Familial and Communal Histories as Environmental Care Work

ABSTRACT

The sharing of our family histories is a way to re-envision care work from a “racial ecologies” and critical environmental lens. We consider family histories as an enactment of the care work that is integral to the task of environmental communication. It is from this grounding that we resist neoliberal notions and practices of exchange. Instead, we contemplate what it means to think of care work beyond material culture and possessiveness. Rather, care work must necessarily be framed by an “investment in others” that emphasizes connection and interrelatedness. This re-conception of care work foregrounds our shared, yet distinctive, experiences and history. It makes transparent our corresponding relations to our communities and the land. Principally, the care work we seek to articulate and to embody is a feminist ethics of care that is linked inextricably to race/gender, social, and environmental justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Care work
• race
• racism
• environmentalism
• eco-feminism

I talk to the grass and ask it to grow/to bless my family/Horses and human alike

–Kelsey Dayle John (Dine), from “Freedom Most Rankles”

in Say, Listen: Writing as Care: The Black/Indigenous 100s Collective

Care work is – necessarily – solidarity work. It is together, not separate, work. It is at once inter-relational and generational. It involves all beings, as Kelsey writes, “horses and human alike.” It is in this spirit of ecological interrelatedness and connection that we begin this offering. Our co-edited collection, Racial Ecologies, brought together Ethnic Studies scholars across the social sciences and humanities to think through the fundamental role of race and indigeneity in shaping our environmental consciousness (Nishime & Hester Williams, 2018). We chose three scholars, Dian Million, Stephen Nathan Haymes, and Min Hyoung Song, who would set the stage for the rest of the book and for the breadth and specificity of their vision of “racial ecologies” and their attendant, diverse, environmental humanities contributions. In doing so, we also introduced three divergent and sometimes contradictory perspectives, since our goal for the book was not consensus but, rather, collectivity. We worked to maintain the paradox of worldviews that overlapped but were far from congruent. How, then, can we formulate a politics independent of assimilation to a singular vision or one based on a mirrored recognition of sameness? In what follows, we argue that one path forward resides in the telling of our familial environmental history. These shared stories highlight how our experiences are shaped by similar structures of state sponsored violence and ancestral resilience while also acknowledging the uneven and differentiated experience of those separated by geography, race, and nation.

I

I am Okinawan, although I usually tell people that I’m Japanese because most Americans don’t know where or what Okinawa is. They don’t know where Okinawa is even though the US has had military forces in Okinawa for the past 78 years. They don't know where it is even though 18% of its main island is a US military base. They don’t know where it is even though as I write this sentence the US military is building an artificial peninsula over the blue coral reefs of Oura Bay. In 2019, 70% of voters in Okinawa voted against the project, but the central Japanese government claimed that the new base was necessary and ignored the vote (Sim, 2019). As Elizabeth Miki Brina writes in her devastating memoir Speak Okinawa: “They must use our land to build a fortress to protect the ‘Free World.’ A world in which we are not included” (Brina, 2021).

When my grandparents immigrated from Okinawa to Hawai’i at the turn of the twentieth century, they were moving from one occupied territory to another. I don’t say this to claim an equivalence between Okinawan migrants and the Kānaka Maoli people of Hawaii, but to recognize that similar conditions of agricultural colonization facilitated their move across the Pacific. My grandparents were recruited by Hawai’i plantation owners who targeted Okinawa because of its poverty and because of the similarity of its climate. Okinawan workers were prepared to toil in sugar and pineapple fields of Hawai’i because, like that other archipelago, colonizers saw the riches that could be gained by exporting cash crops rather than growing food for the islands’ inhabitants. Both followed a similar colonial historical logic of control of island spaces first for trade, then land and agriculture (Fojas, 2014). Finally, when the land itself no longer turned enormous profits, the US military and global tourist trade arrived, further exploiting and degrading our homes.

Since my mother was the seventh of eight children, there always seemed to be more need than money. Yet, my mother tells me they rarely, if ever, went hungry. They grew a small garden since they were familiar with the terrain and weather that echoed the places they farmed in Okinawa. The garden was hidden among the trees since the plantation owners would occasionally travel through the camps by horseback with guests who, believing that bananas and mangos grew wild, would sometimes cut down the fruit and eat them. Technically speaking, the land belonged to the plantation and included everything grown on it, but to my mother’s mind, the sweat equity of nurturing the plants meant the harvest belonged to them.

Beside the food they grew, they caught or traded fish or the freshwater shrimp from the gulches. My grandmother would take leftover rice to attract sea life and swim over the ocean shallows to spear small octopus. My grandfather knew some herbal medicine and my mother remembers rushing out of the house with flashlights to find the plant that could stop her sister’s seizures – although she can no longer remember what it was called. The same plant grew in Okinawa where my grandfather learned to grind it into a quick tea. I don’t know, have never known, the name of my aunt’s illness or the plant that treated her symptoms, but instead I recall these stories repeated, forgotten, and remembered again.

II

Some years ago (the exact date/year escapes me), I went with my husband and our two young daughters to my maternal family’s biennial reunion in South Carolina, a southern state in the US. My mother’s family is from a small town called Eutawville. Her parents – my grandparents – raised their six children there surrounded by their own siblings and their children along with my great-grandparents and their siblings. My understanding is that my great-grandfather was enslaved. I’m not sure about my great-grandmother who was a Cherokee woman. I suppose that means she was likely not entrapped in the chattel slavery system although, again, I am not sure.

What I do know is that their son, my grandfather, was a sharecropper. For the majority of his life he “worked the land” that he and my grandmother lived on. At some point, and it’s unclear how, he apparently was able to purchase the land – all of the land that he sharecropped and more. I’ve been told that it may have actually been my grandmother who came to “own” the land, perhaps because of her Cherokee ancestors. Or, perhaps there was some way in which reparations – for slavery – came into play and facilitated their procurement of the land. The complicated task of piecing together my maternal and paternal family history becomes even more serpentine when considering the current and past debates about reparations. This is in no small part because, like my own retelling of my mother’s family history, many Black people cannot trace their generational origins due to the insidious nature of, and erasure precipitated by, the kidnaping of millions of Africans to feed the Caribbean, South American, and US chattel slavery system.

To continue with my journey of discovery, while driving on a rural road on a very long stretch of land leading to my Aunt Babe’s trailer, I noticed for the first time that it was laced by the greenest and most majestic trees (I’m sure they could tell stories just as the trees in Lucille Clifton’s poem, “The Killing of the Trees,” 1990). There, I explained to my husband that my family owned all of the land he was seeing. Not only was there the land that my grandparents had somehow come to possess, understanding the deeply troubling relationship in a settler colonial society between possession and dispossession, but my grandparents’ siblings also inhabited and possessed almost all the adjacent land that we were gazing upon, acre after acre – a stretch of land, trees, brick houses, and trailers as far as the eye could see. He was, understandably, astonished and told me that he had never seen that much land owned by one family. I, myself, was also quite amazed – even though as a young child I spent many summers with my parents driving my younger brother and I across the country, from California, to visit this vast landscape. I am still in awe when I travel through this resplendent countryside. Yet, I am also dismayed by this history – as much by my knowing as my not knowing. As Lauret Savoy ruminates, considering the underlying meaning and deeper history of place-names, “It may be commonplace to consider place-names or toponyms as givens, merely distinguishing one piece of terrain from another. But to assume this is to see a reflecting surface and not what lies beneath” (Savoy, 2023).

III

We offer our family histories as an enactment of the care work that is integral to the task of environmental communication. This allows us to form a critical environmental lens grounded in familial and communal ecologies that contribute to a larger framework and discussion of care. We must first acknowledge that there are many ways to “do” care. By this, we are not referring to self-care, but rather, care work. That is, the emotional investment in others – beyond oneself – based on gift and giving rather than an exchange of material products or possessions. This framing of care work emphasizes connection and reparative rather than punitive justice. It foregrounds our embodied and ancestral connections to one another and our shared, yet distinctive, experiences and history. We are also grounding our definition and discussion of care work in this essay from a feminist ethics of care that is linked inextricably to race/gender, social, and environmental justice. In a 2019 interview, Selma James explains the imperative behind the practice and ethos of care work:

We now know more about how much the market usurps our time and has been destroying not only our bodies but all life on earth. The floodgates have opened for the movement to save the planet from capitalist greed. It is a chance for us to come together when every act to save the planet is in the interest of the whole human race. All over the world, indigenous communities, starting with women, have led struggles for land, water, and life, and against destruction and pollution caused by corporations and war. This protective work has often been as invisible as other care work women do. (Augustin, 2019)

James, who famously discussed the implications and injustice of women’s unpaid labor, insists that we understand broadly the differences between a society based on mutuality and communal care and one based on accumulated wealth and capital exploitation. Instead, we are engaging in the imperative of environmental care work through family stories in three expanding circles: generational, communal, and across differences. In thinking of these interrelations and interconnections within our own families we create “a more complex story” (Powell, 2023).

In recalling and sharing these family histories we extend our care from previous generations, learning how we came to live on unceded Indigenous land. In recalling and retelling this history we narrate our own stories of our relationship with the environment, and we build what Diana Taylor calls the repertoire of the embodied histories that have been neglected, lost, or dismissed as they fall outside of US histories of exceptionalism (Taylor, 2003). These stories come to us outside the familiar channels of knowledge which are usually routed through mass produced textbooks and corporate media. Instead, we learn these histories through talkstory after dinner, long car drives to visit relatives, or overheard fragments of conversation, and through ancestral remembrances and rememory. By listening and remembering/rememory we become guardians of family trauma and resilience. This intergenerational memory work functions as recovery work. The retelling of family stories offers both recovery of that which was lost and recovery as healing.

The care also extends horizontally as we tell our stories to our friends, colleagues, and community. In writing these stories we risk a vulnerability that threatens our armor of objectivity and disembodied logic. At the same time, we refuse the neoliberal turn that relegates our family histories to the realm of the individual and the personal. Our histories are embedded in both US and global flows of humans, plants, and animals. Our families’ losses and gains are always bounded by unequal hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and nation. In our stories we recognize ourselves within broader communities, across histories, time and space, generations and geographies. In Marilyn Hirsch’s study of the descendants of Holocaust survivors, she argues that the shift in what she calls postmemory, or the transmission of traumatic memory across generations, from single family histories towards a collective remembrance, “necessitates forms of remembrance that reconnect and reembody an intergenerational memorial fabric that has been severed by catastrophe” (Hirsch, 2008). Tracing how familial relationships to our environment were steered by statecraft and molded by hierarchical social structures enables us to connect with larger communities buffeted by the same forces.

It is toward this larger view, with the narration and reception of our shared and “more complex stories”, that we are empowered to both imagine and enact ways to expand how we think about care work – work that is not only about our physical and mental well-being, as crucial as that is, but also our ecological well-being. This is the care work which is inextricably linked to our connections to one another and to the more-than-human world. Remembering this also allows us to respect and to recognize our differences without identifying them as “otherness”. In turn we inculcate a boundlessness of interconnectedness and interrelationship that defies market forces and the destructive impetus of global and national logics of capital accumulation and relentless, ongoing dispossession.

Thinking deeply and rigorously about care work means thinking about well-being universally and collectively – and interrelatedly, as the editors and contributors of Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness discuss in the introduction and throughout the collection, in thinking about Indigenous and Black solidarities and shared histories. We correspond here with their call, “to ask questions about the complexities of this relation, and hence the political possibilities that emerge from asking these questions and engaging in the process of relation” (King et al., 2020).

This means that we think, not beyond, but rather across and through difference. When we first told our histories to each other we were surprised by the resonances, the echoes of our families’ routes through sharecropping and the many gaps in our ancestral knowledge. Yet, we also recognized how structures of slavery and colonization have separated our histories and relation to the land. We invite the dialectics of difference and belonging into a new discourse of relationality. We confront the tensions that are produced when we actually recognize one another and the planet, the environs, as another mutual partner in this endeavor. That is, we hold all living beings and the span of the natural world, into relations that are built on a model of care rather than extraction and destruction. We reveal the many ways that constructs of race and gender – and other false categories of difference – are used to weaponize us against each other and the planet. This does not mean we do not recognize differences and our distinctive, albeit shared, histories. We bear witness to them. We certainly do acknowledge, and we honor them. We must.

At the same time, we imagine ourselves linked in what Dr. Martin Luther King described as, “a single garment of destiny … an inescapable network of mutuality” (King, 1963) or what Toni Morrison recalls as “re-imagined” relations expressed by the West African boy king figure in Camara Laye’s narrative, The Radiance of the King, with the “exquisite words of authentic belonging, words welcoming him [the lost European] to the human race: ‘Did you know that I was waiting for you?’” (Morrison, 2017).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).