Page 130 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Being a storyteller, my journey took the form of writing a novel. My earlier fiction had explored

how places inhabit and shape us, even when we’ve chosen to be rootless. Now I wanted to

probe the sources of our separateness. I was fed up with it, desperate for another way. Our

civilization was accelerating its crash-course to biocide. In the midst of this, I wanted to write

about re-connection.

My immigrant ancestors were always moving; they’d stand still long enough to let a child age or

an elder pass away, then push on to another town, another property, always another, better

place. Following the opportunities opened up by colonial conquest and the imperatives of

capitalism, which must always have new and expanding markets, settlers claimed this continent

as an endless frontier. And so it’s remained: a resource to develop and ‘get a living’ from. Yet a

commodity isn’t a home. In my novel I tried to dramatize a process whereby people like

myself—modern, urban—are drawn to the land, drawn down past empire’s foundations,

physical, psychological and mythical; are drawn into a place of nakedness in themselves, where

re-connection to this earth can begin. This is the place—outside the borders of empire—that the

Kanien’Kehaka (Mohawk) scholar Taiaiake Alfred speaks from in his urgent and visionary book,

Wasáse.

Like an eagle feather, Wasáse fell across my path at the end of my long writing journey.

Wasáse means “thunder dance, war dance,” and this book summons all of us to the work of

restoring a free and thriving world. Until we settlers become “real people of this homeland,”

Alfred warns, we will remain perpetual drifters and conquerors—alienated and defensive,

destroying the land and attacking those who protect it, or feeling disempowered, apathetic,

useless in the face of such destruction.

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