Swan River Manitoba

There are only a few places in the world that pull at the strings of my heart. As unlikely as it is, the Swan River Valley of Manitoba is one of these places.The northern-most agricultural settlement in Manitoba, it is on the southern edge of the boreal forest, with a parkland landscape of beautiful fields of canola, wheat, and flax (less today) interspersed with ash and pine forest. Unlike the United States Great Plains, the ethnic diversity includes Russian and Ukrainian settlements.

The town of Swan River itself has around 4000 people with an additional 2000 scattered through the adjacent rural areas. Locals often have multiple sources of income to survive. A plumber might also be a long-haul truck driver and may also need you to be home to do a plumbing job. The person hiring the work is needed as the second employee. And, of course, every such encounter is also a social encounter.

I've always been intrigued with places that are on the edge of settlement, such as Swan, but other elements add to my attachment.

I would have never even heard of Swan River, nor visited not once, but three times, if it hadn't been for a college friend to went there to serve a church and ended up marrying a farmer as well. That was more than two decades ago. I recently visited her as part of aiding in an assessment of a rural-based clinical pastoral education (CPE) course she had developed and taught. Several stories and statistics from that visit illustrate the culture of this place: The Swan River area has some of the highest percentage of elderly in the province, greatest diversity (native peoples, metis, etc.), lowest incomes, but greatest satisfaction with life.

What creates a place that has such great challenges, but also high levels of social capacity, and social capital to meet those challenges? This is one of the things that intrigues me. Another way to describe this would be to say that Swan River has a strong internal locus of control. The community does not exhibit fatalism, but rather is pro-active in shaping its community life. The fact that the community embraced the CPE students is an example. Another community might have been suspicious of outsiders. Swan River residents are not.

This strong sense of self was also reflected in another story I heard. Some local churches close during July. A particular pastor was not comfortable with this and wanted to continue to have services. His board kindly told him that they would close. Why? The locals understand that in small communities the work load for running institutions falls on few people. Everyone needs time off. And in addition, it is actually easier to visit other churches when yours is closed--no rumors are then spread about your possible dissatisfaction with your home church.















It is this strong sense of self that is intriguing. But also the landscape is mesmerizing. The Swan River Valley is actually the remnant of an arm of a glacial lake, leaving behind rich soils. You drive into the valley from drier and higher land into a green, broad valley. The sky expands as you come onto the flat plain. The changes colors of the sky and the landscape of parkland and
cropland leave me spellbound.

Landscapes of memory

My father died on May 16th. My memory, and our process of celebrating his life, cannot be separated from landscapes and places. We had a service in Grand Rapids where he lived his last five years. Here we were joined primarily by church members, others from my parents' retirement complex and many of my friends and colleagues.

Several weeks later we drove to Canton where the last church he pastored had a reception. As we left the woods and dunes of Michigan, it was appropriate to move into the space of the open prairies and Midwestern farms in whose small towns he had spent the majority of his life. We spent time in Canton where he lived for 41 years and had been an active member of the community, visiting with long time friends, but also going to Joe's for supper with some friends, playing Rook with other friends, and looking over the state of the town and the people in whom he had invested so much of his life. Walking through this space was important because we are not placeless people. We build lives in real places with real people in real physical settings.

While we were in Canton I reflected on how the town of your origins shapes you. I lived there for a mere 8 years, but because it was the years I grew to adulthood, it leaves an indelible mark on you. Is it because these people and places knew you when you were young? Or is it that they also knew my parents even after I left?

I drove up a rural hill with Gene Taylor one day on a trip to Peoria. Gene has very deep roots in the community that go back many generations, so different than my family's roots that began with my parents coming and ended with their leaving. As we drove up the hill Gene commented on how this hill was called the Chipperfield hill because Congressman Chipperfield had lived at the top and had a horse farm there. This congressman is long gone, gone before even my time in Canton. But I knew where his widow had lived--in the house with the big pillars between my house and the church that I regularly walked past. Someone once told me that this was where the widow of Congressman Chipperfield lived and it remained a mysterious but important fact to me. And it made me stop and think. My roots don't go back very far in Canton, but it is the landscape that holds my deepest memories. I knew where Widow Chipperfield lived. I knew which was the Solecki house and where Mr. Ingersol, who paid for my college education, had lived though I never met him. I remembered the square before the fire and after. And I could tell that the trees were finally growing tall again after being devastated by the tornado of 1975.

And what happens when this older generation is gone? Is it important that someone remembers that this rural hill was the Chipperfield hill? Does the hill need us to remember all those that belonged there at one time or another?

Now we are contemplating the final pilgrimage to Windom, Minnesota in the beautiful open prairies of southwestern Minnesota. While Canton is the place that I grew up, Windom is where my parents grew up. This is the place where my family's roots are deep--back several generations on one side. My grandparents, uncle, aunt, great-grandparents, and at least one great, great grandparent are buried in the area, and now my father. The minister that will be at the burial is from the church that he grew up in, and was ordained in, and who buried my grand-mother. We will be surrounded by our extended family on this leg of the trip. My father's knowledge of this landscape was deep--from Norwegian Hill, the house that Beaufort had his funeral home in, and the homes of various small town characters.

Keith Basso, in his book Wisdom Sits in Places, talks about how place names and landscapes are used for teaching and cultivating wisdom amongst the Western Apache. It is appropriate that this be a summer of walking through landscapes.

Wisdom is developed in places.

New Zealand, place and legacy

I am in New Zealand exploring issues of sustainability in the Bay of Plenty with a group of students. A focus that has come up in conversations with a local Maori group is one of legacy. What is the legacy that we inherit from those that have gone before? And what legacy do we leave for the next generations? These questions are often answered by the amount of an inheritance we leave, but I have been contemplating legacy through several lenses. My grandfather, who I never met, visited the local jail on Sunday mornings. He also quietly financially supported different needs in the community. My father who died just two weeks ago, helped start the mental health facility in my hometown, the headstart program, and the local hospice program, amongst other things. I have been thankful that my father lived near us these last five years of his life because it gave my daughters a chance to know him better and a better chance of passing on the legacy of caring for those who are on the margins of society. One of my daughters went on a mission trip to Nicaragua several years ago. she saw it as a continuation of the legacy of our family--she was the third generation to have a tie to Nicaragua and the people who are struggling there to improve their lives. My other daughter spent a summer working with the homeless in Los Angeles with the Catholic Workers. She saw this as having continuity with my father's legacy, who had spent time working there a decade before with my mother. This is the type of legacy that shapes the way we value places, build places and community, and care for each other beyond the narrow confines of the nuclear family.

I have often thought of legacy as one of landscape as well. I have inherited a Midwestern landscape. My family has inhabited this landscape for at least 5 generations. In late August the larger extended family will gather in southwest Minnesota to bury my father's ashes on the family plot in the midst of this landscape. It is a physical, but also an emotional legacy. The returning to a place of origin within this landscape grounds us and allows us to return to a place where we are drawn to talk about the values that we desire to pass on to the next generation. We walk through the spaces together.

The Maori are restoring forests to New Zealand to be able to have a physical space through which they can walk, use physical and biological features to ground the lessons that aid in the transference of their values to the next generation. But also their space is one of origin that goes back hundreds of years. To know who you are it to connect to a physical place.

My landscape is one of an open prairie landscape with big skies, extensive farmland, and violent storms. Theirs is one of unfolding fern fronds that teach about the unfolding life and its intricacies and interdependencies.

We need landscapes and physical spaces that remind us that legacy is not really about money, but about passing on vision and values.

Place, Christmas, and the 21st Century

It is Christmas break and the celebrations have begun. Last night, after dinner out with our family, we arrived back home. Soon after our arrival I looked around me and captured an image of the 21st Century.

My dining room table, expanded for the next day's dinner, had four college-age young people at it, each with a laptop. My daughter was creating versions of Elf yourself to send to friends around the world. My Vietnamese daughter was on skype with her brother in Vietnam. Her fiance was playing a game in cyber space with our guest from Hong Kong who was sitting next to him via their computers.

I was on my computer reading my nephew's essay for graduate school, using track changes for suggestions and sending it back to him in Phoenix.

Too bad my Aunt and Uncle had to actually drive to Michigan from Mpls through Chicago to join us for Christmas. OK. Some things don't change (yet).

More than a decade ago my family and I moved to Grand Rapids. In the search of a house I kept going back to one particular neighborhood. What drew me there? Perhaps something in the built environment -- sidewalks or the small neighborhood shopping center -- reflected something appealing. I speculate that the habits of living embedded in a place -- the sense of place -- that developed during a time when the neighborhood was more homogeneous have been passed on to the new families who now come from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds. Places continue to develop and come into being through a variety of means.
As I contemplated all these issues recently, I sat in a coffee shop in my neighborhood shopping center, a district that everyone had worked hard to maintain. The hardware store, against all odds, rebuilt after a fire and, just this fall, a new vegetable and fruit market opened after a three years gap since the closure of the previous grocery store. The new store has much more local produce. The coffee shop, library, and ice cream shop are busy. And recently some of the local churches have joined to form the Stewards of Plaster Creek, a group that is moving the faith community toward action in restoring the creek that travels through this part of the city, providing habitat for everything from wild turkeys to salmon. Through greater attention to our impact on the community of the watershed, we try to work to bring Shalom in the place where we live.
We are attempting to form spiritual disciplines, or habits of life, that help us “know” our piece of the Earth. I believe my neighbors and I are moving closer to a fully integrated life—shalom—when we experience the joy of the neighborhood children who walk to the Tuesday evening book reading at the ice cream shop, and the excitement of locals who stop to tell us they have seen the wild turkeys on their walk. For me? I experience shalom every time I can walk into the hardware store with parts from my bathroom shower in my hand, and have the owners hand me replacement pieces AND tell me how to put it all back together.

The connection between land and community

Throughout my academic career, there are three questions that have continued to stalk me, all relating to the relationship between land and community:

What does it mean to truly “know” a piece of the Earth?

Can landscapes unconsciously tell us whether we are getting closer to a fully
integrated life—shalom—or further away?

What is the relationship between spirituality and place?


I have come to believe that the Earth is crying out for Christians to begin to take seriously their relationship to it and the relationship of the Earth to our Creator. The land suffers alongside human communities yet we fail to recognize and probe the deep connections among the suffering. Perhaps we should do as Wes Jackson suggests to begin the process of understanding,

“What if we employed our rivers and creeks in some ritual atonement? Their sediment load is largely the result of agricultural practices based upon arrogance, tied in turn to an economic system based upon arrogance…but perhaps we need an annual formal observance in the spring - when the rivers are particularly muddy - a kind of ecological rite of atonement, in which we would ‘gather at the river.’ Maybe we should ally ourselves by virtue of a common watershed…for a watershed can and often does cut through more than one bioregion. There would be nothing abstract about a common covenant among people of a common watershed (Jackson 1987, 155).”

In his book, Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith Basso describes his work with the Western Apache in recording place names. He soon learned that stories were associated with place names. Just saying a place name then became used as a moral teaching (arrows pointed at the heart). The path to wisdom involved knowing the places, the stories, and their meaning as well as walking through that space. What if the Western Apache were removed from that place?

What does it mean to truly “know” a piece of the Earth?

Can landscapes unconsciously tell us whether we are getting closer to a fully
integrated life—shalom—or further away?

What is the relationship between spirituality and place?

Regional Geography as Narrative

I have been trying to get my students to think of regional geography of Michigan as narrative rather than as a list of "people, places, and products."

We examine the present patterns--the end of the narrative--and then try to tell the story that led up to this ending. The copper mining area of Michigan in the UP, with its universities focused on geology and engineering arose out of deep history--the exposure of some of the oldest rocks in the world and a fault line. At the same time that mining peaked, immigration from Finland also was at a height, contributing to the Finnish cultural heritage of the area. I have a neighbor in Grand Rapids who is Finnish Lutheran, from the U.P.

Every place is the result of a complex story line. What is the narrative of your "place?"