I arrive in the Cascade Head Biosphere Reserve and Experimental Forest on March 1, 2024. Cascade Head is one of 28 UNESCO Biosphere Reserves in the United States. There are 309 such reserves in 41 countries worldwide. This place is special not only for its beauty but also for its distinction as the first scenic research area in the United States. It was made such by Congress in 1974 to protect and restore the region’s ecological integrity. I am here as the inaugural fellow of a literary residency for Indigenous writers.

To better understand UNESCO’s role in this biosphere reserve, I turn to their website. I find a quote from their constitution: "Since wars begin in the minds of men and women, it is in the minds of men and women that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” So that settles it. I am here to construct defenses of peace—a peaceful mind responding constructively to ecological violence and the spiritual disturbances that result.

My first morning in the reserve, I wake to snow, make coffee, build a fire, and let the peaceful beauty of the place settle on me like the snow soundlessly falling into the valley below. The cabin has wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling windows and is perched on a hillside with a peek-a-boo view of the Salmon River, which meanders to the grand drama of the Pacific Ocean, crashing ashore less than a mile away.

The days pass, and of course, I am happy and grateful to be here, but it is an uneasy happiness, a gratitude existing on the same coin as grief. As an indigenous person, to be in a beautiful home in a beautiful place is never a simple enjoyment. In such a house, built on the homelands of displaced peoples, colonizer violence is always standing in the corner, trying not to be noticed amid the charming architecture; architecture skillfully aimed at highlighting the landscape to make one feel as though they are a participant in nature, rather than a spectator, occasionally cheering from the luxury box.

In the most beautiful places, it is difficult to be at peace fully because I am always aware that the people who belonged to the place, who lived here because of its beauty, cared for the place for thousands of years because of its beauty, had spiritual beliefs and practices that were fused with the wellbeing of this place because of its innate beauty and function—I am always aware that those original people didn’t simply leave because new people arrived on their shores. These places—all up and down this coast, every coast, every watershed, every nook, and cranny of hospitable, desirable land—through violence, or threat of violence—were taken.

And once taken, the violence was turned from the original inhabitants to the landscape itself—ancient forests felled, salmon rivers dammed and damned, buffalo herds systematically exterminated to break down Indigenous resistance, by destroying food sovereignty to make way for privately held domesticated livestock. The introduction of livestock, agriculture, clear-cuts, mines, and factories destroyed native flora and deprived species that relied on those wild harvests so integral to survival. Each of these beings, like the original people, contributed to the balance of their homelands.

There is an assumed cultural supremacy about colonizer science that discounts knowledge rooted in a deep relationship to place. This type of science often serves the interests of extraction rather than integration. Rich men who pay for studies will never set foot in a place yet say with confidence that we primitive savages lived here in ignorance of how to cultivate our land and, therefore, have no right to it or the wealth it contains. For centuries now, they’ve been handing us pickaxes and plows, backhoes and hydroelectric dams—the tools of our collective destruction—and telling us to get to work becoming civilized. At the same time, they line their pockets with the spoils of our sacred homelands and the fruits of our labor. Am I angry? I am cultivating my mind in defense of peace.

The word integrity comes from the Latin root, “Integer,” meaning “intact.”  In this biosphere reserve where I am trying to make my mind a vehicle for peace, I must wrestle with the fact that the Western Hemisphere and indeed the world, is not intact. We live in a society built on the destruction of integrity. With this knowledge, I don’t know where in my mind to construct a sanctuary where a peaceful thought might live, so I read. I search for understanding, something to say. I read books on how to write, books on history, books on art. I read Caste by Isabella Wilkerson, learn all the gruesome details of the American caste system. I read Cosmic Scholar, about an anthologist who recorded Indigenous spiritual songs to save them from oblivion. I read Shapes of Native Nonfiction, and encounter so much alchemy—courageous voices transforming the shadow of genocide into strength and places where light can once again shine.

It is hopeful but difficult. I grow sad. I call my cousin and we chat about it. She tells me she’s upset about Gaza; seeing Palestinians subjected to violence, starvation, and isolation strategies that were endured by Indigenous communities not so very long ago is triggering. “There’s no help for them.” She says, “Just like there was no help for our ancestors. And nobody will tell their stories the way they should be told.” I think about how the genocide in Gaza began with the burning of their ancient olive groves. We end our phone call trying to encourage each other, but I am still sad.

My cousin’s talk of Gaza makes me recall a recent breakfast with my dad and his girlfriend, a rich white woman from California. The crisis in Palestine came up in our conversation, and she said, “It’s just terrible. They should be allowed to have a reservation too. Everyone deserves somewhere to live.”  Then she changed the subject to conversation better paired with her bloody Mary. My husband watched to see if I would keep the peace. Of course, I would keep the peace. What could be gained in warring with Gloria?

Now, her words come back to me: Everyone deserves somewhere to live. About that she is correct. There is no need for a whole genocide right now. There was no need for one beginning in 1492 and continuing on for hundreds of years. There is no need for the burning of olive groves, the extermination of buffalo, the eradication of biodiversity in favor of domesticated, monetizable monoculture. There never has been a need for it. "Since wars begin in the minds of men and women, it is in the minds of men and women that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” Everyone deserves somewhere to live: people, fish, birds, wildflowers, trees and bugs. Spaces for holistic habitation should be preserved and protected, and this effort by UNESCO is beautiful.

Still, it would be better if we as a species didn’t condemn healthy ecology to such oppressively small quarters. It would be better if the biosphere reserve were the big one, the original homelands, the whole planet. To draw a little boundary around a space and declare it Nature: Preserved is like the legendary king trying to carpet his kingdom to protect his delicate feet rather than wear shoes. It’s good to make the initial step toward protecting something, but as my mind strives toward peace, it keeps returning to an obvious conclusion. We must try to find a way back to integration, integrity, a way of being intact. How? I think it begins with belief.

I remember hearing my friend tell a story of when he was a little boy at the beach with his grandmother. He was smashing rocks against each other, and his grandmother said, “Leave the rocks alone.” She told him there were beings who lived in rocks who shouldn’t be bothered. He believed her, so he left the rocks alone, understanding that the earth has rights. I believe there are answers in ancestral knowledge. I’m not talking about this in a woo-woo way. I’m talking about it from a standpoint of indigenous knowing.

I was listening to a neuro-scientist talk about gut reactions. She explained how our gut is connected to the nervous system and responds when we know something intuitively. The interviewer asked her, “What is intuition?” She said that we have a limited amount of access to memory but everything we ever encounter is stored somewhere in our brains; even if we can’t easily retrieve it. All our accumulated knowledge and experience is still there, and when we have to make a decision with limited information, our intuition kicks in. We have a feeling, a physical feeling, about what needs to be done. She said this accumulation of information and awareness of the world gained through experience is the reason older people have a stronger sense of intuition.

In my tribal community, elders are revered for this reason. What if honing intuition through accumulating knowledge and experience works the same way over generations? Imagine living in a place for your whole life. You would learn its patterns, what grew where, when the tide turned, what drew the fish and game, and how to harvest so that more would return next time; you would feel safe and connected to your surroundings.

Now, imagine your DNA thriving in those landscapes and waterways, forming symbiotic, spiritual, and physical relationships there for ten, fifteen, twenty-thousand years. You would have connections to that place that newcomers couldn’t replicate.  The food there would be tied to your gut flora and those special brain-body pathways for instinct and intuition would be supported by the food you ate, the water you drank.

In search of the science of integration, I turn to the oral histories of my ancestors. Their brilliant, integrated worldview is soothing in the perfect sense it makes. For example, in Lummi lore, it is said that if we treat the salmon with respect, they will “travel from their longhouse, the smoke of which is like a rainbow, and journey to the fishing sites to be food for the people.” I wonder what kind of fire makes smoke like a rainbow. How does the fire of the salmon people burn? I don’t know, but its power is restorative.

In old Lummi culture, there is a belief in a world under the water that mirrors our own. It is upside down. Tiny things are big, and big things are tiny. Smoke is made of rainbows. Here in our world, rainbows come when the sun shines after the life-giving rains. A rainbow is a symbol of renewal. So, smoke made of rainbows is a symbol of new life, and the fire of the salmon people is not destructive but creative.

When the salmon return, they are the spark of life that will carry us into a new season. A spark that finds fuel is the beginning of fire. An electrician once told me that a high-voltage electrical arc, (essentially a really big spark) can be as hot as the surface of the sun. The sun, of course, is a star. A star, of course, is a fire. Are we not made of the stars? Are we not also fire? Yes. We are. Fire consumes. Fire destroys. People consume. People destroy. But fire also purifies and makes space for new life, so it is both destructive and creative. We have our place here, just as the salmon people have their smoke rainbows in the sea. (“Did you hear about the rainbow who got in trouble? It had to go to prism. It was a light sentence.”)

If you use sound waves to burst a bubble under water, it will expire in a flash of light, light which by its nature is a rainbow. The phenomenon is called “Sonoluminescence.” Science can’t fully explain it. Another phenomenon that science can’t fully explain is called wave-particle duality. It is studied via what’s known as the double-slit experiment. In the experiment, light behaves as discrete particles unless observed, in which case it acts as a wave. Is it childlike to try to understand this inexplicable fact by saying that the universe, at the level of particles, is conscious?

In my culture, it is not unusual to go and express gratitude and prayer to the water. The water is conscious. Like light, it behaves as both particles and waves. Why would light not be the same? It is the same. In my ancestral language, the word for river is also the word for the Milky Way, a river of light in the sky, a river of billions of burning suns. It continues that idea of the mirror world under the waves, the multi-layered nature of existence. Everything is connected. The ancestors understood this deeply.

A friend of mine shared a story about his visit to a National Forest in Oregon, the tour host was a geologist who gave a presentation on what he calls the “mythic dimensions” of his research, which otherwise is rooted in what he calls the “hard-ass science” of “geophonics, biophonics, and anthropophonics - sounds made by different components of the world.” The talk overviewed ecological interconnection through sound, and how a fish in need of a home can send out a signal, which is received by the forest and the roots of trees, which may respond by felling a tree over the stream in exactly the right place to slow the current and make the stream habitable for the fish. Spawning salmon bring nutrients from the ocean into the forest, so salmon have symbiotic relationships with the trees and the underground fungal networks that connect them.

I don’t know if this is why the tree would respond the way it did, but what this story seems to want to teach is a fundamental understanding of one of my favorite features of reality: that the right combination of wishing, need, and expression can find an audience with a conscious and benevolent universe. That the universe, in its infinite intelligence, with the infinite connections between the fires that shine above and those that glimmer below, will seek balance, will hear a request and find a way to make it so. And remembering this good teaching about having faith in the benevolence and wisdom of nature, I have finally constructed a defense of peace in my mind.