I can always tell when I am crossing from eastern lands to the west. Yesterday was my first day of crossing a length of land, miles and miles, that was only wide and open. It feels like the way the land changes when you cross the Missouri River in South Dakota heading west. I thought this might happen when I crossed the Missouri in Saint Joseph but it didn’t. Farms on the east and farms on the west looked exactly the same. But now it is different.  An hour ago I pulled up a map and looked directly north of where I am sitting right now and then I giggled. I am almost exactly due south of where the Missouri River crosses South Dakota… the magic zone. I have been peering at maps of bioregions to try to understand the shift. The descriptions I find tell of a movement from tallgrass to shortgrass prairie.  I am currently in the “mixed prairie,” another word for transition zone that is not poetic enough. I feel my usual rage, briefly like a habit, at how little people outside of prairie regions - short or tallgrass - understand the glory of it. The first time I actually drove across Nebraska en route for Denver from Minneapolis, I was startled at its beauty. Everything in my chest and head opened wide once we moved out of farms and into open grassland. It felt familiar, deeply anciently familiar, in ways that made no sense but felt as real as the wind making the grasses move like water.

In the United States about 2 million acres of grassland are lost every year. This is not just in the western midwest, this is ALL grassland. The site linked above shows how much grassland has been lost since 1992, between 100 and 300 years AFTER first contact. So much grassland lost before 1992 with an escalation in the last 32 years.

None of us should have to build a case for the value of prairie land. These complex ecosystems are valuable because they are alive, because they are kin, because they are part of creation. Period. But sadly, that is not enough. Certainly not for settlers who saw horizons of land with minimal trees and thought yeeeha, look how easy this will be to farm and ranch.

Think of prairies as the ultimate water protectors, along with all wetlands. Prairies are like sponges, thick biomass where most of the life of a plant is below ground rather than on top.

I love this image, the way they try to get at what is underneath the ground. I love walking across prairies and letting my feet remember the tangled weave of roots that are laced through the soil. There are a lot of images on the internet that show the root systems like this, including some where you have a person standing on a ladder holding a plant with the roots cascading down, down, much further than their arms can reach. These images, like most western botanical drawings, display separation, each plant neatly pulled out of the whole with the visibility of a distinct life. The weave and tangle below the soil - through the soil, that IS the soil - are more than what any single image can display. That’s true for all ecosystems, this weave that holds soils and supports burrows and change. 

Prairies are water protectors because when the rain hits the surface of grasslands, it trickles down through this mass of roots and root filaments, these literal sponges, filtering, cleaning and carrying. And the underbelly of all of that filtration is an underground lake of clean fresh water. Western science calls these underground lakes “aquifers”  but I like to think of them as the large bodies of water that they are: lakes with their own rhythms and depths. I am currently walking on top of one of the largest in the world: the Ogallala Aquifer. Again, taking aquifers out of the landscape of human use - often the only way that ecosystem protection gets talked about - then aquifers are a brilliant creation of the earth to store large amounts of fresh water. I don’t know why, not in any way beyond a surface level, but I know she has clear reasons for doing this. Life needs fresh water. We can survive more days without food than without water. When I say “we” I don’t just mean us humans. I mean kin. I mean all of us organic kin, even if the amount we need varies. The earth, this planet, this home is organic and alive. Up until some of our frontal cortex human kin got all focused on growing more and more, the planet had plenty of fresh water in reserve.

The depth of a single aquifer will vary, with some places coming close to the surface as springs and others miles and miles underground, protected from the sun. Because water moves, dances and shifts across and around and through the planet, aquifers are one part of that overall dance that includes clouds and airstreams and oceans and rivers and the water in the bodies of organic beings and everywhere else.

When those settlers came and saw prairies ripe for farming and ranching and they dug their wells, they found stores of water on what otherwise seemed like dry land. I have seen videos of huge wells being drilled where, when they reached the aquifer, the water came spurting out like a geyser.

Like all natural resources touched by the extraction of settlers, the Ogallala Aquifer is drying out. We, us humans and in particular, us settler farmers and ranchers and the folks who depend on what they harvest, we did this in less than 100 years. I guarantee that there is food in your home that exists because of the water pulled from below the ground, water that first began to pool there below ground about six million years ago. 

Six million years ago. Fascinatingly enough, that’s estimated through western evolutionary theory to be the same time that hominids first began to appear. Our species is as old as that water. I don’t know if this is a coincidence, a plan, or a mistake. Six million years ago, we both were born. Let that be a meditation.

The other way I can tell that I am crossing from lands in the east to lands in the west is that I have begun to encounter anti-indigeneity. Or anti-indigenous racism. The timing of disappearance strategies in the east mean that you don’t hear anti-native racism in the same way. You hear stories of disappearance and commodification and appropriation and a whole host of dangerous myths and bullshit but white people talking to white people and saying racist things? In the East this generally shows up as anti-Black racism and then anti-immigrant malarkey with its specific mix of xenophobic racism. It was somewhere in western Missouri, right before I crossed into Kansas, that I heard a white man say vile things about Native folks as living breathing people. And I thought, well, I am now in the west. And then I did and said the things I do and say when encountering all of the different kinds of verbal violence when they show up, working to counter the bullshit but preserve the potential for relationship…and change.

Did you know that only 10% of the population of the United States lives between the Mississippi River and the Rockies? 80% of the population lives east of the Mississippi River and 10% lives in that little band of land along the Pacific coast.

Here’s another graph that blows my brain. Two out of three people live within the red border zone in the image below. This is not, of course, a consistent graph as far fewer people live in the northern and southern borders including Alaska. My guess is more like 2.5 people out of every 3 live in the red borders of the Atlantic, Pacific, Southeast and Great Lakes. And what happens in the rest of the continent? A lot of people growing food and supplies, drilling oil and gas, and building new factories to produce things that are then shipped to that red band. Sometimes as I am walking, I am overwhelmed by the constant stream of semi-trucks and trains carrying stuff… stuff…and more stuff. So much stuff traveling on big and small roads. The stuff is EVERYWHERE and if there are stores where you can buy it, most of them are closer to those red bands.

How the hell did some group of white men think it would be a good idea to have a nation state of this size and to give the right for people in those red borders to make decisions for people living in other areas? Or for those of us living in the more densely populated areas to believe we have the right to make decisions for people in wide open areas - and vice versa? As though we know a god damned thing about each other’s lives?

Tonight at dinner with the people I am staying with, people I just met, they told me that people from out of state are the ones buying the big 100 acre parcels of land to use for hunting ranges. They leave the land to its own wildness but also separate it from the communities it is connected with. The local economies continue to unravel, and wealthy people from large cities and towns just own more.

I have always hated the nation state. When I first encountered the idea of bioregionalism in my 20s, where community is organized in relationship to ecosystems and not nation states, everything in me started to hum. This was long before I understood that that is what being indigenous means and that is what indigenous cultures are, the sacred instructions from the land shared over generations, as explained by Sherri Mitchell. There are all kinds of arguments about where and how and when and why nation states first began - and they are not a solely western creation - but with general agreement, a nation state tends to emerge as an ordering of people for some reason other than the specifics of an ecosystem. They vary in size, reason for emerging and length of time they have lasted. The word “nation” is now used for any sovereign group of people but its origins and its tendency is that members of a nation-state feel loyal to the nation-state. This is different from feeling loyal to the land, to our children, or to our ancestors.

So we have an imperial state like the United States, an expansion of national boundaries as part of both colonization and manifest destiny, an expansion of the Doctrine of Discovery that says that the United States is destined to take over the western lands - the lands I am now walking through - and to remove the people already living here by any means necessary.

I am preaching. I am doing that thing that my partner and daughter roll their eyes about, where I just go off and start tying together all of the things and talking on and on without checking in with the person listening. Right now I am going off because I have just walked through some lands where people have been so very kind to me and at the exact same time, I have learned again and again about the hundreds of indigenous petroglyphs on privately-owned farms around me, the mounds that have been dug up and flattened including the mounds around Salina, and I just started walking along the Santa Fe Trail, one of the primary veins of manifest destiny and there, on the hill of this beautiful prairie, just on the side of the road, were the stone remains of what was likely one of the many watch towers that were built along the trail to “protect” western settlers from the tribes who fought back against their manifest movements. The Osage and Kansa and Comanche and Pawnee and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Kiowa and Ute and Jicarilla Apache and Pecos Pueblo and others. 

I am preaching because inside I am keening, because I keep meeting people who are so very kind to me and all of this kindness sits alongside these histories and presents and I am not far from the last official (according to the United States) war within Kansas which was the Battle of Punished Woman Fork between the US government and the Southern Cheyenne not many miles from where I am writing this and it was only 15 years before my great grandmother was born, a woman who died when I was 15.

My god, what a foolish thing it is that people in New York City vote in elections that shape this land and what a foolish thing it is that people here vote in elections without knowing anything about the history of the land where they live, the land itself and the generations of people who know this land as well as they know the feeling of washing their children’s bodies. And how little I know about what local folks actually know and this is what I mean when I say that walking is not slow enough.

I just sat in on a meeting for a project I am part of. It was a beautiful meeting and I was there as an observer. The meeting was of the newest generation of leaders and thinkers and I listened to them, noticing how their conversations mirrored some of the same conversions that the first generation, the one I am part of, had with some of the same struggles and insights. But it was more than that. This group was wiser. And within its wisdom, it was clear there was and is a commitment to stay in relationship with that first generation of leadership, their elders in this work. I had just written that paragraph about the earth’s wisdom at keeping water stores within her body and in listening to their conversation, I remembered for the five thousandth time (after forgetting for 4,999 times) that this is what we mean by cross generational work and that the land we are part of carries the template for this every day.

There is a “new” theory of evolution currently emerging called assembly theory. It’s a weaving together of insights from biology, chemistry, physics and information science in an attempt to understand how life emerges and why, as it emerges, it moves towards complexity rather than monocultures. Professor Lee Cronin from the University of Glasgow says it this way, “Assembly theory provides an entirely new way to look at the matter that makes up our world, as defined not just by immutable particles but by the memory needed to build objects through selection over time." I have read a bunch of different research papers on this and what I think I understand when I translate what I am reading is this: evolution is not about a kind of random genetic movement forward but instead, memory shapes what the next step might be. The organism's memory determines a next step from an infinite set of possibilities and thus the past and the future become one. Memory is another word for wisdom, remembering what came before to help more thoughtfully - which also means chemically/biologically since that is what memory is - determine the next generation. Since we are talking about generations of wisdom, this scientific theory is a story of, well, ancestors.

Why does a new theory of evolution matter? Why this one in particular, especially when it is “rediscovering” what is old wisdom? I am walking every day across lands shaped by a culture that privileges efficiency over relationship, monoculture profit over the complexity of an ecosystem, a family line, and the contradictions of histories. It is this focus on efficiency and profit that establishes lines between what is “useful” and what is not. These lines are sometimes neutral lines of choice but too often, they are lines of violence. Eugenics, apartheid systems, military responses, pesticide razing of a field to ensure that only some plants grow… there is so much here. Some people, some plants, some animals are good and some are not needed and so those we destroy. 

I am 61 and I feel like I am always re-understanding or deepening my understanding of what Audre Lorde meant when she wrote in Sister Outsider, “For the master's tool will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”  

How are you, how am I trying to create a monoculture, a single story ecosystem, an efficient state, a political and cultural landscape where we all agree on the bad guys and the meaning of democracy? I know that I want to practice everyday being uncomfortable with how you and I disagree, a practice that I actually only think we can do when we are on the same land and seeing each other outside of the times when we have access to our best selves.

The state of Israel is creating a monoculture. Period. Elements of the United States with their border control and rising forces of Christian nationalism and anti-trans terror are trying to create a monoculture. And I contribute to this constantly. Like you, I don’t know what to do about the ways in which access is tied to everyone having the benefits of this growing monoculture called neoliberalism: cell phones, cars, and other products that take so much more from the earth than they ever give back. The aquifers are drying up and oh the amount of water it takes to make the cell phone that I am using to map this walk.

I was recently grateful for a Facebook thread that a friend posted, wondering in front of their friends whether or not it was time to reckon with our powerlessness. They asked this question in relation to the ongoing destruction of Gaza, funded by us folks in the US. I had been holding the same question for all of it: Gaza, climate chaos, the fact that there are people who want others to disappear because of how they live their lives and celebrate themselves and their love, and more and more and more. 

Powerlessness is all about the land because what powerlessness asks is that we fall, heavy, to the ground. We stop holding, trying, ideating, wondering, dreaming, storming, forcing, pushing, pulling, appeasing, agreeing, denying, wanting, resenting, daring, taking, expanding, contracting, and every other verb. We stop and instead we face what is rising, the feel it, we know it, we name it, we let it overtake us, which means we fall to the earth.

We fall to the ground, this size of this earth, she who holds water in her belly for when future life will thirst. We fall.

Depending on who your people are, you might have had to do this already. Face the fact that no matter how hard you fight or how smart you are, “they” will come now or have come in the past and will bury you, mouth still open and screaming. 

This origin of this country is an override of powerlessness into an arc of ideate, dream, create, force, push, take, give, want, deny, resent, expand and contract. What matters is the future because the past is dead and gone. A bridge is constantly being built over the histories that are unfinished, reinforced and restructured each time another wide awake challenge comes through. Banned books, attacks on DEI, on critical racial theory, on whose lands we are on in a way that moves far far beyond acknowledgement. This bridge-building over pain and unfinished violence and loss did not start on this side of the Atlantic, its raw materials were shipped on the same ships that brought weapons and plows. People fed, like they flee now, for reasons of despair or hunger or greed or the million things that provoke flight. Many left after generations of the stealing of land, children, and cultural ways. It’s a chain of violence and it goes back quite a bit in time, although not forever. It’s the river of powerlessness that has been forced underground, creating a dead zone where life can’t root itself in.

When we turn and feel the powerlessness, really let it sit here alongside us, we fall. We fall to the ground and then we wait. Our body’s relationship to gravity is one of the ancestors’ gifts. When we fall to the ground, no longer hold so that our bones melt a bit, there is support here. There is always support. Meaning, we do not die. Our hearts keep beating. The blood and lymph and breath continues to circulate, even when we have let go of any kind of holding. And what is below holds, absorbs our screams, our piss, our tears, our never agains.

And then at one point, on the other side of that terror, if we are not surrounded by bombs and violence and the potential end of a shotgun, there is silence. And living in that silence is memory. Generations and generations of memory. Because there is nothing unique or unusual about us. Not a god damned thing. And memory will surge up, help us rise, and from that memory that lifts, those ancestors’ bones and songs and generations of water stored deep underground just for today, those memories will sniff each other, tangle and unwind, and weave into a different pattern, a different moment of evolution that in the short term doesn’t feel that different but in the pattern of years, could bring us someplace we could barely dream of.

Memory work. What stories have been lost and what stories are replaying? How do I seek to keep myself safe by building a monoculture community around me? What are the skills that enable me, you, us to live with complexity in ways that mimic a grassland rather than a war? How am I… and this is, to me, the most important question… how are my fears and my hungers and my desires and resentments and frustrations and beliefs getting in the way of memory, of wisdom as it weaves forward, dancing with what is here to create more rather than less and how do I and we let go of our need to control all of it? After all, complexity includes the things we don’t like as much as the things that we do.

“Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative. “ - Vandana Shiva