An introduced plant can earn belonging by useful reciprocity rather than domination.

Evidence

Our immigrant plant teachers offer a lot of different models for how not to make themselves welcome on a new continent. Garlic mustard poisons the soil so that native species will die. Tamarisk uses up all the water. Foreign invaders like loosestrife, kudzu, and cheat grass have the colonizing habit of taking over others’ homes and growing without regard to limits. But Plantain is not like that. Its strategy was to be useful, to fit into small places, to coexist with others around the dooryard, to heal wounds. Plantain is so prevalent, so well integrated, that we think of it as native. It has earned the name bestowed by botanists for plants that have become our own. Plantain is not indigenous but “naturalized.” This is the same term we use for the foreign-born when they become citizens in our country. They pledge to uphold the laws of the state. They might well uphold Nanabozho’s Original Instructions, too. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 776

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘Naturalized’ is defined through both botanical and citizenship registers, braiding the two meanings into one ethic.
• XREF: Directly continues ch51’s claim that an introduced immigrant plant earned belonging by living as a good neighbor, and feeds the eco-justice ‘settler meets colonizer’ distinction. — connects to: Garden food arises from human-plant partnership where each supplies what the other cannot — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 444; An introduced immigrant plant earned belonging by living as a good neighbor — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 775; Indigenous plant knowledge holds that plants arrive where and when their gifts are needed — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 419
• SEED: The metaphor of ‘becoming naturalized’ through reciprocity could anchor an essay on what genuine belonging to place requires of settlers as distinct from colonizing extraction.

Broader Connections

• Indigenous plant knowledge holds that plants arrive where and when their gifts are needed #corroborates (0.78) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 419