Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Power of Place

Guest post for Power of Place: Conservation, Kayaking and Culture Festival, July 13, 2024 at Menokin
by Jay Grebe, Director, Just Harvest VA

I tug at a weed that has just started poking through the dirt. Despite his size, the roots are so deeply anchored that I have to add my second hand to make any progress with it. It lifts out of the dirt the slightest bit, but still does not loosen. Instead, several inches of a smooth, almost plastic-feeling cord lift out of the soil. Even after having been unceremoniously yanked out of the ground and left lying exposed, still he does not release. He is so desperate to stay in place, fighting so hard, that I almost want to leave him. But I know this little fellow’s kind; they are rhizomes and will quickly choke out the current residents of this garden, so he cannot stay. Braiding my fingers in and around this stubborn thing, I shift my weight backward and after a long pause, I finally hear the familiar popping noise and I topple backward off the wooden garden border I had been kneeling on. I hold him up, quietly impressed with his length and the absurd tensile strength. But when I look down to survey the skinny little trench left behind, I must abruptly end the little vigil I had been holding for him. The rhizome I had so recklessly ripped out of the earth had wound himself too close to the roots of several plant babies and I would need to quickly settle them back into the earth if they were to survive my harum-scarum weed warfare campaign.

As I lean down to tend to the disrupted seedlings, a bead of sweat drops from my forehead onto the soil below. I giggle to myself when I realize that my literal blood, sweat and tears are in this soil (I had cut my heel the week before, and just trust that if you haven’t had a good therapeutic cry in your garden, then you’re missing out). The cliché is just funny to me at first, but there’s a sobering aura around it that I cannot dismiss as the idea continues to bounce around my head longer than it should.

This year, the Just Harvest team had the… honor, responsibility, opportunity, duty, privilege (pick one, they all work) of establishing heritage gardens at Menokin. [If you haven’t already heard it, here’s the elevator pitch: The heritage gardens at Menokin are installed as a community education and awareness-building living exhibit. While the garden will produce food to be donated directly back into the surrounding communities, it’s the how and not the what of the food production that matters. For centuries, the contribution of Black, Indigenous peoples of the world and Natives of Turtle Island [now known as North America] have been at best discounted but more commonly erased altogether. Native and Indigenous science has served as the backbone of sustainable growing practices for millennia. TikTok homestead influencers are not serving up new ideas, they are appropriating old ones. These gardens will demonstrate the ingenious and time-honored planting traditions of the Indigenous and enslaved people of the region and attempt to correct the inaccurate historical narratives currently being pedaled today.

That’s what has brought me here today. As part of my work plan, I spend Fridays at Menokin tending to our three little heritage gardens and--not so much a part of my work plan--thinking the thoughts that quiet time in nature allows for. On this particular Friday, at this specific moment, I am contemplating the literal and philosophical idea of what it means when your blood, sweat and tears are in the land. (If you haven’t already figured it out, I am *neuro-spicy*, which for the sake of this conversation, means I tend to over and under think all the things all at once, all the time. But also, the idea of land ties is a complicated one. If you are not overthinking it, then you more than likely are in fact underthinking the matter.) The idea of “sweat equity” is a main stay of what it means to be “American,” but historically, pouring of oneself in the literary or literal sense rarely seems to translate into any sort of return at all. In modern society as well, it seems the more of a person that is invested into the land the less likely that person is to receive any sort of tangible exchange for the sacrifice.

I am a Native, a member of the Powhatan Confederacy with familial ties that crisscross the region’s Tribes and some that snake all the way up into the Northeast, with large contingents in New Jersey and the Philadelphia region. There are certainly others in other places as well, but tracking down those relations is nearly impossible, by design. That is the nature of being Indigenous in America, the shared generational trauma of having thousands of years’ worth of land ties severed in under a century, by settler colonialism coupled with the diasporic nature of shifting from sustenance-based land ties to survivalist-based homelessness in a single generation. Natives were dislocated and nearly eradicated, then promptly removed from history as though our whole ancestral existence had been nothing more than the fever dream of a colonist. This leaves many of us still struggling today to understand who we are, because we lack a sense of where we are.

This place, Menokin, is technically part of my ancestral homeland… but I didn’t even know it existed until a few years ago when I signed onto a collaborative project with one of the organization’s directors. I had never been on the property until last year, and until this moment, I had never felt the full sense of what it is to be here.

I love Menokin. It’s a beautiful place: scenic acreage with a mix of bucolic fields and old growth forest, and a creek cutting a serene little zigzag through the marshes along its edge. But I’ve also struggled with it. My ancestors were “forcibly relocated” (that’s the more polite way of saying expulsion and genocide) from this place. It was then given to colonists who became incredibly wealthy through the kidnapping, enslavement and exploitation of our Black and African American cousins. That reality presses on me every time I drive onto the property, and no matter the occasion, I feel a hanging sense of despair, like background music running through my brain. I may sound like a lunatic, but I swear I can feel the angry ancestors who still sometimes roam this place. I can feel the bad energy that is trapped here some days, and it feels as though someone has placed a washcloth dripping with scalding water around my heart.

From where I sit in the garden, still mindlessly picking at weeds (more than likely doing more harm than good in my inattentive state), I can see the frame of a small building, jutting sharply out of the earth, like the skeleton of a house that once stood there. There are stones set deep into the earth all around it as well. They are the footprints for other two buildings of the same type, at one time forming some sort of overcrowded haphazardly created neighborhood. Housing for the enslaved. It’s just abandoned bones and frozen footprints now. The couple hiking down the trail next to it do not even pause to acknowledge it or look for a placard. It is just part of the scenery. A f***ing human tragedy.

But what of the Native “skeletons” and “footprints?” There isn’t even anything for random passers-by to ignore. The inhumanities that befell abducted Indigenous Africans cannot be overstated, so I’m not here to debate on who had it worse. I am simply here to wonder “Where are we?!” There is archeological evidence that Natives had settled in this region more than 12,000 years ago… and it is only in the last few hundred that all traces of us seem to have evaporated, as though the first 11,600 years just didn’t count?

Where are my ancestors? Where are the stick figure outlines of a dance circle or a mocked-up fishing weir? I think I hear them when it’s very quiet some days. I know they lived and loved and birthed and buried here. I know we are here… but really, for a culture that is so intertwined with the Land that holds it, how is there simply no sign of us?

Natives of the Powhatan confederacy were people of the water. Their foods, technology, ceremonies, and daily rituals were all made for, by and with the Water. But more than that, their understanding of the World, the way they moved through her and the symbiotic relationship they had with her were all formed in and along these Creeks and Rivers. A Native’s whole sense of identity and community was based on their relationship with the Land that supported them. With this Place.

Post-extirpation (polite way of saying it; they thought we were all dead) the remaining Natives hid in the swamps and eventually took over or managed to purchase the less desirable lands further inland away from the rivers they had always known. What would follow was generation after generation of survivors, and the opening and re-opening of a thousand tiny and not so tiny wounds that might have bled us dry if not for our sense of people. Ever resilient, they established new traditions in new places, [despite the 1883 Religious Crimes Code] rebuilding a replacement culture for the one lost with their land. But while this new life is beautiful in its own right, it is still somehow hollow. Bones with no marrow.

I don’t know if epigenetics is still considered an emerging science or not, but my personal experience leaves me completely convinced. (Epigenetics is the theory that the experiences and actions of ancestors impacts our genetic coding in a way that forms who we are as people, no matter how removed we may be from those ancestors and experiences.)  I can see the longing in my Native cousins and friends for things they never knew, but their bodies nonetheless remember. I can feel the mixed sense of peace and desperation when I am near these waters, though none of this has ever been “mine” in a tangible sense. We are, on a genetic level, tied to this Place. When we are not here, there is a palpable void that no one can identify, but we all feel. That is the power of place at its worst. That is knowing that your blood, sweat and tears are in a place you’ve never been. 

So, how do we exist in this World? How can we be powerful with empty bones?

I hear the big calls for “Land Back” and I love them, but that isn’t feasible on the individual level. I can feel that heat welling up in the back of my eyes… more tears for the Soil? Not today. I shake my head in hopes of shaking off the sense of impotence in it all and hurriedly turn back to re-start my weeding as a distraction. As soon as I lean in, I am immediately smacked in the face with the large, slightly prickly leaf of a bottleneck gourd.  How fitting: reflect on ancestral things and get backhanded by an ancestral plant… (sometimes I mean I can literally feel the ancestors when I’m here).

And then it hits me, literally and figuratively. I am here, in this Place, planting a heritage garden for my ancestors [and my children]. Reclaiming this tiny swath (11’x 11’) of Land and reclaiming its Indigeneity for us. On July 13th, I’ll be standing out here, explaining these gardens and teaching about Indigenous Science at Menokin’s upcoming sustainability event, wearing a ribbon skirt and beaded earrings (ribbon skirts and beaded earrings are not a Powhatan Tradition specifically, but they are a hallmark of contemporary Native culture). We are, bit by tiny bit, rePlacing the tiny things that we have to share. Creating the bones and footprints of our ancestors in this Place.

I am here in this Space, actively doing what I can to support the incoming Native renaissance. Maybe not Land Back yet, but Culture Back and Space back are the baby steps we are working on today. This is how I will refill my bones with the Land that I belong to.