Embodied Kinship in Skywoman’s Garden

An essay from Kinship; Belonging in a World of Relations

As we move from Midwinter into seed-starting time as spring emerges like a sprouting seedling on our Indigenous seed farm, I wanted to share an essay I wrote, which was initially published in the following book, which is part of a 5-volume anthology on kinship published by Center for Humans and Nature:

Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations

Co-edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer

We live in an astounding world of relations. We share these ties that bind with our fellow humans—and we share these relations with nonhuman beings as well. From the bacterium swimming in your belly to the trees exhaling the breath you breathe, this community of life is our kin—and, for many cultures around the world, being human is based upon this extended sense of kinship.

Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a lively series that explores our deep interconnections with the living world. These five Kinship volumes—Planet, Place, Partners, Persons, Practice—offer essays, interviews, poetry, and stories of solidarity, highlighting the interdependence that exists between humans and nonhuman beings. More than 70 contributors—including Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Powers, David Abram, J. Drew Lanham, and Sharon Blackie—invite readers into cosmologies, narratives, and everyday interactions that embrace a more-than-human world as worthy of our response and responsibility. These diverse voices render a wide range of possibilities for becoming better kin.

From the recognition of nonhumans as persons to the care of our kinfolk through language and action, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations is a guide and companion into the ways we can deepen our care and respect for the family of plants, rivers, mountains, animals, and others who live with us in this exuberant, life-generating, planetary tangle of relations.

Vol. 3 – Partners

Interspecies Kinship
Contributors: Sharon Blackie, Nickole Brown, Brenda Cárdenas, Ourania Emmanouil, Monica Gagliano, Anne Galloway, Sean Hill, Julian Hoffman, Tim Ingold, Toby McLeod, Martin Lee Mueller, Steve Paulson, Richard Powers, Merlin Sheldrake, Eleanor Sterling, Heather Swan, Manon Voice, Rowen White

How do cultural traditions, narratives, and mythologies shape the ways we relate, or not, to other beings as kin? How do relations between and among different species foster a sense of responsibility and belonging in us?

Watch the Kinship Book Club discussion of Vol. 3: Partners

Skywoman’s Garden by Rowen White

Winter is the sacred season of story and dream. For my ancestral people, the Haudenosaunee, Midwinter is a time for sacred beginnings, when the infinity loop of time resets and the sacred fire must be put out and restarted with prayers and blessed new intention. It is the beginning of our ceremonial cycle and reconnects us to the place of our origins where our Original Ancestor fell from the sky, the sacred smokehole in the sky known to many as the Pleiades star constellation. When the “Seven Sisters” are directly overhead, it is our cue to spend days in prayer and healing. It is when we see ourselves as seeds in the moist and dark earth, allowing our seed coats to imbibe the StoryWater of Life and begin to crack open in anticipation of the coming spring…we must seed our prayers well in advance of the sprouting of the Earth, to nourish and feed the keepers of Life.

It is an honor and privilege to tend to this exquisite tension of Life wanting to bound up and bless us with abundance. Midwinter is the beginning of our agricultural cycle, the time when the seeds lie dormant, just like the seeds in the dark of the soil before the spring sprouting. Midwinter is the time of seed-dreaming…for some, this comes in the form of gathering the stack of seed catalogs that arrive daily in our mailboxes…for some, it is digging into their treasure box or shelf of saved seeds from previous seasons…tiny little gems of seeds that hold such embodied potential…For us as Mohawk people, it is the time we renew our relationship with our original foods, and sow another season of connection in the grand dynamic co-evolutionary dance that we have with our sacred foods and ancestral homelands.

Years ago, as I accepted sacred bundles of ancestral seeds of my Haudenosaunee ancestors, I began a decades-long unconventional rite of passage where the plants and the Earth helped grow me into a deeper understanding of what it means to be a Mohawk woman in my full capacity. I was told by wise elders that there is a cartography of stories that reside in the landscape that help us as Mohawk people remember who we are, where we come from, and how to live in a way that honors our responsibility of being a descendant of Good Mind and a bright future ancestor. As we traverse the seasons, we walk across a memory landscape of stories that help us remember our place in the mycelial network of kinship all around us.

In our creation story, Original Woman came here to this layer of existence, clutching a handful of seeds, and proceeded to sing the World awake, sowing her seeds into the Earth on the back of a Great Turtle. She came tumbling down from the Skyworld into a watery abyss, and all our relations here conspired to make a suitable home for her and all of us, her descendants. This beautiful layered creation story, which began so long ago, continues to unfurl and come alive in every moment, as our original life sustainers emerge from the soil in our gardens and sing a song that helps us remember our Original Agreements to take care of one another.

Dancing in the direction that the sun goes, First Woman put into place the cycles of continuous creation, continuous birth inside the Earth and all around us. Skywoman gave birth to a beautiful daughter soon after arriving here in this new world, and in time, she too bore the two twins who would continue to help shape the place we call home. During the birth of these original Twins, Skywoman's daughter passed in labor, and in her dying breaths, she claimed that the foods needed to sustain her descendants until the end of time would sprout from her body in her earthen grave. True to her word, from her breasts sprouted the Corn, which would grow in diversity to feed both villages and empires. Twining bean vines emerged from her hands to offer long and slender bean pods filled with nourishing seeds, and raucous squash tendrils grew from her belly button to produce sweet and sustaining pumpkins and squashes to feed people well into the depth of winter. Sunflowers and Original potatoes grew from her legs, tobacco for our prayers from her head, and the life-affirming first fruits of the Strawberry emerged from her heart.

Seeing as though these original foods grew from the body of one of our first ancestors, we understand that we are lineal descendants of these foods that nourish us. These seeds are our relatives, and we are bound to them in a mutually beneficial relationship since the dawning of time. These agreements to care for them are held in the earth of our bodies and the soil into which we plant them. We plant these seeds into good earth season after season to renew our commitment to tending a relational kin-centric way of nourishing our communities and families, just as countless ancestors have done in our ancestral homelands of Turtle Island.

We plant our seeds each season in a continuation of prayer and ceremony of remembrance of these threads of kinship and lineage that have been given to us forever in promise that we would have good food to eat. As an Indigenous woman returning to my traditional lifeways after many generations of disruption from the unspeakable cultural erasure and violence of genocide, acculturation, and assimilation of colonialism, I have to be a patient listener to the memory of the old ones ( human and not), who left achingly beautiful stories and songs in our blood, bones, and in the landscape all around us, just waiting for the monsoons of time to rain down and coax them into sprouting once again in our modern lives.

It is this same Original Woman who, upon her parting from Earth, returned to the Sky in the form of Grandmother Moon, who continues to look over us, guiding the cycles of life, fertility, death, and rebirth with her lunar rhythms. Her beautiful, luminous, changing face pulls at the salty oceans that blanket a large percentage of our planet to create the tides. It is this same gravitational force that moves the smaller oceans that reside inside our bodies and the tiny pools of water that exist within everything alive: the minuscule oceans that sit inside the heart of every seed, the sapling trees, the supple bodies of deer and fox in the forest. Naturally, our Grandmother Moon still watches over the cycles of our plant kin as they move from tiny seeds into sprouts and around the seasons into buds, blossoms, fruit, and seeds once again.

Our ceremonial cycles celebrate this kinship, this connection of our Original Ancestors, and our cosmogeneology of relationships. From Midwinter where we bless the courage of the spirit of the seeds who dream and sleep, to the opening of the Maple Trees who are the harbingers that winter will soon turn to spring, to the Thunderers who send their lightning bolts of energy to awaken the soils, to the vibrant clatter of the peach stone game which helps us humans awaken the seeds...each turning of the season brings ceremonies, songs, stories and a rhythm of everyday rituals that helps us remember that we all play our part in keeping the cycles of creation alive and animated.

Last summer, during the raging wildfire season that turned the sun's blood red in the ash-laden sky, I instinctively anchored into tending what was most important: tending the health and safety of my relatives in immensely transformative times. To calm my limbic system, and to find the headwaters of my breath in a time of great ecological distress, I made myself small and quiet, crawling into the tangle of the Corn, Beans, and squash patch in my garden, a sanctuary where I have apprenticed myself to the food plants that have become my grandmas and wise elders over the decades that I have had the honor of tending them. In the garden, close to the living, breathing, pulsating Earth, I found the headwaters of my breath again, tuning my senses to notice the tiny million miracles of expressions of life all around me. The countless ways Mother Earth sings her songs; tracks of little paws in the dry red clay dust. Tiny little fuzzy nascent watermelon fruits clinging delicately to vines. The sensuous ways beans danced counterclockwise around the corn stalks, bean leaves sticking to my shirt like velcro. The fine little hairs around the edges of each leaf and stem. The cool exhale of plant stomata breathing. Beetles making funny little clicking noises as they meander, and the crackling static song of the hummingbird perched in the nearby pine. We shared the same breath, and I felt in the Earth of my body that the same essence that animates these beings all around me courses inside of me, connecting us in kinship.

There I was, sitting close to my beloved Mother Earth, Ionkhi'nisténha ohwéntsia in our Mohawk language, in all her aliveness underneath the foliage of my Three Sisters garden, planted with seeds entrusted to me by my elders, some of who are now ancestors; I had this profoundly familiar visceral remembrance that this too was SkyWoman’s garden, for as our elders tell us in our stories and ceremonies that our creation stories never ended. These timeless stories continue to unfurl every season as we renew our ceremonial bundles, plant the seeds, and sing the very same songs that Skywoman and her daughter sang when they first came to this place we know as Turtle Island.

Here in my garden, I was once again woven into these cosmologies, as I tended these tiny sprouts which in our mutual dance of reciprocity and care has become corn that still springs from the bosom of our Mother Earth, basketfuls of beans gifted to us by her benevolent extended hands, voluptuous squash fruits that spiral from the umbilicus of the Earth. These relationships, these interwoven stories still reside in the very ground beneath my feet and the Earth of my own body, Her generosity springing forth with every handful of seeds that she offers for our nourishment as we to our best to make our lives love poems and to ensure that the ancestral bundle of seeds and stories that we've been handed is more beautiful and magnificent as we hand it down to the next generations.

It is in this earth-in-hand prayer in my garden that I rehydrate those agreements those promises those reciprocal agreements that link me through the bloodlines of countless generations of women who came before me who kept the seeds alive in the face of unspeakable atrocities and adversities because they knew that young women just like me would one day apprentice themselves to the very Divine life cycles that have been unfurling since original woman's first dance on Turtle Island.

I sing a whisper of a song to give courage to all the future revolutions and epiphanies that will sprout from moments like these, as we return to the profoundly relational ways of our ancestors once again. May we remember that we are woven into a beautiful tapestry of kinship of place as we push against the modern narrative of disconnection that tells us we live on the earth instead of inside of a beautiful, storied, relational landscape. May we lean into this practice of reverent curiosity as we enliven the stories that lie dormant in the land, allowing us to sing countless praise songs to this most exquisite Earth family that has never forgotten us.

May we raise the next generation of humans who love the Earth and moon as Grandmothers and honor the plants and seeds as relatives. Those of us who love the Earth as Mother, we are many.

---

Originally published in: Hausdoerffer, J., Kimmerer, R., Van Horn, G. ( 2021) Kinship; Belonging in a World of Relations. Center for Humans and Nature Press.