landbodymind: an introduction
The Great Lakes are my internal organs.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, in Rehearsals for Living
As we all put our masks on during the pandemic, we become quickly aware of how much of our breath is water, and of how much our breathing connects us to others, to the point where, in the time of the out-of-control virus, breath connection is dangerous. Nibi is very much an inseparable part of the land, and although Indigeneity is most commonly associated with land, within/inside Nishnaabeg thought, land and water are one in the same. What happens outside my body, also happens inside my body.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, in Rehearsals For Living
bodies are hubs forming vital pathways and links between plants, animals, rivers, lakes, the cosmos and humans, blurring the boundaries between body and individual in favour of interdependent communal systems
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, in Rehearsals For Living
When I speak of bodies, I open this noun’s meaning into its playgrounds, the language of poetics, through which we may also say stories, all existing within and upon the noun’s flayed innards: our bodies, bodies of land, water, literature, community…The land is an archive, is a library, is a genealogy—a body of land is a body of literature.
Joshua Whitehead, in “Writing as Rupture” in Making Love with the Land
I would argue that words, orality, sound itself are kin to us since we not only breathe animation into language, but we also enliven stories through the deployment of our voices, senses, bodies. The act of speaking summons words into being through an entanglement of experience, memory, and recognition.
Joshua Whitehead, in “Writing as Rupture” in Making Love with the Land
a pictograph or a petroglyph are story, historical, and communally so, because the body of the storyteller is never removed from the bodies of their landbase, riverbase, oceanbase.
Joshua Whitehead, in “Writing as Rupture” in Making Love with the Land
crossing the bridge, the shatterglass of the river below was the same as the one inside my mind, crazytown…the technical term, crazytown. swimming in our broken bodies like poison fish. diagnosis stew tastes good with alphabet soup.
Kai Minosh Pyle, “landbodymind (in the city of wild onions)”
My landbodymind, too, is made up of the Great Lakes, among other waters. I like the idea of bodies as hubs, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson says, places of dense “pathways and links” of relationships to land—and I would add, mind as well. Might our bodies be a kind of interface between land and mind? This was not exactly what I was thinking of specifically when I coined the term landbodymind, with body in the middle, but it does seem apt.
I’ve focused on the landbody part of landbodymind in these excerpts, mostly because I think the idea of bodyminds is more established and easier for people to grasp. “Land” can be such a big concept that it’s hard to feel the way that bodyminds are part of land and vice versa. Especially since we tend to link our bodymind so much to a sense of individual selfhood. I’ve been thinking lately about how to reimagine the “self” in “self-determination” considering the fact that we exist as part of a landbodymind in relation with other landbodyminds.
Finally, I want to note how Joshua Whitehead, in “Writing as Rupture,” brings us perhaps to landbodymindstory (it just keeps getting longer and longer, haha). He notes that story in its oral form is embodied kin because we speak it, animate it, with our breath—the same breath that Leanne Simpson reminds us connects us to the land and each other through the water in it. The land, too, is a story: as Louise Erdrich famously put it, the lakes are libraries. I haven’t quoted the full section but he goes on to describe how the land tells stories through trails that orient us, through tipi circles that speak of home. And so he joins it all together: a body of land or water, a body of literature, a body as flesh, a body as a community.
How do we “read” all of these things? How are these things the same, different? I’m thinking, now, with the idea of each body as a hub of existence. As hubs of landbodymind.