The Land: Meaning, Perception and Worldviews on Earth Day, by Kai Teague-
Language is a means of communication and can take many forms, shapes, colors, and sounds. Language is essentially a code embedded with meaning. Meaning is derived from our experiences in life. In order to learn a different language, it is likely you 1) have to be exposed to the language consistently and over time and it is likely you are 2) being exposed to the ways of life, the environment, the culture, the values, beliefs, and perspectives that informed the meaning that shaped that language.
Perspectives, morals, and values are all based on the experience of someone, or a story someone was told. We have to ask who told that story, what their intention was, and what experiences shaped how they make sense of the world.
These perceptions inform how someone understands the occupancy of space or what is and isn’t right or acceptable. Those worldviews become a system of beliefs, which someone relies on to determine laws, policies, and systems of governance that can reshape by force, the languages, cultures, beliefs, and values of others.
If there is an experience that Indigenous, black, disabled, intersex, and transgender people can share, it is that to exist in this world you have to know the languages and experiences of your own existence, and the language of the cisgendered, white, heteronormative, able-bodied person.
Indigenous languages are verb or action-based languages. Indigenous languages are alive, describing something in process, something one experiences with the senses and in a specific place and at a specific time.
“Culture is coded wisdom, wisdom that has been accumulated for thousands of years and generations. Some of that wisdom is coded in our ceremonies, it is coded in our values, it is coded in our songs, our dances.” -Wangari Maathai, Taking Root
When we engage with our relatives (seasons, energies, wind, rain, heat, seeds, plants, and animals) using our Indigenous languages, we can ask them who they are, how they exist, what their names are. We can also ask them if they can help us, and if we can help them, if they can feed us, and if they need to be fed. We can communicate with one another, and we can get to know what other relationships they might have. With our Indigenous languages, and in our Indigenous minds and hearts, everything changes, and our needs might not always take precedence.
There are and have been simultaneous political acts through legislation and resource determination that work to disempower and displace Indigenous Peoples all over the world. Ultimately, what continues to affect us is how this influences how we think of ourselves and how we perceive our own cultures and relationships to the world around us. And now, our Indigenous knowledge and values have been supplemented with many other things that distance us from what we knew—our original understandings.
“You cannot enslave a mind that knows itself, that values itself, and that understands itself.” Wangari Maathai,Taking Root
Blog 2 in the series: The Land: Thoughts Into Action, by Kai Teague
What does water do?
What does any seed, shoot, or root do?
What does any other animal do? Buffalo, and birds
What about moss or matts that grow on rocks?
They disrupt, stir, break…ground, soil, rocks, and seeds.
Water and wind move over, and through, eroding and shaping this entire planet.
What happens if no animal or bird, or insect, or wind or rain moved through a place, relocated pollen, and knocked seeds out of the pods?
Our world, our homeplace was formed, from collisions, and chaos that created everything we know.
This is my family’s land. This was my grandma Vivian’s home. In 2019, we started a large-scale garden (almost an acre in size). Aside from an initial pass with a tiller to break up what had been very tall grass, most everything since has been done by hand. We built the rows, planted the seeds, pulled weeds, watered the first year by hand, harvested, cleaned, and shucked each carrot, beet, potato, and ear of corn. We saved seeds from our corn, beans, and squash, which we planted the next year.
During 2020, we provided over 80% of all of our food grown to the tribal elder’s center, to families, and to anyone who reached out to us. We took roughly 40 vases worth of sunflowers and sent them with our sister to share with the elementary teachers coming back to school during a global pandemic.
Giving Back
It has been about four years since my grandma’s land was last contracted to a local wheat grower. In the last couple years, I have started to identify the various birds, plants, and animals that move through here.
I have counted at least 30 different bird types. This land has hosted foxes and their cubs, deer, pheasants, ground nesting hawks, voles, ground squirrels, rabbits, badgers and at least four species of hawks. There are at least four native grass varieties here: yarrow, wild rose, chokecherries, prickly pear cactus, prairie sage, sage brush, women’s sage, red dock, cat tails, moss, lichen, an abundance of pennycress, and many more medicines that I am just getting to know.
We can never go back to what was, and the nature of existence is change…. time, gravity, pressure, wind, rain, heat, life, and death, is all some form of change. But I wonder what it would mean for us to get land back. Are we prepared to do that work and nurture that relationship?
Relatives, we can at any moment go out and get to know our homelands, or the lands wherever we call home. We might not all be ready, and healing is a process and it’s a process we all deserve to enact when we are ready for it.
Find out more about The America Indian College Fund at https://collegefund.org
