The Importance of Place


Quite often I have to drive from western New York to Boston for work. Crossing the state via the NYS Thruway gives me ample time to think and to enjoy the beauty of New York, especially in the Fall when the colors are exquisite. Across the thruway are reminders of the Haudenosaunee, with sign markers borrowed the from Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk tribes. I feel like I'm traveling through a virtual Longhouse, and imagine what it must have been like 200 years ago. When I reach the exit for Albany I am compelled to pull off and drive by the house where I grew up. It's still there, except the people living in it now chopped the hedges down (don't they realize that under those hedges are the remains of all our precious pets growing up? ....from our cats: Tootsie, and Sinbad, to our dog, Happy?), and the massive oak tree that always stood in the font yard is now missing significant limbs. The house was in our family for over 50 years. It's tiny, with a steeped roof,  a remnant of the types of homes that were built post-WWII.

I learned how to climb trees there, jumped off the garage roof with an umbrella (while pretending to be Mary Poppins) and as I got older, hung out on the back porch steps with my friends on hot summer nights smoking cigarettes while listening to the cicadas and peeper frogs in the woods next to our house. In my young life everything was centered around that house. Loved ones passed away, babies were born, history changed, and still there was the house I grew up in. My house. It was foundational to my sense of identity. When I graduated from high school and moved to California I was secure in knowing that my little house would be there waiting for me when I visited home. And it was.

And so I don't get it when people say they don't understand the importance of a sense of place. Really? Okay, maybe I am just too sentimental but I think it's more than that. Now - if I take my feelings about my own sense of place, and I apply that to the sacredness of land and the meaning of places for Native Peoples, I think I can say with confidence - I totally get it. We have a mentality in the west about land that is "owned" and chopped up into parcels and commercialized for profit. But we don't recognize that the real profit that the land provides is a sense of reverence. National Parks are fine for preserving the integrity of a landscape, but why not take it a step further and acknowledge Native Peoples needs to honor specific sacred sites in accordance with their traditions? When we do that, we are honoring all of our identities as Americans.

The image included is from inside the Tory Cave at Thacher Park in the Helderberg Escarpment, just outside of Albany, NY.

References

In the Light of Reverance. ESC Culture Based Online Resources. 2017.

Movie Trailer: In the Light of Reverance. Sacred Land Film Project. 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWCbYsAkGOw


Comments

  1. UnknownDecember 17, 2017 at 6:18 PM

    I was very impressed with the style that you used to describe the importance of ancestral lands to Native Americans. Most Westerners do not care about the land or nature but just what they can build on the land. Westerners are easily able to define their sacred sites because they usually have a wall around them. Native Americans describe sacred sites as "something spiritually alive, culturally essential, or simply deserving of respect" (Sacred Land Film Project, 2017).
    The sacred sites are used for prayer, vision quests or because the places are thought to have power and our energizing. You are unable to put a building around the most sacred places of indigenous people(PBS, 2001). The Constitutions 1st Amendment is supposed to protect the religious freedoms of citizens but the governing culture does not protect the religious rights of Native Americans. The Supreme Court in the 1980's ruled that the 1st Amendment rights did not apply to Native American religious practices that needed large areas (PBS, 2001).

    References:

    Filmmaker interview: Retrieved from: http://www.pbs.org/pov/inthelightofreverence/video/christopher-mcleod-and-malinda-maynor-2001/

    Sacred Land film Project. 2017. Retrieved from: http://sacredland.org/

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