I attended Kent State University in the fall of 2019. My time at Kent was short, and I don’t remember it that well. One thing I do remember, however, is that my time at Kent State was the first time I actually enjoyed school. I think there were two reasons for that. The first is that my classes were easy. I would still learn in class, but I had enough free time outside of coursework to explore campus and the city of Kent and generally enjoy myself. The second reason was that I took a class that was deeply engaged with the land, for the first time in my life. Specifically, the course “Geography of Soils,” which was taught by a retired man who used to work for the US Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service.
In class, we went on hikes through university owned plots of woodland. Our instructor would tell us about each area we went through, the trees that were growing through it, and its soil. We would occasionally take augers with us and sample what was beneath our feet. After these trips, we would look at soil surveys of the land we had just walked on, and see exactly how the land’s trees, topography, and morphology were tied to soil.
I moved with my family to Columbus in December of 2019. That move was rough. OSU was more academically challenging than any school I had gone to before. And while I was brought into a liberatory classroom for the first time, thanks to Dr. Dutta in Geography, I missed the connection I had forged with the land in northeast Ohio. More than that, I missed learning through the land.
When COVID hit, I was stuck in my room in the middle of a new city that I didn’t know. It is no exaggeration to say that I spent around 18 hours a day in my bed. I was living a life on a piece of land without any context for or of it. It was disorienting, and I was miserable.
The summer of 2020, through a series of events both obscure and poetic, I stumbled upon the essay “Land as Pedagogy” by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. This text, over one reading, changed my life. I cried a lot when first reading it, and I am still brought close to tears even when I just have a strong memory of it, or of the time in my life it has permanently situated itself as a feature of.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, author, artist, poet, and musician. She has written several academic articles, book chapters and books, and also has released many albums. She is a talented writer and storyteller. Her works stand out to me for their creative integration of English and Nishnaabemwin, their comedy and wit, their anger, and most importantly their accessibility. I haven’t before or since read any political theory that was written as beautifully as Simpson’s.
Despite their accessibility in comparison to other political theory, Simpson’s works do not attempt to conform or adhere to mainstream settler colonial writing practices or principles. I think she only really cares to write with indigenous people as her target audience, and the enjoyment of her work by settlers isn’t a goal. In fact, in her book Islands of Decolonial Love, Simpson quotes a review she received for one of her articles: “Your work is polemic. If you could re-write the tone of this article to avoid shaming Canadians into a paralysis of guilt and inaction we could move forward with the publication of your article.”
“Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Simpson’s aforementioned 2014 article, argues that in order for indigenous cultures to resurge, they must use their homelands “both as context and process” of pedagogy, in radical opposition to state schooling. In Simpon’s view, indigenous children shouldn’t be forced to engage in state educational programs in any form, and attempts to decolonize the classroom are misguided, as state sanctioned classrooms are always colonial.
Emphasis throughout this article is placed, unsurprisingly, on land. To Simpson, land is not merely an object or ground upon which education occurs. Instead, land and spirit(uality) are treated as pedagogy. The morphology and context for Nishnaabeg teaching and pedagogy is their homeland, and lines between methods and context are blurred. Simpson posits that state schools separate students from land, destroying spiritual and pedagogical potentialities among both students and the land. She also explains that settler dispossession makes pedagogy impossible across much of Turtle Island.
“Land as Pedagogy” is grounded in storytelling. The essay even starts out with a story about a young Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg girl discovering maple syrup. This is, as I’ve explained to several of my friends (and one stranger in an odd conversation), a power-move. Academic articles are not supposed to start out with a several paged story about indigenous children having agency. Throughout the article, Simpson tells several more stories too, both spiritual and historical in nature. These stories and the casual tone throughout make the reading experience seem more like having a conversation with someone with a lot to teach than reading a traditional academic article.
Simpson has also released another version of “Land as Pedagogy” in her 2017 book As We Have Always Done which features a non-binary child as the main character in the opening story rather than a young girl.
This summer term (2022), I am enrolled in the Ohio Field School. One day in class we were discussing an article analyzing and interpreting different land management practices of people in Appalachian Ohio. This article framed itself as looking at coupled socio-ecological systems, and the topic of the day was socio-natures. I asked the course instructors what they saw as the difference between those two terms and the separation of humans and nature in each of them.
Dr. Mary Hufford, one of the instructors, worked with a passion to answer my question. She excitedly went up to the board and explained that in ecofeminism, they used to show the difference between humans and nature with a / slash. This was to denote, pedagogically, that the dualism between humans and nature was constructed. She then explained that a - dash was used to show the interconnectedness and linkages between humans and nature. Lastly, she emphatically explained that they now use a ~ tilde to denote when things are so interlinked that they are one in the same.
The class was laughing heartily. We were in collective disbelief that someone could care so passionately about what punctuation to use between “socio” and “nature.”
“Land is Pedagogy” is an essay I wrote in December of 2021. It technically functioned as my final for my “Political Ecology” class, but I wrote it for myself, largely without reverence for the given guidelines. It is an autoethnographic account of my experience of education and land.
Throughout my life I have always felt a disconnection between myself and the land that I have lived on. I have always been a transient being on top of, not of, the land. I can trace several things as the cause for this, particularly the rise of the neoliberal political economy, but I also think that the landscapes I’ve existed on top of themselves have discouraged me from growing roots. That analysis, and analysis of how landscapes and geographies under capitalism limit children’s mobility, were the topic of “Land is Pedagogy.”
The introduction to this essay throws a whole lot of unwanted ambivalence into the arguments I made in “Land is Pedagogy.” There is a lot of variation within schools. The idea that (quoting myself) “the land analytic of the state run educational-industrial complex, from the perspective of a student, is a desk where you sit down, shut up, and program your head with the state approved curriculum” is so generalized that it’s almost useless beyond its polemic value. The fact that even within the state run educational-industrial complex there are instructors that are willing to create liberatory classrooms or educate through the land shows that my analysis was incomplete.
With this in mind, however, I think it’s important to note that all of the times I’ve most enjoyed my pedagogical experience in school were either at the far margins of or acting in direct opposition to that school. Liberatory and land based education in schools is something that is done in spite of schools, not because of them. Perhaps in addition to abolishing schools, we should eat current schools alive by demanding and implementing oppositional liberatory and land based education. Doing this can both make people’s material conditions better in the short term as well as sow the seeds for radical futures. After all, I don’t think I’d still be alive if not for the liberatory and land-based education I received in state universities.
I don’t want to throw out “Land is Pedagogy,” however. Despite it being at times obnoxious or polemic to a fault, it still has deep value to me. It represents a time when I was incredibly lost, and I found myself again drawn to Simpon’s work. I feel that same lostness now (maybe it never left) and I have returned again to Simpson.
The conclusion of “Land is Pedagogy” includes the following: “My education has not come from tests and term papers, it has come from conversations in and with [and of] the land. Designing a landscape of childhood and education that specifically limits children’s access to the world is oppressive. To educate with the land as the child’s infinite playground is liberatory. I am no longer a child and cannot relive those years, but I can learn from the land I exist within on my own terms… Land is my teacher, land is pedagogy. And I think it's time I take a walk.”
I sit down to write an essay on Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. I don’t really know what I am going to write, and end up frustrated at myself. I ask myself a few questions. Why even write about Simpson for a class? That isn’t education! Being on the land is education. Have I learned nothing from the essay I wrote last winter? Shouldn’t I be taking a walk?
I decide to take a walk.
During the spring 2022 term, despite the fact that I took the semester off, I spent a lot of my time on and around campus. One evening, I went on a walk northwest of campus. This specific walk was the first time I listened to Simpson’s 2021 album Theory of Ice. It was enchanting, and that land, which I had never walked on before, became instantly tied to it.
I arrive on campus and find that my old “parking spot” (which I technically was illegally parking in, but no one once noticed) is now the site of a giant mound of exposed soil and an excavator. I illegally park in a different spot instead.
I start to walk, and I immediately remember why I need earbuds near campus. If I don’t wear them, it is too loud for me to focus, and I become overstimulated. It is extremely hot and bright, unlike the walk where I first listened to the album, which was room-temperature, and at twilight. Before I have the opportunity to set up my earbuds, I pass by a FedEx driver on Lane Avenue. He is playing music loudly, and banging his head to it. I bang my head too, and for that brief moment, even though we don’t know each other and will likely never see each other again, we bond and connect over the music.
I set up my earbuds and play Simpson’s song “Break Up.” Of her songs, this is the one I know best. After I cross the bridge over the Olentangy, I hide from the sun under the bridge. There is a staircase to a small lookout there that I discovered a few years ago. When I walk down I decide to sing a little of “Break Up” as it’s playing on my earbuds:
The upper parts are exiled to the bottom The lower parts deported to the surface There is euphonic rising and falling Orbits of dispossession and reattachment Achieving maximum density 39 degrees fahrenheit... They gather at the edge, thinking They gather in the sky, rethinking They swim towards light, thinking otherwise
There are more geese, wasps, cobwebs, sediment, undergrowth, and bird poop than the last time I was here. Some of the graffiti I saw last time has been painted over. I am hesitant at first because of the sediment, but I end up laying down for a while. I take off my earbuds, and try to take everything in. I write in my notebook “cars are fucking loud.” I sing more, this time a couple songs from memory. I hop the fence, and look more at the river bank at this site. I see soil being stirred up from where I am standing. No wonder the river is so muddy! I notice for the first time while at this location a series of stakes next to the bank. It is clear to me that they used to hold up some sort of netting to help stabilize the bank that is now gone.
I walk north, away from the underbelly of the bridge, now listening to Simpson’s 2016 album f(l)ight. This is my first time listening to this album, and I find that it contains more spoken word poetry and less singing than Theory of Ice. The opening track, “Constellation,” concludes with the line “I’ll sing to you until you sing back,” and I wonder if I’ve sung back.
I walk to a building I have walked past a dozen times without entering, the Longaberger Alumni House. I go inside and chat with the receptionist, and ask her a few questions about the building and surrounding grounds. We have a really nice conversation, and I learn a lot about that chunk of land. Upon asking about a small courtyard that’s around 60 feet from the house I receive an answer of “I’ve never walked that far,” which I find fascinating. She also shows me a closet full of buckeyes that alumni have donated.
After this, I went back to listening to f(l)ight and walking through the heat. The last time I was here, there was a bunch of grass that was slightly overgrown that I walked through. That grass has now transformed into a full fledged prairie. It’s quite nice, and I think a lot about the microcommunities within that landscape and how my steps may have unknowingly impacted them. To the left (west) of the prairies there is a huge largely unused parking lot, which pairs nicely with Simpson’s song “Road Salt” playing in my ears. Similarly, as I walk into the woods on the west bank of the Olentangy north of the prairies, I listen to her song “The Oldest Tree In The World,” which also feels appropriate. I like both songs a lot. Before I cross back to the east side of the river I take a flower and put it in my hair.
Across the river I walk a path that I’ve never taken before from the bridge to the Olentangy trail. It is full of huge broadleaf plants that look like they belong more in the tropics than in Ohio. After that, I decide to start listening to the audiobook The Gift is in the Making by Simpson. I take an unpaved path, which I also haven’t walked before, and I take my shoes off after a while. I walk through the woods barefoot while listening to the story of how the Nishnaabeg discovered jewelweed could treat poison ivy. I stumble upon Mulberry trees, a rope swing that goes into the river, and a dried up stream bed (which is particularly odd because the river’s water is very high).
It begins to drizzle. I wash my feet off and put my shoes back on. Then, it begins to pour. I find shelter under a mulberry tree, and I eat its sweet fruit. Mulberries have a special place in my heart because they were the first trees I climbed as a little kid. I will always have a strong association between them, my brother, and my father. Their sweet fruit reminds me that masculinity can be gentle and kind, which is a gift in itself.
Without knowing why, I place the flower that’s in my hair on the soil next to the tree. Then I realized that it was my first gift to a tree. I was saying thank you, for the shelter from the rain, for the sweet fruit, and for the memories. As the rain slows, I walk to my car. I listen to a chapter of the Islands of Decolonial Love audiobook on my way home.
Then I write this essay.
I think my actions speak louder than my words. I wanted to show that Simpson’s essay “Land as Pedagogy” deeply influences me, so what more can I do to prove that than to use land as pedagogy? In addition to the learning that I did on the land about the land, the land also prompted my reflections in parts one through four of this essay. Something about the land today made me think a lot about Kent State, which I hadn’t done in a while. Perhaps it was the mulberries, as going to Kent was the last time I spent significant amounts of time with my brother.
Land also makes you realize that there are no definite edges. As such, when I was on the land I wasn’t just thinking about and only through Simpson’s work, but also through others such as Mel Chen, Donna Haraway, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Audre Lorde and Jenny Odell, as well as countless additional artists, scholars, activists, teachers, mentors, relatives, friends, and strangers. When I walk through the land, I am embodying several situated knowledges at once, and I can only hope that they come together in a beautiful way.
Land has to be my teacher, because I am land’s teacher. We shape and mold and embrace and reject each other. We give and take each other's agency. We define and redefine what knowledge is. We love each other relentlessly, even if we are sometimes annoyed by each other's actions. Land is pedagogy, and I am land.
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