Honoring ancestors roots me in the place that I live. Remembering, sharing stories, and the constant practice of walking in beauty feeds the tendrils of my spirit that reach into the Earth. With love, with hope, with the grimmest determination, I love the land, the trees, the fauna, the flora.

This particular patch of land, so near to the Great Lake of Erie, is covered with trees. I live with trees, breathing their air, sharing mine. And though I study the way many trees interact with birds, insects, fungi, and moss, and the ways in which they are useful to humans, I have a particular relationship with black sugar maples.

As a homesteader living on 12 acres of mostly wooded hills, I turn to the trees for medicine, fuel, tools, and food. Every spring I spend 4-6 weeks collecting sap in buckets (no icky plastic tubes) and boiling it down in an evaporator. The lengthy endeavor is all outdoors while the seasons shift from winter to spring. So I get a lot of thinking, reading, and writing done while I’m not lugging buckets of sap or skimming the surface of boiling sap, or feeding the forever ravenous fire.

The limited range of sugar maples has a cultural impact as a regional food in the northeastern parts of the U.S. and eastern Canada. So honoring the ancestors of this land, those who came before me, I’ve learned about Nanabozho.

The stories of Nanabozho come from the Anishinaabe, but many other tribes have different names for the same spirit, or have a similar spirit in their stories. To honor these ancestors, these People who came before me, I will tell this story in my own words as I remember it.

Nanabozho, shapeshifter, trickster, intermediary between Creator and the People. Nanabozho is a wanderer, moving from one place to another. He might be the son of the West Wind, or perhaps the Sun, or maybe both. No one is really sure. Some call him Great Hare and his twin brother is Great Wolf, but that is another story altogether. Another story reveals that Nanabozho has four brothers who are sent off to become the four directions, while he remains to care for Grandfather and Grandmother.

Nanabozho creates a New World from a bit of mud after the Old World is flooded by the Creator when the People are punished for losing respect for Creation. In the guise of a rabbit, Nanabozho steals fire from Thunderbird by alighting his own pelt and is offered protection from Birch, who forever has burn marks on her bark. Again as Rabbit, Nanabozho competes in a verbal contest with Owl to decide whether it should be light all the time or dark. Rabbit yells “light” while Owl yells “dark.” Then Owl accidentally says “light” and loses. But all the other animals fear a world of only light so Rabbit allows for dark to happen part of the time.

In this story, Nanabozho has wandered back to the land of the People of the Maples. The People have generally been industrious, hunting, fishing, gathering, farming. But when Nanabozho returns, he can find no hunters, no fishers, no gatherers, and no farmers. He wanders through the empty village wondering where has everyone gone.

Then he wanders into the forest, suddenly finding the People. When Creator made maple trees they were full of thick syrup. The People could easily gather the syrup by breaking a twig to let the sweet syrup drip into baskets. But today, Nanabozho finds only lazy People. They have become so lazy that they are all lying on their backs under dripping twigs, letting the syrup drip straight into their mouths.

Nanabozho thinks, “well, this can’t go on, they’ve become lazy and ungrateful” and as the Trickster he is, he comes up with a trick to teach the people a lesson. First he makes a large basket with birch bark. Then he lines it with the pitch of pine and spruce. Then he carries it to the nearby river and fills it up. Finally, he carries it to each and every maple tree filling the tree up to dilute the syrup to a thin watery sap.

The People wake up from their sugar comas to find Nanabozho lecturing them on how to make syrup from the thin maple sap. First he says they must make many birch baskets like the one he now carries and to collect the sap. Then they will heat rocks in fire and then drop the hot rocks in the sap until it is boiled down to syrup. In this way the People will show gratitude to the Creator for creating maple trees. And they must to return to their hunting and fishing and farming and gathering to show gratitude to the Creator for the food that gives them life. And to this day, we all must work to put food on the table.

I encourage you to learn the stories of the land that you live on, whether it is the land of your ancestors or not, the stories from the indigenous ancestors that lived here long ago impart the wisdom of the land.