Separate Communities: Or One?

The question is a good one:  Why write about both the “Beloved Community” and the “Land Community” in a single Substack?  Aren’t social justice concerns and ecological issues separate from each other?

It can certainly seem so.   In my own case, I am learning about the prairie out here in the country, whereas when I go to meetings of the Black-led organizations I volunteer with—the NAACP, Juneteenth Community Association, Black History Trail of Geary County—I have to drive to our county seat, Junction City.  

And when I wrote about learning from wildflowers and about the launch of our Black History Trail,  I found it easiest to do so in two separate posts. 

But I recognize that this logistical separation is not natural or ideal or the way things should stay.  In many ways the separation is a legacy of injustice--of attitudes and practices that harmed people as well as ecosystems.   

In particular, my work in support of the tallgrass prairie ecosystem has been profoundly shaped by Euro-Americans’ attitudes imposed on North America and for centuries thereafter.  Those attitudes set the table for me and my fellow conservationists; they gave us our historic task. The ur-attitude which we need to overcome (if we do not wish to perpetuate the injustices of the past) was a sense of ethnic superiority and entitlement to the land.   Euro-Americans developed a “white” identity based on their presumed superiority to peoples of color and the presumed superiority of their “civilization” to everything “native” and “wild.”  

They were urged to replace wild plants with tame ones.

Here in Kansas, incentivized by the government, new arrivals plowed up the prairie.  

A number of individual settlers had a gut-level aversion to this destruction—but the prevailing philosophy was one of civic pride.

Indeed, the eradication of the wild was heartily endorsed—even though early results were not encouraging.   Rain did not “follow the plow.” Nevertheless, faith in the March of Progress was strong—an attitude nicely encapsulated by a column in the north-central Kansas Delphos Republican from the late 19^th century.  (Many thanks to Kansas historian and author Ron Parks for drawing my attention to this article.)    Here is an excerpt from it (original spelling and punctuation retained):

Tame grasses are gradually gaining a lodgement in this vicinity and it is only a question of time when they entirely supplant the wild varieties.  There seems to be a law of maturity obtaining throughout the realm of nature which requires a certain degree of development in localities, soil and climatic influences before certain products can be satisfactorily grown.   In other words, a country must be ripe for tame grasses, fruits, etc., before they can be successfully grown, and the wild sourness of primeval conditions give place to the sweets of cultivation.

The writer then cites the example of Iowa which initially had trouble growing fruit trees but now ships to market “carload after carload of apples and other varieties of fruit…where twenty years ago they were choked out by the rank poisons of natural wildness.”

The author concludes by asserting that the same “maturity” would come to central Kansas:

Only a few years more and the Solomon valley will have arrived at the necessary stage of cultivation and become ripe for all the higher vegetable types, then will she blossom like an Eden.

Little did he know that it was not Eden but the Dust Bowl that would “follow the plow.”

Here in the Flint Hills, rocky soil in the uplands protected the tallgrass prairie from the plow.

But the deep soiled bottomlands were all plowed up.  

Our 60 acres of bottomlands were plowed and cropped for 140 years.

It’s in those bottomlands that I have been working since 2013 to restore a native polyculture. The joy of Creation is sometimes overwhelming, soothing the sadness that comes with remembering why the native plants were destroyed in the first place.   

The same antagonism to wild plants extended to people of color.   The result was a violent “whitening” of rural Kansas where I live.  

Not twenty miles from where I live is a little town called Alta Vista.   For over a hundred years, Alta Vista was a “sundown town,” a place where Blacks were threatened with violence if they dared to stay past sunset.   The official signs were still up at the entrances to town in the 1950s.    Alta Vista was one of many such towns in rural Kansas.   

The Ingalls family—of Little House on the Prairie fame—illegally built their “little house” on Osage land in southeast Kansas. The U.S. government enforced the law and made them leave (contributing to the Ingalls-Wilder family’s later opposition to big government, especially the New Deal).   

But the U.S. government’s commitment to treaty rights faltered before the onslaught of settlement.    

The government forced the Kanza people onto smaller and smaller reservations, until, in 1873, they were driven out of the state that bears their name.  In The Darkest Period: The Kanza Indians and Their Last Homeland, 1846-1873, author Ron Parks describes a barrage of crimes committed by Euro-Americans against the Kanza.   These crimes included lynching, theft, grave desecration, vandalism and building homes on Kanza land. These crimes were impelled and excused by a widespread belief in “Manifest Destiny”—a view that God had foreordained the triumphant expansion of Euro-American civilization throughout North America, and thus the subordination or removal of Native peoples.

This drive for white-supremacy was more powerful than legal structures or “love-thy-neighbor” strictures.

It was a drive that fueled violence against Blacks as well.  

In This Is Not Dixie: Racist Violence in Kansas, 1861-1927, author Brent M. S. Campney describes how Blacks were purged from the Kansas countryside, primarily through violence and threats of violence, with the tolerance or encouragement of the powers that be.  

Quoting from rural newspaper reports and editorials, Campney conveys the spirit of the times:

“[The mobbing of Black people in Liberal] brought results. The negroes have gone, and as far as we are concerned we are glad of it.”

 “[The Black visitor] had exactly 15 minutes in which to leave (Pomona), or … the rope was put in suggestive evidence.”

“A riot was organized in Doniphan … for the purposes of driving the colored people out of town.”

“El Dorado had a touch of high life last night. About 200 men participated in the riot and all negroes were forcibly ejected from town.”

“The killing of the negro [in Neodesha] … is already beginning to bear fruit. Most of the negroes have left town.”

Times have changed, but how much?   In the unnatural “whiteness” of rural Kansas there is a ghostly absence.   People of color who once lived here are not here, and neither are their descendants.   

The implications for access to prairie experiences must be considered still today.

The separation of social justice from ecological issues can be traced back to Euro-American constructs of “civilization” vs. “wilderness.” 

Europeans brought with them to North America a world view that presumed that their human society was existentially different from self-directing nature.   “Civilization” was opposed to “wilderness.”

Native Americans had no such construct.  Where Native peoples lived and worked had place names that were often verbs, not nouns, expressive of the ongoing vitality of the land.   Histories, memories, and stories of those places mixed together the doings of humans with the doings of more-than-humans.    “Home” and “nature” were one and the same. 

But for Euro-Americans, social issues were located in “civilization,” while “wilderness” issues by definition arose off somewhere else.

This polarization influenced the conservation movement as it arose in the U.S. 

As European “civilization” advanced across the continent, “wilderness” fell before it.

But even settler society recognized that there were some spectacular places, some “wonders of nature”—such as the mountains of Yosemite or the geysers of Yellowstone--that should be spared.  The Euro-American conservation movement arose in the late 19^th century to protect these special places.  Ordinary native remnants were lower than civilization—a wild prairie was inferior to a plowed field—but extraordinary nature could be superior—the majesty of a mountain could be divine. 

Conservation then came to mean reverentially  setting aside some parts of nature, where people could visit but they had to be on their Sunday behavior; they were to “take only photos and leave only footprints.”  Weekday behavior—living and working—was not allowed.    “Savagery” might be filthy; but “wonders of nature” were pristine.  These spiritually inspiring places were to be kept in their “original state,” as “they came from the hand of the Creator,” “untouched by man.”

This construct, put into action, gave us our great national parks. But there was a problem: They weren’t in fact “untouched by man.”    A recent article in the Smithsonian describes “The Lost History of Yellowstone.” Archaeologist Doug MacDonald is quoted, saying, “Native Americans were hunting and gathering here for at least 11,000 years.  They were pushed out by the government after the park was established.  The Army was brought in to keep them out, and the public was told that Native Americans were never here in the first place because they were ‘afraid of the geysers.’” 

Much of this “lost history” is still being recovered: A recent book from Oxford UP, Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, focuses on Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Glacier national parks.  

Euro-American conservationists brought their construct of “civilization vs. wilderness” into reality—but only by engaging in ethnic cleansing.

Lost in this “cleansing” were centuries of hard won expertise in living with the land.  

Today’s movement to “bring nature home” doesn’t know the half of it! 

Why perpetuate injustice?

Racist injustice is embedded in the inherited separation between social and ecological concerns.

Wrongs persist in the inertial “whiteness” of conservation organizations; in the “whiteness” of access to nature experiences; in the “set aside” concept of preservation; in ignorance of any but settler-colonial ways of using the land; in dismissal of the possibility of reparative remedies (such as a refusal to even discuss the proposal of Ojibwe author David Treuer that national parks be returned to Native nations).

If we ignore these wrongs, don’t we risk perpetuating them?

Opposing Injustice Isn’t Enough. Creativity needed!

Why not work to energize the Beloved Community and the Land Community and bring the two together?

The more reciprocal interactions we experience, the more alive we feel.

So why not work together to create a flourishing COMMUNITY where all can thrive—humans and more-than-humans alike?