Happy Solstice from Unsettling! A Recap of Our First Year
A look at the path we've traveled these last twelve months.
Unsettling went live on Substack on December 23rd of last year, two days after Winter Solstice. That means we are about to mark our first anniversary, making a year-end recap all the more appropriate. Once again, let me offer some deep-felt gratitude to all of you, the readers who have kept me going through this first year. Knowing that there are any eyes on these essays is what keeps me writing.
I have a long list of all the topics I hoped to touch but haven’t, and many half-started pieces that are still brewing. But creating this recap has reminded me of how much we did manage to do. I say “we” because there have been many behind-the-scenes conversations feeding into this work; thanks to all who have taken part or reached out to offer feedback, it’s always tremendously helpful to hear from you.
So where have we journeyed together this year? Here are the major themes and highlights as I see them. And we’ll have another email out shortly to forecast where we might go together in our next turn about the sun.
Warm wishes to all of you on this longest night,
Meg
REPARATIONS
The first half of the year found us dipping our toes into the conversations happening around reparations, be it within the Movement for Black Lives or socialists and indie filmmakers. (“On Reparations: Does It Mean What You Think It Means?” and “A Chance to Think About Reparations: Sixteen Thousand Dollars”)
We looked more closely at the widely praised reparations effort in Evanston, IL, to consider both the point and process of reparations (“Reparations in Action: A Look at Evanston's ‘Historic First’"):
The goal is not to be right; it’s to be whole. It’s not just to create equity and equality, but also healing. This requires more of our already ailing democratic processes than they can usually deliver, even at their best. It requires attention to relationship, to those who do not yet feel as though the relationship has been restored. It means lingering over process criticisms even at moments of historic public triumph. It means, most of all, knowing that there is no program or policy that will be the “endpoint” of reparations. How could there be an endpoint, in our short lifetimes, to repair that which has been ongoing for centuries? We are here to complete as much of the work as we can, to make that endpoint arrive sooner, while holding onto the knowledge that everything we do is just groundwork for future actors. Just the beginning steps.
This focus on reparations as a tool for healing also informed our very first post this year, “Origins: #HealingMeansReparations.”
Yet healing is difficult work, so we tried to find some resources for navigating the tricky seas at the junction overlapping injustices (“Repatriation and Reparations: The Critical Intersection”):
What is at the intersection of repatriation and reparations, if they do indeed intersect? I still think the answer to this question is key to upending all the destructive systems people love to label and shout about. How do we move beyond labeling and shouting? Again, I agree with Kutse: we need to be looking at land. How to repair the relationship with those who were made to work upon it by force. How to repatriate it to those who belong to it but had that relationship severed. […] How do we cease to think of land as something that any group of people owns, and think of it instead as a living entity to which they might belong?
BORDERS AND BORDERLINES
In our second post of the year, we began to interrogate a primary concept that shapes our understanding of the identity of a given place: its borders. In the first of this “Borderline Histories” series, we took a look at the U.S.-Canada border and considered the way the history of its formation has been largely invisibilized in comparison to the more publicly discussed national border further south. (“Introducing the Borderline History Series.”) Then, we looked at how the idea that these borders were contested only in the past is also a myth, and how even today, pieces of the borderline remain disputed (“Borderline Histories: A Borderless Island?”):
All in all, Machias Seal Island is a useful reminder that borders are neither obvious nor certain, never pre-existing and often contested, and that the same is true of ownership itself. We make up borders or claims to ownership with particular ends in mind, ends which others have a right to question, and which we might question ourselves. For despite all the efforts to install concrete and to militarize modern borders, most remain propped up via collective acts of imagination. Simply turning a spotlight on them can help tear them down. This makes modern border disputes like that over Machias a helpful sort of mental dynamite, able to break down our sense of the permanence of borders and blast holes in our views on the inherent precision or certainty of claims to ownership. Useful stuff to keep in one’s back pocket, it seems.
In the spring, I had the opportunity to visit the U.S.-Mexico border in one of its least militarized spots, and shared a photo essay about rivers and borders and a canoe trip down the Rio Grande. (“Boating the Borderline: Reflections from the Rio Grande.”)
A subsequent visit to the border, to try and see wall construction further west in O’odham territory (Arizona) failed, but the experience that day was its own strange adventure—what I dubbed “Your Moment of (Apocalyptic) Zen.” (“Slipping In and Out of Time on the Border”)
A few months later saw another attempt to think about borders in a radically different way, by reconceptualizing the borders and names of the region in which I have often lived. What does it it mean to eschew city boundaries and state lines as the primary identifying markers for where we belong? What alternatives are there? Can one be a resident of Salmon Nation? (“Am I Home Yet?”)
GETTING FAMILIAR WITH FEDERAL LAND MANAGEMENT
We’ve taken a few stabs at getting more familiar with federal administration of public land, providing an overview of the Department of the Interior, poking at the troubled history of the National Park Service, and comparing current and past calls from activists to abolish the Bureau of Indian Affairs. We also wondered about those strange bits of private land held within public parks—a way of asking, “what is an air strip doing in that wilderness area?” (“Into the Interior: The Department of Everything,” “Celebrate Public Lands Day with a Good Critique of the Park Service,” “A different way of honoring Indigenous Peoples' Day: Abolish the BIA,” and “No Road Signs on This Trail.”)
LAND BACK
Questions of Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization, and land return permeated through many of the year’s posts (including all those on federal land management just discussed above.) But we dug directly into the effort in our Land Back News Roundups (see our Spring and Summer editions of these), and highlighted some of the efforts we have been tracking and supporting in our most recent post, “Funding Indigenous Sovereignty: A Year of Giving at Unsettling.” Back in June, we also discussed use rights and treaties to better understand the notion of “treaty people” advocated for by Indigenous pipeline fighters and others:
So what’s the point of the concept of “Treaty People,” as well as that slogan “honor the treaties”? … These weren’t agreements between individuals, and they weren’t agreements between unequal parties; they were nation-to-nation agreements. […]
Nations are made up of people, not just government officials, and the emphasis on the treaties is in part to implicate many more of us as responsible for upholding the terms of each treaty. Furthermore, as understood by many tribal nations, they are also an agreement with the land. So if one is on treaty land, you are a treaty person, with responsibilities to both the other nation of that treaty and the land. (“Honor the What?”)
CHANGING OUR MENTAL MAPS
Building on the work of questioning borders, over the summer we took some time to dwell upon the tools and practices that shape our conceptions of place and places and how we navigate them—both our literal, physical tools and the accompanying mental habits that both influence and arise from them.
“Countering the Master’s Maps” examined the use of mapping as part of empire-building, before asking what Audre Lorde actually meant in her famous quote and looking for examples of mapping that move beyond “the mere tolerance of difference” to stay “within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal,” allowing us to find “the power to seek new ways of being in the world […] as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.” (Lorde!) We then looked at Zuni “countermapping” as one such practice.
“When Getting Lost is the Point” shares some stories highlighting the deficiencies of both over-reliance and over-avoidance of using GPS for backcountry navigation. While remaining hopeful that we might find a more balanced way to utilize modern tech for finding our way, the question remains: “In what ways are we exchanging a sense of security for deeper connection?”
“Rightfully in the Wrong Place” documents an attempt to journey with the presumption that one belongs and has a right to meet one’s basic needs, regardless of whether the land in question is private or public—an experiment in putting a new “mental map” to use ahead of its time. The results of that experiment might be mixed, but it leads us to fruitful questions about access rights and a “right to roam” as potential first steps in eroding our oversimplified notions of private property. In many ways, this echoed themes explored more thoroughly in an essay from February that advocated against new bans on public camping and in favor of the experience of public sleeping: “The Joyful Necessity of Sleeping in Public.”
CHANGING CULTURE AND TRADITION
How do we let go of cultural practices that reinforce old myths about the righteousness or naturalness of land theft on Turtle Island? This is sticky business, as emotions can run high when you suggest canceling a family holiday gathering or refuse to continue partaking in an activity or tradition you once even adored. We considered both the reasons for and the methods to take on these challenges, including calling off the 4th of July (guess which post directly lost us subscribers this year? yes, the one bluntly titled “Cancel the 4th”) and finding new ways to interact with the Day of Mourning, aka Thanksgiving (“Disowning Without Disconnection”):
Understanding connection as both the means and the ends at hand offers up a non-shaming approach to making cultural shifts around symbolically heavy shared practices like Thanksgiving. Rather than focusing on what we’re rejecting, we can focus on what experiences we’re making sure to stay in connection with. It is possible that one has the kind of family where not showing up for Thanksgiving would be such a major breach that it hinders your own ability to have further influence, to stay in relationship with them. This doesn’t describe my own family, but for those of you for whom it holds true, I wonder: does it help to shift away from thinking of needing to either a) reject the family gathering as a whole, or b) make some clear stand on the ‘right’ position to hold about the event, and instead to c) consider how you can help you and your family connect to the reality and variety of Indigenous experiences?
Looking at an entirely different cultural arena, in “What Ball Gowns Have to do With Land Return,” we used this year’s Met Gala to talk about the ties between cultural repatriation and land return, questioning the project of ‘the encyclopedic museum.’
And early on in the year, I shared my own personal story of learning to detach from a once cherished piece of culture in “Getting Over Guthrie.”
LABOR and LAND
I offered up two essays, written eight years apart and both originally intended for publication outside Unsettling (the first I never submitted, the second was published in the online anthology A Day is a Struggle) as a way to talk about the binds—and for some, the very real crisis—created by a society that commodifies land and housing and offers no way to access that outside of physically and spiritually destructive forms of employment.
What a prompt to make one consider: How do we face up to what’s killing us when it seems to be the very tools that provide us with a living?
How many of us have thought that we were practicing freedom, when the very tools of our practice were engendering the opposite? (from “My Shoulder Hurts From Typing This”)
If the system of employment cannot provide us with a future, then why submit ourselves to it? Why allow it to continue its present stranglehold upon us?
Why not say instead: the future must be a future without jobs. (from “Our Future Occupation”)
There would be no more debt for me, I assured myself, even as I carried a growing sense of foreboding that rent would be a forever form of debt I could not escape. (from “My Shoulder Hurts From Typing This”)
So here we are: our jobs do not provide for us, yet we must fight to have them for the sake of staking out some very small space for ourselves to exist. To break away from this system of employment, then, that seeks to take each day more of our energy from ourselves while giving us less in return, we must look to break the spell of commodification over one of the most basic elements: the land. (from “Our Future Occupation”)
Decommodification as a strategy for breaking the tie between employment and survival received further consideration in “Fight for $15! Or Maybe Not? A Shifting Perspective,” which questioned whether fights for higher wages are the right tool for meaningful change:
There are those who want to ensure that we must pay simply to live—that we must pay more than we ever have, for more things than we ever have, just to survive. Such minds will do what they can to extract and hoard whatever higher wages workers manage to secure for themselves. We know that there are many such minds in the world; they’ve been running things for some time now. We aid them in their goals when we allow them to continue putting a price on everything, when we accept that as a natural and given fact about how the world works, and ask only that they give us moderately more means to buy what they have marked for sale.
RECKONING WITH CHANGE AND LOSS
As we entered autumn and the darker days of the year, we took a moment to dwell on the difficulty of accepting death—both how this has more quickly ushered in an era of extreme climate change, and how it limits our ability to now move through that era. Death is an integral part of land-based processes, and our broad-based cultural denial of the role of death and decomposition is yet one more mechanism that distances us from deeper connection with place. That’s the basic thesis of both “The Anthropocene is Haunted” and “Death Comes for the Apples”:
Readers of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo will know the lesson: failure to recognize the dead and let them be as such—to aid them in their dying when needed—leads them not only to haunt us, but locks them into a world of unhappy ghosts, unable to complete their transformation from one state of being to the next. Both the dead and the living suffer.
We cause death so recklessly these days—trees, people, whole species—that there is hardly time to let the departed settle. And in the grief that goes by many new names—be it solastalgia or eco-anxiety—we see the refusal of many a person to reconcile themselves with our new reality. Like Lincoln we return again and again to the cemetery in disbelief, only our graveyard is everywhere: the forest slope, the river canyon, the front yard with plants smothered by smoke and heat.
We do not let the dead rest, and they return the favor.
So how could we expect the era of climate change to be anything other than a haunting? We have literally torn the dead up from their graves to burn them. No wonder it’s all havoc in the atmosphere—we’ve set the ghosts of dinosaurs and massive prehistoric plants to wander loose across the globe. (“The Anthropocene is Haunted”)
There’s something to be learned from such small tasks, something about knowing not to be afraid of the signs of death, and how to find and maintain life within, essential skills for living in the material world. This working at the edge of decay is a defining feature of living, yet one we have sought to reject in recent times. It is the art of maintenance, of “keeping things up.” The art of repair. (“Death Comes for the Apples”)
This seems an appropriate place to end, here on the Solstice. My personal ritual for today is to linger in the dark once it comes, to reflect upon what I hope to leave there, what in my life needs to be turned over to the forces of decay. Later, I will light a candle, and voice what I hope to grow with the return of the sun and the coming of the light. This Solstice, I know that Unsettling plays a starring role in what I hope to grow in the coming year. I hope you’ll join me for our next season together.