By Honor Schauland

The idea that we are separate from the land and the ecosystems we live in is hilarious. How can we possibly be separate? I live in an ecosystem. I am an ecosystem. I travel through many ecosystems in a day or in a week. I am made up of many ecosystems. My house is an ecosystem. My yard is a different ecosystem. The woods beyond my yard are yet another ecosystem. Soil bacteria are inside my body – the land I live on is literally inside of me, because when I touch the soil every day and eat the food that comes from it, that’s what happens. My family and good friends’ bacteria and germs are inside of me too, and mine are inside of them and mostly I am comforted by that fact. I am made up of the genetic material of my ancestors, the traumas and survival that are written into their DNA that I carry inside of me, that began me, but since the moment I was born, I have wallowed and bathed and swallowed and crawled through the genetic material of so many other organisms that have colonized (Yes! That’s what we call it!) my body and swapped genes in my intestines and carried out gods-only-know what kind of symbiotic activities without my knowledge or consent inside of me. What joy! That’s really how it works, folks.

Certainly there is an amazing boundary called skin, and clearly there is an inside and an outside of my body, and I think I can tell from experience what’s best inside and what’s best outside, but oh-my-gosh it makes me laugh out loud to think that anyone ever came up with the idea of our separateness from nature, or our separateness from other animals, or our separateness from each other. Haha! (And if you want more laughs, think about the ideas of land ownership and political boundaries for awhile. Do you think moose or grizzly bears give a rat’s ass about the US/Canadian border? What about fungi? Really? Who are we kidding?)

Speaking of moose or grizzly bears…it seems like I am not one of them, and they are not one of me, but am I sure? How sure, and why? I don’t have horns or claws, I suppose, but if I was a baby I could drink their milk and survive and if I had a baby grizzly bear it could drink my milk and survive. I’d be a little scared of its teeth, but if you’ve ever fed a human baby with your own body before, you would know that you should be scared of human teeth too, and that mamas of all species put up with a whole lot of teeth and other dangerous and painful behavior.

Anyway, all this leads me to is that I am cousins if not siblings with moose and grizzly bears and all kinds of creatures. If I ever needed more proof I would look no further than a memory I have of being a child riding along on a hunting trip with some native guys who were friends of my parents when we came upon a group of non-native guys out on the backroads standing around a pickup truck talking. When we stopped to talk and some of the native guys saw what was in the back of the truck they were instantly uncomfortable and wanted to leave. It took a moment to realize how upset they were, and in that moment I walked my 10-year-old self over and took a look into the back of the truck and saw what looked a lot like a skinned human body not much bigger than my own body. I booked it back to our vehicle pretty damn quick, totally confused about what was happening and why these murderers were standing around so nonchalantly. In the conversation that ensued on the ride away, I began to understand that it was “just” a black bear, but I also began to understand that to my traveling companions, it was family of some serious kind, and they were sickened and worried about how it would affect the well-being of their own spirits simply to have come near such a thing. To them, it WAS some kind of murder, and I saw it that way too, with my child’s eyes, instinctively. I will never forget the awful feeling of identification – of thinking that I was looking at a dead human, maybe even a human child.

I grew up hunting and raising animals for food, and it’s taken me a long time to get past the experience with that bear. I have seen other skinned bears, quelled my reaction, and looked at them up close, marvelling at the similarities and differences. I’ve even eaten bear meat, recognizing that I am not Bear Clan, and that those guys have their own belief system that colored that incident for them. I think I was picking up on their strong emotions somewhat, but I also believe that I had an instinctive reaction to what I saw. I identified with that bear. I knew immediately that we are related. I didn’t see “other,” I saw “self.”

I have another, more recent story, about a friend from the suburbs who decided he wanted to be a more responsible meat eater and hunt for himself, kill it himself rather than buying it from the store, knowing that the animal lived a wild good life before it became his food. He shot a deer and then asked me to show him how to butcher it. We hung it up and I skinned it pretty quickly. I heard a sound, turned to look, and realized he had stepped away to throw up.

“I didn’t know it would look like that.” He gasped, “I didn’t know it would look like me.” Now, anyone with any western culture “sense” knows that deer don’t look anything like humans. Except they have muscle and sinew and blood and bones just like we do. And we identify it as “self” until we are taught not to.

Where do you think vegetarianism comes from? I think it’s just another attempt at decolonization, at bucking the desensitization and separation from animals we are taught as children, and as such, more power to those folks if that’s what works for them. What works for me, and what worked for my friend, was to recognize the selfness and similarity of the being before us, to thank it for its life, and then to begin the deeply personal and sacred process of cutting it up for food. And to remember our sacred relationship every time we eat its body. Relationship is the root of everything.

Everyone likes to talk about this idea of “other” like it’s a given. Sure, maybe it is when you’ve been taught to think the way we have been taught to think for generations, and when a huge part of that thinking is about fear and power and control all the time. How exhausting.

But isn’t there a self and an other and isn’t that other’s very otherness scary? Yes, if you think you are just you, all by yourself, and this other thing is NOT YOU, and you say “BOO” really loud and it doesn’t back off.

But what if you knew because you had been taught all along that you are just the current expression of your family which is currently being expressed inside the multiheaded organism that is your community or your people, that there is power inside of the body you are living in that comes from those ancestors and that community and that land that feeds you all every day of your lives, and that power is either going to help you survive again or it’s not, and if it’s not, then this body is just going to nourish the next organism that comes along and that’s the way it is, and today is as good of a day to die as any. That’s the only kind of power that matters, because we don’t control nature, we ARE nature. Nature is us. We are just ecosystems of organisms within ecosystems of organisms within bigger systems that are so big we can barely comprehend our tiny part in them, if we can see any of it at all. And on the micro-level, we are like a universe to the tiny colonies of organisms that live inside of us, and they may be universes to whatever exists in the spaces between their molecules. I just feel like that’s so tiny that perhaps it’s none of my business.

I don’t really want to tell the story now of how colonialism began for humans because that’s a fun thing to argue about, and no one really agrees 100%. If you are reading this, I hope you agree that our current overculture is pretty soul-sick because people are separate from nature and isolated from each other, and alienated from their bodies, and everyone is traumatized through generations of normalized horrific violence that still continue in many ways for many people and the aftereffects go on and on and we don’t seem to know how to stop.

We’re looking for something better now. We’re trying to heal. We can only work on ourselves. Some of us are lucky. We have family traditions, ancestor memories, research we have done that helps us. Some of us have access to land, to woods, to mountains or rivers or parks or quiet places that help us heal. Some of us don’t. Because of colonialism and capitalism. Let’s not forget that. But it’s more important to heal, and we have to start somewhere. Wherever we are. If we can just touch the soil, or listen to the voices of the wind and water, or participate in community, just those little bits help. Relationship is the root of everything.

The disease of disconnection is strong. The systems we are trying to decolonize ourselves and our communities from are still there giving us loud and conflicting scary messages about power and control.

Right now we’re being told to stay away from other people. Break those connections. They’re dangerous. Sterilize the communities of organisms that live on the surfaces of your homes. They’re dangerous. Maybe they are. But we know deep inside of us that we need connections. We wither and die without them. We die because life is devoid of meaning without connection, and also because life IS connection. The land that I live on is inside of me. The people that I love are inside of me. I’ll say it again: relationship is the root of everything.

Every morning I do a stretching breathing calming practice that I call yoga, but only because it sounds good. It’s partly about getting my body to function properly because I’m almost forty and I have done some hard things with this body and it’s just the slightest bit rusty, but it’s also about getting my head on straight and remembering that I live in this body that is a gift from my ancestors and that the land I live on and the food I eat is a gift too. For part of the grounding I need, I picture my toes as roots going deep into the earth, twining around the roots of trees and plants and my neighbors and friends and all the people I know, whether I like them or not, because that’s who I have to work with, and they all have toe-roots too, whether they know it or not. After that I say thank you to the ancestors of this body, and I say thank you to the ancestors of this place, this woman is grateful, I have enough.