Earthbound on Solid Ground

                Earthbound on Solid Ground by Bell Hooks is an excerpt about home and change. It could be related to Melissa Holbrook Pierson’s book of The Place You Love is Gone. Both authors talk about their home towns and the changes they went through. Bell Hooks writes about how Kentucky Hills is where she grew up and spent her childhood. There, she was surrounded with wilderness and honeysuckle and wild plants. “I was taught early on in my life the power of nature” (Hooks 67). She states that meaning she grew up learning about nature and how it hold all the power. She brings up a point about white power, and her being a black woman, she wanted to believe that whites were not the highest power. Seeing as nature cannot be changed by anyone, she believes that nature hold the ultimate power.

                “Humility in relationship to nature’s power made survival possible” (Hooks 67). Many people learned that nature had made people the way they are. Connecting to nature allows people to learn to survive. Those who lived in nature, like Hooks, learned that the environment gives life and takes life. Those who are from the “backwoods” were taught to ignore the rules of the society and law. “The wild spirit of unspoiled nature worked its way into the folk of the backwoods, and ancestral legacy, handed down from generation to generation” (Hooks 68). She is talking about the people who grew up in the backwoods, and were not able to experience the effects of nature and how it can shape you.

When Bell Hooks said “To tend to the earth is always then to tend our destiny, our freedom, and our hope” (Hooks 68), it kind of caught my eye. Saying that tending to the earth is kind of determining your destiny, she is saying that the nature and the earth can potentially affect your future. How does the earth control your future? According to Hooks your destiny and freedom can be controlled by the earth. Since the earth is not something that can be changed by people, Hooks sees the earth as the essential power, rather than white power.

Bell Hooks is also stating that she would like to be back in her natural suburban childhood home town rather than the urbanization she is now subjected to. There are not as many greens and that is when many started seeing whites as the powerful ones. Much like in Melissa Holbrook Pierson’s story both her and Hooks want to go back to the suburban areas they came from.

Becoming Metis

                Many of the themes we have read about lately are reoccurring, such as themes about multiculturalism, colonialism, and place and home. When Melissa Nelson states "To learn who I am today, on this land I live on, I've had to recover that heritage and realize a multicultural self", she means she has to discover who she is, individually. She states how she is a mix of cultures and breeds, Native American and European. Her goal is to find a culture and religion and spirit that fit all of her native cultures, as well as describing herself.  Nelson states she wants to “honor all parts of myself; the spiritual traditions of my Ojibwe ancestors as well as the traditional knowledge of my European ancestors” (Nelson 147). She told us her story about her native and new traditions and that will help her find herself in a religion. She mentions to us how her mother remembers only a little bit of her native tongue, Anishinabemowin. Even that, however, was a mixture of Cree and Canadian French. I feel that if she learned her native tongue it might help her choose which traditions she can relate to most. Both of her parents had lost most their native tongues because if they were going to become American then they had to forget about the past.
            Melissa Nelson then tells us how she doesn’t feel connected enough with her indigenous past to claim any Indian spirituality (Nelson 148). She explored on her own, by reading books and by lectures. Nelson had to find her multicultural self, meaning taking in all she can between her Native American and European past as well as finding her own creativity now that will express her, separately. To find that, she often wrote poetry and started to play the selje flute. “We all have Earth-based spiritual traditions in our past and we should work to uncover our heritage. But we also have our own individual creativity, imagination, and distinct relationship with what we call the sacred” (Nelson 151).

In History

In the story “In History” by Jamaica Kincaid, she is describing what history is according to her. She says it is “the thing that happened to me and all who look like me” (16). Now, I am not entirely sure what she exactly meant by that, but I think she is referring to her ancestors and all that they went through. They could’ve struggled in America or in another country. That was her families past, therefore it is her history. We all have our own history, and she tries to tell us that in her story. She starts to tell us her story of her history. She mentions how Columbus “discovered the new world” (17). Although she doesn’t tell us much about her actually family history she does elaborate a little bit on where she is from, Antigua. She talks about the landscape. She says it is green. “Let me describe this landscape again: it is green, and unmistakably so; another person, who would have a more specific interest, a painter, might say, it is a green that often verges on blue, a green that often modified by reds and yellows and even other more intense or other shades of green” (19). She goes on and on a few more sentences about how green it is.

Kincaid also talks about Vermont, and how it is not the same place where she is from, Antigua. I find it a little bizarre how she is sort of speaking for Christopher Columbus. When she said that’s he never saw Vermont and he saw Antigua on a weekday, or a Sunday, and that he was exhausted.  She first thought of “what is history” when she realizes she was no longer living in the place that her ancestors, or those who looked like her, had lived. She is making a new appearance (21).  Kincaid also talks about naming different items. Items either have a proper name or a Latin name.

 Creative Challenge

When I was younger I learned about the New World and Christopher Columbus in school. I was very young. It was back in kindergarten, actually. We even had a feast for the pilgrims and Indians. I actually had to make a map of the world, or what I thought it looked like, when I was younger. I know my world was pretty much a few blobs on the paper. I knew, at that point. The world was round. We had a globe in the classroom. As I grew older I realized that my blobs actually took forms as countries. I learned more in detail about Columbus and his discoveries. What I was taught in school and at home is pretty much all I knew about history. I never really sat down and thought of it. When Kincaid mentions the landscape, it makes me think of my home town landscape and that of that world.