Claimed – We thank Martin Shaw for bringing this term to life for us. To be claimed by place means you’ve been pulled by some communications of more-than-humans to a certain spot, or perhaps region. You’ve become attuned to something of the Spirit of some being or community, even if the place has been desecrated, and you love them. We have been claimed by several places and by different kinds of beings, and some have become our small gods (see below).
Community of life, kin, relatives, relations – We prefer these terms as replacements for the dominant society’s use of words like “resources,” “workers”, “property,” and “ecosystems” that categorize the living world, including humans, based on a sense of control, particularly economic. We embrace the interconnectedness and kinship of all creation through these alternate word choices. Use of these words reveals to whom we choose to be responsible, while the words of the dominant society reveal an entitlement toward domination, or in the case of a phrase like “the environment” an erasure of sentiency, mystery and complexity.
Cræft – The word cræft (pronounced craheft with a soft r and a blur of the a as in “ah” and e as in “yet,” and no distinct syllabic break) first showed up in written texts over a thousand years ago. It was an indigenous Old English word that didn’t make it into modern English. The Oxford English Dictionary offers no contemporary equivalent, but instead refers to “knowledge, power, skill,” and a sense of wisdom and resourcefulness that weighs in even more than physical skill. So we are not talking about craft, which has numerous modern uses–from meaning boutique, as in beer, to created, as in an essay. We are grateful to Alex Langlands for writing a book about this, and we like his attempt to resurface the word as a conceptual and lifeway goal to aim for. As our beliefs are rooted in these times of deep need for transition away from living on the take, this word arrived through a book, but landed in our hearts.
Langlands suggest that a state of being engaged is core to cræft, a state that has been overwhelmed by the transfer of power from local, and often individual, to industrial. He writes, “The point when industrial processes emerged as the dominant means of production was the point at which craft as a form of art emerged–as a self-conscious counterpoint to factory-made goods.” He adds that mechanization has changed how we think and how we establish knowledge, so much so that it is often hard to fully imagine the world before the Industrial Revolution, much less think like the majority of our human ancestors. Rather than see this as progress, it seems more akin to a narrowing of our animal gifts.
The uses of cræft in one old text are best explained as “the organising principle of the individual’s capacity to follow a moral and mental life,” according to historian Peter Clemoes. In Langlands wrestling to try to define the word, he offers this gem:
“When we made things, we acquired a certain kind of knowledge, we had an awareness and an understanding of how materials worked and how the human form has evolved to create from them. With the severance of this ability, we are in danger of losing touch with a knowledge base that allows us to convert raw materials into useful objects, a hand-eye-head-heart-body co-ordination that furnishes us with a meaningful understanding of the materiality of our [sic] world.”
The land who is one’s home shapes the cræft, and the cræft then influences the land. To make a cradle that takes tens of thousands of milkweed plants means you understand milkweed, and spend significant energy ensuring their proliferation, so cræft becomes inseparable from both the land and the cræfter.
Langlands ends his 23-page chapter on trying to define cræft with this: “It’s about more than just making. The goal, in being cræfty, is not to use as much as possible of the technology and resources [sic] you have at your disposal but to use as little as possible in relation to the job that needs undertaking. This is the resourcefulness in cræft. Having physical adeptness, strength and fitness represents the power in cræft. And finally, understanding the materials, making critical decisions about how to approach the work and factoring in wider financial and time constraints represents the knowledge in cræft.”
We’d add, just for clarity, that the relationship the cræfter has with the land, the source of all the materials needed to live well, needs to be rooted in deep gratitude and oriented toward the aesthetic of place. And true cræft happens, we think, when the cræfter knows she/he/they could not be whole without this place-specific relationship. In this statement, we realize that cræft is effectually another word for what has become known as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). Neither of these, appropriately used, can be separated from place. Both define a culture. So neither wants to be theorized, globalized, or teased out of the worldview of their culture/place.
Earth-integrated, indelibly earth-based, place-integrated, place-based, land-integrated – We use these terms for those humans and their cultures who live in ways that demonstrate that they know themselves to be inseparable from the rest of the beings–the lands–where they live. To our knowledge, every long-lived non (or not fully)-civilized human culture was, or is, earth-integrated. All earth-integrated cultures are indigenous to place, but not all indigenous peoples are earth-integrated.
Land – Land and life are often synonyms for us. We experience land to be made of more than stone, soil, trees, and waterways. To us, every being is inseparable from the place they live, from whom they consume and where they are consumed. Land is the full set of relationships present in any given spot on terrestrial Earth. And land is a “who” (see below). Intact, self-willed land is the textbook for how to live respectfully with that place. But any component of the natural world is also a source of knowledge.
People, Persons, Kind, Beings – As modern science is making clearer all the time, the degree of relatedness amongst most living beings is staggering. So instead of saying species, we sometimes say people, persons, kind or beings, as in tree people, coyote person, our kind, fungus being, etc.
Regrounding – We created new meanings for this word: 1) returning our bodies to the soil, 2) implying a trajectory toward thinking and acting with deep regard for all the life around us.
Reparations – At core, reparations are the act of making amends for a wrong or injury. With this in mind, we opt to use “reparations” instead of “restoration” for land healing work, because in most cases it is a lot more accurate. To restore is to return to a whole or previous state, but how far back do we go? For example, the presence of modern humans changed the predator dynamics in every continent we migrated to, and human use of fire surely transformed plant community composition as well. And even if we wanted to go back that far, restoring to a pre-human state is utterly impossible, for many of the large animals are extinct. Sadly, in most places we couldn’t even restore to a couple of decades ago. The insects, for one, are in massive decline. But the damage done by the capitalist, colonizing society, particularly harsh in recent centuries as is the case in California, can be assessed, and an attempt be made to make amends for that degradation even though restoration is impossible.
Responsible relationship – We prefer this phrase over “right relationship” because its use is a constant reminder that healthy relationships require fully occupying your half, while the other term is vague and has many interpretations. We also find “respectful relationship” acceptable. But the word relationship by itself has little value–it needs a descriptor.
Self-willed, symbiotically-directed, community-oriented, unselfed, untamed, intact, autonomous, land-integrated, place-integrated – We prefer to use these terms for land and other beings who are normally called “wild” or “wilderness.” Self-willed land isn’t really up for interpretation, not like wilderness is these days. Symbiotically-willed and -directed also clearly imply sentiency. While sadly, wild is often used to mean just the opposite. The starting point for relationship with these other phrases is one of wonder–“I wonder how all these beings get along so well, how long they’ve been making group decisions for the benefit of the whole in spite of their warring parties,” for example. These days, the label wilderness grants officials the right to manage the land “under their control.” Do earth-integrated peoples manage self-willed land, or do they instead manage themselves to find ways to provide for their well-being without destroying this shared need with nearly all of their other-than-human kin? In today’s world, most of the land is used by and for humans, so there’s plenty of damaged land who could be healed a good deal while still providing for human needs. So we encourage our kind to tread as lightly as possible on those places who are still self-willed. And maybe some of those places who are not so habitable by us humans but are heavily managed, places like national forests, maybe they could be allowed to heal on their own terms, to regain their mastery at creating diversity and soil, clean water and clean air. We are encouraged by those who are trying to revive older, proper meanings for the word wild, and we may opt to use that word ourselves, but in today’s context, it seems we need to articulate exactly what we don’t mean when calling a place or person wild.
Small gods, large gods – To us, gods are beings for whom we feel reverence. Small gods are the ones whose symbiotic roles take more rigor to discover. Most kinds of beings, say robins, elderberry plants, or earthworms, for example, could be small gods, the kind mythologist Martin Shaw urges us to pay special attention to. Not-so-small gods are those who are also along for the evolutionary ride, but clearly are hubs of fecundity. Rivers, giant trees, coral reefs, mountains, these are not-so-small gods. All these billions of kinds of beings, including us humans, owe our shared existence to the great cycles of creation and destruction, to the merger of Spirit with rock, fire, water and air. These real shapers are the large gods, informing evolution and creation, but existing in time scales beyond our imagination. The Earth, who is comprised of these four primary large gods and all the life they have symbiotically created, is the largest god of all. You can read Martin Shaw’s full Small Gods essay here.
They, them, their – We are glad to see many people presenting themselves to the human world by telling others which pronouns to use when speaking with, or referring to, them. Apparently, in many earth-integrated (non-colonized) human cultures, there was often a shared word for she, he and it. No gender! No human/non-human split! In the Nomlaki homeland, that word in the present tense is ew if the being you are talking about is near you. We are drawn to use Nomlaki language for the beings of our home, and were blessed to have been given and encouraged to use many of those names by a native speaker. (Thank you Cody Pata!) But Nomlaki pronouns are very relational and we find them too complex for us non-speakers to integrate into English in a respectful way. So instead, given that all of life is symbiotic, that we are all made of multiple beings–often billions of them!–we opt to use the plural forms we already know: they, them and their, just as many of our non-binary human kin are doing. For example, today is a they, as is the sky, the creek, every tree, gopher, rock and so on. If speaking about a being we know prefers to be referred to as she, he, or some other pronoun specified to us, we feel no need to counter their wishes.
Who – Since all of natural creation might be sentient and symbiotically-willed, we prefer to describe them as “who,” not “it,” “that” or “which.” Even ideas and stories who have persisted for eons have a type of life, a persona, and so are called “who.”
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