In California, I live on the land of the Kuumeyaay / Iipai-Tiipai. I am aware I am living on someone else’s ancestral land, I am part of a community group that cares for the creek and salt marsh by my home, and I do my best to honor the land and the culture that lived in harmony for thousands of years in this area.
Emajõgi (Mother river) from Kaarsild (Arch bridge) in downtown Tartu.
In Estonia, I walked on my own land. The land upon which my father grew up. I imagined him swimming in the Emajõgi (Mother River) in Tartu where I was living and he was born and raised. Tartu is the land in which my grandparents graves are nestled. As I walked the streets and woods in and around Tartu, I imagined my grandparents walking these same streets. I imagined my father being part of a korporatsioon or fraternity when he attended Tartu Ülikool (University of Tartu).
In the USA, many people can claim that they are walking on the land where their parents and grandparents lived and maybe even died. The difference for me is that in Estonia, I was living on the land of my ancestors going back thousands of years. Perhaps even to the first people who settled this land after the glaciers retreated ten thousand years ago. The Estonians are the people who lived on the land since time immemorial and I am one of them. With a language not related to Indo-European languages and a unique culture that has modified by colonization, the Maarahavas or people of the land are descendents of the first peoples.
The trees seemed to speak to me, to tell me all the things I didn’t know. The river cradled me and revealed a life that could have been mine except for the ways of humanity. I experienced a deep seated connection to the land via my emotions that was an ache akin to the longing for a lover’s touch. The compulsion to touch and be touched by this land is so opposite from how I feel about California. Understanding the land intellectually is so different from touching land that your ancestors died on, worked on, were enslaved on. And yet I know the land of California, its plants and animals, the mountain peaks and the desert wildflowers in spring. California is one of my homes and now Estonia is another home.
I learned about traditional farming practices that took place for thousands of years and that sculpted the land. I saw how the tending of the lands is managed today to maintain all the habitats that people living, loving and dying with land for 10,000 years created. Now, my experience of connection to land has deepened, shifted, grown more complex and more painful.