Yesterday’s winds sent the first real fall of leaves to blanket the ground. Most trees still have more on the branches than beneath them, but a number of them are already nearly bare.
Too many.
In this season of small deaths, our world is haunted less by walking spirits than by the spectre of ecological crisis.
But this is a haunted land, and I don’t just mean this small corner of the land mass some of our peoples know as Turtle Island. Colonialism by definition destroys; genocide creates its own army of ghosts. And for our peoples, ruins abound.
Ruins, though, are not always a bad thing, despite the connotations of the word. Ruin comes from the Latin for “to fall,” or “to collapse,” and seen in that limited light, it certainly fits. But there are whole airports’ worth of baggage attached to the word, especially on this land, where even in 2019, even Indigenous children who are living examples of their cultures are taught that their cultures, their homes and architecture, art and language, histories and lifeways have been reduced to ruins, the collapsed and empty detritus of colonial occupation.
We’re not, of course. And those structures and cities that now legitimately qualify as “ruins” by the dictionary definition of the term? They’re not, either. What the outside world, the colonial culture, calls ruins are in fact alive: with history, with knowledge, with ancestral memory.
And, occasionally, a spirit or three, but that’s for another day.
“Ruins” are common here, ancient adobes slowly disintegrating into the dust of the earth from which they rose. Some were deliberately abandoned, others less so, but they share an approach in common, a thoroughly Indigenous notion that things stand as long as they’re supposed to stand, considering the level of habitation and stewardship and care given to them and the workings of more elemental forces without, and when it’s time for them to return to the earth . . . they do.
That return, of course, often takes time. Sometimes it’s as simple and quick as a cemetery cross that, after decades, generations, even, no longer holds a solid footing and is called back to the earth that holds whose resting place it marks. Sometimes it’s centuries, even millennia: Mesa Verde, Chaco, kivas and mounds and stone circles that have risen and fallen upon this land mass since the time before time.
Here, it falls mostly in between, old homes that no longer house families, allowed to weather and decay through a century’s worth of seasons, until the mortar crumbles and the bricks disintegrate and the roots of the cottonwoods reach out to embrace their dissolution, wedding it to the fall of their own now-golden leaves.
The ruin shown above is a private one, once a home in a full use. It sits not far from here, still more standing than not. Haunted? Perhaps. No one knows, but it does not speak much of fear, only a kind tired tranquility.
There is, in fact, a ruin right here on Wings’s own land, but it is invisible now to all but the map itself and the spirits, and that is as it should be. It holds no terrors, either, although I have no doubt that colonial desecration would change that in an instant. But it is safe here, left entirely to itself, no visitations, no ingress or egress, no troubling of the spirits. Their wisdom and memory are theirs to hold, and to do with otherwise as they will, and we leave them to it.
For now, our greater challenge is a spectre entirely constructed by human hands, by grasping minds and greedy hearts. The same earth that welcomes the return of these slow-falling structures into her embrace is the one that we call mother, the one form whom we all came, in one form or another, and she is both planet and parent, sphere and shelter. Her own mortar is disintegrating beneath wildfires and rising seas, her bricks loosening and, in too many cases, too many Indigenous places, already beginning to fall.
It is our task to prevent her collapse, before we cease to be haunted by the prospect and become the ghosts instead.
~ Aji
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