, both plant, animal, and even migratory birds. So until there's a time and place where that can happen, the whooping cranes are having a very hard struggle.

Last year, there was a winter freeze. In fact, Ping was with me when the blizzard came through Nebraska, and a blinding, blinding blizzard. And it was late in the season. It was in April already, around the sixth I believe, or seventh maybe. And to get from where we are at the site even to get her to the airport when she was leaving, we had to wait for the highways to open. And there was a lot of traffic fatalities. Well, the birds that were in Texas at that time when it was just lower were frozen. So there was a huge winter kill of the whooping cranes, and it was in April. So it's very delicate. It's a very fragile situation.

This year, 73 whooping cranes traveled together for the first time in several decades. It was a huge amount of hooping cranes. It was all very hush-hush. Nobody was talking about it because nobody wanted it out there. But we went on with the federal people who were there, and they've put us into the programming and allowed us to see where they were traveling from. There is a couple of ecologists there, one's from Venezuela, another's from Spain, that work full-time. And the director of the program center's from Mexico. And they basically came in and showed us different patterns of things on the computer and how you can look at this technology from the tagging and follow.

And at the same time, we got a call from the coordinator of the center. And she said, "Go online and follow the tagging because there's 73 [inaudible 01:07:00] flying together, and they're coming here. Don't tell anyone. Just be on alert. Watch very carefully." And so it was all very hush-hush. And you didn't see people running out to the blinds because nobody in the general public was aware of this because, of course, they would be put in danger.

And so there's a protective measure too. When these things happen, it's not something they really want to get out to the general population because there's fear that some plume hunters will show up and sabotage the flights somewhere along the pathway. So it's very dangerous in some aspects. Mm-hmm?

Speaker 12:

Is there any way to coax them to a spot that is similar to the one [inaudible 01:07:39]?

Allison Hedge Coke:

They've been trying for years. They've developed costuming that they wear to attempt to help them breed and do the things. They emulate the birds. They mask as the birds. They pretend to be the parents of the clutch, the eggs, hatchlings, and they develop little small flight vehicles to try to replicate cranes and return them to their flight patterns. A lot of things have been attempted, but really without that staging purpose, that council that they need to have, the species just doesn't have that collective mindedness and the orchestration that they need to develop the societal structure for the year. And they absolutely have to have that. It's essential to the species. Yeah. And yeah?

Speaker 13:

I just want to say thank you. I'm really glad that this is [inaudible 01:08:28].

Allison Hedge Coke:

Thank you. It's a wonderful combination of looking at the natural world, a particular species in the natural world that has stood here much longer than humankind. And to see the impression it's had on our development as humans and then to rekindle that and come back and revisit and open up whatever happens with the writers in retreat, who also perform readings and they speak in the schools and do community work while they're there, and we have the Platte Valley Review at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. This we just published last week in additions, 280 pages has like four poet laureate and a of good people. But it's a language and migration edition, and so it's bringing all of these fellows and a lot of other people that are involved on flyways or whatever migration they're interested in and combining that into an edition that's accessible to people who are not on these migratory pathways.

And LeAnne Howe who was in here a moment ago, is instrumental to this retreat. And as I said, she's co-editing the book that will result from the different fellows that come throughout the years. Thank you. It's an honor and privilege to work with these guys and with the cranes specifically. Thank you for coming out. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1:

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