It’s been a pretty temperate week, almost unseasonably warm, though leaves continue to drift off branches and litter the empty lot. Gust by gust, the trees lining the back of the lot are losing their leaves. Conversely, every shallow dip in the ground is filled to the brim with brown leaves. Sometimes they hop along the grass as the wind blows, and it’s almost like they’re alive. From the other side of the bug net in the kitchen window, they look like birds, foraging for food. I’ve been thinking about how I locate myself in the world, as Savoy and Bjornerud both say, and I think I tend to live in my own head a little. What would it feel like to look at the world again — to “respect” it, as Savoy explains?
Lauret Savoy’s Trace spoke to many of the frustrations I felt with Bjornerud and went beyond that, too. Upon rereading the chapters, I was struck by the assertion on P23: “…of course, they don’t live here now.” How much violence is embedded within those two small words, “of course”? Of course they don’t. “They” is also an alienating term, assuming that the reader is in a unified “we” with the speaker and speaking about an absent, abstracted “them.” Savoy subverts this assumption by centering the history of Indigenous peoples in what we now call the United States (a name that also carries a lot of violence). We talked a lot about objectivity and factual truth a few weeks ago, and that comes out here: what is “true” is determined not just by objective truth, but also subjective selection. What truths do we present, and how? What truths, like the origin of the name Oregon (78), are already lost to time?
I’m also interested in the role of names: Savoy highlights “the importance of place-making in defining Indigenous traditions and identities” (73). Naming locates us in our environments, they “encode meaning and memory” (75). At the same time, naming our surroundings highlights the namer as the center of this meaning and memory: these names are our histories, the ways we connect with how other people in the past connected with these same places. It almost recalls Bjornerud’s Timefulness, with a keener eye toward historical erasures and violences — and this is the way Savoy moves forward, through a renewed, inclusive place-making.
