Gulls scream as they circle over the dammed waters of the Missouri River at Canyon Ferry. It’s just after summer solstice, and my daughter, Eloise, and I are pulled off beside the lake near the end of a long road trip to visit Latrice Tatsey and her daughter, Baeley, on their family’s ranch in the foothills of the Bob Marshall Wilderness.
We arrived loaded down with garden veggies and elk from our freezer to share. When we got there, we spoke with Latrice’s dad, Terry, a longtime leader in the Blackfeet community. On the drive up, I’d been listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer read her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, about traditional and modern ecological knowledge, and in passing, Terry spoke of reciprocity in the same way Kimmerer wrote. Of something that doesn’t stop as a transaction, but rather, as I understood it, a flow of giving.
The next few days, Eloise, Baeley and I swam in the icy waters of Badger Creek and Two Medicine and Saint Mary’s lakes. We watched a traditional pre-hunt ceremony and the bison harvest that followed at In-nni Days. And that night, we attended the relay races at the stampede grounds in Browning, an astonishing display of athleticism and skill. Before bed in the camper, I fell asleep reading Will Harris’s new book, A Bold Return to Giving a Damn, about creating a more holistic model on his family’s Georgia farm, after several decades of commodity production.
These stories danced among each other as we drove home along the Rocky Mountain Front. Here on the side of the road with the gulls and an unusually patient kid, the stories twirl together with ideas I’m learning about moving through conflict in peace negotiator William Ury’s new book, Possible.
And now I'm wondering exactly that: What IS possible? What can we do together with what we know and care about to leave this world better than we found it?
Traveling back to Saturday’s walk through the summer snows of the Continental Divide, where Latrice wove together parenting stories with updates on her work helping ranchers in Blackfeet Country adopt regenerative practices, and I shared gratitude for our growing friendship and collaboration (while her partner chased our girls through the snow—thank you, Anskii), I return to something that echoes what I’ve learned from Kimmerer, the Braiding Sweetgrass author, and which I hear Latrice mention every time we meet: relationships.
We can never know how each of our roles will evolve as we keep considering these questions, but I do know mine will indeed involve relationships. With land and Earth, with other individuals, both human and animal, and with youth.
Relationships—and reciprocity.
