Reflections on STAYING: Re-indigenizing and becoming home

In this essay, I reflect on the themes of home, belonging, and indigeneity as well as my journey with Finnish language as a way to connect to land. I trace back through the questions that my grant project began with to contemplate deepened understandings even in the absence of answers.

What does it mean to be indigenous?

To stay is to become like a rock. To become like a rock is to attend.

I scratch these lines with pencil onto paper. They become the first lines of my recently published book Silence Chamber– a book about weaving a branch structure in my local forest. There, in the repetition of staying, I create a home for my soul-body.

During my first summer in Finland, I pose the question to myself “What does it mean to be indigenous to this earth?” and “Can I become indigenous to a place, specifically to a country where I was not born?”

These questions of “indigenous” turn into a Kone grant proposal, which is really a sacred commitment to staying. Staying with the land and with the questions.

What if I put terms aside and put mind in feet, words in roots?, I write.

A sense of urgency towards ideas of indigeneity emerges from a surprising sense of home that I feel living in Finland, one that I have never felt anywhere in the United States where I grew up. I have wandered through temporary dwellings in many states, all with their own unique micro culture and landscape, always carrying a veiled hope of finding “my place”.

In the naive beginnings of my artistic research, I look to indigenous people groups as “those who live closely with the land” – an unattainable family I long to adopt me so that I might also live in intimate relationship with earth and Spirit. I feel the absence of a heritage of staying and long to have wisdom and knowledge from a primordial connection with the land passed down to me, to have a more-than-human family and place embracing me with a native belonging. Yet, by birth into the American mashup, I am spelled rootless; I shall never be indigenous.

I soon realize this is a fictional family. Native and foreigner both collapse in the grasp for the external holding of another– each of us just as human and full of longing. I recognize my posture of “if only” as a wish for some easy life stream; to have been born into the distinct holding of land and traditions. But even indigenous peoples are struggling to recover their own holding; they have all, to various degrees, been deracinated. They have lost relationship with their culture, land, and language. So why should I, as both the colonizer and a fellow earthling, run to them to find my belonging?

Through webs of serendipitous reading, I encounter the idea of “seven generations” – a shared lineage. We are not static, exclusive categories; we are generational traces in a multidirectional flow of co-mingling connections to ancestors. In a process, relational prism, we are all indigenous. We are all beckoned into an intimate relationship with the land in this co-becoming.

We belong to each other.

Between the “American” and [Finland]

I too have been stripped and have stripped. I have been raised in a country that founded its nation through the desecration of sacred lands and a massacre of people that lived with that land. I have met my homelands’ ancestors only in dressed-up narratives of “Native Americans”, in estranged myths, in characterizations in history textbooks. I must grieve connections present yet ghostly thin. I have lived most of my life in “New England”. From a distance, this name now hits me as a colonial stamp of a people trying to imagine their new land to be a better, yet comfortingly familiar version of the home they came from. Where is the honest arrival of listening for an unknown home?

Now centuries later, here I am as an American feeling like many Americans I know – without a land and cultural heritage; deracinated.

Living in Finland, I look back at America and see my whole life lived in a country that is some trendy pin board for transplanted versions and visions of other cultures, a puzzling mix of ethnic identities. I have swam in the melting pot of the world and been dazzled and dizzied.

My Finnish housemates know American TV shows better than I do; American imperialism is everywhere, and so the melting pot doesn’t stay amorphous, it solidifies into branded forms that are exported for consumption into parts of the world that its seeds are entangled with.

Over dinner one night, my Finnish housemates reflect:

There is so much cultural colonization– kids at school speak TikTok English. A Halloween pumpkin extravaganza has been erected at the neighborhood Kartano– does it come from a need to feel a belonging to this dominant culture? It’s like a constant input, something implanted in media culture. You feel this pull towards the west. And it becomes normalized– images of this fantasy world with Mac and Cheese. Is it a real place? Where is the culture that rises up naturally from this place? What is Finnish?

Finland is uniquely placed between: between two world powers– Sweden and Russia– between the west and the east– American and all the European countries with a strong cultural identity, and Russia with a rich and ancient cultural history. As a young nation that in many ways never fully-formed its own strength of identity and cultural wellspring, Finland has looked to the west. The west offered a solid ground, offering a sense of belonging to the esteemed majority.

We get enriched by the possibilities of the “American.” But we are blindsided. We don’t look anywhere in the East, Baltic or parts of Europe. No images are coming from these parts. It’s easy to forget where you are, to just be influenced and copy what is over there so far away. It feels like Finland can’t make its own decisions. When the only compass is something distanced and disconnected, it distracts the connection to yourself.

When I pull my memory back across Europe, across the Atlantic, I witness my younger self growing up on the east coast USA. She has a steady distaste for mainstream TV shows and instead reads books about other cultures. She is always dreaming eastward. Now I wonder about my Finnish friends– where were they? Were our stories and identities already entwining somewhere in the ocean between us?

“Why Finland?” I’m asked yet again. More recently, I find myself telling it’s because I sensed a connection to the culture of silence and nature, and there was a pull from my gut, an urge of Spirit. But I didn’t expect to feel that sensation of home, that feeling like – I could be content to stay here the rest of my life. I can carve my belonging here, there is space for me to be me.

I wonder about my gut microbiome; how perhaps it is more compatible with certain bioregions, how that feeling of home is not an arbitrary notion, not a feeling subject to mercurial human infrastructures. Rather, it is something deeply entangled in the ecosystem of my body with the ecosystem of the environment– these co-inhabiting bodies.

The sensation of home is like taking a deep breath for the first time in my life. Yet this home is shifting ground. As immigration laws become stricter, it could be pulled out from underneath me at any turn. At first, I cling harder. And the only way to cling to something is to make it a contained object; to make Finland a bordered land mass, a clarified culture of nature-based introverts, a cosy silence, a rarified language that ought to scoff out English slippage (even as I depend on my native tongue). I need this bundle called Finland to keep breathing, to survive as a distinct entity to hold onto.

Finnish language as becoming home

I try to immerse myself in this country in every way possible. I get on a dating app for the first time in my life to try to (half jokingly) find a Finnish husband (an honest interest in securing a visa and in finding a life partner?). Everyone keeps telling me the best way to learn Finnish is to be in a relationship with someone who speaks it. And perhaps a relationship is my gateway to fully assimilate into the culture and earn a sense of social belonging (the only way to “become indigenous”).

In the meantime, I begin to approach learning Finnish as an artistic practice. I propose and help pilot a course (Inscribing Finnish language through sensory embodiment in the land sessions as part of

Learning Finnish through arts based methods) at the University of the Arts, Helsinki, launching me accidentally into “teaching” Finnish when I can barely speak it. Finnish has been introduced to me with “it’s so difficult” and “why don’t you learn Swedish?.” It is clouded with a sense of it being an unattainable foreign language– something outside myself, handed to me in a textbook and a classroom, formalized and predetermined.

Even my housemate Aliisa, a native speaker, expresses similar sediments: We are born into this language, told to “put it on” as something pre-packaged, abstracted and theoretical. And then we evolve our understanding of the world with this language.

But when I go to the forest and ask the elements what they are called in these lands, when I brush up against textures and taste tones that echo the sensorial characteristics of the elements reciprocally in my mouth, Finnish comes alive. This language is not static or nonsensically structured, but nuanced with playful, creative twists.

When I tell Aliisa about “sammal tuntuu pehmeältä” – this soft, damp blanket in my mouth – she says it makes sense: It awakens something internally that feels like an inner expansion. Through a sensation, the abstraction (word) sets into the body. The exterior world merges with the interior body-mind, creates a space within for what was only known as symbols and sounds. My native tongue begins to land in my body differently, rooting me in connection.

Sam-mal, sam-mal, sam-mal…like an incantation, I taste the word out-loud to the moss while I stroke its thick, soft presence. Abstractions are spelled back into the temporal and spatial, the material webs of relations.

When we talk, Aliisa teaches me about the “ella” ending that can be added to any verb to give it the sense of meandering, nonlinear movements, in-process. When we talk, me keskustellemme (keskustella), we go around a shared center, kicking up words between us, testing how to articulate our thoughts.

Finnish begins to arise from within my own sensorial experience, bending with possibilities to bring attention to the orientation of my body in relationship to place (menen metsää-ää­-n). It grounds me in a primal process of becoming home.

Home as staying

[Finland] slips through conceptualizing language, leaks through my fingers…back to the soil, back to this shared planet which my human species is indigenous to.

Home eludes me. And home eludes itself as a continuous becoming. Home- This everything, this inconceivable ONE that begins in my sensible ground as un-bordered cosmos.

It’s rapturously unsettling to feel how “home” engulfs me and expands me into radical inclusion, into inhabiting corners dark and strange. When I stop clinging to my ideal little cottage in a Finnish forest, home gently proposes itself as the infinite mother, inter-weaving me into the garment of a universal holobiome. A womb I cannot escape.

Rilke writes:

I love you, gentlest of Ways…
You, the great homesickness we could never shake off,
you, the forest that always surrounded us…

Home begins to be more like the longing I carry within for the Beloved, that eternal forest, a longing that I never wish to rarify into the identity of a single country.

I find myself tuning to a life of listening to the land and responsiveness to its inherent proposals of practice. Practices emerge when I devote myself to staying in a place without knowing for how long I will be hosted to stay. The devotion of staying is an intimate and uncomfortable touch. It is lying in the woven branch womb of the silence chamber for hours on a blood-chilling day until the sensation ends at my knees. It is holding blueberries on my tongue and being overwhelmed with ecstatic gratitude, exclaiming, “I cannot live without you!”

Home creates me and I create home. We depend upon one another.

I learn that to practice the temporality of staying is to step out of doors and let your feet be met by a meandering path; to end up somewhere you did not plan; to respond to the invitation of a rock to trace its intricate story with your palm, then your whole body– sliding down its flowing cracks– and realize that at the same, it’s reading your story in the creases and lines of your skin.

When I make “indigenous” an object, an ontological thing to grasp, something to be with or to be without, I disentangle it from its only true existence– relationship. The kind of home experienced in being native to a place is found resting into all the spaces between; is intra-acted in our gazing upon one another.

In my book, Silence Chamber, I write: “what does it mean to belong? Perhaps that my dwelling preceded my residence…in the house of belonging …are all welcome by the very nature of it as flesh of our flesh. To “enter” the house of belonging is a process of getting back to where we already were.”

I can never be home, nor become indigenous, until I land where I already am. Until I touch the earth that houses me with the most intimate embrace. Until home and I become lonely for each other, until we learn to stay in our longing in the spaces between us.

All day today on a forest island, a sharp-orange-eyed fly with black striped wings has been following me. Landing everywhere. My hat. My pencil. My hammock. Tickling my skin with a quick dive to some corner-of-my-eye landing pad. Occasionally, I ask him for a quieter relation, a gentler visit; to be still so that I may gaze upon him and take in the details of his beauty. He seems to hear me, to pause… disappears for a minute or two. And so I stay. I stay in this incessant bother of porous aliveness.

*Here you can read a Finnish/English poem that i wrote about these ideas of home/koti.