contending with belonging
As I returned to Massachusetts, the place I was raised, as a young adult, I found refuge in the natural world. A ritual I would also do as a high schooler. I returned to similar places. There is a bench by a swampy meadow in my hometown that is one of my most cherished places. I love the way the light is there. It is a short walk to get to it, but the walk is long enough that I am transported from day to day living to the magic of being surrounded by trees and soil and birds. Last fall I visited this bench, after having not been for a few years.
This is a place I feel home-ness, yet I am not Indigenous to this place. I am here, and I got here through a complex and violent process of colonization. And that process my ancestors went through to move from Europe to America was sometimes being recruited to work in an iron mill, sometimes to escape an unsafe political shift, sometimes to attempt to find better economic potential, and many other stories I have yet to hear or uncover. In doing this they contributed actively and passively to the building of America which was founded on the murder and removal of many Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of many Africans.
There is a very big asterisk next to my belonging in Massachusetts. Yet I feel completely settled and myself on this bench. A bench I sought refuge on, when things were difficult at other parts of my life. I came here to find pause, and beauty, and Earth’s rhythms, and bright warm sunlight.
I am asking:
Do I belong?
I want to belong
Can i tolerate not belonging?
Where do I belong?
The land and the seasons feel most familiar here in Massachusetts. Does that mean I belong here? A New Zealand scholar, Amba Sepie describes what belonging to a place means to them:
"To belong to a place - to really belong - is to see the same tracts of land, rocky outcrops, tributaries, and watery curves of ocean and stream through the many eyes of those who have shared the view across countless generations. It is to know what the soil and skin of Earth tastes like in this place and no other. So how do you ask the land to recognize you when you were not taught to recognize her in this way?" (2021, p. 22)
There is a real complexity to belonging as a white settler. I feel the wanting to belong, yet know in many ways I don’t belong. A belonging with an asterisk, and important and necessary asterisk.
Building intimacy with the natural world helps me feel the ways in which I do belong. Belonging through being with the process of unlearning the conditioning of the settler. I’m asking what becomes possible in the white settler body when connecting with land to build a relationship rather than extract?
I am alive, I am human, I am white, I am here on purpose, I care, I care deeply, I am breathing, I am alive, my body is colonized, my body is socialized, I am breathing, I am dirt, I am life, I am death, I am here, I am finding belonging