Missing Witches - Meditation： White Pine Kin

00:00:00.000 hi sweet magical podcast listener it's amy and risa here from the missing witches podcast we

00:00:12.120 wanted to let you know that we are getting ready for our annual may fundraiser for native women's

00:00:17.140 shelters it's our third year it's the fourth year that we've donated our proceeds but the

00:00:22.220 third year that we're doing this fundraiser and it's become a community creation that we'd love

00:00:27.300 to invite you to help us build. Every year we donate our own proceeds for the month of May

00:00:33.260 from our Patreon and missingwitches.com. And then we started to put together a raffle with prizes

00:00:39.720 donated by the incredible fucking magical artists, artisans, healers, poets, practitioners 0.98

00:00:45.120 in our wide witch web. And it just got bigger. So to participate in the raffle, just make a 0.99

00:00:51.460 donation of $10 or more to the Native Women's Shelter of Montreal or to your own local non-profit

00:00:58.960 supporting Native women or Native people that's close to your own heart and home. And then just

00:01:04.860 send the receipt for your donation to missingwitches at gmail.com and you'll be entered

00:01:10.380 in our great big prize draw. I think we do one entry for every $10 of your donation. So if you

00:01:15.960 make a $100 donation, that's 10 entries, something like that. That's right. Yeah. And to learn more

00:01:21.220 about this project you can check out missingwitches.com slash reparations or again email us

00:01:26.700 at missingwitches at gmail.com and oh my gosh and oh my goddix and oh my all the goddesses

00:01:32.920 if you are a listener interested in donating a prize we are fucking thrilled to hear from you

00:01:38.140 so please email us uh same address missingwitches at gmail.com and we will be excited to celebrate

00:01:44.800 you and share your work and join in this act of reparations and community love together 0.98

00:01:51.220 thank you bless it fucking be 1.00

00:01:56.020 you aren't being a proper woman therefore you must be a witch 1.00

00:02:02.580 you must be a witch 0.99

00:02:06.180 i want to tell a story about big tree kin out here on unceded anishinaabe territory 0.97

00:02:14.660 anishinaabe people are keepers of these lands though quebec has never treated with the people

00:02:19.700 here, pushing them into reserves the size of small villages while parceling up their traditional

00:02:25.200 territory into lots for the forestry industry and national parks. The only exception is when

00:02:31.340 the government of Quebec was desperate to flood their land and made the hydro dam that would keep 1.00

00:02:35.800 the lights on in this energy-hungry, cold place, though not for indigenous communities like those

00:02:43.160 at Kitsisakik, just down the road from a hydro station, who wait for the promise of affordable

00:02:49.100 light and heat to reach them. Still. I digress. No stories inspired by a kinship with trees move

00:02:57.720 in straight lines. I am tracing roots as deep as I can, reaching in the dark. As usual, I'm trying

00:03:05.740 to find the outlines of a story I've been missing, just hoping not to fuck it up too much. But I'll

00:03:12.200 say this from the start to orient this kinship meditation on the Missing Witches podcast.

00:03:16.900 witchcraft is activism it's political it has to be we are people who were kin with those who've

00:03:24.800 been oppressed witchcraft then is a land back movement it has to be we can't look for connections

00:03:31.980 to spirit and not throw our lot in with the people who spent hundreds of generations here

00:03:37.280 learning the spirit of these places in mapping the practicalities of land back we follow the

00:03:45.240 of indigenous people like Georges Lafontaine, communication officer at the Algonquin Anishinaabeg

00:03:52.120 Nation Tribal Council, who writes, our demands are not aimed at suppressing the non-native presence. 1.00

00:03:58.920 We do not want to put the houses of non-Aboriginal people on wheels. Unoccupied lands are claimed, 0.99

00:04:06.200 as well as participation in the management of the lands of the region.

00:04:09.880 We wish to claim this territory in harmony with the population present.

00:04:15.720 We also want important symbols put back in place, such as renaming waterways in the area,

00:04:21.560 which had indigenous names for millennia before the arrival of Europeans.

00:04:28.120 I lean in to this kind rationality, like resting my tired weight on a giant tree.

00:04:34.120 work together give the water back their names

00:04:40.000 i'm a settler descendant with an ache in my heart for all the species whose lives are

00:04:46.140 entangled here all the people who are here and who have been here an ache for the trauma in

00:04:52.460 our ancestry marking circles in our epigenetic history i have abusers and survivors in my family

00:04:59.400 both mad people and mental health practitioners cunning women and gardeners and people who fell

00:05:05.400 endlessly for multi-level marketing schemes grandparents who fought nazis ancestors who

00:05:11.320 were settlers and ancestors of indigenous heritage whose culture was erased by the time it came down

00:05:16.840 to my grandfather i guess they were just trying to survive i have ghosts in all my family stories

00:05:23.480 I am kin to all the ways we have been made amnesiac and tongue-tied, used by the machine

00:05:32.520 logic of capitalism, the delusions of white supremacists, the death cults of misogyny.

00:05:38.360 I don't know how to cope with the contradictions without breaking apart.

00:05:42.600 I am cracking, whooping in the wind.

00:05:45.000 I am looking for names, rituals, identities, kinships that give me rooted power, that return

00:05:58.380 power to my ancestors and community, and to a green and living, peaceful future which

00:06:04.080 I can almost sometimes imagine.

00:06:07.020 I claim the word witch because it gives me power to imagine as an artist, writer, community

00:06:12.400 builder, shapeshifter, cackling and keening and raising a kid with a good man out here on an old

00:06:19.180 mountain by a small lake in a young forest that remembers ancient trees. When I go looking for

00:06:27.300 missing history, I feel like I am white pine kin, though maybe it's more accurate to say I feel kin

00:06:33.060 to their ghosts, kin to all those who know that we are missing kinship. I feel a kinship with the

00:06:40.720 lonely kinship with the haunted with those whose stories are ashes beyond three generations my

00:06:49.280 ancestors are almost entirely unknown an amnesia that's common but no less disorienting for being

00:06:56.200 banal but i know my ancestors sat beneath big trees on the west it's redwoods but here

00:07:05.040 the giants who sheltered this place, were white pine.

00:07:17.520 White pine seemed to mostly live in the Canadian imagination

00:07:20.640 thanks to high school art class, paintings by the group of seven.

00:07:25.380 Some of my ancestors understood and revered them, maybe.

00:07:28.880 Some probably just felt a twinge of regret as they sawed them down

00:07:32.060 to try and scrape out a farm.

00:07:33.620 but their great roots make waterways feed new generations haunt the landscape here still

00:07:40.460 and sometimes unexpectedly you meet one a towering dinosaur that survived

00:07:46.460 white pine a tree that makes a space for peace beneath its gentle arc

00:07:52.640 a tree that gives everything the original giving tree a tree used to fuel the colonization of the

00:08:00.080 world. A tree that dreams of life somewhere, somehow beyond colonization. Trees whose ghosts

00:08:08.120 are all around us. We live in woods that were logged. All these northeastern woods were logged

00:08:17.020 all the way up north to the tundra in many places. And the loggers were cold, hungry, on the run from

00:08:23.540 the failure of nations that didn't really care for their poor, and decided to dehumanize, devalue,

00:08:29.800 degrade, eat other nations instead.

00:08:34.800 Loggers were paid by the peace out here, which set them desperate,

00:08:37.800 ripping down the woods in search of timber, and especially white pine.

00:08:41.800 Easy to cut and carve, resistant to rot,

00:08:44.800 growing so tall and straight that the tallest, oldest, strongest

00:08:48.800 among them were claimed by the British monarchy.

00:08:51.800 These were called mast pines.

00:08:53.800 They were the tall spines of the ships that invaded the world.

00:08:59.800 But before these trees were felled, lashed together into great rafts, waltzed on by log

00:09:06.360 riders down the great rivers, carved into trading posts and banks, mounted on ships,

00:09:13.200 the pride of the British Navy.

00:09:16.560 Long before all this, white pine was rooted at the heart of the sacred mythology of the

00:09:22.560 the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Six generations back, there is a woman in my family, and almost

00:09:31.120 all I know about her is her name, and that she was from one of the nations in the Haudenosaunee

00:09:35.960 or Iroquois Confederacy. I claim no indigenous identity, but when I run my hand through pine

00:09:43.060 needles walking out here, I always think of her. Hannah Lakin, White Pine Kin.

00:09:49.320 A Teacher's Guide on the Haudenosaunee Confederacy reads,

00:09:55.420 One of the most important events that shaped the Haudenosaunee was the creation of Gaya Nisagawa, the Great Law of Peace.

00:10:04.040 It guides the Haudenosaunee through all aspects of life.

00:10:06.800 A full rendition of this epic, which takes several days to tell,

00:10:11.480 reveals the ways in which the peacemaker's teachings emphasize the power of reason, not force,

00:10:16.700 to assure the three principles of the Great Law,

00:10:20.520 righteousness, justice, and health.

00:10:24.240 The Great Law of Peace provides the Haudenosaunee people

00:10:27.320 with instructions on how to treat others,

00:10:30.120 directs them on how to maintain a democratic society,

00:10:32.640 and expresses how reason must prevail in order to preserve peace.

00:10:38.180 When peace had successfully been spread among the five nations,

00:10:41.660 the people gathered together to celebrate.

00:10:44.220 they uprooted a white pine tree and threw their weapons into the hole

00:10:48.860 they replanted the tree on top of the weapons and named it the tree of peace

00:10:56.140 which symbolizes the great law of peace the four main roots of the tree of peace

00:11:02.060 represent the four directions and the paths of peace that lead to the heart of hadranasani

00:11:07.980 territory, where all who want to follow the great law of peace are welcome.

00:11:16.860 According to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the white pine tree was chosen by the peacemaker as

00:11:22.380 a symbol of the unity of the nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Its needles, which

00:11:28.220 always grow in clusters of five, are symbolic of the uniting of the nations. The white pine

00:11:34.380 also has broad branches that can provide shelter and it is beneath the tree that the peacemaker

00:11:39.340 asked the chiefs to join him the teacher's guide continues great law of peace is one of

00:11:47.020 the earliest examples of a formal democratic governance structure the great law of peace

00:11:52.940 was known to some of the founding fathers and has been compared in terms of designated

00:11:57.820 authorities and balances of power to the U.S. Constitution. The Haudenosaunee Grand Council

00:12:04.220 is the oldest governmental institution still maintaining its original form in North America.

00:12:12.620 The philosophy at the heart of the great law of peace also lent its roots to American pragmatism,

00:12:17.820 a philosophy dedicated to community and social interaction, collectively shaping a truth that

00:12:23.420 is useful. A philosophy that at its best rejects the cruelty of absolutism and asks us to continue

00:12:30.580 to talk to each other, to find useful ways forward. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy combines

00:12:38.380 leaders chosen in season with leaders who serve for life, a balance of genders, and at its heart

00:12:44.260 it enshrines consensus. People come together to tell their stories and perspectives and to find

00:12:52.100 their way up the long roots to a sturdy place of agreement the white pine invites us to peace

00:13:01.540 not a fragile peace or a fake one but a rugged adaptive peace not a quiet obedient peace

00:13:10.180 but a peace alive with the talking of long green needles and small groups and along long branches

00:13:16.580 a peace that is tough and evergreen with space for all our voices and the voices of our ghosts

00:13:26.280 negotiating for this season of the missing witches podcast we are inspired by the voices

00:13:32.900 that we hear whispering as we seek kinship who haunts the land we're on who keeps its stories

00:13:39.820 in decolonization is for everyone nikki sanchez asks us to find out who were the traditional

00:13:47.420 keepers and kin of the land our grandmothers grew up on my canadian grandmother grew up in sudbury

00:13:54.620 her father was an engineer at the coniston hydroelectric dam on the wanapate river the

00:14:00.240 traditional territory of the atakamekshang anishabek anishinaabe people who had traveled

00:14:06.140 and tended this area for tens of thousands of years before the fur trade and then the logging

00:14:12.140 and then the nickel mine before the mine sudbury was called saint and they pay say dan of the pines

00:14:23.660 white pine are an ancient species they are dinosaurs they date to the mid-mesozoic era

00:14:30.140 i.e. the jurassic period they survived great extinction events like the comets that formed

00:14:36.060 the lake where my grandmother's father helped build the dam like the great wall of ice four

00:14:41.580 kilometers high that covered this land during the last ice age if you imagine these tree giants as

00:14:47.900 a family species over stretches of thousands of years picture them walking holding hands under

00:14:54.620 the earth white pine no deep time 130 000 years ago the white pine were here and so were the

00:15:08.140 ancestors of the anishinaabe people they have oral history on these lands going back 130 000 years

00:15:15.340 two ice ages ago when they tell stories of ancestors whom they call ice runners who traversed

00:15:21.340 the great expanse for decades settler historians and anthropologists dismissed these claims it was

00:15:31.340 commonly understood by white researchers that oral history was only reliable to a thousand years

00:15:37.100 anything beyond that must be the fever dream of folklore and fiction but dr paulette steves

00:15:43.820 canadian research chair in indigenous history truth and reconciliation has spent her career

00:15:48.620 documenting sites across north america turtle island that together come to confirm the anishinaabe

00:15:56.060 timeline a hundred and thirty thousand years

00:16:04.060 i rest myself in the cup of that vast timeline people were here living and breathing evolving

00:16:12.860 and walking with these trees in the distance of deep time trees and humans share a common ancestor

00:16:21.420 we share a quarter of our dna with trees i don't claim to speak their language or really know their

00:16:28.060 stories but on campgrounds in northern ontario i have rested my heart against white pine

00:16:35.020 watch them lean into the wind and take wild shapes wolf pine they call them when they snarl

00:16:41.340 hackles up on the rocky shores of the great canadian shield and i know my ghosts and their

00:16:47.580 ghosts are kin and i know you and i are ancient tree kin and unseen we are holding hands

00:16:55.740 and this spring the sap in us is rising

00:17:25.740 Amy and I, in our growing coven of wildly different human beasties all around the world,

00:17:31.260 are missing witches.

00:17:33.140 We come from a place of haunting, still trying to find missing stories and the wisdom we've

00:17:39.140 been aching for, buried beneath the white noise of pop-up ads and optimization.

00:17:45.700 Our work together always asks, if we listen, what could we learn?

00:17:49.420 We come from a place of longing.

00:17:52.540 feeling that we are surrounded by ghosts who long to be guides to help us see beyond what is to

00:17:58.140 what could be this season we are inspired by the more than human world and by the people who have

00:18:04.620 dedicated their lives careers and cultures to connecting and communicating with animals nature

00:18:11.100 sentience beingness paulette steves in her book indigenous paleolithic of the western hemisphere

00:18:18.860 writes there is a quote attributed to louis riel my people will sleep for 100 years but when they

00:18:28.220 awake it will be the artists who give them their spirit back after 500 years of colonization the

00:18:35.420 artists storytellers and knowledge holders are awake and other truths are being told stories

00:18:41.900 have been held in indigenous people's hearts and minds and held within the land for thousands of

00:18:46.620 years they rise now bringing an enormous wealth of proof that other truths are valid

00:18:55.980 other truths are valid and as root systems and the circular ways of stories show other ways forward

00:19:03.980 are possible nadia mikitsuk works in bioremediation in extreme and disturbed environments she wrote

00:19:13.020 about the work that's been undertaken to bring sudbury back from the brink for almost a hundred

00:19:19.020 years sudbury's community and environment were blanketed in sulfur dioxide and metals released

00:19:24.300 from the smelting of nickel ore the sulfur acidified the soils rain and lakes the pollution

00:19:31.180 triggered the complete loss of vegetation leaving barren rolling hills of blackened rock it was a

00:19:37.580 devastated landscape. But 40 years ago, scientists, citizens, governments, and

00:19:44.480 mining companies in Sudbury set out with the goal that no matter how damaged the

00:19:49.040 environment was, it was worth trying to repair it. Since then, city and industry

00:19:54.380 led programs have planted 12 million trees, revitalized over 3,400 hectares

00:20:00.980 of land. People now swim and fish in the 330 lakes that fall within the city

00:20:06.740 boundaries and were once highly acidic. Today Sudbury has some of the cleanest air in all of Ontario.

00:20:17.060 The people are planting trees. We can do hard things, the work isn't done,

00:20:22.580 but we can draw on kinship with diverse people and with ancient species to steady ourselves for the

00:20:28.420 road ahead. Henry David Thoreau went looking for the white pine and was broken-hearted to find

00:20:34.660 mostly massive stumps or trail of tree bones circles of centuries cut short when he found

00:20:42.020 one standing he wrote it is the living spirit of the tree not its spirit of turpentine with

00:20:48.980 which i sympathize and which heals my cuts it is immortal as i am and perchance will

00:20:55.140 go to as high a heaven there to tower above me still

00:20:59.060 The tree's spirit is immortal. It towers above and roots deep below. It crosses thresholds

00:21:12.180 and is at peace bridging binaries. You and I are white pine kin. You were sacred long

00:21:21.360 before you were used as a tool. I had value before I sold my labor to keep food on the

00:21:27.480 table i am a sapling now of someone trying to find their way in the dark to a life with more

00:21:34.920 rootedness and it helps me to remember that i am kin to ancient trees kin to a peacemaker

00:21:43.960 i am sending messages down the living wires dreaming across generations and boundaries

00:21:50.280 of a possible peace my dna remembers how to give everything everything everything 0.70

00:21:59.000 in a ghost in the throat durin nigrifa writes in choosing to carry a pregnancy a woman gives

00:22:05.240 of her body with a selflessness so ordinary that it goes unnoticed even by herself her

00:22:11.880 body becomes bound to altruism as instinctively as to hunger if she cannot consume sufficient

00:22:18.280 calcium, for example, that mineral will rise up from deep within her bones and donate itself 0.99

00:22:23.840 to her infant on her behalf, leaving her own system in deficiency. Sometimes a female body 1.00

00:22:31.300 serves another by affecting a theft upon itself. My body and our tree kin know about giving 0.51

00:22:39.760 everything. My body will give itself entirely to a hope for the future, and it does this

00:22:46.040 with a kind of knowing and decision-making that exists somewhere way beyond my conscious will.

00:22:52.860 White pine trees have their own long memories, their own logic and reason, and they are charting

00:22:59.740 their own path. Eastern white pine trees have moved more than 80 miles west since the early

00:23:06.540 1980s in the United States, according to a new study, and they're likely to continue migrating

00:23:12.040 is climate changes. But climate change explains only 20% of the movement, and the rest is a mystery.

00:23:21.840 We think of people migrating driven by war, or forced to move as the waters rise,

00:23:28.820 or the great migrations of wildebeests across Kenya and Tanzania, but trees migrate too,

00:23:34.860 so slowly. Seeds blown by shifting winds, older trees sending messages down along the

00:23:41.000 mycorrhizal network that connects tree to tree telling their children about dangers we can't see

00:23:47.120 about where to find the right balance of sunlight and water sending them towards some hope written

00:23:53.160 in their cells maybe the great trees of the northeast are walking towards their old growth

00:24:01.900 cousins in the west maybe they are gathering their forces to make a stand

00:24:08.020 a circle of mother trees protecting the spark of life

00:24:15.080 that our delirious consumption has almost extinguished

00:24:18.660 maybe

00:24:23.840 maybe they are driven by knowledge and needs we can't even imagine

00:24:29.820 we know this much white pine need fire

00:24:35.220 Their seeds are cracked open and the life process is triggered by raging heat

00:24:40.620 And they need a clear space with no canopy above to survive their early years

00:24:45.380 And oh, I feel this one in my bones

00:24:49.140 The need to rage, to be split all the way open by the destruction of what I knew before

00:24:54.800 And I relate to the instinct to burn it all down, to make a safe space for my kid

00:25:00.400 in quebec we have a gap in the age of white pines most are over 70 years old

00:25:08.560 after the logging rush our attempts to regrow this species mostly failed because we didn't

00:25:13.900 listen to the knowledge of the people here we didn't grow with fire knowledge about the wisdom

00:25:19.220 of controlled burns was ignored and the white pines that white people planted often died

00:25:24.920 but in the last 30 years maybe we've started to learn something the numbers of white pines

00:25:33.060 surviving in managed forests is on the rise a tiny uptick a breath of hope i want to believe

00:25:41.420 we are slowly together learning a new way forward

00:25:46.400 leaning into the wind i am white pine kin

00:25:53.460 i need to learn to control my rage but also let it out so new shoots of ancient peacemakers have

00:26:01.520 space to grow there is a small fire in me and i'm keeping it alive though i am walking in the dark

00:26:08.380 Mary Oliver in all her wisdom writes isn't everything in the dark too wonderful to be exact

00:26:17.900 and circumscribed for instance the white pine that stands by the lake tall and dense it's a

00:26:25.600 whistling crest on windy mornings otherwise it's silent it looks over the lake and it looks up the

00:26:32.820 road. I don't mean it has eyes, it has long bunches of needles, five to each bundle. From its crown

00:26:40.540 springs a fragrance, the air is sharp with it. Everything is in it, but no single part can be

00:26:47.860 separated from another. I have read that in Africa, when the body of an antelope, which all its life

00:26:54.400 ate only leaves and grass and drank nothing but wild water, is first opened, the fragrance is

00:27:00.460 almost too sweet too delicate too beautiful to be born it is a moment which hunters must pass

00:27:08.060 through carefully with concentrated and even religious attention if they are to reach the

00:27:13.260 other side and go on with their individual lives and now i have finished my walk and i

00:27:20.860 I am just standing quietly in the darkness under the tree.

00:27:29.900 We are standing quietly in the darkness under the tree.

00:27:36.540 The tree conjured by Mary Oliver

00:27:39.680 with the ghosts of white pine ancestors

00:27:43.200 and the wide circle of all our wild

00:27:45.500 and diverse ancestors, 10,000 deep.

00:27:50.860 breathe here pass through carefully breathe in the smell of pine conjure it some part of you

00:28:03.800 remembers and commit to keeping the memory fresh next time you see a pine of any kind

00:28:11.420 hold its long thin needles to your face close your eyes call up the great white pine kin

00:28:18.580 stretching for miles above and beneath just a wink ago in the perspective of deep time

00:28:24.020 crushing weapons beneath them reaching for a peace carry this wish with you may white pine

00:28:33.320 find you in your dreams not just their turpentine their massed spines not just a delicate tea of

00:28:41.160 their needles rich with vitamin c not just their healing sap coursing under skins and across times

00:28:48.220 all this is there too but it's the way trees are the beingness of them their memory the way of

00:28:55.520 knowing that you call to with the dna in you that resonates with them that knowing seeps into your

00:29:03.980 dreams everything is in it but no single part can be separated from another

00:29:10.580 the way we are above and below sky and soil the way we pulse with nutrients nitrogen love

00:29:22.060 and the interstitialness in the space and beings between us that are us we have been

00:29:30.100 used by systems that are in spasm like muscles overused but we pre-exist those raging children

00:29:38.300 our ancestry is rooted and towering we are white pine kin breathe believe begin again 0.92

00:30:08.300 You must be a witch. 0.56

00:30:11.440 The Missing Witches podcast is created by Risa Dickens and Amy Turok

00:30:15.540 with insight and support from The Coven.

00:30:19.000 Amy and Risa are the co-authors of Missing Witches,

00:30:21.520 reclaiming true histories of feminist magic,

00:30:24.400 which is available now wherever you get your books or audiobooks.

00:30:28.500 And of New Moon Magic,

00:30:30.500 13 anti-capitalist tools for resistance and re-enchantment.

00:30:35.440 Coming fall 2023.

Missing Witches - March 23, 2023

Meditation： White Pine Kin

Episode Stats

Transcript