On Dis-Location and Rootedness

Indigeneity implies rootedness, long connection to land/sea/place, since time immemorial. From this long term connection arises traditional knowledge, wisdom about the land, relations among beings, living in place.  I have spent much of my career learning from teachers whose knowledge has deep roots, is emplaced in the web of relationship between cultures and homelands, between people and lands and waters where their ancestors have dwelt in relationship.  I've been reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, and in one chapter she briefly explores the question of whether people can become indigenous. Upon reflection, she concludes that one cannot substitute will or desire for the depth of roots.  One cannot become Indigenous.

What relations then are possible for migrants? In this time most of the world's population has migrated from some imagined or real place of ancient origin, possibly through a long saga of  travels through many places.  Many of us are in some sense hybrid, partaking of multiple points of origin in other places, having no single original homeland.  Some of us continue to be travellers, and our relations with any particular land then is likely to be that of passing through....not a relationship of depth, located in place.  Others have fled homelands or situations of impossible repression, grinding poverty, or outright devastation and war.  The refugee problem...

Some of us had ancestors who participated in Settler Colonialism, arriving to lands which were not tabula rasa or terra nullius.   They arrived at lands which were occupied, homelands of original cultures with a long history of relationship to the lands seen by our ancestors as "empty" or "new".  If empty, that was likely due to the passage of disease before settlers or adventurers arrived at any particular place.  New only to our ancestors, not to the original inhabitants.  With a surety born of God given mandate, and concepts of personhood limited not only to our own species, but even to the specific cultures from which they came, our ancestors elbowed their way onto the land, making homes, transforming the land to support the visions of relationship which came from their European agrarian origins.  They cleared forests, created cities, made canals, polluted rivers, mined minerals.....and believed that the alterations in the land, landscape, web of life represented "progress", instantiated the arrival and propagation of "civilization". Some of us have ancestors who have been in our colonized nations for centuries.  I had ancestors who came on the Mayflower, and the most recent European migrants in my family migrated from Scotland in the 1830s.  We have national narratives, now becoming subtly displaced, of the growth of nationhood, of brave pioneers, of the founding of cities, and of institutions of culture and political entities.  In this most recent period, an unease is growing....a double vision of bravery and devastation, of enlightenment and subjugation.    The excesses of the model of "civilizing" the land led to massive ecological changes in forests, in prairies, for productive estuaries and rivers.  A litany of ecological change, based in the shift of inter-species interactions from relationships to economies and commoditization of components of ecological systems.  In scientific circles, the conception of the land, or other entities that dwell there as subjects, as persons rather than inanimate objects, resources to be used or not as we will---cannot be entertained.  Yet this objectification of the land and the web of life which comprises its living subjects is what enables the massive transformation of the land.

Of course there is reaction by the thoughtful, poetic and philosophical among us, rooted also in the romantic notions of Nature and the polar opposite to the profaned world of urban places and the obvious dirt and filth of 19th century industry....Scottish Miller John Muir founded the Sierra Club in thelate 19th century in reaction to mining and grazing in the Sierra Nevada.  The destructiveness of these practices to the beauty and ecological integrity of the Sierra was evident.  But the role of the Sierra Miwok and other nations in creating the "natural" beauty of the Sierra through their relationship to land was somehow invisible.  At this point in time, many of us seek to "preserve wilderness" and revere "nature".  We may claim ally-ship with Indigenous Stewards (but the  relationship with land is theirs, not ours- I would argue we can at best be "fellow travellers"). Or we may seek to form our own relationships with the land.  And yet while personally meaningful, we cannot claim the depth of relationship, the web of respectful relationship amonggroups over deep time, that comprises Indigenous relationship with the Land.  I would echo Robin Wall Kimmerer: we the migrants cannot become  Indigenous.

 I realize I am Dis-Located.  I have no homeland, though such a relationship is something for which I yearn.  In my own personal history, I don't even have a home town.  My parents moved frequently during my childhood, in various places in North America, and also in Japan and Hawai'i.  When I was in University I added  Mexico and Britain to the places I had lived. In the same way that I sought grandparenting and valued my relations with Elder teachers, I also sought relationship with land.  My then husband and I spent three months on the land on the Oregon -California border in the early 1970s, building a lean-to shelter, cooking over a fire, and– learning all of the plants in that diverse forested landscape of the Siskiyou's .  Learning the way the phases of the moon interact with the height of its passage across the sky.  Observing meteors, pond lilies, and rough skinned newts. It was hard to go back to the City after that. We went to British Columbia to live in a Doukhobor cabin in the West Kootenays, Back-to-the-land-ers, seeking to reclaim the esoteric rural skills of our ancestors.  Cooking with a wood stove.  Getting our water from a spring with buckets. Procuring firewood. Learning (again) all of the plants I could, even the mosses.  Observing animals and learning about tracks. We were hooked.  More than citizens of any nation, I felt like a citizen of the Western North American Bioregion.

There was still a missing piece, however.  We had never lived any place with a substantial population of Original Inhabitants in the US or Canada.  The echoes of the former presence of Indigenous peoples could be seen in oddly spelled names, in stories of removal, in re-tellings of histories or legends.  But not in living relationship with Land. 

More than 40 years ago, when I was pregnant with my daughter, we took a trip to the northwestern corner of British Columbia, and spent a month canoeing on a lake known in English as Morice Lake.  A deep finger lake, extending from the interior Sub Boreal Spruce forest into the heart of the Coast Mountains, at lake level (some 2500 feet) making the transition from interior forests to the Mountain Hemlock Zone, higher elevation coast forest types.  There were no present inhabitants of the lake and its environs.  There was no logging, and no roads.  We saw only one person in the nearly 4 weeks we were there.  Again, we delved deeply into the nature of the place, both from a standpoint of scientific ecology, and a more poetic personal level.  We sought to embrace this powerful place with all of the abilities we possessed. 

The one person we met turned out to be the key to a new job for my ex, and a new home for us.  And now we lived in a land with Original Inhabitants. Still in Place.  My then-husband Allen taught in the Aboriginal Studies Program at Northwest College in Terrace.  He taught biology and environmental studies to First Nations people, including Elders, as well as local undergraduates of various origins.  We began to learn about Indigenous perspectives on Land.

I shared skills in pressing plants with the Aboriginal Studies students.  They shared what they knew of uses of the plants.  I went out on the land with one student, and carried out my maiden research in ethnobotany.  She told me uses.  I collected plants and wrote notes. 

Eventually we moved upriver to Cedarvale.  Once again, I sought to learn all of the plants,observed and made notes on the animals we saw.  We travelled on the land.  But now we knew First Nations people.  I took a Gitxsan class at the local school.  I began to want to know- what do people need to know to live on this land?  I began to see the land as history, as story, as resource patches (owned and cared for within the local social structure, the local laws).  And I began to see that my relationship to Place, however deep and meaningful to me, was qualitatively different than that of my Gitksan and Witsuwit'en teachers, friends, and colleagues.  They had an entitlement that I did not.

With my Gitxsan colleague I began to record Gitxsan ethnobotany.  I learned from Elders and teachers, and recorded what they shared to help to preserve knowledge, and, though I hadn't really analysed this yet, to repatriate knowledge to help those torn from land and culture through Residential schools, and to their descendants.  To help to repair the holes in a social fabric, the transmission of knowledge, and relationship to the land itself  that the institutions of the Settler Colonial government hadcreated.  But my relationship to these teachings and this knowledge, imperfect and partial as it is, refracted through the lens of my natal language and culture, is at best custodial.  These interactions, this knowledge, experiences on the land, have changed me, but still  I cannot claim Indigeneity, become truly rooted.  It is in a deep sense not my place, not my history. 

The Gitxsan and Witsuwit'en, like other Indigenous peoples, have deep and complex stories, histories, that relate to their homelands, their laws, the truth of the world.  This history engenders, and grows out of rootedness.  When we first moved onto Gitxsan territory, we learned that people disparagingly referred to us newcomers at "DP's", displaced persons.  A designation that is stingingly accurate, though I more often refer to our relationship as Dis-Located.

So if we cannot become Rooted, cannot aspire to achieve Indigeneity, what is possible?  There is no doubt that many "White" people have a deep reverence for the land, for its beauty, for its biodiversity, for its iconic animals and birds. Many people speak glowingly (but vaguely) about "Nature" and the restorative powers of being "in Nature". For those of us who have deep and spiritually grounded love of the Land, is finding a Home possible?  Kimmerer makes the analogy that, if we cannot become Indigenous, we may be able to become Naturalized, like a plant from elsewhere that finds a spot in the local web of life to become a regular part of the living community.  Perhaps that is as good as it gets.  I feel that knowing and acknowledging, respecting, the original human inhabitants is a key step.  Acknowledgement and respect yes, but not usurpation.  Respect is key.  And humility.  Perhaps in this way we can earn a spot in the garden.

Those fleeing war and oppression, refugees, face a double challenge, of finding a home in the social fabric of contemporary Canada (or the US), and learning to be comfortable with climate, vegetation, landscape vastly different from that of their country of origin.  Truly refuegees have been transplanted into very different environments from those from they came.  Challenges exist in learning new species and environmental values both.  And further to both of these, to be aware of and respectful of the Original Inhabitants and their relationship to the Land.