In Memory of a Small Tree: An Exploration of More-than-Human Kinship in a Clearcut


Jennifer MacLatchy, Dalhousie University

Through describing one piece of a project of arts-based research that took place in a clearcut, this paper explores what it means to make kin with more-than-human beings in landscapes of destruction, and questions how this might contribute to building livable future worlds in sites that seem beyond hope. The project described in this paper was one of a collection of connected performance acts that began as a part of an artist residency and continued as a part of my doctoral research. It involved observing and tracking changes in a landscape as it transformed from an unremarkable forest of mostly small trees and brush to a clearcut and then blasting zone by focusing on one tiny white pine that survived the first round of destruction. In a capitalist and colonial system that prioritizes caring for or protecting only the more spectacular, iconic, or rare environmental features while casting the rest of the living world as mere “resources,” the act of paying attention to and making gestures to celebrate the life of a scraggly two-foot-tall tree asserted the possibility and importance of making kin with the multitude of small, complex, and often overlooked parts of life-sustaining ecosystem entanglements. The work described in this paper was in response to calls such as Haraway’s (2016) to “stay with the trouble,” and Lee’s (2016) to find that wastelands are not necessarily beyond hope. It was a way of questioning, along with Rose (2013), what it means to grieve for more-than-human kin amidst a mass global extinction event. From the theoretical foundations of ecofeminism and queer ecology, this project understands that cisheteronormativity, transphobia, homophobia, sexism, and hypermasculinity are part of interlocking systems of colonialism and capitalism that perpetuate ecological destruction and unevenly distribute environmental benefits and detriments along striations of privilege and oppression (Waldron 2018). It was further informed by the live-sustaining forms of queer kinship that exist beyond and in resistance to normative forms of kinship (LeBel 2020). This project thus took up an intersectional understanding of systems of oppression and looked to learn from the wisdom of those whose environmentalism emerged from places of Indignity, queerness, disability, and neurodivergence. This project took place in unceded Mi’kma’ki (Halifax, Nova Scotia), and therefore looked specifically to the ways in which the Treaties of Peace and Friendship call upon settlers to come into relationship with the living world in Mi’kma’ki. Working from the tensions inherent in being a settler who benefits from and is therefore complicit in the capitalist colonial system that is the cause of so much ecological destruction (Davis, 2017), I used arts-based methods to experiment with possible ways of decolonizing my own settler relationship with land and place. This paper argues that paying attention, witnessing losses and destruction, and caring for seemingly unremarkable elements in an unremarkable landscape are ways of resisting their illegibility as losses (Gillespie 2015). It further argues that paying attention to the layers of past multi-species assemblages that are bulldozed into so many present landscapes is a method of resisting shifting baseline syndrome (Challenger 2012; Gan et al. 2017; Papworth et al. 2009; Svenning 2017). This project found that, despite what seems like many failures to prevent further destruction and an inability to stop destruction in chains of events that are already underway, “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) by witnessing and remembering informs the enactment of care (Conley 2016). The project described in this paper defies narratives that frame the small tree, its landscape, and other similar landscapes as expendable or unworthy of attention, protection, or care. It demonstrates that, by paying attention, documenting, and making performative acts of care in the actual site of destruction, building relationship with more-than-human kin is an act of mattering that can resist further destruction. It argues that this practice of enacting forms of care beyond normative (capitalist, colonial) modes of kinship works to form the building blocks that are vital to constructing livable futures from the ruins of the present.

This paper will be presented at the following session: