Jesse Wolf Hardin

A selection from

Chanting Home:

Recovering Sense of Place

by, Jesse Wolf Hardin

"We are told that we have no roots, but it simply isn't true. We are not rootless, but uprooted--our roots torn from the soil as we struggled to keep up with our restless, roving parents or broke out on our own. They themselves responded to an ancestral instinct they didn't understand, an inherited compulsion to search out the means of survival in specific, cyclic migrations. Fueled by culturally impressed dissatisfaction, we find fault in what is near and seek out the strange, losing affection for each thing as the shine of its newness wears off. We often pull away from any "base" instincts that seem to counter our civilized protocol or suggest a different pace or lifestyle. We jerk away from whatever seems to "hold us down," "ground" us, or threaten us with stillness. But we are not rootless. Our roots dangle out the bottoms of our skirts and trousers, as we drag them behind us through unfamiliar streets and hallways. If we really focused on it we might still feel them, the way an amputee experiences the sensation of a limb long after its surgical removal. We may have been severed from the body-earth, but our roots still protrude, grasp at the ground at our feet wherever we are, seek out with their probing tips the stability and nourishment nothing else can provide.


We are told that to develop this relationship with place, to be or to become indigenous, requires us to be born in the same watershed where we will one day die. Some scholars of these issues claim it takes generation after generation in the same spot before a people can claim a right to be there. While generational overlap undoubtedly deepens one's sense of connection through a history/herstory of place, I assert that the sole precluding requirement for that relationship of belonging we call "native" is the individual's deepest experiencing of place, their giving back to place, and promising themselves to place. This relationship I call home, like any relationship, is a reciprocal sharing requiring the involvement and approval of both the person and the place. To put it most simply, being "native"--"belonging"--means both gifting to and being accepted by the spirits of the land. Such acceptance requires attention and tim e, but it is ours to find."

please read the rest of Jesses wonderful work here...
http://www.haven.net/deep/council/hardin.htm
as well as see his work on his web page here..
http://www.animacenter.org/jessewolfhardinw.html