Life has been busy!

So it has been quite some time since I last blogged. I have been birding, hiking, running the community garden, camping, trying to get my move to Ashland, OR organized and educating myself. In June I took a week long class about Native American Cultures taught by David West, of Potawatomi descent, and David West, a Wasco man from the Warm Springs Reservation. This class was extraordinarily insightful and I feel my perspectives and perceptions expanding. For this class I wrote a paper about California Condors and the Yurok efforts to restore the condor to their lands, with a history of the condor and their importance to tribes from the Columbia River to southern California. It is interesting to me that the condor and the tribes' fates have been fairly linked considering condors were so sacred to so many tribes. It is also interesting to me that despite my appetite for bird information I had no idea that California condors once flew over the majority of the continent. Or that even after white Euro-Americans arrived in the Americas that condors flew over the western edge of the continent from British Columbia to Baja California, Mexico. Amazing things we can learn when we allow the people the originated on this continent to speak their knowledge. Their truth. When we allow them to be part of the conversation, history, plan, etc., rather than treating them as outsiders or eliminating them by dehumanizing them. My mind reels as I write this. Blogging will possibly continue being sparse for a bit as I will be living in two places, attending graduate classes and driving across the country and back in a salute to the end of summer and the beginning of a new chapter of my life. Enjoy your summer!