It's about land

 

I'll return now to exploring my relationship with land and how that contributes to my effort to decolonize my mind.  

This is a way-back exercise.  Since childhood I have approached my exploration of new places by putting my bare feet on the earth and my hands on a plant or a tree.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent a lot of my time as a kid outside; the outdoors was a place where I forged friendships, in the spots where we ambled and ran and hid and sat to talk.  Connection to the land was also a consistent part of my family life.  I grew up on a farm, which meant I helped with the gardening, weeding, and harvesting.  I picked rocks in the fields and hauled bales of hay.  We always had an eye cast to the weather--wondering what the clouds, wind, rain, and snow had in store for us.  And, when we vacationed, we most often camped.  Some of my richest childhood memories are of walking the beaches of Hornby Island for hours on end, and then sleeping in a tent surrounded by old growth forest at night.  

There is nothing about this kind of connection with land that is problematic.  Where it becomes so is the point at which I started thinking about land as mine, or belonging to me somehow.  I know I had internalized the notion of land ownership even as a very young person.  So, when I learned as an adult that turning land into a commodity was at the heart of colonization, there were some cognitive gymnastics that ensued.  How could I feel so close to the land and not have it be mine?  I had been so thoroughly conditioned to think this way that it took me a very long time to start considering alternatives.  It began by wondering how the nature of Indigenous relationships to land might be qualitatively different than my own.  As a researcher this made sense to me--of course other people experience things differently than I do--but it was the first time I had thought about this in relation to Indigenous land claims.  

Battell and Barker's (2015) book Settler helped a lot to work this through cognitively.  They put it perfectly: "There is a tremendous amount of scholarly study about the importance of land and place because all societies rely on a sense of place to make sense of themselves and the world around them.  Settler Canadians are no different in this regard, and as a people, they often become deeply attached to land, forming strong emotional relationships with particular places and features of the landscape.  Indigenous and Settler people have attachment to land but they must be understood as having very different kinds of relationships with the places they call home" (p. 48).  So, my relationship with land was not wrong, but I didn't fully understand how profoundly intertwined land is with Indigenous identity and personhood.  

Without entering into a full explanation here, it's likely enough to say that collective Indigenous identities are inseparable from land and individual Indigenous identities are forged through dynamic relationships with land.  "Land" is also perceived by many Indigenous peoples as much more than territory.  It includes the sky, wind, water, plants, animals, rocks, sand, and soil; further, it refers to the spirit imbued in these things and how they are connected.  Indigenous identity is "integrated into land" (Battell & Barker, 2015, p. 53).  While I feel connected to the land and that relationship is extremely important to me, it is not a part of how I express who I am.  

Okay, so I got to a point where: I felt good about my connections with land, I understood that all land in Canada is stolen land, and I know that no matter where I live in Canada it's Indigenous land.  However, I continued to get caught up on the notion of "land back."  It made me feel uncomfortable, unsettled (ha!).  Does land back mean that there isn't enough space for me and my family here?  Does land back mean that I should never own a home, or that I should discourage my kids from doing so?  

Settlers, please take a deep breath.  "Land back" does not mean you or I will be booted out of our homes or that you won't be welcome in Canada (even though this is what we did to Indigenous people).  You and I will not lose anything from land back.  Land back means that, whenever possible, land is repatriated to the Indigenous communities it historically belonged to and that Indigenous people have decision making power with respect to that repatriated land.  It means that Indigenous people have an inalienable right to re-forge their identity-informing relationships with land, and that they have control over this process.  There is space here for everyone, but we must restore to Indigenous folks the lands that are their birthright.  

I will freely admit that I still feel a twinge of nervousness when I think about land back.  I think I still have some work to do before I am a fully invested ally in the land back movement, in all its' expressions.  In the meantime I'll foster my own connection with the earth as fulsomely as possible.