Disrupt the Story of the Land
The “lookout” contract
A road trip is full of possibilities. With the flexibility of time to take one of those turn-offs, there's a chance to see something with fresh eyes. At the beginning of July, a couple of years ago, a friend and I drove from Portland, Oregon, to Reno, Nevada, in the United States. It was new territory—volcanic territory—that pulled us up to a fire lookout and down into a cave.
In the northeast corner of California, just west of Highway 139, the Timber Mountain Lookout beckoned us off the highway. Wendy (waving in the photo below) toured us around her summer home, a place to keep an eye on things and send out the alert when there are 'smokes' -- the evidence of fire.
Wendy waving from her lookout. Photo: Beth Sanders.
Wendy has all she needs in her lookout. It is a tiny home up high above the trees, with all she needs to look after herself and keep an eye on the land. She has a kitchen, a bed, maps, cameras and lenses.
It is a place of solitude, the quiet and peaceful kind, or the solitude that comes with a surrounding storm's proximity. It is a place with few human and many animal visitors, but contact with fellow humans is the point. Wendy and her fellow lookout colleagues are in contact with each other and the broader emergency response system. In her lookout life, she is alone and part of a larger endeavour.
We created these lookouts to keep ourselves safe from fire. We chose to make these structures at suitable locations and create a means for the people working in the lookouts to identify with precision the location of "smokes" for their emergency services colleagues on the ground to investigate and, if necessary, fight a fire that threatens homes and livelihoods.
(NOTE: Four wildfires burned in the vicinity of the Timber Mountain Lookout in the summer of 2020. https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2020/)
The lookouts come with a contract—the one who resides in the lookout looks for things we cannot see on our behalf. And we who receive their messages trust that what they name is worthy of investigation.
I wonder, who are the other people on the lookout for us, in different ways? And are we willing to receive their messages?
The dark story we don’t want to hear
As we left the view from the lookout behind us, we followed a little road that took us to the depths and darkness of the nearby lava tube caves and visitor centre at the Lava Beds National Monument. This second pause in our road trip shone a light on a dark story our dominant culture does not like to hear: we settlers arrived to colonize North America and kill or displace people already here.
The path into a well-lit lava tube cave. Photo: Beth Sanders.
For me, a cave is dark and unfamiliar terrain, a world that is unsettling and uncomfortable. Strange to me, yet intimately familiar to the Modoc people who have left evidence of having lived here for 14,000 years.
When European traders and settlers arrived in the early 1800s, there was displacement and a change in the way of life. Then displacement turned into state-sponsored extermination, and California's state legislature funded a campaign to kill Native people: state-sponsored genocide.
A standoff between the colonizers and the Modoc people (who resisted ill-treatment and displacement to reserves and wished to reunite themselves with their homeland) involved the Modoc vanishing into the caves they knew intimately. Outnumbered 10-1, over the winter of 1872-1873 (the Modoc War), their knowledge of the land allowed them to resist and survive.
The Modoc, who know the story of the land most intimately -- where to find water, where to find food, what makes adequate shelter, the stories of the land and sky that sustain life and a thriving culture -- were killed or forcibly removed from their homeland to a reservation in Oklahoma. The stewardship of the land changed dramatically.
The colonizers began a process to reclaim the land for homesteading. Between 1908 and 1930, Tule Lake was drained and converted to farmland. By lottery out of a pickle jar, the colonial government gave the land to homesteaders. A stunning map in the visitor center tells the tale.
The Tule Lake Division Homestead Openings 1922-1948. Public map at the Lava Beds National Monument.
The vast majority of the lake was converted to farmland. What remained of the waterbody was labelled "Tule Lake Restricted Sump."
The language of the colonizer story
Our settler/colonizer language is fascinating:
re*claim
verb
retrieve or recover (something previously lost, give, or paid); obtain the return of.
bring (waste land or land formerly underwater) under cultivation.
Our language reveals what we thought of the land and the people who lived on it:
The land is ours to take.
Indigenous use of the land is unproductive.
Settler use of the land is more productive.
Indigenous people are not productive.
Settler people are productive.
Indigenous people are inferior.
Settler people are superior.
We had our idea of how to use the land, and deeming ourselves and our ideas to be superior, we occupied the land. We killed and forcibly removed people to do so, and now we non-Indigenous people call it our homeland.
My colonization family lineage
I feel connected to the Modoc's story because it helps me see my family land lineage more clearly. Similarly, in central Alberta, the colonial government distributed land to homesteaders, including my Norwegian great-grandparents. In another branch of my family, grandparents bought land along a lakeshore, with many other people of settler lineage, to serve as a recreational property. They surround an Indian Reservation.
I also benefit from the regime that benefitted my grandparents and great-grandparents: I own land in my city that our colonial government claimed for the settlement of non-Indigenous people. Many Indigenous people feel the land my city—and "my" land—sits on was stolen. My family lineage benefits from the land we assumed to be ours for the taking.
And here I choose how far to go into this cave, and I have at least two stories from which to choose.
If I choose to believe that since my people were stronger and superior, no reparations are needed. It is a story in which there is no room for weakness, especially mine. There is no room to accept that my people before me did anything wrong. (Or if I admit they did, there is nothing I have done wrong.) When you're a winner, you enjoy the spoils, and when you're a loser, you have to buck up and take it. I'm at the entrance of a cave, and I don't feel comfortable going into the darkness. I don't want to acknowledge how I continue to reap the benefits of living in a system that works to raise my people and put others down.
A different story will take me into the cave, where I am uncomfortable and in the dark, unsure how to make my way forward. It is the settler/colonizer story, where I take intergenerational responsibility for my people's actions decades and centuries ago. It is a story where I accept that I am part of the settler/colonizer culture, one with a stance of superiority and power that continues to benefit from having taken land. I am part of the settler/colonizer culture that experiences unearned privilege because of my ancestors' actions. I am part of the culture that propagates this old story: we settler people are better than Indigenous people.
“I am part of the culture that propagates this old story: we settler people are better than Indigenous people.”
Colonial training
We reveal the story we live in the stories we tell about the land we live on, whether the land of the Modoc or the Plains Cree, and several other peoples, where I live. I was conditioned, as I grew up, and as I was trained as a city planner, to think about two things: 1) the geography and nature of the land (topography, water systems, plant life, geology, etc.), and 2) the story of settlers on the land. I paid some attention to the Indigenous people who traverse these time horizons, but not an appropriate amount. Our pattern is to behave as though a group of people did not and does not exist.
How we tell the story of the land and people is changing. The usual story I tell and hear, as a settler/colonizer, is the big story of nature and natural processes, and then the story of settling the land. We learn to tell the story as though no one was here when we arrived. We tell the story as if there were no humans of worth here.
Yes, Medicine Lake is a volcano that has been active for over 500,000 years, with the last eruption 950 years ago. Yes, the Oregon Trail and the Applegate Trail are significant stories of European "discovery" and settlement of western North America. Yes, the Lava Beds National Monument acknowledges, rather than hides, the story of the Modoc. Still, the stories of settler/colonizer triumph, the hardship, the hard work, the heroes, and the defeated that thrive. We avoid looking at the stuff that makes us uncomfortable. We avoid looking at the things that erode the security of our superiority pedestal.
The new story will acknowledge this more widely.
“We avoid looking at the things that take us off the security of our superiority pedestal.”
Adjusting to a new story is not comfortable
My friend and I went into one easy-to-travel (and lit!) cave. There are many deeper, darker and challenging caves to explore. As I write, I imagine myself in a place of solitude up on Wendy's lookout on Timber Mountain. I learn some peaceful things about myself, and I also witness the disturbance of stormy weather within myself.
There is a series of caves I have only begun to explore as a settler/colonizer of North America:
I do not understand and acknowledge my people's role in the story of displacement and genocide of North America's Indigenous Peoples.
I do not fully understand the implications of my people's arrival and settlement, that it involved a desire to explicitly "kill" and "terminate" the people we called Indians.
I continue to live in a story of superiority over Indigenous Peoples.
My family and I have benefited from and received the privileges that come with our predecessors' actions.
I do not fully understand or acknowledge the explicit and subtle ways this story of superiority runs in my life.
I learned to remain unconscious of the ways the story of superiority runs my life.
I feel threatened by the "loss" I perceive to lessen my attachment to what I "own."
The story of the land we live on is not singular. The story I grew up with, the dominant narrative, conditions me and us to believe in a superior people. And this story works very hard to maintain its position of dominance. To erode the power of that story, I must make room for others' stories of the land and our relationships with the land.
I must welcome both the view from the lookout and step into the cave. I must make room in my life for disruption, for stories that make me feel uncomfortable.
REFLECTION
What stories—that others are sharing about their experiences—make you feel uncomfortable?
When you hear others' experiences, what makes you feel uncomfortable? (Be as precise and as honest as you can be with yourself.)
What support do you need, from yourself or from others, to raise your tolerance of your inner discomfort?