Shirley Nordrum: Part 2

Find the Shine

We continue our lively chat with Shirley Nordrum. Is it possible to find the shine?

Leah Lemm:

Boozhoo. I'm Leah Lemm, citizen of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe.

Daniel Lemm:

Hau Mitakuyapi. I'm Daniel Lemm, citizen of the Lower Sioux Dakota Oyate.

Leah Lemm:

And this is Wisdom Continuum. We're bringing you conversations from awesome Native folks to celebrate native wisdom for a healthier, thoughtful, more just future. How are you doing Dan?

Daniel Lemm:

I'm doing pretty good. Leah, how are you?

Leah Lemm:

I'm good. Just as a reminder, we are married.

Daniel Lemm:

Yep.

Leah Lemm:

So asking that question is really fun because it's something we need to make sure that we do every day. Right? So might as well take this opportunity to ask you. Are you staying warm?

Daniel Lemm:

Well, thank you for asking. I am staying warm. I got my sweater on. I'm layered up. Life is good.

Leah Lemm:

All right. Great. So today we are going to continue along with our conversation with Shirley Nordrum from the Red Lake Nation, great conversation, and really excited to share the rest of that out.

Daniel Lemm:

Last time we talked with Shirley about a bunch of things. We heard Shirley talk about commodification. And part of that is something only has value in its utility, how it may be used for something in a production process. There are other ways to value what is around us.

Leah Lemm:

And we're going to talk about that. And we're also going to talk about what a healthy ecosystem looks like in Shirley's mind. And I just think it's going to be really fun for everybody to hear.

Daniel Lemm:

You also talked about commodification of the land, and I wanted to ask you about for a little more on that. And what I mean by that is, I've heard a tree doesn't have value until it's cut down and then used for something. And that is a financial value. Of course, there are many different ways to value something, but oftentimes we only think about things in financial terms and yes, as a finance person that is a way I think. It's not the only way that I think. So I'm curious from you, could you say more about commodification of the land perhaps through the lens of the value of a tree?

Shirley Nordrum:

Well, to me, the tree provides so much more living on the land than he ever could being cut up into boards to build a house or something. The tree, he gives me oxygen. He is a carbon sink for the challenges that we have is living the life that we do now, the way that we do it is that we're just putting out way too much. There's way too much carbon in the atmosphere, and greenery and soils are able to absorb that and hold at and kind of hold back some of the warming and the climate extremes that the planet is experiencing. It's just beautiful, depending on who the tree is. He could give me all kinds of things. A wiigwaas, a birch tree can give me bark that I can make a basket from or make some other craft item. There's value in that item.

Shirley Nordrum:

It has its utilitarian use. And it also allowed me to have a creative spirit. There's medicines, tons of medicines in those trees. All those trees have medicines that I use every day. I look at the forest as my pharmacy, rather than a CVS or Walgreens. And they're homes to other animals that I enjoy, the songs of the birds, the beauty of the birds, the peacefulness that brings. It's cool. I could just go on and on about how valuable that tree or those trees as a forest are to me. When I talk about a board, you might build my house or I might put up a shelf. I probably wouldn't have a shelf. There's probably other way to store things without having a shelf.

Shirley Nordrum:

If it weren't for colonization, I probably wouldn't know about a shelf. But that's how I see all that value and I've read a lot about the colonizers. And actually over in Europe, when they heard about America, and they heard reports of what was being seen as the explorers came here, they were like financial speculators. They knew of the value of the timber. They had already cut down a lot of their old forests. Only forests that remained were what belonged to the kingdom. And so they knew those things were there for the taking, and they speculated. And they sent people that they didn't even really have much value for here to be the workers to harvest those things and just to take them away. So it was kind of like their first overseas speculation of a way to make a lot of money because it was all based on money, never thinking another thing about the value of just the beauty of those here.

Leah Lemm:

And there's this folklore and made hero, Paul Bunyan, which is so prevalent.

Shirley Nordrum:

Well that guy drives me nuts.

Leah Lemm:

Prevalent in our area.

Shirley Nordrum:

Yeah. I just hate that guy in Bemidji. I just would like to see him crumble to the ground. When you look at what happened here, I was reading one time. Heck was the name of that article. It had such an annoying... The Vanishing Indian. It was a white paper coming out of Canada written by an anthropologist. That's what it was called, The Vanishing Indian.

Leah Lemm:

That'll do it, an anthropologist.

Shirley Nordrum:

It actually was a good article. It had a bad name, but it was a good article. And in there that anthropologist used this term, nutricide. And nutricide had two definitions. It was the intentional taking of, or causing the loss of life through nutritional manipulation. And look at what happened to Daniel's folks, and a lot of other people with the loss of the buffalo. I mean, the Buffalo were just slaughtered for no reason other than to disrupt and create genocide through the loss of their traditional nutritional relative. Right. And the other definition was the intentional causing or bringing about the loss of knowledge around traditional foods. And that is the boarding schools because you took the children, little bitty kids, three, four, sometimes two years old, you took them from their families, and you took them far away. And they never got out to go home. They lost their language. They lost their connection to their family and their community.

Shirley Nordrum:

And you did this generational disruption for like a hundred years. And so it's amazing that any Indigenous traditional knowledge and culture was hung onto. I'm grateful to those relatives that hung onto that and passed that on. And I always remember the ones who lost their lives in the battle to hang onto that. So I started thinking about, well, what does nutricide look like? And so I started trying to find photographs. And of course, photography didn't come around until like the mid 18th century. And a lot of damage was already done by then. But I was taking pictures. I was going to all the historical societies and all those places, looking for pictures, looking at what did the landscape look like before the colonizers got to the territory now known as Minnesota and just these huge forests.

Shirley Nordrum:

And they were just obliterated. And so I always find it ironic when people started talking about, well, how are your people going to adapt to climate change? Because I was thinking, man, we've already gone through an apocalypse because we lived in these huge forests, and it was like going into our kitchen and just raiding it of everything and leaving us, sitting in a fresh landscape that needed to reforest itself or to regrow. And I've read some things about what happened to the Mississippi River. It was so chuck full of logs and sediment and sawdust and things from the logging that the fish were just going away. The fish were dying. They couldn't live because there wasn't oxygen in the water. So we've already gone through this huge, huge disruption of our way of life and our landscape.

Shirley Nordrum:

So I'm pretty sure we're going to make it through climate change because we're pretty adaptive and resilient person. But when you think about someone like my grandmother born in 1886, I think it was, and what she saw in her lifetime until she passed in like 1930s. Can you imagine what the landscape looked, how the change looked for her? It had to be just...

Shirley Nordrum:

Larry Aitken was a really cool guy. He's not here with us anymore. But one time he said to me, he said, "You know, Shirley?" He said, "Every Native person on this earth is suffering from a disease." And I was waiting for him. I didn't say anything. I was waiting for him to tell me what the disease was. And he said, "It's the disease of a broken heart." He said, "Because everywhere the colonizer went, he disrupted the way of life, and it broke our hearts." He said, "And it's up to us to figure out how do we heal from that broken heart?" And so I guess that's the resilience of figuring out, how do I deal with that broken heart? And what do I do with my life to make things better?

Daniel Lemm:

Shirley, I want to follow up on that. In the conversation this afternoon, you've talked about animals, plants, water, land, climate change, broken heart here. With what you just said about the broken heart, I wanted to ask you what does a well-functioning or a healed heart or a well-functioning natural ecosystem look like to you?

Shirley Nordrum:

I'm not sure that I've seen one because I see a lot of brokenness, but I'm pretty sure it shines. I think what I mean by that is, you know when you've heard that said about a woman who's going to have a child. When people first learn and they say, "Oh, I knew you were going to have a child because you're glowing." Okay. I believe that there's an energy. I think we're nothing more, we're not a physical being. We're a spiritual being in a physical shell, having an experience. And so when our energy of our spirit is vibrating at its height of wellness, I believe that it creates a glow. Maybe not in the way that you necessarily think about a glow, but I do believe it's a visible brightening.

Shirley Nordrum:

And I've seen people that are bright and that are shining. In fact, if you're friends with me on Facebook, I'm always saying shine on. And that's why I say that shine on because there are moments, even broken people have moments when they shine. They just do. And so do ecosystems. I've seen water on a super fun site on a beautiful day shine. And I think it's because maybe in that moment there were people enjoying it or people respecting it, people loving it, people having ceremony, and it created a shine.

Shirley Nordrum:

So yeah, I think it's all about the light.

Leah Lemm:

That's wonderful. I'm looking everywhere to see if I can see. Maybe I'll practice looking for the shine.

Shirley Nordrum:

Just practice shining yourself.

Leah Lemm:

Oh yeah.

Daniel Lemm:

I love that Shirley. I see Leah shine all the time. It's not just her greasy face sometimes.

Shirley Nordrum:

Every time after she has chicken, she shines. I'm just kidding.

Daniel Lemm:

I didn't mean to take something beautiful and deep that you said, Shirley, and turn it to a joke.

Shirley Nordrum:

That's funny. That's Anishinaabe humor. I like that because we can laugh. And that's a bit humility to be able to laugh about yourself, and I enjoy it. So no need to apologize for laughing. Shakes to shine. There you go.

Shirley Nordrum:

If you're ever around me very much, I'm always encouraging people to connect however you can with the earth or with the being on it. Or I'm always telling people, go sit by the water. People will call me quite often when they're feeling down or whatever, something's bothering them. And I tell them go sit by the water. Drink some water. Think about the water you're drinking. Where did it come from? How long has it here? What are you putting? How does that feel as it's in your mouth and going down your throat? And how is that making you healthy? And how is that water that you're sitting by? How can you connect with it? If you see garbage by it, pick it up and then you'll feel better because you heal the earth a little a bit while you were healing yourself a little bit. Look at a flower, look deeply.

Shirley Nordrum:

People fly by through life all the time. They're always trying to go somewhere really fast. And I don't know where they're going or, or why it's so important to get there in a hurry, but they travel too fast. And they don't see the beauty on their way. They're missing a lot by that. It's draining their heart. It's draining their being by going too fast and not. So people will say, I'm going on vacation. I'm going to go sightsee somewhere. You know what? You could probably walk in your backyard. And if you were methodical and thoughtful and present, you'd probably see all kinds of things in your backyard that you never saw before, because you're taking the time. You don't really need to go somewhere to see something different. All you need to do is slow down and be present in the moment where you're at.

Shirley Nordrum:

And you will see some thing different. You will experience something different just by slowing down, just by breathing, just by loving. And then there comes the shine. You're going to shine because of that. And when you shine, that's kind of contagious in a way, You help other people by shining. Who doesn't like seeing a bright smile and a boisterous laugh? I have a sister that she has one of those laughs. It's just really loud and really beautiful. And I also have a couple of friends that have those same kind of laughs. And I was actually outside a building one time. And I heard all three of them laugh outside. And I went, "Oh my gosh, what a beautiful thing to be known for, your laugh."

Shirley Nordrum:

I knew all three of those women. And I went walking in there and I said, "I heard you guys outside. You're having such a good time." What a beautiful thing to be known for a laugh or to be known for a smile or your kindness or your love. And you can't do that unless you slow down, unless you build relationships, unless you take the time to really breathe and really enjoy life. So I think that people would feel a lot better, a lot healthier, a lot stronger, a lot calmer if they could put that into practice. And I wish that for everybody.

Leah Lemm:

Wow. Truly great, Shirley, I really appreciate that. I'm going to think about that all day, all weekend. I don't know. I love thinking about where my water comes from because we have our well, and I'm like, "There's water underneath us."

Shirley Nordrum:

I know, is that awesome? It's like, how awesome is that? One time I was out in the woods with my nephew, and he was looking up in the sky. And I was like, what is he looking at? I didn't want to disrupt his thoughts or anything. I was just looking up too, trying to see what he was seeing. He stared up just high forever. And then he come back, and then later on I said, "I saw you were looking up in the sky, and I looked up too, and I didn't see anything. What were you seeing?" And he said, 'Oh, oh, I was thinking about the glaciers and how they said they were like miles high. And I was looking up trying to think, what would that be like to have that much ice on top of the earth? What would that look like?' And I was like, "Oh, that's really cool." He's trying to have a vision that our ancestors probably had like they knew that and we didn't. So it was kind of cool.

Leah Lemm:

That's great. And spooky a little bit, but that's great.

Shirley Nordrum:

It was so awesome chatting with you guys. I thank you for the opportunity. I just really truly enjoyed it.

Leah Lemm:

Yeah. Thank you. I am humbled and appreciative and all Of that good stuff.

Daniel Lemm:

Thank you too, Shirley.

Leah Lemm:

So Shirley Nordrum from the Red Lake Nation, Chi-Miigwech. I just love how we wrapped up that conversation by hearing about her nephew looking up into the sky. And I think that's such a great reminder that we're not just connecting to one another who we can see right now, but also our ancestors and those to come too, thinking about all of us on this continuum of time, even, and remembering our relatives who are in this realm and who are in other realms.

Daniel Lemm:

I think that that story is really cool in how it connects us to how things were to how things are today and how we might look up and imagine how things could be.

Leah Lemm:

Okay. Well you can find Wisdom Continuum online at wisdomcontinuum.com. And if you have any suggestions for who we should talk to or resources to share, feel free to contact us at wisdom continuum AT gmail DOT com. And thank you to Wisdom Continuum's consulting producer Multitude and also production help by Manda Lillie. I'm Leah.

Daniel Lemm:

And I'm Daniel. And this is Wisdom Continuum.