Being in Relation with Trees

Coming to know with trees

Trees are my teachers, and I learn profoundly with and from them (see Hill et al. 2024; Hill & Peirsol, 2019). Inspired by the work of Flower et. al, (2014) I have developed a practice of attending to the energy or what some might call the life force or chi surrounding trees through sketching, eyes closed and left=handed drawing. In hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, the sacred language of the land where I live, this might be known as šxʷhəliʔ – spirit or the energy that connects us all. Through these practices, I endeavor to be open to what Tree offers up, knowing that there are aspects of tree-ness that I will never know. My practice is informed by Indigenous worldviews in which knowledge comes from the Land. As Anishnaabe and Haudenosaune scholar Vanessa Watts (2013) shares,

"Place-Thought is the non-distinctive space where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated. Place-Thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts". (p. 21).

In this way, knowledge flows from a relational space between me and the Land. The forest is populated with tree knowledge and I come to know particular things in this place. Inspired by post-human theorists, I also work to foreground the material flows (Barad, 2007 Braidotti, 2013), within which the tree and I are both entangled, such as the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Becoming with Tree involves an ontological shift that opens up access to higher frequencies of knowledge (Meyer, 2010) and shifts my understanding of what it means to communicate (Hill et al. 2024).

Planting trees to care for salmon

Since meeting Elder Rick Bailey from q̓íc̓əy̓ Nation, who educated my MEd class about the salmon crisis in the Fraser watershed, forests have become the centre of my teaching and my research. Elder Rick taught us that the sockeye salmon are his brothers, and told us that his family is no longer coming home due to the impact of development, global warming, over fishing, fish farms, and pollution within creeks and rivers. Rick asked us to plant trees along creeks, to create more shade and lower the temperature of the watershed, which is becoming lethal for salmon. Rick and I have received grants to support students to care for salmon through planting trees. Subsequently I have moved most of my university classes into the forest. Regardless of what I am teaching, I manage to connect the curriculum to relational land-centred learning (see Roze des Ordons & Hill, accepted). The pedagogy of creek restoration and caring for salmon and other forest beings like family have become the centre of my scholarship (see Hill, et al., 2021; Hill et al., 2023). Recently we used thermal imaging to enable us to see sameness across human and more-than-human bodies in the forest where we normally might see difference. For example, bodies of the children are rendered in a way that makes them very similar to trees. The thermal imaging also helped to us to see what happens in the spaces in between bodies and the flows across diverse beings. In one image, a child is planting a tree. Following the instructions of an Elder, who wanted the children to treat the trees with respect, she takes time to lovingly and carefully choose a desirable location for the tree, ensure that the hole is deep enough to sustain the root system, and gently enclose the roots of the tree within the earth. She then gifts the tree a small amount of her precious and limited drinking water. As she carefully pats the earth around the base of the treelet, the ground is warming up. The thermal image captures the traces of the energy transfer (as well as love) between the child and another being. Through our project we all puzzle together to make meaning of these new ways of seeing shape our understandings of our relationships with forests.