 Before we get started, I want to first acknowledge the lands that were on Ndakina, this is unceded Abenaki land. You all have the book or the program or both, so this piece actually for me writing this piece was about engaging in a practice of listening as a way of coming into a relationship to place and the place where I live and sort of my presence within it and a lot of that has to do with the fact that it is unceded Abenaki land and that I'm a settler person living on it. So those themes come up throughout the piece. My plan for right now, I'm going to, first I want to acknowledge a lot of people without whom this would not have been possible and then I'm going to talk a little bit about the piece and then we're going to perform it for you. So to start out, I want to thank my partner Sasha and Emma and Baird who are here somewhere in my family for their support in all of this. I want to thank the Vermont Arts Council. This is funded through a creation grant and would not have been possible without them. I want to thank Turn Music and Anne Decker and Steve Klamowski and Elizabeth Reed and Casey Metzler and Evan Primo and who've just done a fantastic job working with the music. I want to thank Tobin Anderson for the continued conversation and throughout this whole process as well and lots of other folks who have also informed this work. So the piece, as you might be able to see from the score, a little bit unconventional as a piece of music because it's a piece of music that is about listening, that is about trying to locate with your ears different sorts of conversations and relationships that exist in the place around us. I would welcome people during the performance if you want to get up and move around a little bit. We've got acoustic instruments here, we've got some sound coming through speakers. The sound is going to sound different in every place. So you can move around to hear the sound differently. The piece starts out with some nail fiddles which are, they should be called screw fiddles but nail fiddles sounds better. They're just boards with screws in them, the screws are tuned and then bowed. Then the first piece of sound that you'll hear, the first piece of sound that I started with in composing it is the sound of water leaking through the dam at Robinson Sawmill up at Kent Corners in Calis. I was intrigued by this idea of that dam is still there and that water is and has been and continues to and is successfully overcoming the dam and that dynamic has been going on for generations, even centuries. And so that trickle of water becomes a character throughout the piece. The first movement, the instruments are sort of picking up musical motifs and threads that are in that gurgling water. The second movement is based on the bell in the Old West Church, also up in Calis. And let's see, what's my third movement? The third movement is the fland, right, okay, that also comes from East Calis and is the voice of Myra Daniels whose folk songs were archived by Helen Hartness Flanders. And so that's a movement about what archiving is and what it means to record a history, what it means to remember a past into the present and the responsibilities attached to that. Then we talk about Japanese knotweed and invasive species. Another thank you to Sean Clute, too, with whom I work in the Rural Noise Ensemble. And that draws upon an installation that Sean and I did a couple years ago. But the question of what an invasive species is and how I, as a member of a settler-colonial culture, relates to invasivity. What you'll hear as well there is the theme of the water from that first movement comes back and is in counterpoint with the invasive species, right, because the invasive species are actually growing in this same water, this continuous water. From there, we return to Helen Hartness Flanders and some of that motivic material to talk about the Vermont Commission for Country Life, which was the commission that funded Helen Hartness Flanders' Ballad Collection and was also a commission that came out of the Vermont Eugenics Project. So in that chapter of the score, it's dealing with that question of what are the politics behind the creation of a narrative of the rural. And then we wind up actually in the garden house, which you can see the roof of right up there, with the question of haunting. And the legend of that garden house is that it was built with the timbers from the Ipswich courthouse where the Salem witches were condemned. And that the Martin family, who lived on this land before it became Goddard's campus, were descendants of Susanna Martin and built the garden house up there with those timbers from that courthouse. So of course, campus lore is that it's super haunted. And so that piece actually deals with the sonic nature of that space itself. I just wanted to be honest with you. Can I be honest with you? Because, yeah. So not everyone is a contemporary music listener. There are going to be sounds, harmonies, timbers, colors that might not be what everybody here is used to listening while you're washing your dishes or whatever. And so I want us all to approach this act of listening and this act of engaging with sound as something that is not just an entertainment, but that is also something of a ceremony, of being in relationship to those sounds, knowing that those sounds are in relationship to the place that surrounds us. And so a way of listening and opening yourself up to listening and hearing how these things come together as just one little window, one little glimpse into being in relationship to place. So thank you all so much for being in this place together so that we can take part in this conversation together. After the piece, I would love to circle up with whoever is interested in talking about our relationships to place, our relationships to history, to belonging, to haunting. I want to hear your ghost stories. I want to hear how you experience the place where you live. So for anyone who wants to stay around afterwards, I would love to do some story sharing and some oral history. But for the moment, without further ado, I would like to welcome Ann Decker. And here's. Let's see. So I'm not exactly sure how to facilitate this conversation, but I will tell you a couple things. I want to hear your ghost stories, if anyone has ghost stories. But I'm also just curious. I mean, a question that I have for people is, who did you learn about the history of where you live through your neighbor? What did you learn about it? I think that's super interesting the way that, you know, something that you bring up there about how you can see the history, you know what I mean, in the shape of the building, probably also in the shape of the land around it, you know? What about for other folks? How did you learn about the history of the place that you live? And now you've told me this, this doesn't have to do with the history of the place where you live, but Andy is a descendant of Susanna Martin as well. Oh wow. Who here isn't a descendant of Susanna? I'm glad you could all make it. Yeah. So I'm wondering, it never, it doesn't get disrupted, it's still right there. And that's in the Elmore area? Yeah, it's in Elmore. Interesting. The Elmore Roots nursery and I met the top and it's just the most magical. Yeah, yeah. So that's interesting. You asked how we might know about... Yeah, how you learned about the place where you live. Uh-huh. Very generalized, but now I've had, just because of more awareness of an occupier in the central and northern lawn, whenever I traverse into the back of my land or whatever, I have such a new regard and yearning to give more Yeah, yeah. I know one of the things that I always find, something that I was interested in this piece is the idea of boundaries and how boundaries are marked. And one of the things that I'm always fascinated by are the piles of rusted metal that you find in the middle of the woods and the way that every junk pile was a place where somebody drew the line between, like, this is the land I use and this is the land where I throw my stuff because it's... But you often find very specific, like clearly somebody... This was somebody's garbage heap. You know, and so it was just outside of wherever they drew the boundary of, like, the land that they considered useful to them. And so in that way, like, there are all of these historical markers of boundaries that may have just been the psychological boundary of somebody. You know what I mean? But that are, like, permanently laced throughout all the woods and in places where you don't even expect to find them. Yeah. So it's my children on the side tell the story and it was prohibition and it may very well happen. We know, and Carlos came, you know, they had a feud. They pulled it off. My story better. Yeah, I like your story. So my grandfather goes down and Geralt and... Because they're just involved because they're storing bootleg boots in the cellar in the house of the ballers to them. And so they say, well, what are you doing? So my grandfather goes down and says, so what do you want me to do? Do you want me to call the police and tell them that they're storing bootleg boots? Yeah, they go, oh yeah, right. My children were raised in that school. Oh yeah. I didn't see any moonshine. It's pretty magical. Back in, oh, in prohibition time. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of life with respect to place. Yeah. Since I was a little cat, I liked walking rivers when there's water in them. Yeah. And I think that's my place and name. Yeah, yeah. Something that that am bootlegging brings to mind for me is the way that so often we think about places, like the things that are bounded, like a property, right? But the river as a pathway, as a thing that gets you between two places, whether it's in a boat or whether you're walking it, and that bootlegging routes as well also define place in a certain way in terms of like, bye Cathy, in terms of like being the route that gets you from one place to another. There's Lisa Brooks, who's cited in the score, but who's an Abenaki scholar in her book, The Common Pot. She has maps of the Northeast where everything is removed except for the rivers. And so it allows you to sort of see place differently because proximity isn't in terms of like our roads, but in terms of what waterways connect different spots. And so yeah, and so it organizes space a little differently. Three of the ways in this piece that I was thinking about boundary was one being like barriers, things that actually stop you from moving. One being about like range, like the range of a bell. And there's in the movement on bells it talks about like how throughout the colonial world, throughout the process of colonization and Christian colonization, the range from which you could hear the church bell was considered like the land that had been civilized by the church. And so that oral range became a boundary marker. So thinking about ranges and as a way of thinking about place, whether that's the sound of a bell or the range of Japanese knotweed, we also have been following the range of the emerald ash borer. You know, I'm right in the last, within the last three years, I've gone from being outside of emerald ash borer to inside of emerald ash borer and now it's moving up to hardwick. And then the third way of thinking about boundaries, being how we frame things, being like those cognitive categorical boundaries that we use to organize and categorize things. So like with the folk songs, with eugenics project that like creating archives and creating those categories is a way of setting boundaries and also like, you know, can be a very dehumanizing and yeah, exclusive way of setting boundaries. Do other people, for this idea of how you learned the history of where you live? Any part of it? Yeah. And you, how it reminds me of that, just by listening to water and it's rather than the thing we call history which tends to focus on that anthropocentric map in the person who is beeping alone. That's right. But I just, when you asked the question, how did you learn about the history of this place, you immediately went to who's history? And prehistory, I mean, here we are with categories again. Even the question itself controls the way we experience it. But your experience of listening to water opens, it really feels like it must have opened you up to all kinds of wonder beyond when the first colonial settlement person found that, discovered that part of the world. Yeah, yeah. And I'm wondering what happened inside of you when you were, I'm going to turn the question around. Yeah, sure, sure. What happened inside of you? It's a gutter joke. When you were just being present for listening as a person, very attuned to sound, how you started experiencing what started happening inside of you, what story began to trickle through your consciousness at that point? Yeah, I mean, I think for me one of the big takeaways is like the idea that listening is never innocent. You know what I mean? That you never like, you never open up to the point where you're not still organizing things in terms of some frame of reference. You know what I mean? And one of the things, so just thinking about these questions about histories and prehistories and that sort of thing, my dad is a geologist and he turned me on to a 2008 article that talks about just how many mills there were in the US, what is now the United States on this continent, by like 1800 and that the shape of rivers at the time that the first sort of like American cartographies of them and hydrologies of them, that those first studies were done, they were already rivers that were like permanently reshaped by the presence of dams. So according to that article, which is mostly focusing on Virginia but also like has estimates for how many dams there were, there would have been at least 70 dams in Washington County. And so when you think about like how many places the same river is dammed to like how many mills, that like I don't know, to me the idea and with the folk song that's in there, the land of beginning again, the idea that there isn't necessarily an access to a before, you know what I mean? And so like we're always navigating our relationship to things, how they are and that always involves, yeah, like all of these histories are always in the pot, you know? Could you write there and listen to this because I'm just thinking how we're mostly all about what's going on in our heads. And heads are often much more what's going on in their body. Did you spend time and talk with you about what you're doing and what is important for you here in Vermont? Well, what I like about Vermont is mainly so, what I like mostly about Vermont is mainly the wildlife and how much wildlife there is in Vermont compared to some places and how much, I don't know, animals. I mean we live in a place where last year there would be bears coming into our yard every day. So I guess I really just like the nature of Vermont. And I've looked at my window from here and I often see bears walk across Vermont and from the bear usually invaded the beautiful state. Thanks for that. Can I respond to the boundary? Yeah, yeah. I'm also a musician, I'm a percussionist, but for me I was able to be taken away from the boundaries through your piece and through the soundscapes that you're creating and the music, which maybe that's just akin to me and unbiased as I'm a musician as well, but it was a sense of freedom that took me away from the colonialization and the counties and back to maybe what these sacred lands were like before white man came and raped and pillaged and created what we have. Yeah, yeah. So that was special for me. It put me to sleep as well for the while. Hopefully a good sleep. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you. And I definitely think my interest in boundaries totally has to do with subverting them and interrupting them and puncturing them and that sort of thing. And the concept of the water of flowing freely and that water keeps going to other places in a sense of real freedom. Yeah. So that was special. And I love the fact, I don't know, for me like that initial idea in the piece and the field recording that is then the source of most of the material in the piece is that trickle of water that's leaking through an 1805 dam and just the fact that like that little, that water like has been working on that project for over 200 years. And I invited the head of the Board of the Robinson Dam. I didn't see him here, but I invited him to the premiere. But it was also like a kind of awkward thing for me too because it was like, yes, I'm featuring the dam and also I'm kind of celebrating the thing that you're trying to repair. But yeah, that idea of the thing that breaks through the boundary. That's interesting. I mean, in some ways I think that the score, and there's some mention of this in the notes that in some ways writing the music is in a way like funneling it into a penstock and making it operate a certain type of machinery. So also just the mere act of taking these sounds and making something out of it is also like an extractive process that is complicit in this settler colonial project. That I'm also taking that same trickle of water and funneling it through my own flywheel. You know what I mean? To mill my own lumber. And so I felt like the structure that you... I told you about the part, so I recognize that when it spreads through the whole theme to go beyond that, it's sort of a paradox. The fact that you put all this effort in the structure allows us to... Yeah, and I think something that for me, and this relates to what, to Suzanne's question as well, that the idea that listening is never innocent also to me means that I don't necessarily need to aspire to total freedom or total structuralistness or total distancing from those categories that I'm using to organize things. But the more it's about surfacing them and engaging with them critically but also knowing that they're not going to go away. You know what I mean? But you can still think about them in terms of... If you're thinking about them critically, you can think about whether or not you're doing harm. Ontological harm. That's the goal, for sure. Did you raise your hand? Did you raise your hand? Yeah. I have stories I want to share. Yeah, please. I come from, which was originally settled in the hills two miles south of town where the original settlers nearly starved to death until they moved... Locke Stock and Barrow picked everything up and moved to what is now the center of Brandon and created a mill. So there's this sense of not listening to the landscape that they were going to, you know, punch it out in those hills that are, of course, complete their bedrock. I mean, you cannot farm those hills without a question. And so only when they sort of learn some humility could they move into town and harness the power of local extreme to make it happen. So that's sort of one cautionary thing. And then another cautionary tale that I think is really important to the street for all of us, for Monteress and all, is that the man who is credited with discovering the headwaters of the Mississippi River is a man named Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who is an early graduate of Middlebury College who was hired by then lieutenant territorial governor of Tass of Michigan to go on an excursion. He was a staff geologist who hired to sort of figure out what to exploit. He keeps a journal where he starts out completely racist towards the strategic way guides who are leading them. They have to travel across New York prior, this is 1820, so it's before the hurricane now. But they're able to take a steamboat from Buffalo to Detroit and then they get in a bunch of canoes and go up through Lake Superior and down looking for the headwaters of Mississippi. Which they failed upon but they manage to find the Mississippi eventually and go down in the Mississippi for a while. And then the same guy, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft is hired to be the Indian agent for the whole upper territory. And he lives in Sault Ste. Marie which is iced in in those days over the winter. He teaches himself Ojibwe but in the meantime marries an Ojibwe woman who, and falls in love with the culture, the language, he writes these huge compilations of stories, of native stories. He completely becomes the socket with the culture. He's like as good a good guy as you can imagine in the early 19th century, right? And he means well for the native people and he realizes, you know, settlement is coming we gotta do something. He basically invents the reservation system in Minnesota and the way he does it and for me, even also like how we dealt with enslaved people versus how we dealt with Native American people, basically we gave Native American families a hundred acres. He just cut them up into rectangles and talked about boundaries, right? And delivered each tribal family their own hundred acres to farm and said here, you're all set now, go to it. What he did not do is set it up on rivers so that these tribal groups could not hang out with one another. They could not do their rituals, their, you know, powwows, like all the things that we know Native people do. They gather, they party, they exchange gifts, they do the stuff. That's really, really important with the culture. So I considered a project called Friends Like Me because this guy is the model of a well-meaning liberal white guy. Totally getting it wrong. I mean, like so deeply and profoundly getting it wrong. But in the meantime, his brother-in-law took him to the headquarter in Mississippi which is why he is credited here. Wow. Wow. And that reminds me of Sir Tobin who's had to leave but I wish he was here because he could speak to this better than I can but he said that when Vermont was first parceled up for sale, it was similarly like grid, you know, like done on a grid system and bought and sold by people who had never been, you know, who had never been to this territory, right? Yeah, yeah. And because of that, people didn't know what they were getting so they would buy like three non-adjacent parcels to increase the likelihood that one of those parcels would be farmable lands. Because then, you know, they knew nothing about the topography and I thought about that when you were talking about Brandon and people like moving to... To the act of will. Right. This is where we are. We're going to make it work. And then what you mentioned about the sawmill in Brandon too, a story that didn't make it into this piece but that came up is that there's a sawmill, there was a sawmill on the Missacoy River and this is one of the only actual agreements between the Abenaki and settlers is a French settler got permission to build a sawmill there from the Missacoy Abenaki but because there was a French sawmill on the Missacoy River when the British took over that sawmill they considered all of that French land and so the presence of that one mill meant that the British didn't interact with the Abenaki at all but said this is already French land we've claimed it in the Seven Years' War, you know, from the French. So to me it's like one of those ways that like this one structure then changed the status of that land within the eyes of those two states and made it possible for the Abenaki to be completely left out of those conversations about land even when the British were negotiating with the Haudenosaunee. You know what I mean? The only thing I'm adding is to this sort of brilliant sort of structural exposition which is the way you and I talk, I'm often thinking is what are the ideas that and values and generational pasts that have shaped these decisions and these outlooks that was obviously all about whatever it was that you wanted quite some time to see and there was ways, there was a profound ideology that's making it very easy to set up the systems because they're all designed to help people and designed to help people who aren't even really people. They're something else. Yeah. Oh, go ahead, yeah. I have memories of listening to a Fanatska teacher talk about the coming of early settlers and the belief system in structures in England and elsewhere that everything that was discovered here is kind of the ownership of the European times. And so that kind of, the history was written onto the land before the people even got here from Europeans who already knew that the whole thing was about the manifest destiny of the church of multiple colonies, multiple colonies that came, multiple groups that came here to settle colonies. And one of the things that happened to indigenous understanding of relationship to place, which all the relationship to place was like history, is that it was collective membership of place. Ownership was a foreign concept until people of First Nation indigenous people were disowned and disinherited. So then when Native people were forced to be relocated and given parcels, that was also foreign. And that was actually what destroyed the heart of that collective collaborative membership of place. Human membership to place was the relational dynamic. Humans were members of the odyssey of creation and were caregivers and taken by creation. And there was inter, it was a very different story as my Penobscot super friend said. Sherry Mitchell. Sherry Mitchell, yeah. I was guessing that I was here. We studied the history of colonization through a Penobscot lens with her. And she said it's when First Nation people were divided into parcels like in Britain, that was the breakdown of tribal identity. That was the beginning of, for her, that was one of the greatest, deepest wounding of colonization, was giving people independence because before it was full place and the whole people in the whole place and the colonization through insanity. Autism. Your structure begs the larger question which was there are ways of charting history and place on paper, on books, on bells. And when so many other cultures chronically by stories that were passed in general, that the stories themselves were wrapped around the landscape. Yeah. In the wild home. Well, whatever, depending on the, one of the things I was talking with was my daughter who's up on the Northwest Coast, daughter of my sister. And she's working with Kwago and her, I'm going to say it's like a sister for her who's an expert to say sometimes people when we talk about native cultures it's as if they're all the same. And that's, none of us do this initially with intention. And that's sort of like the gentleman who said oh, I'll save the folks, I'll make the reservation. But it's just business of the sound. The sound is specific to a place. The people are specific, the resources. And that in a way is foreign to how we grew up and how we experienced and interacted with the world at large. So I just want to thank you for claiming your composition because if you look at it and you listen to it it just recalls. Yeah, it's like, it's a worldview, you know? And so I do think that there's something about the specific and the local and the immediate and the like, you can touch it and hear it and interact with it yourself and put your body there and not say that that's like an experience that relates to it, you know, to every sawmill or every river, you know what I mean? But just like the particular place where you can put your feet in the water, you know? I think that's an important point. There's also a current student that, I'm working with, there's lots of Goddard people here so there's lots of Goddard talk, but is writing about the fact that like because the migration of species is like an essential survival ability, a survival tactic, right? Like that trees, the range of trees move, the range of squirrels move, you know, that, yeah, ticks. But that because migration is like an essential tactic of resilience and because colonization is essentially about the fragmentation of place into property for the purposes of extraction, that like if we want to talk about sustainability studies, we need to talk about this underlying like rejection of the colonial state and of the like this thing that is built all about fragmentation because that ecosystem fragmentation is also what keeps plants and animals from being able to engage in the types of migration that are going to make climate change survivable, you know, even, yeah. And that was going to be my question to you, it's like, so what, of course I was just going to say, my malefills first came out. It was just like so, like just this really playful, like that spirit of playfulness, curiosity, and inquiry, like just to see it coming early and I'm just like, it's like so beautiful. And like, you know, my brother's a music composer, I've been in a couple of these and I just got to say that like I love how you didn't avoid and were so candid with your own contradiction of kind of pointing these things and documenting it with time in a demarcated space. I love that it occurred in a space, not only with the birds but with the highway. It was, it was, it was just, it was candid and real. And it didn't, it didn't try to have some facsimile of like a solution, it really asked questions. And I'm getting to my question. Like, I just, I just loved it. I really did love it. And so I think one of the questions that I'm sort of like coming out from this, and I want to know your sort of piece from that, is like, what does, what does it mean for you to live in a post-colonial piece? What does it mean for you personally dealing with these contradictions to think of, to think of a post-colonial way? I think that's a terrific question. I don't, I don't have, you know, as, as you mentioned in terms of like not, not acting as though one has the answers. I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to say that. I'm acting as though one has the answers. I'm not going to. But I do think, so, you know, one thing that I was thinking about on July 4th, which was not too long ago, right? And this was a new thing for me. But, but like the idea of not thinking about the United States from a perspective of like good or bad, you know, sort of thing. But thinking of the United States, making the shift from thinking of it as permanent to thinking of it as temporary, right? And if you think about the United States as a temporary project, you know what I mean? One that like, that if we just, because we do, you know, whatever in the abstract, everything is temporary, right? But like if we lean into the idea that like this state is a, is a temporary thing that had a beginning and will have an end, you know, and then think about like how do you participate in, how do you engage with and participate in a state with the idea in mind of bringing it to an end that causes the least harm and moves on to the, to a good next thing instead of a bad next thing. You know what I mean? I do, and you can apply that to your own policy plan. That we could call on that. Yeah, I mean, I don't think, you know, I think that decolonization is a multi-generational thing. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? So I think for me, and of course, you know, Eve Tuck and Kay Wayne Yang's decolonization is not a metaphor, is a great source for, but you know, one of the things that they talk a lot about is settler moves to innocence, all the ways that settlers try to do things to make themselves innocent or to make themselves feel innocent, right? And so, like, acknowledging that innocence is not an achievable thing in my lifetime. I thought the piece addressed that. I thought it was so great. I mean, I just have to say it's great. Well, thank you. The answer is yes. I love the interpretation of the lab. It was just, it was important. I don't know, I was just going to say ever so quickly, this strikes me of conversations that we've all had for decades, which is highly on the one hand, building Vermont into a place of natural beauty and greater justice and greater diversity, among other qualities. But then how do we make sure it's not an unclear state? Yeah. And what are my obligations to people in Boston? What are my obligations to people on the coast? What are my obligations to people in any number of different locales? So there's really important questions, but a beautiful thing like this, where I just asked, I spent time with little very students one day at the top of that old senior studies, and they were brilliant senior studies, and then I just said to them at the end, what are you going to do differently now that you've done this beautiful, super study? And they looked at me like, what? Really? That was a new question for them. But here, forgive me, the daughters were really actively asking how this has changed us, what does this do? We'll all be watching you and your family. Thank you. Well, thank you all for coming to the piece and also for sticking around for this conversation. We'll see you in a second.