[Yale-forests-reading-group] Week 1: Where we are, where are you?

[Lewis, Reid]

Where are we, where are you?

We live, work, and learn on colonized land—land that has a deeper and richer history than we are commonly taught in school. In Week 1 of this reading group, we encourage each other to situate ourselves in place and the language we use to discuss it. We’ll also take time to understand whose homelands we live and work on, and interrogate the relationship we have to Native American and Indigenous studies. As non-Native people, it is our collective responsibility to pursue knowledge about colonialism and Indigenous communities, histories, and contemporary strength and survivance. We invite you to virtually join us in doing so at Yale-Myers Forest, the place you call home, or the place(s) you trace your ancestry and family histories, to help critically analyze and understand the stories of how we have arrived on this land.

At the Yale Forests, students, fellows, and professors learn to “read the landscape” through clues that can tell us about human relationships with the land. While we have engaged with topics surrounding Indigenous relationships to the land, such as food and resource harvesting and management, these conversations alone do not tell the full story of settler-colonialism, oppression, and displacement of Indigenous peoples in the context of forest landscapes.

This week, let’s take time to be thoughtful with our words. “Space,” “place,” and “landscape” are words we readily use in a mainstream environmental context. But how can we challenge ourselves to move past this narrative, considering the real and multi-faceted meanings they hold? Ideas of “place” and “landscape” are as varied and complex as the cultures and histories of the people who hold them. They aren’t restricted to physical, spatial areas but deeply tied to ancestry, culture, relationships, and identity. To explore these terms further, we’re reading definitions composed by “Indigenizing the News,” a digital news source dedicated to Native news and voices:

Resource 1: Space, Place, and Landscape: Introductory Definitions by Meghanlata Gupta
https://www.indigenizingthenews.com/articles/space-place-and-landscape-introductory-definitions

Did you know you can find out more about the Native lands, treaties, and languages you are proximate to by searching an address on nativeland.ca<https://native-land.ca/>? Native-Land draws on maps from a variety of sources, prioritizing Native nations' delineations of their territories. On this map, Yale-Myers Forest (150 Centre Pike, Eastford, CT) sits squarely on traditionally Nipmuc land. When we zoom out, it’s clear that there are many other peoples who share this greater landscape: Mohegan, Narragansett, and other Algonqian-speaking peoples. Over the past 10,000 years, many peoples have interacted with this landscape - a reminder that the history of this land is not static and did not begin with “discovery” or European colonization.

*Disclaimer: The Native Land map is not set in stone - official or legal boundaries are not represented and it continues to evolve over time.*

Resource 2: https://native-land.ca/
Tribal Nation websites:  Nipmuc<https://www.nipmucnation.org/>, Mohegan<https://www.mohegan.nsn.us/>, Narragansett<http://narragansettindiannation.org/>

When we combine the knowledge of whose land we occupy with their living histories, we begin exploring Indigenous Geographies. We have been digging into the December 2019 issue of “Indigenizing the News” devoted to Indigenous Geographies. The issue pulls together voices and examples from across North America and beyond, with writing and videos that explore space, place, and landscape, violent dispossession, and what it means to employ a decolonial lens to these thoughts and practices with examples throughout North America:

Resource 3:  Introducing: Indigenous Geographies, the December 2019 edition of Indigenizing the News
https://mailchi.mp/c4df0c88eec5/itn-special-edition-indigenous-geographies-critical-approaches-to-space-place-and-landscape

Entrenched in these living histories are the ways that people relate to the land they live on and with. Western environmentalism emphasizes relating to land through an analytical perspective; the land is a subject to study, learn about, and manage. Though this is the predominant perspective at our school, it is of course not the only way people view land. How people relate to the land varies tremendously across cultures, places, and time. This article by Robin Wall Kimmerer examines how different these perspectives can be, highlighting the need to understand each other’s relationships to land, and the immense value we can gain when we do so:

Resource 4: The Rights of the Land by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Orion Magazine
https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-rights-of-the-land/

After reading this article, we encourage you to continue learning about the Onondaga Land Rights Action here:
https://www.onondaganation.org/land-rights/complaint/

We hope you enjoyed and learned from these resources as much as we did! Here are some questions we’ve been asking while learning, and encourage you to consider:

  *   What Native land do you work, live, or study on?
  *   What has surprised you about the peoples, languages, and treaties of that land? Check it out at https://native-land.ca/!
  *   How have I understood place and landscape - not just as concepts, but also in my connection to particular places and landscapes? How have I understood my connection to places and landscapes as similar or different to other people's connections?
  *   How is our understanding limited by our colonial perspective, and how do Indigenous ways of understanding place differ?
  *   What is one way these resources have encouraged you to challenge Western views of land and nature?

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Thanks so much for following along this week! Have thoughts, comments, or reflections you’d like to share with? Are there resources you feel we should have included? We hope you’ll send an email our way: yale-forests-reading-group at mailman.yale.edu<mailto:yale-forests-reading-group at mailman.yale.edu> or check us out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yaleschoolforests/! Think a friend might enjoy subscribing? They can do so here: https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/yale-forests-reading-group.

A massive thank you to Meghanlata Gupta, rising senior at Yale, president of the Association of Native Americans at Yale, and founder of Indigenizing the News, for her input and sharing of resources this week.

You can subscribe to Indigenizing the News here<https://www.indigenizingthenews.com/>.

A great thank you as well to the many individuals (https://native-land.ca/about/) behind the terrific Native-Land.ca, linked here once more: https://native-land.ca/
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