The story behind Land Clinic is really a ghost story. It’s what happened when I started to confront some of what has haunted me ever since I could remember: anxiety, cultural amnesia, and placelessness. I’ve come to understand these big things as both experienced and inherited.1 I believe as we begin to unravel the shape our vulnerabilities take, we send ripples into the past and the future. For me, finding safe ways to hold these big things came through knowing my own ancestors, compassion and ultimately the foundational work we are doing at the clinic.2
Through this work, I’ve had the deepest honor of knowing other ghosts. I’ve met elders who still remember the time before erasure.3 I’ve walked on the hallowed grounds of sites of massacre.4 I’ve heard the songs spoken in the congressional halls that stopped senators in their tracks and led the way to historical legislation.5 I’ve seen the ancestors reborn in a seed.6 I’ve felt the deep ways my dead are supporting me when I feel engulfed in the heartbreak of this world.
We are in a cycle of great violence, great death on a scale unimaginable even by today’s standards.7 These dead will need you to listen to them. These dead need all of us to not look away from the hurt but hold their hands. This work is not performative and rational but raw and relational. Let each of us long for stories of remembrance and connection: the stories of the lands we live on and the lands we loss, the blood that made us and the way they have hurt/been hurt, and the worlds within worlds we will never fully understand in this lifetime.
One of the ways we’ve created acts of remembrance at the clinic is our mapping projects. In our last substack post, we introduced Wanda Culp of Tongass Women for Forest/WECAN International in Southeast Alaska. Over the past couple of months we’ve created the first of what we hope will be many maps of remembrance in Glacier Bay.
Dakhaá X̱hoo is an archipelago in the Cross Sound and part of Wanda's matrilineal home of Hoonah. We started here because of the relatively simple legal history surrounding the islands and Wanda's deep connection to this place as a skipper on a fishing boat. Our goal is to begin with the Indigenous framing of place and move into (some) of the modern legal history that has caused a fracturing of that relationship.
We've used storymaps for now but may change mediums as the repository of these histories grows. Wanda plans to share them out to her community next year as part of her work with Tongass Women for Forest. In early June, my family will go to Alaska to record her and other Tlingit elders on the origin stories associated with some of these place names (e.g., Ka Kush Tu and the Devil Fish). These stories will be part of the maps to ground from a place of long-time. To view the map in its current form, you can follow this link.
I know that this remembrance is not enough to change all that needs to be changed. I do have a funny feeling though that the practice of remembering with our hearts and humanity is the practice that can sustain the change to come. May it be so.
For me this was about regulating my own the nervous system better, thinking about social-ecological models of stress, epigenetic trauma and the way our DNA holds certain patterns. For more information about regulatory practices, I highly recommend working with the folks of Lumos Transforms.
One of the most challenging aspects of this work was actually accepting my professional lineage as an attorney. The law had been something I always shied away from not wanting this to be my identity or how I connect with others. Culturally, we have a way of deifying attorneys for their power. I have never wanted to be a god, I want to know God. Stepping into myself though, meant acknowledging this professional lineage as much as my personal ones. At a time when I thought I would never practice law again, I was invited to claim it entirely.
Tlingit elder and culture bearer Amy Marvin frequently visits the conversations between Wanda Culp of Tongass Women for Forest/WECAN and myself.
Walking the grounds of Burton Mound massacre in Santa Barbara with Carmen Sandoval of ‘Anapamu Alliance.
Reading the words of Ione Jones’ grandmother, KHIMSTONIK (Mary Jim Chapman) in the 1988 Select Committee on Indian Affairs for Oversight of the Columbia River Fisheries Management Hearing.
Listening to Mercy Kariuki-McGee of Haki Farmers Collective talk about sorghum and the love she puts into planting, harvesting and processing every stalk.
Violence may not be new but the scale at which our technology and geopolitical systems enables it is.