Learning the Lessons of the Common Plantain: Rethinking Private Forest Stewardship as Forest Kinship
Learning the Lessons of the Common Plantain: Rethinking Private Forest Stewardship as Forest Kinship
Kathleen J. Ryan
Montana State University
I often sit on my front steps contemplating the plants, trees, and land where I live in southwestern Montana, once Absáalooke (Crow) territory, and a place through which the Siksika (Blackfoot), Séliš (Flathead), Nimiipuu (Nez Perce), Shoshoni, and Sioux also traveled. While native Douglas fir, ninebark, and serviceberry dominate the mountain scene, pineapple weed, clover, and plantain all grow in the packed-down gravel driveway. These plants thrive in disturbed areas all summer, but my attention is on the common plantain, plantago major, because of Robin Wall Kimmerer. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer, a member of the Potawatomi nation and a botanist, invites her non-Native readers, like me, to be like the common plantain, a plant that came with settlers to Turtle Island and became known among Native people for its gifts of food and medicine. Kimmerer writes that, unlike kudzu or cheatgrass which strangle or displace native species, plantain’s “strategy was to be useful, to fit into small places, to coexist with others around the dooryard, to heal wounds” (214). The plantain’s story, as Kimmerer tells it, is that “it arrived with the first settlers and followed them everywhere they went. It trotted along paths through the woods, along wagon roads and railroads, like a faithful dog so as to be near them” (214). I imagine plantain followed settlers along the Bozeman Trail, a few miles from my stoop. Kimmerer goes on to describe how plantain’s gifts became known to Natives over time:
At first the Native people were distrustful of a plant that came with so much trouble trailing behind. […] When it became clear that White Man’s Footstep would be staying on Turtle Island, they began to learn about its gifts. In spring it makes a good pot of greens, before summer heat turns the leaves tough. The people became glad for its constant presence when they learned that the leaves, when they are rolled or chewed to a poultice, make a fine first aid for cuts, burns, and especially insect bites. Every part of the plant is useful. Those tiny seeds are good medicine for digestion. The leaves can halt bleeding right away and heal wounds without infection. (214)
Because of these medicinal and nutritive properties, Kimmerer writes, “This wise and generous plant, faithfully following the people, became an honored member of the plant community. It’s a foreigner, an immigrant, but after five hundred years of living as a good neighbor, people forget that kind of thing” (214). While Kimmerer tells the story of how the common plantain became naturalized, other writers do challenge this story of White Man’s Footstep, pointing to the different varieties of plantain, like plantago cordata and plantago rugelii, Natives were using pre-contact (“Plantain: Indigenous Food and Medicine”).
Nonetheless, or perhaps because of the propensity of non-native species to crowd out native plants, Kimmerer’s story is a useful teaching for how white immigrants and our descendants might follow the lessons of the common plantain to become naturalized rather than continue down the path of kudzu. Kimmerer offers us this way:
Being naturalized in place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do. (215)
So, here I sit, watching plantago major growing on my doorstep and inviting me to contemplate my potential to be useful, to coexist, to heal wounds – to live here with the understanding that how I live in relationship with this land matters to my mind, body, and spirit, and to our collective survival.
As Warren Cariou points out, Kimmerer isn’t speaking metaphorically when she offers plant teachings; rather, she invites us to “open our minds and our bodies to the possibility of noticing the stories that the land is telling us” (351). While Cariou examines Kimmerer’s stories about sweetgrass, this essay takes up her invitation to consider the common plantain. I explore what the teachings of the plantain – being useful, not taking up much space, coexisting, and healing wounds – offer me as a white woman, a professor, a tree lover, and a private forest landowner in the rural west. I see this list of the common plantain’s gifts as ways to live, as shorthand for fostering reciprocal rather than instrumental relationships with land, for developing and attending to experiential and spiritual knowledges that respect plants as persons and help cultivate more harmonious relationships with the plant world.
Learning to live like the common plantain takes shape within systems of oppression I benefit from even as I recognize the deleterious nature of hierarchical, instrumental relationships to land. It is necessary for me to pause and point to the historical, colonialist mindset and current, capitalist affordances of land ownership that grant me this contemplative opportunity and highlight the daily tension of living on this land that I love. That I may legally call this bit of Douglas fir forest “my” land is a result of historical, cultural, and religious beliefs about the superiority of Western Europeans over Indigenous people, which extend to dominion over land, too. Manifest Destiny politically and “ethically” supported the Western European belief in their “‘God-given’ right to push ever westward in search of new territories for white settlers to occupy” (Murphy 208). Deliberately dispossessing Indigenous people of their homelands through the violences of genocide, removal, assimilation, and violated or contested treaties (and their ongoing effects) forces a western, hierarchical, and instrumental view of land dominion/ownership over the communal, relational, and sacred beliefs of Natives. Diné scholar Marilyn Notah Verney summarizes these philosophical differences well:
The land viewed by Euro-Americans is seen as an object, a commodity to be owned, and viewed as an investment for profit…. By contrast, a common philosophy that is shared by all Indigenous people is that our land is sacred, holy…. Therefore, Mother Earth, as an interdependent sustainer of life, is not to be stripped, taken apart or desecrated, nor should boundaries of property (ownership) be placed upon her. (134)
Part of the legacy of living on this land then is an acknowledgment that my presence is a result of the destruction of Natives’ reciprocal and sacred relationships with Mother Earth, particularly of the Absáalooke in southwestern Montana—whose reservation’s northeastern edge is a two-hour drive east. While the Land Back movement would say I should return this land to the native community, I can’t afford to give it away, so, for now, I learn from living here and reflecting on my responsibilities as a private landowner. While the common plantain travels across property lines, I’m bound by the laws and privileges of private landownership, including the economic privilege that affords me the opportunity to live on this mountain alongside others who prefer the challenges and benefits of private forest ownership to town living. My experience in rethinking private forest stewardship as forest kinship is emplaced in dispossession, disconnection, and commodification, and in the values that brought me here and that I’ve cultivated while getting to know this particular forest. Ultimately, my hope is to help shift the legacy of the persistent western mindset oriented around white dominance and plant domination towards reciprocity and respect for human and non-human others embodied in Kimmerer’s suggestion that her non-Native readers “become naturalized to place” (214).
To engage this hope, I bring together theorizing about plant personhood and human-plant interrelationships and responsibilities with the problematic discourse of stewardship embraced as a western U.S. ideal, and my love for plants, trees, and land where I live. The site where these discourses meet is a sixteen-acre Douglas fir forest sited at 6,000 feet on the north face of Green Mountain in the northern Rockies, and my ongoing musings about what it means to live and work in this place. My goal is two-fold: to dwell in the theoretical entanglements of these discourses as a disenchanted settler colonialist on Absáalooke land to further conversations that cast off monological, hierarchical exclusionary ways of thinking and to offer a rhetorical intervention that advocates for shifting the instrumental, hierarchical ways many landowners understand and care for their land towards a sense of forest kinship, a relational and heterarchical way of being in respectful conversation with plants and other persons. Val Plumwood opens “Nature in the Active Voice” with the observation that “our immediate descendants, and perhaps many of those now living, will face the ultimate challenge of human viability: reversing our drive towards destroying our planetary habitat.” In aid of this effort, Plumwood argues for “a thorough and open rethink which has the courage to question our most basic cultural narratives.” This essay is a “rethink” of the ways some of us relate to land, through listening to the lessons of the plantain, in the hopes of living more harmoniously and equitably with the plants, persons, and places around our doorstep.
Fundamental to learning from the plantain entails better recognizing the historical western orientation towards plants as mere background for human domination and use. We westerners tend to treat plants instrumentally, merely as resources for food, clothing, and building materials. Using Matthew Hall’s Plants as Persons and Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature and Environmental Culture to sketch out the philosophical-rhetorical thinking that permits plants to be dominated and excluded from anything but use-value underscores the need to shift from a monological, hierarchical exclusion of plants based on the western privileging of reason towards a relational, heterarchical value based on mutual coexistence and responsibility, where “responsibility is about developing the openness and the sensitivities necessary to be curious, to understand and respond in ways that are never perfect, never innocent, never final, and yet always required” (van Dooren and Rose 265). In the first half of his book, Hall traces the ways plants are backgrounded and dominated in the western rhetorical-philosophical tradition by Plato and Aristotle, in the field of botany and Cartesian thought, and in the Christian tradition. Val Plumwood’s theorizing affirms Hall’s arguments and helps us see the big picture problem of the rationalist domination of nature as both unjust and constituting an ecological crisis. In general, the historically entrenched backgrounding and exclusion of plants follows from their classification as lacking rationality, higher soul levels, and the capacity for zoocentric movement.
Plumwood characterizes Plato as helping to “set up” the “story” of human mastery that her work, and environmental humanities more broadly, challenges and revises (Feminism 191). Hall likewise attributes the “emergence of instrumentalism and hierarchical ordering” to Plato’s Timaeus (22), which describes a cosmology that separates plant life from the rational souls of men. Their mindlessness renders plants “as passive creatures with no capacity for intelligence or communication” (19), according them the lowest form of Platonic soul. While Plato establishes this hierarchy of humans, Aristotle’s work in De Anima, Parts of Animals, and Nicomachean Ethics, according to Hall, “greatly expands and intensifies this process of exclusion” (22). In particular, Aristotle links exclusion more fully to instrumentality. Because plants are “inactive, mute, and insensitive,” they lack any autonomy which allows for the “untrammeled use of plant resources” by humans (Hall 25).
Hall’s review of early botanists, Cartesian thinkers, and Christian thought shows how rooted they are in these Platonic and Aristotelian perspectives. He argues that both early botanists as well as Descartes, Locke, and Bacon all followed Aristotelian dogma rather than make their own observations of plant life, “entrenching and legitimating the idea that plants are passive and naturally inferior, thus cementing and extending the norm of exclusion” (Hall 50). Hall’s reading of Christianity emphasizes that the “backgrounding of plants can be read as a deliberate move to expand human claims on the natural world while avoiding moral consequences” (70). In other words, “this constructed spiritual inferiority of plants helps to demonstrate the natural superiority of human beings and justifies the biblical-Aristotelian position that plants exist for the sake of human beings” (Hall 70). From a western perspective, humans “naturally” have dominion over plants.
This brief review of Hall’s argument illustrates Val Plumwood’s important observation of the western duality of rationalism and nature whereby “humans are seen as the only rational species, the only real subjectivities and actors in the world, and nature is a background substratum which is acted upon, in ways we do not usually need to pay careful attention to after we have taken what we want of it” (Environmental 19). Plants have been constructed in western thought as mindless, passive, and with no agency of their own. They were and often remain useful only for the ways they serve human needs and desires. Plumwood describes this thinking as “the rationality of monologue,” an epistemology which “recognizes the Other only in one-way terms, in a mode where the Others must always hear and adapt to the One, and never the other way around” (19). Rejecting this monological orientation to plants in favor of a relational one, responsible to the agency of “others” as subjects with whom we might better aim to coexist in “subject-subject encounter[s],” happily “undermines the whole basis of hegemonic anthropocentrism’” (Rose qtd. in Hall 169). For westerners like myself to learn from the plantain, we have to uncover and interrogate our western thinking to foreground this humble plant. In fact, as a plant designated as a weed, the common plantain is particularly “undesirable” (Eastman xi), a plant to pull rather than one to learn from as the “good neighbor” Kimmerer describes. In the remaining sections of this essay, I take up Kimmerer’s description of the plantain’s ability to teach me to be “naturalized in place” through the traits of becoming useful, coexisting, and healing others in hopes of offering a path of forest kinship to forest owners and western thinkers more generally. Moreover, it’s a means for me to simultaneously explore how I might practice these gifts responsibly on this land and in my scholarship. In these ways, I hope to be useful, to coexist, to help heal wounds.
Kimmerer writes that because “humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn – we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance” (9). With plantain as my teacher, I ask, how can I be useful in conversations about plants as a rhetorician and private forest “owner” in the Rocky Mountains? How can I contribute to rethinking relationships with plants and trees as relational and respectful? Kimmerer’s discussion of language as a gift and a shared responsibility, an idea that echoes Toni’s Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture about the power of language, helps activate my resistance to knowledge making endeavors that privilege the monological, whether in academic research or forest management.
Kimmerer and Morrison issue a tantalizing invitation for me to consider the generative nature of writing as a gift and responsibility. As Morrison imagines the old woman’s conversation with the children over the bird, over language, she writes, “Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency – as an act with consequences.” To think of language, writers, and readers as creating meaning together suggests a relational agency that strikingly contrasts the active, living agency assigned to humans while plants are assigned as their “enabling background or context” (Bennett 29). Kimmerer underscores that language is a specifically human gift, and she, like Morrison, pointedly invites me to reflect on the nature of my gift:
Many indigenous people share the understanding that we are each endowed with a particular gift, a unique ability. Birds to sing and stars to glitter, for instance. It is understood that these gifts have a dual nature, though: a gift is also a responsibility. If the bird’s gift is song, then it has a responsibility to greet the day with music. It is the duty of birds to sing and the rest of us to receive the song as a gift.
Asking what is our responsibility is perhaps also to ask, What is our gift? (347)
In aligning the human gift of language with birdsong and glittering stars, Kimmerer’s language “arcs toward the place where meaning may lie,” “toward the ineffable” (Morrison), and I wish to join her there. As such, I contemplate my responsibility engaging diverse scholarship in a messy entanglement of theories, identities, affiliations, experiences, and beliefs. I appreciate Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s and Shawn Wilson’s scholarship on decolonial research methodologies; Malea Powell and the Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab’s discussion of constellating as a decolonial practice; Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s explanation for why she can’t read Wallace Stegner; and Zoe Todd’s decisive critique of Bruno Latour for ignoring Indigenous’ peoples’ “millennia of engagement with sentient environments, with cosmologies that enmesh people into complex relationships between themselves and all relations” (7). These scholars challenge me to rethink my disciplinary attunements (Heard 45) and scholarly relations to find new ways of writing, especially about plants, that are more “attentive to and accountable for the ongoing impacts of colonial rule” (Todd 15). I appreciate how new materialism redistributes agency more broadly and admit my discomfort with theorizing objects and things while the gifts of plants go relatively unnoticed. I find Plumwood’s care in “making connections with animism as a worldview” without coopting Indigeneity compelling (Rose, “Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism”). I wend my way through these scholarly conversations, teasing out connections, and “bumblingly,” yet hopefully and respectfully seeking new research habits (Clary-Lemon).
For me, this methodological work means choosing relationships as subjects of study and triangulating diverse readings with my own experiences and beliefs to add my insights particularly for westernized readers. When Kimmerer writes, “Native scholar Greg Cajete has written that in indigenous ways of knowing, we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit” (47), I recognize that in academia, I have largely focused on understanding with my mind while backgrounding my body, emotions, and spirit. Here, I write with the emotional and spiritual weight of knowing that I grew up in the first praying Indian town in Massachusetts. Praying Indian towns, sometimes described as early versions of reservations, were created to “civilize” Algonquians converted by John Eliot to Christianity in the mid seventeenth century. I am mindful that I’m a twentieth century settler, a white woman living on Absáalooke land and working at a land grant university, a place whose existence is at the expense of removed Indigenous people. I am also aware that I have a sensory-emotional if not spiritual relationship with plants, trees, and land. In trying, sometimes awkwardly, to write through all aspects of my being, I come to limits of language, limits of a typical western orientation towards plants, but perhaps also thresholds of new understanding.
I have an intimate relationship with “my” land. I’ve gathered and plotted data about the slope and aspect of this mountainside; stand health and tree crown cover; types and number of grasses, forbs, and shrubs; and wildlife signs to file a forest stewardship plan with my university’s extension services. I know the common names of the plants, the sweeps and twists of the firs’ boles and boughs, and where to look for white violets in the spring. When I take a writing break, I often walk outside among the trees, reaching my hand out in greeting, getting sticky fingers because I can’t resist touching their amber teardrops and threads of sap. I tell the trees I’m writing about them and thank them for their inspiration, and suddenly, writing on behalf of their personhood doesn’t seem like such a big step.
To help with this re-thinking, I turn to a brief critique of stewardship to resist the prevailing idea of what it means to be useful, productive, or beneficial, as a forest landowner since our stewardship ethic is grounded in the same western domination, capitalism, and instrumentalism Hall and Plumwood critique. Caroline Gottschalk Druschke’s observation of stewardship as polysemous is a helpful start. However, Wallace Stegner’s legacy as a beloved conservationist and writer of the American West – he has been described as “a man many consider the West’s most eloquent twentieth-century spokesman” (Rankin 4)—has promulgated a powerful stewardship ethic rooted in domination. Ann Ronald sums up Stegner’s definition of stewardship this way: “To him, a ‘steward’ is someone in charge of the land around him, someone who consciously takes responsibility for its well-being, someone who acts upon it in ecologically sound ways” (95). Many cite Stegner’s 1960 “Wilderness Letter” for his visionary argument of the wilderness idea; however, his vision is an unapologetically monological one. In Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, Stegner writes, “I know no way to look at the world, settled or wild, except through my own eyes” (qtd. in MacDonald 279); while Stegner acknowledges his anthropocentrism and, indeed, cares deeply for the American West, he doesn’t recognize the ethical and epistemic limits of his perspective.
The MSU Extension Forestry workshop I attended in 2018 fully embraced this stewardship ethic. The workshop was full of well-meaning private forest landowners and instructors with practical and scientific expertise in forest management in Montana. Here, stewardship centered on teaching us ways foresters study land to guide us in creating forest management plans to identify short- and long-term land management goals pertaining to topics like managing land for insects, fire, and desired property traits. Because of the workshop, I know the forest around my house better from that lens. However, my participation in this workshop also led me to interrogate foundational assumptions of stewardship -- that humans can control ecosystems, that stewardship is anti-capitalist, and that we should position ourselves as land caretakers. There is a great deal of hubris in the presumption that “we are in charge” (Stegner qtd. in Ronald 97). For instance, the history of fire suppression practices begun after the Great Fire of 1910 in Idaho and Montana both created the National Forest Service as we now know it and helped set in motion problems we currently face with spruce budworm and dense, dry forests. The effects of climate change on fire in the west with predictions of rising temperatures and decreased snowpack signal an increase in the number and severity of fires, and it’s unclear to what degree current fire mitigation practices can protect humans and their property from catastrophic fire, particularly since twenty-eight of my neighbors recently lost their homes to a fire that blew up one hot, dry, and windy morning. Designing humancentric management plans for complex ecosystems is challenging and expensive. Even as workshop leaders urged us to thin our trees to manage for insects and fire, loggers will only work with private landowners who have one hundred acres or more because it’s otherwise unprofitable. There isn’t state or federal grant funding to help undertake the degree of work most less wealthy and landed forest property owners are advised to do. Capitalism and instrumental views of land ownership undeniably thread through forest management practices.
Nathaniel Rivers effectively critiques this humancentrism that also characterizes stewardship in his critique of environmental rhetoric: “By giving ourselves the responsibility to save or fix the planet, we have over-invested in our own agency, enacting the same hubris that results in dispositions toward the non-human nature that environmentalists themselves might very well (and rightly) condemn” (423). Rivers recognizes that this rhetoric “can neither fully understand nor determine the environment” and turns to new materialism and object-oriented ontology to “complicate environmental rhetorics that continue to reinscribe an unnecessary division between human and the nonhuman nature” (423). However, as Zoe Todd and others make clear, this turn has neglected Indigenous ways of knowing. Indigenous thinkers have been in kinship relations with non-human persons for millennia, and it behooves us westerners to learn from and with Indigenous people rather than erase them. Moreover, Stegner contributes to the erasure of Native people both by naming himself as a native of the northern plains and contributing to the myth of the vanishing Indians (Cook-Lynn 29). His participation in this myth disallows the past, present, and future of Natives in favor of a nostalgic settler vision that masquerades as a universal one. Stegner celebrates a settler mindset, a perspective Dakotah scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn critiques literary scholars for neither acknowledging nor challenging (38). Certainly, Bonney MacDonald’s argument in “Authoring an Authentic Place” that Stegner and Kittredge are environmental stewards and literary stewards of western literature (275) suggests she is as susceptible to the myth of stewardship and the west they both reify, as do so many other well-intentioned westerners.
Ultimately, Stegner shows me the flaws of stewardship, in spite of his concern for the places he calls home. As such, I seek to use my gift of writing as a rhetorician, my learning as a landowner, and my sensory-emotional and spiritual experiences with plants and land to challenge the ease with which the myth of stewardship perpetuates the human domination of plants and land. An additional lesson of the plantain is to fit into small places. This is a lesson of humility; learning to be a good neighbor might take me a while and surely will include missteps along the path. Still, one step on that path is understanding that white scholars like me need to thoughtfully engage with Indigenous scholarship to avoid epistemic violence that perpetuates colonialism, and to approach Indigenous thinking “not just a well of ideas to draw from but a body of thinking that is living and practiced by peoples with whom we all share reciprocal duties as citizens of shared territories (be they physical or the ephemeral)” (Todd 17 italics original). By constellating my scholarly experiences with my forest experiences and my personal history in relationship to plants, land, and those who lived here before me, I might become a “good neighbor” like the plantain. I might offer a “less terrible” gift to the world (Clary-Lemon).
Kimmerer describes loosestrife, kudzu, and cheatgrass as “foreign invaders” with the “colonizing habit of taking over others’ homes and growing without regard to limit” (214); this mindset is characteristic of many settlers and their descendants, as Stegner’s false claim to nativeness demonstrates. Kimmerer goes on to speculate that, “Maybe the task assigned to Second Man is to unlearn the model of kudzu and follow the teachings of White Man’s Footstep, to strive to become naturalized to place, to throw off the mindset of the immigrant” (214). Learning to “coexist with others around the dooryard,” like the common plantain, requires “throw[ing] off the mindset” that perpetuates a stewardship model based on white, western domination (214). With plantain as my teacher, I ask, what might coexisting mean for a non-native knower and private forest “owner”? How might coexisting help move us towards an ethic of forest kinship? To explore these questions, I consider kinship models to spark new imaginaries and ways of consciously being in reciprocal, sensory relationships with plants to disrupt the tendency towards order, rationality, and control that Elizabeth Dickinson observes as the “traditional environmental framing” of nature (33). Kimmerer’s method of observation and teachings on relationality, along with David Abram’s insights from phenomenology, guide me to slow down and move into relations with plants, trees, and lands that are more sensory, receptive, and contemplative than directive, hierarchical, and ordered. In doing so, I begin to sketch out what I mean by forest kinship as a way of “negotiating forms of neighborly kinship in the on-going project of life” (Rose, “Dialogue” 131). A heterarchical forest kinship model emerges from ways of knowing, researching, and writing that include the embodied, emotional, and ensouled work of beings working towards mutual flourishing.
Coexistence is a way of life for many Indigenous, Aboriginal, and animist peoples, and it’s often characterized by kinship between humans and more-than-humans. Anne Waters writes, “The Indigenous understanding that all things interpenetrate and are relationally interdependent embraces a manifold of complexity, resembling a world of multifariously associated connections and intimate fusions” (xxv). In “Acoma Coexistence and Continuance,” Petuuche Gilbert similarly describes “the essence of coexistence” as “always being in equal relationship” (38). Rarámuri scholar Enrique Salmón names this interconnectivity as a “kincentric ecology,” founded on a belief that humans are “kindred relations” with “the rest of the natural world” (1331). Deborah Bird Rose describes how for Australian Aboriginal people, non-humans can be both persons and kin (“Death” 137), and that “Cross-cutting categories of kin groups generate a system of looped, entangled, and enduring moral bonds of care, responsibility, accountability and exchange” (“Death” 136). Similarly, “animism is lived out in various ways that are all about learning to act respectfully (carefully and constructively) towards and among other persons” (Harvey, Animism xi). While kinship relations are not part of my given cultural, spiritual, or familial history, learning about these ways of knowing and being in the world helps me resee myself in a web of intimate relations with the plants and trees around my home, intertwined as they are with the historical, academic, and cultural legacies I describe above.
Consciously attending to sensory experiences is a way those of us not born into kincentric ecologies can develop or recognize more heterarchical, open relationships with plants includes listening. In “‘Just Listen’: ‘Listening’ and Landscape Among the Blackfeet,” Donal Carbaugh describes Blackfeet listening as a way of dwelling in the world (263). This activity entails sitting and listening in a sacred place and offering a prayer or remembering traditional activities that took or take place in that location. Blackfeet “listening” is a “highly reflective and revelatory mode of communication that can open one to the mysteries of unity between the physical and the spiritual, relationships between natural and human forms, and links between places and persons….” (262). Kimmerer’s understanding of listening invokes this perspective: “Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligences other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop” (300). While Blackfeet “listening” is unavailable to me as a white woman, these ways of listening collectively invite me to be present to the human and more than human “voices” around me. And so I sit outside in contemplation, listening to the Douglas firs moving in the wind, watching and listening to the heavy snow whoomp off branches, open to what I might learn from tuning in to the trees. Surrendering, as Jessica Restaino describes it, is a lot like this kind of listening: “I understand the concept along the lines of relational exchange, shared motion, a phenomenon of contact and mutual impact after we are changed in some way” (47). Although I lack memories of this land bred in my bones, I listen to the trees and plants in this place to open up a relationship with them that is more heterarchical and spiritually nourishing than making forest management plans.
Listening is just one aspect of Kimmerer’s observation method, drawn from a blending of her scientific and Indigenous knowledges. Kimmerer invites readers to approach observation as a subject-subject relation, a conversation with the land and plants as living, dynamic beings. Observation is embodied, located, and textured. In “Witness to the Rain,” Kimmerer wedges herself under a log in an Oregon rainforest to watch and listen to the rain while trying to stay dry. As the rain drips, she distinguishes between the “pitpitpit” of rain dripping from the hemlocks and the “bloink” of the maple drops. She locates her perceiving body in relation to the world around her. Just so as I snowshoe through the forest on a warm winter day, the snow heavy with water, and I find myself squatting down to examine the colors and textures of a branch covered with lichen—grey-green, brown, and the chartreuse of wolf lichen. Embodied observation has the capacity to return to me to an understanding of the gifts of a Douglas fir forest in the changing winter snowscape and to the possibility of reciprocating those gifts with my own. If we listen with our bodies and hearts to the beings around us, we learn, we create connections, we might make kin in the ways Donna Haraway suggests.
The power of storying sensory observation is that it might teach us reciprocity as a way of living—an ethics, an ontology, an episteme—that honors and expresses gratitude for the gifts of the earth. In reviewing Kimmerer’s book for The American Indian Quarterly, Natchee Barnd writes, “…Kimmerer expertly outlines the crucial relationships and responsibilities Native peoples have long maintained with the non-human world, relationships and responsibilities that require a fundamentally reciprocal interaction” (439). Reciprocity, Kimmerer writes, is “a matter of keeping the gift in motion through self-perpetuating cycles of giving and receiving” (165); it’s an active orientation towards living well with others through giving and receiving gifts. For example, in “Asters and Goldenrod,” Kimmerer writes that the “September pairing of purple and gold is lived reciprocity…. When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response” (47). Kimmerer also describes her father offering coffee and coffee grounds at sunrise during childhood camping trips as a “Potawatomi way of sending gratitude into the world, to recognize all that we are given and to offer our choicest thanks in return” (106). It’s time for more of us to learn to live in reciprocity, to make kin with the lichens, trees, and land.
In the context of making forest kinship, I want to pause on a matter of reading, relating, and experiencing that highlights the complicated dance of coexisting as a white woman and academic. I read David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous at the same time as Braiding Sweetgrass, and it was his discussion of phenomenology that first helped me grasp the epistemological and ontological significance of Kimmerer’s plant stories and see my own sensory experiences at enough of a remove to examine them anew. He helped put words to my experiences with the world around me when describing how the “recuperation of the incarnate, sensorial dimension of experience brings with it a recuperation of the living landscape in which we are corporally embedded” (Abram 65). However, in gifting me with the study of phenomenology, he both gave me academic justification to write about my relations with plants and an additional western layer to reading Kimmerer. I’m struck by my perceived need for theorized academic justification to talk about how I might follow the plantain and “become naturalized” to this place. Abram writes, “It is natural that we turn to the tradition of phenomenology in order to understand the strange difference between the experienced world, or worlds, of indigenous, vernacular cultures and the world of modern European and North American civilization” (31).
In reflecting on my sensory experiences on this land and considering the western history of plant exclusion and blindness, I wonder how “natural” it actually is to “turn to the tradition of phenomenology” to mediate my world and Kimmerer’s. On the one hand, it makes sense to me, in keeping with Val Plumwood’s philosophical animism, to avoid over-identification with Indigenous ways of knowing and invoke phenomenology on the way to forest kinship. On the other hand, it is strange to turn to yet another western tradition to better understand a text by a Native woman and fellow academic to better understand the sensory and cultural ways I experience snowshoeing in the forest. It unfortunately seems natural to use Abram to engage Kimmerer given the “rationality of monologue” privileged by western traditions and academia and given the distance between white and indigenous scholars in our discipline, on my western rural campus, and in communities where Indigeneity is often rendered invisible or historical. As I revised this chapter, I realized I don’t need Abram anymore; he was a helpful neighbor in my thinking, but as I remembered and trusted the sensory experiences I first cultivated as a child exploring the woods behind our New England house, and those I have gathered over time here in Montana, I see I’ve been coexisting with plants around my doorstep as long as I can remember. Writing this chapter hasn’t returned me to my senses so much as encouraged me to bring my sensory relations with plants and trees into relationship with my academic work and physical work on the land around my house. I think Abram would get my point. He acknowledges,
as we return to our senses, we gradually discover our sensory perceptions to be simply our part of a vast, interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations borne by countless other bodies – supported that is, not just by ourselves, but by icy streams tumbling down granitic slopes, by owl wings and lichens, and by the unseen, imperturbable wind. (Abram 65)
I feel a kinship with some of Kimmerer’s stories as a New Englander who treasured the gift of finding wild blueberries rather than strawberries and as a transplant to Montana who now knows the gift of huckleberries. My hesitation in saying so follows my recognition that our stories diverge materially, culturally, and historically. I am no scientist, and my ancestors were not forcibly removed from their homeland, their language or their ways of being in the name of Manifest Destiny. Practicing reciprocity explicitly, through the practice of sensory observation and hanging out with plants and trees, is a way to make explicit the ethic of coexistence. And perhaps making kin with plants and trees around me even though, or perhaps because, I lack the ancestral beliefs and stories of people and plants that Kimmerer has as a botanist and indigenous woman. On the way to meeting my land on more equitable terms, I imagine forest kinship as a means to create relationships and make stories with the trees and plants I live with by recognizing their gifts, sharing my own, and living consciously in relationship to the fraught history and injury of American colonization and domination of western thought. And perhaps this orientation towards coexistence is a path towards healing.
Living, walking, and working among these Douglas firs with their understory of serviceberry, ninebark, Rocky Mountain maple, and waves of bright yellow glacier lilies in the spring, repeatedly invite me to think about how I live in this forest ecosystem and community of plant beings. As I visit the forest, I greet the Douglas firs and thank them for growing strong and supple, despite the spruce budworms and the fact that to a forester’s eye many of the trees are too bent or swept to get any profitable log lengths from them. I have a double vision in the woods now, after taking that forestry course. I find beauty in all the trees, whether their crowns are the “proper” pyramidal shape or less desirable ones. I know them, even some of the tree stumps, by their unique shapes and locations. One Douglas fir is about 200 years old, large and venerable, with a significant fire scar. She is likely, based on her splendid size, to be the oldest tree on my property, a mother tree. I imagine the changes she’s seen over the years from her home on this mountainside. She likely predates settlers in this area, and I wonder how she finds my presence.
In considering the unfolding attention I’m giving this land through greater reflection on and attentiveness to reciprocity and observation, I’m exploring what forest kinship might mean. Practically, it doesn’t mean ignoring the need for fire mitigation. It does mean that when I had to remove two Douglas firs close to the house that I mourned their loss of life and acknowledged my accountability in taking their lives. It also means that I had a conversation with them about it; I told them in advance what I was doing and why and offered some prayers to support them before and after they were cut down. It’s true I don’t speak their language, and I don’t know if they heard, but it seemed like the right thing to do for these beings who were here long before me, this house, and fire mitigation and house insurance existed. Ultimately, I’m considering how what I learn about living on this land, and what I learn about the scholarship I’ve referenced here, helps me shape a practice of forest kinship that might offer healing back to this land that heals my heart and soul. I’m appreciative of the stewardship class I took and the many lessons I learned about the science of fire and how to study land like a forester, and yet I’m also interested in other ways to engage with this land. I am perhaps mostly aligned with new animism, a way of thinking Linda Hogan describes as “a beginning, even without the history and aboriginal connection to this land. It says that the human is searching and with a need to be in touch with this land, or other lands of origin in a time when the world is so achingly distressed” (22). I’m imaging a beginning where I might cultivate a sacred and ecologically sound relationship with this place, an unfolding of forest kinship that encourages me to live up to my gifts and renewed responsibilities as a scholar.
It’s hopeful to see conversations that also contribute to healing happening in a range of disciplines and from multiple philosophical orientations, like Jane Bennettt’s interest in the liveliness of matter, Tim Ingold’s project of “restoring life to anthropology” (14), John Hartigan’s exploration of plants as ethnographic subjects, Matthew Hall’s philosophical study of botany, and necessary critiques of western materialisms by Zoe Todd, Alison Ravenscroft, and many others. New animism and philosophical animism, from scholars like Plumwood, Rose, and Harvey, offer hopeful ways forward to being like the plantain and becoming naturalized. I recently came across a blog called Druid’s Garden, written by a university professor, druid, and permaculture designer named Dana, who is now the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America. Her work, grounded in both druidry and permaculture, includes physical and spiritual ways to “aid the land in healing, regeneration, and growth” (“Druidry”). What I find compelling about her writing is how she brings together her scholarly work and her work on land through the spiritual connection she has cultivated with nature. Her physical work includes “building refugia,” or creating small places “where biodiversity and life can spring forth once again” (“Druidry”) and “wildtending,” or planting seeds to help restore damaged land (“Wildtending”). Within this spiritual work, she acknowledges her colonialist, capitalist ancestral legacy as a white woman in western Pennsylvania and works on an energetic level to offer spiritual healing to the water, trees, and plants in her community. The relationships she talks about with trees and plants makes sense to me intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, and the way she’s brought together permaculture and druidry successfully disrupts the backgrounding and exclusion of plants from moral considerability, from counting as souls, and is situated in the concerns of ecological crisis that characterize this century. She offers an alternative to the ethic of stewardship, and I see she is clearly learning the lessons of the plantain on her druidic and scholarly path. I see a fruitful alliance between this druidic approach to permaculture and my thinking about forest kinship.
My hope in learning the lessons of the plantain is to usefully and humbly help disrupt the monologic orientation and colonialist mindsets that promote an unreflective hierarchical ethic of stewardship or professorship and to participate in conversations with plants, places, and people with a sense of responsibility and reciprocity. One of the early seeds of this chapter was planted for me at a university diversity symposium on my campus by a woman colleague in Native American Studies who asked my discussion group how Native ways of knowing might be heard and valued on our campus. I am grateful to her question for nudging me along this path. Kimmerer says, “It’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land. As Gary Habhan has written, we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without ‘re-story-ation.’ In other words, our relationship with land cannot heal until we hear its stories” (9). Americans must collectively heal our relationship with this land, and I hope learning from the plantain is a step on this path. As I remember the plantains of my childhood, which we studied while laying belly down on our suburban lawn, and as I sit on my doorstep contemplating the plantain’s gifts, I see myself reforming relations, knowledges, and conversations, so that I might grow roots here in this Douglas fir forest in southwestern Montana and continue to explore the practice of forest kinship. So that I might learn to be a good neighbor and help heal the hurts of backgrounding and excluding plants from personhood and help heal the hurts of colonialism I’m complicit in as a white woman, a scholar, and a forest landowner and transplant to the Rocky Mountains. My writing and my work as a private forest owner converge on this hope for healing – the optimistic hope and challenge Kimmerer expresses that “maybe White Man’s Footstep is following in Nanabozho’s” (215). Following the path of the common plantain, plantago major, as a guide to living more wholesomely on this land and in relationship to others is a good lesson for my living and for writing. And so I’ll follow the common plantain from my doorstep to see where it may take me and who I might meet along the way.
1. While Hall conflates indigenous thought and animism into “indigenous animism,” and Deborah Bird Rose talks about aboriginal beliefs as animist ones, I respect Linda Hogan’s observation that animism “is not a term traditional indigenous peoples would use to describe our relationship with, and love for, the world around us. Nor is it a word that fully defines the complexity of knowledge systems we have had of the world around us” (18).
Kathleen J. Ryan is an associate professor of rhetoric and writing and chair of the English Department at Montana State University. She is a coeditor of Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies, a coauthor of GenAdmin: Theorizing WPA Identities in the Twenty-First Century, and coeditor of Rethinking Ethos: A Feminist Ecological Approach to Rhetoric. Her current research examines intersections between feminist rhetorical studies and ecological feminism.
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York, Vintage, 1997.
Barndt, Natchee. Review of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, The American Indian Quarterly, 39, 4, Fall 2015, 439-441.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, Duke University Press, 2010.
Carbaugh, Donal. “‘Just Listen:’ ‘Listening’ and Landscape Among the Blackfeet.” Western Journal of Communication, 63, 3, Summer 1999, 250-270.
Cariou, Warren. “Sweetgrass Stories: Listening for Animate Land,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 5, 3, 2018, 338-352.
Clary-Lemon, Jennifer. “Gifts, Ancestors, and Relations: Notes Toward an Indigenous NewMaterialism.”Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing and Culture, 2019.
Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
Dickinson, Elizabeth. “Ecocultural Conversations: Bridging the Human-Nature Divide through Connective Communication Practices,” Southern Communication Journal, 81, 1, 32-48.
“Druidry for the 21st Century: Druidry in the Anthropocene.” The Druid’s Garden: Spiritual Journeys in Tending the Land, Permaculture, Wildcrafting, and Regenerative Living. https://druidgarden.wordpress.com/2019/02/17/druidry-for-the-21st-century-dealing-with-mass-extinction-and-the-age-of-the-anthropocene/
Eastman, John. The Book of Field and Roadside: Open-Country Weeds, Trees, and Wildflowers of Eastern North America. Mechanicsburg, PA, Stackpole Books, 2003.
Gilbert, Petuuche. “Acoma Coexistence and Continuance.” Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future. Edited by Melissa K. Nelson, Rochester, Bear & Company, 2008, 36-38.
Hall, Matthew. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany, SUNY Press, 2011.
Harvey, Graham. Animism: Respecting the Living World. New York, Columbia University Press, 2006.
---, editor. The Handbook of Contemporary Animism. Slough, Acumen, 2013.
Heard, Matthew M. “Tonality and Ethos.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 46, 1, 2013, 44-64.
Hogan, Linda. The Handbook of Contemporary Animism. Edited by Graham Harvey, Slough, Acumen, 2013, 137-147.
Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon, Routledge, 2011.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, Milkweed Editions, 2013.
MacDonald, Bonney. “Authoring an Authentic Place: Environmental and Literary Stewardship in Stegner and Kittredge.” True West: Authenticity and the American West. Edited by William R. Handley and Nathaniel Lewis, University of Nebraska Press, 2004, 275-289.
Morrison, Toni. Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1993. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/
Murphy, Anthony G. “Communicating History: James Welch’s Killing Custer and the Cultural Translation of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.” American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance: Word Medicine, Word Magic. Edited by Ernest Stromberg, Pittsburgh, U of Pitt Press, 2006, 196-213.
“Plantain: Indigenous Food and Medicine.” Real Food and Scandalous Gardening Secrets, July 18, 2015. http://harvestsgardeningsecrets.blogspot.com/2015/07/plantain-indigenous-food-and-medicine.html
Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London, Routledge, 2002.
---. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London, Routledge, 1993.
---. “Nature in the Active Voice.” Australian Humanities Review, 46, 2009. http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2009/05/01/nature-in-the-active-voice/
Restaino, Jessica. Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 2019.
Rivers, Nathaniel A. “Deep Ambivalence and Wild Objects: Toward a Strange Environmental Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 45, 5, 2015, 420-440.
Ronald, Ann. “Stegner and Stewardship.” Wallace Stegner: Man and Writer. Edited by Charles E. Rankin, University of New Mexico Press, 1996, 87-104.
Rose, Deborah Bird. “Death and Grief in a World of Kin.” The Handbook of Contemporary Animism. Edited by Graham Harvey, Slough, Acumen, 2013, 137-147.
---. “Dialogue.” Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene. Edited by Katherine Gibson, Deborah Bird Rose, and Ruth Fincher. Brooklyn, Punctum, 2015, pages.
---. “Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Interactions in the Sentient World,” Environmental Humanities, 3, 2013, 93-109.
Salmón, Enrique. “Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Receptions of the Human-Nature Relationship,” Ecological Applications, 10, 5, 2000, 1327-1332.
Stegner, Wallace. “Wilderness Letter,” The Living Wilderness, December 1980. Reprinted in The Wilderness Society. https://www.wilderness.org/articles/article/wallace-stegner
Todd, Zoe. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ is just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology, 29, 1, 2016, 4-22.
Van Dooren, Thom and Deborah Bird Rose. “Lively Ethology and Storying Animist Worlds.” Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene. Edited by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino, London, Rowman and Littlefield, 2017, 255-271.
Verney, Marilyn Notah. “On Authenticity.” American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays. Edited by Anne Waters, Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 133-139.
Waters, Anne, editor. American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays. Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
Wildtending: Refugia and the Seed Arc Garden,” The Druid’s Garden: Spiritual Journeys in Tending the Land, Permaculture, Wildcrafting, and Regenerative Living, 9 October 2019.