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Reindiginise! Pennines is a network of people across the Pennines working to repair our relationships with our lands. We approach this work through a programme of action which we consider as nine interwoven practices.
Landbathing is immersion in the land. It is inspired by shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing. We recognise that our lands are not just forests, but also moors, bogs, hills, valleys, and plains. By spending time in our lands, simply being and observing, we start to develop an emotional and spiritual dependence on the non-humans around us: plants, insects, soils, waters, rocks, trees, birds, winds, … We allow our roots to unfurl and make contact with the soils on which we live.
Landwriting is about expressing the things we learn with the land, and allowing the land to write, draw, and create through us. Although landwriting builds on landbathing, it is a distinct practice, because there are times to create, and times to simply be. We practice landwriting when we create art in conversation with the land, and our relationships with our lands. As we are landbathing, we learn things from our non-human siblings. When we write and draw about what we learn from our lands, they help us to understand ourselves and each other as well.
Foraging is when we take things from the land. Many of the plants around us can be taken and eaten for food. Foraging is the ultimate form of material dependence on the land: to take the other things that live here and eat them as food so that we can continue to live. We do not forage until we have spent time landbathing and landwriting. We cannot take things from the land until we have made a relationship with them and developed an understanding of each other. Taking things without permission is colonial behaviour. Reindiginising is decolonising. We are seeking to develop relationships of mutual care with our non-human siblings over multiple generations. This includes understanding that we are all food for somebody else, and that all food is a precious gift of life.
After the forage, we come together to cook and feed ourselves. Our food-based practice is inspired by Food Not Bombs. We make vegan food using foraged plants and invite others to join us and eat together. In addition to foraged food, we also divert food waste. The food we cook is vegan because we seek an approach to food which is minimally violent and accessible to all. Sometimes we go out on the streets to make or attend events, and serve free food to anyone who needs or wants it. We are aiming for food sovereignty and food liberation: that we should have control over our own food, and that no one should be hungry.
These attempts to grow our roots, to become more dependent on the land, are themselves rooted in an understanding of the importance of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous ways of life, and Indigenous knowledges. Our meal times are also opportunities for us to learn about different Indigenous peoples around the world.
Once we have discovered and learned about some of the Indigenous peoples around the globe, we will reach out to them to begin conversations, exchanges of greetings and information. We have rebuilt and repaired our relationships with our lands by developing material, conceptual, emotional, and spiritual dependencies on them, which have grown into mutualities. Now we must re/build relationships with the Indigenous communities who have already understood these things for generations, who can help us with continuing to heal and grow, and to whom we owe transformative personal and social reparations.
Probably every Indigenous peoples has at some point been subjected to external violence, discrimination, and oppression. Many have been exterminated by genocide and colonisation. Many today continue to fight, to struggle, every day, for what they have, and for hopes for a freer future. These struggles, of Indigenous peoples against governments and companies seeking to displace and murder them and appropriate their lands as resources, are not independent of our living conditions here in the British Isles. Neither are these struggles separate from these disconnects from our lands which we are seeking to repair, or the daily struggles that we face living under austerity capitalism. We are aware that BAE Systems and other arms companies operate factories on our lands, which build parts of the F-35 fuselages used in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. We are aware that many of our neighbours work for these companies, that they provide ‘education and employment opportunities’. We are also aware that workers have more options for withdrawing their labour when they can become more independent of capital and the state. Because reindigenising is decolonising, it requires becoming imbricated with the struggles of Indigenous peoples around the globe. We do this by simultaneously providing our neighbours with opportunities to shift from dependence on global capitalism to dependence on our home lands, and by working with other local radical groups to directly resist systems of violence and oppression in material solidarity with multiple Indigenous peoples, particularly the Palestinian people.
Our whole programme of action is driven by a lot of theory. Theory is important, but it must be generated from our lived experience, what Sara Ahmed calls “sweaty concepts”. It is for this reason that our programme is so paced, and only now arrives at theory at step eight of nine. It is a slow bend away from the path of the motorway, developing an appreciation for ‘nature’, learning to give and take, eating the plants that grow around us, learning about so many different ways of life and the struggles to maintain them, a growing awareness of the things that through industrial civilisation we have both gained and lost. Until suddenly we realise that we have come a long way away from the motorway, and now we can see it differently. Our theory is consistent with that of total liberation: we seek an end to all oppression. As Warzone Distro point out in their zine ‘How is Veganism Anticolonial?’:
The anticolonial critique reveals [the shared logic of all domination] clearly. Colonialism operates through the same three-step structure: identify difference (the colonized are not European), assert inferiority (they are savage, primitive, uncivilized), justify domination (they must be civilized, their land must be taken, their labor must be exploited). This is the same structure that appears in speciesism. The colonizer and the animal agriculture industry use the same logic. They identify difference, assert inferiority, and use the asserted inferiority to justify domination.
We develop theory almost as a side effect of our other practices, of shifting more of our lives towards something reindigenising. As we start to develop our own personal understandings, and apply these theories to our own lives, this will lead to a diversification of local and networked analysis and action. There are connections from here to fracking at home and water protectors across the ocean on Turtle Island. There are connections to local ownership and control of public infrastructures: transport, water, energy. There are connections to healthcare, self-defence, housing. We live on our land, we live through our land. Everything we experience is a story, a connection waiting to be made. As our network grows and becomes more active, the types of projects we undertake will become more diverse. But we will always connect them back to our lands and our global Indigenous ancestors.
We are currently just a small group of activists in the West Pennine Moors, and we are keen to hear from our neighbours across the Pennines, and from Indigenous peoples around the globe. Over the next few months, we will begin hosting landbathing and landwriting events, and making contact with other groups across the Pennines. For updates, please follow our blog at https://reindiginisepennines.noblogs.org or email us at reindiginise.pennines ~ a t ~ inventati.org .
Until are all free,
Reindiginise! Pennines