by

Aviva Rahmani

"We enter the medicine wheel to find our places on the wheel of life and our relationship with all of life, to find hidden reservoirs of gentle strength within ourselves and find new ways of walking in harmony on the earth." - Grandfather Thunder Cloud, Elder of the Cherokee Nation Ghost Nets takes place in a former dump site on Vinalhaven, a fishing island in the Gulf of Maine. This project was conceived as a response to the severe development pressures that the island faces. Ghost Net's name derived from the invisible but immense monofilament fishing gill nets that get lost in the ocean, strip-mining all sea life. The first 8 years of this work addressed the problem of exhausting ocean resources as a consequence of familiar attitudes to life on earth that are hard, but critical, to change. The inspiration for the first 3 years of Ghost Nets was the Plains Indian Medicine Wheel. The Medicine Wheel is a Native American ceremony of teaching and blessing, the purpose of which is to heal the earth and all who engage in the ceremony. The idea of the traditional sacred Medicine Wheel inspired me to purchase the Ghost Nets site in 1990, to begin restoring the property back to a viable wetlands. The 2 « acre site is in a Class A Migratory bird fly zone. It provides habitat linkage for 80 contiguous acres. Wetlands are essential to spawning fish to feed birds, yet they are being lost globally at exponential rates. Earth care is symbiotic. The sea, the air and human survival are intertwined. Phase 1 of Ghost Nets was the creation of a restorative garden on the Ghost Nets site, inspired by the symbols of the Medicine Wheel Garden. The purpose was to restore healing energy to local people, water and land on the degraded site. Local politics and education were concerns that were addressed informally. The construction site for the Medicine Wheel Garden included a promontory of manmade land extending into the ocean on the East side of Vinalhaven Island, creating a desirable deep water wharf. The property was purchased with a local commercial fishing family, part of the then economically threatened culture of the island. This partnership allowed an overlapping work area for lobstering, socializing and art making on the deep-water wharf. A former sawmill on the wharf became my studio. I built a modest home uplands from the riparian area that was going to be daylighted and protected by the Medicine Wheel Garden. Contemporary ecological restoration practices and Native American teachers and students guided my strategies. Preparation for the Medicine Wheel Garden began with rebuilding the soil with mycorrizhae, native grasses and forbs. Indigenous trees and shrubs were interspersed with local granite boulders in patterns that echoed the coastal views. At the Four Cardinal Directions of the Wheel, trees that represented the ends of the earth beyond the site were planted (Pin Oak, Norway Maple, Chinese Chestnut and Siberian Elm). In a series of ceremonies, rocks were gathered and consecrated under the guidance of local Elder Ricki Soaring Dove in preparation for Grandfather Thunder Cloud's arrival on the site. He conducted a traditional Medicine Wheel ceremony on the wharf of the "Ghost Nets" site August 11, 1991. This initiated the establishment of the Medicine Wheel Garden . The site was intended as a model for living lightly but effectively on the land. The house in the Medicine Wheel Garden was designed in collaboration with Steve Robinson, AIA, author of The Energy Efficient Home. It is a two story 800 sq ft building that incorporates elements of the Medicine Wheel Garden and was part of the garden's design and construction. It has unusual structural engineering to withstand the local winter winds that routinely reach 60-70 miles per hour. The design allows maximum interaction with and minimum disruption to the microclimates of the Garden. It was also designed to blend with the traditional stylistic terms of the island town. Paintings completed on site became part of my observation strategy. The sawmill-studio building became the site for me to complete a series of seascapes. They were executed to understand how high impact wave dynamics erode geologic forms into soil the elements of the process of change. The Ghost Nets project was a transformative exploration of change. These paintings were continuously produced during the life of the project. Collaboration and knowledge sharing were essential aspects of the project. Scientists and engineers from the Gulf of Maine area were invited to use the site as a laboratory. In addition, each phase of the work was marked by a series of planned actions that included and were informed by others. Many actions were simple, performed as humble daily devotions such as housekeeping and gardening. When possible, local children were included in the work. The creation of an electronic database on a website http://www.ghostnets.com was an eventual priority for out reach for the project. The Medicine Wheel Garden culminated in the final phases of Ghost Nets. In the second phase, KindWind the salt marsh on site was daylighted and bioengineered with Wendi Goldsmith of The Bioengineering Group, Salem, Mass. In the final phase, Traffic Dance, the biological assessment of viability was completed by Michele Dionne, Ph. D. Research Director of the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve, Wells, Maine. ________ This is an updated version (2003) of an article originally published in the Words on Works section of Leonardo 25:1, 1992, p. 96