[Originally posted 13 January 2015] Among the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest, the solitary North American species of badger, Taxidea taxus, is a primordial friend and ally; indeed, as Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko observes, it was a she-badger who made possible the migration of humans and other beings from the Fourth World beneath us into this, the Fifth World of our current existence: The people found the opening into the Fifth World…
KENNETH GRAHAME’S OTHER BADGER [originally posted 4 January 2015] Although best known for The Wind in the Willows (1908), the writer Kenneth Grahame was also the creator of the short story, “The Reluctant Dragon” (1898). As a somewhat vexed romantic, and as a keen observer of both animal behaviour and human attitudes toward animals, Grahame offers another badger, this one unnamed but significant. In this contemplative fantasy, the brave knight St. George comes to a small…
[Originally posted 11 August 2015] Collective nouns are a curiously eccentric feature of English, whereby evocative or pun-inspired terms are used to describe a group of animals, people, or items. Many of these are common parts of our everyday language–a pride of lions, a murder of crows, a host of angels, a flight of stairs–and have their roots in older vocabulary and terminology that makes sense to etymologists but are often obscure or invisible to…
[Originally posted 20 April 2015] In North America and Europe alike, there are many stories–and a long history–about badgers in relationship with their canid neighbours–generally coyotes in the former, foxes in the latter. Not only have cooperative hunting and dwelling interactions been extensively observed as actual behaviours in nature, they have also become part of the lore about these species in their respective territories. These storied traditions can be found among many Indigenous peoples in North…
[Originally posted 1 February 2015] “What’s the deal with you and badgers?” It’s a fair question, and one I’m asked not infrequently by both longtime friends and new acquaintances. Admittedly, badgers are pretty far removed from my other writings and scholarship–and in some ways my badger interest is a seemingly eccentric departure. After all, I’ve never worked with wildlife in any sustained way, although I spent much of my early life roaming the Pikes Peak…
[Originally posted 7 December 2014] In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt set off on a campaign tour by train across the western United States, stopping in various communities along the way. In the small Kansas town of Sharon Springs, he attended church service and made the acquaintance of a little girl who, according to Roosevelt, asked him if he’d like a badger kit her brother Josiah had caught. A celebrated collector (as well as notorious killer)…
[Originally posted 28 November 2014] What is a badger? A simple question, but not such a simple answer, as the category of “badger” is actually quite a malleable and dynamic one. Historically, and across many cultures throughout the world, badgers have long been considered a smallish type of bear, dog, or pig, both biologically and ceremonially. While some of those cultural associations continue today, especially regarding badger-bear kinship, among biologists badgers are widely categorized as fossorial…
I am grateful to be a visitor working on the lands of the Musqueam people, on whose traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories UBC is located and to be living as a visitor within the unceded ancestral territories of the shíshálh people.
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