I have been slowly, ever so slowly, making my way through Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I am reading it slowly because it is so rich and deep, I must bask in and integrate each bit before going onto the next, and linger against its end. Robin's book took the slow path to the New York Magazine's bestsellers list. This is a route taken when you are not an already famous author, and when no one is actively promoting your book, when you are published by a non-profit publishing house rather than a big name one, but when one reader after another tells others to read it or gifts others with the book. I am honored, like the millions of other readers that Robin gifted us, a primarily white American audience with her wisdom and was bothered enough about us to call us back to the earth. There are Native people who feel done with us descendants of settlers, disgusted and angry with the destruction that has been wrought on "Turtle Island" - and feel that what we reap now is what we have earned.
Yet Robin, shares her own off reservation journey back to the land of her ancestors and understands intuitively that all our fates are joined now by climate change, and so she calls us back to living in relationship with the earth. Joanna Macy has for years called her deeply experiential workshop approach "The Work that Reconnects" and when asked will say she is calling us back to reconnection with each other and with the earth. While I in some abstract way understood why both were good ideas I would not have ever seen myself as disconnected from the earth. But as I have read more of Robin's book and lived in this pandemic, I am coming to understand for the first time how disconnected I have been my whole life. It really does fall into the "don't know what you don't know, till you know it" category.
I mean to live on the earth where you do not know the names of the plants, the trees, the animals or the birds that live there, to not know what time sunrise, sunset or high tide is, and to not know the planting season or what can successfully be grown there....is pretty disconnected from the earth. Two years ago I listened to someone gush about how nice it was that the daffodils were coming "early" in Feb - with no apparent awareness that this is a sign of deep illness - that the earth is out of cycle because of the warming and is actually the sound of the earth crying out. I just felt saddened by her comment. I have further come to understand through my climate work that we can only keep making incredibly stupid and destructive decisions that pollute our own water, air and food, if we are so disconnected that we don't understand the impact of our actions. During one chapter of Robin's book I realized how crazy us settler descendants must look to First Nations' people. I mean here come these settlers who don't know the land, don't know how to survive on it and bumblingly go forward, and then while incredibly disconnected from the earth destroying it. Imagine watching a chicken in your back yard pee and poop in the only water supply. You would just shake your head.
So Robin's message that we descendants need to become naturalized to the land feels very important to me. I see it as central to solving the climate crisis. I am looking at my own life and what will have to change for me to come into a real and healed relationship with the earth.
In a somewhat tongue in cheek, but an also metaphorical description based off an actual Halloween House of Horrows she accidentally visited, Robin describes 7 steps of descendants journey back to the earth. She names them in the following way.
1. Earth as Capitol - Land seen only as a means to make money.
2. Land as Property - Property means one has "rights" to all the resources of the land. These "relations" dwelling there are not seen to have their own rights.
3. Land as Machine - in which she raises the pointed question are humans or the earth the driver of what happens on the land?
4. Land as Teacher and Healer - She had eloquently described through the whole book how Native people are in communication with the plants and animals and the land, and how they are taught and healed by that communication. Could we be too? She describes the amazing way succession works in the natural world to begin to heal an environmental wound (much as I described in my post about Hope and the healing of Mt. St. Helens.)
5. Land as Responsibility - Here a key shift of being back in relationship must happen first so we can be responsible stewards of the land. She has previously described how the gathering relationship with plants can actually nurture the ecosystem. She talks about the shift from a scientific lens that sees the land as thing, to one of actually loving the land. She talks about our current responsibility to clean up the land we have laid waste too.
6. Land as Sacred, Land as Community - She says: "What if we could fashion a restoration plan that grew from understanding multiple means of land? Land as sustainer, Land as identity. Land as grocery store and pharmacy. Land as connection to our ancestors. Land as moral obligation. Land as sacred. Land as self." These many understandings are ones I see that Native people hold, but they are not ones I was raised to see or know. This is part of the journey.
7. Land as Home. All of the above, allows us to come home to the land.
It is instructive for me to survey this list. I see that I was not taught 1 and 2 by my parents. I was slow to understand that part of the capitalist game. My parents both traumatized by the economic fall of their families in the Great Depression, did teach me land as security, which I do understand as some twist of one and two. I was taught 3 in the public schools, where I learned much later during my daughter's public education about succession from 4. And then as shared in other posts I started to have the land teach me as I bumbled along. So I just now am taking on the question of 5 - how to be responsible to the land. I have a long journey ahead to get to home. How about you?
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