More Trails, More Tales. Bob Henderson

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      Flying back to Yellowknife from Bathurst Inlet, imagining Franklin’s men’s march.

      land expedition closer to my mind.[7] (Although it was second to Samuel Hearne’s two-year tramp with Chipewyan families thirty-five years earlier.) I know the stories. Specific days had long since been etched in my head. These two weeks on the Mara-Burnside rivers were the closest I’d come to being there, and the low-level flight was a great gift.

      Who else was thinking this way as the flights began? I was rendering a human story of the past into a felt experience on the land. I was mulling over our trip with its “harsh” summer conditions compared to Franklin’s men’s truly harsh October conditions, (read: early winter) and our viewing of animals for pleasure rather than on desperate survival-focused hunting excursions.[8]

      There are many ways to frame the country, and perhaps the best way is no way at all. That would be to sit back and stare with no references to the terrain; to just be with it. Others might be doing that, although I’m not sure it is possible for most humans. Some certainly are naturalists first. They are looking for animals: the land as a laboratory for genetic diversity, perhaps. The geographer or land scientist watches for glacial features. The theologian might explore the possibility of sacred sites or ponder the land as cathedral. The paddler watches for waterways: the land as gymnasium. Some do all of this to some degree simultaneously. I suppose I do, but the land as a storied place is how I primarily tend to look at it. Did I find it, this way of seeing, or did it find me? In other words, did I first have the theory of place-responsive pedagogy whereby as a place becomes imbued with story it becomes meaningful and then bring it to my practice? Or did I see the land as a storied place and then discover a corresponding theory? I believe the latter is true in my case. It was a matter of imaginative spark. Educators Brian Wattchow and Mike Brown discuss the varied privileged interpretations from which outdoor educators see the land: “… nature as an arena where students experience personal development through challenging activity; or nature as a venue or landscape that can be appreciated and encountered aesthetically and for which we should develop some affinity; or nature as an environment in need of sustainable management practices by humans.”[9] William Godfrey-Smith in the 1970s explored ways of seeing nature: as a gymnasium (for recreation), as a cathedral (for spiritual growth), as a lab (for scientific study), and as a silo (for genetic storing and coding of materials).[10] It appears that from these environmental educators’ perceptions that nature is always a resource. It is always to be used. But as we bring personal meaning and an ever wider understanding to nature — simply put, as we bring nature inside — nature shifts toward being home. It provides study and recreation, yes, but as a home place for dwellers, not a visitor’s space for strangers. I was sure the naturalists, scientists, adventurers, and historians among our group all had some desire to move toward this Arctic place as a core place, rather than as a peripheral space. Indeed, we talked of such themes often.

      Finally, and adding further to Godfrey-Smith’s list, Warwick Fox in 1995 wisely suggested that our culture’s nature awareness and perceptions have shifted with time. Culture moves. We are more aware of nature as a life support system (“which holds that a diverse non-human world benefits humans by performing functions necessary for our healthy survival, including the recycling of nutrients, the production of oxygen from carbon dioxide, and so on”); we are also moving toward seeing nature as psychologically necessary. This position acknowledges wild places are