OpinionGuest Essay
The Turtle Mothers Have Come Ashore to Ask About an Unpaid Debt
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Dr. Kimmerer is a plant ecologist, a writer and a distinguished teaching professor and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. She is the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.”
Each summer I teach at the Cranberry Lake Biological Station, a remote wilderness field school in the Adirondacks. It is a community of scientists and students, surrounded by rich forests and glittering lakes, where bears and loons are our neighbors. We may think we’re learning about wild lives, but in fact, we are learning from them.
One of our best teachers returns every summer, just after the solstice, clambering her way up a steep bluff from the lake under cover of darkness, to lay her eggs in the warm open sand of our volleyball court. With powerful bearlike paws she flings the sand aside. Her sharp-snouted mouth open and gasping for breath, she rests for a minute. Then she digs some more with fierce maternal commitment and utter disregard for the students who surround her, snapping photos as eggs like leathery Ping-Pong balls leave her body. When she has covered them safely, entrusting them to the earth, she makes her way back to the water.
She and I, we go back a long time, to a story we both remember, a creation story of my people, the Potawatomi. It is a story of how the troubled world was cleansed by a great flood and our new home was made on the back of a turtle who gave herself so that we might live. It was the gifts of the animals and the seeds of the plants who made this paradise.
The turtle reminds me that I owe my small human life to the generosity of the more-than-human beings with whom we share this precious homeland. The Earth was made not by one alone but from the alchemy of two essential elements: gratitude for her gifts and the covenant of reciprocity. Together they formed what we know today as Turtle Island, or North America. In return for their gifts, it’s time that we gave ours in return.
We have betrayed the millions of other species with whom we share this leafy paradise with an extractive culture that threatens their inherent right to be. Turtles among us carry a warning: We need to acknowledge our unpaid debt and create solutions that protect not only our species but our more-than-human relatives as well. They want to live, too.
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