Could be something, but what?

I know this: the universe does send us messages. The trouble is, most of us don't know how to read them.
- Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams, p. 207 (NY: Anchor Books, 2004)

I have such different relationships with North America and Australia. In North America, I feel that I have a relationship with the land , a spiritual connection to it. I miss the Rocky Mountains, the aspens, the pine trees, the way I would miss a friend or a lover. The government of the United States, in contrast, I have nothing but an official relationship with. I used to believe in the ideals of democracy, embodied in the Constitution of the US, but I can't anymore. I knew too much about what the government actually does to believe it embodies those ideals. The government of Australia is certainly one I have some problems with, but overall, I'm much happier to be paying taxes to this government. There is a reasonable public health care system, there is a welfare state. Those things don't work perfectly, but they work a lot better than in the US, where they're nonexistent. However, I feel little relationship to the land in Australia. It's not that I don't think one can have a relationship with the land and Australia, it's just that I don't. Apparently, it takes a white immigrant longer than three years to develop a relationship with the land. It's very hard for me to be happy living in a place where I don't feel a spiritual connection to the natural world around me. I respect the land here – it seems fierce and powerful. I do a bit to try to protect the land also: save water, try to avoid using plastic shopping bags since I found out what they do to turtles, donate to conservation, try to ride my bike or use public transport instead of driving. But these are intellectual decisions I make based on ideas about the environment, and the idea that it's just "polite" when living on a piece of land to try to treat it well. In Colorado, protecting the land is a matter of "that's what you do for a friend."

There has to be more to my coming to Australia than just finding out how important it is for me to feel that I'm living on land I'm spiritually connected to. My sense when I came was that this would be a good place to work on the relationship between science and indigenous knowledge. That's what all the dreams and intuitions that guided me here seemed to be pointing to. OK, could be something, but what??!! UQ is turning out to be a wonderful place to explore connections between indigenous knowledge and science. But the more I read and think and reflect about indigenous knowledge, the more I ache for the kind of connected experience I feel with the land in Colorado. Delving deeper into an authentic Australian form of knowledge just makes me realize how little I feel that I fit here. I love the work that I'm doing helping to build a relationship between Psychology and ATSIS, but part of me just wants to be in the place I call home: Colorado.

Here, I feel like I'm just living on the surface of the skin of the land -- those are the words that keep coming to mind to describe the way I feel. In Colorado, in Northern California, or in the Appalachian Mountains near where I grew up, I feel like I'm living in the land, deeper in it. However little I understand its communications, it does communicate. It's the land that nurtured me for 40 years, and it's beautiful, so beautiful. I love North America, however much I detest its current government. So where do I belong?

What is that quote from Michael: colonization forces everyone to ask of themselves constantly "who am I?" Going back to the discussion from last week in class about commodities and decontextualized objects in capitalist economies: If I'm just a commodity, then I have no history. I'm just a worker with a set of useful skills for my employer, and an employer is just a set of resources that I can use to do my work and my research. So it makes sense for me to move around the globe, to find the employer-employee relationship with the best match between skills and resources. But I'm not a commodity. I'm a person with a history, with relationships to lands other than this one. And yet, I'm here, and I bring all of that history with me when I work on indigenous knowledge and science. I bring all that history with me when I try to build a relationship between my department and ATSIS. So where do I belong?

I'll finish with another quote by the same author, an Asian Indian woman who immigrated to California. As preamble to the quote, I don't agree that Native Americans have been completely driven from California, nor that their ways of dreaming are not still alive, but I understand the feeling of dreams not coming:

Dreams would not come to me in California, because it was too new a place. Its people had settled there only a few hundred years ago, and neither its air nor its earth…was weighted yet with dreams. Yes, there had been older inhabitants, but they had been driven from the land, and in going, had taken with them, along with their hopes, their ways of dreaming.
- Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, Queen of Dreams, pp. 197-8 (NY: Anchor Books, 2004)