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The Life Story of a Recipe

Gina Rae La Cerva revisits her grandfather’s recipes, tracing the elements of her Sicilian heritage. Through legacies of wild food gathering and feasting, she seeks to embody the traditions that have brought her family joy and sustenance, even in times of grief, conquest, and migration.

by Gina Rae La Cerva, June 24, 2021



THE TRUTH DIDN’T COME out until after my grandpa had passed. It had been a family rumor among some of the cousins but unknown to most of us. Despite his meticulous record keeping about his own life and the boxes of memoirs he left behind, there was never any mention of it. I think he obscured the truth even from himself. On most days he was successful, even if it gnawed at the back of his neck. Even if it made him angry at times. I wonder if he ever uttered the Italian phrase acqua in bocca, which directly translates as “water in the mouth” but means “to keep a secret.”

We called my grandfather Papa.

One night toward the end of his life, I Skyped with him. Even in his nineties, he still carried the poverties of his childhood. He was the second youngest child of eight, raised in a poor Italian family in New Orleans, and had lost his mother by the age of two. I’d heard stories that Papa used to steal bananas from the docks to prevent himself from starving. One of his earliest food memories was of his grandfather taking all the kids to the French Market, where it was customary to taste ingredients before purchasing. A grape, an olive, a slice of peach, a bit of cheese, a wedge of mandarin, or a bite of watermelon. The vendors knew the family and would give a small special treat, a lagniappe, with every food sale. This gift was traditional, but because the merchants knew the children were without a mother, they were often overgenerous.

Papa’s father had been successful in the pasta machinery and macaroni production trades, then had a grocery store in the French Quarter. But when the Great Depression hit, he became a foreman in a sugar refinery and then eventually joined the family’s illegal winemaking business, which led to at least two stints in jail. When Papa was twelve, they relocated to Bushwick, Brooklyn, and the five of them lived in a four-room cold-water flat. In the kitchen there was a tub for weekly Saturday baths. It had a metal lid and was perfectly positioned between the stove and the sink, so it served as a food-prep area when not in use. The toilet was in the tenement hallway and shared by everyone on that floor. Papa’s father died shortly after the move. They mourned him by wearing black for a full year.

Despite the many childhood hardships and upheavals, Papa went on to live a life that reminded me of a James Bond character. He was a spy in World War II, spoke five languages fluently, rode a motorcycle down the California coast, taught ballroom dancing for Arthur Murray studios in New York City and Australia, and even danced on TV during a regular weekly program. Only later did I find out about the numerous nervous breakdowns he’d suffered throughout his life.

Papa loved to cook and eat. He would send frequent emails detailing where he got his ingredients, praising the local farmers, the family grocers, the German-owned bakery, even the chef at the local Chinese restaurant who had “a Bronx sense of humor.” To others, this record keeping of his life’s details in emails and memoirs might seem obsessive, but for Papa they were a genuine form of gratitude. I don’t think his childhood hunger ever fully left him.

Even a month before he died, he was still cooking himself delicious meals. “Am again sharing meals the only way I can these days,” he wrote in an email above a picture of his dinner. There was often a caption to the photo describing the ingredients, as well as any memories it evoked. In one email he reminded us of what his grandmother whispered every time she kissed him goodbye: “Sciaddu miu”—Sicilian for “my breath.” Such words of love are never an error.

He died among his memories—left the living as a man who had become his stories.

Chicken patty on twelve-grain bread, cranberries, string beans, avocado with roasted red pepper, and half a sweet potato

IF YOU CAN’T FIND your origins in food, you can sometimes find them in a name.

For many centuries, surnames identified people by their place, status, work, or parents. The name La Cerva translates as “of the doe.” It was of noble status in Spain and meant we had been the “keepers of the game” who managed the royal lands of King Alfonso V of Aragon. Then in 1436, the king sent Raniero de la Cierva to Sicily to help fight a war. He established residence in Palermo, and a long line of descendants have remained there ever since. There is still at least one town, somewhere, named after us.

One of my great-great-grandmothers had the last name “Sempreviva,” forever alive, which was given to her because she was a nameless foundling. She had been abandoned with her twin sister on a covenant doorstep. The twin died, but my great-great-grandmother fought to live. The nuns named her “Michelina” in honor of St. Michael, the warrior archangel.

The tradition of naming children to honor parents and parental siblings was a firm rule in our large family. “Rose” was an especially prevalent name, an abbreviated version of “Rosalia,” the patron saint of Palermo. Saint Rosalia, “the little saint,” was the deeply religious daughter of a Norman noble family in the twelfth century. In her later years, she retreated to a cave on Mount Pellegrino above the town and lived as a hermit until she died, alone, in her mid-thirties.

Almost five hundred years later, in 1624, a plague besieged Palermo. About a year into quarantine, the ghostly Saint Rosalia visited a sick woman. Then, according to legend, she appeared to a hunter. “I will show you where my bones are. You must bring them back and carry them in a procession around the city, circling it three times,” she told him. The hunter climbed up the mountain and brought back the bones he found in the cave. After the procession of her remains, the plague disappeared.

It is traditional on September 4 to solemnly walk barefoot from Palermo up to Rosalia’s cave on Mount Pellegrino. But first, in the summer, there are two days of feasting and ceremony in celebration. Pasta with wild fennel, sardines, pine nuts, and raisins. Little snails steamed with parsley and garlic. Boiled octopus and mussels. Pickled lupini beans, corn on the cob in their husks. Fincione, bread dough covered with onions, tomato sauce, anchovies, oregano, bread crumbs, and caciocavallo cheese. Snacks of pumpkin seeds, chickpeas, fava beans, and almonds—all roasted and lightly salted. Mountains of watermelons and prickly pear fruit on ice. Nougat with sesame seed; bomboloni, Sicilian doughnuts; and iris, fried dough stuffed with ricotta cream.

Sicily’s culinary culture is based on migration and conquest. For millennia, the island lay at a global crossroads, which meant that its cuisine relied heavily on ingredients and flavor pairings brought from elsewhere. Saffron, capers, pistachios, and agrodolce sauce—a sweet, sticky, sour sauce made by reducing honey or sugar with vinegar and sometimes adding spicy fruits, herbs, or scallions.

The first arrivals after the volcanic island rose out of the sea were the indigenous Sicani, Elymians, and Sicels. Then came the Phoenicians (from what is now called Lebanon), followed by more people from Carthage (what is now called Tunisia), who themselves had mixed with a few North African Berbers. These invaders were followed by the Greeks and Romans. The Jews came next, not as invaders but as migrants, although no one is sure exactly when they arrived, as they did not announce themselves as loudly as those on a colonizing mission. They were followed by the Muslims who overthrew the Byzantine rulers, only to be challenged by the Berbers they’d once fought alongside. At some point even the Vikings arrived, along with the Vandals and the Ostrogoths (Germanic tribes). There were invasions of Normans, Swabians, the Angevins of France, the Aragonese, and the Austrians—and finally, those migrants who could simply be called mainland Italians.

I think of all those bodies full of bacteria, and their genetic recipes migrating from one person to the next. Across the country. The world. Across generations and time. My carnagione, my skin tone, darkens deeply with the summer sun. My wavy hair finds its curl in humid places. I inherited these traits from some Sicilian ancestor, lost to history but alive in my story today.

My family once owned a mountain home near Monreale. Perhaps it was on a clifftop overlooking the sea. Was it there that my great-great-grandmother first learned to make granita? This granulated sherbet was brought to the island by the Arab cultures and was popular among the Sicilian merchant class. The snow on volcanic Mount Etna was harvested, stored in stone grottoes, and then flavored with syrups made from rosewater, elderberry, lemon juice, or jasmine blossoms (these heavenly scented flowers were also brought by the Arabs). My great-great-grandmother took the granita tradition to New Orleans when she emigrated there in 1907. She used shaved ice, which was as close to snow as possible, and added fruit juices, herbs, or liquors. Her favorite flavoring was Coca-Cola, to which she was addicted, since it contained some cocaine in those days.

Although she was illiterate, my great-great-grandmother sure could talk. She spoke in Sicilian and broken English, usually a mix of both. I imagine she cast many protection spells, praying to the saints and laughing with the sinners, depending on the kind of help she needed. But it was through food that she spoke most eloquently. She blessed her family with every meal set down upon the table.

Whole wheat pasta with kale cacciatore sauce, accompanied by a side salad.

SO WEIRD to be living through the end times,” I half-jokingly said to my oldest friend the other night after we had been discussing the impending collapse of some vital global system, like the Amazon, or the Great Barrier Reef, or the Arctic. Or how we’d just hit 500,000 dead in the United States from COVID.

“It’s always been the end-times,” he replied.

“Truly. Imagine living through the Plague in the Middle Ages,” I said. “It killed more than a quarter of Europe’s population.”

I’ve known this friend since before we were born, when we were both in our mothers’ wombs. I like to think we said hello through the ether at some prenatal yoga class or birthing group potluck. It was the early ’80s, and Santa Fe was full of coastal hippies—Jews and Italians from Brooklyn and Westchester, Santa Barbara and San Francisco—who came to the desert, following one whim or another: a cult, a woman, a landscape. They sought a sense of freedom, outside the acculturation of the places where they had been raised. They migrated to new landscapes to see how they might adapt—from wet forests to dry deserts. They became creatures of the sun, leaving their damp shadows behind.

In nature, migration is a universal and general adaptation. In periods of sudden change—such as a fire, a flood, or famine—migration allows mobile species to escape the immediate danger and inhabit new areas. Other creatures, like birds and caribou, and even some humans, such as the Florida retiree, migrate with the rhythms of the seasons. These regular movements define their lives. They live in a constant dance, adapting daily to the weather, the food, the feeling of the morning.

Over the millennia, these seasonal migrations have shifted in location and timing, due in part to climate change and evolutions, but the form has remained the same. Migration is a feature of life that is so ordinary, so at home with the changeability of the world, it is impossible to imagine our planet without it.

There are many plants in Northern New Mexico, where I live, that feel deeply familiar to my heritage. There is a long history of Sicilians gathering wild plants—borage, chicory, fennel, endive, and purslane—for salads, stews, or spiritual comfort. Bundles of wild rosemary were burned to ward off the evil eye. Chile peppers migrated around the world and back again, eventually becoming a necessary ingredient in both Italian and New Mexican cuisine.

In Sicilian food, pine nuts from the stone pine tree are common, often paired with raisins and some sort of salty fish. New Mexico has a related species—the piñon pine. Last fall I gathered nuts from the squat trees that dot the hills above town. They were luscious, buttery, and sweet. These tiny morsels sustained the Indigenous people of this region, the Tewa and Tano, for many lifetimes. They ate them raw, ground into a flour or a butter, and used them in soups. Harvesting and eating piñon nuts remains an important social and ceremonial tradition in the fall. This delicacy sustains the squirrels, birds, and rodents too.

They were part of my childhood as well, a way to connect to the land where I lived. I couldn’t believe the earth could gift such sustenance. Today, these nuts feel so precious. The piñon trees mast and offer their bounty only once every three to five years. The future of these trees is uncertain. Many are already dying back because of climate change. As I gather, my hands sticky with sap, I am full of gratitude, guilt, and a gnawing grief.

Other plants, like grapes, were brought here during Spanish colonialism. Franciscan monks followed the conquistadors to bring Christianity to the Indigenous people. They were required to buy their sacramental wine directly from Spain, as it was illegal to grow Spanish grapes outside the country. But around 1629, some bold monks smuggled vines into New Mexico. The variety was known as “mission grapes.” In 1868, Italian Jesuit priests settled in New Mexico and brought their winemaking techniques to the region. In less than twenty years, New Mexico was producing almost a million gallons of wine annually.

Some plants made the reverse trip. In Sicily, opuntia cacti commonly known as prickly pear, were first brought to the island by the Spanish, who took them from the Americas during the colonial period. It was fashionable at the time for the Sicilian upper class to have extensive gardens filled with rare and exotic plants. The prickly pear was bred to bloom twice a year, which doubled the fruiting season of these tasty treats. In a procedure known as scozzolatura, a practice that continues to this day, the first cactus flowers in late spring are cut off and the fruits that result, the bastardoni, are the most highly prized because they are bigger and juicier. At some point, a few cacti escaped the confines of the aristocratic gardens and made a home on the windswept hillsides. Clusters of green pads studded with bright magenta fruits now grow freely over much of the island. Plant migrants assisted by human desire.

When I was a kid, the fruits reminded me of gemstones. Such a deep juicy color in a land of tawny browns. I still love gathering them today. I can never manage to wait until I get home and clean them before eating one or two, so I associate them with the sensation of having hairlike, splintery needles in my lips. Somewhere down the lines of the past, my noble ancestors lived in a huge palazzo, a long, rectangular mansion with an interior courtyard. I imagine it overflowing with opuntia so genteel that it’s climbed up the sides of the stone walls to mingle with the fuchsia bougainvillea.

Sicilians love feast days and celebrations. Perhaps because their history is one of such upheaval, it is ever more vital to make time for joy and sustenance. The volcano at the heart of Sicily, Mount Etna, is both a continual threat to the island’s existence and the means by which it has grown. In 1669, an eruption began that lasted 122 days—explosive outbursts from flank and central vents, molten rocks flung miles into the air, lava flows overtopping city walls, plumes of ash settled over life in suffocating layers. The lava flows remained hot enough to boil water for many months; it reportedly took eight years for them to cool completely.

To live so close to a volcano—this is to know the meaning of the Italian phrase, meno male, which is a way of thanking God; because truly it could always have been worse.

When I gather wild foods in New Mexico, I connect not only to these roots but also to the history of conquests and migrations and disaster and feasting on this land. I wonder how long this place will be habitable. The drought here is worsening. Millions of years ago much of it was under a shallow sea. You can still find fossilized shells in the rocks. How will it change in the next hundred years, as climate chaos forces all things—animal and plant, human and nonhuman—to move and find new ways to thrive?

Migration might not save us this time. Of all the species that have ever existed, 99.9 percent have gone extinct. It’s likely not a question of if humans will disappear but when. Some extinctions are quick: species survive a few millennia before their particular branch of the tree of life terminates. Other extinctions are so quiet they seem like something else—an evolution from one thing to another.

On the scale of millennia—the age of the rocks beneath our feet—humans have been a tiny blip. And yet our devouring activities have been so frenzied that our existence will be seen in the archaeological record as a thin layer of devastation, as though an asteroid had hit. We’ve changed the earth so fast and so extensively, in such a short amount of time, that we’ve become the most dominant natural force on the planet. We’ve burned it all up. Is there any use in arguing over whether it’s capitalism or the fossil fuel companies, or the eight billion people, or the rich, the patriarchy, the aliens, or the devil causing all our problems? We’ve been on this path to extinction a long time.

The pleasure of food allows us to feel the abundance of being alive in this ever-dying world. It allows us to look outside of the memories we faithfully reconstruct in order to keep the world static, beyond our desire to be remembered as individuals. Each recipe has its own life history: a shift in relationships between people, place, and plants; upheavals of what was known and had to be relearned; reconfigurations of what it means to feel at home. It is a migration of our perceptions from one landscape to another. It is a story of the senses.

Feasting allows the loneliness and terror of existence to be forgotten, at least momentarily. Such pleasure brings us into that raw, mad, deep love of life. How easily we leave behind our stories of movement and desperation—of making a new home in a foreign land—when our stomachs are full. How many generations thought, “Well, surely this must be the end of the world? Might as well eat!”

Breaded ground pork cutlet with plum tomato. Steamed broccoli, EVOO butter beans with dried onion flakes and garlic-pepper-salt; stir-fried edamame, cauliflower, and carrots.

ADJUST AND ADAPT. That was his adage. His prayer. His affirmation.

As a resident of coastal Florida, Papa experienced a number of hurricanes. He once sent us a photo of himself in the bathtub with a colander on his head in preparation for an impending storm, a sly grin on his face that made me wonder if this was a game or a genuine precaution.

In some ways, Papa would have excelled in this time of pandemic and quarantine. Adjust and adapt. He always kept a full pantry, fridge, and freezer. He had an “eat-soon shelf” so that he would not let food go to waste, and since he already ate most of his meals alone, he had a reserve of leftover portions in the freezer.

In other ways, Papa would have hated this forced solitary retreat. Most of his socializing took place in small moments with strangers—the Vietnamese man who cut his toenails at the mall, the women who took the tickets at the movie theater. He used to keep boxes of cookies in his car so that he could give them to the service workers he encountered.

This time of isolation would have stolen those little, important joys from his life. He wanted to feed everyone, to bring some cheer to those he encountered. Perhaps it was a relic of childhood. Maybe such rituals reminded him of the fig-and-date cookies, called cuccidati, that his big Italian family made for Christmas. Or the tradition on the feast day of Saint Joseph, in which Italian households in New Orleans set out elaborate altars to feed the poor.

I wonder if he ever truly adapted to an adulthood of solitary meals after a childhood of noisy family feasts. Family reunions were like dinner-dances, attended by hundreds of relatives. He recalled that at one such birthday celebration, before the troubled times, all the mothers and grandmothers, aunts and godmothers, helped to cook. They scoured washtubs and placed them atop charcoal braziers to serve tomato-sauced pasta crowded with meatballs and Italian sausages. Another tub overflowed with a Sicilian mixed salad. The one next to it was filled with ice and fresh oysters. The uncles helped shuck, topping each one with a squeeze of lemon juice or splash of hot Tabasco. There were mounds of bread and biscotti and candied almonds. For dessert, cannoli and sfogliatelle surrounded the centerpiece: a huge cassata cake—a delicious marriage of sponge-cake layers, ice cream, and ricotta, flavored with chopped semisweet chocolate, lots of candied citron and orange peel, glacé cherries, and blanched pistachio nuts. It was enough food to satisfy the many family, friends, and neighbors, with leftovers to bring down the driveway to feed “the ever-present poor.”

Papa grew up in direct contact with the vendors and farmers and fishermen who provided his sustenance. Food was medicine to him, and every day of good health was a blessing. In his old age, the sad, familiar question When will I eat again? no longer tore at him. When he shopped, money was no longer a worry. He marveled at the abundance, at times overwhelmed by such a variety of choices. Occasionally, he would offer to pay for the groceries of someone in line ahead of him, especially if he saw they were putting something back or struggling to find enough money.

He wrote to me that while he cooked, he often wondered: “Who planted, cultivated, harvested, packaged, and shipped these ingredients to my market? How many strangers helped get this all from wherever it started to my condo kitchen and dining table? My appreciation and gratitude should be expressed to each of them! It saddens me that I can thank only God and the market workers, but I never get too sad to lose my appetite … or my abundant weight!”

In the last years of his life, he emailed photos of his meals to us, almost daily, as if a prayer that we should eat well too. Separate but together. I wish I had cared enough when he was still alive to understand his loneliness. Despite his many friends and connections with strangers, feeling lonely was a consistent theme that ran throughout his memoirs. It seems to me that, as humans, we were never meant to eat alone. I have eaten most meals alone during this pandemic, and I understand now how it is both easier and harder to be so solitary.

Papa wrapped himself up in his traumas, and that made it harder to reach him. He was so critical. It was impossible to ask him questions, for doing so would derail his story, which had to be told in his right way. He needed to be the center of attention. He was desperate to be remembered. He was a man who urgently wanted to share himself with the world but was never quite sure how. His mouth was full of secrets.

I’ve tried to make it a practice this year, when I sit down to a meal alone, to imagine all the people and creatures who’ve had a hand in the food I am eating, to think of the magic and great miracle of life up close. It makes me feel a little bit less lonely. It helps to quiet my rage.

Faith. Hope. Charity. These were the words, linked together, that gave my grandfather happiness throughout his long and blessed life. They gave him happiness for nearly ninety-one bittersweet years. He adjusted, adapted, and laughed through every crisis. Sharing the gift of food in whatever way he could.

THE THING I am craving most in this period of isolation is dinner parties. I adore dinner parties. I love to feed people. And because I tend to be an outgoing introvert, I find escaping to the kitchen mid-meal to finish preparing the next course provides a moment of respite. I gather myself over the elk ragù, then pop into the dining room with a steaming bowl of new flavors.

Sicilian food is a hybrid cuisine that celebrates whatever ingredients you have on hand or can be gathered from the hills and plucked from the water. Papa used to say that no true Italian’s garden is complete without tomatoes, figs, lemons, and cucuzza squash, “as sweet as it can be long.” He loved red beans from birth. He ate them with rice on Mondays, cooked with the ham bone from Sunday’s dinner, which is still a tradition in New Orleans. In Brooklyn, he ate them in pasta fazool. In adulthood, he would add ham, but only when he could afford the meat. In his Florida retirement, ditalini was a favorite pasta cut. “Like many other Italian favorites, including pizza and polenta,” he wrote me, “this one started as a peasant dish, being composed of inexpensive ingredients.” His food was a reflection of his own migration, from one landscape to another, adjusting and adapting to the new layers of himself that were revealed by foreign lands.

When the world opens up again, I will throw a dinner party in honor of my ancestors and the foods they ate, the rise and fall of their successes, the mark of survival in their recipes. We will sit outside under the lace vine, with the scent of apricots and woodsmoke in the air, bouquets of wildflowers, poppies, lupines, lilacs, and irises spilling down the center of the table. It will be set with painted porcelain plates and mismatched crystal goblets, which I’ve collected from thrift stores, yard sales, and free boxes over the years. There will be candles in the nooks of the adobe walls that encircle the yard. Here we shall eat together. A family. Migrants in a new land. Refugees from the calamities of tragedy all around us.

I will cook:

Pinto beans and red chile rice.

Ravioli with prickly pear, piñon nuts, and freshly made ricotta.

Anise bread baked in an horno, an outdoor mud-beehive oven, like the old Italian furnos.

A goat roasted underground, spiced with green chiles and garlic, served with a rose-hip wine sauce.

Roasted wild duck stuffed with dandelion greens, to mimic the Sicilian quail stuffed with chicory. Roasted rabbit with wild raspberries instead of pomegranates. River trout, filled with mint and the wild oregano that grows from the cracks between my flagstone patio, then steamed on a bed of salted pine tips to recall the taste of the sea.

And for dessert, rosewater custard and honeysuckle granita topped with elderberry flower syrup.

Our thirst will be quenched by wild amaro, an herbal liquor made from local desert grapes and infused with drought-tolerant plants.

These recipes are transformed by time and space. A tradition migrating from place to person, from person to place. These recipes are a life story. They are secrets in the mouth.

Before we sit down to feast, I will raise a glass and speak the toast I heard throughout my childhood: Per cento anni. “For a hundred years may you live your bliss.”

Here’s to the joy of eating in the company of others. Such joy will come again soon. I am writing it into existence. Magari—may it be so.

(Sources: Emergence Magazine)

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751 Unmarked Graves Discovered Near Former Indigenous School in Canada

Experts estimate 4,000 to 10,000 children may have died at the schools, often from a combination of poor living conditions and disease

By JUNE 28, 2021 11:39AM

A memorial at Queen's Park in Toronto was set up to honor the 215 Indigenous children discovered in unmarked graves in British Columbia. Now, after the subsequent discovery of 751 such graves in Saskatchewan, the memorial continues to grow. (Steve Russell / Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Two back-to-back discoveries this year of the unmarked graves of hundreds of Indigenous children are sending shockwaves across Canada and throughout North American Indigenous communities. The children, who were students at residential boarding schools from the mid-1800s to mid-1900s, died far from home after having suffered brutal abuse and neglect. For decades, Indigenous children in both Canada and the United States were taken away from their families and sent to boarding schools, where they were forced to assimilate to Euro-American culture.

Last Thursday, Cadmus Delorme, Chief of the Cowessess First Nation, announced the discovery of 751 unmarked graves of mostly Indigenous children at the cemetery of the former Marieval Indian Residential School in the southeast corner of the Saskatchewan province.

In late May, Chief Roseanne Casimir, of the Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc First Nation, announced that researchers using ground-penetrating radar (GPR) had discovered the unmarked burials of 215 students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Some children buried onsite had been as young as 3 years old, the First Nation noted in a statement.

After the Kamloops news broke, the Cowessess First Nation initiated the scanning of Marieval with GPR on June 2, Delorme reported in a virtual press conference.

“This is not a mass grave site. These are unmarked graves,” Delorme says.

The finds have rekindled a national reckoning with the traumatic history of Canada’s residential schooling system, a practice that systematically separated Indigenous children from their families and sent them to church- and government-operated boarding schools across the country.

On Twitter, the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FISN), the provincial federation of Indigenous groups, noted that survivors of residential schools in need of support can call a toll-free line at 800-721-0066 or a 24-hour crisis line at 866-925-4419.

The boarding school system “was a crime against humanity, an assault on a First Nation people,” Chief Bobby Cameron, of FISN, tells Ian Austen and Dan Bilefsky of the New York Times.

“The only crime we ever committed as children was being born Indigenous,” says Cameron.

Canada’s National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 2008 to investigate the residential schools, stated in the 2015 report “What We Have Learned” that nearly 150,000 First Nation, Métis and Inuit students passed through the system. About 150 schools operated in the country in total, from the first schools founded in the few years before Canada’s 1867 founding to the last school closure in the late 1990s. (The United States government funded about 350 such schools.)

For children sent to—or forced to attend—the Marieval and Kamloops schools, the experience was, according to the Canadian analysis, “lonely and alien.” Students faced harsh punishment and were often prey to sexual and physical abuse from the priests, nuns, ministers or teachers that operated their institutions. Aboriginal cultures and the student’s native languages were “demeaned and suppressed,” in what the government now describes as an attempted “cultural genocide,” per the report.

Some experts estimate that more than 4,000 children died at the schools, often from a combination of poor living conditions and disease, per the 2015 report. But Murray Sinclair, the Indigenous former judge who led the commission, tells the New York Times that the true total may actually be “well beyond 10,000.”

Founded by Roman Catholic priests in 1889, the Marieval Indian Residential School operated until 1997, per the CBC News. The Canadian federal government began funding the school in 1901 and took over administration in 1969, until turning the school over to the Cowessess First Nation in 1987, report Amanda Coletta and Michael E. Miller for the Washington Post. The Roman Catholic church also founded and operated the Kamloops school for most of its years, from the 1890s to the late 1970s.

The Canadian federal government has set aside funds for Indigenous groups to carry out similar research at residential schools, to seek out and commemorate the dead, per the Post. “The findings in Marieval and Kamloops … are a shameful reminder of the systemic racism, discrimination, and injustice that Indigenous peoples have faced—and continue to face—in this country,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau noted in a statement last week. “While we cannot bring back those who were lost, we can—and we will—tell the truth of these injustices, and we will forever honour their memory.”

On Thursday, amidst renewed pleas from Indigenous leaders to Pope Francis, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, to apologize, as Alec Salloum reports for the Regina Leader-Postthe Roman Catholic Archbishop of Regina Donald Bolen said he and others were trying to bring about an apology for the church’s role in operating boarding schools and perpetuating the abuse of Indigenous children. As Matthew S. Schwartz reported for NPR earlier this month, the Pope offered his condolences regarding the Kamloops discovery but stopped short of offering a full apology for the church’s actions—despite consistent urging from the Canadian federal government.

This week, spurred in part by the discovery at Kamloops, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced plans to investigate the “troubled legacy of federal boarding school policies” in the United States. Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, recently wrote about her own family’s history with boarding schools, including her great-grandfather who attended the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.

Like Canada, the “United States also has a history of taking Native children from their families in an effort to eradicate our culture and erase us as a people,” she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “I am a product of these horrific assimilationist policies,” she added.

“The lasting and profound impacts of the federal government’s boarding school system have never been appropriately addressed.”

(Sources: Smithsonian Magazine)

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Living with the Unknown: Returning to the Essential Roots of Spiritual Ecology

retreat with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee at Bore Place (Kent, UK) from August 10th - 12th, 2021

 

Photo by Beth Evans

The pandemic ushered in the era of the apocalypse. Predictions of a future threat became lived reality as failing societal and economic structures revealed the fragility of our modern industrial way of life—cracks in the system became chasms. So much has been revealed—both the light and the dark—that we have no true sense of what has been set into motion. Over the coming year, Emergence Magazine will be seeking out stories, hosting gatherings, and facilitating conversations that we hope can help guide us into the next chapter of our collective future. 

From August 10th to 12th, at Bore Place in Kent, England, Emergence is hosting its first in-person retreat since the start of the pandemic, exploring these questions through the themes of initiation and transformation, walking with ashes, returning to the essential roots of spiritual ecology, and emerging from fire into possibility. The retreat will include talks, film and storytelling, nature connection practices, silent and walking meditation, and a special musical performance by Sam Lee—the acclaimed folk singer and song collector, recently featured in the Emergence podcast.  

For three days, we will gather together to find ground in this new reality, gain deeper kinship with the living world, celebrate the abundance of summer, and look to the emerging connections between ecology, culture, and spirituality. In addition to this retreat, we look forward to hosting more in-person gatherings as it becomes safe to do so in the United States and other parts of the world.

(Sources: Emergence Magazine)

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Germany’s New Wildflower Meadows Offer Urban Safe Havens to Bees and Insects

, June 25, 2021

An endangered honey bee on a wildflower. Roberto Lopez / Unsplash

In Germany, hope is growing for wild bees and insects. Surprisingly, it's taking root in the country's large urban cities, thanks to wildflower meadows being planted precisely to reverse precipitous declines in insect populations.

Insects around the world are in danger. A 2020 study published in Science estimated that global bug populations are down 25 percent on land. Populations declined 9 percent every decade, meaning nearly a quarter of all insects have gone extinct in the last 30 years. The figure jumps to over half in the last 75 years. A different report estimated that all insects could be gone within 100 years.

According to the BBC, the losses are the worst in the West and Midwest of the U.S. and in Europe — especially Germany. The Guardian reported that Germany is home to about 580 species of wild bees. More than half are endangered or on the verge of extinction. The news report cited a 2017 study by the Entomological Society of Krefeld which showed a 75 percent decline in total flying insect biomass in protected areas in Germany since 1989.

Both the BBC and The Guardian listed the main causes of insect loss as climate change, the use of insecticides, land-use changes and pollution from chemicals, exhaust, light and sound. In Germany in particular, a loss of diverse habitats was listed as the main reason for the sharp decline, The Guardian reported.

The anticipated biodiversity loss has been dubbed the "Insect Apocalypse," and scientists are warning against it and the ripple-out effect that such a loss would have because bugs are the "fabric of life." They serve vital ecosystem functions such as aerating the soil, pollination and the recycling of nutrients, the BBC reported.

In the case of bees and other pollinators, the "perfect storm" of parasites, air pollution and other threats currently decimating insect populations could also lead to crop shortages and affect food security. The list of popular foods we would lose without pollinators includes everything from apples and strawberries to avocados, coffee, onions and tomatoes.

To combat this catastrophic decline in bee and insect populations, Germany has undertaken a country-wide project to plant urban wildflower meadows. The Guardian reported that more than 100 flowers and wild grasses have been planted throughout Germany's largest cities over the last three years, and more are on the way. Many of these included endangered plants that take two to three years to mature, mixed in with annual blooms.

At first, local neighbors were dubious about the floral additions, especially at the expense of vast grass patches and lawns.

"I was quite skeptical at first," said Derek O'Doyle, an Irish citizen living in Berlin, to The Guardian. "It looked disorganized. And I resented the loss of a large patch of grass where I could play catch with my dog."

With the German summer now in full swing and the meadows buzzing with color and activity — literally — even the most reluctant city-dwellers have been persuaded.

"I've changed my mind," said O'Doyle. "It's become an incredibly attractive addition to our neighborhood. You experience the seasons in a whole new way."

Longer-term efforts to save bees and other insects must move beyond city limits to address agricultural land use and pesticides, Christian Schmid-Egger told The Guardian. Schmid-Egger coordinates Berlin's wildflower meadows on behalf of the German Wildlife Foundation. Still, he hoped the urban effort would help raise awareness of the importance of preserving wild spaces, even within cities, and of protecting the insects we all rely on.

"Eventually, many such hotspots could create a network of wilderness right inside our cities," he said.

(Sources: EcoWatch)

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Vietnam’s Pangolin Protector

Thai Van Nguyen receives Goldman Prize for saving imperiled wildlife 

By Lindsey Botts | Jun 15 2021

Photo courtesy of Save Vietnam’s Wildlife

As a boy, Thai Van Nguyen spent his days exploring the forest near his home in Vietnam’s Ninh Bình Province. He grew up just outside of Cúc Phương National Park, Vietnam's first national park and largest nature reserve. His proximity to the forest fostered a connection to nature that at 38 he still carries with him. But it also gave him an up-close view of the perils that wildlife face in Vietnam. Poaching, trafficking, deforestation, and other human pressures played out right before his eyes. 

When Nguyen was eight years old, he watched a group of his fellow villagers dig out a pangolin mother and baby from their burrow and kill them to keep as hunting trophies. Pangolins, a scaly mammal native to Africa and Asia, are the most trafficked mammals on Earth. Their scales are erroneously believed to have medicinal value in many traditional cultures, and their meat is prized as a source of protein in rural communities. When threatened, they curl up into a tight ball, making them easy pickings for would-be predators, including humans. As a result, all eight subspecies of pangolin are at risk of extinction due to poaching. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) red list, their conservation status ranges from vulnerable to critically endangered

As Nguyen grew up, pangolin sightings in the forest near his home became increasingly rare. Eventually, he stopped seeing the animals. Watching the armadillo-like mammal disappear had a profound impact on his attitude toward conservation. “As a small child, Thai told his parents that he was going to grow up and save pangolins,” says Suzi Eszterhas, a wildlife photographer who has worked closely with Nguyen. “And that's exactly what he did.” For his work as founder and executive director of Save Vietnam’s Wildlife, Nguyen was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize on Tuesday.

After leaving high school, Nguyen studied natural resource management at the Forestry University of Vietnam in Hanoi. This led him to his first job, in 2005, as a program coordinator for the Asian Pangolin Conservation Program, a pangolin rehabilitation and rescue initiative managed by Cúc Phương National Park. It was one of the first programs to focus on pangolin conservation in Vietnam. But Nguyen says that the federal oversight that came with being managed by a government entity made it difficult to raise money. Additionally, according to Eszterhas, the government officials that Nguyen worked with sometimes used questionable conservation tactics, like selling some pangolins back to traders to raise money for the program. To really improve pangolin conservation, Nguyen needed a nongovernmental organization that could act more independently and also raise money.  

“As a small child, Thai told his parents that he was going to grow up and save pangolins, and that's exactly what he did.”

Nguyen left his government position in 2013 to study nongovernmental organization management at Montana State University. The following year, he took his newly acquired skills back to Vietnam to start Save Vietnam's Wildlife (SVW), a nonprofit whose goal is to stop the extinction of Vietnam's wildlife, including the binturong, a small bear-like carnivore; river otters; leopard cats; and of course, the pangolin.

Located in the Cúc Phương National Park, SVW has over 60 staff members and volunteers who rescue trafficked animals, rehabilitate animals into the wild, and are fighting to change the local narrative around wildlife. A great deal of Nguyen’s work includes spy-style operations in which he and his colleagues pose as poachers or potential buyers to catch criminals in the act of trafficking wild animals. With the help of park rangers, they often rescue animals on the spot. So far, they have been very successful. Since starting the program six years ago, they've rehabilitated almost 2,000 wild animals, including civets, leopard cats, pangolins, and river otters. 

Nguyen’s organization also advocates for better wildlife policies and recommends improved conservation measures at the government level. For example, in 2014, the advocacy arm of SVW successfully lobbied the Vietnamese government to stop health insurance companies from covering the cost of pangolin scales. The group has also successfully convinced the government to implement steeper penalties for the possession of snares or hunting dogs in areas where hunting is prohibited. Another milestone includes persuading the government to increase the protection status for civets, linsangs, and pangolins.  

"Thai is really to be credited for a lot of the policy changes that have been made on pangolins in Vietnam," Eszterhas told Sierra. "He is one of the most inspiring conservationists I've ever worked with."

In addition to advocacy and wildlife rescue, Save Vietnam’s Wildlife also focuses on education and outreach to local communities. Nguyen’s connection to Cúc Phương National Park gives him unique leverage in this part of Vietnam. He understands the challenges that people in rural Vietnam face and routinely meets with wildlife traffickers, poachers, and villagers to open up a dialogue around pangolin conservation. He also conducts surveys within communities to determine their needs. This information is evaluated against conservation requirements for target species. Together, the data points are used to create a plan for wildlife management. SVW also hosts field days in the park for youth groups so that young people can connect with nature. One of Nguyen's ultimate goals is to foster in kids a love of nature, so that future generations share the same affinity for wildlife that he has. More recently, Nguyen was elected to be vice chairman of the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC) Pangolin Specialist Group, a volunteer network that advises the IUCN on the conservation status of pangolins.

Despite all his hard work, Nguyen can't believe he won the Goldman Environmental Prize. "When I heard that I got the award, I was at home at night. I got the call through WhatsApp," says Nguyen. "At first I was so surprised. I didn't know who nominated me for the prize. It's a whole life twist." But it's one that he welcomes. Not only is the award a great honor, he says, but the prize money will also go a long way in helping him further SVW’s mission. "I want Save Vietnam's Wildlife to stay forever. We want to make people more interested so that they get involved in wildlife conservation."

(Sources: The Magazine of Sierra Club)

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How to handle your child’s negative self-talk

 

Hi Jon,

Negative self-talk is an easy habit to fall into (for adults and kids alike 😕) but it can also be an easy one to break with these 4 tips I found! Do you ever catch yourself saying negative things about YOURSELF that you’d never say to someone else? I definitely do.

Don’t worry. It’s totally normal to get down on ourselves sometimes—and interrupting those negative thoughts is easier once you know how. I found 4 tips that can help your family break the cycle of negative self-talk. 
 
Stop negative self-talk
Remember to be gentle and patient with yourself. It takes time to build new healthy habits and unlearn negative patterns, but it will definitely pay off in better mental health for the whole family! ❤


All the best,

Nani

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