Daniel’s Posts (Intro)
Where there’s fire, we’ll be there. Where the community needs us, we’ll be there. Where the culture is at, we’ll be there.
If there’s food, I’ll be there faster 😀
I am Daniel, an iCrews member. Here to help with the full extent of my skillset where able. Happy to be here 🙂
Below will be my blog posts and reflections from trips that I’ve been on.
iCrews Mariposa Reflection 2025 (no link yet)
****will past here for now, will be it’s own page****
Gratitude
I want to start by thanking everyone involved for giving me the opportunity to go to the mariposa trip, and making all of this happen, which to be very clear, is a LOT of people.
I want to thank the Elders, my mentor, our crew (iCrews), the ancestors, the land, TallBull Memorial Council, everyone and everything involved that led up to this. As you can imagine, I wish to thank you all so much. This is a true blessing, thanks.
Preface
Writing was never my strong suit, you’ll see that soon. The identities of some of the people involved may or may not have been altered for privacy reasons. Also to provide better insight, I traveled with someone else on this trip, but I will only be talking about my own personal experience.
I remember TA’ing an astronomy class that my mentor was teaching, and she played a video where a physicist said, and I’ll roughly quote, “It is a failure of the English language, that it cannot accurately describe the electron. In English, you define things in one way or another, but not in a many-things-at-once way. But math describes it perfectly. I can look at these vector equations, and they describe every nature of it, all at once.” I think about that a lot, and I especially did on this trip, because at many times I felt so many things that I fail to perfectly describe what I felt and saw from the work we did, everything that we witnessed, and experienced. I’ll try my best though.
This trip was community. It was a privilege and lucky opportunity to go out there and be a part of it.
I feel happy to help out as best I could, and I would 100% do this again.
The First Day
In the beginning of the first day, I remember how we woke up early and headed straight to the site where we would do our part for this work. Many people were in attendance, from different places, and we all gathered in a circle that morning to hear the elder, Ron Goode, speak and preface what we were here to do. I cannot articulate his words in the same way that he did, but he explained that he could not stress enough the importance of culture in the work we were about to do. That this was much deeper than just a “prescribed burn”. He wanted to make it critically known that this was cultural, and about/for the culture, not a prescribed burn in simple terms. He told us many insightful things. He said that just like how we feel great getting our hair cut and nails cut, the plants would also love to get that treatment, and glow just like we do when we treat ourselves. He told us that everything is a balance with nature, and this next part is what stuck out to me the most. He said to not only think about our children, but also the bear’s children, and the lion’s children, because they also wish to feed their kids. He said that if we didn’t take care of our surrounding environment and the food for the lion became scarce, then whose children would the lion look at? “Ours”, he responds. He asked, “Can You see the lion?”, “Look around”, alluding to the bushes and implying that the treatment the plants would get would also allow for an easier time to spot the lion. Ron is definitely very funny. He said that the work brings balance, allowing for the mama lion to hunt the deer and guide the cubs to the spring water to drink, and that the father lion would be sitting there watching over with a Rolex on his wrist.
After doing some maintenance on the landscape, we went on a hike around the premises. For lack of a better way to phrase it, the land had many historical sites. I don’t want to sound like an archaeologist, but the site had a lot of history from the ancestors of the land. We heard the history briefly before we started, that the land was acquired from someone indigenous, and kept everything intact as he could, and now the area is being cared for by the people we met then. We took some pictures of what we could. Some photos were of the Bedrock mortars (BRMs) found in the granite rock by a river stream. Many of them were everywhere. Hearing the stories of the community practices in tradition painted a picture in my mind of families living happily in the community here.
[Bill Tall Bull] from our crew later said after the hike that he could feel the spirits of the ancestors, and that they were happy. After seeing the BRMs, and hearing the background of the area during our hike, I couldn’t help but imagine the scenery of what the community looked like around a big feast or party overimposed with the time of me being there. I like to imagine old or future times happening over the current moment. It reminds me of when Ron told us in the beginning that the land has been here and waiting for us since for a long time. I often think “Time moves forward, and soon 500 years will pass”. I like the connection between multiple time frames.
Last Day, November 9th
After working the second day, in that moment, after giving the elder our respects and showing our gratitude for the opportunity, I could mentally and physically feel that I felt and saw a lot of beautiful things; beauty. I never had a community based on family, didn’t know what it was like. Ron told us many stories, sharing his wisdom and experience. The community energy was beautiful. The energy was healing, and everyone was connected and there for multiple reasons. I’ll try to list some of the reasons: the community, the goal to help tend the land, history of injustice to indigenous people and the current healing effort for the community, tradition, and family. ***draft because I don’t want to sound like I’m minimizing painful history, need to find better wording***
[Recording I made on the Final Day to remember how I felt]
Yo siento que yo senti [I feel like I felt,]– I saw a lot of beautiful things, like beauty. I can only speak for myself, but, it feels like because I never really had a community like that based in family I never really sought it out, you know, knew what it was like. Knew what it felt like. It was easy for me to be a solo bird. Cuando veo al señor que le dimos las ah– the blankets, fue bonito [when I see the elder who we gave the uh– the blankets, it was beautiful]. [*Eats chips, reflectively*]. Listening to his stories… La comunidad aqui se siente bonito [The community here feels beautiful].
To me I was there to work. My favorite mentor ever told me to come through and I did not question it. The physical work we did looked like some of the same work I did with my grandpa growing up: landscaping. I felt like I was in my element doing the landscaping part of our journey. I’m not trying to sound egotistical, but I really wanted to make my grandparents proud of the skills I happened to learn as a kid used now as an adult for a community that, not to sound harsh, I don’t even know. The reason I also say this is because I was terrible at landscaping growing up. It was my worst performance and people would actively avoid hiring me with my grandpa for it. Now here I was, sending many photos to my grandma of how I was making the plants proud. I had no idea the level of joy, community, and lessons I was gonna be slapped with. It was like getting your favorite breakfast/food ever, the kind that reassures you life is good.
Conclusion and Aftermath
I mention the word “feeling” a lot in this reflection, because I want to accurately emphasize exactly how much I felt on this trip. Just like Ron, I can’t stress enough how great this trip was, and the many feelings, lessons, thoughts, and blessings it left me with.
I learned from my mentor about historic reports documenting that the forests and land were very clean when foreigners witnessed the land that indigenous people lived in and took care of in the very early days. This is the traditional knowledge of keeping a balance in the ecosystem and maintaining the relationship/bond we have with plants. Plants very much take care of us medicinally as well, too. Ron explains that this work is tradition and by definition founded in science, since it is knowledge and wisdom stemmed from generational experience, experiment, and observation across generations. Science is based on observation, this makes perfect sense to me.
When I returned, I felt different. I felt great. I wasn’t afraid to be outside at night (lol). I felt refreshed. And blessed. I felt gratitude. I reflected on a lot that night when I was back home, which is why I keep saying what I felt and thought. The trip was definitely powerful. It sounds repetitive but that’s why I said in the beginning that English sucks, especially the way I use it.
I remember my mentor bringing up what the elder said, how she still thought about it when he said that the plants want to be taken care of just like we take care of ourselves when getting a haircut. That made me smile. I found connections with fire, culture, experience, history, the land, and decolonization. I learned a lot which also helped evolve my perspective in my current field of work, and overall as a person.
Daniel
iCrews | iHub
iCrews Mariposa Reflection 2025
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