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I’ve been sitting with Daniel R. Wildcat’s On Indigenuity: Learning the Lessons of Mother Earth this week. I had been caught up in many racing fantasies and wild hopes and constructing imaginal spaces and it felt important to get my feet back on the ground. It’s a small book, and I already had a deep feeling of respect for Mr. Wildcat, from reading his introductions to various Vine Deloria Jr’s texts. Listening to interviews and speeches he has given me a sensation of standing upon a cool clean truth after being splashed cold water to wash away the illusions. The distance between those who intentionally misrepresent what they think they know and those whose error is based on what they honestly think they know is vast. Honestly, I don’t know much, not in the way of knowing that Wildcat calls “indigenuity” as he experiences it. Indigenuity is about imagination and creativity rooted in a people’s deep spatial and experiential relationship to the land air and water and the life found therein.
I was raised to live in what he calls a room-full-of-mirrors world – a deeply human-centric world focused almost entirely on what humans have and haven’t done, can and cannot do, have and have not categorized. As a young child I think I did have an instinctive visceral relationship to the earth and the environment and the waters that I was raised on. The lake and the trees and the soil taught me things, and offered me sacred gifts. My dad had been raised on this land, but our attachment to the place and the land was a thin one, only a generation deep. I knew my grandparents farm, two hours south, almost as intimately. My great-grandfather had built the house, and my grandfather had been born there, and raised his own babies and also initiated us grandbabies there. I knew where all the pets, the special horses cats, and especially the dogs rested in the earth: my grandfather’s dog from childhood, my mother’s dogs and cats, and Lucky, the smiling Samoyed who I knew and buried my face in, that my grandparents never allowed into the main house beyond the kitchen threshold - were buried in the north end of the tall pine windbreak. When Grandpa buried Lucky an old worn out horse shoe came up in the dirt when he was digging. I knew where all the old farm equipment and threshers were left to rust into a climbing structure, and I knew the graveyard in closer to town where his parents and siblings were buried, and where my grandparents, my aunt and uncle and their young son, and my mother too are interred. But again, as ancestral and as ancient as those ties felt to me, they are only ankle deep. My grandparents who moved westward as children toward the Dakotas and Iowa and Minnesota in their covered wagons took that place from The Dakota and Ioway people who knew those lands and lived as an extension of those lands, along all the other living species, and had generational knowledge that was thousands of years deep. People were created, emerged, and placed.
How hard this is to imagine. To belong to a place, to feel myself, in an embodied experiential way, to be of a place so profoundly. To understand ourselves as living in kinship with an environment, instead of passing through, or extracting needs from it like at a rest stop on a highway. I once heard or read Wildcat talk about white colonizer culture as an invasive weed culture, and I feel this so profoundly. I only know I generally and diffusely come from across the ocean one way or another. I know my history. But I really don’t know how I ended up here. A weed, always reaching out into new spaces, new environments, to be swept up in a colonizing fantasy of adventure to new, “undiscovered” lands. I have lived this way. I learned to live this way. When my parents’ marriage failed my mother packed up all of our belongings and our cat and drove us out to start “a new life” in California. The desire to leave a place of pain and complexity and shame behind and escape ones place and one’s old self. How rarely do Euro-American’s experience themselves as members of an environmental family? How have we been taught to think of place and land and location? What do we do when our relationships to place begins to sour? A deep life-defining sense of place.
If human individuals are the center of all our values and perceptions places become disposable, garbage. The systems we live in teach us to avoid attaching to environments and locations, and to the species and creatures that share the home beyond our house and owned property. Relatives not resources.
I would like to understand this in an embodied way, but none of my people knew how to initiate me. They were as dissociated from their roots and passing on what stories they could from only from what they could bear to speak of. I can barely imagine, but I can almost dream of the healing such an impossible severance. I have no idea how to do it, but I hope one day healing is possible in every direction. But some steps: since moving to New Mexico and surviving a whopper of a cancer everything feels more precious. I say hello every spring to the tiny wildflower bloom of chocolate daisies which dies back and blooms again intermittently through to the fall around a quarter of a mile from my house on the side of a dirt road. I haven’t seen them growing spontaneously anywhere else in the five arroyo-walking miles or twelve mile radius by bike trail that I have become familiar with. I know the order in which all the tree and plant-cousins bloom through the seasons. When they release their pollen. Who wakes up first, who comes out last. I know that some are medicinal, and others are edible – although I don’t know how to prepare them as medicines or for lunch. I say hello to the ravens and the crows. I am happy when the buzzards arrive because they are such exquisite gliders. I know in the late summer and fall the coyotes love the dense patch of prickly pear fruit on our hill because I see their scat, but I’ve never made pear jam. I know that spring and fall the area around and behind our house are the domain of the coyotes, the patio belongs to the bobcat and her litters, and that they have all granted us a pretty consistent easement with the dogs through to the dog pen. We don’t let the chihuahua out alone. I’m not familiar enough with where I am to ever belong. That can never happen whether I yearn for it or not. It is centuries upon centuries of generational experience in one place that I am thousands of years away from. I do love it here, differently than I’ve loved any other place. I am learning something miniscule but heart-based about place - in the way Wildcat speaks of it - in this place that I’ve never felt before. Differently than I have in the cities and suburbs of my adult life. But my relationship to my sibling species isn’t intimate. I don’t know how to be intimate or if I am invited. The gulf between us is respectful, I hope. But impassable. I know the ravens and bobcat and juniper and the finches know far more about my ways than I know about theirs. But I’m being as neighborly respectful, prudent, as attentive as my split-headed dualistic abusive invasive weed culture taught me to be. I’m breathing in and watching. And learning. Eco-kinship. Kinship communities
How can I be family? We’ve only just met? I’ve only just in the past few years really learned to say hello. And now just words from my notes bare. Wildcat’s words as I felt them. Knowledge as a gift received The natural world IS the spiritual world. Dissecting and reducing things to parts. Nature and spirit are one: God. Is. Red. Creation as a face of God. “Civilization” and perceived tension between nature and culture. The walled city that guards against the wilderness that always denies the cruelties that exist within the walls. We are not managers of the world. Mis-knowledge. Mis-orientation. The illusion that humans can operate autonomously from landscapes. All of what we know is incomplete. The cosmos – the cosmic mystery is less an idea than it is a sense, a feeling. That surrounds us. There is no waste in nature. Waste and consumption are the cruelest addictions. There is good work for everyone. I wrote that twice. Once with a big box around the words and a star and a heart next to it.
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