Living with UNdisposable Destructions
Shared by Tanya Farzaneh
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“Each of us can name these wounded places. We hold them in our minds and our hearts. The question is, what do we do in response?”
(Kimmerer, 2013, p. 327).
We return on Monday morning to the mass destruction upon our doorstep; torso, limbs, broken pieces of the trees resemble that of a horror film. Here, left upon the doors of the child care a heaping piles of corps. The scene is disturbing, a chilling story of a mass slaughter and the lack of respect and disregard for life. There is no honor here. The air is heavy, the smell of fresh cut pine, the smell of murder. Entangled in the inheritance of neo-liberal destructions and ruins, we attend to indigestible path of disposable relations. In a bid to honor the pines we save the destruction.
How might we encounter the pines in the messy, tangled ruins of neoliberal destruction? What possibilities emerge when we see our relations with pines not through resource-extraction-consumption relational logics but as a call to resist complacency and maintenance of the status quo?
We gather the remains, the limbs, torsos, arms and legs of the pines, and willows as a testament to the wrong that was done here, to not forget. A heaping pile of corpses, an assemblage, a visual to the loss of the life of fellow citizens. The children, educators, and families live with the bodies of the pines, the remains at the front of the centre, entangled with and attending to neoliberal destruction and logics.
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References
Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.