American materialist pathologies stem from settler-rootlessness rather than staying in place

Evidence

After all these generations since Columbus, some of the wisest of Native elders still puzzle over the people who came to our shores. They look at the toll on the land and say, “The problem with these new people is that they don’t have both feet on the shore. One is still on the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they’re staying or not.” This same observation is heard from some contemporary scholars who see in the social pathologies and relentlessly materialist culture the fruit of homelessness, a rootless past. America has been called the home of second chances. For the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second Man may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become indigenous to place. But can Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we were staying? With both feet on the shore? — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 747

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to eco-justice pedagogy’s settler-colonial critique and to place-based land relationship across the polyad — the ‘both feet on the shore’ image grounds legal-systems land rights critique. — connects to: Settler-colonial solidarity persists only through materially maintained structures, not primordial identity — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2139; Modern Western rootlessness is learned as second-nature habit
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what does ‘becoming indigenous to place’ actually demand of non-Indigenous people without appropriating Indigenous identity? Kimmerer leaves this deliberately open.
• SEED: Angle for an integrative essay: rootlessness as the ecological original sin — tracing how dispossession of Indigenous land correlates with settler materialist pathology.

Broader Connections

• Settler-colonial solidarity persists only through materially maintained structures, not primordial identity #expands (0.80) — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized, 2139
• Modern Western rootlessness is learned as second-nature habit #qualifies (0.75)