Reading Recommendation: “Making Relatives” by Dianne Wilson

Continuing our fall theme of harvest, Indigenous history, and stewardship, here’s an essay Sam recommends by Dianne Wilson in Emergence Magazine.

Wilson is a Dakota writer, educator, and formerly the Executive Director of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance. While writing about the tenacious, all-consuming prickly ash on her land in Minnesota, she adds layer after layer of biology, history, and emotional nuance.

“As the old trees have given way—often surrounded by prickly ash and buckthorn—the land has come to mirror the loss of identity that has affected generations of Native families, including my own,” she writes.

Wilson’s essay brings up a few themes that will be familiar to Threshold listeners: how we can’t separate nature from history, how even things like weeds don’t fit into simple categories, and how many stories there are of Indigenous people working in the present to repair deeply disrupted relationships with ecosystems. There’s even a bit of midwestern oak savannah, a rare habitat we encountered in our Season 4 miniseries “Prayers of Steel.”

Wilson writes: “As a Dakota grandmother, I have a responsibility to reach for a deeper understanding. I refuse to accept a relationship with nature that is grim and apocalyptic.”

Illustration by Jesse Zhang