My “land story” shared at Salt & Light/Leaven Community on 10/11/15
I was blessed to spend some early years in a wild place of ponderosa and aspen, of bluebell and shooting star, wild strawberry and elderberry, a miraculous spring and a marsh with mounds of grass that my sister and I would hop across on. This is the 40 acres in SW Montana that my “back to the land” parents acquired in 1980, where we spent the next three summers living in an elaborate tent while my parents built a cabin. Although I was almost three by the time we moved there full time, I loved to hear my mom tell me how I had been growing in her belly the first time she set eyes on this land. It reinforced my sense of being deeply interwoven with it, that I was part of it and it was part of me from even before my first breath.
Today, I’m learning about how we were settlers on this land, how I and my husband are settlers on the quarter acre here in Portland that we purportedly “own.” I’m considering what it means to have purchased land that in the not so distant past was stolen from people who had called it home for thousands of years. I’m trying to hold these things at the same time: that this land does in fact run in my veins in some mysterious way, and yet I only belong to it as a result of theft, smallpox epidemics, brutal massacres.
I’m learning about the Chinook people here, their 30 year struggle for federal tribal recognition, the 40,000 Native Americans that live in Portland today. The Native American Youth and Family Center, a mile from where I live, was the location of a Multnomah Chinook village known as Neerchokikoo that thrived well into the 20th century. And so that brings me to the land where I live now, where I grow food, where I have only 7 years of history plus another 9 elsewhere in Portland. A lot to me, but not a lot to really know a place, to be of and from it in your bones. Plus, my purchase of this land is rooted in more recent class and race privilege, being gifted money for a down payment from grandparents who accumulated it in large part due to my grandfather being a beneficiary of the GI Bill, benefits which black soldiers, and thus their descendants, were largely excluded from.
All this is in my head while I harvest pumpkins, plant my winter garden, and contemplate more fully taking on the identity of an urban farmer. There’s wondering how I could possibly be a responsible and ethical settler with the weight of all this history. And, there is the dirt under my feet, the seed in my hand, the potatoes packed snugly in their boxes for the winter. There’s the little spring that I can almost imagine I myself sprung out of, whose waters flow eventually into the Columbia and the watershed I live in today. I love these places, they are my homes, and I am still at best a guest in the homeland of others who loved them a lot longer.
Vibrant Mission 