The New Canaan
“It is too late. The white man has the country which we loved, and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die.” -Ten Bears, Yamparika Comanche Chief, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
The middle of Oklahoma was not any place anyone really wanted to be. At least, not until the other places became too crowded. It was a place that the Native Americans didn’t settle, but, instead roamed through depending on the time of year. What is now the state of Oklahoma was only a small part of 4 different tribe’s land. Oklahoma did not even become a state until 1907. If you exclude Alaska and Hawaii there were only two states admitted to the Union after Oklahoma – New Mexico and Arizona – states firmly cemented in the Southwestern region, the region furthest from our nation’s capital.
The other states that touch mine were admitted years before the Great State of Oklahoma. Missouri: 1821; Arkansas: 1836; Texas: 1845; Kansas 1861; Colorado: 1876. So, for 30 years (really almost 50 years considering how little of Colorado actually touches Oklahoma) there was an Oklahoma shaped hole in every map of the United States, almost all of which labeled the area Indian Territory because, well, that’s where we shoved all the Native American tribes we didn’t know what else to do with.
Why would we have moved as many Native American tribes as we could to this land in the center of the nation? Because besides wide open spaces, the land had no redeeming quality, at least compared to the other land in the space between the oceans. In other words, Oklahoma was not a place anyone really wanted to be. In the millions of years that our continents have been essentially where they are, no one settled this land or lived in it year-round until just over 100 years ago.
I made the decision at the age of 19 that I didn’t want to be there either. Call it itchy feet, call it wanting to see if I could “make it” on my own, call it running away, call it whatever you want, but I made the conscious decision to leave home to live in a new place. I left my center, my foundation, my local and familial roots behind in search of something I didn’t think I could find in that great state.
That was 15 years ago. I still don’t know what I was looking for or if I ever found it.
As with almost all adolescents, especially those in early adulthood, no matter how far away I went, or how long I stayed away, I was always welcomed home. I’d turn onto New Canaan Rd. and know there was refuge there – a promised land I had to journey to, often through the wilderness of the decisions I had made, at times barely making it out alive.
Canaan, Israel, the Promised Land, the Land Flowing with Milk and Honey, – the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan. Or, the land the Israelites longed for. It is the land they conquered after the Exodus, Joshua at the helm (poor Moses?). It was the land they called home and longed for even though they hadn’t stepped foot in it for generations. It was the land flowing with milk and honey, the land God had promised them when they left slavery in Egypt and wandered the prairie until most of them died.
That phrase – flowing with milk and honey – has become so familiar, at least for Jews and Christians, we don’t actually think about what it means. Even people who read the Bible literally will treat this like the metaphor it is. I have never met anyone who thought there was a literal spring in the ground with milk flowing up and out of it and down a milk-creek bed on through the countryside. Nor has anyone ever pitched the idea of a giant beehive, hanging from the Oaks of Mamre, so full of honey it is continually nearly bursting at the seams, people standing under it with jars, letting the honey drip into it until their jar is full.
Canaan is a place metaphorically flowing with milk and honey. What is not so metaphorical is the story of the Israelite spies who scouted the land (tsk, tsk, tsk…) and brought back a bundle of grapes so large (tsk, tsk, tsk…) that two soldiers had to carry it back together. Only something like that could come from a place metaphorically flowing with milk and honey.
By the time the Israelites left Egypt and made it back around to the promised land, it had been re-inhabited. People, new people, many different nations of people, had started making that land their ancestral land. The amount of time Israel was enslaved in Egypt gave generations of other nations what they needed to make the actual land of Israel, or what would become Israel, their home.
According to an old U.S. Geological Survey the geographic center of Oklahoma is “8 miles north of Oklahoma City.” If you go from the Oklahoma City line, straight up Interstate 35, 8 miles is eerily close to New Canaan Rd.
There is a certain irony in the fact that almost exactly in the center of the land no one has ever wanted to inhabit, unless absolutely necessary, is a road called New Canaan. Even more irony in that this was the road I grew up on, and, at least in my youth, I could not find anything sacred about the place or the land. It is not a place I would have chosen. For me, it was not flowing with milk and honey.
I have since come to know and believe that all land is sacred, all land has its beauty and its wilderness, all land has its refuge and its deserted places. All land has been created by God, but perhaps not all land was made for us to inhabit. I think Oklahoma was one of those places – not scenic in the sense of mountains and oceans, only seas of invasive wheat; not a place with much refuge from the constant wind from the west, or the winds that cause sirens to split through late afternoons in the early summer months, or from the biting winter wind that brings ice and sleet; and not home in the sense of full-time habitation.
If there is one way I would not describe Oklahoma, it is flowing with milk and honey. Waving wheat? Maybe. Milk and honey? No way. Native prairie grass that has evolved to withstand brutal winters and possibly dry summers? Definitely. The place we call Oklahoma; from Black Mesa to Idabel, from Red River to Ponca City, is certainly sacred, but it is no promised land.
In our relatively recent past we went from being a people who thought of land as a home – a place where our ancestors were, a place where we would not just trace our ancestry back to that city or specific plot of land, but we would actually live there and continue the story there. Obviously, I am speaking generally here because land has been in flux since the beginning of time. The land itself over the last 200+ million years has physically moved and continues to today.
Instead, it is our attitude toward land that has changed drastically more than their position on the globe. We don’t think of lands as ancestral any more – except in a romanticized way, getting DNA tests to tell us which part of the world our ancestors were from – and, instead we only think of land as resourceful or places we can make a little more money. Only, the resources are diminishing each and every day. With it, and with our movement to and fro on the earth, our connection to the land disappears, too.
I live 1000 miles from where I grew up. My parents lived their entire adult lives 400 miles from where they grew up. I am now effectively 1500 miles from my ancestral lands. At least we are close to my wife’s ancestral lands. Even in this foreign land – this foreign land where my house is – that is and was someone else’s ancestral land; on this land that has been paved with roads; forests clear cut to make room for this house I live in (luckily I can still see some of the woods from my back porch!), we apparently haven’t done enough. Today local farmland is being bought up to make way for a new coffee shop. What was, in effect, a small quarry for a concrete business, is being filled back in and leveled so another grocery store can come to town. And, car washes. So many car washes. Perfectly good land is being cleared, plumbed, and cemented for ANOTHER car wash.
If we are no longer connected to the land, or care for the land, then soon the land will stop caring for us.
In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s (and probably still today because… you know… capitalism and greed) the Havasupai tribe were fighting for the right to live in and seasonally roam their ancestral lands. That sounds great, right? Their only major problem was that they were unlucky enough for their ancestral homeland to be the Grand Canyon.
Over many, many, many years the land of the Havasupai reservation had continually diminished. Traditionally the Havasupai spent their summers in the depths of the canyon and their winters on the plateau surrounding the canyon, but those lands were becoming less and less available to them. So, they fought the United States government for larger portions of their land back. The only problem from the government’s view was that the government was starting to lean more toward preservation of federal lands, and, to preserve land, you can’t give more of it up for a native people to inhabit. Habitation does not equal preservation of land.
Eventually the tribe regained some of its ancestral land for animal grazing purposes, but not much else. So, Grand Canyon National Park and the Sierra Club started to work on “A Master Plan for Grand Canyon National Park” which didn’t include anything remotely related to helping the Havasupai people live on their land. Instead, the “Master Plan” included creating new campsites on reservation land to meet the growing demand of tourism.
Many Havasupai came to the public hearings for the Plan in May 1971. After sitting through hours of speeches and presentations (presumably about how perfect this plan was for everyone involved…) the chairman of the tribe, Lee Marshal, finally had a chance to speak. These were his words. “I heard you all talking about the Grand Canyon. Well, you’re looking at it. I am the Grand Canyon!”
We don’t think of place like that anymore. Instead, we think of land and place as a thing to be exploited, not nurtured, or toured. What can the land do for us? we ask, instead of realizing that we are the land. In some cases like mine, the land my roots had started growing in became something to be abandoned instead of embraced and nurtured. As if anyone could ever completely uproot themselves from a place.
As I’ve been writing this my grandparents land, where my mom grew up, her ancestral home, my second ancestral homeland that I seasonally inhabited every summer, has gone up for sale. It is now August, my dad died last December, and my mom has bought a new house and will soon be moving out of the house that I grew up in. The pilgrimage sites I grew up loving and connected with are being sold and will soon be taken over by others who will grow up in those places, and leave for college and come back to those places when their heart breaks.
Scott Russell Sanders wrote an essay called Staying Put in which he argues that there is an ecological and spiritual necessity to staying put, staying in one place, or, as he says, becoming an inhabitant of a place. I personally find it difficult to become an “inhabitant,” since I come from a place that never had full time inhabitants until just over 100 years ago. There is something in the spirit of the soil of Oklahoma that causes one to roam – at least that causes this one to roam. Maybe it was that something that caused me to need to abandon that land for a time; something in that soil instilled in me the need to briefly be a nomad. And, I did. For many years I left home and came back, seasonally.
Most Plains Indians were semi-nomadic. They would travel the plains based on the season. Each season they would go to this place and hunt this food. Then they would move on and plant their crops at that place. I know some anthropologist somewhere will say I’m technically misusing the word, but I don’t care because that lifestyle speaks to me.
People have been living this way in certain places in our world forever. In the low Alps of Italy, families used to have three different dwellings at three different altitudes based on the time of year, and they would travel up and down the mountain with their livestock as necessary.
I may not move from season to season anymore, but I think what that lifestyle says is that a person can have different ancestral lands. There are places we go to in different seasons of our lives, and some of our roots have found their way into that sacred soil.
My roots are in the lava-rock infested land of North East New Mexico. My roots are in the short, scraggly, Black Jack Oak forests of Central Oklahoma. My roots are at the steamy confluence of the Saluda, Broad and Congaree Rivers in Columbia, South Carolina. And, now my roots are digging deep into the fertile soil in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee.
There is a new movement, well, really an old movement that is gaining new traction, to rebuild the soil, mostly in farmlands. For hundreds of years we have been leaching nutrients out of the soil by only planting one crop in a field year after year. Every plant needs, takes, and leaves different nutrients in the soil. By only planting one crop in a soil for an extended period of time (say, 150 years), that soil will inevitably be lacking in some necessary nutrients because that one crop will have taken all of that nutrient from the soil and not replenished it. And, by removing most of the trees from the land, and tall grasses, in order to make our crop rows as straight as possible, we are losing our topsoil at an alarming rate. Some experts say we only have about 40 years of topsoil left if we don’t do something to correct it now. If we don’t then there probably won’t be any soil left to grow our roots in.
For years our families have been losing their topsoil, too. In a few generations no one will be from anywhere. There is a certain beauty to that – that no one has any claim to any particular place. But, in the world we live in, that would quickly cease to be a beautiful thing and even quicker become bloodier than the reality we live with now.
We must, quite literally, take care of the land we’re on if we want to take care of ourselves. We must, quite literally, develop the soil, if we want to continue developing ourselves and our stories (here, I admit, that many do not want to develop and grow, and that is why I have lost some faith in our world, at large.) We must, quite literally, deepen our roots where we are, even if just for a season of our lives, if we want to be healthier people.
When we first moved into our home almost 3 years ago there were 4 tall pine trees in the backyard. Each was probably 60-70 years old, no doubt planted when the neighborhood was first planned. By the time these trees came under our care, they were no longer healthy. They had been so mistreated over the years that even to my untrained eye they looked unsalvageable.
That first summer, one dropped in a storm on Father’s Day. We called a crew out a couple weeks later to take down the three remaining trees before one fell on the house. The backyard has been sunny and bare (and hot in the summertime) ever since. The grass has suffered, as well. There are far fewer roots to retain rainwater, and the lack of shade has led to scorched grass in the heat of summer.
Because of this, my wife and I are in the process of figuring out what trees to replant, and where. There are basically two options. We could plant some fast growing, non-native trees that don’t do much for our environment except look pretty. Birds don’t nest in them, caterpillars don’t inhabit them, and they’ll have to be replanted in 20-30 years. Or, we could grow something native, like White Oak trees, that grow slower and are more useful to all of creation, and last about 100 years or so.
The main difference between the two is that one we will almost certainly get to enjoy the beauty of. The second, it is doubtful we will see the trees reach maturity. It is clear the second option is better, it’s just not better for Jessica and me – at least, as our society might see it – unless we happen to stay in this house for the next 60 years.
Caring for the land makes us a part of the land. We nourish the land by putting ourselves back into it. Physically nourishing the land binds us with where we are, even if we only stay there for a moment or two. It nourishes the soil, and it nourishes us. We keep the land going so that others can come in and develop their roots after us. With as transient as our world is becoming, this might be the best we can hope for. I think it is the best I can hope for.
Certainly, there is an argument to be made for growing the fast-growing, non-native trees, most of which have to do with aesthetics right here, right now. But, that feels a lot like just wandering on the prairie until we die.