Robin Wall Kimmerer is an Indigenous writer and scientist who writes on the teachings of plants in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass. Reading her book, I have been moved to reconsider my reciprocal relationship with land. Her book includes a Thanksgiving Address—a land acknowledgement of its own that reminds readers and listeners of one’s place on Earth. In my land acknowledgement, I want not just to acknowledge the people who lived on and should still be living on the land I occupy now, were it not for colonialism, but I also want to acknowledge the land itself. That, I feel, is a key teaching of the plants and underlying message of Robin Wall Kimmerer: to repeal ideas of ownership and replace them with beliefs in gratitude and reciprocity.
Before I share a little bit about the land on which I’m sitting as I write this rationale and curriculum, I want to acknowledge the space I’m in now—the satellites, the electromagnetic waves, the pixels, everything that makes it possible for me to have created this Thought Garden in this very strange ‘third’ space, so to speak. In a sense, I am on shared land in this ‘third space’—or perhaps it’s simply shared space, between myself and you, the reader, but also between every other person in cyberspace at this moment.
I’d like to share a little bit now about the actual ground beneath my feet. In the spirit of removing the idea of ownership and honoring Indigenous beliefs about land as a gift for its inhabitants, to be shared among those who take care of it in return, I won’t say this land belongs, or belonged, to a people, but the people who inhabited the land on which I stand before colonizers forced them out were from the Anacostan (Nacotchtank) and Piscataway nations.
On this land, the American beech tree thrives. In Latin, it’s called fagus grandifolia. In the language of the Indigenous peoples who lived here—its name has been too difficult for me to track down yet. But I mention the beech tree because I want to tell a story about one. This is the story about the beech tree that has lived for centuries on the land that is just in front of where my house now stands—the house where I grew up and where I am writing this thesis.
When I was young, we had a beech tree in our front yard. Their bark was smooth, their trunk was big and round, their roots emanated in tall, thin, vertical shelves before slipping silently beneath the soil. They were home to a family of squirrels that had built their nest in a crevice where two branches split ways. They were a playground to my sister and I, who liked to chase each other around the trunk and use it as a hiding spot. My family tied a simple rope to create a rope swing around one particularly large limb, and all of the children in the neighborhood spent many an afternoon taking turns swinging back and forth on that rope swing. Then one night—I was in sixth grade—we had a snowstorm—the largest of my lifetime in this area. We got about a foot of snow and school closed for a week and a half. But the night that it snowed, the tree fell down.
I kept a small branch, whittled it with my knife into a little keepsake, and counted the rings with my family—over 250 of them. The tree had been here, serving as shelter, as food (with its nuts and leaves for people and animals alike), as play space, as caretaker of the land, for over 250 years. This was not my first experience with loss, but I felt it deeply, washing through my bones.
But when the tree fell, some roots must have stayed, unscathed, in the ground, because the next year, we saw a tiny sprout shoot up from the ground. A few years later, the tree was a small bush. Now—at a ripe twelve years old—the tree still stands, healthy, caring, giving and taking and being in and on this land.
I’ve had the pleasure of watching this tree move through the seasons—not just seeing them but really noticing them. I have grown up with this tree—literally. I sometimes call it the ‘miracle tree,’ but really, I think it’s just all a part of the language of gratitude and reciprocity. It is with this in mind that I ground myself and begin to grow my Thought Garden.
Obi Taswell 