Woman between worlds: Lois Beardslee on why the turtle crosses the road

By F. Josephine Arrowood
Sun contributor

Each summer, while traveling through Michigan’s lake country, I notice a wide and depressing variety of roadkill, evidence of creatures not equipped for encounters with large, speedy machinery and an ever-increasing dissection of pavement across former habitat. I usually also encounter some few fortunate creatures like turtles, which have somehow avoided being struck or smashed — yet who are trapped in the roadway, trying to negotiate their ponderous way across alien terrain.

On what may have seemed like a frivolous mission, and based largely on my happy memories of “The Turtle Egg-laying Song” from her Leelanau Earth Stories three-part audio collection of stories for children, I called Lois Beardslee to ask her about the annual reptilian phenomenon. This busy scholar, artist, civil rights activist, wife, mother, cherry farmer, tradition keeper and award-winning author graciously agreed to meet me at her home near Maple City, to discuss why the turtle crosses the road, and other issues of importance — not only to Native Americans, but to the larger community as well.

We settle in chairs in the center of her newly planted vegetables, and she reads an excerpt from her 2007 book, Not Far Away: The Real-life Adventures of Ima Pipiig:

“I knew a young turtle once. His mother had him way up on a hill. There was no sandy shoreline left for the mother turtles to lay their eggs in undisturbed. It had all become subdivided and had become the domain of children with toys, adults with lawn mowers, and docks, condos, personal watercraft, speedboaters, and all sorts of scary stuff to a mere turtle. The only places left for the mother turtles to brace the shore, heavy with eggs, were the backwaters and the sloughs, lowlands, places too wet to keep their precious cargoes warm and dry. So they’d taken to climbing the cliff-like hills above the sloughs created by distant river dams. There in a band between the bluffs and the industrial part of town flanking the railroad tracks, they found warm, dry sand devoid of vegetation anymore, suitable for the sunshine growth of turtle embryos a few inches below the strong sniffing ability of predators and the mere curious.

“It was here that the young turtle was born, on the upper banks above the Boardman River plain, far from water. The job that faced him was one for which evolution had not prepared him. An unnaturally long scrabble to fresh water awaited him. If he could make it across the manmade plains, an occasional puddle, the strip of muddy service road, the woods and their brushy understory would provide him protection from crows, blue jays and robins. Perhaps he was too small for even a hawk to bother with …

“So it was that Manaboozhou, the spirit child of Winona and the West Wind, happened to pick up the small turtle, no bigger than a quarter, in his big, full-grown human hand …”

Glen Arbor Sun: Talk, if you would, about the importance of the turtle in Native American culture. I think a lot of people have heard of Turtle Island as a title or a label …

Lois Beardslee: In a world that’s so controlled by water access, and in some places really searching for dry ground, especially, in this part of the country — we came to call the earth Turtle Island. We say that the ground upon which we live — this is held up by a turtle, and when that turtle gets tired, another turtle comes to take its place, and when that turtle gets tired, another comes … so our stories are really allegories for common sense ideas, notions about how to live together, how to support one another.

So you have an allegory of people growing old and being taken care of by the next generation that’s automatically woven into the fabric of our stories, but in mnemonic sort of ways, using the turtles and the animals. I think people do a disservice to Native American people and traditional stories when they concentrate on the spiritual, rather than on the pragmatic, because the spiritual and the pragmatic should be tied together. They should be interwoven, and turtles are certainly just like frogs: they’re canaries in the coalmine in terms of our environment.

We all like getting from Point A to Point B … When we need to get into a hospital in a hurry, we have to travel very fast on the roads, but at the same time, our use of the roads causes damage to wildlife around us, and impacts their populations phenomenally. So we need to always keep perspective on our relationship between other species and our own. I know that there’s always a strong tendency to tie Native people to the environment — and again, I’m always cautious about doing that in terms of stereotypes. If we look at turtles, look at them lovingly, but also pragmatically, in terms of what they tell us about our environment, our water quality, about dividing territory into tinier and tinier spaces.

Sun: You talked about turtles being a source of food in the past also.

Beardslee: Right. I’m in my late 50s — when I was a child, we certainly ate a lot of turtle. They were an important and dependable food source, along with ducks, frogs, wild eggs — young animals that would lay their eggs on the beach … We always grew up being taught to be cautious about how we harvested these things, but I think the impact of development and population have really changed the way that we have to look at how we utilize these animals. But they were at one time an incredibly plentiful food source.

Sun: When you’re talking of the people, what is your tribe?

Beardslee: Ojibwe or Chippewa. It’s actually the second largest tribe in North America, and covers a territory that ranges for thousands of square miles, in Canada and the United States.

Sun: The story you read had to do with a young turtle just hatching, trying to get to the water. Why do turtles try to get to the water? I always thought these turtles were going to the beach to lay the eggs.

Beardslee: Sometimes when you see these older turtles crossing the road, they get a whiff of something familiar, a food source …

Sun: (laughing): ‘I smell fish!’

Beardslee: Right! (laughing): ‘I smell a dead crayfish!’ And so … that may send them across the road. It really is important to have respect for these animals crossing the road. And maybe getting someplace so many seconds sooner isn’t as important as watching out for those animals, and not running them over.

They can only cross the road slowly. When you see them stuck in the middle of the road, they’re so confused when cars go by; there’s absolutely nothing in their evolution that’s prepared them for this — in fact, evolution has prepared them for standing their ground. That’s why they have the shells.

Sun: I’ve seen snappers, some quite large ones, crossing the road. I have an old throw rug I keep in the car, and I discovered that by putting it almost like a shawl around them, they can’t see your hands underneath. Then just gently lifting them by their shell and running across the road with them seems to work well.

Beardslee: They have a hard beak; they can really bite, and they have long claws … Even a painted turtle can surprise you. Imagine how terrified they are, being picked up. I’ve seen immense snapping turtles — those are old, old turtles. They actually live longer than we do, sometimes, that’s pretty amazing.

Sun: Who is Ima Pipiig?

Beardslee: She’s sort of a curmudgeonly, middle-aged Indian woman in northwest lower Michigan, and she sometimes says things that I can’t get away with saying. The book is a very unusual format, it was considered very ground-breaking when it was written … it mixes fiction with nonfiction, so that the reader has to sort of figure out, midway through the chapter … because the two run precariously close. The book is actually about the impact of post-Brown v Board of Education and white flight on Native Americans in rural northern Michigan. It’s a heavy topic, so I chose to use humor and traditional stories to lure in the reader and really make some difficult topics more palatable.

Sun: You’re a writer, an artist…

Beardslee: I preserve several different forms such as quillwork, sweetgrass basketry, birchbark cutouts. At one time there were only two of us alive still doing those … Thank to the efforts of the few of us that still did this, we’ve kept those art forms alive. I was actually trained as a museum curator, went to Oberlin College. It wasn’t an integrated profession, so after graduate school, I went back and got certified to teach, and that was an even less integrated profession. So I kind of fell back on traditional arts, and I’ve always been good with words … I go all over the country to lecture and guest-teach at universities.

Sun: You were talking earlier about how a lot of Native American people are invisible here, isolated and segregated still. People just don’t see you, or see them. Like in the story you were reading, the turtle doesn’t want to leave; it’s his home…but it’s become dangerous as well.

Beardslee: That is an allegory for the position Native people face — not generically, but in this region — not some far-off homeland, but here. That’s why the book is called Not Far Away. Indian people here, we refer to ourselves as the Under People, or the Invisible People.

And something that rarely gets discussed out in the open: when we talk about Indians, [the dominant culture] likes the faux-Native American literature for non-Indians. The cute stuff: why the bear got its tail, things like that. [For an in-depth essay, see “American Indians in Children’s Literature: Lois Beardslee on Mackinac Island Press,” on the real harms done by faux-Native American “literature” that perpetuates stereotypes, strengthens misinformation, and disenfranchises Native cultures.]

Beardslee: And we rarely talk about the apartheid that exists here. Northwest Michigan is considered one of the most segregated places in the continental United States. Off-reservation employment for Native American people here is in excess of 99 percent, which is actually worse than the Gaza Strip.

For example, in northwest Michigan 15 or 20 years ago, there were about 50 Native American people with teaching credentials. And today, one would be hard-put to find two, because of the lack of even getting interviews. The community self-censured, and we began telling our young people, ‘Do not go into education if you go to college, because you won’t get a job’. In fact, our schools are only two percent more integrated than they were at the time of the Brown decision [in 1954], and the teaching profession even less integrated … because when you had schools specifically for people of color, they had teachers of color.

In Brown v Board of Education, the basic premise was that “Separate is not equal,” when it overturned a decision from the late 19th century — which was Plessy v Ferguson, which said that separate was equal. I certainly write and lecture about the topic quite a bit.

Sun: So if we were to think about the analogy of the turtle trying to cross the road…

Beardslee: Right, and for Native people, we live in small pockets where we feel safe, and because of really foolish stereotypes that I think we’ve all grown up with, there’s a tendency for others to wish that Native people would stay in those small pockets.

Sun: And only come out for the powwow, or for some other ‘valorizing’ occasion?

Beardslee: Right, the cute dancers. Whereas Ima Pipiig, in my book, is a woman who believes in equal work for equal pay, and that’s not nearly as sweet and acceptable as a Native woman who says, “Take my venison tenderloins, please!”

Sun: Does the word pipiig mean …

Beardslee: It means, “Between.”

Sun: And “Ima” — is that kind of a pun? “I’m between.”

Beardslee: Right, I’m between, or I’m Bu-BIG. I’m not a child, I’m a grownup now. It’s almost as though Native people have never been allowed to grow up. As teachers, we can only teach about Indian stuff, you couldn’t possibly teach about math or science. That’s a little frustrating, because Ojibwe is really kind of a language of math nerds! We conjugate everything, even our numbers. When people first came into the western Great Lakes, they didn’t send people who could record the Ojibwe word for a sine-generated curve; they sent guys who could paddle real hard! They were people who were themselves escaping from a place where the bulk of the wealth was in the hands of just a few families, and made treacherous journeys to get here.

Part of the mythology that developed into U.S. history that helped these people survive, was that they were taking over less competent people. While homesteaders are considered heroes in mainstream U.S. history, in the Native community, it’s considered … an ugly word. But at the same time, to overcome barriers between both groups, everyone needs to understand that these people had made treacherous journeys and were trying desperately to survive, to make something out of nothing. So it really helped to develop this mythology of certain people as lesser than others. Certainly in the Gilded Age, the late 19th and early 20th centuries, all people of color were depicted as buffoonish and incapable of maintaining their own resources … but it’s time for us to grow up as a country and a culture, and reexamine that history.

The cuteness of the turtle story … the cuteness of helping turtles to cross the road — isn’t cute at all, it’s really serious business!

Lois’ words from the Introduction to Not Far Away stay in my mind long after our talk concludes: “If we are locked out, rejected, and feared, and the very foundations of our self-esteem and our cultures are destroyed, we are not the only losers. You lose, too. People who are schooled and brought up without access to diversity are destined to function in a limited domain. Eventually, they will have to step out into the integrated world, or they will have to let it in.”

For more on Lois’ books, art, Native traditional arts, and recorded works: www.loisbeardslee.com.