Calling Upon the Language of Healing: Earth Stories
Amy Hill
(Editor’s Note: This article has been edited and re-printed from Medium, with the permission of the author.)
By Camie Bontaites
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“Thank you. May I?”
These gentle words are repeated often in the videos created through StoryCenter’s Earth Stories digital storytelling workshop. The storytellers – all women – crafted personal accounts of their connections to, and disconnections from, the natural world. Many cite heartbreaking histories of erasure and exclusion. In each story, the teller seeks pathways to healing, invoking words that honor and harken back to the indigenous peoples who lived and live on the landscapes that inspired their film.
A language is an anchor, to a landscape, and to one’s culture. “Indigenous languages are not only methods of communication, but also extensive and complex systems of knowledge that have developed over millennia.” (UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, 2018). In Native American languages, there are common threads in the words used to speak of the Earth, relaying gratitude, respect, relatedness. When invoked in the videos, these qualities are a keen reflection of the words that were once used.
“Earth mother, I come to you humble.”
These words have the deep-tuned thrum of a million lives lived. The sound now echoes with recollections of unfounded wrath and impudent crimes. The ancient languages themselves are becoming extinct, due to the historic, violent efforts of white settlers to erase them, but also because as new generations adopt more commonly-spoken tongues, the old ones fall into the archives. According to the Indigenous Language Institute, more than 300 indigenous languages were once spoken in the United States, and approximately 175 remain today. Without restoration efforts, 20 at most will still be spoken in 2050. This loss is a glaring reflection of the systematic decimation of the country as it was, and is an indicator of the lens of its colonizers. They saw disposable languages, of disposable people, in a disposable landscape.
In Planting Seeds, Emily Hicks recalls, “I thought about the great, great, great grandmothers, uprooted from homelands, disconnected from the traditions they were once trusted to carry. Pulled from the centers of communities into more socially isolated, pushed aside places, in the name of progress. What is progress? To feed and nurture your children well? To feed and nurture all the world’s children well? … We, being the descendants of colonizers, here, growing sweet berries on stolen land, offer these questions up…”
The U.S. government, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, attempted to eliminate all traces of Native language and culture. They forced Native children to attend federally funded boarding schools, where they were deprived of their own cultures and assimilated. They were made to change their names, and were punished for speaking their Native languages.
A culture without its language is upended and emptied. Being denied the ability to speak is a common experience of the oppressed. In a familiar pattern of conquest, the oppressor removes language, culture, property, land, songs, names. The collection of Earth Stories touches not just on the racism directed towards American Indians, but also on that faced by the descendants of slaves: In No Trace, Sharon Latimer-Mosely points to the gentrification impacting the Black families in her neighborhood, and speaks of her African ancestors in the United States as nomads, pushed out of their homes by eminent domain.
”... severed, erased, even in death unwelcome, relegated to the back of cemeteries, near train tracks, under buildings and highways…the bodies of black people...their dust returns to the land...their spirits overjoyed to leave this world behind - ‘thank you, thank you, I’m finally home’ leaving no trace behind.”
Reparations for these crimes are inadequate, and tentative. Black author and journalist Ta -Nehisi Coates observes that a lack of reparations for Black people in the United States, “suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential … We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.” (The Atlantic, 2014). The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, along with several other federal agencies, approves Native American tribal applications for the restoration of land rights to the indigenous owners, yet, as Cherokee Nation citizen and award-winning writer and activist Rebecca Nagle notes, “For every dollar the U.S. government spent on eradicating Native languages in previous centuries, it spends less than 7 cents on revitalizing them in this one.” (High Country News, 2019).
“For my daughter, and all children, in hopes that we may succeed in changing the tide.”
The goal of healing in the Earth Stories videos, given the history and sense of loss for the environment, and the multiple cultures represented, is palpable, admirable. They are personal journeys, and in the larger picture, they can be an important contribution toward mitigating the damage inflicted on people and treasured landscapes in the U.S. and globally. The videos employ photos, and stark memories. Things that cannot be brought back surge forward, called into view by words of reflection and reverence.
From Tania Marien’s piece, Silent Sierra:
“This wasn’t just a quiet moment in the Sierras. It was pure silence, something only the earth experiences. It was the loudest silence I have ever heard.”
In At Home, the Douglas Firs sway above Georgia Hennessy-Jackson. She describes one tree taking on the spirit of her beloved grandmother:
“Suddenly, I feel the matriarchal line of my ancestors like a thick braided rope, stretching through time, anchoring me, keeping me safe.”
How does one hold the threads of a language, weave them with the contexts of destruction and death, and use them to honor, forgive, and heal? White supremacy, the eradication of cultures, the oppression of women and trans people, the destruction of natural resources. These concepts are frantic, tyrannical. To face them, to name the loss and pain they have wrought, and then to answer by speaking words of acknowledgement, humility, and gratitude creates an aperture toward hope for the future. Let us listen as these women teach this graceful practice.
Please join StoryCenter on Friday, September 24, at 5-6:30 Pacific / 8-9:30 Eastern, for an interactive screening of the Earth Stories videos and a chance to hear from the storytellers about why holistic and inclusive approaches to challenging oppression and healing our world are so desperately needed.