Fragments — Sophie Macklin

FRAGMENTS OF ROOT AND BONE

World making and unmaking with deep time ancestral inheritances

Everything is alive and in relationship and always has been - what happens when we take this seriously? When we see the past not as a fixed place we can look back to and discover, but as a dynamic, living place that we are still intimately interwoven with? The past is teeming with life (and death), and the future is too. What becomes possible when we disrupt cohesive and linear narratives of the past and bring these fragments and experiences to life here and now, alongside us and inside us, in the intimacies of our day to day life in 2023?

In this class we will take our relationship to ancestry, belonging and deep time as a collaborative research project. Together we will explore the fertile places beyond the “right” way to practice, and play in the lushness available to us outside of a quest for unbroken lineages and traditions, or a “good” past to return to. Valuing the multiplicity of our experiences, we will engage in collective meaning making and knowledge building with these topics, finding instead of dogma or a single truth, something living and varied. This is experiments in thinking with, in feeling with, in mattering with.

For those of us not raised in indigenous cultures, especially if we’re white, a lot of the preoccupation with dna tests, finding out which traditions are “ours”, and ideas of “going back” to something has made room for essentialism and fascism to thrive. We are currently doing this work in the context of white supremacy, gender essentialism, and other unholy power structures, and as such, always have to track how our longing to reconnect with an animate world will intersect with them - this is rich soil. There is no way to separate our work of reconnection with the work of composting these structures and rather than this being limiting, the possibility of creating new worlds and ways of being lies right here.

The rhythm of ice sheets growing and receding, sea levels rising and falling, birches and pines traveling north, great plains becoming seas, apocalypse coming again and again in different colors. Humans, singing to these rhythms with rituals of ochre, weaving, whale bone and fire. We are made from this.

In long arcs of time, things like racism, transphobia and ableism become not immovable behemoths or telling reveals of human nature, but strange, temporary, and compostable. We see that there was no “natural progression” from one stage of history to another, but that civilization, capitalism, and any of these soul destroying ways of living have not only just recently been created, but also resisted at every turn. That just because something becomes dominant does not make it “natural”, or even total. There are always gaps, there is always multiplicity, there are always other ways.

Like deep mineral deposits and peat bogs, these nutrient dense containers of knowledge are passed down to us and living through us in countless ways. We find clues in books, stones, songs, pottery, volcanoes, lichen and rabbits. We also find it in gesture, inflection, nerve endings and desire. We will consider the gods and other otherworldly beings, folk traditions and customs, the magic in the land, and our own bodies as sites of knowledge making and possibility, following threads of desire to places at once very familiar and very strange.

As we become multilingual, speaking not only empire and separation but flowers, streams, magic, memory, beauty, we become hybrid. Like an earthworm in the compost that is eating the apple peels and creating the fertile nutrients for the soil in the garden, we too translate. What do we bring with us as we make and unmake the world? What worlds do we find in the past? What worlds do we create with the material we find and are made of?

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