Becoming Naturalized

 In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer says:  "Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit.  To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground.  Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities.  To become naturalized is to live as if your children's future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it.  Because they do."

This is a powerful call to action and a generous invitation.  There are undoubtedly Native people who feel we Settler Descendants can never be anything other than squatters and uninvited intruders upon the land.  Yet Robin invites us to stop running (as many of our ancestors did from famine, war, poverty and legal difficulties) and to put down roots - to come into relationship with the land.

It broke my heart the other day to hear almost full blood Native woman tell about being in grocery store and a guy in baseball cap spit out at her "Go back to Mexico'.   This squatter had the sense of entitlement to not notice that Mexicans are indigenous to this content - white people are not.  He had the racial blindness to not be able to distinguish one person of color from another.

Robin's words call us to deeply examine our relationship to the land.  The average American moves every 7 years - it is hard for us to form this sort of relationship to the land - especially with an ancestral heritage of having left "the motherland" - and of the disconnection from land and culture that the move across the ocean brought.

I grew up in the Midwest.   As most children, I was taught the names of the plants and birds and trees around me.  I still know those when I see them.   I moved to Washington State when I was 26...the plants, birds and trees here were quite different and I often felt like I was in some sort of Dr Suess book with oddly whimsical looking flora and fauna.  I struggled to learn the names and still know less than from my childhood haunts. The previous generation of my family is buried in the Midwest.  Once after having been gone for only 10-years I went back and heard the sound of the Cicada's singing, common to the summers of my childhood, and almost started crying.   I am told that when my father returned to his native Florida after 35 years gone and saw the palm trees he started to cry.

Science says that when we live somewhere for 7 years that the minerals of the land and water start being in our bones.  When I first arrived, a dentist looked in my mouth and said: "you are from the Midwest?"  I was shocked and said: "How did you know?"  From the mineral deposits on your teeth, he told me.  (Bonus points he said the deposits were protective.)   After 2 years my blood shape literally changed so I was not chilled to the bone by a damp cold that was 20 degrees higher than a Chicago winter but that no wool sweater could protect me from.

While I had to pass the 26-year mark to feel fully a Northwesterner....to I guess naturalize to this WA land, it has indeed happened.   The breath-taking beauty of this land - from the always green, to the huge old trees, to the magical flowers, to the mountains peeking out and Salish Sea itself, I have come to love this land.  My daughter who spent her whole childhood here was so homesick her first year at college she asked me to send her pinecones and moss!  She was torn for her 6 years in Massachusetts between the deep relationships she forged there and her sense of rootedness to the land.  Ultimately, she decided to come back here and try out being an adult here.

When she was wavering, I considered carefully - what if she would not come back?  She is my closest living relative and a part of my heart.   The only thing deeper than my sense of connection to land is to family (which is why so many Native people were destroyed by being forced off their land - the burial place of their ancestors.)   I decided if she did not return, I would have to move where she was - but it felt like a wrenching loss filled idea.  Happily, she has stayed.

I moved 4 years ago to Olympia, WA from Seattle where I had lived 32 years.  That move was not hard because I realized it was the Northwest - not Seattle I had naturalized to.  Seattle was too much concrete and steel to naturalize to it, and it has actually been easier to root here in Olympia where I can afford to own a house, and to watch the trees change with the seasons, to watch wildlife come through my yard and to learn when each flower will in succession come up.

But Robin does not just call us to love and respect the land - she also says: "To become naturalized is to live as if your children's future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it.  Because they do."   To me this is the call to fight climate change.   One could fight that in any part of the country.  Each part will be affected differently and already is.  Each has different strengths for living with and not against the land.  I have been fighting climate change for 15 years because I want my daughters to be able to grow old...and not in an inferno but in the beauty and lushness she was born into.  I am fighting hard for better protections for the city trees as well as fighting hard DNR for our old second growth trees. I have a responsibility to my daughter and to the land to fight for it.   I think it is only this bizarre Settler mentality that sees the land as "natural resource" as a thing to take from, that does not see when we pollute the water that we are polluting our drinking water, that when we pollute the air that we will breathe that in, and that when we pollute the land we will ingest that in our food.  We have to start living on the land like we are part of an ecosystem - not hoovering somewhere separate from the land that is our host.  What do you love enough in this land, your naturalized home, to fight for it?