History sits in places

“Wisdom sits in places,” said the anthropologist Keith Basso. So does History.

Places are made through time, memory, and the actions and lives of thousands of beings, seen and unseen. The human and more-than-human incline together in specific places. A Place can represent the entirety of life: it holds our stories through generations of transformation and human-nature relations—sometimes caring and regenerative. Other times our stories of Place are undone through violence and extraction.

Place is a work-in-progress. It’s where what we could be meets what we become:

—Who will we become, in the interface of colonial history and the geologic, biological, and carbon past?

—What will happen to our Places in the pervasiveness of extraction, colonial power, and injustice?

—How can we make the survival of those who inhabit our Places possible?