Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

by Suzanne Simard

I come from a family of loggers, and I am not unmindful that we need trees for our livelihoods. But my salmon trip showed that with taking something comes the obligation to give back. Of late I’ve become increasingly enchanted by the story told by Subiyay, who talks of the trees as people. Not only with a sort of intelligence—akin to us humans—or even a spiritual quality perhaps not unlike ours. Not merely as equivalent to people, with the same bearings. They are people. The Tree People. I don’t presume to grasp Aboriginal knowledge fully. It comes from a way of knowing the earth—an epistemology—different from that of my own culture. It speaks of being attuned to the blooming of the bitterroot, the running of the salmon, the cycles of the moon. Of knowing that we are tied to the land—the trees and animals and soil and water—and to one another, and that we have a