A SENSE OF PLACE

I have been thinking lately about place and the sense or meaning of place. I remember a few years ago returning to the Xavante village in Brazil where I grew up and, more specifically, to the little plot of land that I called "home" most of those growing up years. While everything was changed, there were still “landmarks” left of the places I remembered. Large rocks still outlined the foundation of what we called the “old house.” On the space that had been the house where we lived, the only thing left was the cracked remains of cement and brick floors. Hidden within an area now overgrown by shrubs was the thick concrete slab where the gas-engine-powered washing machine once sat. Most amazing were the

A pool in the stream that ran near our home
 had been changed little by the passage of time

mango trees still alive and laid out in the same pattern that I remember from my childhood, their now thick, gnarled trunks providing stately witness to the decades that had passed. And in a wooded area just beyond what had been our yard I found, much to my surprise, the rounded moss-covered rock basin, part of a stream bed, looking very much the way I remembered it. Crystal clear water still moved gently through this space, meandering its way to the flow of the Batovi River, a half mile away.

Returning to this place, now in so many ways changed, I remember observing, exploring, seeking out, noting, every detail and delighting in each lingering hint that reminded me of the way things had once been. In my mind I mapped it out, measuring distances and re-creating each item that had been – houses, trails, the corral, the depression marking what had once been the outhouse, a palm tree no longer there. . .  I felt a sadness, a longing and nostalgia (in Portuguese saudades) for what had been, and yet at the same time there was a sense of calm connectedness, of being in the place where I belong. The feeling of the dry cerrado¹ air; familiar aromas – some sweet, some pungent - of the trees, grasses, and flowers, and of the damp earth along the stream bed; the whispered gurgle of the water; the feel of the hard-packed clay soil and gravel under my feet; the distant call of a lone seriema and the shrill chorus of cicadas. I noted and recognized each one, and it was as if I had never left. I had been away for so long, I have traveled and experienced and lived in so many different places, yet in a sense that is not true of any of those other places, this place is for me home.

My thoughts shift to recent news stories of numerous indigenous groups in Brazil re-claiming, fighting and even now in the 21^st Century dying for land that has been home to their peoples not for one life time but for generations, centuries, millennia. Driven by land, lumber, agricultural – and finally at the base of all money – interests, entire peoples and cultures have been and still are threatened and too often forced from their land. In the case of the Xavante of Mariawatsede in eastern Mato Grosso state, their land was sold right out from under them more than 20 years ago and the entire tribe was flown out by the Brazilian Air Force to be “dumped” at a religious mission. Now, finally, after years of legal and political confrontation, just this year the tribe gained right and ownership to this their land, their place, once again. Other cases in recent months have involved Native Brazilians who, tired of waiting on the empty or bureaucratically delayed promises of government officials have taken things into their own hands and invaded and re-claimed their people's traditional lands. There are also those fighting the construction of enormous hydro-electric projects that if completed would submerge whole villages, resulting in profound changes to both the natural environment as well as ways of life, forcing entire peoples to leave their place. Most famous of these, for the international attention it has gained, is the Brazilian government's Belo Monte dam.

I remember back to my years among the Winnebago People, the Ho Chunk, as well. Although living on designated reservation lands in north-eastern Nebraska for over a century, their sense of home, of belonging is still attached to the land and forests and lakes of central Wisconsin, the millenial homeland that their people had been driven from in the mid-1800s. Over the intervening decades many have actually left the reservation to move back to these ancestral lands.

This sense of place that carries the attachment that we call home, where we feel that we truly belong, runs deep in us as human beings.² It is a multivalent perception of place/space in all of its dimensions and details. We know it by sight, smell, sound, texture, even taste. Perhaps a fusion of the senses . . . and something more, it takes us to a deeper level of human knowing. Felt as a longing/yearning when we are absent, it is replaced by a settled calm and knowing that we are at home, that we belong when we are in that place.

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1The savannah-like biome that occupies much of the plateau region of central Brazil.

2For a helpful brief reflection on this human sense of place, see the blog post on Wendell Berry's “Story of an Old Bucket” at http://anothernathanmyers.com/2011/06/04/wendell-berry-a-story-of-an-old-bucket-and-a-sense-of-place/ , viewed online 06/22/2013.