Does Mother Earth like to wear dark sticky lipstick?
Posted on October 25, 2021“We know that Mother Nature has a culture, and it is a Native culture” – Yupiaq scholar, Oscar Kawagley
Two weeks ago I went to upstate New York to visit tiokasin ghosthorse, a man from the Indigenous people at Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota at his place in Stone Ridge. tiokasin ghosthorse intentionally uncapitalizes his name, to emphasize how humans aren’t the center of the world (Field Trip, 2021). Stone Ridge is, from my point of view, a small town, and at this point, I’m not too sure if I should call it a typical American town. Going down the main road, my three fellow peers and I passed a gas station, a church, and several houses. We stop at a traffic light, where I then notice empty ground – empty in the sense that there is no house anymore, just the bare asphalt left revealing the sprouts growing through the cracks and some ruins of one more treehouse alongside the main road and a house that some family once called their home. As the engine goes on again, decreasing the emission by holding still while waiting for the lights to turn green – thinking back – I wonder what stories were hidden under the asphalt? What happened before someone took ownership of the land and decided to pour asphalt on the soil to build a house, to settle, and have a family?. Did high ‘wild’ grass, trees, and plants hide a family of deer from wolves or bears? Which kinds of flowers blossomed and bees vibrated? Who bought this ground and who did they buy it from? Where are these people now?
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang address how “External colonialism […] denote the expropriation of fragments of Indigenous worlds, animals, plants and human beings, extracting them to transport them to – and build the wealth, the privilege, or feed the appetites of – the colonizers, who get marked as the first world” (2012: 4). The notion of having ownership of land is a Western construction that tiokasin ghosthorse agrees with: To expropriate, to build wealth and privilege for oneself rather than for the earth and yourself as a part of the earth (Field Trip, 2021). The ground and the asphalt on it, in my opinion, tell a story of how one might manifest power over instead of with or through Mother Earth for she is every one of us. “Yupiaq scholar, Oscar Kawagley’s assertion, “We know that Mother Nature has a culture, and it is a Native culture” (Tuck & Yang, 2012: 30), is an assertion of Oscar Kawagley, a Yupiaq scholar, Yupiaq being an Indigenous people of Western and Southwestern Alaska, could just as well have been said by tiokasin ghosthorse from the Lakota people. As Indigenous people, they relate to each other, to living with the earth and not off of the earth, a distinction – tiokasin ghosthorse emphasizes – between the Western way of living compared to the native way of living. Like most other indigenous peoples in the US, and worldwide, tiokasin was separated from his family at a young age, sent away to un-learn his native language and culture. tiokasin ghosthorse was born into a system of colonialism when his mother had to walk 3 miles while in labor because Lakota women weren’t allowed to give birth anywhere other than inside of state hospitals (Field Trip, 2021).
Growing up in Denmark I remember the general saying that the US is “a free country”, but it wasn’t free for everybody, not for those who were there before America came about. The story of tiokasin ghosthorse exemplifies how the complex system of colonialism is constructed intentionally to leave out certain populations, whether that is through the restricted access to the healthcare system or the educational system or through the ignorant act of, in Tuck & Yang’s words, “not-seeing” all of the world, and the relationship it holds with nature (Tuck & Yang, 2012: 29). When Donella Meadows uses the example of a bathtub being filled with water to explain stocks, inflows, and outflows in systems, she makes sure to rip apart the illusion of this system as a replica of the real world (Meadows 2009). She tells us to not “forget” that the system is only a construction with illusive boundaries to highlight certain relations in the system, not depict what the world is infinite. When stories of separation and transportation of Indigenous women in labor are toned down, it belittles the minorities’ relations in a system, a system that one might argue only has a purpose of teaching us to live off of Mother Earth rather than with Mother Earth.
On the way back from Stone Ridge, I wonder how Mother Earth feels about being covered up by asphalt? Being forced to hide away with dark sticky lipstick, all expanding from her lips to the rest of her face and onto her body. In this story, I have used the asphalt as a metaphor – a very concrete one – for how humans through centuries have tried to cover up and hide away history, actions, and behaviors that deteriorate the existence of Mother Earth and all species including ourselves. I have used darkness as a way of a settler’s move toward innocence claiming ownership to the land, and as I close off I want to encourage a conversation of how we talk about and value darkness. Audrey Lorde argues that in the dark an incredible reserve for creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling can be found. One, reserve, that only survives because of its ability to stay below the surface (Lorde, 1984, pp. 36-37) (Tuck & Yang, 2012: 20). Thinking of Mother Earth as a reserve for creativity suddenly gives much more power to what cannot be seen with the naked eye.
JLJ
Notes
This story is written from the remembrance of the author’s memory and most likely differs from the correct life story of tiokasin ghosthorse.
Ressources
Field Trip, 10.06.2021. Field trip visiting tiokasin ghosthorse, Superstudio Event: Language of Oppression. More on tiokasin ghosthorse: https://firstvoicesindigenousradio.org/node/7
Meadows, Donella H., Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2009. Edited by Wright, Diana. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.libproxy.newschool.edu/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=430143.
Tuck, Eve, and Yang, K. Wayne., Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. “Decolonizing is not a metaphor”, Wiki, 2021. Yup’ik. [Located on the 10.19.2021 on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yup%27ik ]
More stories from Indigenous Peoples
Krenak, Ailton (2019) How to Postpone the End of the World. House of Anansi Press