Reflections on Land by Patty Krawec

Day 1 of 5: I want the land to want me back

I thank the land for their gift of being
make it promises I hope to fulfill
we don’t yet know the other’s language, so I smile
and a week or a month later blooms smile back at me
I sing them ceremony songs and Broadway hits
to let them know who I am
we are relatives

I want the land back, yes
but even more
I want the land to want me back
each the other’s missing piece
our jigsaw edges fitting together
in a long-awaited embrace

I think often of the scene early in Steinbeck’s book Grapes of Wrath where the tenant farmers are pleading with the representatives of the bankers who own the property. The men are facing eviction from land that they had obtained through the allotment process that happened in Oklahoma, a massive giveaway in the late 19th century that broke up reservations and led to the displacement and impoverishment of so many Cherokee, Choctaw, and others that the US government enacted more legislation to stop it. The men in Steinbeck’s novel point to their relationship with the land that goes beyond a piece of paper. Grandpa killed Indians, Pa killed weeds and snakes. But the land is silent. Like ancient mourners in the Bible, the land covered herself in dust and mourned. She mourned for those that Grandpa killed, people that the land has been in relationship with long before the latecomers came to this place. Maybe she mourned for the cruelty being shown to these tenant farmers as well, layers of violence done on top of the land. I often think of what the land holds onto and remembers, the stories that it absorbs along with bloodshed for and on it.

As an Ojibwe person, I want the land back, but I want the land to want me back too, to put my hands in the waters and feel relationship rather than silence, to go beyond the extractive relationship of how the land makes me feel and think about how my presence and my actions make the land feel.

Take some time today to listen to the land. Not to listen for what God may be saying to you through the land but to the land itself. Listen to the land, to what it remembers. Pay attention to the trees, consider how old they are and what more recent memories they may hold. What memories they draw up from the ground. Listen to the world that is around you, what is it trying to tell you?

Day 1 of 5: I want the land to want me back

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