2. Learning a Dead Birdsong: Hopes’ Echoescape.1 in ‘The Place Where You Go to Listen’ Julianne Lutz Warren
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M Living Earth Community ICKEY Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing , T , EDITED BY SAM MICKEY, MARY EVELYN TUCKER, AND JOHN GRIM UCKER If you are looking for reasons to believe that humans can fi nd a way through the unfolding catastrophe, this is your book, your hope, your answer. , , — Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Great Tide Rising and Wild Comfort AND Why are we in such a predicament? The contributors to this volume trace our discontents to a kind of G cultural amnesia. In our rush to progress, we have forgott en deeper sources of wisdom, and with it the calm awareness that humankind is a part of the larger community of life in the unfolding cosmic story. RIM We’ve been looking for meaning, as it were, in all the wrong places. From varied perspecti ves, the ( essays here shed the bright light of remembrance and reverence. EDS — David Orr, author of Hope is an Imperati ve, Down to the Wire, and Ecological Literacy ) L ) This book is a celebra� on of the diversity of ways in which humans can relate to the world around them, and an invita� on to its readers to partake in planetary coexistence. Innova� ve, informa� ve, and highly accessible, this interdisciplinary anthology brings together scholars and educators across the sciences and humani� es, in a collabora� ve eff ort to illuminate the diff erent ways of being in the world and the diff erent kinds of knowledge they entail – from the ecological knowledge of indigenous communi� es, to the scien� fi c knowledge of a biologist, and the embodied knowledge communicated through storytelling. IVING This anthology examines the interplay between Nature and Culture in the se� ng of our current age of ecological crisis, stressing the importance of addressing these ecological crises occurring around the planet through mul� ple perspec� ves. These perspec� ves are E exemplifi ed through diverse case studies – from the poli� cal and ethical implica� ons of ARTH thinking with forests, to the capacity of storytelling to mo� vate ac� on, to the worldview of the Indigenous Okanogan community in Bri� sh Columbia. C Living Earth Community is essen� al reading not only for researchers and students, but OMMUNITY for anyone interested in the ways humans interact with the community of life on Earth, especially during this current period of environmental emergency. As with all Open Book publica� ons, this en� re book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital edi� ons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com Living Earth Community Cover image: ‘Feathers and Fins’ (2014) by Nancy Earle, all rights reserved. Cover design: Anna Gatti . Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing book eebook and OA edi� ons also available EDITED BY OPEN ACCESS SAM MICKEY, MARY EVELYN TUCKER, AND JOHN GRIM www.openbookpublishers.com OBP https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2020 Sam Mickey, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors. This work as a whole is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs license (CC BY-NC-ND), which allows readers to download parts or all of a chapter and share it with others as long as they credit the author, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially. Selected chapters are available under a CC BY 4.0 license (the type of license is indicated in the footer of the first page of each chapter). 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Attribution should include the following information: Sam Mickey, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim, eds, Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020), https://doi. org/10.11647/OBP.0186 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit, https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at, https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-803-7 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-804-4 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-805-1 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-806-8 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-807-5 ISBN XML: 978-1-78374-808-2 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0186 Cover image: Feathers and Fins (2014) by Nancy Earle, all rights reserved. Cover design: Anna Gatti. 2. Learning a Dead Birdsong: Hopes’ echoEscape.1 in ‘The Place Where You Go to Listen’ Julianne Lutz Warren Prelude It was spring of 2011. I was searching for something else in Cornell University’s archive of sounds when I first came across a sixty-three- year-old recording of a Māori man whistling his memory of songs of Huia.1 These tones both cut and enchanted me. In 1948, these birds were already believed to be extinct. Huia — whose distress notes speak in their onomatopoeic given name2 — were endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand. The elder Huia mimic — Henare Hamana (aka Henare ‘Harry’ Salmon 1880–1973) of the Ngati Awa hapu of Warahoe — had been invited into a Wellington recording studio by a Pākehā,3 a neighbor called R. A. L. (Tony) Batley (1923–2004) (see Figure 3.1). Batley, who also narrated the recording, was a regional historian from Moawhango settlement. He was interested in preserving this remnant of remembered avian language. The birds were, as Batley puts it in the recording, ‘of unusual interest’. For instance, all Huia had ivory-colored bills, but they were curiously dimorphic in shape. The bills belonging to males were generally shorter and more like ‘pick-axes’ than females’ bills, which 1 R. A. L. Batley, Archives, Box 2011.117.1 MS 177, Whanganui Regional Museum. The original recording can be heard here: https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/16209 2 Michael Szabo, ‘Huia, The Sacred Bird’, New Zealand Geographic, 20 October- December 1993, https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/huia-the-sacred-bird 3 The Māori-language term for a white person, typically of European descent. © Julianne Lutz Warren, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.02 20 Living Earth Community were long and curving. Both sexes were crow-size, with black-green bodies and a dozen stiff tail feathers edged, again, in ivory. Against the darkness of dense native trees and ferns filtering sunlight, the bright trim on each bird leaping between low limb and earth must have arced like coupled meteorites through a night sky. Fig. 3.1 Transcription of R. A. L. (Tony) Batley’s recording, by Dr. Martin Fellows Hatch, Emeritus Professor, Musicology, and Dr. Christopher J. Miller, Senior Lecturer/Performer, Cornell University (2015). Huia became extinct due to complex human causes that were local, but globally common due to expanding colonization. Huia range likely contracted, then stabilized, after the arrival of Māori ancestors around a millennium ago. A couple of hundred years of European settlement escalated stresses on the birds. Ecological communities of old-growth forests co-evolved with Huia were widely cut-down and disrupted by newcomers’ with industrial and capitalist assumptions. These underpinned an overpowering system of cropping and livestock-grazing alongside an influx of unfamiliar avian predators and parasites.4 These 4 For discussions of extinctions in the wake of both Māori and Pākehā arrival, see, for example: Alan Tennyson and Paul Martinson, Extinct Birds of New Zealand (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2007) and Atholl Anderson, ‘A Fragile Plenty: Pre- European Māori and the New Zealand Environment’, in Environmental Histories of New Zealand , ed. by Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 35–51; see also Catherine Knight, Ravaged Beauty: An Environmental History of the Manawatu (Ashhhurst: Totara Press, 2014). 2. Learning a Dead Birdsong 21 wide-scale harms in turn alienated Māori from customary relationships as Tangata Whenua5 (People of the Land), a worldview basis of cultural identity and Indigenous authority entwined with language and the health of the land, Huia included. Generations of Māori had learned to attract Huia, who were tapu6 or sacred, by imitating the birds’ voices. Māori had ritually snared Huia for tail feathers — which were sometimes given as gifts — and other ceremonial or ornamental parts. Huia may have sometimes been eaten. These birds emerged in ancient cosmology and conveyed messages in living dreams. With the privileging of British economic valuations, mounted Huia skins and tail feathers became commodified and sold internationally, which increased the rate at which they were killed by both Māori and Pākehā hunters. By the end of the nineteenth century it had become evident to observers across cultures that Huia had been brought to the brink of extinction. Some Māori, particularly Ngāti Huia, placed their own protections on Huia range, protecting the birds.