The commonest language

By Katarzyna Nowak, Safina Center Fellow

Birdwatching by canoe in the Yukon. Photo: Katarzyna Nowak

I had spent several hours the previous day paddling on Lake Laberge with the ice candling (a sound I had never before heard) adding new bird species to my naturalist list of “Yukon signs of spring.” It was glorious: trumpeter swans (North America’s heaviest bird and the world’s largest waterfowl), goldeneyes in flight; a merganser pair; American wigeons convening near mew gulls, which always seem to be convening; a pair of plump blue-winged teal.

Mew gulls, and widgeons, each convening. Photo: Katarzyna Nowak

Trumpeter swans. Photo: Katarzyna Nowak

Merganser pair. Photo: Katarzyna Nowak

“You chose well, Kat,” said my friend Paul after asking me if the eyelid of summer had begun to open (this is how lyrically he naturally writes and speaks) and I sent him a recording of the ice sounding like a glass chandelier in the wind, distant trumpets of swans reverberating against rocks, then the canoe hitting ice, wind blowing loudly into the speaker, dog whimpering in the canoe.

“You chose well.” 

Late last year, my parents retired and made the difficult decision to, after more than 30 years away, return to Poland, our country of origin. At around the same time, I was offered and accepted a position in the Yukon chapter of a Canadian organization focused on wilderness conservation. I told my parents about the direct summertime flights between Whitehorse, Yukon and Frankfurt, Germany (short distance from Wroclaw, our birth city to which they went back). This was before COVID and lockdown.

Ironically, we left Poland as political asylum seekers in the late 1980s when the borders were tight. In 2020, my parents returned shortly before the borders closed because of the pandemic. Poland has had nearly 32,000 cases and 1,356 deaths from COVID-19 as of 22 June; the Yukon has had 11 cases, all recovered.

“You chose well.”

I felt a pang of guilt. I also thought about how, the more time I spend in the Yukon, the more I speak with First Nations Elders and colleagues, and new friends, also immigrant-settlers, the more I consider the importance of sense of place and land-peoples relationships to identity (see Yukon First Nation Elder Joe Copper Jack’s Land and Peoples Relationship Model). A sense of duty comes over me, to return too to rediscover roots, give something back, get time with my grandmothers (both in their late 80s).

At times this feeling is like an internal tug of war: the ecological integrity (and relative spiritual freedom) of the far north versus the coal-polluted Polish country, with its spirit tethered to the past, still figuring itself out after periods of occupation and resettlement and boundary changes. Can it create, recreate and restore its ties to land, salvage its forests, wildlife, air and water? Who am I but a mere drifter if I don't eventually return? Who am I but a mere outsider when I do return?

“This sounds like the deciphering of a map,” Paul says. “One that’s been stared at, hard, for awhile now. And it sounds right to me. It may well be (without sounding too contrived or precious, I hope) that you’ve been preparing for this journey for years. Tracing an important umbilical back via Africa, the Americas, elsewhere, to a source where you can deploy all that you’ve learned along the trail. No drift at all: each of your many traverses a necessary leg of the voyage home. Be prepared for anything. Including the possibility that not even Poland is the ultimate destination. Be open to that, too.”

My sister, wise and six years my junior, thinks as immigrants, we never feel belonging, and our sense of place is found in transience; that change is our “place”. Starting over is our controlled burn: we clear the way for new growth while enriching the soil. Perhaps it's why neither of us is good at standing still. 

But along the way, I’ve learned. One learned thing is: a common language.

The common language is not English

It is not signs

It is not science

It is not expressions on faces

It is some of these things

But the commonest language is that of our interactions with nature

The common language lies in our interactions with the rest of nature.

Maybe at our best we are like floating ant mounds weathering a flood. At least so implies adrienne maree brown (who doesn’t capitalize her name on purpose, in a subtle show of anti-capitalism, explained my friend Asad who recently lent me her book). According to brown, emergent strategy—of which biomimicry, “mimicking the natural world”, is part—provides a lens for seeing the world, spotting where collaboration can happen, and righting our relationships, with each other and with the living planet that is our home (watch here from minutes 2:35).

There is no country without nature, without an environmental history, present, future. There is no person who has not learned from nature.

I expect that, if and when I return to Poland, I would use nature as The Common Language, via which to reconnect. I’d like to better my understanding of eastern Europe’s environmental problems and learn how land—irrespective of its political history and boundary changes—might be restored and rewilded. I’d like to apply the tools I’m learning in the Yukon.    

Dislocation bears gifts, like adaptation, but wounds too, uprooting included. You belong to no place, you are a perpetual outsider, settler, visitor, what rights do you have to comment? But could we who feel this way have it any other way? We’ve learned to observe, suspend judgement, immerse, acclimate, start over.

Tern, spotted in the Yukon. Photo: Katarzyna Nowak

“No finer way to walk home—through the borderless touchstones of nature. You’ve hit on a wonderful compass bearing. True north.” 

Spring is transforming into summer, and when not working and not worrying, and with the Yukon’s borders still closed, I go about learning the names of wildflowers festooning the Yukon’s body, its slopes wide open. This body, these slopes are still stewarded by the Peoples and Nations who were here first, who hold a wealth of traditional knowledge about resilience and from whom we can learn, if we use and practice the common language.     

At Shipyards Park in Whitehorse, Yukon, Kat in conversation with Joe Copper Jack, Yukon First Nations Elder and Senior Policy and Planning Advisor at the Yukon Land Use Planning Council, and Asad Chishti, Community Outreach Manager at BYTE and “weaver” at Chairs and Tables. Photo: Katarzyna Nowak