Mariposas y serpientes
A Mvskoke-Jewsish naturalist reflects on Indigeneity, invasion, and occupation.
Serpentine
Serpentine is a metamorphic rock formed through churning and pressure deep within the crust of the earth. Nutrient-poor, acidic, significant heavy metals—it erodes into an inhospitable soil for plant life.(1) It was chosen in 1965 as the state rock of California for its economic importance to the booming asbestos industry(2) of the time, a distinction Union Carbide might like Californians to forget. These hostile qualities make Serpentine a refuge for hundreds of endemic California plants.
Serpentine is a soil for specialists; only native plants who’ve built a relationship and resilience with serpentine can thrive where non-native flora cannot. Native wildflowers and grasslands hold out in these harsh soils against the Mediterranean grasses that have replaced them over most of their historical range. Several species, like Marin Dwarf Flax, have become so specialized they can only grow in serpentine soil. Another such species, the Tiburon Mariposa Lily, lives on a single serpentine outcrop within Marin County’s Ring Mountain Preserve.
Known to the Linneans in our midst as Calchortus tiburonenses, its tripartite flowers have a kaleidoscopic interior thick with hairlike trichomes. Muted reds scatter over petals whose shade of green seems an homage to the serpentine that gives birth to them. Their center bears a resemblance to the Celtic triquetra knot. With the early spring rains, slender leaves emerge from subterranean bulbs, whose flowers bloom for a few weeks in June. Releasing their seed pods, the plants wither away, bulbs sleeping amongst the asbestos and heavy metals till rain comes again.
Ring Mountain
My life began as an invasive, growing along the suburban foothills of Ring Mountain, on the homelands of the Coast Miwok peoples. A Franciscan mélange cast from a Jewish, Creole, Mvskoke, and Anglo matrix. My home was surrounded by a canopy of Monterey Cypress trees planted a century prior when the land was still owned by the Reeds, the Irish-Spanish family who purchased the unceded Miwok land from the Spanish Presidio. Tasmanian Blue Gum, English ivy, African wood-sorrel, Meyer Lemon, Loquat, Harding Grass— these were the species I most intimately lived amongst. The California quail who passed through our yard each morning nested in an empty lot of Armenian blackberry. Feral cats ate them all when the brambles were converted by new owners into a native plant garden.
Purchased in the 1980s by The Nature Conservancy to stave off development, the Ring Mountain Preserve today is a feature for those who want both isolation from neighbors and proximity to the economic engine of San Francisco. It was a ten-minute walk up from my house to the Ring Mountain trailhead. Winding up the asphalt roads, I passed houses whose listing prices increased with elevation. Still in my adolescence, I thought of the preserve in contrast with this gaudy real estate, but in truth, the open space is symbiotic with this bioregion of ultra-wealth.
The biodiversity of the mountain could have been completely buried beneath faux Mediterranean houses and luxury apartments, but instead it survives between the trails of weekend hikers and their golden doodles. Affordable housing would have never gone up on the mountain, but it is hard not to look at the mansions that surround the park as an indication of who has stood to benefit the most from this park. Earnestly many of them must see themselves as conservationists of a sort, stewarding their favorite trails and views with gold and silicon ripped out from mountains someplace else.
Mvskokvlke
In the 17th and 18th centuries, several autonomous townships in the southeastern woodlands united into the Mvskoke or Creek confederacy—covering most of what is currently Alabama, Georgia, and Northern Florida. The Tvlwa, or towns, remain central identifying markers to this day—many Mvskoke can tell you their family’s ancestral Tvlwa. My mother’s Mvskoke ancestors lived in Atagi. The Hale and the Elliot families are enumerated there in the 1832 Creek Indian census.
That census was an inventory of empire. With the passing of the Indian Removal Act, Creek Indians were enumerated to remove them and annex the land for white settlement and plantations. Most Mvskoke were forced west to Indian Territory, but some mixed-blood families would move south into the piney lowlands of Southern Alabama. My own ancestors would follow this path, blending with Creole and Anglo families along the way.
I frequently feel the insecurity of my own removal. Has something been lost in the act of transplanting and cross-pollination? In a time of rampant pretendians and shifting boundaries of belonging, there are real questions to be asked about Indigenous authenticity. Would I be seen as Este Cate, or is my Indigeneity a fathom strand of DNA trapped with the flesh of colonizers? Does blood carry ripples of winds felt by the skin of great-grandparents?
I traveled to Atagi a few years ago, near the town of Autagua outside Montgomery, Alabama. There are no surviving structures or even a plaque acknowledging where Atagi historically resided. I had to stand in the stream that my ancestors once lived beside and consider if there was some continuity between myself and the flow of that creek. Might there be old fields hidden beneath pine trees and camper parks where the seeds of my ancestors once grew, the ones I grow in my garden today? It is certainly in the interest of colonizers to flatten Indigeneity to a static geography from a singular moment in history—to steal the movement of space and time from the people. Tvlako vines spiral up cornstalks and launch their seeds from dried pods in the summer, unconcerned with the edges of fields.
Neophyte Nations
Neophyte, a new convert to Christianity, literally comes from the Greek for ‘new plant.’ In botany, a neophyte can also describe a plant that is new to an area, a non-native, or an invasive. Functionally, western conservation treats the year 1492 as the beginning of biological invasion, the Columbian exchange of plants. Plants brought by wind, birds, or Indigenous peoples are natural, but those transported by settlers, the enslaved, or migrants are alien—out of their proper place in the natural order.
Scholars Nick Rio and Laura Ogden consider the Anishinaabe relationship to invasive plant species.(3) Anishinaabe and many other Indigenous nations consider plant species as nations with particular relationships with human and animal nations. Rio and Ogden share cultural leader Kathy Leblanc’s perspective that these ‘invasive’ plant nations may be amidst their own migration stories— finding their place amongst a new political landscape of living beings. The language used towards invasive plants shares a disturbing similarity to how state governments speak of migrants and the subaltern.
It’s worth considering as well that many of the so-called worst invasive species are named as such not for their impact on ecology but for their impact on capitalist endeavors. Kudzu, zebra mussels, Asian carp, pigweed— these beings are despised more for their impacts on shipping, fishing, and farming than any particular ecological collapse. This isn’t to say there is no harm done by invasives, consider the Mediterranean grasses who’ve all but pushed out the native bunch grasses of California, but since these grasses feed cattle, they aren’t of much concern to state land managers. Is invasion a phenomenon of biological species or of the colonial capture of our relationships with other beings
Chernozem & Shtetls
Chernozem, a black soil layer stretching across Eastern Europe, has made the region a breadbasket. Deep-rooted grasslands have spent millennia pulling the sun into the soil, the layers of their decomposed ancestors producing some of the most ideal humus for agriculture.(4) There is evidence that anthropogenic fire has played a role in the soil’s creation as well.(5) It is a history of life and death which feeds the sunflowers and wheat of the region.
My father’s family came from the shtetls and Jewish districts around the Eastern European cities of Lviv, Odesa, Mykolaiv, and Iasi. Jews weren’t newcomers, they had been present there since the Middle Ages but were legally barred from accessing most agricultural land. In 1897, only 2.66 percent of Jews living in the Russian Empire made their living from agriculture.(6) Jews could live along the edges of the Chernozem but not put down roots too deep.
In response to a rising climate of antisemitism, in particular violent pogroms in their home cities, my great-grandparents immigrated to the United States. Siblings and relatives of theirs moved to Mandatory Palestine. Those who stayed behind were later killed in the holocaust.
I never met my great-grandfather, Meyer, but I was told that it took him some time to come to terms with the fact that he was never going back home, that there wasn’t a home to go back to. In Ashkenazi culture, it is traditional to name a baby after a deceased relative, and my middle name Michael was chosen as a less Yiddish version of Meyer. Meyer was an old man’s name, a name of a time and a place that were best left behind.
When the war in Ukraine began, I saw for the first time in any real detail the cities my family had once called home. These were cities they’d fled a century prior that had rejected them as full citizens. Now those same cities were being torn apart by rocket fire and 21st-century warfare. Amidst the images of rubble were layers upon layers of absence. Jewish relationality to land in Europe has so often been defined by its absence, the inability to establish roots in any one place. Lands shape a people even after they leave, accreting soil upon the boots of wanderers.
Canaanite Thorns (7)
Like hundreds of thousands of young Jews, I took that free ticket to Israel. I was under no illusions about the political motive behind that program. I’d been to Hebrew school, where young volunteer teachers spent more time clumsily indoctrinating us with Israel factoids than the Aleph-Bet. I respect anyone who refuses the trip out of moral conviction, but for my part, I wanted to meet my cousins there, the other living branch of my father’s family. I was greeted at the airport by a cousin holding a bold letter sign, “Son of The Cockroach,” under a clip art image of a giant horsefly. An irreverent man with a chaotic sense of humor, he famously abandoned my dad for an hour in the Negev desert as a joke. He was a prototypical Sabra—the name for native-born Israeli Jews, taken from the Arabic word for the prickly pear cactus.
Prickly pear are common in the Levant these days, symbolically significant to both Palestinian and Israeli conceptions of resilience in the desert. It also haunts the sites of occupation. The cactus gives its name to the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp of Southern Beirut, the site of the 1982 massacre. In November of 2023, the Gazan neighborhood of Sabra and its mosque were destroyed by an Israeli bombardment as a part of the ongoing Israeli invasion of Gaza. Fences of prickly pear still outline the ruins of villages lost in the Nakba.
The cacti won’t show up in any botanical accounts of Judea written by Philo or Josephus, and certainly not amongst the plants mentioned in any religious text. Prickly pear are neophytes cultivated for millennia by Indigenous peoples in the Americas before arriving on the shores of Ottoman Palestine. Their large protruding thorns are intimidating, but far more painful are the fiberglass-like barbed spines that harpoon themselves into the skin and itch for days.
Like spines, Indigeneity is barbed into the discourse surrounding the occupation. The Southern Levant sits at the isthmus of Africa and Asia; its peoples and cities have always been points in constellations stretching across continents. Exclusive notions of Indigeneity deny the plurality of that land. How many waves of people have written their own letters into its clay? Here in the Americas, are mountains not capable of holding dozens of names from overlapping and mobile peoples? Do Mvskoke rivers not flow into Choctaw or Miccosukee ones? Does the Indigeneity of a people only come at the expense of another?
I often scratch at the way Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora, have positioned ourselves to colonialism. We’ve stood at both ends of empire throughout most of our history. Early Zionism was unapologetic in describing its project as colonial, appealing to those European powers that wanted to support their endeavors.
Today, we see Zionists speak of Jewish indigeneity in its lowercase, stripped of its political positionality to colonialism in favor of static ethnic geography. Such claims of Jewish indigeneity are more concerned with justifying a Jewish nation-state than sincerely considering the relationality between people and land. The diaspora is positioned as wayward cuttings, wandering Jews; we are made into the people without a land. Why must we remake ourselves into an endemic species whose roots can only grow in Levantine soil–a soil now soaked in lead and white phosphorus? Here in the Americas, many young Native folks look at Palestinians and see themselves—recognizing the surveillance, political annexation, environmental devastation, religious desecration, and expendability.
At a Kibbutz in the Negev, I would sit with a group extolling the need for a Jewish presence in the desert, “our religion was born of the desert; we were a desert people and must become stewards of this desert once again.” I looked outside and saw an irrigated lawn, street trees, and a row of suburban-style houses. A form of desert stewardship more akin to Palm Springs than Bedouin. The Essenes would not have recognized the landscape outside the window, though perhaps the zealotry. I don’t know what they’d make of the cacti.
Serpentine (reprise)
Serpentine can be a text, a matrix for humanity to inscribe its place on the land. In the metamorphic boulders of Ring Mountain, the ancestors of the Coast Miwok people created a series of circle petroglyphs. What they represent isn’t known to Western archeologists and probably isn’t supposed to be. The meaning, the message, the relationship between those people and the rock—it’s a message outside observers can see but not understand.
When thinking about relationality, the lands and people who make us, there is a tension between conditionality and continuity. Each moment is unique, unrepeatable in its minutia, and still patterns form and string together. Meaning seems to be born from both the novelty and the rhyme. It’s tempting to try and classify and bind these patterns, to pull a solid object out from the noise, and sometimes it can feel like it’s possible.
As for me, I’ll never be able to live on Ring Mountain again, and I would never want to; my niche there is gone. My parents divorced and sold the house. The cypress trees were cut down, the ivy was pulled up, and certified native plants now decorate the driveway. I still go and visit the Mariposas when they bloom. I imagine myself a slide on a zoetrope, iterations of myself staring into the blooms each summer. Like turning a kaleidoscope, the patterns inside those petals must shift slightly each year. On the way back down the hill, I sometimes spot blackberry vines and quail.