In Research is Ceremony, Opaskwayak Cree knowledge keeper Shawn Wilson asserts that traditional ceremonies are much like new methodological approaches towards research: ceremony stresses the importance of relationships over specialized forms of knowledge. Perhaps more importantly – for me – is that his approach emphasizes how “research” is not necessarily a given in any particular cultural context. What we denote and what we exclude under the banner of research is a highly political choice and it makes cross-cultural research seem all the dicier.

We are immediately bombarded: Isn’t all research necessarily cross-cultural unless it studies research culture itself? Is the archaeology of knowledge prone to a positivist bias that might contribute to the silencing of marginalized groups? How does one map controversies between radically divergent discursive formations, let alone divergent languages and epistemological formations? Can controversies exist if one side ignores them? Can one apply Foucault’s approach to discourse analysis to an oral culture, an oral tradition? Conversely, can one apply the oral tradition to Foucault’s approach to discourse analysis? Can we use material culture?

Let us start where all things start: at the end.

Imagine a sweat lodge.

A sweat lodge is a small dome-shaped structure, roughly 12 feet in diameter and 5 feet in height. They are generally used by Indigenous groups for various ceremonies.

Lodges are generally made to sit about four to eight people in a circle. In the center is a fire pit. Hot stones are placed here. Water is poured over the rocks to create steam. Lodges can be made from materials ranging from birch bark, peat, and cedar to sleeping bags, polyethylene tarps, and various canvases. Our present sweat lodge is the former set of materials, including others.

First, an appropriate place for the lodge must be selected. Usually, privacy is preferred, so that ceremonies are uninterrupted. The ground should be flat and suitable for digging. It also helps to place your lodge near the materials you need – white birch, cedar, peat, water.

Second, it is necessary to acquire the materials with skill and respect. For the most part, traditional knowledge keepers are taught how to build lodges, from collecting the materials to conducting ceremonies. One is socialized into these practices: the collection of materials is often highly ritualized.

Before gathering materials, a number of considerations are made. Where is (say) this tree situated in relation to other plants and its immediate geography? In addition to the instrumental considerations—we need a cedar sapling around 8-10 feet high, relatively straight yet pliable, and so on—the “history” of the tree and its relation to its surrounding ecological context is of the utmost concern. When a suitable candidate has been chosen, one generally shares words of gratitude and makes an offering of tobacco before harming the tree.

The knowledge keeper who is constructing the lodge considers (and sometimes reconsiders) the tree as an agent in its own right and mentally charts these relations along an exponential number of axes—always according to a ceremonial methodology. With each new lodge built, the knowledge keeper engages in a reiterative process whereby they not only perform and articulate certain relations, but they return to re-articulate those relations over and over again. Over time, they develop a mutual history with the things that shape the space around them.

Certain geographic areas might be mentally “mapped”, and an inventory of these maps might make re-territorializations easier, but it is implied that one never maps a forest without expecting new growth. In mapping the forest, the emphasis for the knowledge keeper is not on power relations; it is more a stoic meditation on a series of contingent, collaborative, conflicting, and ultimately contradictory dependencies and alliances.

The knowledge keeper is not as interested in interrogating extant relations as they are in performing new ones. These can take form anywhere between the mundane and the entheogenic. The scholar, however, is more interested in interrogating certain power relations, economic considerations notwithstanding. Nevertheless, we might say the struggle for both the knowledge keeper and the scholar are to now see the forest and the trees simultaneously.

All materials go through similar considerations. I could perhaps list them all, but I’ll refrain from that by outlining specific considerations for subsequent materials—a caveat analogous to don’t try this at home.

Knowledge keepers generally cut white birch vertically, from top to bottom on, the East-facing part of the tree. They know how deep to cut, so as to not damage the tree permanently. Similar incisions are made around the tree at each end of the cut and the birch bark is peeled off. The bark will be easier to peel if it has rained recently. The rocks that are chosen—called grandfathers—must be given special consideration. The stones are generally about a foot squared. And it is necessary that the rocks be igneous rather than sedimentary. Sedimentary rocks have a tendency of exploding when heated and doused with water. We prefer when our rocks don’t explode.

Generally, a hole about three to four feet across and two feet deep is dug in the ground. Around the hole, eight de-limbed cedar saplings will be stuck into the ground, each about 3 or 4 feet from the fire pit, relatively equidistant from one-another and facing an opposing sapling. [A common representation of this arrangement can be found in the Mi’gmaq star.] Each set of saplings that face one-another are then woven together. Sometimes the trees can be wrapped around one-another effectively, sometimes they need to be braided—in our case, they’re tied together with sinew. Sinew is generally made from moose hide and it is a highly durable string reminiscent of twine.

Once the structure is in place, the bark “scrolls” are rolled around it. They’re sewed in place with sinew and generally patched with a mixture of peat and resin, or even covered with full-on sod. Ours is peat and resin.

Lodges have no windows or openings other than a small, blanket-covered entrance facing the East. We face the East because that is where Na’gu’set (the Sun) rises. We use a Mickey Mouse blanket for juxtaposition.

At the beginning of sweat lodge ceremonies, we formally give thanks.

We give thanks towards the East first.

When we pray here, we pray for the grandmothers.

When we pray to the South, we pray for the grandfathers.

When we pray to the West, we pray for the fathers and the mothers.

When we pray to the North, we pray for the little ones.

When we pray to the sky acknowledging Nisgam (or Gitchi Manitou)—the Creator (or the Great Mystery, respectively).

We pray to the ground below us and acknowledge its bountiful love.

And finally for the seventh direction we direct our prayers inwards and we give thanks to ourselves.

This procedural method of acknowledging different relations is generally captured in the spirit of the phrase M’st No’gmaq—which in English transliterates to “all my relations”. It is perhaps the most common, yet immutable phrase in all of Mi’gma’gi.

When the knowledge keeper conducting the ceremony finishes the first round, you file out of the sweat lodge on all-fours. Crossing the threshold of the lodge, you maybe feel “reborn” (as some, present company included, might say). Struggling to breathe the “cold” air outside, lying in the fetal position on some stranger’s wooded lot, a dog licking your face: you take nothing for granted. And this is only the first time. Generally, you will repeat this process a total of seven times. Each time, up to seven rocks are added. This is how Mi’gmaq generally use a sweat lodge.

With each round the prayer acknowledging all our relations is rearticulated anew. Each round presents each participant with an opportunity to add their thoughts and prayers. And each new round presents each participant with an opportunity to contribute again. But one is not forced to say anything. Some might even sit out a round. The boundary of the lodge is permeable—as are its practices, but once you leave, you generally cannot enter until the next round.

Addendum:

Let us not into translation, but deliver us from evil:

Gesalul,

Gesa’lul,

Ge’salul.

I love you,

I hurt you,

I light you on fire.

These are all complete thoughts—what, in English, we generally call “independent clauses”. Written in Mi’gmaq, each of these words contains a subject, a verb, a predicate. They are related in their polysynthetic morphological structure, to one-another, but they are also comparable to other Indigenous languages such as Kanien’kehá:ka. This means that most of these word-sentences can be expanded by adding little bits of other words. This makes Mi’gmaw a very descriptive and malleable language when spoken, but it creates issues for linguists working with the language as it is written in the Listuguj orthography.

Gesalul,

Gesa’lul,

Ge’salul.

I love you,

I hurt you,

I light you on fire.

The similarity between the words escapes the privilege of the speaker and gets caught in the privilege of the researcher. The relation between the terms is not intuitive to the few exclusive speakers of the Mi’gmaw language in my community. To those who write the language – which are even fewer – the relation between these seemingly unrelated phrases becomes apparent in their grammar. Indeed, when the evidence is presented in this way, the relation even becomes apparent to people who have no knowledge of the Mi’gmaw language.

How could it be? Why does the Mi’gmaw language seem to structurally relate loving someone to lighting them on fire? Are we a bunch of raving, pyro-sexuals?

M’st No’gmaq. Perhaps.

There is a certain unity to these terms which was imposed when they were initially translated from our petroglyphic writing system into alphabets: into the Rand orthographic system, into the Father Pacifique orthography, and then into the Listuguj orthography. We could go back and see when the problem was first formulated. Rand and Pacifique kept immaculate journals – perhaps we could learn what either of them ate on a certain day or whether they had irregular bowel movements that month.Whether or not Rand was constipated is not inconsequential, but far be it from me to privilege that relation over others. M’st No’gmaq.

It is far more likely the word-phrases are a series of structured possibilities which can be articulated in any number of ways. They are related more by the linguists’ framing of them than by a meaning or logic inherent to the Mi’gmaq language. In other words, they had to be plucked out for particular treatment. The three words aren’t even on the same page of the Mi’gmaq dictionary. Again, the relation is not intuitive.

The politics of writing the Mi’gmaq language is a discourse dominated or influenced largely by European men of faith. In the face of an apparently incoherent Mi’gmaq writing system, early linguists dutifully imposed a number of incoherent structures onto something they simply failed to comprehend. In the face of something “inferior”, these barons of signification performed the “superior” in an arena with which Indigenous peoples were at best vaguely familiar. Instead of cedar saplings, they foresaw aluminium poles; instead of birch bark, they foresaw polyethylene tarpaulins; instead of igneous rock, they foresaw 9-volt space heaters; instead of petroglyphs, they foresaw bibles; that is, the project of translation is as much a process which mediates the way we relate to the Other in material, lived conditions, as it is simply the way we relate to other languages in abstraction.

Gesalul

Gesa’lul

Ge’salul

M’st No’gmaq

Wela’lioq