Greetings Friends and Neighbors,
After days under the steady influence of North Wind, morning dawns calm and clear. Warm. Stepping from the house onto soft ground, I speak, “Good morning East, where Sun, Father Sun, you rise now from beyond the end of the old road leading down toward the broad Lake. You’ve come to grant us another day, and might our movements here gather together like a great Song, so to sing human beauty back into the World. Good morning South, home of the warm, moist and most powerful Wind, Greening Wind, bringer of Springtime.” Sunlight glows through young Aspen leaves along the field edge. Electrically. Grass has grown greeningly through the mild night. Sky blues boldly in the presence of such a day. Birds embroider the thickening morning Air with joyful song. South Wind bends down to kiss the bare skin of my face and hands. Gently, generously. There will be hours of animal chores and cleanup from yesterday’s Beltane Eve Feast, but for a long moment the day and its denizens ask simply to be admired. What an honor to be asked, I think. What an honor to be asked to bear witness to the non-human collective and to try write on their behalf.
It is an unusual thing, this writing practice. I wonder regularly, “Why does anyone willingly subject themselves to such discomfiting writings as these?” Discomfit: to unsettle, disturb or distress. For example, I’ll ask you to entertain the following questions, even to speak them aloud—a set of questions that I wrestle with every day:
How will I respond when I awaken to find myself in possession of a stolen life? When I learn that my way of living amounts to a feeding frenzy, drawing down the communal savings accounts of Soils, Waters and Weathers? When I see no signs of a societal course correction? When I am offered no road map for a personal, moral course correction? How do I even begin talking about this with my neighbors, my co-workers, my family? What happens if I decide not to talk about it?
Over the past two weeks this Letter has tried to approach the thorny question of living on unceded territory—home to the Abenaki in Vermont and the Mohawk here in New York. I remember a conversation with my Family in which I asked the question, “Why does it seem so much easier for us to imagine reparations to African Americans for the legacy of chattel slavery—at least to talk about it, even if nothing happens—than to turn toward the legacy of land theft and genocide of First Nations peoples?” I can’t help but think that the difficulty comes down to this: To talk about giving land back begs the question, “But where would we live, those of us whose ancestors came over from Europe?” I faced the specter of homelessness last Fall as it became increasingly clear that there was no farmland available in Huntington or the surrounding towns. Fear casts a long, cold shadow. And the decision to purchase this old Farm undeniably unfolded in the half-light of that shadow. It was last summer that I had that conversation with my family about reparations, as we dined on the screen porch of our lakeside vacation rental, on unceded Abenaki land in Northern Vermont. In fact, the Lake still carries its original name—Memphremagog. I asked, “What if we gave it all back, the whole state? If we apologized, and then asked if we might be forgiven and allowed to stay on as tenants, or refugees? What do we imagine we would hear in response?” My parents have since joined with others in their community to help re-settle a family of Afghan refugees, and they tell me regularly of the meaning they have found as they extend hospitality to people who have been forced to flee the only home they have ever known.
I just finished a novel set in Ireland during the Potato Famine of 1847—The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens. Surprisingly, the book barely mentions the fungus that destroyed the potato crops. Rather, the story unfolds around a different kind of disease—a social disease. The main character, Fergus, lives with his family as a tenant on the estate of English farmer Owen Carmichael. Orphaned after his parents and sisters die, Fergus desperately scrapes together the money for a passage to America. As the novel opens, Farmer Carmichael comes upon the corpse of a peasant along the side of the road. The stench startles his horse, and Carmichael is disturbed by the Crows feeding on the body. He dismounts to throw a stone in a half-hearted effort to scare off the Crows.
Depressed, anxious, he remounts and continues homeward. He has been to Ennis to see the agent who manages the affairs of his landlord, the sixth earl. Remembering the interview causes Carmichael’s back to stiffen. He hates it all – the pettifogged transaction of legal business, the rites of tenantry, the paying of rent, the dead smell of ink.
The landlord’s agent has ordered him to eject the sixteen tenant families living on the upland portion of the Farm. This includes young Fergus.
Carmichael has spent his life watching, coaxing mountainy people, and he knows them. The peasants are peaceful….if only they have their [potato] patch, their snug cabin, their turf fire. They breed like rabbits and content themselves with very little, but if you touch their land, attempt to turn them out, they get frantic and wild.
“If I throw them out they’ll starve.”
“And if there’s blight they’ll starve anyway, sir…Sheep, not people, is what you want to fatten. Mutton is worth hard money. Mutton is wanted, mutton is short. Of Irishmen there’s an exceeding surplus.”
As he rides on, Carmichael remembers the meeting with disgust.
The agents voice, flat as paper. “Any investment, Mr. Carmichael, must show a decent rate of return.”
A woman calls out in a language Carmichael has heard all of his life but does not understand. Instead of ignoring her, he makes the mistake of turning his head, and instantly there are a dozen or more paupers closing in on the road, a tide of females with gray mud on their legs, holding up naked children screaming with hunger.
Across the ocean, just down the road from here my friend Mallory Finnegan lives with her family in a large brick farmhouse. An extensive stone foundation on the opposite side of the road remembers the dairy Farm that once sustained the family. Mallory recently told me that her ancestors John and Mary Finnegan immigrated from Ireland in 1851—three years after orphan Fergus sailed to Montreal. The Finnegans purchased a parcel of unceded land and then began building the house in which she lives today.
Several years ago, I attended a talk put on by the historical society at the old Town Hall. The Abenaki Chief would talk about his people’s history. How courageous—and generous—of him to give such a talk, I thought as I looked around the room at the pale-skinned faces of those who settled in for the presentation. At one point, as he told the story of eugenics-era forced abortions and sterilizations of Abenaki women, he spoke one sentence that seemed to float across the room in search of a patch of fertile soil. He said, “We don’t choose to see ourselves as victims.” Those words pinned me to the ground that night. Or perhaps his words planted me in the ground. Either way, I remember them as clearly as I do the bitter-tasting medicine forced upon me as a young child. I remember hiding under the dining room table as my father measured out the Giardia medicine, refusing to come out. I remember how he mixed it with orange juice, which I couldn’t stomach for years afterwards.
These are complex and painful histories. They offer no ready-made roadmaps for personal, moral course correction. No easy plan for how to fix a terribly tenuous situation.
These histories, do, however, tell a story of what begins to unravels when humans take ownership of land. Private property creates two distinct categories of humans: land owners, or Landlords, and those who do not own land—renters, peasants, or Tenants.
The condition of being a Landlord is one of entitlement and unrestricted access, whereby one assumes the right to extract value from that which is legally owned. This condition applies to land, yes, but also to property of all kinds—stored monies, consumer goods, educational degrees, and so on. The condition of Tenantry, on the other hand, obliges one to contribute a certain portion of one’s labors, harvest, or monies to those who own and maintain the land or property. The distinction between business owners and employees is closely related, and might help turn our investigation from rights to responsibilities. All of the landlords reading this are probably protesting, “But do you know how much work it is to maintain property and how high taxes are these days?” As a former business owner, I have had these same thoughts in relationship to my employees. “Do they know how hard I work after they clock out?” As someone who has recently signed the deed for a property with an old Farmhouse that will cost 30-50K just to tear down, or many times that to render livable again, I can relate as well. So at least we can acknowledge that the condition of Landlordship includes some real responsibilities. How then could we describe the responsibility of the Tenant? To offer faithful service to the Landlord as a plea for a place to live and sufficient food and shelter to stay alive? By that measure, Tenantry amounts to a position of ongoing supplication and submission. And we recoil at the thought of being forced into that stance in the world, do we not? And what if our way of living is a faithful enactment of that reaction, that recoil, that trauma response? What if freedom—from supplication and submission, from limits and permissions of all kinds—is the name we have given to our way of living? What if freedom and homelessness are the two faces of the same gold coin?
So what was the name of the social disease described in the story of young Fergus and Farmer Carmichael? The social disease described by the Abenaki Chief? The social disease described by the news of collapsing populations of wild animals and plants, by the widespread poisoning of the Soils, Waters and Weathers? This is very tricky territory we are stepping into, vast territory. I will attempt to tread with tremendous care.
This week I pushed into my fears and sat down to write an email to the St. Regis Band of the Mohawk at Akwesasne. I didn’t want to ask for too much of their time, so I kept it brief. “I have recently taken responsibility for the restoration and conservation of an abandoned Farm in Keeseville, NY. I will be travelling by your offices next week and would like to offer to leave some gifts—a box of ground beef, frozen in 1-lb packages and a financial gift to assist your work. I would be interested in talking with someone there to learn how I might work to extend reparations to your peoples for the histories of land theft and genocide, but only if I am able to prove myself trustworthy first. Hence, I ask to begin by delivering gifts. Many thanks for your consideration. I await your reply.”
I find the words Landlord and Tenant very compelling. And so I will try to ask them to pay their keep. What if the social disease described in the stories above emerges when we assign to humans a role that was never meant for them—Landlordship. The responsibilities of Landlordship include building, maintaining, and improving the shelter within which others live out their lives. This is precisely the work upheld by the non-human collective, including the Soils, Waters and Weathers. The work of a Librarian might help us to shake our negative associations with the word Landlord. We recoil at the thought of pleading for home and continued life from other humans, and rightly so. And yet, in our fits of writhing recoil we seem to have forgotten altogether about our rightful stance in relation to non-human Life. This is where it gets hard, and I will leave you with this thought. What if the condition of Tenantry accurately describes the responsibilities of an adult human being at home in a more-than-human household of place—an ecology? What if humans have labored to remember that they live from the goodwill of those who make and uphold life? What if humans have cultivated a capacity to live accordingly, to live gratefully, to willingly submit themselves to limits? It is certainly hard to imagine from where we stand today.
I can imagine peeling away all the human names from the tax maps and the bank accounts, including Farmer Carmichael and his landlord the sixth Earl, including your name and mine, and beginning to replace them with the names of those who are actually responsible for keeping the place up: Wind, Rain, Sun, Soil and the rest of the nonhuman collective. And I can imagine revisiting those conditions of Tenantry with fresh eyes, even the hard-to-swallow words supplication and submission. And I can imagine stepping from the house down onto the soft ground each morning and greeting the day by asking how I can be of service and then trying to live accordingly. Call it Tenantry, or Peasantry, or just plain Gratitude. I call it a terribly humbling practice in a troubled time. Trying to remember the words to a song I have never known.
Many thanks to you for reading.
With great care,
Adam
Aaah thanks for this, Adam.
I think humbled, unsure of what to do, and just a wee bit more educated, is how I feel coming away from your article, from Behren's book (wow!) which I just finished, and from Nicole Eustace's book Covered With Night (double wow!).
I look forward to knowing the response of the St. Regis Band of Mohawk.
I have so much to learn.
-Brooke.