“Land is life – or, at least, land is necessary for life.” Patrick Wolfe
“Whose woods these are I think I know” begins the canonized Robert Frost poem about stopping on a horse one evening “to watch [the landowner’s] woods fill up with snow.” Though the first stanza is concerned with this probable owner and whether he would catch the speaker of the poem stopping on his land, Frost’s primary aim in the poem, it seems, is to render a stolen moment of contemplation on the darkest day of the year, before traveling the long road home and ultimately the long road of his life to death, the forever sleep.
As someone who walks in woods often, nearly daily since COVID and moving up on a hill, this opening comes to me not infrequently. It’s one of the many lines I chirp out as I go, a refrain as I make music with my feet as well. Others include: bah bah bah bah bah bah bah You say it’s your birthday! Or, from The Sound of Music of my youth: Oh Mother Superior I could never get lost in these hills! And, also, because I take me with me: Paranoia paranoia everybody’s coming to get me. Just say you never met me. I’m not sick, but I’m not…. Well, you get the picture. Songs, catch phrases, bits of conversation – usually unbidden – burble up from the well of my experience, which is some small part of a collective experience, a version, if skewed and biased, of communal mixed tapes.
The Frost line, I’ve noticed, usually comes out as Whose woods are these – an interrogative, the maybe more expected version than how it was constructed for the poem. Of course Frost is being a poet in arranging his line for rhythm and surprise. In conversation we might say, “I think I know whose woods these are.” Instead, he opens with what sets us up for an expectation of the question. “Whose woods” feels as if it will be asking, rather than asserting. Though he then undermines the assertion (he thinks he knows, not he’s certain he knows), there is a claim embedded in the line. He is sure that there is a singular owner, even if he’s not entirely sure he knows which.
The woods where I now live are the original homelands of the Mohican (Muhheconneok) people. Their villages and great council fire were down closer to the river, the land in the hills for seasonal hunting, fishing, and gathering, and it is certain they were here for millennia prior to Henry Hudson sailing up “the river that flows both ways” in 1609. Their territory extended on both sides of the river and from as far north as Lake Champlain all the way south to close to the mouth of the river at Manhattan island. One account has it that their numbers had been 25,000, with 4,000 warriors, at their peak.
We know that this changed – dramatically and violently – with the coming of the Dutch, and then the English. This isn’t news. It also isn’t new to say that settler-colonial myths surrounding “giving thanks” between colonists and Indigenous people, as an obvious example, are distorted, propagandistic narratives. Still, the story of an amicably shared feast with scant acknowledgment of the atrocities that settlers enacted gets repeated every November. As do the tidal waters with their source high in the mountains of where the Mohicans lived still get called the Hudson rather than the Muhheacannituck.
Which names and narratives we reiterate have tremendous material, emotional, psychological, and spiritual significance. Erasure equals death. In a most literal sense, the story told in the 1493 Papal Bull that decreed “that barbarous nations be overthrown” wrote the justification for violently dispossessing non-Christians of their land solely by erasing the humanity of anyone who did not succumb to Rome. This is often called the Doctrine of Discovery, and in 1823 a United States Supreme Court decision incorporated this argument into federal law as the basis for further usurpation of Turtle Island. A more seemingly benign example, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, wherein he wrongly conflated the Mohicans and the Mohegans (neither of whom are extinct), gets retold to this day.
What story, then, shall I tell of these woods? Rather, what story is it my place, nee duty, to tell? I am aware as I walk through the forested hills where I now live that I tread on history I don’t feel good about, to put it plainly.* I am also aware that this story is not solely in the past. The Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation, the present-day descendants of those whose homeland I also call home, is a sovereign, self-supporting federally recognized tribe of about 1500 enrolled members. They live some one thousand miles west in Wisconsin on a reservation in Menominee tribal land due to various coerced removals, what they have called the “many trails” of their history. This distance has not diminished their connection to the area. The Muhheconneok, the people of the waters that are never still, after all, are a people named for place.
“The connection has never been broken,” says Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Bonney Hartley. “We’ve always returned, we’ve always had land claims, we’ve always had historical interest in our cultural sites. It’s always been home.” Her office, in fact, is located not in Wisconsin, but in New York in Muhheconneok ancestral homelands. Through the National Historic Preservation Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, their Tribal Historic Preservation program reviews hundreds of projects every year within its recognized areas of interest. In other words, in these woods.
What follows territorial acknowledgments? What comes once this story is brought to the fore? How to make this right? One specific avenue for reparation is, to use a complicated term, giving land back (is it giving if it was never rightfully owned?). The recent Supreme Court ruling in McGirt vs. Oklahoma, which decrees a large portion of that state as never having been disbanded as Muscogee (Creek) Nation land, is an historic win for Indigenous rights in the US. Could this signal the possibility of other favorable outcomes for Native American tribes and people? As for the Mohicans, they did petition the State of New York in 1986 for 23,000 acres, enough land that they would have been able to return home to live. The territory named wasn’t along the river valley but in western NY, the tribe’s last location before being forced out by developers in the 1800s. The suit was finally settled in 2010 with an award of less than 2 acres for potential establishment of a casino and an additional 330 acres added to their Wisconsin territory. The casino was never developed due to encroaching competition, ultimately from NY State itself. This certainly was not the win the Muscogee (Creek) Nation experienced, but that was 2010. Would the case have turned out differently today?
I am no legal scholar. I don’t know if there is a case to be brought for land along the Muhheacannituck. I imagine the tribe’s best legal claim was the one they sought in western NY rather than their original homelands. There are deeds that document agreements for most of the land along the river, though both sides of the signers on paper had vastly differing understandings of what those leases meant. But maybe this isn’t something that has to be negotiated through the law. Chelsea Vowel, writing as âpihtawikosisân, says that returned land could come from privately held territory. “I mean damn…maybe your huge ass union needs to fork over some of the land its executives have squirreled away on their massive salaries as a gesture of good guesting. That could be a real thing that could happen.” (She’s writing in response to the Canadian Association of University Teachers, hence mention of unions, but the point remains if we’re talking about corporate CEOs, for example.)
I don’t know if that is a thing that would happen. It’s easy to mention words like hell and frozen over when it comes to expecting “good guesting” from corporate America. Corporate anywhere, really. It’s also easy to deflect personal responsibility, hence the moves I just made in pointing out the government and then corporations as the culprits. Maybe the real thing that could happen includes the 1.33 acres that are deeded in my name. Maybe not, but reckoning with this history – this present – is as crucial as (and interrelated with) remediating the climate crisis, and it isn’t only about territory (though obviously that’s a big deal). The theft of land is a symptom, if you will. The disease is White hegemony, and I believe it can be healed with patience, dedication, and a willingness to be uncomfortable (here I am talking to my fellow Whites). Even for those of us who’ve been engaged in this kind of introspection and/or public action for a while, there is still deep individual and collective work to be done. I hope that the watershed moment we are in regarding race leads to truly liberatory transformations that take hold. I think repeating that story, the one that says righting wrongs and honoring the agency of others is liberating for all involved, could be of use. For anyone, and I include myself in this, who is grappling with his/her/their path in this process, I’ll offer the reminder that no one has to have all the answers. It’s good to be asking questions. Possibility can absolutely emerge from uncertainty. Of that I am sure.
Notes:
*I realize that centers a White woman’s feelings (mine). I do this to show that it isn’t healthy (“feel good”) to be an oppressor.
The Tribal Seal of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians is included with gracious permission by Tribal Council. It is the creation of Tribal Member Edwin Martin.
***
Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hobart, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.
Read previous posts in this series: Hello From A Distance and Enter Geese.
Whose woods these are I think I know - it seems even Frost was uncertain as to whom the woods belonged. What a beautiful meditation on land, colonization and its repercussions. Thank you for taking us wandering through the woods with you.
Posted by: Julie Owsik Ackerman | August 07, 2020 at 09:18 AM