Page 159 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

state parks, historic sites, farms, cities, wildlife refuges and industrial sites. When the group

reached the Chesapeake Bay, they sang and performed ceremony to offer the headwaters from

their copper pail. “We are telling the water, ‘This is how you began, and this is how we wish for

you to be again,’” Ojibwe elder Sharon Day told a local newspaper. The walkers wept tears of

joy to be greeted by a family of cavorting dolphins.

I imagine walking with a small group of companions, carrying a copper pail and pouches of

tobacco and corn pollen. Walking with an open heart and listening, trusting that my sincerity will

allow me to hear the song of the Chesapeake, even though in my growing up no one taught me

how to do this. In my culture such things are dismissed as childish superstition. As I walk, my

ancestors send visions of the great crust of my culture slipping off the living land, just as a crab

sheds his shell. When my path takes me through the asphalt parking lot of an abandoned

shopping center, I see the truth of their vision: knotweed rising to the light from a crack in the

paving. The spirit of the knotweed plant sings of restoring balance to the waters of the human

body. And my spirit is filled with hope. I know myself to be water, to be united by water with all

other beings.

There are hundreds of thousands of creeks, streams and rivers in the Chesapeake Bay

watershed. At the shoreline, the major tributaries are the Susquehanna, the Patapsco, the

Patuxent, the Potomac, the Rappahannock, the York, the James, the Pocomoke, the Nanticoke,

the Choptank, and the Chester. Smaller rivers include the Elk at the head of the Bay, the

Gunpowder near Aberdeen Proving Ground north of Baltimore, the Severn and South Rivers at

Annapolis, the Piankatank and the Nansemond in Tidewater, Virginia, and the Sassafras on the

Eastern Shore. There are two small Wicomico Rivers. One feeds into the north shore of the

Potomac about twenty miles from its mouth. The other lies between the Pocomoke and the

Nanticoke, with the Ellis Bay Wildlife Management Area at its mouth. Mostly marsh and forested

! ! (!

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