Time, land, and the settler's imperative

I'm currently participating in a course called "Climate, Complexity, and Relational Accountability," led by the magnificent Vanessa Andreotti.  At the heart of it, I think the course is about decolonizing our relationships with land, self, emotion, spirit, and other humans...  which is thematically resonant with the Decolonizing Educational Relationships book and many other works. In the course, learners have been offered an invitation to read, watch, and do a number of activities to deepen our learning experience.  I've taken up the invitation to engage in a walking exercise called "re-turning time," and it's literally and figuratively taken me to all kinds of places.  

The exercise is conceptualized as a forest walk, with the option to do the walk in whatever outdoor spaces are accessible.  I chose to do the exercise three times: once in my back yard, once in the city, and once on the forest trails adjacent to Royal Roads University campus.  There were several parts to the walking exercise invitation: listen through your feet while you are walking; situate yourself in the stories of the land; imagine the land moving through the cycles of the seasons; imagine how a reversal of time on the land might look and ask how the land has transformed; and visualize how the land has held space for all kinds of stories enacted over time.  The purpose of the exercise is to deeply consider reciprocity with the land in an embodied way and ultimately to interrogate our current colonial relationship with time.  

I walked barefoot as I did this exercise for the first time in my back yard.  It felt relatively easy to connect with the energy of the land through my feet, and also to sense how the contours of the land had changed over time.  Knowing the age of the house (it was built the same year I was born) was actually a helpful cue for my visual imagination.  Just beyond the back fence there is a massive cedar that is likely centuries old, now hemmed in by a concrete pathway.  This was the object I focused on as I peeled back the layers of time in my mind's eye and wondered what the narrative of the land was like stretching back to time immemorial.   

In the second iteration of the exercise, I walked the city streets of Langford.  If you've been there recently you'll know that there's lots of construction happening - cranes, building materials, and "workers" everywhere.  It was more of a challenge to feel the land somatically, with pavement and the soles of my shoes coming between me and the earth.  I felt surprised, though, at how it seemed easer to reverse the time-lapse reel  in my mind.  However, I also felt viscerally that there were more forgotten stories in this physical landscape, like there was a world of narrative laying just beyond my perception.  I watched a pair of eagles in the sky, and attempted to transpose them to a time hundreds of years ago and then to a time hundreds of years from now.  For some reason this inspired a profound sadness in me.  

The third time I did the exercise I walked through the forest along a well-established path.  I noticed immediately that my physical connection to my surroundings was much stronger; I could actually feel a buzzing in the palms of my hands as I moved through space.  I also stopped to touch things (leaves, tree trunks, stones, flowers) and experienced my sense of smell far more keenly than I had in the city.  Somehow the stories of the land were right in front of my face.  Time felt rather meaningless, and I felt welcomed to sink into that feeling.  Time was a non-existent thing.  I watched bees buzz and felt wind blow and inhaled the scent of cedar and there was no time at all, but the stories were all right there.  

My reflections on the forest walk exercise have been focused primarily on my thinking about time.  I was reminded that I had already begun to question the concept of time as part of another self study I did several years ago, and I started to think that perhaps it is the colonial construct of time that has been most damaging to my own humanity.  As I reported in the Significance Project: "For as long as I can remember, I have considered time as an obstacle.  I've tried to bend time, to make it something more like what I thought I needed.  No matter how much I tried to cram into a day, there was never enough time for everything.   I wanted to wrestle time into submission, and as a result, I also became very judgmental about people who I thought were wasting time."  This judgement - a constant questioning and criticism - was applied to both myself and other people who I perceived to be playing too fast and easy with time.  While recognizing that I had been conditioned by the colonial project to think this way, I also recognize that these judgements were neither kind nor warranted.    

As follow-up to the forest walk exercise, we were invited to consider: How have colonial systems limited the ways we sense and relate to time and to our intergenerational responsibilities?  If we are participating in the ongoing occupation of stolen Indigenous territories, what steps do we need to take to correct the historical wrongs of our ancestors?   

I will explore the second question in a future post, but for now I'd like to think about how colonial systems have influenced my perception of intergenerational responsibility.  This is directly tied to the sense of accountability I wrote about in my last post.  Although I deeply love and value people who are now deceased, I have not connected that love across generations until now.  Despite the fact that I have two kids I have not intentionally thought about intergenerational responsibility moving forward in time.  And, while I don't think I ever said this out loud (thankfully), I do remember wondering if I should be punished for the wrongdoing of my ancestors (I wasn't there!  I didn't contribute to the harm!).  Now, I think that I definitely need to continue to be held accountable, that it is imperative for all settlers to be held accountable.