In the past couple of days I’ve been clearing buckthorn from our yard and woods. Buckthorn is an invasive species, poisoning the surrounding soil so that nothing else can grow, and sending its tentacles out so that it quickly overtakes existing flora. What begins as a single shoot here and there quickly becomes a thicket. It has completely overtaken the woods at Hartley Park, not far from where I live, and has been appearing in ever denser patches in parks and woodlands throughout the city.
Elderberries
When I first saw one or two buckthorn bushes in our yard several years ago, I thought, “How lovely. We have elderberry bushes. I’ve never seen them here before. I should try making elderberry jam.”
Buckthorn berries
I’m lucky I didn’t. A friend who suffered under the same case of mistaken identity made what she thought was elderberry syrup, and though she only ate a spoonful of what seemed to her a far too bitter brew, spent the ensuing evening in intestinal distress. Just as the buckthorn poisons the ground around it, so are its berries toxic, and when ingested are a powerful laxative and emetic.
Robin Wall Kimmerer describes buckthorn as “the invasive species that follows Windigo footprints (374). I would liken it to the Windigo itself – taking over everything in its path with its insatiable greed. Not content to share the earth, it must own it all.
The Windigo, in Anishinaabe legend, is the monster of the hungry times – the depths of winter when food is scarce and hunger is large. A monstrous oversized man, with frost white hair, yellow fangs, and a heart made of ice, the Windigo is a human who has become a cannibal monster and everyone it bites becomes a cannibal, too. Its needs, its hungers, its greed are insatiable. “The more a Windigo eats, the more ravenous it becomes. . . . Consumed by consumption, it lays waste to humankind. . . Born of our fears and failings, Windigo is the name for that within us which cares more for its own survival than for anything else” (304-5).
The Windigo is in our midst. More US voters than not chose to put a man into the office of the presidency who has so often been described as caring only about himself. His seemingly endless greed for wealth and power, and his ability to infect others with the same, certainly places him in the category of the Windigo. He undoubtedly has fostered cannibalism amongst us, inciting us to turn on each other, to eat each other alive as it were.
“The fear for me is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light. Indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous is now celebrated as success. We are asked to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable,” Kimmerer writes (308). Over the past several months people in my circle of friends and acquaintances have been baffled by how among his faithful Trump could do no wrong – the more abhorrent his behavior, his rhetoric, his lies, the more they clung to him. In this man we are asked to admire lying and licentiousness, abuse and assault, dehumanization and divisiveness, grift and greed. The world it seems has indeed been turned inside out.
The Windigo is in our midst as well in our seemingly bottomless pit of profligacy. “Drill Baby Drill.” “Shop Till You Drop.” The slogans urge us to spend, to extract, to “grow the economy,” as if growth were a good in and of itself, as if we do not live on a finite planet, as if our excesses had no consequences for the lives and well-being of others with whom we share this planet and the very earth itself, and as if that didn’t matter. To those lured into the spell of the Windigo, which is most of us, it doesn’t. Or we want to believe it doesn’t matter in the sense of being of no consequence. I suspect one reason part of the electorate chose Trump was because he encourages the self-deception that in gorging our gluttony we do no harm, and perhaps even a little good.
It's easy to be lured in, to be deceived. The buckthorn bush is shiny and green, the berry ripe and luscious-looking. We can be duped into thinking it’s tasty, even good for us. But the tale of the Windigo tells us to beware -- that the impulse to self-indulgence sows the seeds for self-destruction. It urges instead self-discipline, limits, might we even dare say generosity.
It’s difficult to eradicate buckthorn. With the rapid rate at which it spreads it is easy to become overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, give up, and simply let it take over. I fear this in our country right now. But the task is not impossible. It takes persistence, a good pair of loppers, and helping hands. To paraphrase Marge Piercy:
Alone you can begin, remove a bush, maybe two,
But two people, back to back, can cut through multitudes, give each other support.
Three people can eradicate an acre,
With hundreds, a forest.
And to continue in Piercy’s own words:
“it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say ‘We,’ . . .
Sources
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Press, 2013.
Piercy, Marge. “The Low Road.” in The Moon Is Always Female. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980: 44-45.