Medicinal Histories: The Stories Our Stories Don’t Tell
The paradoxes, imperfections, and blindspots of the written word.
Dear Reader,
We have been graced with phenomenal rains this month in Northern California. Rains with tremendous energy where the sky opens and unrelenting water forces us to surrender indoors.
These rains have felt like winter’s sacred holding — nourishing, calming, and grounding. They have also helped alleviate California’s epic drought, which two years ago seemed unfathomable.
And yet, the days are slowly getting longer, and the bird calls are beginning to chirp in the pitch of spring.
At each bird cry, I feel an opposing tension in my stomach. My heart excitedly flutters at the lightness and joy of spring, yet my soul yearns for the quiet spaciousness of winter’s darkness and having long dark hours to spiral inward and deeper into the mysteries of my winter cocoon.
I write this February letter, listening to the rain, knowing the Spring Equinox arrives in a few weeks, calling us all inevitably, to bloom again.
In this tension of seeding and blooming, spiraling inward and spiraling outward, this month we will be playing with the paradoxes, imperfections, and blindspots of the written word, and how it impacts our worldview.
The Paradox of Stories
Last month’s Dear Nature explored the mystical language of the desert, and I have been thinking a lot about how stories and language shape our relationship to the surrounding world, including nature.
Stories come in many forms — written, oral, pictorial — formats that all hold unique benefits and blindspots.
Before the advent of the written word, in pre-literate societies, the spreading of knowledge and facts went only as far as the memory of individuals and their communities. The passing of information was slow, contained, and perhaps, fluid.
The written word today, in contrast, spreads like wildfire. We are exposed to more information each day than our finite brains can hold and process. The compromise? Depth. Discernment. Presence.
While writing is a beautiful craft that I cherish dearly, the written word comes with flaws and impacts that are both positive and negative.
Writing has taken the illusory experience of our inner world and allowed us to create a false sense of permanence and absolutism in the things we document. It also creates a tricky hierarchy of importance between what has, and has not, been documented.
But, who decides what qualifies as “historically significant” and therefore gets documented?
Historical Significance — Who Decides?
Most of the history textbooks that we grow up reading are presented as objective accounts.
The authors and researchers have worked hard to keep themselves distant from the subject — they are the invisible and astute documenters of events that we neither see nor know.
Yet as the researcher remains invisible in their “documentation” of history, so do their innate biases, which have undoubtedly impacted which events, facts, and people qualified in their accounts as “historically significant.”
Meanwhile, we are not taught to read history as skeptics. We are told these imperial histories are factual and holistic depictions, conveniently handed to us on silver platters.
But in the negative space of every text are thousands of undocumented historical fragments that did not qualify as historically significant.
As a writer, I know this negative space well.
We writers omit details our readers will never know we omitted and remove people we feel no longer serve the narrative. This discernment and focus are required of the writer and editor, otherwise, we lose our readers before getting to the point.
Though in a slightly different manner, this too is the role of the researching bodies that shape the historical texts we read. They must choose a focal point and build with this intent. Otherwise, their histories will look like the unending waterways of the Grand Canyon.
While the linear orientation of our minds does not like approaching “factual” historical texts as incomplete and fragmented, the world is simply too complex at any moment to document in completion.
It is also too complex for us to then reach backward in time today and perfectly repair histories that we feel were not told in full.
Instead, we live in a state of fragmented pieces of events. Some pieces that were accidentally erased, and others that were unrightfully documented.
We live in a vast state of imperfection as it relates to the natural world, not knowing an unthinkable volume of stories of the land we live on. Stories that didn’t qualify as historically significant.
We instead know the stories of the conquerors of the natural world. Societal, governmental, and private sector entities who made history exploiting nature in the name of “human progress.”
A piece of my heart breaks when I consider how many voices of nature — plants, animals, and organisms — have been erased.
How many voices of nature will we never hear?
The Stories Our Stories Don’t Tell
In response to this idea of tracking erased stories, this month I was introduced to a framework called Medicinal Histories, by writer, activist, and historian Aurora Levins Morales. Please note that my use of this framework does not endorse Morales’ political views. I am only using this framework as a lens to explore our relationship with nature.
In, The Historian as Curandera (Healer), Morales writes, “All historians have points of view…We construct history from some perspective, within some particular worldview. Storytelling is not neutral.”
In contrast to imperial history that attempts to hide these biases, Morales introduces the idea of “medicinal histories,” which make the bias of the historian explicit by openly naming their partisanship and intent to influence people in the writing.
Morales argues that much of official history has been fashioned in a way that “makes sense” of the actions taken against those who have been oppressed. Morales writes, “The colonized everywhere are defined as in need of improvement, which only a better management of their labor and resources can offer.”
Reading this, I thought back to a prior edition of Dear Nature that looked at how the four industrial revolutions have colonized wild nature.
As early as the biblical story of Adam and Eve, the narrative that nature is dangerous and better when managed by humans is one of the first accounts of nature’s value that most of us are introduced to.
And this narrative has helped justify the proceeding exploitation we have enacted against the natural world.
Today, false stories about the land we live on and enjoy exist everywhere.
If we pull back the curtain on many “protected” lands in the US, a lot of this nature that qualifies as “wilderness” today, holds a quiet and dark story of colonization.
While we absolutely must protect nature from human development, many of the national parks we fashioned in efforts to protect and “purify” land, all hold a long history of indigenous stewardship. This land was wild before we seized it for recreational “wilderness.”
What then, could have been the balance of protection without the eradication of the indigenous stewards? What are the alternative histories of our national parks and their prior inhabitants?
There Is A Crack In Everything. That's How The Light Gets In.
While the histories we read today give a sense of truth and permanence to imperial stories, we as readers can begin reading like detectives, seeking the stories that have fallen through the cracks.
When we read histories with the acknowledgment of their biases and incompleteness, we empower ourselves to become more discerning and whole in our relationship to where we are in place and time.
In seeking these alternative stories, we begin healing our conditioned disassociated relationship with the natural world.
Morales provides a few tools in her medicinal histories framework that we can all benefit from trying on:
Challenge historical standard of evidence: Seek to understand which biases were built into what qualified as evidence, and what did not.
Reveal hidden power relationships: Look deeper to expose unequal power by revealing hidden economic relationships in the story that were not documented.
Show complexity — embrace ambiguity and contradiction: To reveal deeper complexity, we must give up the idea that people in history are 100% heroic or villainous. We must release the fixedness of our black-and-white thinking. This is hard for all parties, yet critical for enabling complex and peaceful dialogue. History is complex, there is no single truth.
Ask speculative questions: When you feel holes in stories, asking speculative questions can help uncover lost history.
My Writing Is Imperfect
I end this letter aware of its imperfections, of the thousands of stories, contexts, and events that I am failing to acknowledge.
I am aware of some of the blindspots my biases create, and I am aware of a glaring bias of mine that you may have picked up on as well — which is that in this piece I chose to focus on land, not people.
And then, there are the hundreds, if not thousands, of my blindspots that fall into my “unknown unknowns.”
To find these, I will continue on this humble journey of imperfect writing, imperfect discoveries, and imperfect documentation.
With love,
Alison ❤️
I love the line about negative space in writing. The comparison to art-making and writing is so real. I am learning more and more as I continue to write.