about the walk.

A few days ago, I met someone who was a friend of a friend at a Vietnamese restaurant in Florence, Massachusetts. After she sat down and we did the quick greetings, she looked at me and said (and I am paraphrasing), you have to change your website. I went to read about your walk and it was hard to understand. If you want regular people, my people, to understand what you are doing, you have to be clearer and more direct.

Well, I thought, we are DEFINITELY going to be friends. This is the kind of feedback that makes me purr. I laughed and told her that I had a partially finished update sitting in my google drive that I had been avoiding. I didn’t always know, I explained, how to describe this walk and so that confusion came through on the website. Well, she replied, you have to figure it out.

So here we are. This is a revised explanation of this walk. I hope that it is clearer and starting to make sense to you, person I have never met. And thank you, Anika, for the push.

I am walking across the United States, across Turtle Island which is the indigenous name for North America. I expect it will take a year and while I know some things about the route, not everything has been planned. I have been dreaming about doing this walk since I was 16 years old and I started it when I was 60. 

I started this walk on April 11, 2024 in Castine, Maine. Castine is one of the oldest settlements in the United States, older than Plymouth Rock and Jamestown and younger only than the Spanish colonial sites in Florida. It’s also a place where I have family history, a mix of Penobscot and French ancestors whose lives were deeply impacted - that is an understatement - by Metacom’s war, also known as King Philip's War and the first Indian War, as it was the first large scale military operation and resulted in the first large scale forced expulsion of indigenous people from their land. This war shaped many of the policies that defined both colonization and the institution of slavery in the years that followed. I also want to do a shout out to Atlantic Black Box’s research on Castine, an organization in Portland, Maine tracking Black and African histories across the North Atlantic. Like many things, I didn’t know this history before I began.

At its base, the question I am walking with is this: how do we live together on this land in a good way? Sitting with that question, it felt right to start in Castine, one of the places where the opposite of living on this land in a good way was strategized.

I am writing this after my first month of walking, what I called my prep month. During that first month, I stayed with people most nights and let myself walk as much or as little as my body felt that it should walk. I stopped at historical societies and cemeteries, stayed in people’s homes and slept in churches, and kept asking that question to myself and sometimes to the people I met: how do we live together on this land in a good way?

I am a light-skinned raised white middle aged woman with gray hair. I already knew that I was going to be surrounded by privilege as I walked, knowing how many people I love who could not imagine walking into a new town and asking a stranger for help without experiencing potential violence or, at its most gentle, total disregard. I think about this with each step: how is this step and then this part of the millions of small steps needed to shift patterns of mistrust and violence and fear so that we can begin to imagine living on this land in a good way together? I think about this as I stride along with a tent in my backpack, knowing that the Supreme Court is currently considering a case that makes it illegal for unhoused people to sleep outside even when there are no shelter beds.

And I am camping. Sometimes hidden quietly behind trees.

How do we live together on this land in a good way? What land do you live on? Not everyone who comes to this website lives on Turtle Island. Some of you live on land that your people have lived on for more than 20 generations and while you have been there a long time, you are not breathing along with the land. Recognizing the land as our wise elder made up of oak and frog and nettle kin.

From wherever you are, how do you, how do we live together with the land in a good way. How do we live together with the land in a good way, as part of the land, as bodies created by the land and whose ancestors’ remains are part of the land around us?

I don’t know the answer to this which is why I am walking. 

A few weeks before I set off from Minnesota for Maine, an elder in my life said this to me: You are someone who still has some of that arrogance that people with certain political understandings have. You think that because you understand some things about histories and about power that you understand what people you have never met should do and believe. That, she said, is arrogance. She continued, on this walk you are going to meet people who have wisdom about where we are right now and about what needs to happen to change the things that need to change. Some of them will have very different ways of understanding why things are messed up and very different stories about histories. My wish for you, she said, is that you are able to hear the wisdom they share and that you can meet them with something other than judgment.

I asked her if I could share this story as part of how I answer the question: why are you walking? 

Some of the things I am doing while walking - visiting lots of local historical societies and museums to hear how they tell the story of their town and to ask questions. This includes sharing what I have learned about the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and the recent changes that put the responsibility for reporting any artifacts and remains to the Department of Interior. It matters that I have already encountered a very old wooden canoe, pulled out of a lake by a farmer and mounted in a museum without any tribal connection. The important thing is to do any of this not as someone who knows with the arrogance named by this elder, but as kin with kin, listening and awkward in trying to do things differently from how our people have previously. 

And I am walking in a time that is leading up to an election that shows the extreme polarization that is already here, the fight over what it means to be a good person, who you can trust, and what needs to be controlled or cared for. 

There are always days when I am afraid - and sometimes the fear is of strangers and sometimes the fear is of people I know, my fear that I will change in ways that shift how I understand and name things and that this will take me away from those I love. I name this because I think this is a fear that many of us hold, across political beliefs and stories, and here we are.

How do we live together with this land, on this land, as part of this land in a good way? All of us? I remember that this was the question that most indigenous people held as they first sat in treaty conversations with those who were settling this land. This was not the approach that most European folks had as they sat in those treaty talks, trying to find a way to get as much as possible for themselves.

So this is what the walk is about, at least as I understand it today. I am only just at the beginning. For six months before I started walking, I wrote out the various things that I have been thinking about in preparation for this walk. It goes into a lot more detail than this page and you can download it, called At The Fork in the Road, here. You can download it for free or if you have some extra cash, send a little my way. This helps pay for these months of walking. I expect that how I talk about this walk is going to change over and over again with each mile that passes. If you are curious to hear more, you can sign on for my blog where I am sending irregular updates. You can go to Instagram (@raffosusan) and Facebook (Raffo Susan) where I also post irregularly. 

And if you are tracking my route at all, either through social media or the map on this website, and it looks like I am coming close to where you are, reach out and let me know. I’m always open for a companion for a few hours or, if I come really close and you have an extra bed and a hot shower, those as well.