On being made of Velveeta cheese

The "self" that we think of in Western culture, or at least that I, as an American, think of, could be entirely different from the self that other cultures think of. I do not tend to think of myself in terms of my ancestry or the land that I live on, or even in terms of the friends and community that I have. I think of myself as my individual traits and accomplishments. Here is one example of a different way to think about it. Jeanette Armstrong, a First Nations Okanagan woman, tries to explain the Okanagan notion of self:
"The first difference I want to explore has to do with the idea of what we are as an individual life force within our skins, and how we might think that in relation to the unseen terrain we traverse as we walk the land. I speak of how we perceive that, and in consequence how we perceive the effect on the world around us. … Each person is born into a family and a community. No person is born isolated from those two things…. You are that which is family and community; within that you cannot be separate. … Without [the capacity to bond] the person is said to be 'crippled/incapacitated' and 'lifeless.' To not have community or family is to be scattered or falling apart. … [Okanagans] refer to the land and our bodies with the same root syllable. This means that the flesh which is our body is pieces of the land come to us through the things which the land is. The soil, the water, the air, and all other life-forms contributed parts to be our flesh. We are our land/place. Not to know and to celebrate this … is to be dis-placed."*

So who am I, on this view of self? It will take a lot longer to tell in this way of thinking of self. Thinking of the parts of the earth that make up my self, when I was a child, I was made up of wheat and chemicals (white bread), more chemicals (Velveeta cheese), peanuts and sugarcane (peanut butter), grapes, apples and more sugarcane (grape jelly from the store and apple jelly that my father's mother made), pecans from my father's parents' farm, pears, apples, cows (loved hamburgers, and would never eat anything else when we went to a restaurant), cow's milk, and more wheat and sugarcane (sugary breakfast cereals). With the exception of the apples that went into my grandmother's jelly and the pecans my grandfather picked, I do not know which soil or which land produced any of this food. Now I am living in Australia, the first person anywhere in my ancestry to do so. My body is made up of kangaroo meat, shot somewhere in the Australian bush as wild game, lambs from some sheep station somewhere in Australia, almonds grown in South Australia, apples grown in Tasmania, whiting and barramundi caught in the rivers and ocean just off the coast of Brisbane, ginger beer from ginger and sugarcane grown in north Queensland, vegetables grown mostly within a day's drive of Brisbane, bought at the local farmer's market, and Dagoba chocolate made from cocoa grown on a fair trade, sustainable plantation in the Dominican Republic. (This really is pretty much my diet -- I know it sounds politically correct and joyless.) I breathe in oxygen breathed out by the eucalyptus, fig and mangrove trees growing in my neighborhood. (And I think the other plants I breathe in are grown somewhere in northern NSW.) Still, I don't know that I feel that I belong to the land here yet.

I was born into a family in the United States of America, born to a white mother and father who had been and would continue to be active on behalf of equal rights for African-Americans. I have a brother who is three years older then me, and he has a son and another child on the way. My mother was an only child, and my father had an older brother and sister. I have many cousins, who I do not speak to often, but who I love and care about. In recent years, we cousins usually see each other only at weddings and funerals. My grandparents are all dead now. My father's parents, in South Carolina, had also each worked on behalf of African-Americans (though they thought of them as 'coloured'), with my grandfather treating them as equals in his work on the railroad, and my grandmother volunteering to teach local black children to read when she found out that they could not. They did not think of this in terms of civil rights, merely in terms of being "good Christians." Their ancestors came to North America from Scotland in the early 1800s.

My mother's father was born to Finnish parents in Montana, on a ranch that they had been given as homesteading land. My great-grandfather fled Finland so that he would not be drafted into the Russian Czar's army, and as far as he and his new bride knew, their homestead was unoccupied land available for settling. It actually belonged to the Crow Indians, and was made "available" to whites when the US government revoked several Indian treaties in the late 1800s. My mother's mother was from Arkansas, an orphan from age 8, but we have family records for her side that go back many generations. Her ancestors were among the first white settlers to come to North America in the 1600s, and they settled in what is now Massachusetts.

So, one branch of my family has been in North America for only 3 generations, another branch for about 17 generations. I do feel that I belong to that land. It could be because I grew up there; it could be because my ancestors have been there for so long. But whatever the reason is, I feel a sacred connection, not to the U.S., but to North America.

* Jeanette Armstrong, "Keepers of the Earth," in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, T. Roszak, M. Gomes & A. Kanner (Eds.), San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995, pp. 316-324.