September 19, 2024

Hello, dear ones. Hello.

It’s been a minute since I wrote. Actually, a month and some change. Since that time, I have spent a few weeks in Minneapolis with my family and then took off walking on part two with my 22 year old daughter, Luca. I spent a lot of time with the Mississippi River heading north and then we spent some time on the river heading south. This dance that has nothing to do with an east west trajectory is why this walk will be closer to 4,000 miles than the 2,8xx that it takes to walk from east to west going the shortest distance. It is also why I don’t mind if I get a ride to shave off 20 or 30 miles from time to time. That is what some of the big gaps are that show up on the map. Either a ride or one of those 25 mile days that has my feet throbbing and my mind filled with wonder that I could do that.

That circle is where we are right now - Fairfield, IA. Home to the Maharashi Vedic City and the Maharashi International University. It’s been interesting how many people have raised their eyebrows and talked about the randomness of this town being here, a town rooted in Hindu culture among the cornfields, as though it isn’t equally strange that seekers from England and Germany crossed an ocean to establish their culturally-shaped towns, road systems and ways of farming on these indigenous lands. And yes, most of the people who live in this town are older white folks who follow the creator of Transcendental Meditation, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I am learning some things but I don’t know a lot about what this means. I’ve reached out to a few people to meet with them but haven’t heard back. I’ve been going through some of the community chat rooms and learned that this community, like so many intentionally created (rather than evolved) communities, is dealing with the dying of those who established the communities in the 1970s and 80s while a smaller number of younger people seem committed to staying…..Intentional communities, movement frameworks, transformative organizations.

I am really aware that I am moving deeper and deeper into lands and communities that are not familiar to me. I keep being struck by things, particularly by the Christian literalism that I encounter, and so am having all kinds of insights but, of course, what is new and filled with insight for me is the baby food that some of you grew up with. I want to be accountable in advance. I will be sharing stories that illustrate how much I don’t know and this will be constant. Way back in the day, like the late 90s/early 2000s, I was part of a crew that created a weekly local newspaper called Siren. You can’t find it online because, well, online didn’t exist. Not really. Web-based media was just beginning to rise. There was no social media so community papers still served a kind of town square function. Our commitment was that every article, every restaurant and film review, and every editorial would do two things at the same time: assume that the reader was brand new to whatever we were talking about and also assume that we were writing about someone’s home food, life experience, family stories. Our aim was to do both of those things with our storytelling so that we weren’t constantly centering our own experiences but also remembered and showed that whoever read the paper belonged, whether they were learning or remembering the thing. 

I keep thinking about this as I move into spaces that are more heavily rural and red and evangelical. Places where whiteness has been mostly homogenous until recently -  at least since the first waves of colonization. When I go in and look at the demographics and histories of the communities I am moving in, almost every single town, from the smallest to slightly larger, has experienced some kind of dramatic demographic change. Sometimes it’s been small - maybe 5 or 10% difference in the cultural/racial groups identified - but a  number of towns I have passed through have had a 25 to 30% demographic shift in the last 20 years. That is not evolution, although it is definitely a necessity. In the same way that Minnesota is seeing high numbers of internal refugees coming north for an abortion or trans-affirming care, for safety and respect, there are scores of people who are leaving home communities to find a place where their families will be ok. Just like Lake Street in Minneapolis in the 1990s, there are new businesses - Mexican restaurants and shops, Asian groceries that rise up as google maps shows me where two other grocery stores once stood and are now closed.  Locals, mostly white multigenerational folks from these small towns, tell me these businesses haven’t been there that long. So far, the people who will talk with me generally celebrate these businesses as a boon to the town. I have had some of the best Mexican food of my life in tiny barely marked restaurants in towns where there is almost no other infrastructure.

So, again, much of this is “new” to me - or else has moved from something I know because I read/heard about it to something I am experiencing, which always shifts everything. If you read anything here that is about your home, your life experience, and you want to correct me or complicate what I am saying or just share your experience, please know that I am always open to this. I am going to keep observing and wondering what it means to live on this land in a good way together, but as I move into lands that I have less experience with- including with the land itself  - I mean did you know there are three varieties of prickly pear cactus native to Iowa?!  - I am likely to sound even more naive than before. Or maybe I have sounded naive the whole time and you have been humoring me.

I have also finally updated my route document. I was originally planning on meandering into Oklahoma and Texas, but the leaves are changing and there is a slight crispness in the air combined with the strangeness of blooming lilacs, a spring plant, and all of these have me heading directly towards the southwest. So this means I am going to be crossing from Iowa into Missouri in a few days and from there, heading at an angle to Kansas. 

One more observation that is holding my imagination as I look forward:  separate from what you feel about political elections as a sign of how people are actually feeling, or as a route to real change, I have been looking at these red/blue/purple maps.

I know this is not representative or accurate. I have seen the maps that shift these colors by adding in population density. I have also seen how the maps have changed where for most of my growing up - I was born in 1963 - the color of the states was much more purple in general than polarized. And this is what is true: I have only ever lived for any length of time in a purple state (Ohio - blue when I was a kid and purpleing in later years) or a blue state (hello Minnesota). This means that there is a lot that I don’t know. So much that I don’t know. But as an outsider, the first thing that struck me while looking at this map was how the states with the highest rural food deserts - from North Dakota directly down south to Texas like a belt buckle that goes through the middle of what used to be called the Bread Basket of the US - overlap with the red states I will be walking through. 

I feel some kind of accountability to that. It still amazes me, like fucked-in-the-brain amazes me, that you can get fresher and cheaper food in cities than in rural areas. Some of the best produce I have ever seen was at a market in Manhattan.  And there are fruits and veg for sale just about everywhere in that city. Of course , the freshest yummiest food is in the richer or middle class neighborhoods and food deserts are also in cities, especially poor and Black neighborhoods, and this is real and still, there is food. I just recently moved from the southside of Minneapolis where I could walk to 9 different grocery stores within a three mile saunter -  three stores within a mile- to the northside where there are far fewer, unless you head to the wealth of the North Loop. Food access is classed and raced and if that doesn’t show that capitalism is a problem, I don’t know what else can make such a clear case. Except lack of access to clean water, air and care.

So few people anywhere are growing food in their yards. This continues to be true as I walk.  Did you know that until World War II, most people in the United States raised chickens - in cities and countryside? And that after World War II, a bunch of factors including the ending of federal support for victory gardens and chicken raising, a private chicken lobby that wanted people to buy their eggs and chicken in stores so advertised health horror stories about salmonella, and an increase in supermarkets and a supermarket lobby over small local butchers and produce stands, all of this combined to end household food raising including on farms. I love when I walk through a town or an area where it seems like everyone is raising some kind of food, although it is rare. It reminds me of that organizing wisdom: being the first matters and being second matters but if you really want to make change, you need to have a third. Once you have three of a thing, then you can start to see ripples moving out. The change can build its own momentum. So in those places where there are children playing outside or food being grown or raised in multiple yards and farms, those places likely have at least three so that the shift wasn’t as frightening for the fourth or the fifth and so on down the line.

Be the change. Be the third.

It astonishes me how much starts to change almost immediately when you cross the Mississippi River. The land is different. There is more space between towns and farms. I have walked down gravel roads where less than a dozen cars have passed me all day. Here in Iowa, the historical plaques I most often see are a brown sign on the edge of three cornfields and lots of wind. The plaque will say something like: here was the town of Wooster that had a post office, a general store and a church. The town was settled in 1834. OR there will be a sign pointing across a monster of a corn field that says something like Gilman Cemetery 2 miles due north. No idea how you get to that cemetery because the corn is planted so close together that no light let alone walking bodies can get through, but for the descendants looking for it, the sign points the way. Never mind that the land on either side of the Missippi was - and is - filled with burial and ceremonial mounds. Never mind that most of those were plowed under by those farmers now buried and remembered at Gilman Cemetery.

I remember something I wrote a few months ago on social media, that I met someone while walking in Minneapolis who told me that the best time to walk across this land would have been around 1923 when the rural economy was at its peak and there were small towns with resources all within a day’s walk of each other. When he told me that, I got this image of towns that had exploded into cities or towns that no longer had any infrastructure, just some old houses and boarded up shops. What I hadn’t really thought through was how massive agrobusinesses would have bought up land and literally razed whole towns.

But why didn’t I? Why am I surprised? That’s what settlers, the grand American Experiment, territorial and state and county and federal governments and profit-based companies did to those who had lived on these lands for over 40,000 years - before and around and through the last ice age. Razing whole towns to put something that would make money on top of the cleared land. 1834, the time when the town of Wooster that I mentioned above was first settled, was just yesterday. My great-grandmother lived until I was 15 years old. She was born in 1896. This means that someone who is the same age as I am right now when my great-grandmother was born was themselves born just as Wooster was settled as a town. So close, so recent that I can touch it. Like walking past a Domino’s Pizza, a chain that was founded 60 years ago but is now just an everywhere part of the landscape.  Whole towns razed and disappeared and 60 years later, new towns were already established and had maybe another 60 years before they too were driven under by DeKalb or Cargill or ADM. 

Did you know that the first settlers in this land now called Iowa were Spanish-speaking, coming up the river from the south? And the second was French? You can see the French influence in some of the buildings in Davenport and other river towns. What you don’t see are signs and stories and accountabilities and care about who lived here for so very long before the Euro folks came scouting land.

This part of the story - the first wave of razing as Meskwaki, Lakota, Hochunk, Ioway, Potawatomi and other tribes including those who had settled here after being forced west - is not recounted anywhere I am walking through, except in statues put up in the early 1900s from the “Improved Order of Red Men,” an organization of white men playing/stealing “Indian” that still exists including chapters in Minnesota. If you can stomach it and don’t know about them, go in and check it out. The same Christian anxiety that fuels anti-Semitism, the anxiety that says we have to prove that Christians/Jesus makes “us” the chosen people is the anxiety that weaves together fake indigeneity to assert a, well the title says it, an improvement with white settlers now the chosen ones. This is not an accounting, a moment of honesty or clear truth-telling. It’s just a very honest and bold example of never-ending stealing.

How different it would be if indigenous joy and wisdom had been celebrated and honored so that when any one of us said the word “Iowa” we had a physical and emotional felt sense of land and people and time and language and song and names, something dense and relational. Real. Complex. Joyful. 

Is it possible for us to live on this land in a good way together? Not to be the same, not to agree, and not even to have shared core values but still, to live. To live in such a way that our descendants can assume they will be safe and loved? 

I have been going down a rabbit hole trying to deepen my understanding of what gets called American values. I’ve been reading a lot of things written for non-USers to help them understand what makes “us” think. Individualism, uniqueness or exceptionalism, right to privacy, commitment to and belief in change as a goal and possibility, time and productivity as resources for control, equality, self-help and self-reliance, competition and a free market, a focus on the future as separate from the past, etc. This overlaps with white supremacy culture but is not exactly the same thing, although it is close. This list refers to the culture or some of the context for those who have been at least three generations in the United States and doesn’t include Native people because Native folks have their own nations, although these values are so entrained that they seep in everywhere. It takes three generations to assimilate to/become a thing. And for those of you who, like me, position yourself as working towards something different - centering collective spaces rather than individualism, etc. - we are still in the dance of these values in the same way that romanticization/racism are two sides of the same coin. If we are pushing against a thing, we are still in some way defined by the thing. And for those of us locked out of access to American mainstreams, even if we wanted in, we are still impacted by these values, even if they are not freely shared.

It’s Cara Page who first introduced the idea of “memory work” to me. Memory work can be many different things but it includes memorializing a space, a site, a moment that has shaped the present and has largely disappeared. Most often, strategically and intentionally disappeared. Like the first razing that sits behind the signs that tell stories of towns once there and now razed into corn fields. It’s not just an objective accounting, as though just getting the  data on the record is enough. Instead, it’s spiritual, political, cultural. It seeks to heal and to root as much as to tell and show. I have been thinking about this as I walk among the cornfields, singing to the corn and remembering their ancestors, their wild connected ways before they were ravaged and genetically harmed. I think about this as I learn about the layers in the ground and the ghosts woven through the lands I pass through. 

Memory work should, I believe, come from relationship. For the last three generations - and some of the three before that - most of my people have been settlers. They came here wanting something different and let that want overshadow and disappear the lives and teachings of those who had loved the land for thousands of years before we arrived. Every one of my ancestors made choices that they believed would keep their children safe. I remember….

And so remembering is about finding and feeling connection to all of this, telling those stories. Listening. Right now I am mostly doing this alone as I walk - hello American individualism. As memory work has been taught to me, it is collective. It is a ritual. It is prepared for. It is intentional and time has to slow down. It is what elders and spiritual leaders hold in communities and it is why these things are always attacked as part of a colonial strategy.

I still don’t know what the answer is nor if there is an answer to what it means to live on this land in a good way -together - but memory work must be part of the healing, part of the shift from a future-only ethic to one that remembers that the future is an extension of the past. Maybe this is a small part of it.

And memory work can not be about finding the single truth that we all agree on. There is no such thing as a single truth. I recently spent time with someone who was very very Christian. At one point, I want to write, think, listen and learn about the relationship between people seeking to recover from addiction and fundamentalist Christianity because I am meeting so many people who are sober and strong and fierce about a rigid Christian faith that they believe keeps them away from drugs and alcohol. Whatever it means for us to live on this land in a good way together, it seems like it has to include a capacity for contradiction. I don’t know how we can do any of this without having a capacity for holding multiple things true at the same time. Not the fact of concrete violence in the present moment, but the stories of how we were impacted, what we remember, and how we were shaped.

And the land will always teach us about this more thoroughly than our tangled fearful minds. What is beautiful can be dangerous to some and the most exquisite food or companion to others and all of these things are true at the same time… and the ecosystem continues, expands, shifts and a large blue butterfly called the Maculinea steals its way into ant homes when it’s a caterpillar, mimicking their queen so that it can snack on the ant eggs, and then crawls back out and transforms into a gorgeous blue butterfly, the photo of the kin at the top of this page. If it ate too many eggs, the ants would disappear. If there are too many ants, their appetites will devour other species. Everything is balance and wisdom should evolve to assess that balance, to assess what is out of balance. 

I remember reading Malidoma Somé who shared that this is what makes someone indigenous - a commitment to being with the balancing of relationships as the purpose for life. He was funny when he shared it, reflecting that non-indigenous people think that indigenous folks are all at one with nature all of the time when that is completely not the case. All people are filled with folks who are glorious and are shit heads, who make mistakes and get selfish and cause harm. The question is what you center. He reflected that when you center the balancing of relationships - between people and between all living kin - then you create the conditions for a sense of one-ness to emerge before it unbalances again and you are back to doing relationship repair.

My daughter leaves today, heading back to Minnesota before she leaves the US to be with other family for awhile. In a week I will be in Kirksville Missouri where I will go to the Museum of Osteopathy, something I have written about a lot. When I look at maps of Kansas, all I see are rivers and I didn’t know that this was part of the land there. I will be in eastern NM on Election Day, I think. These are some of the tidbits swirling through my brain as I look forward. So many relationships to listen to, so many moments to notice. As always, if you live or have people on my route, let me know. 

Oh, and by the way. In another few months, go check out Google Street View near Glasgow, Iowa, one of those towns that is filled with signs that say we were here once and aren’t any longer. Luca and I were wandering down the road when the streetview car passed us a bunch of times. We’ll be scouring the maps in a few months to see if our echo is out there on the side of the Glasgow Road. And if that doesn’t sound like some old folk song, I’m not sure what does. Particularly because there is a small road feeding on to the Glasgow called Unicorn Road…..