Being Present: Native Perspectives on Sustainability

When I was five years old, the men would take me out. Maach would take me out there with the men. We’d be hunting sealion.

The sea lions would always be in the water in the wintertime because it’s too cold on land. So we’d have to shoot from shore to land. We weren’t on boats because the water’s too rough in the Bering Sea in the wintertime.

And I would notice two very, very important things about these hunters.
One is that they never zoned out.
We could sit there quietly for hour after hour after hour, and nobody dulled out. They were just there, constantly aware.

And the second thing is that they would always know when a sea lion was coming, even before we saw it.
And I wondered: how in the heck would hunters do that?

I found out at a very young age. Again, using this whole principle of the intelligence of the entire human being. It’s not just centered in the head, but using all of one’s senses: eyes, ears, smell, intuition, gut feel — all of these things synthesizing without thought.

That’s a concept very hard for many Westerners to understand.
So I was kind of immersed in that kind of way of knowing.

By age six, I decided to go out underneath the bird cliffs in the Pribilof Islands, on St. Paul Island, where I was born.
We call it the Galapagos of the North. Two and a half million seabirds all nestled around the island on cliffs.

And so we’d have tens of thousands of seabirds in any cliff area.
I would go underneath there before sunrise, because I wanted to be there when the birds would take off.
And I just watched them without thinking. Just watching. Just taking it all in.

Then one day I noticed that there were all these different species of birds on the cliffs. Literally tens of thousands in one area. They were moving, flying in every direction: up, down, diagonal, in circles, opposite circles, different species at different speeds and heights.

And never did I ever see a single bird wing clip another.
Imagine that. Tens of thousands of seabirds in what appears to be chaos, and never even a clipped wing.

And I wondered, how do they do that?

Then an insight arose. One that I connected to what the hunters were doing.
These birds were intensely alive.
They were completely present.
They were nothing but a field of awareness.

And I thought: Hmm....That must be how they’re doing it.
So I decided to try it.

I’d go out hunting and try this “being present.”
I didn’t have the words for it at six years old. I just intuitively went into this kind of state of being, where I’d sit there without thought.

As soon as thought drifted in, I’d zone out.
After sitting for hours, feeling the rhythm of the ocean and the wind against you, you could get into a dreamy state. But that state meant you wouldn’t be a good hunter, because you wouldn’t be aware.

A sea lion might come by for thirty seconds after you’ve waited all day. And you can’t afford to zone out.

I had to be fully alert, fully aware. Just like the hunters. Just like the birds.
And as soon as I did that, I began to feel the sea lion coming.

That was the beginning of my understanding of how one connects profoundly with the Earth.