Forced removal severed the Potawatomi from their named nut trees and homelands
Evidence
The word pecan—the fruit of the tree known as the pecan hickory (Carya illinoensis) —comes to English from indigenous languages. Pigan is a nut, any nut. The hickories, black walnuts, and butternuts of our northern homelands have their own specific names. But those trees, like the homelands, were lost to my people. Our lands around Lake Michigan were wanted by settlers, so in long lines, surrounded by soldiers, we were marched at gunpoint along what became known as the Trail of Death. They took us to a new place, far from our lakes and forests. But someone wanted that land too, so the bedrolls were packed again, thinner this time. In the span of a single generation my ancestors were “removed” three times—Wisconsin to Kansas, points in between, and then to Oklahoma. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 55
Categorization
- XREF: Driver for colonial land/rights and settler-colonial critique thread — removal as the destruction of specific land-plants-people relationships; pairs with Eco-Justice environmental racism content. — connects to: Colonial renaming erased Innu place-names like Patshetshunau — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 331; Colonial progress destroys cultural ecosystems as thoroughly as ecological ones — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 256; Losing a landscape plant can unravel the cultural practices built around it — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 956
- ADDENDUM: Direct support for the land/place thread that complements my published tree-infrastructure article — tree species as anchor of place-identity and what displacement does to both.
Broader Connections
- Losing a landscape plant can unravel the cultural practices built around it
#expands(0.80) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 956 - Colonial progress destroys cultural ecosystems as thoroughly as ecological ones
#expands(0.75) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 256