I Own This Stolen Land/Words
"Everything in US history is about the land… who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity…" - Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.
"The objective for Native people is to heal. The objective for non-Native people is to come out of denial" - Faith Spotted Eagle (Dakota)
When my wife and I bought land next to our house in Tompkins County, NY in 2021, our purpose was to forestall logging and development. However we soon realized that our well-intentioned new ownership perpetuates a genocidal injustice.
For well over 10,000 years the Gayogohó:nǫˀ (Cayuga), one of the six Nations of the Hodinǫhsǫ́:nih (Iroquois) Confederacy, stewarded and shaped land in what is now known as upstate New York. Through the Colonial period they endured pandemics, wars, and predatory fur and alcohol trading, but were driven into exile by the murderous 1779 Sullivan Expedition and subsequent fraudulent treaties. Inhabitants of their homelands today are mostly unaware of the continued existence of the people and culture they are displacing. The word “Cayuga” is seen everywhere, but there are few actual Gayogohó:nǫˀ (Guy-o-KHO-no).
I Own This Stolen Land uses photography, video, text-sculptures, and social practice. Sculptures at the site are generated from variations of the title text. They are made from grass, reclaimed lumber and fencing from the site, and words carved into rock and dead trees; the work collaborates with the land. Many of the photographs are digital collages; I let the joins show faintly, in sympathy with the land’s history of disruption and subdivision. I also record performance videos of the laborious creation of some of the pieces.
Understanding and acknowledgement are empty without action. As part of the project I have joined a local non-profit group, the Gayogohó:nǫˀ Learning Project and invited Gayogohó:nǫˀ and Hodinǫhsǫ́:nih people to use the land. For two springs they have maple sugar and syrup using traditional methods. This sweet medicine from their homelands is sent to Gayogohó:nǫˀ on reservations in Canada and Oklahoma. Hodinǫhsǫ́:nih poets have given readings on the site and other uses are planned.
These events have been deeply meaningful, so we are working towards a conservation easement to protect the site; this will include perpetual access for Gayogohó:nǫˀ people. This will perhaps become a template for other landowners.
Colonization deliberately suppresses the visibility of the colonized. I hope that this work will be affirmative for Gayogohó:nǫˀ and other Indigenous people, make space for improved Indigenous-settler understandings, and stimulate new thinking for settler populations on colonized lands, wherever they may be.