How can you care about anything if you don’t first know and love it yourself? For Sue and I, this collaboration fosters time to reflect as we consider the beauty and destruction of wild and naturalised remnants of land in SE Saskatchewan. Today I’m sharing some of my personal struggles around the word “relationship” in reference to land, hoping by sharing them here it will not only help myself but others too.
Many people have shared beautiful stories with Sue and I about their deep relationship with the land. For them, it’s difficult to imagine not having it. Others have said they would “like to have a relationship” or “no, I likely wouldn’t use the word relationship” when talking about the land.
So, I know I’m not alone when I say using “relationship” in reference to the land doesn’t come naturally to me. I am trying to understand why I feel this way and how I might be able to change it.
I asked myself, “Is it how I was brought up or the time I was brought up in?” I grew up in the 60s in rural Cape Breton on Canada’s east coast, picking daisies to decorate mud cakes baked in the heat of the sun. I held grasshoppers in my hands saying, “Grasshopper, grasshopper, make me some molasses.” Magically a brown spot appeared. Maybe not really molasses.
Of my parents, my father was the “outdoor person”, the one who took us camping and initiated picnics. He taught me to put the squiggly, slimy worm on the fishing hook, then gently release any “too small” brook trout for another day. But this all came crashing down when he died in a tragic accident, changing my life forever. Still, decades later, I can see him standing by the edge of a pond, patiently watching for the red and white bobber to be pulled under. I wonder how I might be a different person had he lived.
After my father died, my mother, who didn’t drive, moved us to the small coastal village of St. Peter’s to be closer to all the amenities. Life revolved around my friends, boys, and school. I attended a church, participated in its youth group and sang badly in the choir.
I mention the role church played in my life because one article I read considers how we began to think of ourselves as separate from nature. It says, “When Judaism and Christianity rose to become the dominant religious force in Western society, their sole god – as well as sacredness and salvation – were re-positioned outside of nature. The Old Testament taught that God made humans in his own image and gave them dominions over the Earth.”
I found community in church at a time in my life when I needed one. Despite the fact that I daydreamed through most sermons, I think some of the language settled in my subconscious. In this collaboration, we’ve been thinking about how the language we use shapes how we see the world around us.
In school, like most people in the Western world, I learned a language that draws a line between the non-human and human world. For example, the land, the trees, the animals are all objects and referred to as “it” - non human. Did this teaching influence my outlook towards the land? The language we chose places us separate from and superior to the non-human world. Sue and I sometimes talk about this on our walks, and try to shift and play with our words. Honestly, I feel embarrassed calling a plant “she” but I think I might need to feel uncomfortable now and again in order to change.
Over the years I’ve talked about how childhood informs my photography, and I start there with this collaboration as well. I wonder if I always had a relationship with the non-human world but didn’t know that was what it was called? Were they my friends - the flowers and grasshoppers? If so, when did I forget?
I am 60 years old now with a lifetime of experience. After years of working in a big corporation and government, the Western world mindset that sees the land as a commodity has been deeply ingrained in my psyche. In our conversations, Sue reminds me this is true for many of us. She says, “It is the sea we have swum in and so much of what we think is unconscious.”
Since I’m so focused on the word “relationship”, I looked up its definition:
re·la·tion·ship /rəˈlāSHənˌSHip/ (noun)
“The way in which two or more people or things are connected, or the state of being connected: ‘the study will assess the relationship between unemployment and political attitudes’
The state of being connected by blood or marriage - ‘they can trace their relationship to a common ancestor’
An emotional and sexual association between two people ‘"the landlord–tenant relationship’”
What can I do to be comfortable using the word “relationship” when speaking about the land? Even our dictionary only references the way people refer to one another, with no place for the non-human world. I don’t want to just say it, I want to feel it in my heart. True change will take time, and I have started.
Today, many of us consult “Google” when looking for a quick answer so I googled “how to have a relationship with the land.” I found a good deal of information on the importance of land to First Nations people. This left me feeling sad. Wouldn’t it be great if I had read how “relationship with land” is important to everyone?
Google may not be the best way, and definitely there are books, lectures, etc that might have given me different information, but I do believe in some way the google answer is indicative of society in general.
I’m fortunate to have experienced first hand the rich culture of Inuit people. I lived in Nunavut for five years, three of those in the small fly-in communities of Clyde River and Kugaaruk. At community picnics out on the land, I ate raw caribou cut from the frozen leg laying on the snow, and enjoyed slivers of cold, pink Arctic char slowly melting in my mouth. Everyone brought something - egg sandwiches, chocolate chip cookies, hot sweet tea. Sometimes an igloo would be built and like anywhere, kids played in the snow.
Reflecting back, I question if what I had considered “making friends,” or “sharing food at a picnic” was, in part, doing what I now read about - building respectful relationships with Indigenous people. These times together on the land are some of my best and happiest memories of being there; the times I felt closest to my Inuit neighbours.
Not once during these years have I considered my own “relationship” to the land. For some strange reason, I have felt this is a word reserved for Indigenous people to use, but in my recent reading of the book The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King put it into perspective for me when he wrote, “Yes, a great many Native people have a long-standing relationship with the natural world. But that relationship is equally available to non-Natives, should they choose to embrace it.” The choice is mine to make.
I also think about the term “cultural appropriation” often. I’ve become hypersensitive about it, fearful of doing something to offend Indigenous people. I listened to an interview with Robin Wall Kimmer that helped guide me. She said the most important ceremonies come from a relationship with the land that is one from our heart. Being grateful, she says, is uniquely human, not culturally specific. Our own ceremonies can develop organically out of an intimate relationship with place.
A podcast one of our readers shared is also helpful. Emmanuel Vaughn-Lee reminds us that history is much deeper than we think and for a great deal of time we were in “right” relationship with the living earth. He believes that somewhere deep within us, a sacred relationship with the earth is still there, waiting to be remembered. This is reassuring!
These days, I don’t race up the hill across from our house to see how fast I can make it to the top as I once did. I slow down to look at small things around me; how the leaves form, their changing colors, the shape of different grasses against the snow. I notice the berries on the prickly brain, a pincushion cactus I’ve befriended. Wow, I never would have been comfortable calling a plant my friend before! I listen to the birds fly overhead; a sound I don’t think can be translated into human words.
Ever so slowly, I am understanding what is meant by “feeling the rhythm of the earth.” I believe I can “rekindle” a relationship with the natural world. After all, it is my choice.
As always, we would love to hear your comments and stories. Just click on the GREEN COMMENT button below.
Other References:
Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A curious account of Native People in North America, 2012
“Where will the frogs sing?” is the collaboration of two rural settler artists responding to the beauty and destruction of SE Saskatchewan’s remnants of land to encourage reflection on the land’s intrinsic value.
Thank you for sharing. I appreciate the thoughtful reflections that are warm, intimate & insightful. It brought to mind my childhood exploring fields & streams behind my home with my brother. We enjoyed the flowers and wildlife that lived there. We often brought home critters like fish, frogs, turtles, snakes & night crawlers for fishing to my mother's chagrin!
Love that picture of you & your dad💕I've always loved your pictures from the north!
I love reading these. Your descriptions are so vivid that it takes me on a journey. It also reminds me of youth and sitting in a field of blueberries. Picking them with my grandmother, my neighbor Jess or Cecil.
I didn’t realize then but now how those berries soothed me. I loved picking berries and I was meticulous in making sure I just put berries in my bucket and not any leaves like grandma.
While I read this it made me think even though I would never use the word I had air have a relationship with the land. The land growing up around me, also in Cape Breton, gave me comfort at times that I never realized before. Come to think of it, it still does.
I know when I go out for walks on the trails around us I am looking at all the different trees and plants.
If nature calms you and soothes your soul is that considered a relationship and we just don’t realize it? Do we only consider it to be a relationship if we know the names of the plants trees?
If we notice the land is being destroyed misused and conjures up sad feelings as to why it is being destroyed. Aren’t those sad feelings caused by the relationship you have for the land? Why else would it bother me?
Relationships are complicated and maybe this is true when it comes to the land and trying to figure out what it means for each of us.