Sophie Land
I have felt this so intensely myself. In times of trauma lying in that liminal space between wakefulness and sleep, my soul returning home to limestome creeks flowing with fresh spring water, airs fragrant with juniper and petrichor. The land I was rooted in holds me, has never failed to save me from despair.
sophie land
thank you Sophie. Your words continue to be a balm. I have been uprooted and displaced so many times throughout my life of being a deeply place-based dancer and soil builder, I felt my heart break each time I had to pack up and leave again. I've rationalized that I leave each place a little more well tended to, a little more fertile than when I arrived and definitely more loved. That maybe that is part of my 'purpose'. And the land has lived me, shaped me and added to and taken from my holo-ecosystem. But still the heart break of leaving before I chose on my own accord, is always real. So real that I was hesitant to make connection and root into this most recent spot on the edge of the Ventana Wilderness in Esselen territory, with so much disturbance and human caused trauma, yet held and sustained by 19' circumfrence ancient oaks with deep black acorns the size of my thumb. I did not have the energy to open my heart enough to let it all in and "risk being changed" by it. This sweetest essay, however, affirms what I was not able to endure in my resistance, and although it is a temporary home, I have built more soil, grown more gardens, mended eroding gullies caused by Forest Service fire breaks the width of 6 lane freeways, with elderberry, hedge nettle, lupine and clarkia. I have planted my heart into this wounded place, feel it more deeply every day, have been fed by its acorns, held by the ancients and welcomed by the junkos, all knowing that I will leave soon enough. And although there will be sadness, I will remember this essay and affirmation that our hearts are meant to be planted.
From the farm field you can see the Catskill mountains where I was raised, their irregular stone scrawl a signature I would recognize even if it was signed in sand on the shores of a land far from here. Here, where I have been walking every morning since I quit smoking. Since I quit starving myself to death. Since I decided if my body was going to kill me, I\u2019d stop making its job easier. The field is a patchwork of smaller fields, the faded grid resurfacing again when the snow falls, and hung in the right-hand corner of the farthest quadrant is a pond. I sit at its shore with the geese and watch the sun break free from the mountains, stain umber the river just visible through the leafless trees, before continuing my perambulations. And one morning the geese leave, cleaning the sky with their determined Vs, the last pollen, the last sweetbitter smells of autumn mildew stolen away on the downy barbs of their retreating wings.
When I meet B I briefly think he is a field. He is a landscape of geese and foxes and forget-me-nots. He is stone carved by glacial heft. Mountains built from ancient seashells. We are together a long time. When we finally disarticulate, come apart like words from languages with different conceptions of time, there is nothing left of that original fiction. He is no field, no ruffle of wind through a stand of aspens. He is a person not a place.
When I have been in emergency rooms and ambulances I have walked through my own heart like a portal to the land where it is has been planted. When I sat in a cold shower in Oklahoma miscarrying, I was glad my heart was twined with willow roots, hung as a lace of frost across the stone fontanel of Overlook Mountain.
Vanderhoop, 67, cherishes stories of days long past when the island's natural cranberry bogs, blueberry bushes, and Sassafras trees were cared for by Aquinnah Wampanoag men, women, and children all over the island.
A historian for the tribe estimates there were around 4,000 Aquinnah Wampanoag people at the tribe's peak, though others estimate there were thousands more. But over the last 400 years, since colonists first arrived, the on-island Aquinnah Wampanoag population has shrunk to about 500, and only a fraction of them know ancestral practices.
In Vanderhoop's case, development over the years forced his forefathers to take jobs away from their property. The result: their land is completely overgrown and has been overtaken by invasive species.
But prompted by the threats of climate change and a desire to educate the next generation, Vanderhoop and his wife, Saskia, are determined to restore their land to what it was centuries ago. Drawing from oral history and a variety of research methods, they're replanting, reharvesting, and re-establishing a productive food forest, full of original sounds, smells, textures, tastes, and sights. They're calling it the Land Culture Project.
"Not only do you take the nutrient-dense, wild foods away from the people, you change their complete culture," she said, "because food and the land are the two major, essential components of the culture."
Parts 3 and 4 of the collection focus heavily on Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration and how to reconfigure settler relationships to the land and Nation state through encounters with iconic symbols of Canadiana (see contributions by Dector, Isaac, and Goto), and the ways in which violence to Indigenous bodies persists through uncontested Canadian nationalism (see contributions by Dewar, Goto, and Morin). Allison Hargreaves and David Jefferies conclude the collection by reminding readers that reconciliation...
"Indigenous peoples rely on their land for their survival and therefore any incursion onto their land creates serious problems for any community," Sophie Grig, a senior campaigner for Survival International, a UK-based indigenous rights advocacy organization, told IRIN. "These incursions in West Papua generally also involve the presence of the military to protect the project [which] leads to human rights violations."
Over the past four years, at least 74 people have died in the village of Baad alone - one of more than 160 across Merauke- due to infighting between communities created by disagreements over the sale of land to agribusinesses, and police brutality, according to Leonardus Maklew, a Baad resident who has been representing nine Malind villages in negotiations to defend their land from an Indonesian sugar cane plantation since 2010.
"Police and military personnel routinely accompany companies when they come to ask the Malind to sell their land. It is a form of intimidation," said Sophie Chao, a project officer with the Forest People's Programme (FPP), a non-profit organization registered in the Netherlands that campaigns for the rights of indigenous peoples of the tropical forest facing environmental destruction and human rights violations.
"The government says we are just a hot-headed people, always fighting, but it is worse now. Tools that used to be used for hunting are now used against one another," said Maklew, explaining that bows and arrows, and knives, are all commonly drawn during fights, which have occurred at least once a month since corporations started (in 2009) trying to convince villagers individually to sell their land, bypassing customary collective decision-making processes.
Company spokespeople of PT Anugerah Rejeki Nusantara (ARN), a sugar cane plantation owned by the Wilmar International Group (WIG) headquartered in Singapore, often co-opt tribal leaders, paying them a salary to convince the other villagers to sell their land, according to the FPP, and without giving full information to communities that they will not see their land again, according to Rainforest Foundation Norway, an NGO that campaigns for the protection of rainforests and their inhabitants. WIG strongly denies the charge.
According to the WIG's own guidelines for community development and land ownership, "in Indonesia, land use and ownership is an inherently complex matter, exemplified in part by the high incidences of overlapping or un-delineated land rights in land concessions... development policies and projects, they can sometimes have an unintentional impact on the local communities, resulting in conflicts and disagreements."
In 2007, the World Bank suspended funding to WIG for palm oil operations in Sumatra and Kalimantan after an internal audit exposed the company's lack of respect for community land rights. After this, the company declared a moratorium on further deforestation, and resolved to obtain free, prior, and informed consent from communities, according to the UN Global Compact
The Malind demarcate their land in the 45,000 square kilometre area using rivers, stones, and certain trees, but as some villages sell their forests - such as Zanegi village, which ceded 300,000 hectares to an Indonesian timber company in 2009 - traditional means of demarcation are changing, leading to confusion and contributing to a rise in social tensions.
"One of the most tragic outcomes where corporations are land grabbing, is that communities have become bitterly divided,"said Marcus Colchester, the director of FPP, who explained that the villages resilient enough to hold out from selling often face "terrible consequences" including intimidation, harassment and beatings, and sometimes even deaths - all of which are committed with impunity in Papua due to the political legacy of separatism.
"The police and military are already around us, and we are stigmatized by the independence movement. They justify beatings and arrests by saying we are separatists," said Maklew, who has been imprisoned five times since 2010. One conviction was for standing up to police after 23 women from his village were allegedly raped by the military. "We are not separatists, we are just trying to defend our lands and way of life," he said.
At least 47 Malind land defenders have died in Merauke in the past four years alone, while under police custody, according to Maklew, who says he himself has been beaten by police and punched in the face. 041b061a72