Odia Wood-Krueger - Places That Hold Magic Are All Around Us

Odia Wood-Krueger is originally from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and now calls Minnesota home. She is a District Program Facilitator for Minneapolis Public Schools in the Indian Education department. In her spare time she can be found cooking, exploring, or crafting. She and her husband Tim recently started their own bicycle company called Advocate Cycles.

My husband, Tim, and I have been on vacation for the month of July. We have meandered from Minneapolis to Haida Gwaii, an archipelago in northwest British Columbia. Living with no agenda has given us time to enjoy simple pleasures like drinking tea and reading magazines, not to mention, resting our heads wherever the spirit takes us.

One of Tim’s favorite magazines is filled with stories of travel afar. In the current edition, two sightseers travel to Mongolia and, at first glance, I was excited to read of their adventures, since Mongolia has been on our bucket list. While I’m sure the writers had good-intentions, I felt a rub at their reference to Khuvsgul Lake and how the locals “believed” it to be their mother. The inability of the writers to take this as fact sent a red flag up for me. Shouldn’t we as travelers be willing to have our worldview lens challenged? Who are we to journey thousands of miles to question the traditional knowledge of the peoples we share our experiences with?

This morning we awoke on the east beach of Haida Gwaii. As we ventured back to civilization, we neared the place of origin for the Haida peoples. It is at Rose Spit – in the most northeastern tip of the archipelago – where Raven tapped on the giant clamshell and Haida climbed out. While we weren’t joined by abnormally large clamshells or ravens for that matter, it didn’t lessen the reverence of the place. You see, there is magic all around us, assuming we’re open and willing to accept it; accepting someone else’s narrative as fact doesn’t make our own views less valid.

Where is a place that holds magic for you? How has learning someone else’s traditional knowledge made your experience more meaningful? These are questions you might want to take some time to answer for yourself wherever you happen to be on your earth travels.

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