Tapping Into the Sweetness of Spring

For example, just this weekend, I heard honkers across the road. There is a little depression in the landscape, a small wetland, and an ideal place for waterfowl to take a rest. Too, I spotted a skunk shuffling in a ditch. While the skunks do not necessarily hibernate, they are more inactive during the bitter cold and snowy weather. Their body temperatures and heart rates slow, and they drift off into a deep sleep called torpor. Yep, I definitely associate the frequent smell of skunk with a sign of spring.

During early spring, the warming temperatures during the day and back to freezing temperatures at night are what provide the right conditions for the tree’s stored sap to flow up the trunk and back down to the roots. This back-and-forth aligns with this transitional period of not quite spring, yet not finished with winter.

Conversely, last fall when our Autumn Blazes were dropping their scarlet leaves, they began storing extra energy into a concentrated sucrose in their roots. It is similar to our own biological process of additional fuel (too much food) that is stored as fat reserves. And the cycle prior to that, during the summer, light is being captured through the leaves and converted into starch. This starch supports the life and growth of the tree, a magical process called photosynthesis. Some of you might remember this term from your science class. Ideal conditions for sap to flow are when temperatures rise above and below freezing—for example, 40s during the day and 20s at night. It is this back-and-forth that creates pressure within for sap to flow down the tree due to gravity or out through a broken branch. Tapping trees takes advantage of the traveling energy, by capturing some of the life-giving sap.

Tapping our 10 maples

Each year, my partner, Jason, gathers sap from the trees so I can make syrup. Jason (or Jay, as he prefers) is Dakota and from the same small rez as me. Both of his parents are Dakota and from the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate. His mother grew up on the Lake Traverse Reservation—the Ḣeipa District, to be precise. His father grew up in the Upper Sioux Community, the related and original eastern Dakota lands in Minnesota. Jay was born over in Sisseton but grew up in both communities after his parents split up. Later he made his permanent home at Upper Sioux when he and his dad returned from a stint on the Fond du Lac reservation—a northern Ojibwe reservation. How they ended up in Ḣahatoŋwaŋ territory is another story for another day.

Jay is a quiet and patient man. He is short, perpetually trim, and light on his feet. His spontaneous and easily contented characteristics are from an earlier drifter lifestyle and later, as a response to coming home. He is quite my opposite—except that I, too, am low to the ground. We are complementary to each other, which I believe is why we have been happily married for so long.

Undoubtedly, Jay has retained the ancestral gene that intuitively signals it is time. He begins the sap harvest by gathering the supplies he keeps stored in one of our boys’ abandoned backpacks from their schooldays. He carries the backpack over a shoulder, and with a little hammer his rough brown hands gently tap the metal spigots, called spiles. He puts them in two to three inches through the semi-rough bark into the trunk about three feet up from the ground. Our trees are mature and could handle two spiles, but he only uses one. Then he hangs white food-grade gallon buckets from a small hook connected to the spile to collect the tree sap.

The tree sap looks just like ordinary water yet contains approximately 2% sugar content. Although he could collect sap until the trees begin budding, he usually stops collecting far earlier. Typically, he collects 40 gallons each year from the 10 maple trees surrounding our front and back yards. As he walks from tree to tree, he pours the sap into five-gallon buckets, covers them, and stores them in the garage until he has enough to begin cooking it down.

Weather depending, this will take approximately a week to gather as he begins preparing his makeshift wood stove. The outdoor stove is made from an old oil barrel that he sets up in the back of his shed. He will gather cut up wood from our hillside but prefers supplementing from my dad’s stash of oak, as it burns hotter than the scrub cedar abundant on our lands.

He will start cooking down the sap when he has at least 10 gallons ready. The reused roasting basin holds about three gallons that nestles on top of a hole cut in the side of his barrel. Bundled up, he will sit for many hours in his makeshift “sugarbush”—our backyard, composed of a folding chair, a pile of wood, five-gallon pails of tree sap, and the felines circled under his boot-covered feet. While the cooking-down process could be done with consistent heat from a propane stove, we prefer the smoky flavor of our maple syrup. Tapping trees and making maple syrup is our first foraging activity as spring awakens.

Growth and renewal

In the Mni Sota River valley, early spring snowstorms are common and can bring discouragement after being cooped up indoors. Yet, just as these heavy and quick-melting snows leave behind beneficial moisture and nitrogen for emerging perennials and annual crops, we gain enthusiasm and energy for the work ahead. The late Dakota elder Danny Seaboy shared this teaching that wa skaŋ, those melting snows, are heavy with moisture and leave behind beneficial minerals for the wato oyate, the plant nation. The ground is cleansed and the air smells fresh with these final seasonal snowstorms. After the long winter’s solitude of reflection and rest, we are ready.

Last year’s harvest was plentiful and nourished our family throughout the cold and dark moments and months. We have finished up long-overdue tasks, mended neglected relations and garments. We have told stories of ancestors and place and passed between us the memories of warm summer days. We have shared collected traditions and gifts, recipes and seeds. We have thoroughly assessed the learnings from last year and reflected on past experiences. We are rested, rejuvenated and ready to put the new ideas into action.

Wetu, a Dakota word meaning the time of blood, is the time when things grow and renew. It is spring and I can hear the enthusiasm in the migratory birds flying overhead, returning north once again. I imagine their conversation, “Yes, yes, this is the path we took last year. I can see the all-too-familiar big pond up ahead. Keep flapping. Keep going. We can do it!” Other signs of spring emerge. The grass is greening up and early blooms of bloodroot, western rock jasmine, and the pasqueflower can be found. And we too awaken from our slumber and are ready for renewal.

The shifting of seasons is all about change, and while we anticipate this change, the change also changes us. We begin to wake up earlier, we spend more time outside, we may even feel lighter with our sweaters and Netflix put away for warmer days ahead. In Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler poetically writes, “All that you Change / Changes you . . . God / is Change.” We are awakened and now ready to set about changes and charter new paths and plans. Let the groundwork and planting begin.

Excerpted from Perennial Ceremony: Lessons and Gifts from a Dakota Ceremony by Teresa Peterson. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2024 by Teresa Peterson. Used by permission.

Teresa PetersonMore by this author →

Teresa Peterson, Utuhu Cistiŋna Wiŋ, is Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota and citizen of the Upper Sioux Community. She is author, with her uncle Walter LaBatte Jr., of Voices from Pejuhutazizi: Dakota Stories and Storytellers. She also wrote the children’s book Grasshopper Girl and is a contributor to Voices Rising: Native Women Writers.