I am working on my birch bark scroll

I am working hard to finish my project for my master in environmental studies. One of the results will be the birch bark scroll that I am currently making!

The scroll itself holds more meaning than I am able to fully explain via writing as it revisits and teaches our traditional Anishnaabe knowledge. I am going to tell reflect in part on why this is relevant to my counting down. This has been my journey towards counting down to December 21, 2012. That date will coincide with the last day of the 12 Day Festivities and the scroll I am working on tells of that ceremony, our ways of knowing and our history. So much has been written about the world ending but, is that what the mayan and Aztec calendars really say? I beg to differ and will continue to say no. Long before this date became a point of focus, my teacher, Nellie Ashwasegai, and family worked long before my arrival to keep alive our knowledge. In doing this work, they reviewed our history in order to walk back our ways of knowing. The point of doing so was to insure that our history would not be lost. In walking back and reviewing our history, more questions and a deeper pursuit followed that has driven me and those before me for centuries and longer. Eventually, i learned and was given this great responsibility to share what was shared with me and now I am following through with that goal and task: to reveal all knowledge that we once kept in our scrolls. I attempting the impossible to write and be able to speak to fulfilling my goal and task.

The scroll is a reflection of my learning and my effort to illustrate what I have learned through having conducted the 12 Day Festivities with my family and friends. The 12 Day Festivities is a celebration of life and the scroll also illustrates our mathematics and understanding of creation. The ceremony is a reenactment of our creation story. The scroll also tells of this story and the multiple layers of our ways of knowing. So for now this where I will stop. The world is not ending it is only beginning and turning into a new direction for all of the human family.