contents

0.      introduction: tree cultivation as aesthetic practices responding to multiple crises

I.          some northern circumpolar fruit tree gene pools

II.        defending Proust’s nineteenth century orchards:  reconnecting enjoyment to cultivation, stewardship and art-making

III.       challenging the aftermath of colonial violence & erasure: recovering indigenous orchards

IV.       decolonizing land art: from non-sites to re-establishing indigenous stewardship

V.        decolonizing permaculture & agroecology as intercultural  conversations

VI.       native fruit tree cultivation as aesthetic responses to  ecological crises

VII.      conclusions & questions: recombining fruit cultivation practice as new forms of organic multimedia art

notes ………………………………………………………………………

0.

introduction:

trees cultivation as aesthetic practices

responding to multiple crises

“Erect and towering in vast offering of their branches, and yet calm and refreshed, the trees, in their strange and natural posture, murmur gracefully, inviting us to participate in so ancient and so youthful life, so different from our own, and virtually its obscure and inexhaustible reserve.”

Marcel Proust 1895 “Under The Trees”[1]

The previous essay explored fruit trees and orchards as artistic media whereas this discussion builds a lexicon of aesthetic practices in the service of these three contemporary projects: recovery of indigenous (arbori)culture as culture; decolonizing perspectives on fruit and respective trees; and responding to planetary crises around climate and biodiversity (including threats to fruit gene pools). The endgame, in the nearly lost / presque perdu project has been to begin to demonstrate some interventions in public space that re-establish small groves of tree crops especially older varieties.

To honour the tree planting legacies of countless indigenous and peasant orchardists around the Northern Hemisphere along with twentieth century artists such as Joseph Beuys and Alan Sonfist[2], I argue that agriculture and horticulture embody practices central to the collaborative and community-based impulses in contemporary art. In this work, we are also strongly influenced by the relational aesthetics[3] proposed over a decade ago[4], that we define as more concerned with social learning than production of static art objects, and more recent forms of radical materialism centred on cultural cognition of threats to the biosphere and human life support and that in turn challenge to intensifying social inequities. Central to this inherently decolonial work is to contrast the cultures, economies, and systems of land stewardship of the four shifting circumpolar gene pools that built Western Europe and sustained north-western North America.[5]

The forms of fruit tree cultivation are myriad as are associated cultures and practices. Across ecosystem-based and more regional and globalized economies, supporting a range of cultures from tribal to cosmopolitan, fruit and tree symbolism and narratives have had a myriad of roles with cultivation often linked to ceremony and performance. The previous essay in this series, explaining the nearly lost / presque perdu project, argued that fruit and orchards can be aesthetic media unto themselves. This essay investigates cultivation practices that are often utilitarian, on one hand, and ceremonial and aesthetic, on the other hand. These disappearing forms of cultivation and be revisited and, while avoiding exploitative forms of appropriation, can be recombined to produce contemporary multimedia art in response to three of the most central crises and related activism of this century: loss of indigenous and more generally rural cultures (including arboriculture) including language; further displacement of respective communities from their land bases especially the usurping of aboriginal stewardship; and loss of both biodiversity compounded by climate change.

Recombining traditional ecological knowledge, modern science and contemporary art practices can generate investigations and artistic statements that transform communities. Such projects invoke cultural and environmental memories in ways that generate art-making – including fruit trees and orchards. Imagining and cultivating new networks of fruit trees, orchards, and woodlands could comprise a disruptive form of contemporary art form unto itself – that will be explored in the following essay. And much of this aesthetic work around fruit, trees, history, communities and cultivation disrupts dominant twentieth century notions of subjectivity, collaboration, presentation, labour and production.

In these recovery processes, I use “aesthetics” to span cultural narratives, creative impulses, actual artistic production, enjoyment of creative products, and discussion that can involve criticism and theorizing. “Aesthetic practices” are used, in turn, for those cultivation practices that are not entirely for modern forms of fruit production with market economies. These aesthetic practices range from the indigenous and traditional (including language and visual conveyance) to research, experimentation, and archive development and then to new ways to cope with global crises related to loss of biological diversity and climate change. In a time when fruit production is increasingly dominated by large corporations, too often relying on diminishing gene pools, aesthetic practices provide refuges and conceptual and institutional transmission for a host of worldviews, knowledge, and techniques not supported, and more often obliterated, by today’s conventional fruit-growing practices.

Today, aspects of tree cultivation are also multimedia artmaking practices that respond to multiple crises. This essay focuses on responses to three crises: the difficulties of recovery and repair of indigenous and traditional peasant tree-cultivation cultures after centuries of erasures; the social contests and turmoil from challenges to ever the present hierarchies, violence, and inequities imposed through colonialism; and the intensifying threats to planetary life support especially related to carbon pollution, climate change, loss of habitat and biological diversity, and toxic substances.  In the face of imperatives to act, new aesthetic forms of fruit cultivation and production can challenge colonial binaries and constraints for imagining decolonial futures while embedded in contemporary site-based art and agricultural production.

After describing the four most important fruit tree gene pools in the northern hemisphere and beginning to identify a set of cultivation practices, I explore the limits of the modern subject, illustrated by the literary works of Proust, with only narrow, consumerist engagements with agriculture and food. I then begin to identify aesthetic practices that challenge the erasure of indigenous fruit tree cultivation in north-western North America, decolonize land and related environmental art along with permaculture, and responds to the threats to the biosphere from climate, to toxics, to loss of habitat, forest, and biological diversity. What follows in this essay is an overview of the four fruit and nut tree gene pools central to northern circumpolar cultures followed by a critique of Proust’s nostalgic descriptions of orchards in fin-de-siècle France as part of creating notions of the modern twentieth century consumer including isolation from the knowledge and labour of fruit tree cultivation. A contrast these declines in rural landscapes in Europe to the destruction and erasure of indigenous orchards in north-western North America extending into the land art of the second have of the twentieth century. I then sketch the explosion in tree and fruit cultivation in contemporary visual art especially since the 1970s and link these diverse movements and practices to the contemporary multimedia art-making spanning a growing number of mediums, sites, digital devices, and forms of representation and documentation.

I.

some northern circumpolar fruit tree gene pools

In the Northern Hemisphere, four gene pools of fruit trees have evolved with, sustained human communities, and often been central to respective cultures:

apple, crab-apple (Pacific crabapple[6]) and pear (Malus spp.[7]);

plum and cherry (Prunus spp.)[8];

hazelnut (Corylus spp.)[9], and

hawthorn (Crataegus spp.).

There are also some seminal fruit shrubs that underlaid human culture in both north-western North America and north-western Eurasia, especially Rubus species spanning blackberries and raspberries, Vaccinium species with blueberries and cranberries, and grape, Vitis spp. These shrubs are for another essay but often have co-existed with these fruit trees.

Thriving in an almost continuous arc from Western Europe, through Eurasia, to western North America, the many species in these gene pools were shaped by traditional communities in both Eurasia and the Americas. There is an increasing body of knowledge suggesting that some of the populations of these fruit trees on the West Coast of North America have been enriched by marine and land-based peoples moving east across the now-inundated land bridge, Beringia[10], at various periods over the last 14,000 years.

Today, many of these groves of wild trees, and orchards of traditional indigenous and post-colonial cultivars are in decline. Respective habitats, such as hedgerows, are being cut down to monotonous fields and urban areas. Ecological edges, where these small trees often thrive, are not being maintain by traditional agriculture and burning. The traditional practices to maintain certain species and varieties are being discontinued and forgotten. In many areas, there is more pervasive, cultural erasure. For example, the Salish Sea gene pools, modified and managed for millennia by indigenous communities, are under threat not only from habitat change but from the loss of local languages and the cultural knowledge to which it is tied. In this context, a growing body of legal decisions have allowed First Nations to re-establish some stewardship and consultation practices.

Curiously, some mid-19^th Century fruit trees, planted by the first settlers around the Salish Sea, have naturalized and hybridized with local species. Similarly throughout Eurasia, wild and early cultivars continue to hybridize. These adaptive introgression[11] processes are important for the evolution and survival of these tree crops, thickets and orchards especially in the face of climate change and environmental stress. To keep it simple for this essay on practices, these fruit tree gene pools are divided into the following:

1. truly wild and unmodified before climate change in the sense of probably being so remote as to not having been created by historic and prehistoric human communities through harvesting and intensive stewardship – with very few of these populations having existed in both Europe and North America in recent millennia;

2. as with the previous category, “wild relatives of crops”[12] for fruit trees are populations in relatively unmodified and ‘wild’ conditions today, such as in protected areas, that are products of indigenous ecological legacies[13] involving various levels of domestication[14] through practices of translocation (planting seed and cuttings), harvesting, intensive stewardship, and often hereditary ownership up until recent centuries – that were sometimes originally created as traditional orchards;

3. weedy[15] and volunteer populations that often the products of hybridization and introgression between native species and Eurasian cultivars, often those that were pre-grafting, landraces sometimes adjacent to heritage orchards and today extending to experiments such as guerrilla grafting and orchards;

4. heritage orchards with genetic material transmitted through root and grafted material often populated with nineteenth and early twentieth varieties that have not been heavily modified genetically including field gene banks and experimental farms; and

5. conventional commercial orchards typically consisting of a small number of recent varieties requiring high levels of inputs, including pesticides, in order to produce commercially viable volume and quality.

Aside from the few truly ‘wild’ portions of these four gene pools, these fruit trees, their recombination of genotypes have been modified for at least 10,000 years through human presence, harvesting, stewardship, and landscape aesthetics. For the last two centuries, some European “breeders” have been engaged in make new forms, and fresh art – reflecting combination of values and priorities often shaped by governments and markets. More importantly, there have been many multigenerational processes, always at least part aesthetic, to favour certain characteristics in these gene pools particularly in parts of east Asia and the Middle East. Each of these regional domestication and breeding clusters have involved religious, aesthetic, and political economic dimensions.

In exploring ways to protect and reintroduce individual trees and small orchards into the public spaces of Western North America and Western Europe, legions of stories spanning fruit gene pools and human communities become evident. One better known set of indigenous stories around a native fruit tree, involving scores of cultures and languages and that still barely recovered, is around Pacific crabapple. Douglas Deur and Nancy J. Turner noted in 2005 that, “Pacific crabapple (Pyrus fusca [now classified as Malus fusca), for instance, was prized for its fruit, which was gathered in tremendous quantities up and down the coast.”[16] Routson et al. 2012 described the distribution of Pacific crabapple, without any definitive identification of subspecies or stable variants, from the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska to the mountains of central California.[17] Victoria Wyllie de Echeverria argued further that,

“Since Malus fusca has been shown genetically as being more closely related to certain species of crabapples in Asia, rather than to one of the other crabapple species in North America, botanists have postulated that Pacific crabapples possibly spread to North America via Beringia during the Late Pleistocene.”[18]

A decade ago, Wyllie de Echeverria  posited that, “by using these two knowledge systems – traditional ecological knowledge and western scientific knowledge – to complement each other, it can result in a more detailed understanding of a botanical species, as they both present us with information about slightly different characteristics.”[19] Reckoning these divergent perspectives (and experiential realities) remains as much, if not more, in the realm of contemporary aesthetic explorations as plant science. Collaborating with Gitga’at elders in Hartley Bay, one of the more southerly of the Coast Tsimshian communities, to describe traditionally tended crabapple trees “(Malus fusca (Raf.) C.K. Schneid.; Rosaceae),” known locally as moolks, Victoria Wyllie de Echeverria 2013 “identified significant [morphological] variation within and among trees.”[20] This phenotypic[21] and genetic variation within this large circumpolar gene pool was only partly recognized by Wyllie de Echeverria while she noted that,

“There are four native Malus species described from North America…with Malus fusca being the sole geographical, morphological, genetic and chemical outlier…Malus fusca is the only crabapple native to the West, and is geographically separated from the other three North American species by over 3000 kms. Genetically, Malus fusca is more closely related to several Asian Malus species than to the other North American species, which are more closely related to the European species.”[22]

Wyllie de Echeverria went on to state that,

“First Nations peoples who have relied on this species as an important food for centuries and probably millennia, however, recognize and name different types based on fruit morphology, taste, tree location and other characteristics…”[23]

Considering Gitga’at cultural practices around native crab-apple has an added relevance in that some of the communities on that part of the coast of north-western North America go back 10,000 years. Gitga’at elders even confirmed transplanting of crabapple.[24] along with six varieties of local crabapples named in the Sm’álgyax (Tsimshian) language:

1. “Gasasii, “long legs,” for a small sweet tasting crabapples with long stems on the fruit;

2. Bu’uxs, “a word referring “to a move in the game of marbles” for larger crabapples that stay green when ripe and very sour tasting;

3. Auntie Edith’s or Grandma Dawl’s bu’uxs for the patch of bu’uxs belonging to a certain individual person for  crabapples slightly smaller than bu’uxs and sour tasting;

4. Moolks sigawgaaw for “crow’s crabapples” that red on one side when ripe and sour;

5. Sm-moolks for “real crabapple” for a residual category of crabapples; the most common type, not belonging to one of the other varieties, and sour tasting; and

6. Dickwan for over-ripe fruits with skin brown and flesh soft (almost liquid).”[25]

And some of these varieties and phenotypes also have various forms of cultural and aesthetic significance well beyond consumption. Gitga’at knowledge of crabapple extended to identification of sites and orchards based on fruit appearance and taste.[26] As early as at least a decade ago, elders worried that historic crabapple orchards being killed by salt from rising sea levels.[27] 

In beginning to compile a lexicon of aesthetic practices for fruit enjoyment and fruit tree cultivation, the Gitga’at were engaged in the following perspectives and activities:

• cognitive mapping of trees by visual and olfactory characteristics;
• selective harvesting of fruit based on visual and olfactory characteristics;
• stewarding trees based on visual and olfactory characteristics extending to translocation[28] or transplanting seedlings (that probably extended to dividing rooting material separating a seedling clump into two or more and moving some of this material elsewhere);
• stewardship linked to hereditary ownership and ceremony; and
• stewardship and planting linked to global change as in sea level rise.

The following is a very different example of fruit tree cultures than the crabapples of the Gitga’at: the loss of traditional orchards, and adjacent habitats of introgression, in Western Europe. Between these poles are hundreds of examples in Eurasia of the loss of fruit tree knowledge, habitats, and production as well as new movements of resurgence and renewal.

II.

defending Proust’s nineteenth century orchards:

           reconnecting enjoyment to cultivation, stewardship and art-making

Where the Gitga’at are an exceptionally localized and remote community, Proust lived in the centre of a vast empire and at its zenith. Like the Gitga’at, Proust had a fondness for apple trees especially “the inimitable ornamentation of their leaves,” and the “broad petals of white satin.”[29] But while Gitga’at apple enjoyment was linked to stewardship and respective community and protocols, Proust’s passive consumer, at best a flâneur, was divorced from communal labour and cultivation knowledge.

In Proust’s orchards, local aesthetics of peasants and aristocrats were irrelevant even if part of rustic landscapes. These orchards of north-central France were products of eighteenth and nineteenth century agriculture that were increasingly revolutionized and transformed through the resources stolen and accumulated from colonialism and the rise of the urban bourgeoise. But embedded in the landscape were certain ecological and political economic relationships, that provided refuges for some wild, semi-domesticated and cultivated fruit trees. Rather than to parse this contested world of fruit trees, Proust conflated what he saw, from his standpoint as a Parisian, as a rustic world bathed in nostalgia. But Proust’s fin-de-siecle orchards, their forms and respective gene pools, were quite different from those a century or more into the future, as we know today, as well as from those a century or two before. Proust attention is more on remembering and observing loss than in trying to decode these dynamic ecosystems and gene pools. In other words, Proust’s losses and stories were real but his readings of the actual orchards were facile – codifying a modernist landscape aesthetic.

For all of its limitations see from today’s world of decolonization, cultural resurgence, and ecological crisis, Proust’s world was revolutionary and liberatory in that it centred on the experiences and wills of individuals less fettered by rural labour and the church. But today, many of the orchards and adjacent wild populations of apple are under increasing pressures and are on the decline.[30]

Individualized aesthetic experience of art and nature laid the basis for new forms of enjoyment of nature and more autonomous sexualities.  But there were some limitations and new constraints from today’s vantage point: the individual become largely divorced, artificially, from community. And aesthetics displaced practical knowledge out of labour along with agricultural and ecological relationships. Proust had his own agenda on aesthetics where,

“No doubt they regarded aesthetic values as material objects which an unclouded vision could not fail to discern, without need to have their equivalent in experience of life stored up and slowly ripening in one’s heart.” [31]

Autonomous enjoyment of fruit tree forms can foster new perceptions and generate some powerful experiences of beauty as when Proust celebrated, “the round shadow that apple trees make on the sunny earth and those silks of impalpable gold which the sunset weaves obliquely under the leaves.”[32] Similarly, Proust celebrated the pear trees as an urban walker around Paris.[33]

While purporting a new kind of realism, Proust described hawthorn trees romantically as part of his outer social network where,

“For often I have wanted to see a person again without discerning that it was simply because she reminded me of a hedge of hawthorns, and I have been lead to believe, to make someone else believe, in a revival of affection, by what was simply a desire to travel.”[34]

From fruit trees, Proust went on to prefigure a more direct form of sensuality, when he noted that, “At that time he had been satisfying a sensual curiosity to know what were the pleasures of those people who lived for love alone.” [35] So with Proust, we see some relatively passive aesthetic practices around fruit and respective trees centred on looking, tasting, walking, and production of text.To defend Proust’s fruit tree landscapes in twenty-first century Europe requires a far more aggressive, policy-savvy, and activist set of aesthetics, strategies, and practices than those celebrated by Proust – while continuing to examine the imperial and bourgeois blinders of his worldview. This project is a theoretical stretch. Any kind of decolonial defences of Proustian agro-ecosystems will require recentring narratives on his social critiques around antisemitism and homophobia and seeing his beautiful landscapes as foils for social contests that interrogate bourgeois propriety. Like its first century, the second century of Proustian narrative, often forms of spatial storytelling, will return to beautiful fruit trees but not in the service of modernism but rather for social equity and community survival.

III.

challenging the aftermath of colonial violence & erasure:

recovering indigenous orchards

“The story of these [indigenous] cultivation practices and how they came to be overlooked by the people of Europe is an enlightening one…”. Douglas Deur and Nancy Turner 2005[36]

The deep and unbroken engagement of the Gitga’at with the Pacific crab-apple trees of their territory contrasts markedly with the violence and erasure that has destroyed much of the traditional indigenous, fruit tree knowledge, “horticulture”[37] and economies of local fruit. A few years after a horrific smallpox epidemic that depopulated the Salish by as much as eighty percent, George Vancouver described massive fields that were the products of indigenous transformation and use.[38]A half century later, colonial naturalist, Berhold Seemann recognized the huge extent of Salish cultivation in 1846 with “signs of cultivation in every direction.”[39]

Wide-spread destruction of “orchards”[40] became a key element of clearing and settlement. While destruction of indigenous cultivation sites was illegal in the colonial period, these assaults on local communities were enabled by a cultivated blindness to the cultural dimensions of these landscapes. For example, Gilbert James Sproat’s racist claim that indigenous land use on Vancouver Island was very limited.[41] In this way, “[c]ultivated places [have] become contested spaces.”[42] And this active colonial ‘blindness’ was coupled with racist violence and exclusion. For example, the colonial-era, Douglas Treaties of the early 1850s often used the phrase, “these small exceptions” for cultivation and habitation sites in the process of erasing stewardship. The Douglas Treaty templates then went on to repeatedly use the following phrase to take control: “the land itself, with these small exceptions, becomes the entire property of white people forever”[43] – all contrary for cultivation sites to the Royal Proclamation of 1763.[44]

Indigenous communities did not give up their fruit trees and orchards nor watch them be destroyed without a tremendous amount of resistance. Numerous late nineteenth and early twentieth century efforts by First Nations to protect and maintain stewardship and harvesting of traditional orchards. [45] Efforts to defend these strategic sites and lands subsided only when First Nations governments were politically neutralized with local arboriculture practices and economies subsequently erased through institutional assaults such as residential schools. In British Columbia there were hundreds of presentations to government officials along with scores legal interventions in the hopes of protecting traditional orchards – until such court challenges were outlined early in the twentietch century. The most documented of these struggles over indigenous orchards in north-western North America was in 1897 where the Haisla of Kitimaat asserted traditional ownership of their “Crab Apple Gardens.”[46]

Indigenous orchards in north-western North America were the casualties of the twin projects of colonization and imperialism (including erasure of indigenous cultures) required ignoring indigenous management as “not labour” and cultivation sites as “not owned”.[47] In 2005, Deur and Turner were the first to sketch, within academia, the outright erasure of indigenous cultivation in north-western North America through misguided anthropologists notably Alfred Kroeber and Franz Boaz.[48] They called for “[r]econceptualizing cultivation” effectively decolonizing notions of growing food. [49] They began to challenge narrow concepts of cultivation[50] with its Eurocentric baggage.

Today, most of those orchards are gone though sometimes roots and shoots survive providing hope for partial recovery. More grounds for hope are the hundreds of successful interventions, some legalistic and most on the ground, by First Nations in north-western North America to re-establish stewardship over territories.[51] Two contemporary movements of First Nations are beginning to take back indigenous fruit tree cultivation. The expanding framework for consultation of proposed development on respective territories could consider traditional and contemporary orchards though there has been little publicizing or documentation so far. Secondly, there is tremendous interest in indigenous foods. As part of reconnecting to lands and traditional cultivation, scores of indigenous food sovereignty projects increasingly involve plant fruit-bearing trees and shrubs.

Less organized, so far, has been the case for the continued ownership, by indigenous communities, of semi-domesticated tree forms as First Nations-owned varieties, effectively landraces as precursors to crop varieties, especially for Pacific crabapple. “Domestication” of crops is the product of cultural practices over many generations as “the genetic modification of crops as a result of selective cultivation and propagation of plants with anomalous and desirable traits.” For long-lived fruit trees that often take nearly a decade to become reproductively mature, domestication involves thousands of years of cultural practices. For example, Victoria Wyllie de Echeverria described sweet and sour crabapple “domesticates, or proto-domesticates”[52] in the same gene pool as cultivated Eurasian apples. Perhaps more profound, Wyllie de Echeverria has confirmed that “the different varieties recognized by some Indigenous groups, lead to a more differentiated classification scheme for this plant than is reflected in western science.”[53] And this divergence in ethnographic experiences do not only have direct implications for taxonomy and other fields of natural sciences but to cultural studies, postcolonial aesthetics, and the make of new representational and site-based works. So these species, genetic resources, and cultural sites have only been partially described to the modern world with only a few examples so far recovered.

In north-western North America, traditional indigenous use, stewardship and cultivation practices for fruit and nut patches included a wide range of activities and techniques often with spiritual and aesthetic dimensions. For the sake of clarity, I divide this list of practices into ‘use’ and ‘cultivation’ though both categories are imbued with Eurocentric biases that were largely irrelevant to these cultures. The following are partial lists of use and other enjoyment practices for these four indigenous fruit trees.

The one native species of apple, was “highly important fruit for Northwest Coast peoples” [54] with landrace varieties, ecotypes and phenotypes sometimes identified and utilized selectively.  Of the north-western North American fruit trees species, Malus fusca has the closest links to Eurasia and “possibly spreading from Asia in Late Pleistocene.”[55] Contemporary usage in Kamchatka includes as fuel, implements, and medicine.[56] On the North-West coast, crab-apple berries were picked in late summer and fall, cooked slightly and stored in water or eulachon oil in boxes, that were often traded[57], and often eaten with grease.[58] Crabapple fruit and red elderberries were simmered into a sauce.[59] Crabapple bark was an important medicine[60] with squares ceremonially harvested. Infusions of this bark were used to fight colds.[61] Crabapple wood was sometimes used for spiritually imbued digging sticks and tools.[62]

The two species of cherry trees were used differently. Along with crabapple, chokecherry, Prunus virginiana, trees often produced significant amounts of nutritionally strategic fruit such as in the Interior Plateau of British Columbia and northern interior. There, two varieties were recognized, red-fruited and black-fruited, with large amounts of pits recovered from early archaeological sites.[63] Chokecherry fruit was pounded into mush to remove the pits.[64] Chokecherry fruit was dried and traded between the Interior and the coast.[65] In contrast, bitter cherry, tended to produce less fruit but its bark was traded up and down the coast and into the Interior of British Columbia making a red dye for basket decorating. Bitter-cherry wood is very hard and was used for tool handles, especially knives, and traded[66] In contrast, poles of chokecherry were light though weak and often favoured for tipis.

Both bitter and chokecherry bark were key ingredients for many indigenous medicines in north-western North America.[67] W̱SÁNEĆ elder Violet Williams described harvesting protocols where rectangles of roughly 3 by 5 centimetres were taken in the morning on an empty stomach with harvesting for a particular person who is ill.[68]

The fruit of the two species of black hawthorn, in north-western North America, were harvested for food. Analogous to the two cherries species, Crataegus douglasii, was the species that produces economically significant amounts fruit. Fruit was pounded to remove the pits was kneaded into cakes for winter.[69] Dried fruit and cakes were traded.

Large quantities of native hazelnuts, Corylus cornuta[70]were gathered from the West Coast to well into the into the interior of North America.  There was extensive trade and processing of native hazelnut.[71]

The following is a partial list of combined cultivation and stewardship practices for these indigenous fruit trees:

            creation of “manufactured soil” as a prerequisite for cultivation[72];

fertilizing around cherry trees[73];

weeding such as the Haida controlling other plant growth around their crabapple

trees[74];

pruning[75], such as of crabapple, where “Trees [were] tended pruned, lopped, and

transplanted”[76], and more intensive coppicing[77] often topped[78]to foster strong

horizontal branches for making subsequent harvesting easier[79];

thinning[80];

an array of burning practices[81] to clear areas[82] and stimulate growth[83] with

expertise including seasonal conditions for burning, types of days, tides and

wind[84] with one 1848 complaint of traditional burning of indigenous orchards in

Sooke, on Vancouver Island, in August through October of that year[85] with many

of the records, located so far, of burning orchards for thinning hazelnut[86];

planting orchards with hazelnut and crabapple often relying on twigs as the major

reproductive material[87];

landraces of crabapple, cherry[88], and hazelnut were recognized and often guided

transplanting;

an array of transplanting[89] and “translocation” [90] practices extending north along

the coast to at least the Skeena River[91]  including the use of “pegs” of vegetative

 material as the crux of cultivation of food plants in the estuaries of Kingcome

 Inlet, including crabapple[92], such as described by the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw Chief

Adam Dick[93];

“intensification” [94] such as increasing tree densities through planting to create

“orchards” of crabapple[95], hazelnut[96], and cherries;

spreading seed[97] and other reproductive material such as twigs and roots;

the Secwépemc, in the Interior mountains, intervened in insect infestations on and

managed tent caterpillars on chokecherry[98];

fruit tree wood was used for fencing partially to protect inter-cropping plots of

pollinating species such as West Coast tobacco, Nicotiana quadrivalvis[99]often

after clearing and low intensity burning in part to benefit respective orchards;

cognitive maps for intensive gathering and stewardship ‘grounds’ were inscribed

with social and cultural meanings[100];

prayers to plants such as in the case of Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw  prayers that is better

translated as “words of praise”[101] along with related verbalizing and ceremony such as Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw invocations to berry bushes before being burned[102];

First Fruit ceremonies[103] often organized by and celebrating the leaders of

lineages engaged in respective stewardship, ownership, and fruit distribution[104]

that often involved observing anthropopathic relationships that saw human-like

feelings in those cultivated trees[105];  and

“ownership may be defined as the formal recognition of rights to control access to

lands and resources”[106] as “primary rights”[107] for “restriction of non-kin access”[108] to food production sites, especially crabapple orchards[109], with “ownership protocols” “authority over land and resources”[110] sometimes combined with and sometimes diverging from stewardship[111] with just one example from the W̱SÁNEĆ of south-eastern Vancouver Island adjacent islands where there was differentiation between ownership of land and taking care of it.[112]  And at the north end of Vancouver Island, Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw ownership and cultivation extended to crabapple.[113] Poles were sometimes used to demarcate property lines.[114]

Much of inheritance of trees was gender-based with some fruit economies matrilineal and others patrilineal.[115] Women often directed management practices including pruning, weeding, and controlled burning.[116] Most of the practices above were specific for particular species of native fruit trees as well as specific territories, cultures, languages and ecosystems. For example, Pacific crabapple was a crucial and highly prestigious food item often given as gifts with specific “ownership protocols.” [117]

For many cultures in north-western North America, “plants [continue to] serve as mediators across spiritual barriers.”[118] But where a small and sacred plant, such as KEXMIN, Lomatium nudicaule, can be nurtured somewhat surreptitiously, orchard comprise more obvious territory.  Certainly, crabapple gardens[119] continue to be sacred spaces.  Crabapples often had important ceremonial uses in the life stages of women.[120] For example, Pacific crabapple were used by Haida women to mark puberty and womanhood[121] where the fruit was thought to be former human beings.[122] Some north coast cultures thought of crabapple fruits as human eyes served as food in the land of the dead. Crabapple trees were sometimes views as supernatural beings which in a sense they were for providing key nutrition, preservable over the winter months.

Most enigmatic were beliefs about crabapple powers for ecological regeneration. Some crabapple cultures harboured a complex concept of a magical expansion of twigs to re-establish devastated ecosystems.[123]

Reviews of the ethnographies of the other three fruit tree gene pools has been far less extensive.  For the Lil’wat, bitter cherry was associated with supernatural powers.[124] One route for fuller understanding of the religious and cultural significant as these smaller trees as ecological linchpins, are language and stories. For example, chokecherry is central to two, foundation Ktunaxa stories on Coyote and Grizzly Bear and Mosquito.[125]

While much of her local ethnobotanies were hurried and partial, Nancy Turner mentioned an important set of stories involving the Volcano Woman (or Creek Woman or Frog Woman). Some believe that these stories came in the latter sea migrations from Asia where ancient communities were punished for not respecting the Earth (and their own stewardship customs).[126] The roles of these fruit trees, especially Pacific crabapple, in these stories remain unexplored.

How to recover, steward, honour, and support re-establishment of these orchards in an era of intense appropriation? Across scores of languages, cultures, aesthetics and narratives, there are already many community-centred initiatives than span families, clans and governments – with a few guest artists invited to provide symbolism and rhetoric. The spread is breath-taking ranging from reasserted stewardship, on one hand, to public art and responses to the growing hazards of the Anthropocene on end of a diversifying array of practices. And directing, managing, and withholding information, such as on site and plants, become distinct cultural practices in themselves. All of this work remains vulnerable to the worst kinds of appropriation. In response, Lucy Lippard sketched a fin-de-siècle picture of indigenous aesthetic practices of “emotional sovereignty” noting that, “Native Americans have had good historical reason to keep their most important feelings and knowledge to themselves, to maintain a kind of indigenous withholding details of traditional (and contemporary) knowledge as a form of resistance.”[127]

Whether as part of food sovereignty initiatives, memorials to families, territorial demarcations, community renewal, or creative responses to the ‘Anthropocene’, new orchards are forms of repair: ecological, political, emotional, nutritional, demographic, cultural and aesthetic. Traditional indigenous orchards were rich intersections of sensibilities and resources. New orchards will be recreated and maintained by a cultural richness that will warrant, more than what we saw in the twentieth century, the ambitious label of “land art.”

IV.

decolonizing land art:

from non-sites to re-establishing indigenous stewardship

“Indigenous peoples in north-western North America were not just casual wanderers through a bountiful land, hauling salmon from the rivers and perhaps plucking a few clusters of berries as they were encountered. They were active participants in managing their environments and in using their resources sustainably treating them with care and consideration.”

Nancy Turner 2014 [128]

“Olmsted’s parks exist before they are finished, which means in fact they are never finished; they remain carriers of the unexpected and of contradiction on all levels of human activity, be it social, political, or natural.”

Robert Smithson 1973[129]

“I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that much land art is a pseudo rural art made from a metropolitan headquarters, a kind of colonization in itself.”

 Lucy Lippard 2014[130]

In imagining indigenous and decolonial, “social practices”[131] to nurture local fruit tree cultivation cultures as part of contemporary art, the early decades of land art in the mid-twentieth century were revolutionary and broke some of the old Eurocentric notions of art. [132]  But early land art viewed from today is a largely a neocolonial movement negating local ecosystems and human presence,[133] provides some lessons. Curiously, only few early works of land art engaged with living material and cultivation practices. The few works that did engage with ecosystems have provided routes for bringing local cultures of cultivation into contemporary culture.

Lucy Lippard posited that “Ideally part land and art, it is best located deep in place, where one comes upon it unexpectedly, like ruins and rock art — poignant reminds of human agency and time’s victories. The viewer, like the artist, is so awed, so sensitized, so aware of seasons and materials, space and wildlife, that the work truly co-exists with the place it creates.”[134] Robert Smithson’s 1966 essay on dialectics transformed the notion of a work of art from object to process where “a dialectical materialism applied to the physical landscape. Dialectics of this type are a way of seeing things in a manifold of relations, not as isolated objects. Nature for the dialectician is indifferent to any formal ideal.”[135] Smithson’s ideal of art presented audiences with “the physicality of things outside” [136] often taking advantage of dramatic “geologically ambiguous sites”[137] while effectively erasing signs of human presence and knowledge of ongoing stewardship.

Lucy Lippard argued that, “The task of land art, on the other hand, is to focus landscapes too vast for the unaccustomed eye to take in, or to give us views into the cosmos, connecting places where we stand with the places will we never stand.”[138] These large works both obscured the “colonial wounds”[139] that depopulated sites and through that obfuscation contributed to the further dispossession of indigenous communities on respective territories.[140] As part of her critique of the colonial nature of the practices of the most influential land artists, Lippard imagined “A vernacular land art [that] might include commemoration that looks to the smaller scale, land-based notions of nature, remembering small farms and common lands, the disappearing histories of places and ecosystems.”[141]

But how to move art-making on the land from the colonial to the decolonial? Early land art comprised exploitative intrusions enabled by the art world because as T.J. Demos argues, “Colonialism, at its most basic, imposes a subject-object relation of power, defined by mastery and appropriation.”[142] Early land art replicated cultural forms of colonialism on the land while trying to free itself outside of the art world through creating  ‘Non-sites” [143] as an “abstract container” of the physical site with “installations that transgress the boundaries of the museum through literal and symbolic dialogue with remote sites — wilderness areas, or the wastelands of the metropolitan fringe”[144] One of the most notorious examples of early land art as ecological obstruction and erasure is Robert Smithson’s 1970 “Glue Pour (destroyed)”[145] imposed on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) territory outside of the City of Vancouver. Drawn to the area because of resistance to some of his projects near where he lived in the United States, “Pour Glue” was literally toxic with the artist paying little or no attention to the site’s history or vulnerability.[146] The rising artist was sufficiently sophisticated in his thinking to conceive of Pour Glue (Destroyed) as an illustration of colonial relationships on the land (while perpetuated most of these dynamics) where, “Smithson developed a “toxic discourse” in which he treated the nineteenth-century landscape as a totally engineered prototype for the twentieth.”[147] The “dialectic” [148] that he sketched had a more direct relationship to acknowledging erasure of indigenous legacies in landscapes without any sense of responsibility for contributing to recovery and repair – while not fully acknowledging that his practices were still part of  that “violence.”[149] Public art’s contributions to the cultural perpetuation of projects of control and accumulation, involving repeated assaults, was explored briefly two decades back by Miwon Kwon.[150]

While the currency of the larger land art sites created a half century ago, especially by Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, was bulldozing, there was, simultaneously, a thread of cultivation presented as modern, western art explored by Dennis Oppenheim, especially the work 1969 “Directed Seeding” and “Cancelled Crop[151] and Hans Haacke’s 1969, “Fog, Flooding, Erosion and his 1972, Rhine-Water Purification Plant.”[152] In the same period, Helen and Newton Mayer Harrison began a much longer engagement in cultivation with the 1971-2 “Portable Farm” and “Portable Orchard.”[153]

In the face of only a few projects ever involving cultivation practices in site-based art, two works on trees have been influential. Alan Sonfist’s “Time Landscape” on lower Manhattan goes back to 1965 and continues to illustrate woodland succession.[154]

A decade and a half later, Joseph Beuys, in one of his most active periods politically, transformed Kassel with his “7000 Eichen – Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung  /  7000 Oaks – City Forestation Instead of City Administration.”[155]

Since those early works of the 1970s and 1980s, there has been a modest increase in art works with cultivation though few have full engaged with site histories and earlier (and current) human populations. Nor has acknowledging experiences of indigeneity been  central to these works. herman de vries recreated a meadow of native plants in The Netherlands through practices he termed “decultivation.”[156] Early on in his career, Mel CHIN grew plants in some of his works as “remediation.”[157] In Vancouver in the 1990s, Oliver Kellhammer created several works centred on cultivation sometimes with conventional fruit trees as part of demonstrating “Open Source Landscapes.”[158] Recently, Ron Benner, a non-indigenous artist actively engaged in solidarity, explored indigenous cultivation in Gardens of a Colonial Present / Jardins d’un Present Colonial.[159]  

It has not been easy for indigenous artist to reintroduce cultivation practices especially when much of those skills and aesthetics have been erased.  Duane Linklater’s 2012 blueberry garden[160] created more space for indigenous cultivation as art-making[161] similarly, Rebecca Belmore’s 2012 unwrapping a tree on Canada Day[162] linked organic to performative practices.

It is one set of formidable challenges to recover cultivation aesthetics and safe spaces, it is another more problematic process to use such organic interventions for inter-cultural dialogue. So indigenous fruit tree cultivation as an artistic intervention in the well-defended territory of a First Nation can be part of a process that Jordan Abel[163] awkwardly termed “Indianizing” most future orchards will be in far more contested landscapes.  In 2015 Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and Sophie McCall argued that, “Arts-based approaches to reconciliation are often touted as a positive step forward and are viewed favourably in narratives of ‘moving on’ and ‘healing’ in the name of a unified nation” effectively implying “that art’s function is to smooth over, to make whole rather than disrupt.”[164]

Over the last two decades, there has been a modest movement of non-indigenous artists trying to challenge the erasures of contemporary indigenous communities, and respective histories, associated with colonial and genocidal notions of the “purportedly ‘vanishing race'”[165] and the broader narrative of Indian extinction. Indigenous experts on plant knowledge, notably Robin Kimmerer, have stressed “reciprocity” between people, plants, and the earth[166] and “the moral covenant of reciprocity.”[167] This activist botany has been laying the basis to critique erasures of key plants, including the right to restore, modify, repossess and heal sites even with land art that obstructed harvesting, stewardship and spiritual observances and other ceremony. These practices, in turn, lay the basis for broader challenges to “colonial spatialities,” well beyond consultations on traditional territories, as part of expanding toolkits of cultural “resurgence”[168] and indigenous “mobilization.”[169]

Re-establishing indigenous orchards could be part of even more ambitious projects. Dylan Robinson and Keren Zaiontz argued for new public art in the Vancouver region, “To develop a civic infrastructure of redress means to develop a location on unceded Coast Salish territory through the city’s very form, from its sidewalk to its signs and from its public art to its uses by the urban Aboriginal public in asserting their rights to sovereign space.”[170] The concept of indigenous survivance[171], and the expanding movement to explore futures defined simply by survival, is important here in moving from “redress” to joy extending to appropriating high art techniques for healing the land for “Opening ourselves up to experiencing direct communication and embodied being-with plants is therefore an exercise of extending our preconceived ideas of what a “person” actually means, and then, honing one’s sensorial faculties to stretch our capacity for knowing beyond the human scale and re-connect with what David Abram terms ‘the many-voiced landscape’.” [172] In this way, living works by and for indigenous populations can move from being commodities[173] in western art economies to means of care within thriving communities. And certainly new orchards can be part of articulating an array of what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson termed, “indigenous aesthetics” in part “to disrupt the noise of colonialism.”[174]

V.

decolonizing permaculture & agroecology as intercultural conversations

Today, land art, as part of a global art economy, warrants decolonization and in many cases indigenous rebuilding of artistic installations. In addition, conventional agricultural cultivation remains yoked to a small number of Eurasian varieties and practices in economies that too often still denigrate indigenous food production. We are a long way from any defensible and sustainable postcolonial ecologies as we can see in the following examples. Much of organic agriculture still contributes more to “settling,” as in imposing certain favoured agricultural activities on the land, in contrast to “unsettling,” acknowledging indigenous populations and governments, and dismantling Eurocentric hierarchies. Here, I posit two different movements of organic agriculture: permaculture driven by innovative gardeners and agroecology as grounded in ethnographic studies of farming systems. The empiricism of agroecology methods have fostered a nuanced recognition of diverse indigenous farming systems[175], especially in Mexico, with metrics for community health.

The vague and widely circulated term, “permaculture,” is largely derived from early critiques of colonial Australian agriculture by visionary Bill Mollison.[176] But while Mollison’s perspectives continue to be grounded in the losses perpetrated during colonial Tasmania and contemporary attempts at recovery, the various permaculture movements have rarely acknowledged and allied with decolonial projects either around food production, land redistribution, and recovery aesthetics. Many focus on a small number of simple principles similar to other forms of organic agriculture such as that stated in 2009 by the London-based, The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination 2009

“Permaculture is an ecological design system whose central tenet is that by observing the way ecosystems such as a forest or meadow work, we can learn to build human habitats that are energy efficient, resilient, waste free and productive. Described by some as “the art of creating beneficial relationships” and by others as “the science of connections”, Permaculture merges traditional wisdom with contemporary ecological research.”[177]

Question arise here about the extent of the “observing” and respective biases.

Problematic for re-establishment of indigenous orchards, permaculture methods have rarely involved assessing native plants and indigenous crops. Too often, relationship between cultural legacies in the landscape and the multicultural present with social projects such as recovery of indigenous food sovereignty have been ignored in favour of a few fast-growing fruit trees and shrubs combined with annuals. In their fascinating sketch of gardens and sound as somewhat integrated art works, Caleb Kelly and Ross Gibson 2010 note that,

“Permaculture is a popular and very effective gardening practice in Australia [the region in which it was first popularized], but it is not universally loved. For one thing some permaculturists tend to be rather zealous and evangelical about their methods and philosophy and for another, it is difficult to describe permaculture gardens as aesthetically satisfying with reference to any conventional definition of beauty or refinement. True, this may indicate that the standard definitions need revision, but to put it bluntly, permaculture gardens can look unruly, scrappy, weedy and unplanned (despite the fact that there is always a strong background-design to every healthy permaculture garden).” [178]

In recent decades, there are movements to more clearly combine planting fruit trees and other crops as part of challenging social disparities and food insecurity. Artisanal interventions sometimes labelled “guerilla gardening”[179] along with guerilla grafting[180] and viticulture embody a wide range of local movements. The Los Angeles-based Fallen Fruit collective combined planting, harvesting, processing, and art-making in ways that are festive and of long-term benefits to neighbourhoods.[181] In a similar vein, a community group in Seattle has established a food forest for local residents regardless of their incomes.[182] And some of this urban ecology goes back to nineteenth century urban gardening and activism most notably the containing gardening movement originating in London with its curious lineage going back to the explosive creativity of the Young Romantics in Geneva.[183]

One aesthetic movement of the second half of the twentieth century that paralleled land art but that has been poor investigated for its ecological and cultivation impulses is Arte Povera. The relatively short-lived movement, largely confined to Italy, was conceptual and minimalist often using cheap and found materials echoing vernaculars of abjection and industrial discard while prefiguring the inevitable ecological impoverishment of the Anthropocene. Today, the 1967 Manifesto by Germano Celant first appears as a mash-up of the projects of the twentieth century, European avant-garde though at times points to stripping down modernism,

“It’s a question of an identification between man and nature, but with none of the theological purposes of the medieval narrator-narratum; the intention, quite to the contrary, is pragmatic, and the goal is liberation, rather than any addition of ideas or objects to the world as it presents itself today…in favor of a focalization… that live instead as self-sufficient social gestures…The shift that has to be brought about is thus the return to limited and ancillary projects where the human being is the fulcrum and the fire of research…”[184]

In the face of the excesses and environmental costs of industrial production, art has “self-sufficient social gestures” could extend to learning how to grow the heartiest most local fruit trees. And Arte Povera also contributed to  general destabilization of the Western art world through,

“its use of everyday materials, such as: iron, wood, charcoal, sludge, basic foodstuffs, etc. and talked about a work of art that crosses the boundary between life and art. Marked a conflict with the art of painting and especially the expressive tradition, revolted against all Western Art, which was dominated by the School of Vision…The artists of the Arte Povera agreed not only to deny the aesthetic practice of Abstract Art and the consumption-oriented design, beyond their differences in theoretical positions, they had a common goal. To extend the range of art on that sociopolitical area in which we should build the creative process of both sensory and visual observation and critical transformation of the world.”[185]

The most important contribution to revisioning cultivation as part of contemporary culture is its contribution to today radical materiality that investigates and sometimes celebrates everyday objects[186] – today items increasingly investigated for ecological impacts such as carbon footprints and recyclability. The simple organicism of Arte Povera was sometimes powerful and occasionally trivial. Piero Manzoni dabbled in excrement carefully canned as a precious object. At times, the “igloo” by Gilberto Zorio and Mario Merz, as part of “When Attitudes Become Form” and the weavings of Marisa Merz alluded to rank appropriation of the so-called ‘primitive’. But such work created a gateway for appreciation of indigenous technologies into the global art world. It was the humility and simplicity of much of the Arte Povera works that were small steps towards today’s tree cultivation as artistic production. But few, if any of these works, were ever installed outside involving material that kept living.[187]

Today, the movements for agroecology, permaculture, and agroforestry[188] are all becoming institutionalized. But indigenous fruit tree cultivation in north-western North America still faces a series of obstacles barely outlined in this essay. Prospects for major site-based works, with indigenous fruit trees in north-western North America, are a decade away. Today, possibilities for establishment of native fruit trees languish more in futurist imaginations and aesthetics. And yet the pressures continue to intensify for expanding stewardship, loss of biological diversity, carbon pollution, climate change, and the production of more nutritional food.

VI.

native fruit tree cultivation as

aesthetic responses to ecological crises

“The view from above — like broad, planetary frames including the ‘Anthropocene’ — has a tendency to subsume particularities into totalities, with the risk of naturalizing, or depoliticizing, states of affairs along the way.”                                         Emily Eliza Scott 2015[189]

“Simply put, plants are not art. What we do with them, however we honor their life processes as part of creating ecological functions – that’s art.”

Benjamin Vogt 2017[190]

Most of the site-based and public artists involved with cultivation in the twentieth century were visionaries who saw massive ecological crises looming well before they were identified in popular culture. Most were hoping that conditions would not deteriorate as fast as they have. The art with fruit tree cultivation in the twenty-first century has often originated in contemporary anxieties around global change and distressed elements of life support. In this New World, cultivation in site-based art is increasingly view as responses to these crises.[191] The problem with crisis-centred theorizing on cultivation as part of art works, that deeper currents of these aesthetics, going back to indigenous and traditional cultures, on one hand, and alternatives to industrialism re-envisioned in the mid-twentieth century are often eclipsed.

As humanity experiences more of the unevenly distributed costs of dumping carbon into the atmosphere, art-making that fixes some of that pollution, including planting fruit trees, is attractive and logical. Over the last decade and a half, there has been a huge increase in responses to the vagaries and devastation of what McKenzie Wark terms the “Anthropocene”[192] and that other, notably Donna Haraway, have given a wider range of labels including “Capitalocene” and “Chthulucene.”[193]  These conceptions often bleed into older conceptions of “Apocalypse” that often involve divergent experiences between those that are Judeo-Christian and those that are more grounded in localized, indigenous cultures.[194] Fruit tree cultivation in the face of the excess of distressed carbon, as contemporary culture, involves a different set of social priorities, cultural perspectives, and aesthetics that the previously discussed recovery of indigenous and traditional orchards and the broader decolonization necessary to remove obstacles for survival of these groves.

Today, the ‘contract’ between humans, each other, and natural ecosystems is being re-naturalised catastrophically by capital. But there are counterforces especially the powers and limits of ecological relationships and processes, where Michel Serres noted, 

“[T]he Earth speaks to us in terms of forces, bonds, and interactions, and that’s enough to make a contract. Each of the partners in symbiosis thus owes, by rights, life to the other, on pain of death.”[195]

This somewhat primal contract over-rides part of contemporary globalization as T. J. Demos described as, “the current regime of resource colonialism, industrial ecocide, and the neoliberal agro-economy is socially and environmentally destructive, economically and politically unequal in the distribution of its negative effects, and historically rooted in paradigms of imperialism that go back centuries”[196]

Simply put, cultivation, as ways to sometimes fix carbon, could be part of resisting what Emily Eliza Scott termed above the subsuming of particularities.  Cultivation for both survival and artistic expression could keep people grounded in the face of mounting crises and inevitable losses.

As was discussed around land art, modern art briefly hosted some cultivation impulses in a score of sculptural and site-based works that were poorly understood at the time.[197] Beuys’s 1982 “7000 Eichen – Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung  /  7000 Oaks – City Forestation Instead of City Administration” was the first large environmental work that involved a politicized artist who had a clear sense of the impending ravages of the Anthropocene. In the same period, Helen and Newton Harrison were creating works that were less didactic and focused more on creating earthworks that healed the land.[198] Concurrently, Mierle Laderman Ukeles highlighted huge issues of waste and recycling.[199]

In the face of the growing number of losses due to climate change, both cultivation and art-making remain under-valued form of human “labor”[200] even though blends of such practices could mitigate the perils of the new epoch. One set of practices for both of human survival and aesthetic intervention is carbon sequestration through the creation of more biomass as in living trees. But how to mobilize a necessary labour force and inspire the acquisition of new tools of human survival? Given the poor prospects of a massive new workforce of paid arborculturalists, contemporary art could provide one gateway for mobilization. And transfer of knowledge, especially from indigenous elders who often have experienced deep trauma from misappropriation of their knowledge and culture, remains fraught and daunting. Before credible new solutions can be communicated, a kind of cultivation-as-art related research is necessary. In 2015, Ashley Dawson proposed “networked research collectives”[201] especially scientists and artists researching climate change. And climate change, in turn, embodies synergies with other threats to the biosphere and humanity especially loss of biological diversity and toxic materials.

Over the last two decades as awareness of the massiveness of the changes and losses from carbon pollution, loss of biodiversity, and toxic are generating, so have the number of works involving trees, fruit, and cultivation. There has been a growing appreciation for the loss of genetic resources including wild and traditional fruit trees illustrated with the celebrated grafting of plum and cherries by artist Sam van Aken.[202] For more radical than celebrating old fruit tree varieties is the radical cultivation envisioned in the Planthroposcene movement that envisions less anthropocentric partnerships such as “Plant / People Conspiracies”[203] with photosynthesis the cheapest route to fixing carbon. There have been sardonic interventions into the pollinator crisis such as a cocktail book.[204] Moving into the second quarter of the twenty-first century, production of multimedia works to keep sites alive, often cultivating fruit trees,has gone from being exceptional to part of a recurring theme in contemporary culture.

VII.

conclusions & questions:

recombining fruit cultivation practice as new forms of organic multimedia art

“On behalf of the land and everything living on it, new image wars must be waged.”                                                            Lucy Lippard 2014[205]

“The tree planting enterprise provides a very simple but radical possibility…”

Joseph Beuys in conversation with Richard Demarco, 1982[206]

“We cannot carry out the kind of decolonization our Ancestors set in motion if we don’t create a generation of land-based, community-based intellectuals and cultural producers who are accountable to our nations and whose life work is concerned with the regeneration of these systems rather than meeting the overwhelming needs of the Western academic complex or attempting to ‘Indigenize the academy’ by bringing Indigenous Knowledge into the academy on the terms of the academy itself…The land must again become [italics] the pedagogy.” Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2017[207]

Planting and enjoying a tree, and certainly recovering or creating an orchard, can be part of an aesthetic movement centred on what Emily Eliza Scott and Kirsten Swensen termed, “new representational and performative practices to reveal the social significance of hidden, or normalized, features inscribed in the land.”[208] New orchards of native fruit disrupt still partially colonial, colonized, neocolonial cognitive maps sometimes fostering forms of “experimental geography”[209] But in this milieu, the site-based, ecological practices employed by Beuys in the art-making near the end of his life, when he was also participating in some seminal movements in German politics, remains more the exception.

In this essay, I have outlined three sets of contemporary goals for cultivating native and traditional fruit trees as part of site-based works. First, indigenous communities are reasserting cultivation practices as part of recovering indigenous culture, stewardship, and territory. Secondly, cultivation of native and traditional fruit trees can be part of strategies for creatively challenging the remaining obstacles to decolonization within multicultural societies – barriers that are often still daunting. Thirdly, inclusion of the cultivation of native and traditional fruit trees can be part of expressing emotions around the losses associated with the Anthropocene and imagining possibilities of avoiding and healing some of the worst damage. But while more works with fruit trees fits into a half century arc of putting cultivation back into contemporary culture, many theoretical problems remain compounded by erasure, lack of knowledge and the ease of appropriation. More broadly, cultivation requires collaboration, and reskilling, in ways that are inherently inter-culture.

Much of the use of fruit trees in site-based works in the next two decades will involve just transmitting facts that had been erased especially about local communities, cultures, technology, species, and gene pools along with speculations on how cultivation could avert crises. But even communicating ideas of native fruit trees as solutions and refuges in the face of the Anthropocene is daunting. There are numerous points around which to creatively investigate from carbon sequestration of trees, ecological benefits for pollinators, and the nutritional contributions of the resulting fruit. Site-based works with native and traditional fruit trees become research and monitoring sites as much as challenges to impending losses. And these debates often have uncomfortable inter-cultural and demographic dimensions. But most artist is ill-equipped to engage in ethnographic research where,

“Some artists have used these opportunities to collaborate with communities innovatively: for instance, to recover suppressed histories that are sited in particular ways, that are accessed by some more effectively than others. But I am skeptical about effects of the pseudoethnographic role set up for the artist or assumed by him or her.”        Hal Foster 1995[210]

Foster’s essay has prefigured several decades of projects where unresolved power dynamics, with economic, resource, and educational disparities, and contests, have dominated collaborative art interventions. In this context, indigenous knowledge, culture and artists, other from traditional and other marginal communities outside of the global art economy, remain vulnerable. And how we acknowledge, challenge, and overcome these disparities becomes central to the enjoyment of and transmission of experience to such site-based works with fruit trees.

Throughout human existence, fruit and fruit trees, certain cultivation practices, have often had symbolic, as well as survival, value.  At times, fruit, trees, and certain acts of cultivation become mirrors of broader aspects of communities and cultures. If there was ever a time when the cultivation of trees could become central to contemporary culture it is after a century of more rapid and widespread losses of forest and woodland than at any other time in human history. With the rapid rise in atmospheric carbon, art that fixes some of that pollution back into living material is a demonstration of hope. If there was ever a time in history when recoveries from colonialism and neo-colonial, along with indigenous languages and traditional knowledge, can be the focus of nuanced aesthetic statements, it is now. And as food reserves dwindle and the costs of living increase, art that engages around, makes, and shares fruit becomes part of culture bordering on spiritual observance.

In the essay, I have outlined organic responses to three pressing global crises: erasure of traditional knowledge, language, techniques, and aesthetics; continued obstruction of indigenous stewardship over territories; and loss of biodiversity, natural ecosystems and agro-ecosystems accelerated by climate change. This destruction is happening rapidly and increasingly debilitates communities as much as it mobilizes them. How can new visions, strategies, and skills, in order to challenge these losses, be transmitted to the millions of people increasingly mobilized? One of the most effective routes to face and respond our contemporary vulnerabilities is through making and interacting with multimedia art, often transmitted digitally, as part of new aesthetics and ways to live in the world. So while recovering and expanding these established sets of indigenous, decolonial, and ecologically restorative skills, it is necessary to add in two additional movements:  “place-based practices”[211] and activism in public space that disrupts the propriety of both the state and private interests.  The beauty of fruit and trees can inspire and the interactions, interventions and patience necessary to successfully cultivate can invigorate.  Art focused seductively on fruit can become a gateway for seeing the power[212] that continues to destroy and erase communities.

Today, indigenous melancholy, common with fuller reckoning of the huge social, language and cultural losses of native communities, is profoundly divergent from Proust’s modernist, remembering and nostalgia. Cultivation, as homages to traditional links to land and communities, can be part of strategies to move on from the pain of those losses.  As for averting the greatest losses of the Anthropocene, interactive and site-based art involving living material is a gateway to reskilling a range of complex horticultural skills as part of locales, cultures and languages. Similarly, site-based interventions can be part of unlearning colonial aesthetics and re-reading the land as indigenous ecological legacies. And in a decolonizing global culture, why wouldn’t cultivation be as ceremonial and religious, and often encoded through aesthetics, as it is manual?

Today, there are few new orchards reparation and for biosphere repair. If new site-based works, with growing of local fruit, were to flourish, a host of questions will be investigated and debated. For example, the wild and traditional portions of these gene pools are still poorly assessed, throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere. How many semi-domesticated landraces are there for these fruit trees? What are the full set of fruit tree names, vocabularies, practices, and ceremony in the scores of languages of the cultures that fostered fruit tree cultivation? Where are the remaining orchards and former sites? Of the answers to these questions, which information should stay with elders, their families, and First Nations and other local governments? What are all of the slim mentions of cultivation in the land art and Arte Povera movements? And while these essays have focused on three recent impulses for growing trees, recovery, decolonization, and averting losses, what are the other motives for cultivation in making contemporary art. Huge issues remain about appropriation and the control of information and aesthetics by the often struggling communities in which they originate? How can fruit tree growing as art also be homages without appropriating and collaborative while fully crediting communal cultural ownership? Can re-establishing indigenous and other local fruit tree cultivation contribute to recovery and retention of language, culture, ceremony, and infrastructure? Can wide-spread cultivation of fruit trees, especially on under-used and degraded land, contribute significant to carbon sequestration, reverse pollinator crises, and contribute to food sovereignty?

notes

---

[1]  Marcel Proust from “Under The Trees,” written in Dieppe in 1895, and included in his 1896 “Pleasures and Days. See page 145 in Marcel Proust. 2003. The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust. (Joachim Neugroschel [translation]  Roger Shattuck [introduction]). London: Rowman & Littlefield.

[2] Sonfist, Alan, Wolfgang Becker, and Robert Rosenblum. 2004. Nature, The End of Art: Environmental Landscapes. New York: Distributed Art Publishers and Landi, Ann. 2011. Separating the Trees from the Forest: Alan Sonfist has built a career as an urban land artist. ARTnews (Summer 2011) (POSTED 08/15/11 5:58 PM). http://www.artnews.com/2011/08/15/separating-the-trees-from-the-forest/

[3] Bourriaud, Nicholas. 2002 (1998). Relational Aesthetics. Simon Pleasance and Fonza Woods translators. Dijon, France: Les Presses du Réel.

[4]  Bourriaud first outlined relational aesthetics in his 2002 Relational Aesthetics plus two other essays from the same year (Nicolas Bourriaud. 2002. Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. Translated by Jeanine Herman. New York: Lukas & Sternberg. &  Nicolas Bourriaud. 2002. Touch: Relational Art from the 1990s to Now. San Francisco: San Francisco Art Institute.).

[5] The central roles of these four circumpolar, Northern Hemisphere  gene pools (apple/pear, cherry/plum/almond, hawthorn, and hazelnut) are well-described. See Renfrew, Jane M. 1973. Palaeoethnobotany: The Prehistoric Food Plants of the Near East and Europe. New York: Columbia University Press; Sauer, Jonathan D. 1993. Historical Geography of Crop Plants: A Select Roster. London: CRC Press; and Zohary, Daniel, Maria Hopf, and Ehud Weiss. 2012. Domestication of Plants in the Old World: The origin and spread of domesticated plants in Southwest Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean Basin. Fourth Edition. New York: Oxford University Press.

[6] Routson, Kanin J., Gayle M. Volk, Christopher M. Richards, Steven E. Smith, Garry Paul Nabhan, and Victoria Whyllie de Echeverria. 2012. Genetic variation and distribution of Pacific crabapple. Journal of the American Society of Horticultural Science 137(5): 325 – 332. http://cals.arizona.edu/research/azalfalf/pdf_pubs/fusca_genetic_variation.pdf

[7] With a huge amount of historic and recent research on wild and traditional apple populations, the following articles illuminate some of the most relevant lines of investigation: Pollan, Michael. 1998. Breaking Ground: The Call of the Wild Apple. The New York Times (November 5, 1998); Robinson, S. P., S. A. Harris, and B. E. Juniper. 2001. Taxonomy of the genus Malus Mill. (Rosaceae) with emphasis on the cultivated apple, Malus domestica Borkh. Plant Systematics and Evolution 226(1-2): 35 – 58;  Coart, Xavier Vekemans, Marinus J M Smulders, Iris Wagner, Johan Van Huylenbroeck, and Erik Van Bockstaele. 2003. Genetic variation in the endangered wild apple (Malus sylvestris (L.) Mill.) in Belgium as revealed by amplified fragment length polymorphism and microsatellite markers. Molecular Ecology 12(4):845-57; Coart, E, S Van Glabeke, M. De Loose,  A.S. Larsen, and I. Roldán-Ruiz. 2006. Chloroplast diversity in the genus Malus: new insights into the relationship between the European wild apple (Malus sylvestris (L.) Mill.) and the domesticated apple (Malus domestica Borkh.). Molecular Ecology 15(8):2171-82. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16780433; Routson, Kanin J. 2012 Malus diversity in wild and agricultural systems. PhD diss. University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona; Schnitzler, Annik, Claire Arnold, Amandine Cornille, Olivier Bachmann, and Christophe Schnitzler. 2014. Wild European Apple (Malus sylvestris (L.) Mill.) Population Dynamics: Insight from Genetics and Ecology in the Rhine Valley. PLOS| One (May 14, 2014) http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0096596 and Glausiusz, Josie . 2014. Apples of Eden: Saving the Wild Ancestor of Modern Apples – The original apples still grow in Central Asia, but are threatened with extinction. National Geographic (MAY 09, 2014). http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/apples-of-eden-saving-the-wild-ancestor-of-modern-apples/

[8] Because of so much hybridization, Prunus taxonomies in North America are incomplete with some recent work for Europe: Hanelt, Peter. 1997.  European wild relatives of Prunus fruit crops. Bocconea 7: 401-408. http://www.herbmedit.org/bocconea/7-401.pdf In both Europe, especially Switzerland, and in North America, including in the Fraser Canyon, excavations of cherry pits have highlighted to archaeologists the central role of this fruit in diets and health. For example, see Pollmann, Britta, Stefanie Jacomet, and Angela Schlumbaum 2005. Morphological and genetic studies of waterlogged Prunus species from the Roman Vicus Tasgetium (Eschenz, Switzerland). Journal of Archaeological Science. 32(10):1471–1480. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440305000853 . Also see, Tavaud, M., A. Zanetto, J. L. David, F Laigret and E. Dirlewanger. 2004. Genetic relationships between diploid and allotetraploid cherry species (Prunus avium, Prunus x gondouinii and Prunus cerasus). Heredity 93(6): 631–638; Teeling, Claire. 2012. In situ conservation of wild cherry (Prunus avium L.) in Europe. Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/4390/; and Teeling, C., N. Maxted and B. V. Ford-Lloyd. 2012. The challenges of modelling species distribution: A case study of wild cherry (Prunus avium L.) in Europe. in Agrobiodiversity Conservation: Securing the Diversity of Crop Wild Relatives and Landraces. Nigel Maxted, Mohammad E. Dulloo, Brian V. Ford-Lloyd, Lothar Frese, Jose M. Iriondo, and Miguel A. A. Pinheiro de Carvalho. Egham, Surrey UK: CABI. 29 – 35.

[9] With only two very similar species of hazelnuts or filberts, both cultivated and wild with one in North America and the other in Eurasia, contemporary research is slow and is mostly more in plant ecology rather than crop studies such as in the following discussion: Campa, Ana, Noemí Trabanco, Elena Pérez-Vega1, Mercé Rovira and Juan J. Ferreira. 2011. Genetic relationship between cultivated and wild hazelnuts (Corylus avellana L.) collected in northern Spain. Plant Breeding 130(3): 360–366. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1439-0523.2010.01835.x/abstract

[10] For an animation of the shifting land mass of Beringia throughout the latter part of the last ice age and more recently as it was submerged by rising seas, see Manley, W.F., 2002, Postglacial Flooding of the Bering Land Bridge: A Geospatial Animation: INSTAAR, University of Colorado, v1, http://instaar.colorado.edu/QGISL/bering_land_bridge .

[11] Concetta Burgarella, Adeline Barnaud, Ndjido Ardo Kane, Frédérique Jankowski, Nora Scarcelli, Claire Billot, Yves Vigouroux, and Cécile Berthouly-Salazar. 2019. Adaptive Introgression: An Untapped Evolutionary Mechanism for Crop Adaptation. Frontiers of Plant Science (01 February 2019). https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2019.00004/full For one example of the many forms of apple introgression, see, Coart, E, S Van Glabeke, M. De Loose,  A.S. Larsen, and I. Roldán-Ruiz. 2006. Chloroplast diversity in the genus Malus: new insights into the relationship between the European wild apple (Malus sylvestris (L.) Mill.) and the domesticated apple (Malus domestica Borkh.). Molecular Ecology 15(8):2171-82. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16780433

[12] Hajjar, Reem and Toby Hodgkin. 2007. The use of wild relatives in crop improvement: A survey of developments over the last 20 years. Euphytica 156: 1 – 13 and Kole, Chittaranjan (editor). 2011. Wild Crop Relatives: Genomic and Breeding Resources – Temperate Fruits. New York: Springer.

[13] An introduction to the conceptual framework of indigenous ecological legacies is sketched in, Mann, Charles C. 2005. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Knopf. For a seminal essay for investigating indigenous plant domestication legacies around the Salish Sea, see Suttles, Wayne P. 2005 Coast Salish Resource Management: Incipient Agriculture? in Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America. Douglas Deur and Nancy J Turner (eds.). 181 – 93. Seattle: University of Washington Press. For further investigations of the evolution of fruit trees around the Salish Sea, see Suttles, Wayne P. 1974. Coast Salish and Western Washington Indians: The Economic Life of the Coast Salish of Haro and Rosario Straits. New York: Garland; Moss, Madonna L, Dorthy M Peteet, and Cathy Whitlock. 2007. Mid-Holocene culture and climate on the Northwest coast of North America. in Climate Change and Cultural Dynamics: A Global Perspective on Mid-Holocene Transitions. David G. Anderson, Kirk A Maasch and Daniel H Sandweiss (editors). 491 – 529. San Diego: Elsevier and Academic Press; Dana Lepofsky and Kenneth P. Lertzman’s 2008 Documenting ancient plant management in the Northwest of North America (Botany 86: 129 – 145); Meltzer, David J. 2009. First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America. Berkeley, California: University of California Press and. Senos, Rene, Frank Lake, Nancy J Turner, and Dennis Martinez. 2006. Traditional ecological knowledge and restoration practice in the Pacific Northwest. in Encyclopedia for Restoration of Pacific Northwest Ecosystems. Dean Apostal (editor). Washington DC: Island. 393 – 426.

[14] The following are two key discussions on domestication processes as part of human political economies and culture: Renfrew, Jane M. 1973. Palaeoethnobotany: The Prehistoric Food Plants of the Near East and Europe and Zohary, Daniel, Maria Hopf, and Ehud Weiss. 2012. Domestication of Plants in the Old World.

[15] Turner, Nancy J., Łukasz Jakub Łuczaj, Paola Migliorini, Andrea Pieroni, Angelo Leandro Dreon, Linda Enrica Sacchetti, and Maurizio G. Paoletti. 2011. Edible and Tended Wild Plants, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Agroecology. Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences 30: 198–225. See pages 216 and 217.

[16] Douglas Deur and Nancy J. Turner. 2005. in Introduction: Reconstructing indigenous resource management, Reconstructing the history of an idea. Keeping It Living. 3 – 34. See page 3.

[17] Routson, Kanin J., Gayle M. Volk, Christopher M. Richards, Steven E. Smith, Garry Paul Nabhan, and Victoria Whyllie de Echeverria. 2012. Genetic variation and distribution of Pacific crabapple. Journal of the American Society of Horticultural Science 137(5): 325 – 332. http://cals.arizona.edu/research/azalfalf/pdf_pubs/fusca_genetic_variation.pdf  See page 328 plus herbarium samples from parts of California more southerly and inland, extending to the Cascade Range Foothills and the Sierra Nevada foothills, described in

http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/get_cpn.pl?Malus%20fusca  including

http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/new_detail.pl?RSA86807

Consortium of California Herbaria (on file Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden:

Specimen number: RSA86807; Determination: Malus fusca; More information: Jepson Online Interchange;  Collector, number, date F. W. Peirson, 1991, Jul 10 1908; County Tulare;  Locality: Divide between Nelson and the Little Kern River, Seirra Nevada.

[18] Wyllie de Echeverria. 2013. Moolks (Pacific crabapple, Malus fusca) on the North Coast of British Columbia: Knowledge and Meaning in Gitga’at Culture. Thesis for a MASTER OF SCIENCE in the School of Environmental Studies, University of Victoria, British Columbia. 2013-05-07 http://hdl.handle.net/1828/4596. See page 4 and  Routson et al. 2012. Genetic variation and distribution of Pacific crabapple.. See pages 329 and 330.

[19] Wyllie de Echeverria. 2013. Moolks (Pacific crabapple, Malus fusca) on the North Coast of British Columbia. See abstract.

[20] Wyllie de Echeverria. 2013. Moolks (Pacific crabapple, Malus fusca) on the North Coast of British Columbia. See abstract.

[21] At least part of the diversity of crabapples in the region is phenotypic and related to site and cultural variation. Wyllie de Echeverria  noted that, “Each variety was said to grow in different parts of the estuary and river system at the fall harvesting camp, but several of these variety-specific areas were located relatively closely to each other (i.e. within 100 m). Moolks found outside these specific harvesting locations were often classified as the sm-moolks variety, since sm-moolks refers generally to any moolks not classified as being in one of the other four varieties.” (Wyllie de Echeverria. 2013. Moolks (Pacific crabapple, Malus fusca) on the North Coast of British Columbia: Knowledge and Meaning in Gitga’at Culture. See page 55.  Phenotypic variation is also suggested by the details provided by elder, Elizabeth Dundas, in her discussion of transplanting of a type of crab-apple (Wyllie de Echeverria. 2013 See page 62.)

[22] Wyllie de Echeverria. 2013. Moolks (Pacific crabapple, Malus fusca) on the North Coast of British Columbia: Knowledge and Meaning in Gitga’at Culture. See pages 101 and 102. Then she elaborated on the Asian affinities noting, “”Based on molecular evidence, the most recent classification scheme places M. fusca in Section Sorbomalus, Series Kansuensis…” This portion of the apple gene pool also includes the species M. kansuensis (Batalin) C.K. Schneid., M. toringoides (Rehder) Hughes, and M. transitoria (Batalin) C.K. Schneid. (Robinson et al., 2001), all of which are native to Asia.” See page 102.

[23] ibid. See page 2.

[24] ibid. See pages 60 – 64.

[25] ibid. See page 54.

[26] ibid. See page 92.

[27] ibid. See pages 94 to 100.

[28] ibid. See pages 38 and 39.

[29] Proust, Marcel. 1956. Swann’s Way. (C. K. Scott Moncrieff trans.). New York: Random House. See page 209.

[30] Jacques, Dominique, Kristine Vandermijnsbrugge, Sébastein Lemaire, Adriana Antofie and Marc Lateur. 2009. Natural Distribution and Variability of Wild Apple (Malus Sylvestris) in Belgium. Belgian Journal of Botany 142(1): 39-49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20794670 and Iris Wagner, W.D. Maurer, P. Lemmen, H.P. Schmitt, M. Wagner, M. Binder and P. Patzak. 2017. Hybridization and Genetic Diversity in Wild Apple (Malus sylvestris (L.) MILL) from Various Regions in Germany and from Luxembourg. Silvae Genetica 63(3):81-94. https://www.sciendo.com/article/10.1515/sg-2014-0012#

[31] Proust, Marcel. 1956. Swann’s Way. (C. K. Scott Moncrieff trans.). See page  210.

[32] Marcel Proust. (1913) 2002. Swann’s Way. (Lydia Davis translation). New York: Penguin. See page 149. For another of Proust’s description of an apple orchard, see Marcel Proust. 2003 (1993, 1919) Within A Budding Grove. (In Search of Lost Time Volume II). (C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright translators). New York: Random House / Modern Library. pages 390 and 391.

[33] Marcel Proust. 2003 (1992, 1921). The Guermantes Way. (In Search of Lost Time Volume III). (C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright translators). New York: Random House / Modern Library. See 203 – 212.

[34] Marcel Proust. (1913) 2002. Swann’s Way. (Lydia Davis translation). See page 189.

[35] Proust, Marcel. 1956. Swann’s Way. (C. K. Scott Moncrieff trans.). See page 497.

[36] Douglas Deur and Nancy J. Turner. 2005. in Introduction: Reconstructing indigenous resource management, Reconstructing the history of an idea. in Keeping It Living.  3 – 34. See page 3 to 27 especially page 8.

[37] James McDonald. 2005. Cultivating in the Northwest: Early accounts of Tsimshian horticulture. In Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America. 240 – 73.

[38] Douglas Deur and Nancy J. Turner. 2005. in Introduction: Reconstructing indigenous resource management, Reconstructing the history of an idea. in Keeping It Living. 3 – 34. See pages 22.

[39] Nancy J. Turner. 2014. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume One. Montreal: McGill – Queen’s University Press. See pages 229 – 230.

[40] Wyllie de Echeverria, Victoria Rawn. 2013. Moolks (Pacific crabapple, Malus fusca) on the North Coast of British Columbia: Knowledge and Meaning in Gitga’at Culture. See pages 40 to 42 and 56 to 60.

[41] Douglas Deur and Nancy J. Turner. 2005. Conclusions. in Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America. 331 – 342. See page 336.

[42] Douglas Deur and Nancy J. Turner. 2005. in Introduction: Reconstructing indigenous resource management, Reconstructing the history of an idea. in Keeping It Living. 3 – 34. See page 27.

[43] Nancy J. Turner, Robin Smith, and James T. Jones. 2005. “A fine line between two nations” Ownership patterns for plant resources among Northwest Coast indigenous peoples. in Keeping It Living. 151 – 178. See pages 172 – 73.

[44] ibid. See pages 172 – 73.

[45] One of the more documented of these First Nations efforts to protect traditional orchards was in British Columbia in the submissions to 1913-16 McKenna-McBride Royal Commission. (Douglas Deur and Nancy J. Turner. 2005. in Introduction: Reconstructing indigenous resource management, Reconstructing the history of an idea. Keeping It Living. 3 – 34. See page 28.)

[46] Nancy J. Turner. 2014. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume One. See pages 228 – 9.

[47] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. See pages 149 – 50 .

[48] Douglas Deur and Nancy J. Turner. 2005. in Introduction: Reconstructing indigenous resource management, Reconstructing the history of an idea. in Keeping It Living. 3 – 34. See page 3 to 27.

[49] ibid. See page 14.

[50] ibid. See pages 3 to 8.

[51] In north-western North America, few First Nations ever really stopped stewardship over their territories. But before the 1960s, indigenous governments and family had to be stealth to avoid racist laws and violence. In the second half of the twentieth century, there were increasing instances of public challenges extending to blockades. As a child in a Métis family, that travelled across north-western Canada for century, and growing up in a majority W̱SÁNEĆ (Salish) community, I was part of W̱JOȽEȽP (Tsartlip) programs for children as part of rebuilding their educational infrastructure after evicting a Jesuit day school for Indians that was later the subject of a number of successful trials about horrific sexual abuse. Part of that early education of mine, parallel to Grades 1 to 3 elementary school education, saw some of the stewardship, management, and cultivation practices mentioned in this essay.

[52] Wyllie de Echeverria. 2013. Moolks (Pacific crabapple, Malus fusca) on the North Coast of British Columbia: Knowledge and Meaning in Gitga’at Culture. See page 47.

[53] ibid. See page 48.

[54] Nancy J. Turner. 2014. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume One. See page 273.

[55] Nancy J. Turner. 2014. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume One. See page 65.

[56] Nancy J. Turner. 2014. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume One. Montreal: McGill – Queen’s University Press. See page 71.

[57] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See page 123.

[58] Nancy J. Turner. 2014. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume One. See page 273.

[59] ibid. See pages 302 – 3.

[60] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See page 437.

[61] Nancy J. Turner. 2014. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume One. See page 424.

[62] Nancy J. Turner and Sandra Peacock. 2005. Solving the perennial paradox: Ethnobotanical evidence for plant resource management on the Northwest Coast. in Keeping It Living. 101 – 150. See page 115. Also see, Nancy J. Turner. 2014. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume One pages 99 and 108-10.

[63] Nancy J. Turner. 2014. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume One. See page 273.

[64] ibid. See pages 294 – 5 and 345.

[65] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See page 124.

[66] ibid.

[67] ibid. See page 437 with note 32.

[68] ibid.

[69] Nancy J. Turner. 2014. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume One. See page 272.

[70] ibid. See page 136.

[71] ibid. See page 307.

[72] Nancy J. Turner and Sandra Peacock. 2005. Solving the perennial paradox: Ethnobotanical evidence for plant resource management on the Northwest Coast. in Keeping It Living. 101 – 150. See page 147.

[73] ibid. See pages 118 – 19.

[74] Nancy J. Turner and Sandra Peacock. 2005. Solving the perennial paradox: Ethnobotanical evidence for plant resource management on the Northwest Coast. in Keeping It Living. 101 – 150. See page 117.

[75] For the Haisla, Pruning was done in two ways. First, the trees were pruned to strip away old spent branches and to stimulate new growth. “Old people would [then] cut the branches from the top…this would ensure that there were lots next year…just cut the ones that had lots of fruit, not all of them” (Davis, A with B. Wilson, and B. Compton. 1995. Salmonberry Blossoms in the New Year. Some Culturally Significant Plants of the Haisla Known to Occur Within the Greater Kitlope Ecosystems. Kitamaat, British Columbia: Nanakila Press. See page 29 and Turner, N.J., and S. Peacock. 2005. Solving the Perennial Paradox: Ethnobotanical Evidence for Plant Resource Management on the Northwest Coast. In Keeping It Living. 101-50. See page 121 and James McDonald. 2005. Cultivating in the Northwest: Early accounts of Tsimshian horticulture. In Keeping It Living. 240 – 73. See page 251. Also see, Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See pages 196 – 98.

[76] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See page 189.

[77] Nancy J. Turner and Sandra Peacock. 2005. Solving the perennial paradox: Ethnobotanical evidence for plant resource management on the Northwest Coast. in Keeping It Living. 101 – 150. See pages 120 – 24.

[78] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See pages 211 – 212.

[79] Wyllie de Echeverria. 2013. Moolks (Pacific crabapple, Malus fusca) on the North Coast of British Columbia: Knowledge and Meaning in Gitga’at Culture. See page 37.

[80] James McDonald. 2005. Cultivating in the Northwest: Early accounts of Tsimshian horticulture. In Keeping It Living. 240 – 73. See page 251.

[81] Nancy J. Turner, Douglas Deur, and Dana Lepofsky. 2013. Plant management systems of British Columbia’s first peoples. BC Studies 179: 107 – 33. See pages 123 and Nancy J. Turner and Sandra Peacock. 2005. Solving the perennial paradox: Ethnobotanical evidence for plant resource management on the Northwest Coast. in Keeping It Living. 101 – 150. See pages 126 and 27.

[82] Some research by Richard Hebda describes indications of burning going back to 5,000 bp though widespread ecological impacts are more definitive by the late Holocene (3,000 bp to present). (Nancy J. Turner. 2014. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume One. Montreal: McGill – Queen’s University Press. See pages 82.)

[83] To stimulate growth, Native hazelnut groves were sometimes burned on the Gulf Islands. Nancy J. Turner and Sandra Peacock. 2005. Solving the perennial paradox: Ethnobotanical evidence for plant resource management on the Northwest Coast. in Keeping It Living. 101 – 150. See page 140.

[84] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See pages 198 and 214 to 2177.

[85] Nancy J. Turner and Sandra Peacock. 2005. Solving the perennial paradox: Ethnobotanical evidence for plant resource management on the Northwest Coast. in Keeping It Living. 101 – 150. See page 127. For a  more regional overview of burning, see Lepofsky, Dana and Kenneth P. Lertzman. 2005 Documenting pre-contact plant management on the Northwest Coast. An example of prescribed burning in the central and upper Fraser Valley, British Columbia. in Keeping it Living. 218 – 39.

[86] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See page 198.

[87] James McDonald. 2005. Cultivating in the Northwest: Early accounts of Tsimshian horticulture. In Keeping It Living. pages 240 – 73. See page 250.

[88] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See page 189.

[89] In north-western North-America at least three tree species were regularly transplanted: saskatoon berry, hazelnut, and red cedar. ibid. See pages 203 – 4 and page 365.

[90] Wyllie de Echeverria. 2013. Moolks (Pacific crabapple, Malus fusca) on the North Coast of British Columbia: Knowledge and Meaning in Gitga’at Culture. See pages 38 and 39.

[91] James McDonald. 2005. Cultivating in the Northwest: Early accounts of Tsimshian horticulture. In Keeping It Living. 240 – 73.

[92] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See pages 189 and 365.

[93] Nancy J. Turner and Sandra Peacock. 2005. Solving the perennial paradox: Ethnobotanical evidence for plant resource management on the Northwest Coast. in Keeping It Living. 101 – 150. See page 101.

[94] Kenneth M. Ames. 2005.Intensification of food production on the Northwest Coast and elsewhere. in Keeping It Living. 67 – 100. See pages 67 and 75.

[95] Wyllie de Echeverria. 2013. Moolks (Pacific crabapple, Malus fusca) on the North Coast of British Columbia: Knowledge and Meaning in Gitga’at Culture. See pages 40 – 42 and 56 to 60.

[96] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See page 212.

[97] “[Apple] Fruit is distributed by animal vectors…including humans.”  Victoria Wyllie de Echeverria. 2013. Moolks (Pacific crabapple, Malus fusca) on the North Coast of British Columbia: Knowledge and Meaning in Gitga’at Culture. See page 104.

[98] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See pages 189 and 206.

[99] Douglas Deur and Nancy J. Turner. 2005. in Introduction: Reconstructing indigenous resource management, Reconstructing the history of an idea. in Keeping It Living. 3 – 34. See pages 16 – 17.

[100] James McDonald. 2005. Cultivating in the Northwest: Early accounts of Tsimshian horticulture. In Keeping It Living. 240 – 73. See page 246.

[101] Nancy J. Turner and Sandra Peacock. 2005. Solving the perennial paradox: Ethnobotanical evidence for plant resource management on the Northwest Coast. in Keeping It Living. 101 – 150. See page 133.

[102] ibid. See page 127.

[103] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See page 91.

[104] Nancy J. Turner and Sandra Peacock. 2005. Solving the perennial paradox: Ethnobotanical evidence for plant resource management on the Northwest Coast. in Keeping It Living. 101 – 150. See pages 130 – 32.

[105] ibid. See pags 132 – 34.

[106] Nancy J. Turner, Robin Smith, and James T. Jones. 2005. “A fine line between two nations” Ownership patterns for plant resources among Northwest Coast indigenous peoples. in Keeping It Living. 151 – 178. See page 154.

[107] ibid. See page 153.

[108] Douglas Deur and Nancy J. Turner. 2005. in Introduction: Reconstructing indigenous resource management, Reconstructing the history of an idea. Keeping It Living. 3 – 34. See page 19.

[109] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See page 189.

[110] Nancy J. Turner, Robin Smith, and James T. Jones. 2005. “A fine line between two nations” Ownership patterns for plant resources among Northwest Coast indigenous peoples. in Keeping It Living. pages 151 – 178. See page 153.

[111] ibid. See page 152.

[112] ibid. See page 151.

[113] ibid. See page 166.

[114] ibid. See page 167.

[115] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See pages 90 and 91 .

[116] ibid.

[117] Nancy J. Turner, Robin Smith, and James T. Jones. 2005. “A fine line between two nations” Ownership patterns for plant resources among Northwest Coast indigenous peoples. in Keeping It Living. 151 – 178. See page 175.

[118] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See page 345.

[119] ibid. See page 212 -14.

[120] ibid. See page 271.

[121] ibid. See page 306.

[122] ibid. See page 264.

[123] ibid. See page 344.

[124] ibid. See page 272.

[125] The source for the Coyote and Grizzly Bear and the Mosquito stories was “Paul” who lived near the infamous St. Eugène Mission in south-eastern British Columbia and who shared them in 1891. (Franz Boas editor. 1918. Kutenai Tales. Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 59. Washington: Government Printing Office. See pages v, 5 to 8, and 25 and 26.)

[126] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See page 290.

[127] Lucy R. Lippard. 1998. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: The New Press. See page 72.

[128] Nancy J. Turner. 2014 Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. See pages 410 – 11.

[129] Smithson, Robert. 1973 (1996). Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape. in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Jack Flam (ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. 157–171. See page 160.  http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic641765.files/Smithson%20-%20Frederick%20Law%20Olmsted%20and%20the%20Dialectical%20Landscape.pdf

[130] Lippard, Lucy R. 2014. Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West. New York: The New Press. See page See page 88.

[131] Viegener, Matias. 2015. Speculative Futures: Social practice, cognitive capitalism and / or the triumph of capital. in Informal Market Worlds: The Architecture of Economic Pressure. Peter Mörtenböeck and Helge Mooshammer (eds.). Rotterdam: nai010.

http://mviegener.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Viegener-Matias-Speculative-Futures-Social-Practice-Cognitive-Capitalism-andor-the-Triumph-of-Capital.pdf

[132] Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art . 2015. A Film by James Crump Featuring Germano Celant, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Vito Acconci, Virginia Dwan, Charles Ross, Paula Cooper, Willoughby Sharp, Pamela Sharp, Lawrence Weiner, Carl Andre, Gianfranco Gorgoni and Harald Szeemann. Running time 72 minutes. Summitridge Pictures and RSJC LLC. http://troublemakersthefilm.com/about/ Also see, Su Wu. 2015. A New Documentary Sheds Light on the ‘Troublemakers’ of Land Art. New York Times (MAY 4, 2015).  http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/land-art-smithson-holt-heizer-troublemakers-movie/?_r=0

[133] Suzaan Boettger. 2002. Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. Berkeley: University of California Press. See pages 184 to 225.

[134] Lippard, Lucy R. 2014. Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West. See page 87.

[135] Smithson, Robert. 1966 (1996). Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape. in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. 157–171. See page 160.

[136] Suzaan Boettger. 2002. Earthworks. See page 207.

[137] Lippard, Lucy R. 2014. Undermining. See page 83.

[138] Lippard, Lucy R. 2014. Undermining. See page 89.

[139] Mignolo, Walter and Rolando Vázquez. 2013. Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings. Social Text: Periscope (July 15th, 2013).

[140] Lippard, Lucy R. 2014. Undermining. See pages 81 to 93.

[141] Lippard, Lucy R. 2014. Undermining. See page 90.

[142] Demos, T. J. 2015. Decolonizing Nature: Making the World Matter. Social Text Periscope (2015 March 8 Radical Materialism issue) : 14 – 25.  See page 15.

[143] Suzaan Boettger. 2002. Earthworks. Page 66.

[144] Lauder, Adam. 2015. Glue Pour, 1970: Robert Smithson’s Vancouver sojourn. Canadian Art (Summer 2015): 90 – 94. See page 92.

[145] Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis (editors). 2005 (1998). Land and Environmental Art. London: Phaidon. See pages 96 – 97.

[146] Lauder, Adam. 2015. Glue Pour, 1970: Robert Smithson’s Vancouver sojourn. See pages 90 and 91. In addition, I reviewed the photographic documentation of the event, taken by Vancouver artist Christos Dikeakos, in 2011.

[147] “One of the reasons Smithson still seems so relevant is that his work responded so directly to a nostalgic trend that arose in both American studies and American environmentalism during the 1950s and 1960s. On the whole, it was a nostalgia for nineteenth-century pastoralism…To counteract this elegiac tendency Smithson developed a “toxic discourse” in which he treated the nineteenth-century landscape as a totally engineered prototype for the twentieth.” Menard, Andrew. 2014. Robert Smithson’s Toxic Tour of Passaic, New Jersey. Journal of American Studies 48(04):1019-1040.  See abstract.

[148] Smithson, Robert. 1973 (1996). Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. 157–171.

[149] Mbembe’s conceptions of the multiple links between colonialism and violence was first outlined in a 1990 essay (Achille Mbembe. 1990. Pouvoir, violence et accumulation. Politique africaine 39: 7 – 24.) and this expanded in subsequent translations such as, Mbembe, Achille. 2001 On the Postcolony. A. M. Berrett, Janet Roitman, Murray Last, Achille Mbembe, Steven Rendall (translators). Berkeley: University of California Press.

[150]  Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge UK: The MIT Press. See page 28.

[151] Dennis Oppenheim, “Directed Seeding” and “Cancelled Crop 1969 Wheatfield, harvester 267 metres x 154 metres, Finisterwolde, Holland. in Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis (editors). 2005 (1998). Land and Environmental Art. London: Phaidon. See pages 50, 186, and 189.

[152] Hans Haacke “Fog, Flooding, Erosion” 1969, Seattle and Hans Haacke “Rhine-Water Purification Plant 1972, Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld in Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis (editors). 2005 (1998). Land and Environmental Art. See pages 139 and 141. And for context, see Nisbet, James. 2014. Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

[153] Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis (editors). 2010. Land and Environmental Art. See page 142.

[154] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Landscape; Sonfist, Alan, Wolfgang Becker, and Robert Rosenblum. 2004. Nature, The End of Art: Environmental Landscapes. New York: Distributed Art Publishers and Landi, Ann. 2011. Separating the Trees from the Forest: Alan Sonfist has built a career as an urban land artist. ARTnews (Summer 2011) (POSTED 08/15/11 5:58 PM). http://www.artnews.com/2011/08/15/separating-the-trees-from-the-forest/

[155] Beuys, Joseph. 1982. 7000 Eichen – Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung  /  7000 Oaks – City Forestation Instead of City Administration. Kassel, Hesse: documenta 7 and Beuys, Joseph. 1982. Richard Demarco, “Conversations with Artists.” Studio International 195 (996) (September 1982): 46.

[156] Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis (editors). 2010. Land and Environmental Art. See pages 162-3 (“The Meadow” 1986 – present).

[157] Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis (editors). 2010. Land and Environmental Art. See page 168 (Revival Field, Pig’s Eye Landfill 1990-3).

[158] Oliver Kellhammer. n.d. Botanical Interventions-Open Source Landscape and Community Repair. http://www.oliverk.org/sites/default/files/live.pdf

[159] Benner, Ron. 2008. Gardens of a Colonial Present / Jardins d’un Present Colonial. London, Ontario: London Museum.

[160] Linklater, Duane. 2012. Untitled (A Blueberry Garden for Bard College). 12 blueberry bushes, garden implements, soil, mulch, wood, rope. Variable dimensions. http://www.duanelinklater.com/index.php?/a-blueberry-garden-/  

[161] Ingram, Gordon Brent. 2013. Repopulating contentious territory: Recent strategies for indigenous North-west Coast site-based & public art. FUSE (Toronto) 36(4): 7 – 8.

[162] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. See pages 203 – 205.

[163] Jordan Abel. 2014 Un/Inhabited. Vancouver: Talon / Project Space. See page 58.

[164] Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and Sophie McCall. 2015. Introduction. in The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation. Gabrielle Hill and Sophie McCall (editors). 1 – 19. Winnipeg: ARP Books. See page 12.

[165] Jeannine Tang. 2015. Look again: Subjectivity, sovereignty, and Andrea Geyer’s “Spiral Lands.”in Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics. Emily Eliza Scott & Kirsten Swenson (eds). Berkeley: University of California Press. 93 – 109. See page 95.

[166] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions. See page ix.

[167] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass. See page 384.

[168] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2017. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. See page 196.

[169] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2017. As We Have Always Done. See page 208.

[170] Dylan Robinson and Keren Zaiontz. 2015. Public art in Vancouver and the civic infrastructure of redress. in The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation. Gabrielle Hill and Sophie McCall (editors). 22 – 51. Winnipeg: ARP Books. See page 48.

[171] Alice McSherry, Paul Moss, and Amba J. Sepie. 2021. Eating the Sun. e-flux (August 2021).

https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/survivance/411277/eating-the-sun/

[172] ibid.

[173] Cuauhtémoc Medina. 2005. High curios. in Brian Jugen. (Brian Jugen & Daina Augaitis authors). Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre / Vancouver Art Gallery. 27 – 39. See pages 35 – 37.

[174] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2017. As We Have Always Done. See pages 200 to 210.

[175] Altieri, Miguel A. 2018 (1987, 1995). Agroecology: The Science Of Sustainable Agriculture (Second Edition Paperback). Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.

[176] The most important of the original documents on permaculture, effectively manifestoes, outline Mollison’s partial critiques of colonial Australian agriculture: Mollison, Bill. 1988. Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual. Stanley, Tasmania: Tagari Publications and Mollison, Bill. 1979. Permaculture Two: Practical Design for Town and Country in Permanent Agriculture. Stanley, Tasmania: Tagari Publications.

[177] The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. 2009. 13 Attitudes. 9th Experiment: C.R.A.S.H: A post capitalist A to Z. London: https://www.degrowth.info/fr/library/13-attitudes  

[178] Kelly, Caleb and Ross Gibson. 2010. Contemporary Art & The Noise of TENDING. Interference A Journal of Audio Culture (Dublin) 4. http://www.interferencejournal.org/the-noise-of-tending/

[179] Reynolds, Richard. 2008. Guerrilla Gardening. London: Bloomsbury.

[180] Lonny Shavelson. 2012. Guerrilla Grafters Bring Forbidden Fruit Back To City Trees. National Public Radio (April 7, 2012).

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/04/07/150142001/guerrilla-grafters-bring-forbidden-fruit-back-to-city-trees

[181] Burns, David, Matias Viegener and Austin Young. 2005. FALLENFRUIT Manifesto. http://www.fallenfruit.org/wp-content/uploads/FF-manifesto-handout.pdf . Also see, Goodyear, Dana. 2012.  Eat A Free Peach: Mapping “Public Fruit.” The New Yorker (March 12, 2012). http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/eat-a-free-peach-mapping-public-fruit

[182] Thompson, Claire. 2012. Into the woods: Seattle plants a public food forest. Grist. http://grist.org/urban-agriculture/into-the-woods-seattle-plants-a-public-food-forest/

[183] Kent’s Flora domestica effectively jump-started the modern urban ecology movement (Kent, Elizabeth. 1823. Flora domestica, Or, The portable flower-garden: with directions for the treatment of plants in pots and illustrations from the works of the poets. London: Taylor and Hessey. https://archive.org/details/floradomesticaor00kent). Daisy Hay recorded Elizabeth Kent’s presence in the Young Romantics in Geneva in her late 20s as one of the oldest females in the group (Hay. Daisy. 2010. Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. See pages 284 – 287]).

[184] Germano Celant. 1967. Arte Povera: Notes on a guerrilla war. Flash Art 5 (November–December 1967). https://flash—art.com/article/germano-celant-arte-povera-notes-on-a-guerrilla-war/ . Also see Celant, Germano. 2011 Arte Povera: Histories and Protagonists. Milan: Electa

[185] ART: Arte Povera. http://www.dreamideamachine.com/?p=968 (2022 February 9)

[186] Boscagli, Maurizia. 2014. Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism.  New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

[187] The dearth of outdoor, site-based installations with living materials in the seminal 1967 – 75 works of Arte Povera was confirmed through reviewing the following catalogues: Celant, Germano, Tommaso Trini, Jean-Christophe Amman, Harald Szeemann and Ida Gianelli. 2001. Arte povera. Milan: Charta; Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. 2005. Arte Povera. London: Phaidon; Flood, Richard, and Morris, Frances. 2001. Zero to infinity: Arte povera 1962-1972. London: Tate Publishing; Lista, Giovanni. 2006. L’Arte Povera. Milano: Cinq Continents Éditions; and Lumley, Robert. 2004. Arte Povera. London: Tate Publishing.

[188] Honoré, Tiphaine. 2012. Agroforestry, the traditional practice of growing crops around trees, is regaining popularity in parts of France. Guardian [London] (21 August, 2012).

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/21/agroforestry-france-farming-revival

[189] Eliza, Emily. 2015. Earth Seeing. Social Text Periscope (2015 March 8 Radical Materialism issue). http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/earth-seeing/

[190] Benjamin Vogt. 2017. A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future. Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society. See page 12.

[191] New kinds of theorizing for these site-based works increasingly view these aesthetic currents as responses to crises. See Natural World Museum. 2007. Art in Action: Nature, Creativity, and Our Collective Future. San Rafael, California: Earth Aware Editions and Paul Ardenne. 2018. Un Art Écologique – Création Plasticienne Et Anthropocène. Brussels: Bord De L’eau / La Muette.

[192] Wark, Mckenzie. 2015. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso.

[193] Donna Haraway. 2016. Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene. e-flux journal 75.

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/

[194] Marques, Pedro Neves. 2015. SUPERCOMMUNITY – Look Above, the Sky is Falling: Humanity Before and After the End of the World.  e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale (Apocalypsis, May 23rd 2015—Day 14).

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/65/336645/look-above-the-sky-is-falling-humanity-before-and-after-the-end-of-the-world/

[195] Michel Serres. 1995. The Natural Contract [1990]. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson translators. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. See page 39. http://www.mara-stream.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Michel-Serres_The-Natural-Contract-Michel-Serres.pdf

[196] Demos, T. J. 2015. Decolonizing Nature: Making the World Matter.

[197] Suzaan Boettger. 2002. See pages 185-8.

[198] Keats, Jonathon. 2018. Eco-Art Or Science? Helen And Newton Harrison Are Sculpting Earth Systems To Endure Climate Change. Forbes (August 21, 2018).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2018/08/21/helen-newton-harrison-santa-cruz/#3e4f77207214

[199] Mierle Laderman Ukeles. 2016. Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art. London: Prestel.  Also see Lippard, Lucy R. 2014. Undermining See page 132-3.

[200] “Addressing the Anthropocene is not something to leave in the hands of those in charge, given just how badly the ruling class of our time has mishandled this end of prehistory, this firstly scientific and now belatedly cultural discovery that we all live in a biosphere in a state of advanced metabolic rift. The challenge then is to construct thelabour perspective on the historical tasks of our time.” And later, “Labor finds itself in and against nature. Labor is always firstly in nature, subsumed within a totality greater than itself. Labor is secondly against nature. It comes into being through an effort to bend resisting nature to its purposes.” Wark, McKenzie. 2015. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (On Alexander Bogdanov and Kim Stanley Robinson). e-flux 63. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/molecular-red-theory-for-the-anthropocene-on-alexander-bogdanov-and-kim-stanley-robinson/

[201] Ashley Dawson. 2015. Documenting accumulation by dispossession. in Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics. Emily Eliza Scott & Kirsten Swenson (eds). Berkeley: University of California Press. 161 – 178. See pages 167 to 171.

[202] Brooks, Katherine. 2014. This One Tree Grows 40 Different Types Of Fruit, Is Probably From The Future. The Huffington Post (July 24, 2014). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/24/tree-of-40-fruit_n_5614935.html

[203] Natasha Myers. 2020. How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene. ABC Religion and Ethics (28 Jan 2020).

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/natasha-myers-how-to-grow-liveable-worlds:-ten-not-so-easy-step/11906548?fbclid=IwAR2gGLXraFnagagtB-qtja5-J21DgxM_Nc057e41xKu9-AK3q4ddAD1TwLY

[204] Gallardo, Francisco Javier Fernández. 2014. biodiverCITY, the cocktail book, notes on how to taste soil, bees, ecosystems and networks of organisms — including humans. Else 0 (October 2014): 26 – 35.

[205] Lippard, Lucy R. 2014. Undermining. See page 190.

[206] Joseph Beuys in conversation with Richard Demarco, 1982 (Richard Demarco. 1982. “Joseph Beuys – Conversations with Artists.” Studio International 195 (996) (September 1982): 46.)

[207] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2017. As We Have Always Done. See pages 159-160.

[208] Scott, Emily Eliza and Kirsten Swensen. 2015. Introduction: Contemporary art and the politics of land use. in Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics. Emily Eliza Scott & Kirsten Swenson (eds). Berkeley: University of California Press. 1 – 15. See page 1.

[209] Lippard, Lucy R. 2014. Undermining See pages 175-177. Also see Nato Thompson. 2015. Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism. New York: Independent Curators International / Melville House.

[210] Hal Foster. 1995. The Artist as Ethnographer? in The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers editors. Berkeley: University of California Press. 302 – 309. See page 308.

[211] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2017. As We Have Always Done.  See page 192.

[212] Nato Thompson. 2015. Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Twenty-first Century. New York: Melville House.