"Listening to the Other: Can a Sense of Place Help the Peace-Making Process?" by Gary Nabhan

"Listening to the Other: Can a Sense of Place Help the Peace-Making Process?" by Gary Nabhan
Orion

(excerpt)

By some counts, political and economic refugees recently uprooted from their ancestral homelands now number two billion. We live during an era, in fact, in which there are as many descendants of refugees around us as people who have stayed put, living in the same places where their ancestors lived.

PEACE AND PLACE. I have always sensed that these two words have a bit of the same ring to them in modern English, but had not thought much about their semantic overlap until recently. I hadn't appreciated the simplest of facts: that anyone who feels secure, grateful, and satisfied in a particular place is likely to feel at peace. Or that those who have fled war or other forms of violence not only grieve for what they have lost; they are often unable to see the beauty of their newfound land because the salt of their tears continues to blind them. They feel humiliated by those who have taken over their homeland, and feel the wounds that their land has suffered.

If we listen, much of what we may hear around us is the keening of displaced peoples, struggling to regain some modicum of dignity, which they pray will come through reconnecting with their ancestral lands. As the late Edward Said eloquently observed, that is why we hear such desperation from Palestinian families evicted from their homes in the West Bank by Jewish "settlers"; they are frustrated because they do not have any legal recourse in Israeli courts to negotiate for a return to their land. That may also be what underlies the vindictiveness seen in certain Kurds who have been forced back and forth between Turkey and Iraq, unable to retain control of land that has been the legacy of their families for centuries.

The unfulfilled need to live in peace, in place, is what fueled the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, and what continues to drive the Mayan farmers who feel that their only hope for staying on the land is to join ranks with Zapatista rebels in Chiapas. It is why the forced relocation of Navajo families from the Big Mountain region of northern Arizona has been largely unsuccessful.

For too long we have assumed that confronting racism and social injustice were altogether different challenges from safeguarding land rights, practicing multigenerational land stewardship, or protecting cultural and biological diversity. But I see these seemingly disparate threads woven tightly together nearly every place I go. I see it among my O'odham friends, who used to drive past a sign in a national park that warned tourists to "Watch Out for Cattle, Deer and Indians." They had been displaced from living near one of their sacred sites by preservationists who wanted the park, and who did not understand that the wildlife attracted to that desert oasis were lured there by habitats that the O'odham themselves had stewarded for centuries.

I see it among my Hopi neighbors, whose springs have dried up since the Peabody Coal Company began mining the aquifer underlying their land some thirty years ago. Their culture and their environment have suffered because of water-pricing deals made without their consultation.

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