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"A superbly written true story of love and self-discovery."
A Reviewer-Author Interview with Lynne O’Connor, Author of Elk Love
Site unseen, to wrap your brain around the majesty of Montana takes an imagination as big as the Rockies that tower over the state’s river valleys and prairie—especially for those who arrive from urban areas to the east. But few people consider Montana’s cultural side based on the Native people who have inhabited the region for many thousands of years.
A scholar in Native American Art History, with time spent on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Lynne O’Connor has a rare understanding of the state on many different levels. But at a low period in midlife, she heard the most basic of calls: Montana as a source of healing.
Her memoir, Elk Love, details her move to Great Falls, the ranching life she fell into, unexpected love, and so much more. With a glowing review from Kristine Morris coming soon in a future issue of Foreword, we connected reviewer and author for the following deeply spiritual conversation.
What was it that first drew you to the Indigenous artists of North America and their work?
Since I was a small girl, I’ve been interested in art and nature, and the ways Indigenous people around the world have lived so intimately with both. When I went to graduate school in the late 1980s, non-Indigenous art historians were finally opening to the fact that what had been traditionally labeled by anthropologists and art historians as “cultural artifacts” by groups that were “primitive” or “other” were in fact great works of art and needed to be researched and exhibited as such. Like all artists, these skilled and thoughtful individuals drew from their own life experiences, from specific belief systems, cultural traditions and aesthetics, and their surroundings for inspiration.
In thinking about how best to appropriately display non-mainstream works by Native American, African, Mexican, American self-taught and folk artists in mainstream gallery and museum settings, I was hugely inspired by James Clifford’s 1988 book The Predicament of Culture. This man (with a pretty cool title: Professor in the History of Consciousness Dept. at the University of California in Santa Cruz) was asking the hard questions that needed to be asked: Who has the authority to speak for any group’s identity and authenticity? How, in the context of museum exhibitions, travel, ethnography, and everyday life, do our ideas of ourselves and “the other” come into conflict? Who gets to define the authenticity and the boundaries of any culture? Everything in me responded to these early glimmers of a profound imperative to recognize, respect, and honor diversity as it is expressed through art. It was this call—to listen with open ears and hearts, practice self-reflection regarding unconscious racism and assumptions, while inviting inclusiveness through collaboration and reciprocity—that inspired me to return to graduate school. And eventually, to spend time with smart people on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation whose ancestors had been amazing artisans and wise stewards of the northwestern lands I love so much, long before I or my ancestors ever arrived.
What are some of the most important things you learned from those experiences on a reservation, and how has your life been impacted by what you’ve learned?
Over ten summers spent there, I witnessed the profound significance of slowing down, listening, honoring, having patience, practicing gratitude and reciprocity on a daily basis. In traditional Blackfeet elders and friends, I observed a deep spirituality that influenced every aspect of their lives. With clarity and knowledge (often infused with good humor), they instilled deep respect for the natural world. All living things were honored as relatives. In equal measure, the invisible world of spirits and ancestors merited respect. Like Buddhism (another great influence in my life), emphasis was placed on finding refuge in the eternal comings and goings of all experiences and beings. I witnessed these perspectives influencing people in ways that were significant, connecting, and sustaining.
My memoir describes a later time in my mid-forties when, having left city life behind to spend more time in nature, I was able to begin engaging the sacred skills and perspectives I’d observed earlier with Native friends—observing and listening on my own (and with a rancher named Harrison) to everything that lived in a variety of habitats within a specific mountain valley in northcentral Montana’s cattle country. Direct experiences in nature, with observations of all its diversity, drew me into endless curiosities about unimagined sources of brilliance and wonder. My lifelong struggle with loneliness finally gave way to feelings of deep belonging. I wrote Elk Love because I wanted to document this seminal period of five years in my forties when the natural world began showing me the absolute individuality and undeniable interconnectedness of every living being.
What was there about ranch life that drew you to become involved in the care of the land and the animals to the extent that you did? Please share one or two pivotal experiences that let you know you had found your healing place.
My very first summer spent in the astonishing beauty and spaciousness of Montana’s landscape on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation told me I’d found my healing place! At that time, I was reading a lot of Eckhart Tolle speaking about the spaciousness of awareness. I was a graduate student, but I was feeling what a favorite Scottish poet and teacher, Norman MacCaig, once expressed: “Scholars, I plead with you, Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?” I longed for chances to listen into the silence of nature’s wilderness to learn from its libraries and repositories of wisdom. I felt supported—by Native friends and by their wide-open landscape—to become even more curious about a sacred expansiveness and wisdom that might also live inside me.
Like E.B. White, Mary Oliver (two personal favorites), and so many others in the world who prefer the company of animals to people, visiting a working cattle ranch years later in a gorgeous mountain valley (owned by a gorgeous rancher) and surrounded by National Forest felt like pure heaven. Working all day with horses, cows, goats, chickens, dogs, cats, and did I say horses?! Walking through millions of colorful spring wildflowers blooming across hillsides of high native grasses. Listening to the winds and the sounds of flowing mountain creeks. Helping to deliver calves and foals. Following mountain lion tracks in the snow. Being close enough to a herd of two hundred elk to witness the power of huge bulls in rut. Listening to the sweet sounds of native sharp-tail grouse speaking softly to one another while they’re invisible, hidden under snow for protection and warmth. How utterly refreshing!
In nature, everything was absolutely and purely itself, without pretense. In nature, there was no alienation. Everything belonged. I discovered that to spend time with—listening, observing, feeling—anything in nature led me to intimacy. The intimate experiences I was having on Harrison’s ranch led me to love and a strong desire to care each day for all that I loved.
How did you manage to adjust to the physical and emotional rigors of ranch life, not having lived it before? And how did you manage to help so much on the ranch while continuing your work at the museum?
Adjusting to the emotional rigors of ranch life was especially difficult for me. I had lived in relatively safe city neighborhoods my whole life and knew nothing about caring for hundreds of domestic animals and encounters with wildlife. Just as there was more nature, authenticity, and wonder than I was used to, there was also more death, loss, and violence than I’d ever experienced. But it came at a perfect time for me: I had devoted myself to completely surrendering to life in all its manifestations. I was attempting at every turn to accept and find peace with things as they are, no matter what. As readers will discover, my time on the ranch was surprisingly helpful for my personal growth, and complementary for my job at the museum working with Native American art objects and consultants to tell a story of bison in the Northern Plains.
Excerpt from Elk Love: “On weekdays, I dress in a skirt and blouse and drive four minutes or walk to the museum. I spend long days sitting inside, researching and organizing Native American works of art for my bison exhibit. On weekends, I check road conditions and don long underwear, jeans, muck boots, and a Carhartt jacket before setting off with Willow to experience the rawness of winter night calving.
The intellectual part of me is living as a scholar/curator/educator. The heart part now lives as a help-partner and rancher-in-training, a city woman unable to have children of her own helping to deliver two hundred baby calves. This second part is both intimate and less familiar. Standing knee deep in the flow of life, everything feels so inherently authentic, so bracing and pure. Everything has a life of its own.“
You wrote about how much you wanted to learn everything there was to learn about your new life, including hunting. And although the taking of life was traumatic, your writing about the hunting experience conveyed the sense that you had touched something of its spiritual aspect. Would you tell us something about this, and why you decided to stop hunting altogether?
It took a very long time before I was willing and able to cross that threshold from observer to hunter. Becoming a hunter allowed me to feel my direct connection to the sacred cycles of birth and death that everything is a part of, that connects every living thing to every other living thing. I never had children of my own, never gave birth, but I imagine it has a similar effect. It also allowed me to have a rare experience in this modern life of feeling what it is to assume full responsibility for procuring what I eat. Only through the direct experience of one animal’s life being sacrificed to sustain another’s did I understand just how sacred that experience is, and what it is to receive such a gift.
I had great difficulty bringing myself to even hold a gun, let alone to shoot it. But I am grateful for what my short experience as a hunter granted me. Ultimately, the conflicts I felt in the taking of any life were just too great for me to continue.
Your three-year-long project curating a permanent exhibit of Native American art, Bison: An American Icon, for the C.M. Russell Museum was a resounding success despite some initial trepidation that the area’s demographic might not be enthusiastic. To what do you attribute the public’s outpouring of appreciation?
We were incredibly fortunate to work with a great team of consultants and made sure that our story about Native American artwork, bison, and their significance for Native Americans of the Northern Plains was told from the perspective of those Native American people and cultures. We also worked with major organizations like the Smithsonian to engage high-level conservationists and other talented professionals. We were fortunate to have generous financial support from the NEH and other organizations, which gave us the freedom to settle for nothing less than excellence at every stage of our project, from research to development, in creating our exhibition. When our show in Great Falls opened, the NEH offered yet more support to facilitate the creation of a travelling replica version of our permanent exhibition, which was put on the road for several years. Each venue across the country was encouraged to work with their local Native communities and to tailor the exhibition so as to convey their own region’s stories of bison as reflected through Native perspectives.
Please tell us something about regenerative ranching practices, their effects on grassland conservation, and why this is so important.
Thanks for asking about this!—I’m still a novice, and ranching’s effect on the ecosystem is a controversial topic. But I’ve learned, for instance, that people concerned about the “health hazards” of cows need to understand the differences between cattle in feedlots (finished on corn, living in terrible conditions) and grass-fed, grass-finished cattle in small operations like ours. We’ve opted for an ethical system of managing cattle in the healthiest way, both for the animals and for the product, as well as doing what’s best for the soil and grasslands habitat where we live. One example: 1) We feed our cattle biochar which promotes better health, absorbing pathogens and creating a better biome in their guts for improved digestion. 2) We do not use a de-wormer for our cattle that remains in the soil and kills dung beetles. 3) Dung beetles ingest cattle dung and take that biochar underground into the root system, sequestering carbon and supplying carbon for a variety of microbes that promote healthy soil and grasses. More and more folks like us are implementing various efforts and coming to understand why regenerative ranching practices like these are so incredibly important.
This is a huge and fascinating topic that I invite everyone to learn more about! A few educational sites, including Audubon’s Conservation Ranching Initiative that our ranch is a member of, are listed on my website. On my News Page, readers can find an interview with me about grasslands conservation. I highly recommend Diana Rodger’s film, Sacred Cow, as an excellent look at the complex issues involved in how most of North America produces food and what we are doing to the land. You can rent it on Amazon or find it here. Another great link will take readers to the Regenerative Renegades video (produced by Natural Grocers) which is one of the best twenty-minute videos I’ve seen in explaining the relationship between grazing, grasslands, and carbon sequestration.
Excerpts from Elk Love: “All I knew of grass until these days of walking miles with Harrison was mowed lawns in cities, sprayed with chemicals, kept neat and trim. Now I see how cattle, the wild elk and deer in this valley depend on grasslands for shelter and food. As do migratory waterbirds, songbirds, and raptors in different seasons. As wild bison once did. Their grazing, in turn, encourages the continued growth and health of habitat.”
“Years later, I would appreciate more about the imperatives and significance of caring for cattle. I would learn about Allan Savory and holistic management practices that employ livestock to heal the environment. I would discover that cattle are some of the only herd animals today that can be used deliberately to do—in small ways—what tens of millions of wild bison once accomplished—fertilizing the land with their manure, composting it with their movements. Their grazing improves soil health, sequesters carbon, accelerates photosynthesis, stimulates plant growth, boosts biodiversity, providing a spectrum of necessary benefits to grasslands. All this helps protect and conserve the threatened ecosystems of old-growth grasslands like Harrison’s. There are multiple points of view about all this. Eventually, I would understand more about one side of the argument: Some people—including the Audubon society—believe cattle and good practices can help to sustain this fast-disappearing habitat that a wide diversity of bird species, other creatures, and plants all depend on for their survival.”
Have these practices been widely accepted, or are they being resisted by ranchers?
Agricultural corporate entities as well as many independent ranchers and farmers continue to use damaging herbicides and other chemicals. But organizations like The Nature Conservancy, Montana Land Reliance, and Audubon are doing a lot in our state to educate and partner with local agricultural communities, leading to tremendously creative collaborations compared to even twenty years ago. This is a deep topic, with lots of perspectives and different things happening in different places. But more and more folks today are leaning into alternative ways of doing things that are not harmful to the environment and to our food sources. We are grateful to be one of many ranches across the country partnering with Audubon’s Conservation Ranching Initiative to encourage rotational grazing and other ethical practices (no antibiotics, incorporating high-grade seaweed and biochar into cattle diets to enrich soil and help sequester carbon, etc.) doing what we can to support these old-growth grasslands for birds and other forms of life that depend on them.
What was easiest about writing this book? What was most difficult?
Descriptions of the landscape and wildlife were delightful! It was pure pleasure listening and observing carefully over the years, then doing my best to transcribe the delicious voices and inherent poetry of nature. Dialogue was fun too. Descriptions of my own family history were the most difficult. I don’t have that many childhood memories, and the majority of those I do have aren’t great. Having spent many years working through the residue of my earlier years, I knew I wanted Elk Love to be primarily a hymn of praise, an ode to the overwhelming presence of wonder, joy, love, and gratitude I experience in my life now.
Are you working on another book, and if so, what will the subject be?
I’ve got a roughed-out draft of a second memoir that picks up where this one ends. I’m largely a visitor in Harrison’s world of ranching and hunting in Elk Love. In my second volume, I’m getting my sea legs on, as a rancher and a wife. I’m initiating a lot more and have some wild experiences on my own, as the adventures in our valley continue to deepen and expand.
Thanks, Lynne! Please add anything else you’d like our readers to know.
I’ve had a longstanding fascination with the concept of alchemy and transformative experiences in life. There is a lot of alchemy in Elk Love—in the heat of things, I’m changing into someone different. Phyllis is a playful trickster figure. Harrison is half man, half beast. We construct a lantern using willow branches that looks like a butterfly chrysalis or an egg. In another scene, Harrison and I build a bridge together over the creek we must ford to get home. The entry to every Zendo and monastery I’ve been to has a bridge to cross, symbolizing the passage from one world to another. Inviting conversations with what is different or unfamiliar, building bridges of connection, seeking relationships between what is human and not human, comfortable and uncomfortable, visible and invisible … this is where I like to live.
Elk Love is a story of wonder and inspiration. I wrote it for anyone like me, who might be looking for an ideal escape from the crush of a busy life, and is needing an opportunity to wander, for a time, into a lost garden to explore a hidden love of nature and the spirit of animals. I wrote Elk Love as an open invitation to readers who are curious about the healing capacities of stepping outside one’s comfort (or discomfort?) zones to explore the generous wisdom of what is truly wild—both precious and disturbing—in us all.
Kristine Morris
