Susan Feathers

I meet Earth and Sky

I met Earth and Sky in Yuma.

Below is an excerpt from a time when I studied with two Native Americans. Gabe Sharp (aka Running Water) was a college professor with Arizona State University and a social worker at the Quechan Indian Reservation in nearby Winterhaven. Louise Etienne, his wife, was an artist and teacher known as Sundance Aquero. Gabe was born on the Mohave reservation in Parker, Arizona and Sundance was born in Montreal to a French mother and Mohawk father.

They offered workshops to individuals and groups about indigenous worldviews and tribal history. I had always been curious about Native Americans because our family includes a part Cherokee relative in my mother’s lineage. (For readers, my last name, Feathers, is Scotch-Irish.)

During my formal education, there was practically no information or simply wrong information about Native Americans in the U.S.A’s formation and history. I did not encounter the abundance of printed material from tribal nations until I became an environmental educator as my teaching career blossomed to new venues.

Science was my way of knowing, partly because my father was a big influence on me. He studied physics and loved all the sciences which he shared with me as I grew up. I knew about water cycles, turnover of matter, population dynamics, biodiversity, etc. but something about the sacred nature of God’s creation was missing from this way of knowing. Gradually, I turned to indigenous perspectives about living on the land as it was abundantly obvious to me that our capitalist values about land, water, sky and people could plunder a landscape when it exceeded some internal set of rules which I now understand to be species relationships described by Robin Wall Kimmerer as reciprocity, i.e. give and take that observes the limits of a particular place to maintain its healthy and enduring function. One of my favorite and most insightful American conservationists about the ethics of living well on a piece of land—Aldo Leopold—described the essential dichotomy between European and Indigenous perspectives:

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we believe it is a commodity belonging to us. When we see land to be a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. ~from A Sand County Almanac, Foreward, Oxford University Press, Special Commemorative Edition, 1989.

But in 1990, I had yet to read Leopold’s great works. I just knew something was essentially wrong and out of balance about how we used Nature for profit. I’d personally witnessed the decapitation of mountains for mining coal in Appalachia, my home, and living near the Colorado River and Imperial Valley were living proof logic was not an underlying principle for intelligent use of our natural resources in the U.S.

Below are excerpt’s from a memoir, The Little Book of Wisdom, unpublished but under copyright law.

When I began my exploration of truth and justice with indigenous people, I began by examining the nature of these principles in my own life. This is the story of how I came to face the truth about my life and discover the true nature of Western culture as reflected by contemporary Native Americans whose nations had lived in North America for thousands of years. What I came to see first revealed itself in the English language. My teachers brought out a huge dictionary in my mother tongue as the first text in ultimately four years of intense study.

With guidance I first studied how my culture expresses dominance in its language, inherited from empires. After instituting values of equality and justice before the law, our government has preferentially applied them in practice. I kept a little notebook of this study which I gave to my teachers.

Next, they suggested I read three books: Basic Call to Consciousness, God is Red, and a novel, The Loon Feather.

Basic Call to Consciousness by John Mohawk contains an address from the Haudenosaunee to the Western World. The book is still in print and is the best comparison of indigenous perspective from European perspective that I have studied. It also contains the founding story of the Haudenosaunee (Oneida, Mohawk, Onondaga, Huron, and the Seneca) nations’ compact for peace and governance). You would know them as the Iroquois Confederacy, a name given by French fur trappers and continued in U.S. use for centuries. It is this body of law and principle that Benjamin Franklin studied with tribal leaders and later presented to the early colonial governments as a good plan upon which the 13 colonies might structure their new nation.

God is Red, by Vine Deloria, Jr., is considered the seminal work about Native perspective on religion. It repositions humans from the dominant species for which the universe was created to being just one among many species interrelated and dependent on each other.

The Loon Feather, written by Michigan author, Iola Fuller, is a classic story which takes place mostly on Mackinac Island as a system of wealth based on unlimited extraction ends with the collapse of the beaver nation population. The Mohawk chief, Tecumseh, has been successful in a Pan-American alliance among eastern tribes to oppose the European theft of their homelands. Tecumseh’s daughter, Oneta, lives among her own people and the French and European traders on the island. Eventually she must choose between the values of her Mohawk people and those of her stepfather, a French merchant with the Hudson Bay Company whom her mother married after the death of Tecumseh. While the author is of Euro descent, I believe my teacher, a daughter of a French mother and Mohawk father, believed the themes presented in Oneta’s story would work for my study of two starkly contrasting systems for living in the world.

And then I had an experience lifted out of time and space in a rundown, dusty thrift shop in Winterhaven, Arizona when Sundance suddenly asked to visit it.

There among stacks of old books and magazines, a cacophony of throw away objects from locals, Sundance found several volumes of the Stockholder’s Board of the Hudson Bay Company.

To be continued…

Resources:

Basic Call to Consciousness

Haudenosaunee Confederacy

God is Red

The Loon Feather Note that I have written a book review about the loon feather here.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

A River Divided

From 1990 to 2008 I called Arizona home.

I had accepted a teaching position at Crane Junior High School in Yuma, Arizona. In turn, this would be an education for me beyond my wildest imagination. My degree in special education for students with hearing loss was a rarity. The administration decided that I could teach any kind of learning disability as well. It was a rich if not chaotic teaching experience for me and my brilliant classroom aide, a Yuma local.

The Lay of the Land

The city had gained the name “the Crossing” when people traversed the Colorado River at Yuma into southern California during the Gold Rush. It was my first encounter with the river which is channeled to water America’s vegetables and grains in the Imperial Valley of California. Its precious water also flowed along quiet canals among date farms and citrus groves throughout the city of Yuma. My school was surrounded by broccoli fields and orange groves. The whole environment was blooming with diversity.

In many ways I felt at home in Yuma which is a sprawling western town with a mashup of cultures and languages. It is a major location for Marine, Naval and Army facilities. I thrived in the milieu and while there, I discovered the history and cultures of the region from my students and their families. They represented the Cocopah and Quechan tribal communities, migrant-farmer and military families, and locals whose families had lived in the region for generations. They grew cotton, dates, fruit and vegetables.

Most of my students spoke Spanish fluently but could not do so at the public school which observed a strict English-only rule. For some of my students, sign language solved the language gap, but for others it burned in their soul with indignation. The area’s history of settler dominance repressed Mexican and Indigenous cultures. Colorado River tribes were numerous up and down the river between Parker, Arizona near Lake Mead and down into Mexico to the Sea of Cortez. Their cultures had lived along the wild river for at least 20,000 years. They farmed in the rich silt left after the spring floods receded, leaving rich silt for planting. The ancient Lower Colorado River has been likened to a Nile culture. Curious about the river’s history and ecology, I spent my time exploring historical sites and learning from elders and regional scholars.

When I first encountered the Colorado, it was unrecognizable to me as it was sprayed at high velocity from circulating sprinklers across the Imperial Valley on the California side of “the crossing”. Precious water evaporated in the dry hot atmosphere before falling to the ground. Row upon row of lettuce, broccoli, and cabbages lapped up what water fell to the ground. As far as the eye could see, this preposterous apparition filled my windshield as I drove through the Imperial Valley at sea level.

My first sight of this phenomenon occurred as I descended from the Continental Divide atop the Laguna Mountains (6500 feet above sea level to below sea level at the base of the mountain and the vast plain of the Imperial Valley. I was driving my son’s El Camino, a great San Diego beach buggy but treacherous in a place as hot as the valley. By the time I pulled into a watering hole near Yuma, I was growing faint. My education in Yuma would include heat stress and heat stroke prevention and how to equip a car for travel through the desert.

In its natural state, the Colorado River began as melt water that ran down through the Rockies, gathering size and speed, carving deep canyons in the red sandstone of northern Arizona. The river ran red where it dropped suddenly down toward the Sonoran Desert, flooding its banks in the spring as it flowed down into Mexico and emptied into the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). Where it slowed and spread from its banks, a delta region of marshlands formed that were places of high biodiversity. Plenty of fish and game abound. Indigenous fishers and hunters found a wide margin of mesquite tree forests on the banks of the river, as did French fur trappers and Spanish explorers. During the Gold Rush, however, these trees were cut down to burn in the steamboat business that developed to ferry gold hunters back and forth over the river which was a mile wide near Yuma. Loss of this tiny tree forest meant fewer deer and loss of a foodshed. The mesquite trees release bushels of nutritious bean pods seasonally. Later, scientists discovered the pods, when ground and made into flour, provide natural immunity to diabetes by regulating blood sugar. Mesquite bread is still made and sold regionally. It is naturally sweet and easily digested. (I made pancakes from it). Legends record that people walked across the river on the backs of large fish.

The Lower Colorado River was once a thriving place of wildlife and river cultures. In our Anthropocene era, the river is most recognizable at its highest elevations where it continues to cut the stone of Colorado and Northern Arizona and carry it tumbling south. Lake Mead collects the lion’s share of water, but starting at Parker, Arizona, water is pumped 700 ft into the air where it falls into an open canal system (Central Arizona Project or CAP) and travels by gravity toward Phoenix, then shimmies through and on to Tucson and drips into Mexico. The rest goes to Nevada and California. All these artificial truncations are due to something called The Law of the River. In short, this is the pact formed originally in 1922 between states on how to parcel out water to each.

Over decades and extensions of the canal system to accommodate burgeoning populations and infrastructure, the river no longer reaches the Gulf of California. It peters out above the marshy delta region and slowly dries up. Recent efforts by federal, state and tribal nations have managed to restore enough river flow to fill key areas of the marshland again. However, a regional 100-year drought is drying the land, while increasing temperatures from climate change have robbed the Rockies of its snowpack and thirsty alpine soil soaks up more river water reducing flow from the source.

At this writing, Hoover dam and Glen Canyon dam and their respective reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are at historically low levels. Hoover dam was built in the first decade of the 20^th century on faulty predictions of average flow. Calculations were made during an unusually high snowpack in the Rockies. This did not become apparent for many decades. Conservation of water did not start in earnest until about 25 years ago. Development pressures continued until, at present, 40 million people rely on the Colorado River for drinking water, farming and ranching, electrical generation and industrial uses parceled out among the seven western states in the Colorado River Compact. A prolonged drought, increasing temperatures, and changing precipitation patterns threaten this broad area of the United States.

Water is the limiting factor in a desert. My students and I gained insights about overharvesting a natural resource—the river in their backyards.

To be continued …

Route 66: America’s Highway

I grew up on Route 66.

For all practical purposes I was a gypsy girl traveling with my clan: parents, sisters, dogs and cats. Daughter of a career military officer in the United States Air Force, my gyroscope was set to travel over hill and dale. Before I graduated from high school, I had moved 21 times.

What kind of person can live in motion, on the road, always knowing each place is just for now, not knowing where the road turns until my Dad walks into the kitchen one night and announces, “Take down the wallpaper! We’ve got orders!”

Breathless, petrified, happy and sad, my sisters and I rush to the bookcase for the maps. Plattsburgh? Near the Canadian border, wow! Lake Placid and the Olympic village, skiing and skating! Subzero winters…far from Kansas…and my newfound friends…hmmm.

You either go with it or you resist fiercely. I went with it transforming like a chameleon, blending in wherever I went. Try-on the cultural mores, see how they fit!

Somewhere on those dark winding roads, with my arms propped up on the dashboard while all the clan snored, hacked, and wheezed through the cool night, listening to my father drone about his boyhood in rural Tennessee – a theater of stars, hum of the tires on the asphalt, dad’s baritone voice and gift for storytelling, I fell in love with America.

This big land over which we continued to crisscross became my homeland. It included everybody – Southerners, Yankees, Midwesterners, Californians, Hawaiians, Native Americans, Emigrees, sophisticated New Yorkers, hillbillies and coalminers, and many religions, sects, and points of view. Places on Rt. 66 became points of navigation on my life’s map.

In my first 18 years on Earth I came to know the people we call Americans. And they all influenced me in some way, truly the melting pot. Yet it left me in search of myself. I was a gypsy girl who knew a lot about other people and little about myself. How did I feel, what was my way, my rhythm? I hardly knew. So, I began to search for “me.” That, in part, is what this story is about. It required that I sort out what I cared deeply about and to do so in an ever-changing landscape.

Here then is one citizen’s story cast in the larger American odyssey – offered to the reader as a unique reflection of the great diversity and sometimes hilarious incongruities of American life.

I did not always appreciate the great gift of being an American. As much as people say they hate us, still people flood our shores. Yes, it’s to get a better paying job, no doubt, or to expand into the open space of freedom to pursue happiness. But for me it is about the landscape. This is Turtle Island of the First Americans, imbued with spirit and liberty. Even with the huge impacts of our consumer driven society, it is still a country that takes your breath away.

Come with me on a sweeping journey from coast to coast, a journey that took me into unseen realities behind the foreground of contemporary life. There, I found the America that drew me to her breast as a child. It was in a dusty western town in an American desert that I learned the true nature of Liberty when I reached back in history to the arrival of the first Europeans on the North American continent.

To be continued ….

Jimmy Dean’s Spirit Lives on On Historic Rt. 66

More on heat …

Grist Magazine published an article about the impact of heat on the human body’s systems and organs. I think this is a good time for everyone to understand the risks we face as the world continues to warm, mostly due to human made climate change. Here is the Link to the Article in Grist.

Below is an essay I wrote in 1999. I lived in Tucson, Arizona then but had recently moved from Phoenix where I worked at Arizona State University at the Center for Environmental Studies, now the Global Institute for Sustainability and Innovation. This shows how I tried to deal with the heat island effect.

midsummer-nights-dreams Download

A saguaro in the Sonoran Desert swollen with collected rain water which it can hold with expanded flutes on its limbs and trunk. Very shallow roots that run out from the giant extend for up to 100 feet or more to collect precious water.

Dealing with the heat…

ncceh-extreme-heat-event-health-checklist-web_0 Download

Note on the graph you can read by Fahrenheit or by Celsius. The graph helps us understand how relative humidity can cause health impacts at lower temperatures. Be sure to read through the first document above about symptoms of heat stroke in children, seniors, and adults.

Note to Europeans: I have been watching news about what is happening there. I see so many standing or hanging out in the sun. Also, many people are wearing dark colors. Keep physical exertion minimal; swimming laps is not very effective because you are stressing your body. Get out of the sun into shade, wear white or light colored, light weight clothing, and hydrate over the day. Look for rehydration tablets with electrolytes. Understand how easy it is to get into trouble. Our bodies have limits on internal temperature. Read the guidelines above. Children are particularly vulnerable to heat as are seniors and people with respiratory disorders.

Look on Amazon by country for rehydration tablets or beverages with electrolytes.

Here is the Amazon link on U.S.

Here is the Amazon link in UK.

Here is the Amazon link for India.

This book grows in relevance as the Earth warms.

Why Is a Jaguar a Character in Threshold?

Sit with Dr. John Mohawk as he discusses a living democracy and its renewal by each generation.

Dr. John Mohawk

“Mohawk was a major visionary of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy of Nations who played a singularly important role in fashioning the intellectual bridge of the traditional Indian movement toward the national and international community. Firmly based in the traditional Seneca Longhouse, he was a practitioner and master singer and orator. He was a writer, journalist, researcher, and lecturer. A specialist in the field of culture and community economic development and an activist and commentator on the cultural survival of indigenous peoples,.” ~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mohawk

Helen Hunt Jackson –

Angie Debo:

Democracy is not a passive, one-time project. It is a living conversation among citizens of all ages in the service of a just and free society.

Environmental Costs of A.I. Energy Use: Report from UNU Institute for Water, Environment and Health

Read the major points and Executive Summary of the report here:

UNU-INWEH-Report-The_Env_Cost_of_AI-2026 Download

Watch a video from Democracy Now about Data Center development on Tribal Lands. Many governing bodies like Tribal Councils or City Councils sign nondisclosure agreements (NDA) with developers of data centers that prevent citizens from knowing what kinds of deals their governing body makes. Link below to segment.

Krystal Two Bulls, Executive Director of Honor the Earth is interviewed by Amy Goodman about tribal nations pushing back on data centers on their lands, many in water stressed regions such as Utah.

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/4/22/krystal_twobulls_indigenous_lands_data_centers

Despite Trump et al, clean energy surpasses coal energy in U.S.A

Today, The Guardian carried an article about solar surpassing coal energy production in the U.S. Here’s the link: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/11/solar-energy-us-coal

Data Centers for A.I. are also drawing Americans’ ire with concerns about fresh water use, land use, property values, and quality of life when a massive data center builds within 25 feet of your property. I live in Virginia, ground zero for data center development promoted by Glen Younkin, past Governor. Abigail Spanberger, the current democratic governor, is promoting data centers for rural communities which seek the income from taxes that such gargantuan projects offer. I believe this is misdirected. We are a water-stressed state from drought. Our farmland, meadows, and forests must be protected as a natural failsafe against drought and rain bomb events that ravage landscapes without increasing the watershed. Also, after construction, most centers will run via A.I. and maybe a few employees. Is it worth the impact on our natural resources for a short term gain? Voters will decide.

Ceres Report Drained by Data Download

This report has been downloaded by dozens of readers. It discusses the impacts of data centers on the environment and communities while advising business developers about the relative risks they face should communities say yes and then later, when the impact is fully realized, turn against them.

A Long Walk in the Woods…

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. ~ John Burroughs

In 2024 my daughter gifted me a small book, John Burroughs, The Gospel of Nature published by Applewood Books. The book is part of the American Roots series of books published by Applewood. It is a treasure that can be carried in your pocket as you take your walk in the woods.

Nature writing is an American tradition and we have many great writers who have each been inspired by this wonderful land we call America.

At present, however, we have leaders who look upon our most iconic landscapes only for the minerals or forests to be exploited for industry and profit. Many of our public lands are vulnerable today due to legislation signed into law by our current president and Republican party. The president has devoted most of his business career to exploitation of people and places. Now in this 250th year anniversary of our nation, we are understanding the full impact on the values we have enshrined as fitting – for our Republic. We as yet know whether the American psyche and will can withstand the forces of anarchy that currently pillage our natural and economic treasure. My own belief is that liberty and truth will win out. I just hope I live to see it.

To salve my broken heart I turn to nature. Below is a first draft of A Long Walk in the Woods, a memoir I am crafting which is almost entirely based on the principle that the land where we live forms much of our character.

Introduction

It began in Tennessee.

As an infant “the woods” encompassed a living room, and my bare feet searched for purchase only months after my arrival. From there to the front yard, and much later to the street on a Schwinn bike. My paternal grandparent’s farm in nearby Watauga served as a touchstone. All the while my body stayed close to the soil, the trees and the miraculous creatures of ground, water, forest and air that delight youngsters who are awake to the Creation.

The Watauga House, still unfinished in 1906, was purchased for $600 when my grandparents were married. My grandfather and uncle finished the interior. Here it is today still maintained in its classic beauty:

I was born into a military family so my adventures were destined to encompass “the woods” of a continent. For eight decades I’ve been in discovery of “woods” and curious about the humans who call them home. These stories are a memoir of hope and conviction that we can restore “the woods” when we realize we are a part of them.

Awareness of “woods” is present in the body as we grow up and all through our lives. Each infant comes equipped with knowledge of Earth begun in their Mother’s body, listening to the sound of her voice and the beating of her heart. All through gestation, a newly developing life gains greater awareness of interconnectedness, i.e. association, as life-sustaining and that awareness persists in us to our death. It may dull over a life in which a child is not afforded access to the greater scope of nature, and it can also be deaf or blind to the life-giving natural world by living in unnatural conditions. Parents must cultivate that essential knowing though wonderment and exposure. Every little person should touch Earth soon after birth. Feet in the warm soil, face in the sunlight and breezes, a garden of scents and color, or a puppy are delightful means to the know the “woods”.

Though I currently live in an urban environment, I consciously seek out little havens of nature and there are plenty: a simple window box of flowers, the deep grass in an unmown lawn into which we may roll in its cool embrace breathing in the scents of plant and earth. Other “woods” may be:

A bench on a trail in a botanical garden under shading trees;
A walk in an urban forest animated by birdsong or cicada choruses;
The wonder of farm, field and stream; a vibrant farmers’ market among neighbors;
The fragrance of upturned soil basking in the noonday sun in your garden;
The joy with friends on a golf course edged by trees; the feel of spikes penetrating the closely mowed green and the scent of rich earth underneath;
A long walk on the beach where white sails fly and skimmers dip and dine;
The lovely song of a Carolina warbler that cheers the heart;
Fishing along a stream, lake or ocean; plop of frog and buzz of dragonfly wings;
Light playing through water or rainbows sparkling across the mist from a sprinkler;
Rain on a hot day with the window open and the curtains afloat;
A teacup tidepool of hermit crabs and keyhole limpets on a rocky beach.

The fact is every living being is born of nature. We “recognize” its features, scents, and touch in myriad ways because we all belong to the same Mother. We are all made of the same “stuff”. Wherever I have resided for a time, there are perceptible Earth energies, no matter how much concrete may lay over it. That lovely little plant will find its way through a crack in the surface, or a tree root lift that sidewalk. I cheer my kin on!