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St. Thomas Law Review

First Page

127

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Article

Abstract

When the first wild strawberries flowered, my friend Chris Jocks, a Mohawk professor of comparative religion at Dartmouth, took his students to meet me at the old beaver pond on Thetford Hill. As the sun set behind a warm sprinkling of rain, we sat on top of the beaver dam and listened to successive waves of croaking, roaring, warbling, chirping, and hooting. "In the beginning," we explained that ''the Beaver made the world out of mud from the bottom of the waters. All the animals came and thanked the Creator. That is the way it was, and the way it will continue to be." We then left gifts for the beavers before heading home. Chris and I wanted to make the point that people who live in an intimate association with living landscapes build their models of the universe to represent observed ecological relationships. The "religions" of indigenous peoples are not purely symbolic exercises in moral philosophy. They are empirical statements about the dynamics of the biosphere, with an interwoven moral commentary. Teaching and insight accordingly, rely on experiencing particular places, where particular living processes can be observed. Instead of telling our students that beavers made the world, we took them to a place where they could see it happening. Through direct observation at the pond, they realized that beaver ponds form temporary islands of extraordinary biodiversity in New England forests. They could not see all of the animals attracted to the pond, however, they could hear them sing (a lesson in perception and observation). Most importantly, they began to appreciate why the first farming and iunting people who lived in the area respected and conserved beavers, and incorporated beaver imagery throughout their visual arts, stories, and performances.

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