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Mackenzie

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Workman 1

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Plural

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La Bande 1

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Meech Boakye (BA in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto) is an artist and writer currently based in “Portland, OR.” Their practice is rooted in relationships with flora, fungal, and microbial kin as armatures for learning how to be in a community.


The Eramosa River was carved out as a glacial spillway over 20,000 years ago. It flows through the treaty lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit and the ancestral territory of the Chonnonton (known to some as Attawandaron). Fed by underground springs, it flows along the course of a bedrock moraine south-west into the city of Guelph where it meets the Speed River. Together they flow into the Grand River and the Haldimand Tract treaty lands, the territory of the Haudenosaunee.[^1] The impacts of colonization, industrialization, and capitalist growth are evident along the riverbanks. In the first 100 years of settler colonization in the area, dams, levees, and ponds were constructed along the Eramosa to contain its flow, and many of the surrounding wetlands were drained for farming. Before this, the river was substantially wider, surrounded by low-lying marshy areas that were home to _manoomin_ [^2] and other important wetland species like cattail and native willows. As it winds into Guelph, the Eramosa flows through St. Patrick’s Ward, an industrial and working-class immigrant neighborhood that was once a floodplain. From as early as the 19th century, the riverbanks here were used as a holding place for industry and domestic refuse, and were designated as an official city landfill from 1935 to 1958.                                                                                                       

>###### _A holding place for_
glass, cinders, porcelain, fly ash, fibreglass, domestic refuse, lumber, charred wood, wire, brick, ash, fabric, metals, inorganics, petroleum hydrocarbon contaminants (PHCs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)[^3]

The Eramosa’s history as a landfill is currently unmarked and relatively unknown. In the early ’60s, the City covered the landfilled riverbanks in soil which began a process of rewilding that continues today. Through the decades, they have become botanized by plants, shrubs, and trees which root within their soil. Tree plantings happen yearly, organized by the City and local conservation groups. Many other species arrive in the curious ways that they travel: seeds dispersed by birds, animals, water, and wind, planted by neighbours, or by other means we don’t fully comprehend. If you look closely, fragments of waste are visible in parts of worn footpaths and entwined into the root systems of fallen trees—evidence of its historical and continued [^4] contamination.

Even more subtly, if you walk along the river, you will notice that while less disturbed areas remain home to indigenous plant communities, the landfilled areas are marked by the proliferation of plants from other places that are able to thrive in the poor and contaminated soil. These plants were transplanted to this continent as familiar food, medicine, agricultural aids, “exotic” garden plants, and escaped stowaways. They show up year after year, at times sprayed or injected with herbicides by City staff to slow their spread. Conservationists know these species have real consequences—for instance, without natural predators, they often reduce native biodiversity, growing into coarse monocultures in already disturbed areas—but their distinctive contributions exist alongside these consequences. Many of these plants decompose into new, nutrient-rich layers of soil, support the microbes and fungi in their work underground, and have root systems engaged in the important labour of holding the waste in place, preventing it and its toxins from leaching into the waterway.
                                

>###### _Holding in place_
European buckthorn, white willow, Japanese knotweed, garlic mustard, common plantain, Manitoba maple, ground elder, mullein, ragweed, black swallow-wort, periwinkle

Conservation science’s view of these plants as alien and invasive—in need of control and eradication—reproduces colonial binaries that echo xenophobic and militaristic responses to “foreign” or deviant human bodies. It also espouses a moral agency, an attitude of conquest, to beings that are surviving and reproducing as they were meant to. Resisting this perspective, we propose the term “transplant” for these species, as a way to consider connections between plant and human bodies beyond colonial categorization. Transplant thinking provides a shift in orientation that invites us to think about the interconnections between: plants that have migrated without agency; human bodies that have been transplanted against their will through displacement and enslavement; and cyborgian transfeminist ethics that offer pathways toward radical queer and anti-capitalist futures. While it is necessary to attend to the negative impacts transplant species have on biodiversity and ecosystem health, making kin [^5] with transplants allows us to sit with disturbance, providing modes with which to understand the unique ways we all require each other. [^6]

The two of us met in the summer of 2021, [^7] engaging in conversations in a virtual doc that acted as a repository for ideas, questions, research, and poetic musings. Transplant thinking emerged from these collaborative writings, which were accompanied by on-site relational and material experiments including walking, listening, foraging pigments, and creating decomposing biomaterial offerings. On a cool night just after the equinox, we invited a small group to gather along the Eramosa to share stories and build alliances with transplants. We harvested buckthorn berries to make into ink, considered the medicinal gifts of Japanese knotweed, observed the way the violets had recently arrived within a patch of garlic mustard, and reflected on how the presence of periwinkle has guided researchers to abandoned gravesites of enslaved Black communities. We sat in the dark quiet, around the light of hag’s tapers [^8] dipped in beeswax and lit like torches, and offered gifts. These practices of imagining speculative futures and enacting smallscale forms of remediation have productively complicated our relationships with disturbed sites. 


>###### _Offerings_
elderberry and swamp rose mallow plantings, zinnia and calendula flowers, a poem, blue vervain leaves, beeswax-dipped mullein stems, silence, an ear of corn, hulled walnuts, hair, a blank page, breath, joe-pye weed, evening primrose seeds [^9]

In the midst of climate catastrophe, there lies a strong desire to hold tightly onto the precious things that are left, which might disappear indefinitely within our lifetimes. Changing our relationships with transplant species requires us to contemplate adaptive solutions to such disappearances beyond belligerent eradication, and within deeper time frames. [^10] It asks us not only to build relationships that hold us accountable to the complex histories of degraded lands, but also to think dynamically about what they are becoming as a result. This shift in perspective invites speculative imaginations that further kinships between human and more-than-human neighbours—kinships that allow us to collaborate, heal, and continue on.

[^1]: In 2020–2021, land defenders occupying a site referred to as 1492 Land Back Lane protested a housing development in Caledonia on unceded Six Nations territory as part of long-standing resistance to settler and government land theft in the area. The development was officially canceled in July 2021.
[^2]: Anishnaabemowin: wild rice. This knowledge comes to Christina from a story told to her by Anishnaabekwe nookomis Waabanokwe N’dodem Aijijaak Zhashagi.
[^3]: Waste and contaminants found in Eramosa River Park in recent site testing. MMM Group Limited, _York Road and Eramosa River Parks Site Characterization Report for City of Guelph_, October 2015, https://guelph.ca/wpcontent/uploads/YorkRdEramosaRiverParks_SiteReport.pdf 
[^4]: In 2016, concerns were raised when the Guelph Polymer Distribution Inc. company was found responsible for spilling from rail cars thousands of plastic pellets, which entered the river through storm drains. Also, in 2019, over 4.4 million litres of raw sewage spilled into the Eramosa where the City was installing a new sewer line.
[^5]: From a 2020 talk by Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Learning the Grammar of Animacy: Subject and Object,” we accept Kimmerer’s invitation to use the word kin, a variation of the Anishinaabe aki, meaning “Earthly being” as a foundational perspective of care and respect when writing about land and relational work.
[^6]: Paraphrased from Donna Haraway, _Staying with the Trouble_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016): “Staying with the trouble requires making odd kin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles.”
[^7]: Our collaboration began on a Zoom call initiated by curators Vince Rozario and Mitra Fakhrashrafi for the “Collective Offerings” exhibition at the Art Gallery of Guelph. 
[^8]: A folk name for dried stems of common mullein, _Verbascum thapsus_.
[^9]: "01 Afterwords - Collective Offerings, 2021," updated February 15, 2022, https:// meechboakye.com/Collective-Offerings
[^10]: For instance, garlic mustard is labeled an invasive plant because it releases sinigrin into the soil that inhibits the growth of mycorrhizal fungi and native plant species. However, recent research has found that as populations of garlic mustard age, sinigrin production is reduced until it eventually stops, allowing these native species to move back in. These findings suggest that this plant is actually self-regulating over a longer timeline. Jeffrey A. Evans, Richard A. Lankau, Adam S. Davis, S. Raghu, Douglas A. Landis, “Soil-Mediated Eco-evolutionary Feedbacks in the Invasive Plant _Alliaria petiolata_,” _Functional Ecology_ 30, no. 7 (July 2016): 1053–61.



Writer

By now we understand extraction as the political-ontological basis for the circulation of resources under neoliberal capitalism—and that agents of such appropriation scarcely do enough to respect, heal, and replenish their sources. From sex work and old-growth forests to ghost towns and lost languages, this issue explores artistic and activist practices that interrogate an array of extractive efforts and attempt to demarcate non-extractive modalities. 

Extraction

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Environment

Meech Boakye and Christina Kingsbury discuss how their shared work around the former landfill on the Eramosa River in Guelph led them to interrogate the perceived binary between native and so-called invasive species. 



Header

C Mag

Mâkochî Nîbi Îhonîach (The Land is Close to Death)

About contributors

Subjects

Composition: Transplant Collaborations

Trickle Down

Cooked Earth: Ambivalence in Terracotta