Becoming Native

A year ago this week I finalized the purchase of my home in the North Carolina mountains. Though I didn’t actually move until June, I’ve been thinking this week about that memorable event of a year ago. Committing myself to a new place after forty-five years in one community is significant, and I didn’t do it gradually. I couldn’t afford nor did I want to have a vacation home and an apartment in Macon. Wherever I was living, I wanted to be all in, fully committed to a place.

As if to commemorate the purchase of my home, I discovered a Catesby’s Trillium blooming near the porch! First, I love trillium (who doesn’t) and second, the place it was blooming did not seem a hospitable place for it, so near to recent construction and all the debris that the builders left lying on the ground. I was so excited to discover it, and another one, not yet blooming, nearby. Along with the serviceberry, dogwood, and flame azaleas that have been blooming this spring, I am reveling in the colors and discoveries offered by the land here.

A few years ago my word for the year was “native.” When I shared that at work in our weekly staff meeting (we were all sharing our words for the year) I got a few chuckles. Someone said something about deodorant and I had to explain why the word chose me. I won’t go into detail now about how that word shaped my year, but since moving to North Carolina and committing to plant only native plants on this land I am tending, I’ve thought about the long-lasting impact of that word in guiding my life, and in ways that were totally unknown to me in the year I was living into it.

Living on land that for centuries had been the home of the Indigenous Cherokee people, I have a strong sense of responsibility to honor this bit of earth by avoiding non-native plant species, with the exception of daffodils a friend in Macon gave me prior to my move here. As the wild places in our nation are increasingly at risk of being damaged or lost, I want to do what I can to promote habitat for plants and the creatures that depend on them. I know I am not native to this land, being of European ancestry, but I want to live as though I was native, with a strong degree of love and care for this place that is giving life to me.

I’ve been moved by reading Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is both a professor of environmental biology and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. While my ancestry does not connect me to the Indigenous people of this land, I appreciate Kimmerer’s words that “for the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second Man (non-native peoples) may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become Indigenous to place.”

The Catesby’s Trillium and the flame azalea blooming now and the mountain laurel that is just about to bloom all urge me to become Indigenous to this land that more and more feels like it is adopting me as its own. I hope to bloom here in this soil, just as they are.