This is the first in a series of articles exploring what it means for a people to be rooted, or rootless, and how our rootlessness (in the modern West) has impacted everything from the way we treat one another, our economy, our spirituality, and our relationship with the Earth.
Let me start by saying that I am a white woman living on the unceded lands of the Duwamish people. I did not grow up here, I grew up on Mississauga land, I lived for about six years where the Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan nation once thrived.
And, I was raised on stories of my family’s lost homeland. Half remembered, perhaps mythical tales of the Highland clearances, of fighting for Bonnie Prince Charlie, of Culloden, massacre, exile, and forced migration. I was raised with a longing in my chest for a place I’d never seen. (Whether these stories are historical fact, and whether that matters, is something else we’ll tackle later.)
Colonialism has created a world filled with uprooted people.
My ancestors, however they got here, settled on land that had been inhabited by native peoples for generations (people who had been pushed out ahead of them). And I still live on that land, still enjoy the privileges that come with being descended from white European colonizers. Naming that matters.
But the consequences of rootlessness go beyond “just” (there is nothing just about it) living on land stolen from others. Because of colonialism, and the dualistic nature of modern Western Christianity (which has left its mark on all parts of our social fabric) most of the colonizers who came to this place didn’t put down new roots. They did not become of the land in the way the indigenous people they pushed out were, or the way their ancestors in Europe had once been. And we, their descendants, remain mostly rootless as well.
Our rootlessness, our disconnect from the land where we live has real impact on the ways we respond to climate change, to how we treat land (and the natural world in general) as a resource and a commodity. It impacts the way we connect (or don’t) to sacred stories that were born in a whole other place. I would hazard that it even impacts our souls/spirits and our spiritual practices. In this series we’ll explore both the impacts of our rootless culture and how we can reroot ourselves where we are.
The web of the ways we all have been culturally, spiritually, socially, mentally harmed by colonialism are vast, diverse, and tangled. (The colonizer harms others, and in the process harms themselves as well. The harm is different, but it exists across the board in systems of violence.) It will take a long time and very wise people to tease the whole mess out, but we can make a little start to it here and now. We can begin by asking questions, always a good place to start.
So let’s start this series with some more honesty: I do not have the answers to this problem, or a solution. There is no meditation we can do that will fix everything, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start. My own quest to untie the knot of rootlessness and colonialism began when I stumbled across the book If Women Rose Rooted by Sharon Blackie. Sharon, unlike most of us, still lives on her ancestral land. Her sacred stories (fragmented and damaged as they are by Christian conversion of the British Isles) shine through the rocks and hills in which they were first told.
She writes in If Women Rose Rooted about the power of rootedness to the land of your ancestors, woven into the fabric of that place by the stories that helped generations of people make sense of their lives and their world.
But her work made me even more keenly aware of the problem of rootlessness for those of us here in the “new world” who do not live where our ancestors did (this is true of many native peoples as well as white settlers, more recent immigrants, and descendants of African slaves brought here against their will.)
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s (a Native American biologist) luminous Braiding Sweetgrass brought this home further as she talked about the way being rooted in relationship to land changes the way we view and treat it, and all the beings that we share it with. For those tied intimately to land it is a friend, a companion. For those unrooted from land it is simply where your house sits, a resource to be owned, sold, and controlled.
It is no wonder our relationship with land in the colonized world is so commodified. What our rootlessness started our capitalist system built upon. Land, and the plants and animals that depend on it, are seen as resources to be exploited or (at best) managed. We talk about “unproductive” land and mean land that is not being used for some human money making endeavor.
But our rootlessness doesn’t just turn the land into a commodity, it has heightened the duality that divides our spirituality from our daily life. When we live on the land that formed our sacred stories, that is holy to our people our lives are easier to see as holy in their entire. Indigenous religious practice is surprisingly consistent in the ways it expresses the connection between the holiness of land and the people. Together they are sacred, and the spiritual practices of such a people are usually tightly tied to the world they inhabit.
But what happens when you live unmoored from the sacred spaces of your ancestors? When the land and creatures around you are considered commodities, not sacraments? Our spirituality fractures as well. Our spiritual practices become increasingly head centered, and they are additions to our daily lives, rather than intimate parts of.
Even our sacred stories, for most European descended peoples, have been far removed from their native soil. For those of us raised in the Christian tradition not only were the sacred stories of our ancestors destroyed and replaced with scriptures that had already been removed from their own context, but they were then used to deprive native people here in Americas of their connection to the land, and their own spiritual and religious practices.
In short, we’ve got a mess. A multilayered mess that stretches back for generations but that is our problem here and now. I think some of us have already started waking up, I am certainly far from alone. The first step is beginning to see what we hadn’t before, to begin to ask the questions we’d never thought to ask.
If you are ready to start wrestling with this in your own life here are some questions to consider for discussion or journaling.
- How can those descended from colonizers root ourselves where we are without doing further harm to our indigenous neighbors?
- How can we all form a relationship with the land where we are, and begin to see the nonhuman beings there as neighbors?
- How can we tell sacred stories that make sense in the places we are now, and that help us make sense of the world, now?
- What does it even mean to be rooted in relationship with a place? (This isn’t a question our ancestors even had to think about!)
- Can our old stories find new life and new meaning in the new places where we find ourselves?
Read the next installment here.
