Hi, my name is Fianna, I use she/her pronouns. I feel like part of my relationships with place is deeply connected with birds, because I love birds a lot. They're always different wherever I go, and I've lived in a lot of different places. I’m kind of piggybacking on their deep connections with places, just thinking about, for example, the Brown creeper, which is this super tiny bird. I’ve seen them in a bunch of different places; their plumage reflects the bark in those different places. I was in the redwoods, and they're really really dark brown there, and then I was down in the New Mexico area, Southern Turtle Island, and they’re really, really light colored, super gray. 

I think traveling so much it's been really exciting to feel connected to place. Since the beginning of high school really, I've moved a lot. I remember being really obsessed with needing to know what plants were edible everywhere we went because that was the only thing that I felt like I could feel connected if I knew there were plants that are edible, or I knew their names. In Massachusetts, I was able to more deeply understand sort of my positionality as a settler person, and build more connections, work with Indigenous communities, and do some of the work of decolonization. Oh my gosh, it is wonderful, complicated, difficult, amazing, heartbreaking sometimes. 

A lot of birds migrate at night, especially small bird songbirds. They have a lot of very complex ways that they navigate, I think we totally as humans don't really know all the ways that they use to navigate. They definitely use the stars…this is something that I always try to do every single migration season: if high migration at night correlates with the full moon, you can go out, get a spotting scope or just binoculars, and you can sometimes see the birds traveling across the moon. It's incredible. 

We made this art piece that was thinking a lot about Indigenous ways of knowing and reciprocity. How can we create these art pieces that are very visible to humans and so it creates a story and a message and curiosity? And how can it also be something that is deeply connected to supporting the birds’ well being as they migrate hundreds, if not thousands of miles? Artificial light, or electricity is a really, really big challenge; they'll often go towards it, they'll run into buildings and die. So we created these gigantic black paper panels and then cut individual silhouettes out of the birds. And then we put them in the windows of the library. I think emotionally this made me feel a lot like it was a gift that we're giving back to the birds and to people on campus to have a possibility of understanding this really amazing travel that birds do, oftentimes twice a year. Also a way to show love to the birds and support them on their often very perilous journey. 

I also worked with the Quartz Valley Indian Reservation, and Wiyaka shared some of the different Karuk words for the birds, and that was really an honor to hear about other communities’ relationships with birds over a long, long time. It's just such a responsibility to learn as much as possible. We're always going to make mistakes; it's a messy, complicated place with so many layers of histories and stories and all we can do is learn those to our fullest and think about the moments now and think about what the future can be and live in the best relation possible with places and peoples.