15

ROOTLESS IN THE BOTANICAL GARDEN

Is it possible to have a deep, continual, intimate relationship—or for that matter any kind of meaningful relationship—with nature while being rooted in a human-built or highly disturbed environment? Is the answer to this question different for Native Americans and for those who do not have indigenous ancestry and sensitivities? How do we answer if we ask the question from the perspective of other beings: the four-legged, the winged, and the rooted ones?

I am fortunate enough to have lived for two decades in Vermont, one of the more rural places in the eastern United States, and one of the smallest and least populated states in the country. The very name Vermont is derived from the French words for green and mountain: vert and mont. I look out the window into a forest that is carpeted in the springtime with wildflowers, Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria). To the west is a wetland and pond where tiny frogs chirp all night and resident geese and ducks call out. North and south is the territory of owls, Koo-koo-o-koo. Coy-Wolf howls come and go in the night from all directions.

When Carolyn and I are not in the forest, we are in our small apartment in Montréal, near where the St. Lawrence River forms Lac-Saint-Louis, the southern boundary of the arrondisement, or district, of Lachine. Here the dominant sounds are traffic, church bells, and sirens from a nearby fire station. This is an intensely man-made, urban environment. Patches of well-trodden green are to be found mostly in small areas between expanses of concrete and asphalt pavement.

Moving back and forth between these two radically different worlds increases my appreciation for and awareness of the natural world. It also makes me wonder about how we as a species adapt to, or suffer from, urban nature disconnects.

For me, the epitome of this dilemma—being disconnected from nature yet seeking connection—is to be found in the Montreal Botanical Garden, an institution that is, ironically, dedicated to plant and nature preservation. We often bicycle there to enjoy gardens, an arboretum, or greenhouses, which replicate on a small scale the mix of flora to be found in desert, semitropical, and tropical environments.

It is, however, the garden’s large bonsai and penjing^*18 collection of miniaturized trees that continually commands my attention. While standing in the midst of these beautiful, artificially dwarfed trees, I experience many reactions simultaneously: awe at their beauty, admiration for the experts who maintain them, and sadness for these living beings who dwell in containers, their roots one meter above a concrete floor, never to touch Mother Earth. It is the latter fact, real unrootedness, that leaves me struggling to fully understand and overcome my own profound sense of being biologically rootless in Montréal. This experience is all the more perplexing as I have recently reconnected, rather profoundly, with my human ancestral roots in Montréal. Why do I feel so rooted and uprooted at the same time and in the same place? What can this state of consciousness, divided against itself, reveal if I examine it carefully?

All of this muddle has forced me to back up and confront a series of awkward but illuminating possibilities.

First, I have been on the verge of uncritically echoing what many naturalists and wilderness advocates implicitly, if not explicitly, affirm: a value judgment that life immersed in “unspoiled” nature is spiritually richer or better than urban life. This notion originates from oversimplification and misreadings of Thoreau’s Walden and the writings of naturalists such as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and others.

Second, I was ignoring the obvious fact that many of our most passionate and eloquent advocates of wilderness developed their appreciation of and sensitivity to the natural world partly through their experiences in human settlements. Their enlightenment did not arise spontaneously in a wilderness where they had lived from the beginning of their lives as feral children, in total isolation from human culture. For example, my beloved Henry David Thoreau spent many years of his life working in and managing the family pencil factory.¹ That lesspublicized aspect of his life very much contributed to his appreciation of the benefits of living in the wild. Even after he became a celebrated naturalist and Transcendentalist, Thoreau spent years in crowded public places: lecture halls filled with enthralled listeners. Thoreau lived only temporarily in his famous cabin in the woods.

Third, in reflecting upon my own awakening, I have not yet come to terms with the fact that 70 percent of contemporary Native and non-Native Americans now live primarily in human-settled areas, as Thoreau did for most of his life. If I hope for my readers to see the relevance of my writing, I need to explore if and how traditional Native American and mainstream culture and consciousness maintain and cultivate direct connections with the natural world while being embedded in a primarily human-built and often profoundly disrupted natural world.

If I do not address and reconcile these issues, I risk setting Native Americans, their culture, and their sensibilities on a pedestal, something akin to the nineteenth-century Romantic notion of noble savages living in a pristine natural world. This mischaracterization, still widely shared as a cultural stereotype, risks turning what should be an admirable model into something more like an exotic, inaccessible, and unattainable uniqueness. This is devastating as it “others” Native Americans, letting mainstream society off the hook from its responsibility to truly understand indigenous perspectives. More seriously, Native exceptionalism does not encourage those in mainstream culture to fulfill their own obligations to protect nature.

Whenever I struggle with these questions, I return to the Montreal Botanical Garden’s collection of bonsai and penjing trees in miniature. And I ask, “What do the real experts on living disconnected from nature, the bonsai trees, have to say on this matter?”

To answer that question, let me invite you to join in a tour of their home. I hope that it will be more than just another travel magazine summary of a tourist hot spot. My desire is that this can be a lesson in listening, seeing, and feeling with Native American sensibilities.

Butterflies Go Free

It is March, a grayish and cold month in late winter, when once pristine white snow lies blackened and piled high in the Botanical Garden’s parking lots. At this time of year, north of the forty-fifth parallel, long, sunny days seem a distant memory. In order to momentarily escape this gloom, Carolyn and I have decided to visit the botanical garden’s annual “Papillons en liberté/Butterflies Go Free” exhibit. The hugely popular event is held in a large, heated greenhouse. Visitors must walk through other greenhouses to reach the exhibition.

The final and smallest greenhouse before reaching the “Butterflies Go Free” exhibition is the bonsai and penjing collection: tiny trees growing in beautiful ceramic containers. They range in age from a decade to nearly a century. Despite their age, each tree is less than a meter tall; most do not even reach half a meter in height. They are living images that appear to have been taken directly from antique paintings of the Sung Dynasty. Nature has been coaxed to conform to human aesthetics, an altered and meticulously curated reality to which we will return after making our way to the butterfly exhibit.

We enter the butterfly exhibition through a double-doored entry lock. This careful effort to secure and contain the butterflies is part of an effort to prevent the beautiful creatures from escaping into other greenhouses, or into the surrounding city, where they and their offspring might become hungry, devastating, invasive caterpillars or spread plant diseases.

Inside, thousands of butterflies and moths of all sizes, colors, and shapes fill the air and cover a wide variety of plants. Some are luminescent and attract the eye. Others practice camouflage and can be located only with great effort. I once asked what happens to the butterflies after the exhibition. I was told that they and any eggs are incinerated.^*19 The information quite literally knocked me off balance for a while. It colored my visit and dulled the luster of the beauty flitting about the room.

My shock and horror resulted in a fantasy which I hold dearly. Perhaps it will become a short story some day. But for now, it is a fragment of newly developed consciousness that I drag about the entire garden, like a ball and chain attached to one leg. Life was so much simpler when I just viewed the world less critically and within a mainstream cultural frame.

After realizing that they are condemned to yearly premature hatching, and then required to hold a carefully choreographed yearly pageant for visitors, the butterflies begin to feel like one of those concentration camp orchestras whose members were allowed to live only so long as they entertained their jailers. The winged ones eventually see the handwriting on the wall, or more appropriately the message written in the dew that accumulates on the inside of winter-chilled greenhouse window glass. It reads “Escape or submit to a perpetual cycle of doom.”

The butterflies plan a prison break. It is in both its mechanics and spirit like the 1973 movie Papillon, a prison escape film starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. In this movie, the central character, a safecracker, is framed for murder, imprisoned, and brutalized in multiple remote locations, from which he continually escapes. Finally he is sent to the infamous Devil’s Island prison in the Caribbean, from which no one has ever escaped. The protagonist is nicknamed “Papillon,” the French word for butterfly, because he has a tattoo of the insect on his chest. But more to the theme of my story, the prisoner’s final, successful escape from Devil’s Island suggests that he has the freedom of a butterfly within his reach as he floats away on a raft made of coconuts.

In this spirit, the garden’s butterflies slowly plot their escape for generations. They act with the determination of human prisoners who use a spoon or crude metal tool to dig tunnels for countless years through stone walls and under vast distances to the outside world. In my story, some butterflies who scheme to survive the annual postexhibition extermination hide in rafters of the greenhouse and its tiny nooks and crannies. Their next challenge is to escape the effects of cold after the exhibit ends and the heat is turned down. They find steam-heat pipes that are poorly insulated. They then develop a plan to avoid the deadly effect of the “purifying” postexhibition yearly pesticide applications. They manage to transmit this information about the unfolding escape plan and route from generation to generation, much as Monarch butterflies somehow transmit memory of migratory routes and the precise coordinates of their ancestors’ birthplaces, to which their descendants will return.

One day, when little children and indulgent parents once again ignore signs about not touching the butterflies, and they pose with smartphones while colorful performers alight on little hands, fingers and clothing, the butterflies do it. They execute the final act of their escape plan. They lay their eggs in the creases of colorful, hand-knit sweaters, and in the machine-crocheted flowers sewn onto them by distant Chinese factory workers. In this pseudonature found on human clothing, the butterflies introduce tiny fragments of real nature. And they give their descendants the gift of freedom, even if they themselves will not see or experience it. Now that is thinking seven generations ahead.

Once these human visitors return to their Montréal homes, the eggs, which were protected inside the human warmed snowsuits, hatch. The resulting caterpillars and butterflies develop a strategy to survive, some living on exotic big box store houseplants that were imported from abroad. These survivor butterflies acclimate. Some reproduce on their own natural schedule. They breathe the outdoor air of summer for the first time in generations. And they find plants and nectar sufficient to nourish them. They establish themselves, eventually making news in local papers as the “latest invasives.”

Then, as some of them alight on houseplants around Montréal and rest, they watch humans viewing a French-dubbed version of an old movie, Papillon. The winged ones silently testify to the film’s message: while escaped prisoners may pose a threat to society, their liberated spirits are a triumph of the will to survive and ultimately affirm the reason life continues on this planet.

I am eventually overcome by the noise of the crowded exhibit. I return from my reverie to the reality before me: a large greenhouse with butterflies whisking about in great numbers while snow and wind abound outdoors. The sight is certainly breathtaking. And perhaps the event is partially successful, or so I tell myself: after all, it is used to educate busloads of schoolkids about butterflies and other insects. One hopes that some larger sense of appreciating the natural world will take hold, rooting biophilia in young, urbanized minds. The joy on young faces, amazed at the winged ones, is truly wonderful, and I remind myself that I should hesitate to undermine such embrace of the natural world, even if it is rooted in a large measure of naïveté about the destiny of those who charm the young visitors. Perhaps the young children won’t notice, can’t read, or won’t question the rather misleading exhibition title “Butterflies Go Free.”^*20

But I cannot long escape such troubled musings. I have learned to listen to my kin, the winged and rooted ones. The very concepts of rootedness and freedom are being seriously challenged a few steps away in the bonsai hall, and a fated rendezvous with these ideas is beckoning me. With this thought in mind, I reluctantly pass back out of another double door passage and return to the bonsai exhibition. With fanciful images of escaped butterflies still in mind, I stand with agonizing ambivalence before the potted plants.

My thoughts return to rootedness, both in its literal meaning and as metaphor. I struggle; I tell myself that I must be honest and recognize that these tiny, stunted, and heavily pruned trees are forced into perpetual miniaturization for mere human pleasure. Their limbs are forced to conform to human notions of natural perfection by being continually pruned and wrapped with wire that distorts their growth.

The roots of these miniaturized trees, which live in shallow containers fifteen centimeters deep, are also continually pruned. Such actions are painful echoes of foot binding, a practice that made aristocratic women in imperial China have little, “pretty,” and broken feet on which they could barely walk.

Between visits to the bonsai, in an attempt to ground my hypersensitive musings about plant suffering, I force myself to reread scientific literature on how trees communicate with one another,⁴ how they form communities, and how their roots are connected by vast mycorrhizal networks now called the “woodwide web.” Information and nutrients travel along these tiny threads. Although I risk anthropomorphizing, these relations rise to the level of living forms caring for one another.

My delving into science offers little comfort; it merely fuels my concerns. Now I must confront the reality of bonsai trees cut off not only from the Earth, but also from one another.

I try to reconcile myself to the fact that mistreated trees are not about to become an exhibition of “Bonsai Go Free.” They cannot hitch a ride to freedom, as the butterflies might.

And then I notice that one of the many beautiful bonsai trees has in fact attempted the seemingly impossible. This plant must have read the sign at the entrance to the butterfly exhibit and decided that the idea of escaping to freedom, of growing real and deep roots, rather than having them perpetually pruned, was worth an attempt. Its ceramic container has been cracked by roots refusing to recognize the limits of their imprisonment. I momentarily wonder if this effort will set off some kind of alarm, if pruners will soon arrive in an electric golf cart with a flashing light, prepared to end a budding insurrection. I even imagine a plants rights advocacy group making a documentary about the Great Bonsai Escape attempt, and that it might have a soundtrack of Montréal’s own Leonard Cohen singing “There is a crack in everything.”⁵

As a result of this fanciful encounter, I write to a Chinese colleague, Liu Yang, about my reactions. She has just written a Ph.D. dissertation on urban and rooftop gardening in China.^*21 6 A fan of bonsai, she has recently written to me explaining how much pleasure she finds in a small bonsailike plant in the window of her urban room. When contemplating it, she imagines herself as an ant-sized being in the mossy forest. It was an idea inspired by Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, which I had previously sent to her because of its possible connections to her research.

I hesitate at first to undermine Yang’s wonderful fantasy, concerned that she might view my questions about the botanical garden’s bonsai as an implicit criticism of her thesis. After all, its premise is that urban dwellers do indeed reconnect to nature with their tiny balcony plantings, rooftop gardens, and urban gardening plots. She was even suggesting that urban gardeners were maintaining some deep, even spiritual, connections with nature.

I am surprised by Yang’s response. She directs me to a nineteenth-century Chinese poem, “Sick Plum Blossom.” In the poem the author, Gong Zizhen, reflects on his encounter with a collection of heavily pruned bonsai plum trees and laments their fate. He buys them, releases them from their confining containers, which he shatters, and plants them in the ground. Chairman Mao purportedly liked this poem; he saw it as a portrayal of the decadence of aristocratic life.

Encouraged, I wonder if Gong Zizhen, or I, might have a protest exhibition featuring liberated plants. It would be called “Bonsai Plants Go Free.” It is an inviting fantasy, but I doubt that the Montreal Botanical Garden would entertain such a suggestion. My previous experience with the institution indicated that they are not receptive to suggestions challenging fundamental assumptions about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century horticultural traditions, “conservatories,” and collections of specimens. Even less comforting for them is raising fundamental questions about human engagement with the natural world and the ethics and spirituality surrounding these efforts.

I discovered that botanical gardens are rooted rather narrowly in a scientific model of botanical knowledge. They are laudably committed to scientific inquiry, and the rigor that such a scientific mindset entails. Consequently, they often challenge and correct public misconceptions about plants. There are wonderful little signs to this effect throughout greenhouses and gardens at the Montreal Botanical Garden. But on matters of human culture rather than horticulture, they are more than a little stuck in the mud.

This became obvious to me when the Montreal Botanical Garden hosted a wonderful international exhibition of mosaiculture in 2013. Dozens of giant floral images, both flat and three-dimensional, filled acres of the garden. The images and sculptures were composed of plants that were used like living pointillist dots in Impressionist paintings or like fragments of glass and ceramic in mosaics—hence the notion of mosaiculture, which might better be thought of as mosaisculpture. We visited the display multiple times and brought many friends. It provided memories for a lifetime.

But, once again my rational, historical awareness combined with my budding Native American consciousness to complicate what could have been an unmediated aesthetic experience. This occurred as I stood before a humongous, three-dimensional, fifteen-meter-tall mosiaculture creation titled Mother Earth. One of the most popular and awe-inspiring installations, it was intended to celebrate Canada’s First Nations peoples and their teachings. As the event catalog notes:

Montreal International Mosaiculture 2013 could have no better ambassador than Mother Earth, the exhibition’s second masterpiece, to set the tone for the event’s key theme, “Land of Hope”, and to illustrate its first subtheme, the interdependence of man and nature.

Taking its cues from North American Aboriginal culture, Mother Earth was inspired by a speech reportedly delivered in 1854 by Chief Seattle during his meeting with then President of the United States Franklin Pierce on the occasion of the sale of Native land to white settlers. His words capture the essence of the privileged relationship our continent’s first inhabitants maintain with nature.

From that speech, the following excerpts served as the basis for Mother Earth:

“We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters, the deer, the horse, and the great eagle are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man, all belong to the same family. . . .

What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from great loneliness of the spirit. For what ever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. . . .

Preserve the memory of this Earth as [we] deliver it. And with all your strength, your spirit and your heart, preserve it for your children and love it as God loves us all.”⁷

These thoughts about the relationship of humans to nature are noble. The real author of these words, however, is a professor who taught at a college where I once was a research scholar in environmental studies. I interviewed the author decades ago and wrote about the true origins of the speech for the ECOLOGIA Newsletter.⁸

The revelations collided with the claims of some of my ecologically passionate colleagues, who asserted that they had the original version of Chief Seattle’s speech in its Native American language. Their dismay was probably increased when I exposed numerous settler-colonial misconceptions and embarrassing historical distortions in the speech. In fact the speech was re-created for a television movie, and was taken from a minister’s highly imaginative reinvention, made thirty years after the fact, of what Chief Seattle might have said.

When I wrote to the Botanical Garden about their error and misattribution, I was ignored. I offered to have a small seminar explaining that although the origins of the speech were confusing, its lesson was affirmative and valid, perhaps even more so: we can reinvent ourselves. We can reimagine ourselves within the frame of Native American sensibilities, even if we are not descended from indigenous ancestors.

Had I written to the administration with a botanical fact check, I think there would have been a rapid response and correction. But cultural matters, even in the context of Canada’s enlightened reconciliation efforts with First Nations, do not easily resonate with botanists and the public relations staff who act as promoters of popular exhibitions. So the plaque with quotes from “Chief Seattle’s speech” remained in place, prominently in front of the mosaiculture monument, for the duration of the summer and autumn. No corrections or errata were noted at the exhibition site or in the catalog. A white man’s words building on another white man’s words, which attempted to put unspoken words into the mouth of Chief Seattle, remained standing as a tribute to the wisdom of indigenous people.

More troubling was the possibility that this was yet another manifestation of the disconnected-from-nature consciousness that I was struggling to understand: white settlers living in an urban environment pretending to be more Native than Native Americans, and preaching to other urbanites about the virtue of the deeply interconnected natural world. Talk about cultural appropriation.

With the bitter taste of this experience still lingering, I reconciled myself to not raising questions about the bonsai exhibit. I even let go of my more practical fallback fantasy of leaving tiny cards with lines from “Sick Plum Blossom” in the bonsai exhibition hall. Such surrender was difficult, because I could easily anticipate the vibes of disappointment I would get from the bonsai that had cracked ki’s ceramic prison. Ki had sent a message to those who looked carefully. It was the bonsai hall’s equivalent of a message in a bottle. Had I picked up and tossed this desperate plea back into an ocean of misunderstanding?

You see, once you begin to imagine how plants and other natural kin feel and once you open yourself to what they actually have to say, both wonderful and deeply troubling awareness descends.

Then it occurred to me: Perhaps the message was not about one plant’s escape dream. Maybe what I saw was a wake-up call about breaking out of the boundaries of our thinking about human relationships with nature.

I was forced to step back yet again to rethink my dilemma about how and when to act upon my emerging Native American consciousness. I returned to personal connections that informed me of other forms of rootedness in Montréal. I returned to the fact that my French Canadian ancestor had left Montréal in the late eighteenth century for the wilderness, where he married into the Potawatomi. His indigenous relatives were later uprooted and marched off their forested ancestral lands in what is now the Chicago area and the Michigan peninsula and violently and temporarily transplanted in the Kansas prairie, only to be uprooted again and retransplanted into the Oklahoma desert, each time having to adapt to radically different physical surroundings.

And if my spiritual imagination serves me, the spirits of some of those ancestors returned northward, disguised as coyotes, to our ancestral lands. They then bred with wolves and now inhabit the forests and meadows around our house in Vermont, where they are known as Coy-Wolves. They mingle with the soaring hawks, owls, and plants, who have all been patiently struggling to collectively enlighten me about what we need to attempt together.

The spiral of these ruminations embraced and captured me, looping past, present, and future into one thread leading back to the same haunting questions: What is the human potential for engaging directly with nature? What does this capacity actually amount to in the twenty-first century? What are the possibilities for Native American sensibilities to inform such capacity?

At this juncture, I encountered another complication: a provocative book, Gavin Van Horn’s The Way of Coyote: Shared Journeys in the Urban Wilds. The book forced me to examine my assumptions about spiritual connections with nature in urban settings. I learned, once again, that examining our least tested assumptions can be demanding and emotionally exhausting. But often it is also where something akin to enlightenment begins. The path to enlightenment is zigzaggy.

Van Horn writes about his personal spiritual experiences with coyotes and a wide range of flora and fauna in and around Chicago. Many of these encounters occur in very small urban green spaces, which the author calls “urban wilds.” In one account, he extols the merits of hiking on a greenway path built upon an abandoned elevated train track high above street level.

My initial reaction was to recoil and see this as the tragedy of the bonsai writ large. Miles of greenery, with their roots suspended high above the earth below, which itself is paved and so disturbed as to no longer resemble a complex, living woodland ecosystem. “Wild? Really?” I asked.

The fact that Van Horn is writing about industrial society built on the forest homeland of my Potawatomi ancestors made his claims to spiritual connections with nature all the more troubling. White settler descendants extolling their spiritual connections to a paved-over and dug-up version of the natural world where my ancestors lived? At first glance, this was nearly impossible to accept.

When Van Horn wrote about his sense of kinship with urban coyotes, once again my initial reaction was to cringe. How could he possibly use language, and even playful fictitious stories that were so similar to mine, to describe his encounters with coyotes who live on pesticideand herbicide-saturated golf courses jammed in between superhighways and shopping malls? My relationship with Coy-Wolf happens in the Vermont forest and meadowlands surrounding my house, in a rural setting where Coy-Wolves enjoy something approximating unlimited free range. Not only are the species we describe different, but might not their spiritual well-being and psychological states be unbridgeably dissimilar? How could I compare my experience of being welcomed to the neighborhood by Coy-Wolves roaming free to Van Horn’s encounters with coyotes dodging cars on superhighways and scrounging garbage in backyards? Grrr! Coy-Wolf howls of protest.

When Van Horn described how well peregrine falcons manage in an urban landscape whose skyscrapers vaguely resemble the cliffs where these raptors traditionally dwell, I nearly lost it. He enthusiastically describes their remarkable adaptability. But looking at this from a peregrine’s perspective, I questioned whether mere survival could even be vaguely connected with any possible concept of thriving. So I researched how peregrines and other migratory birds fare in urban areas. It turns out that these same “welcoming urban habitats,” where well-intentioned urbanites build nesting boxes on building ledges, along with the light they emit in major migratory paths, are responsible for an estimated one hundred million to one billion bird deaths yearly across the country.⁹ Birds collide with windows, and their dead bodies accumulate on the sidewalks below. Does this not undermine the claim that densely settled humans and wildlife can comfortably inhabit the same space?

While reading Van Horn’s book I encountered an article in a science magazine about chimpanzees losing their own cultural and adaptive practices, such as using sticks and stones as tools, when they come into contact with humans.¹⁰ This depressing news raised questions beyond those of the mere physical survival of species. It raised questions about the well-being of our kin of the meadowlands, forests, waterways, and sky, and the preservation of their knowledge.

I apologize, dear reader, for this short journey into the now familiar territory of depressing daily news about the degradation of the Earth’s ecosystem. Unlike the media, which have learned that such stories attract readers’ eyes for would-be advertisers, I am not attempting to exploit emotional environmental news to capture and hold attention. I hope to show that there is currently a small but potentially huge and hopeful silver lining in these dark clouds.

The sword needed to cut the Gordian knot of concerns I had wrapped around myself appeared when I finally allowed myself to identify with the sensibilities that Gavin Van Horn so wonderfully records in his book. Van Horn reveals a genuine and profound sense of joy and celebration at feeling connected to the natural world, if only sporadically and in small, green wild pockets in an otherwise desolate urban wilderness.

Then as I read and reread parts of his text, I sensed hope, sometimes desperate hope, hope against the odds, that reason and science place like tripping stones in our path. Van Horn’s defiance of reasonable evidence that the glass is three-quarters empty rather than one-quarter full reminded me of my college readings of the existentialist philosophers whose worldview grew in large part out of the devastation of World War II. Witnessing so much of human indecency and so much basic morality upended, they argued that it is humanity’s destiny and responsibility to affirm meaning, even in the face of overwhelming evil and absurdity. Even in the face of what they saw as a godless universe.

I see Van Horn, living and working with the Center for Humans and Nature in Chicago, as a similar affirmation of the urgent need to keep our sensibilities about and with the natural world alive, against all odds and in the face of daily challenges. Even in the rubble of postmodern urban society. I finally came to see The Way of Coyote as an ethical affirmation rather than an empirically grounded perspective.

My overzealous rural elitism and the mindset of a new convert to Native American spirituality were finally brought within bounds as I read Liu Yang’s interviews with urban gardeners in Chengdu.¹¹ Here I found a much-needed dose of evidence suggesting that I think with more humility. In page after page of rich transcripts buried in a Ph.D. dissertation, speaking in their own words, young and old, highly educated and less formally educated former denizens of the Chinese countryside describe their heroic efforts to cling to and revitalize connections with the natural world. They seamlessly combine practical objectives, such as a desire to have safe and affordable food, with spiritual objectives, such as a desire to feel intimately connected with a part of the world of nature and the world of their ancestors. Often they conduct their activity in tiny plots of disturbed land tucked between apartment buildings or near railroad tracks, on rooftops, or on balconies. Some of the passages I read could have been written by contemporary Native Americans, or even by my ancestors, who lived centuries ago on what is now Van Horn’s home turf.

Van Horn and Liu Yang’s findings all point to a similar conclusion: there is quite possibly something innate in humans that compels us to seek connection with nature, even if it is with a bonsai plant, an abovestreet urban greenway on a former railway bed, or in a rooftop vegetable garden ten floors above street level in the polluted air of a Chinese city. This allowed me to answer the question of whether or not it is possible to cultivate a personally meaningful connection with nature in a disturbed and human-built environment. I can now say that my answer is yes.

However, I still believe that prolonged immersed contact in the natural world, as my ancestors enjoyed, and as I enjoy to a degree in Vermont, is more nourishing to the human soul than struggling to overcome material and spiritual obstacles in order to occasionally connect with nature in an urban environment. I believe that there is a qualitative difference between a relationship with some slice of the natural world and an intimate and ongoing daily reciprocal relationship with an enveloping nature. That difference is of great significance not only for us, the two-legged, but also for the four-legged, winged ones, and rooted creatures that share the planet with us.

The distinction between focusing on nature-derived benefits solely for humans, as opposed to a reciprocal, mutually caring relationship between humans and nature, is critical. This distinction is thrown into relief by two high-profile perspectives in mainstream society.

First is the now fashionable academic habit of referring to the benefits of nature to human society as “ecosystem services.” Part of the motivation behind this approach to economically valuing nature is to arm environmentalists, who have long been disadvantaged by having economic cost arguments used against their efforts. By monetizing the benefits of a healthy ecosystem (or so the argument goes), policy makers can argue that expenditures for nature protection yield measurable economic benefits; therefore they are an investment and not an expense. For example, cleaner air reduces medical expenses for asthma treatment. While there is truth in this argument, it is extremely anthropocentric. It also opens the door to a perilous line of reasoning implying that nature with no demonstrable economic “service” is less important, or even unimportant.

Second, and equally anthropocentric, is another fashionable perspective that superficially appears to be nature-friendly, but actually leaves Mother Nature and our natural kin as subservient to our needs. I refer to the growing host of activities surrounding biophilia. The term was popularized by Edward O. Wilson’s 1984 book Biophilia, although the concept had been introduced decades earlier by Erich Fromm, a pioneering psychologist who used the idea to refer to the innate human need for intimate connection with nature.

Many seek to capitalize on this need. The Montreal Botanical Garden’s annual butterfly exhibition is one example. This urge also accounts in part for the global ecotourism industry. Ecotours routinely offer opportunities to commune with nature, spend time with wild animals, or meditate in wild places. Japan, one of the world’s most densely populated countries, has made “forest bathing” part of its health care culture. Millions of people go to the forest or urban gardens and parks to get their nature fix. A book by Florence Williams with that title, The Nature Fix, discusses how humans benefit from immersion in nature and suffer from “nature-deficit disorder.”

I find much of this line of reasoning to be well grounded in science. It also resonates with my own personal experience. However, I am concerned with the term fix. It refers to an unhealthy drug dependency and invokes an overmedicated culture that seeks immediate solutions from a bottle when social and cultural remedies are called for. In fact much of Williams’s book focuses on quick-fix solutions to our societal disconnect from the world of nature. This is not just the author’s perspective. The notion is deeply embedded in a centuries-old assumption that nature is there for our benefit and for our taking. If such a variation on biophilia wedded to a “nature fix” translates as love of nature in contemporary society, then it is a possessive, narcissistic form of infatuation, not a mutually respectful and caring relationship.

For this reason, I am concerned about quick-fix, urban, service-oriented views of nature engagement.

Uprooted Indigenous Culture

Recognizing the distinction between some meaningful connection with nature and an ongoing intimate connection with nature returns me to the question of how contemporary Native Americans are coping with the postcolonial legacy of being uprooted from ancestral homelands. In fact, they confront not only a dilemma but a trilemma.

This is more than a semantic distinction. It acknowledges a complexity that adds more than just one additional option to the proverbial two horns of a dilemma. A trilemma creates complexity more akin to an order of magnitude. It introduces the potential of debilitating confusion.

This becomes evident if we examine the Native American dilemma of two paths to connecting with the natural world: (1) a heroic, against-all-odds struggle to recapture intimate, continual connections with nature, and (2) some less demanding form of occasional, personally meaningful engagement. But there is a third option: to abandon any pretense of placing a high moral value on human-nature spiritual connectivity in our daily lives. I fear that this option is far more inviting and widespread than most of us in the Native American community wish to acknowledge.

Assuming a posture of indifference to disconnects from the natural world is seductive, because it allows us to escape our discomfort over the damage we have done and are doing to Mother Earth. This is not just some “liberal” hypersensitivity found only in educated urban elites. It is the existential guilt most of us, Native and mainstream, feel because in our heart of hearts, and perhaps in our genes, we know that the Earth is our mother. Mother Earth is being raped and much of the time we are nonparticipating but nonintervening witnesses. We are complicit, like frat-house brats who know what is happening upstairs during a drunken party that is out of control. We turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the calls for help.

As social critics often claim, this posture of indifference to the fate of nature is not the sole province of anthropocentric capitalist exploiters. The posture lies buried deep within the core of most Western, and many modern, worldviews. I am not referring only to economic systems, but also to our dominant philosophies and religions. Humans are widely considered to be superior to the realm of nature, which is viewed as some “thing” placed here to serve our needs, so that we should not hesitate to maintain our hegemony over, and separation from, nature. Challenging this largely unexamined position is deeply threatening.

I am not exempt from the desire to escape from what often feels like a burdensome responsibility for protecting Mother Earth. That is the whole point behind my attempt to be honest about the extreme ambivalence I feel when I stand before the bonsai tree or have a butterfly from the “Butterflies Go Free” exhibition alight on my arm. I too struggle with the tendency, after being seized by remorse, to seek refuge from guilt and to avoid committing to a solution, which I know is going to put me in a very awkward position with my own interests and my social standing as a “reasonable person.”

Although it may come as a surprise, the notion of near irrelevancy of human-nature connections, particularly for urban residents, even has currency in the contemporary Native American world. This is nowhere more evident than in the highly reviewed novel There There by Tommy Orange. To be fair, the author is attempting to address the neglected topic of contemporary urban life of Native Americans. In Orange’s example, this is Oakland, California, about as far from natural wilderness as one can get.

As Orange explains, many of these urban Indians, or their parents, were forcibly transplanted to cities under the Indian Relocation Act of 1956. At this time, in an effort to reduce the financial burden of honoring treaty obligations to tribes, the federal government discontinued recognition and decreased funding for some tribes. Indians were encouraged to relocate to urban areas. Incentives such as relocation cost grants and job training programs were promised but not always provided. With or without relocation assistance, the cultural shock was devastating. Many Indians were turned into the equivalent of human bonsai plants, their roots pruned and their outward forms cruelly altered.

In this context Tommy Orange’s words assume particular poignancy. In his novel’s prologue, he asserts, in words echoing and perhaps mocking those of the reimagined Chief Seattle, previously discussed:

Urban Indians were the generation born of the city. We’ve been moving for a long time, but the land moves with you like memory. An Urban Indian belongs to the city, and the cities belong to the earth. Everything here is formed in relation to every other living thing and non-living thing from the earth, all our relations. The process that brings anything to its current form—chemical, synthetic, technological, or otherwise—doesn’t make the product not a product of the living earth. Buildings, freeways, cars—are these not of the earth? . . . Urban Indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. We came to know the Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the redwoods in Oakland hills better than any deep forest. We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread—which isn’t traditional, like reservations aren’t traditional, but nothing is original, everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing. Everything is new and doomed. We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being an Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.¹²

Orange buys into the notion that indigenous culture and identity are portable, hovering, disembodied abstractions. This is apparent when he states that “the land moves with you like memory.” Orange is denying the importance of rootedness in nature for Native Americans, while paradoxically affirming the importance of place. For him, Oakland, California, is home, the place. Indian culture is a powwow in a giant coliseum, the place where his novel ends in tragedy.

It is ironic that Orange echoes so much of the destructive misunderstanding of Native American culture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For anthropologists and ethnographers of that era, the essence of pan-Indianness, and the uniqueness of individual Indian tribes, could be captured and reduced to placeless qualities. For example, before Franz Boas helped to establish modern anthropology, Indianness was reduced to race, and Indians could be identified by skull shape and size. Boas, a nineteenth-century German Jew, presciently saw the dangers and scientific fallacies involved in this kind of thinking, and then abandoned and openly challenged it.^*22

However, the very anthropology and ethnography that Boas helped to found sought to capture the essence of “vanishing Indians” in large part by gathering up material aspects of Indian life, their artifacts. For Boas it was masks that fascinated him. Anthropologists acquired such items, removing them from their cultural context, and put them into museum collections. How many of us have visited natural history museums with dioramas displaying the habitats of extinct and exotic animals? Then we walk into an adjoining wing and see more dioramas, with mannequins dressed in authentic Indian clothing, surrounded by Indian artifacts, doing authentic Indian things. The not-so-hidden message of these displays is that Indian people have become or are about to become extinct, just like the showcase animals.

This premature declaration of the extinction of Native peoples became a self-fulfilling prophecy that facilitated government efforts to break many remaining Native American peoples’ connection with their land. After all, as policy thinking went, indigenous people had virtually ceased to exist as sustainable tribes anyway. Ethnographers were dispatched to capture the final remaining traces of Indian stories and ceremonial practices.^†23

In her essay unmasking the assumptions of salvage anthropology (“Why White People Love Franz Boas; or The Grammar of Indigenous Dispossession”), Audra Simpson documents why mainstream culture was fascinated by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropology: it confirmed and legitimized the belief that indigenous cultures could be preserved in disembodied form, uprooted, and removed from ancestral lands.¹³ Anthropology saw Indians as trees that could be preserved in bonsai containers and fenced-in arboretums, without the nurturing threads of mycorrhizal networks connecting the web of plant life. Perhaps a more apt analogy would be eighteenth- and nineteenth-century botanists’ practice of tearing leaves and flowers from rooted plants and then pressing them flat and lifeless in specimen books to be “preserved.”

Where do Native Americans stand in this discussion? It would be a mistake to use Tommy Orange’s prologue to draw sweeping conclusions about contemporary Native American perspectives on spiritual attachment to specific lands and ancestral places. Passionate proclamations about the importance of such connections are to be found widely in the writings and utterances of many prominent Native Americans. Authors like Winona La Duke articulately advocate a Native American spirituality that is rooted in an intimate connection with nature. The writings of Kimmerer have confirmed the ability of Native Americans to combine science and connectedness with nature in a manner that resonates with a broad readership both mainstream and Native.

The importance of connectedness to land and nature is evident in highly publicized public struggles between Native Americans and resource extraction companies, which erupt frequently and often focus on land rights. Sometimes the disputes involve explicit treaty obligations that are being abrogated. More often disputes involve treaty rights involving public lands beyond the boundaries of a reservation as with disputes over hunting and fishing rights “off the rez” in the Great Lakes region. Indians there are still arrested, shot at, and physically attacked for exercising treaty rights that guarantee their traditional sources of food, not to mention the maintenance of their cultures.

Clearly many Native Americans remain deeply connected to the natural world even as they live with one foot planted in contemporary society. Meanwhile, other off-the-reservation Indians, like me, are rediscovering diminished or nearly extinguished connections with the land and are struggling to rekindle direct engagement with the natural world.

So many of us in the twenty-first century are in the same boat. We have much to learn from indigenous people who have struggled, against all odds, to preserve their traditional spirituality and connections with Mother Earth. It is at this interface of indigenous and mainstream cultures that the potential for cultural transformation is greatest precisely because the differences are so great and the creative tensions so wonderfully provocative. It is here that the embers of a new kind of environmentalism, rooted in an understanding of intimate connections with Mother Earth, may be rekindled.

I found support for this notion in Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. She dedicates an entire chapter, titled “You Want an Army? Indigenous Rights and the Power of Keeping Our Word,” to examining the implications of indigenous peoples’ legal and spiritual claims to ancestral lands. It is appropriately one of the more optimistic episodes in the book. She draws heavily upon her Canadian roots, and the comparatively stronger legal, social, and cultural status of Canada’s First Nations people. Unlike Native Americans, Canada’s indigenous people have control over, or at least significant influence within, vast tracks of resource-rich territory.

Much to her credit, Klein does not view indigenous land claims merely as opportunities for temporary issue-based protest movement alliances. She makes it clear that the most important contribution of indigenous people to environmental protection is their spiritual connection to the land and the wisdom of their cultures, which view a reciprocal relationship with Mother Earth as paramount. She paints a scenario in which indigenous land claims buy time by stalling rapacious resource extraction projects driven by short-term thinking and capitalist greed; and with this time, a new land ethic and a spiritual relationship with nature takes root beyond the confines of indigenous society. How wonderfully ironic it would be if settler-colonial society were rescued from its own self-destructive impulses by the very culture it sought to destroy.

I don’t see this cultural transformation merely as a moderate adjustment in personal spiritual connections, or as delivering intermittent doses of daily escape from the nature alienation of urban life, as is sought in forest bathing. I believe that Klein is describing, and prescribing, a deeper and more radical shift in North American society. If her vision comes true, Sick Plum Blossom bonsai may yet be replanted on a sacred mountain and tended by future generations as well as by the spirits of nurturing ancestors and our forest kin.

Such an aspiration can be kept alive in part by urban residents, be they descendants of white settlers or indigenous tribal members, who find refuge and spiritual strength in a plant on the windowsill, a walk on an abandoned elevated railroad track greenway, or a rooftop garden.

We, Native Americans, mainstream European settler descendants, Mother Earth, and our natural kin need all the allies we can muster.

That leaves one remaining question concerning the welfare of the rooted ones, the four-legged ones, and the winged ones. My musings have focused mostly on the spiritual well-being of humans in various wild and human built environments. With the exceptions of noting peregrine and migratory bird deaths, a struggle in a bonsai container, and the contradictions in a butterfly exhibit, I have taken a rather anthropocentric approach to the concept of intimate connections with nature.

I want to address the issue of our natural kins’ spiritual lives and connections, their well-being, their expressed desire for more connectivity with real nature, and their rights. However, to do this adequately I would need more than a few additional paragraphs, or even a few more chapters. I would need an entire book.

At this point in my journey of rediscovery, I simply wish to acknowledge that the field of studying plant and animal communications, culture, and even feelings is a rapidly developing area of study. Scientific evidence is confirming the central assumption of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK): our kin are alive and conscious. We, the two-legged ones, are not alone in suffering from rootlessness. We are not alone in desperately seeking meaningful and intimate continual (re)connections with Mother Earth.

Consequently, for the coming critical decades, those of us rerooting ourselves and our spirits will be hearing and feeling the beckoning call of Mother Earth and her creatures as they reach out to us, guide us, seek our assistance, and show gratitude for our caring.

Like my bonsai friend in the Botanical Garden cracking a ceramic container, none of us needs to accept rootlessness as a permanent condition. We can begin pushing beyond current boundaries regardless of our location. We can hold on to our dream and use our instincts to reconnect with the Earth.