White settler "anxiety"

Walking composition

My interview with the Water Cooler Podcast is out. It was a wide-ranging conversation. I’d forgotten that we talked about conspiracy theories straight off the bat. The first hour is mostly about walking, the second hour largely about the commons, watersheds, and hydrology; and within that we discussed the need for local community engagement and attention, talking with people of opposing worldviews, how cars are an identity, and my charity of choice the Flathead Warming Center (a local-to-me low-barrier homeless shelter) along with my county commissioners’ dogged opposition to it. The host did an impressive amount of research. He referenced a very old personal essay I’d written about my name (including my two middle names), so we spent much of the last half hour talking about the importance of names. And OF COURSE Lord of the Rings came up.

For those who requested a print copy of the Introduction to No Trespassing, I put them in the mail yesterday. For those who are new here, just email me a mailing address if you’d like a print copy (overseas included). And welcome!

I spent the last morning of my recent Dear Butte writing residency in tears. The evening before, I’d finished reading Debra Magpie Earling’s new novel The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, which is followed only by her first novel Perma Red in being one of the most stunning I’ve ever read. As with Perma Red, Sacajewea was a book I had to downshift for. I turned off all my devices and sat on the porch of that perfect little house in Butte, listening to the rain and thunder and being unraveled by Earling’s storytelling.

I wish I could describe Sacajewea’s power and precision. It’s impossible to compare Earling to another writer. The only thing I can say about her is how good she is. She’s better than Virginia Woolf, more multi-dimensional than Margaret Atwood. Far more intelligent and insightful than Haruki Murakami. She reminds me a little of Svetlana Aleksievich, except completely different. Whom could I compare her to? All I can really do is create a patchwork of writers her books make me think of. She’s on another level from all of them.

Afterward, driving hours northeast and out of the mountains toward Fort Benton through White Sulphur Springs and the wrinkled gullies of Belt (where one of my second cousins farms), I thought a lot about that book. About how the settler-colonizer structures imposed on the land seemed to unravel under the power of Sacajewea. All that barbed wire rolling itself up, the surveyed boundary lines—behind which massive mountainside homes and ranchettes looked so self-assured—scorching, the monument stones and survey markers cracking under the force of it. Like that slim novel is its own geological epoch.

It made me want to believe something was changing.

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The international Reclaiming the Commons conference, which I’ve just returned from, was something else, another shift in the sand beneath my feet. Monday evening I attended a screening of Brazilian documentary filmmaker Marcos Colón’s new movie about Indigenous resistance in Peru and Brazil to extractive capitalism and violence in the Amazon, Stepping Softly on the Earth. Marcos and I ended up having a long conversation the next day about the conference, resistance, what he thinks needs to change in how these stories are told, and our mutual admiration for the perspectives Jessica Hernandez shared in her book Fresh Banana Leaves.

There was so much commitment to deep change at this conference that it’s hard to pluck out presentations or conversations to share, or even construct a narrative about it, though there is one, even if it hasn’t coalesced for me yet.

One strand of that narrative was hidden in the title of the conference itself, “Reclaiming the Commons.” JoDe Goudy, former Chairman of the Yakama Nation Tribal Council, clarified the unspoken point in his keynote speech:

“Who took the commons? If it’s being reclaimed, who took it?”

Listening to Goudy’s speech came on the heels of being very annoyed by an opening plenary in which the speaker didn’t seem to know much about the conference topic, or even what “the commons” are beyond a vague abstraction. One person asked a question about reclaiming the commons and the speaker talked about a rancher doing regenerative agriculture—which I’m not opposed to; let’s regenerate soil, by all means, but in a conference where land theft came up a lot its context at best missed the point. I don’t blame the speaker so much as think the organizers missed a step in judgment in that one choice.

Another audience member asked about solving problems across differences, to which the speaker’s answer went something along the lines of people being kind to one another. Which, again, considering the topics of many of the panels, at best missed the point.

Kindness matters. I’m big on kindness and compassion. But kindness is a floor, not a ceiling. It’s a necessary condition for many things, but it’s not always sufficient and in too many cases puts the onus of compassion and understanding on the people being most harmed.

One speaker on a panel I watched later presented on a Land Back example from Australia, leading to an audience member’s question about Land Back prospects in the U.S. and how to mitigate “white settler anxiety.” Which, kindness aside, I just about scorched my brain wanting to answer.

I wanted to tell that audience about the Bison Range, close to where I live, which was returned to Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) management in 2022. Not the whole history of the range and the bison, which is a record of forced removal and land thefts laid down one on top of another (including allotment through the Dawes Act) along with the U.S. government’s intentional and wholesale slaughter of bison almost to extinction. I wanted to tell them instead about the kinds of comments that turned up in local newspapers (attitudes also covered in Threshold’s Season 1 episode about the Bison Range) when return of the Range was first being discussed, only to be canceled in 2017 by then-Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. The letters to the editor came from people living in my valley, the same kinds of comments that are coming this year from a lot of the same people with regards to the CSKT’s water compact agreement, and the same kinds that attended CSKT’s purchase of Seli’š Ksanka Qlispe’ Dam in 2015. I don’t see anybody asking those objectors to consider anyone else’s possible anxiety. Nobody is asking them for kindness, or justice, even basic honesty.

There is a point at which one has to recognize that the word “anxiety” is a cover for racism and entitlement. A point at which one has to understand that when these complaints are aired, what people really mean is, “These benefits and resources are something I’m entitled to because our system is designed to ensure that they only go to people like me and I expect to be satisfied,” that there is no amount of anxiety-easing that will end up in compromise, much less in changing their minds. A point at which one has to make the choice to do the right thing anyway.

The coddling of racism in the guise of “anxiety” or similar words has been enabled and perpetuated for hundreds of years by an entire system of colonialism designed to hand every possible advantage over to a few people at the expense of almost everyone else. It didn’t begin with the Doctrine of Discovery, but the Doctrine solidified acceptance of it into U.S. legal statute and the rest of the colonizing world followed.

In a recent episode of the Mapping the Doctrine of Discovery podcast, Tina Ngata of the Māori Nation described how the Doctrine’s values are embedded in psyches all over the world, and the monumental effort it’s going to take to even raise awareness of its existence and those values, much less begin dismantling it:

“As an ideological concept, the Doctrine of Discovery is deeply embedded in the present moment. It takes deliberate work to confront the ideological power of the Doctrine of Discovery.”

“It wasn’t just about extracting. It didn’t just accord rights in relation to lands. It set a power structure in place. . . . There are two main tasks that they need to carry out in order to maintain this economic project: One is the setting up of a system so that you can protect the flow of privilege. And that comes of course with military force. And the second thing that they need to do is that they need a narrative to legitimize the system that they set up.”

Ngata talked about narratives of domination, about who has the authority to make laws and in whose interests. Detailing the Doctrine and its effects on the U.S. legal system and Indigenous rights in his recent keynote speech, JoDe Goudy said that, “We are all dealing with a framework of dispute resolution that’s founded on a false religious pretense”—the Doctrine is based on papal bulls issued by the Catholic pope in the 1400s and was encoded into U.S. law in the 1823 case Johnson v. M’Intosh. As I wrote in a post on the Doctrine, the Johnson v. M’Intosh decision stated outright that “discovery of land (by Christians or Europeans in general, depending on which empire was doing the discovering) was equivalent to ownership of it” no matter who else was already living there. Or, as law professor Robert J. Miller put it,

“The Doctrine of Discovery is international law that’s been around since the early 1400s, and what it gives is legal justification for European Americans to acquire legal title and sovereignty and jurisdiction over the Indigenous nations around the entire world.”

Which brings me back to “white settler anxiety” and the ways in which that framing hides the real forces at work. Thinking about these issues and their barriers as “white settler anxiety” is incredibly disempowering. It makes it very easy to perpetuate the current system, in which white settlers continue to be the primary beneficiaries of ongoing theft and racism.

Deciding acts of justice by what makes a dominant culture least uncomfortable isn’t justice at all.

I’m not saying anyone has to go around being intentionally cruel to people (please don’t) or dismissive of their fears, or even that solutions to these problems are uncomplicated or don’t involve seemingly insurmountable social and political forces. Again, kindness is a floor for most things. I’m saying that I’ve been in more conversations with people holding opposing or offensive or frankly dangerous worldviews than I can count, and there are many who will never agree with what needs to be done, no matter how long you give them or how much trust you build, and that those things need to be done anyway, “anxiety” be damned.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker, author of As Long as Grass Grows, said it succinctly in her panel talk on Aldo Leopold and N. Scott Momaday:

“A transformational American land ethic must be accountable for U.S. history of genocide and land theft; establish a relationship of true respect and dignity with tribal nations.”

Related to that subject, I might be the umpteenth person you’ve seen on Substack recommending that you read Chris La Tray’s recent post, which I won’t attempt to quote from—as Leah Sottile noted, just “Read Chris La Tray. Always read Chris La Tray.”

And remember that the erasure of these histories is intentional, part of the larger efforts at colonization. “This forgetting is nothing new,” wrote Steve Minton in a recent Aeon essay on residential schools. “It is part and parcel of the European colonial project.” Settlers “didn’t just choose to forget, we participated in a grand project of forgetting.” One can also choose not to, and to act accordingly.

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Leaving Butte last month, before heading up to Fort Benton, I first drove toward Bozeman and spent a little time walking around the neighborhood I grew up in, in Belgrade, which had changed almost not at all. The stained glass window my mother had made for the front door was gone, but the fence my father had built was still up. One neighbor’s front garden—cultivated by the town librarian, who, judging by the name sign on the front porch, still lived there—looked the same. None of the homes had been replaced by fancy new constructions. Even the cottonwood trees felt familiar.

It was disconcerting. I walked to the elementary school as I had so many times in childhood but stopped short when the first brick building came into sight. I hadn’t made the connection until seeing it again, but that building has shown up many, many times over the years in a particular recurring nightmare—decaying, inescapable, full of crumbling stairs and dark passageways—and I have no idea why. I wasn’t particularly unhappy in it that I can remember.

Both elementary schools (why such a small town had two separate elementary buildings I also have no idea) had the same playground equipment from when I’d swung on the monkey bars almost forty years ago. I stood for a while by the cracked concrete and four basketball hoops, two of them missing nets and the metal posts looking battered, and remembered walking there to shoot hoops over and over by myself so long ago.

It was a surreal experience all around. My legs felt weak, like they were full of straw. Like I didn’t want to be there, anywhere in that town. Maybe it was the unchanged nature of my old neighborhood, how my feet knew how to get to my friends’ houses, the lot where the outdoor skating rink used to be, the library. I knocked on the screen door of the house I’d grown up in, which also hadn’t changed almost at all aside from one in-window air conditioning unit. I could hear the family out in the backyard and see the whole downstairs through the open front door, the layout just like I’d remembered it, but they couldn’t hear my knocks and there was no doorbell, so I stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the tiny window of my former bedroom on the second floor, where I used to crawl out on the roof to be alone. I wondered if they knew about the root cellar underneath the old lean-to back porch.

My family moved away from that town when I was ten, and I entered another six school districts over the next six years. The memories of those places and how I experienced them live within me one way or another, but it’s Belgrade that forms the base layers, the bedrock.

The past will haunt us in both good ways and bad. It can’t be buried or ignored. It will forever refuse to remain hidden.

“People say history is history but do not understand that it’s the reality of the present moment,” said JoDe Goudy in his talk. If one can accept truth that for one’s own personal life, then one has to face it for centuries of history and the ongoing damage. Learning about the Doctrine of Discovery and its continuing influence, along with the longer history of the privatization, theft, and domination of life everywhere, is essential. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Or, as a presenter on another panel put it:

“The story of how we got here is also the story of how we get out of here.”