Inhabitation
A Preface
Some books, it is said, need no explanation. This one does.
—Ansel Watrous, History of Larimer County, Colorado, 1911
I live on three acres at the base of the Rocky Mountain foothills in Larimer County, Colorado. It often snows more on these few acres than it does in Fort Collins, just four miles away. When the weather shifts, the wind is so fierce that it has overturned horse-trailers and uprooted playsets. Once, I watched from the kitchen window as our wheelbarrow made its way down the driveway and onto the road, as if pushed by a ghost. In late summer, the land resembles a desert with dying prairie grasses and prickly pear cacti we boil down to jelly.
Compared to the rugged mountain terrain to the west, and the arid prairie to the east, this bit of rolling land a mile or so from the Cache La Poudre River is relatively habitable. By the time white settlers and trappers arrived, indigenous encampments had been here for millennia. The main road running alongside our property, Overland Trail, was a well-traveled Native American route long before the US Army claimed it in the mid-nineteenth century, making it a “short-cut” off the busy, volatile Oregon Trial. In 1849, a wagon train of Cherokee and white pioneers, hoping to cash in on the gold rush, extended the trail over the Continental Divide, and it soon became a major thoroughfare on the Overland Mail and Express Company’s route.
Because rattlesnakes hide in the tall grass, I mow much of our property several times a year. One spring my husband and I set out to remove protruding rocks in hopes of saving the mower’s blade. As we dug, we realized if we combine our surnames—Hadfield, from Old English heathland, field, pasture, open country; and Steensen, from the Dutch steen, stone, son of stone—we would arrive at Fieldsen, “son of field,” or “Steenfield,” “field of stone.”
We quit digging, and we now replace the mower’s blade every year.
When our family of four moved to this land over a decade ago, we had big plans. An enclosed garden to keep the deer and rabbits away; a chicken coop; goats, who would need a fence, a lean-to, and a milking stand; an orchard; a bridge over the canal; a flower garden; and a rope swing. Because of the labor the land requires, I sometimes begin to feel that I belong to it, and it belongs to me.
This isn’t untrue, but it isn’t the whole truth either.
During the first years on our property, I wrote odd prose poems, accounts of our own “settling” of the land, infiltrated by the strange language I was finding in pioneer diaries. But mostly, the poems were about parenting. Of all my experiences, mothering, it seems, has been the most unsettling.
For over a decade, I’ve held on to a stack of local history books withdrawn from Colorado State University, where I currently teach. No one has recalled them. I shouldn’t be surprised. Even I abandoned this project for years at a time.
The closest things are hard to see.
And then there are the buried things.
In all my withdrawn library books, there is no mention of how the land under my feet came to “belong” to me. Even the books documenting CSU’s history fail to disclose the fact that, under the Morrill Act of 1862, the university received close to 90,000 acres of expropriated Indigenous land. Nor do they mention that, in Larimer County, over 3000 acres, including my three acres, were given to states across the country to found their own land grant universities.
If the history of the theft of indigenous land was so hard to find, how well hidden would the specifics be?
During the latter part of the pandemic, the University’s archive—open to two researchers at a time—became my excuse to leave the house. The archive, Derrida tells us, is tied etymologically to the Greek word arkheion: “a house…the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons.”In short, the archive is its own kind of domicile, always already sheltering empire in place.
If an archive is a house, is the inverse true?
What does a house—and the ground upon which it sits—hold?
What does it hide
& how to hear it?
Susan Briante, poet and documentarian, writes, “Instead of shrinking from the archive, we can match it as [M. NourbeSe] Philip does, becoming a medium for what has been silenced. We must imagine, but we must not appropriate or ventriloquize. We train ourselves to tune into alternative archives.”
But what if the land,
haunted and hallow
violated and vibrant
is the medium,
not the poet?
A few months ago, while gazing out the window of my studio, I spotted a strange mound covered in dry grass in my neighbor’s sheep pasture. Just beyond, there was another mound, uncovered and bloody. A mountain lion had attacked the sheep the night before, burying one so that it might return the following night for a second meal.
It wasn’t long before my neighbor came looking for her lost sheep, and a few hours later, the District Wildlife Manager, Jackson Davis, arrived to set a trap, using one of the sheep’s hindlegs as bait. That night I dreamt there was a festival to celebrate the mountain lion’s capture. My house was overtaken with balloons and children in party hats, and though I knew the mountain lion was caged at the base of the hill, I couldn’t seem to get near it. The crowd of revelers was too thick.
As predicted, the lion returned, and early the next morning I found the majestic creature trapped and pacing. I had assumed the cat would be relocated, but as Jackson and his partner strapped the cage to a pulley and lifted it onto their truck, I learned otherwise.
Just a few days prior, reading Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Life Among the Piutes, I copied the opening sentences on a notecard and placed it on a windowsill in my studio: “I was born somewhere near 1844, but am not sure of the precise time. I was a very small child when the first white people came into our country. They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued so ever since.”
Ansel Watrous, the reluctant author of History of Larimer County, Colorado, published in 1911, claims there are “two legitimate ways of writing history. One is to make a plain, simple statement of fact; the other to clothe the statement in language fitted to appeal to the reader’s imagination.” Rushed to write his history before all the pioneers of the region died off, he chose the former, but invited “him who writes the next history of Larimer County to enlarge upon the theme and clothe the facts in literary raiment.”
The facts, though, are ghosts and ghosts don’t wear clothes.
What vision quest do I go in search of, blindly, and how to tell it?
I don’t want to
pry open
the region’s secrets. Instead,
I want to
listen
to the wind’s
raging.
Two miles from my house, on a hill overlooking the foothills to the west and the valley to the east, there is a settlers’ cemetery. Possibly an earlier indigenous burial ground, the cemetery holds the remains of white colonists, French-Canadian trappers, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Mexican nationals, along with many of their multiracial offspring.
Donaciano Vigil, born in 1842, boasts the largest number of descendants in the cemetery. Vigil was said to be of Native American, Spanish, French, and Irish descent. But his death records state he was Mexican. In other words, the cemetery is both a palimpsest of the region’s early colonial diversity and an emblem of its uncertain history.
The graves of Bazille and Mary Provost, children of French Trapper John Provost, a “squaw man,” and his wife White Owl, are the oldest marked graves in Larimer County. John “purchased” White Owl from her brother when she was sixteen, renaming her Mary, after his own mother.
The Provost family, along with 142 other Anglo-Native families, signed the “Half-Breed Petition,” requesting 320 acres of land from the US government for their “Indian relatives and friends exclusively.” The petition was either ignored or denied.
Somewhere around 1872, Mary divorced John, temporarily taking up with another white settler with whom she had at least one child, named Ida Stinking Bear, or Ida Little Killer. Mary soon left Ida’s father, too, marrying a third white settler, becoming Mary Jumper. After Wounded Knee, Mary Jumper and her children, along with every other Anglo-Indian family in the valley, were forced off their land and onto reservations. On the Pine Ridge Reservation, Mary married a final time, becoming Mary Yellow Bear.
“Squaw,” a word derived from the Algonquin language, once meant woman. Colonial misuse soon rendered it derogatory. Often it implied property, which is true in Mary’s case, but it is also true that Mary, somewhat paradoxically, found agency by marrying and re-marrying.
Naming is, as we all know, a method of control. Renaming, a claiming.
The cemetery is now known as “Bingham Hill Cemetery,” but in its earliest years, it carried the name of the nearby town, “Laporte,” previously “Colona,” colony. For many years, the cemetery sat overgrown and all but forgotten.
Is a grave an archive? Is a name?
Laporte, “Behold the door.” Laporte, “A threshold,”
a word of half known origin—thresh, to tread or trample; hold, unknown.
Doors, Mircea Eliade tells us, “are symbols and at the same time vehicles of passage from one space to another… the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate.”
At the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, I see: Folsom knife.
Atlatl point embedded in
a limb
of Council Tree.
Beaded moccasin.
Burrow holes.
Allosaur bone.
Bison Antiquus bladder,
bone needle, ochre nodule, stingray fossil
& also, a tornado chamber where
my daughter exorcised her fear
of the raging winds she believed
would someday come to claim her.
Pioneer, frontiersman, mining camp cook, county judge, journalist, Pony Express rider, “Byron of the Rockies,” womanizer, and horse thief, Joaquin Miller, claimed to have spent years living in a Modoc village. He either worked to protect the Modoc’s rights to their land, or he was swept up by the greed of the gold rush that displaced them, or both. Passing through the Rocky Mountains, he wrote: “Colorado, rare Colorado!, Yonder she rests; her head of gold pillowed on the Rocky Mountains, her feet in the brown grass, the boundless plains for a playground; she is set on a hill before the world, and the air is very clear, so all may see her well.”
Is a mountain an archive? Is a hill? Is air?
Is Colorado a woman whose body is a playground? Is she a city on a hill? The air is very clear here, except when forest fires burn near.
“A city on a hill cannot be hidden,” preached Puritan John Winthrop, enroute to the New World. Or, maybe that was a rumor. There is, in fact, no evidence that the jeremiad was ever delivered.
And yet, this is the origin story of American exceptionalism. The Pilgrims had another way of saying essentially the same thing: “For the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith,” they “plant[ed] the first Colony.”
Neither set of newcomers could fathom anything prior to Genesis, the events of which, in their cosmology, dated back just 5000 or so years before their arrival in New England. My ancestor, and probable author of “The Mayflower Compact,” William Brewster, established himself as Adam’s heir by inscribing, “Hebel est omnis Adam” on the inside cover of several of his books. Though ostensibly an act of humility before God, Brewster’s motto, a reference to Adam’s vanity, admits what he himself would not: the vanity of all vanities is the belief that God gifted Plymouth, the ancestral land of the Patuxet, to his small band of religious radicals.
Nearly three-hundred years after Brewster and his children—Jonathan, Patience, Fear, Love and Wrestling—died off, brothers Roy and Claude Coffin came across several fluted-lance points 28 miles north of Fort Collins. A team of Smithsonian archeologists quickly arrived, bringing with them a motley crew of pets: a black chow called Punky, an unnamed pelican, and a purple marlin dubbed Gog. By the mid-1930’s, the team had unearthed what turned out to be the most extensive late Ice Age campsite yet found, which they named after the landowner at the time, rancher William Lindenmeir.
Like the pilgrims before them, the Coffins situated their discovery via a Judeo-Christian tradition. In his 1937 report, Northern Colorado’s First Settlers, Roy, a CSU Geology professor, refered to Northern Colorado as the “‘Garden of Eden’ of the Western Hemisphere.”
About halfway between my house and the Lindenmeir site, there is a forest of piñon pines growing atop a limestone deposit. No one is certain how these trees arrived this far north, but it is probable that nomadic tribes carried piñon seeds from southern regions to northern trading sites. Piñon charcoal found in nearby firepits dates back as far as 670 CE.
Is a seed an archive? Is a tree and its embers?
Today, in the center of the piñon forest there is deep crevice, a mine. The Pete Lien & Sons mining company extracts carcinogenic minerals used to manufacture toxic products, like paint and plastic, that will long outlive me and my offspring.
If I’ve learned from anything from coniferous trees, it is this:
lie low & listen.
In time,
I come to see I
inhabit the wake of a long wave, lapping, once ocean, once coastal, once volcanic, once glacial, once tidal, once swamp,
all written in rock.
Not far from here, a continent divides &
rivers drain to different seas.
Where mountains and plains converge, huge spans of geological time meet.
A Precambrian archive
under my feet.
As more and more white settlers moved onto Native American lands, conflicts along the Overland Trail intensified. The Treaty of Fort Wise, signed by President Lincoln in 1861, established reservations and greatly reduced the land promised to tribes just ten years prior. Our three acres, “ceded by treaty,” were part of a larger 160-acre plot “purchased” from the Arapahoe and Cheyenne for 86 cents. The following year, as part of the Morrill Act, these 160 acres were allocated to the state of South Carolina to be used as seed money for the establishment of two land-grant Universities—Clemson and South Carolina State. Proceeds from parcels to the west helped found Colorado State University.
The small delegate of Arapahoe and Cheyenne who “ced[ed] and relinquish[ed] to the United States all the lands now owned, possessed or claimed by them” did so not by their own signature, but rather, by drawing small crosses in the allotted space between their transliterated and translated names.
Is a mark an archive?
It wasn’t uncommon to ask tribal leaders to place a cross or an X next to a name imposed upon them by colonists. “The X mark,” writes Scott Lyons (Ojibwe/Dakota), “is a contaminated and coerced sign of consent made under conditions that are not of one’s making. It signifies power and the lack of power, agency and a lack of agency. It is a decision one makes when something has already been decided for you, but it is still a decision.” That is, to see the mark as only a sign of coercion is to erase the hand that made it; it is to grant the X mark the power to X out the presence of indigeneity then and now.
Many tribal members refused to leave.
These are the antecedents to the brutal massacre at Sand Creek.
What is a ley line, and where does it lie? It lies outside settler’s time, but so does the poet,
at least at moments.
I walk at night with stars that are my own being, and yours too.
I lie awake with the full moon, and the new.
“If time is a turning circle,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, “there is a place where history and prophecy converge—the footprints of First Man lie on the path behind us and on the path ahead.”
Here, where these paths meet in the now of our bodies, the lay of the land says:
before you, and through you,
there is an ancient time circling
back on itself, and forward.
Our bodies include the knowledge of our bodies adapting to live on this planet.
Is a body an archive?
Are ley lines?
Grass? Dirt? Worms?
How can I, a settler’s settler, deeply implicated in the terror of territory, come in awe of an indigenous knowledge that knows an alternative archive whose purpose is not to command, but to commune?
The property surrounding my land now houses CSU’s 1,400-acre Foothills Campus where a range of important climate-related research is conducted: work on water shortages; methane emissions; reintroduction of native bison; solar energy; hurricane and flood mitigation; reforestation; honeybee research, and equine-assisted therapies. In short, the land is used for research and efforts that aim to mitigate the very effects of the colonization and exploitation that brought the land into CSU’s care over 150 years ago.
The acreage is also home to The Infectious Disease Research Center, the Colorado Army National Guard Recruiting Center, the Poudre Fire Authority Training Center, and Christman airfield, which often serves as a camp and command center for those fighting nearby wildfires. To the west of the airstrip, there is a coyote den. On summer nights, when the windows are open, I fall asleep to the sound of their howls.
In 2006, after my husband and I moved to Fort Collins, my parents moved to the area, building a house in the mountians that would burn in the High Park fire just six years later. In 2020, the state’s largest wildfire on record lit up the foothills behind our house. One day, in late October, a Public Information map from the nearby firefighter’s camp appeared in my backyard, blown in by the same wind that fanned the fire’s flames: “Cameron Peak Fire, 207,464 acres, as of 10/23/2020 @ 2120, 60% contained.” That year, the view from our windows included helicopters with ropes in tow carrying fire retardant over the hills.
East of the airstrip is a hanger once used by the Forney Aircraft Company. It is here that my father’s first airplane was built, a 1958 F-1 Forney Deluxe; the plane, which was co-owned by several families, went down in a storm in West Virgina killing everyone on board. My father was just 13 when he learned fly, and at that time, he hadn’t been anywhere west of Ohio. When I see the hanger in the distance, I imagine my father as a teenager awaiting the arrival of an airplane flown from a location where he had never been, but would one day live.
My father’s father flew too. As a child, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered: a pilot. The walls of my childhood room were covered in Blue Angels posters. Recently, from my backyard, I watched the Blue Angels perform their “Dirty Loops” in preparation for an upcoming airshow.
Is inherited desire an archive?
Is a coyote’s howl?
Even if we have never set foot, can an expanse of land draw us back to it?
On the other side of the irrigation canal separating our property from our neighbors’, there is a rickety tower and a well. According to neighborhood lore, the well once served as a 19th century watering station for those traveling along the Overland Trail. In winter, I can see the tower from my studio, but in summer, when the leaves unfurl, it disappears behind a stand of giant cottonwood.
During the pandemic, with nowhere to go to escape the prying eyes of their families, my teenage daughter and her boyfriend snuck onto my neighbor’s property, climbed the tower, and took photos of one another on the ladder. Later that evening, a post captioned “Trespassing” appeared in my Instagram feed.
To reach the well, I must cross over a canal that intersects my property but does not belong to me; it belongs to the Pleasant Valley Irrigation Company. For most of the year, the canal is filled with water diverted from the Cache la Poudre River, which received its name from a group of French trappers who buried a stash of gunpowder along the river’s banks. Previously, members of the Ki-Ya-Ksa band of Sioux called the river “Minni Luzahan,” or Swift Current. If the river’s earlier name paid tribute to its own power, its new name celebrates the power of its colonizer.
Is a cache an archive?
Is a river?
Is a canal an archive?
Is a well?
I, too, longed to escape. I walked the same dead-end road until my neighbor showed me an overgrown trail leading to CSU’s Foothills property. With all the researchers and employees working remotely, my dogs and I roamed the campus and its wide-open expanses freely. A portal of sorts, the path led me back to this abandoned project.
Is a road an archive? Is a path?
Now, on weekends and evenings when the campus is empty, I trespass undetected. On snow days, I cross-country ski.
I trespass where I work.
I trespass where I sleep.
I trespass where I eat.
My family, my friends, my dogs trespass with me,
all
invasive beings.
Like my own property, seized parcels just south of our house were sold for development; others were retained by the US Government. As if to reinforce the land’s racist legacy, the Klu Klux Klan bought a plot in the early 1920s. After the government conveyed several nearby acres to the University at no cost in the 1950s, CSU’s football stadium found a home here, too. That is, until 2017, when the University built a $220 million on-campus stadium, the stands of which now obscure natural light in the Fine Arts building.
When the old stadium was demolished, The Intertribal Alliance for Hughes Land Back demanded the rematriation of the Hughes Stadium property, noting that it was “a one-of-a-kind opportunity for the 48 Native and Indigenous tribes, bands, nations and peoples of present-day Colorado, the CSU community, the City of Fort Collins, and Northern Colorado Residents to come together in a Right Relations way.” The Alliance vowed to protect the area’s 267 wildlife and 396 native species and, having found evidence of teepee rings and sweat lodges, they proposed using the land to grow indigeneous ceremonial and medicinal plants.
On August 17, 2021, the Alliance sent a letter to CSU’s Board of Governors, writing: “Recognition and words are not enough to restore the cosmic balance after the systematic displacement, forced assimilation, and genocide of the Native and Indigenous Nations and Peoples of this continent.” CSU’s performative Land Acknowledgement Statement asserts otherwise:
Colorado State University acknowledges, with respect, that the land we are on today is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute Nations and peoples. This was also a site of trade, gathering, and healing for numerous other Native tribes. We recognize the Indigenous peoples as original stewards of this land and all the relatives within it. As these words of acknowledgment are spoken and heard, the ties Nations have to their traditional homelands are renewed and reaffirmed.
CSU is founded as a land-grant institution, and we accept that our mission must encompass access to education and inclusion. And, significantly, that our founding came at a dire costs to Native Nations and peoples whose land this University was built upon. This acknowledgement is the education and inclusion we must practice in recognizing our institutional history, responsibility and commitment.
Words are enough, it seems. A few months after receiving the Alliance’s letter, CSU sold the land to the City of Fort Collins for 12.5 million dollars.
Is a teepee ring an archive? Is a ceremony? Is a demolition? Is a missed opportunity?
My father asks, somewhat facetiously, “ Why don’t you give the land back?” It is a fair question, for which I have no sufficient answer. It occurs to me: Perhaps I abandoned this project for years at a time because I was afraid of this very question.
It is not lost on me that, in my complicity as landowner and employee, I, too, have turned to words. As Paisley Rekdal admits in West: “I am empire’s scribe.” As such, I am often seduced by chronology, but perhaps the poem isn’t?
If settler’s time locates its terminus in manifest destiny, the poem, in conversation with the land, might offer an alternative temporality. The poem’s ears hear the land when I can’t.
Diné poet, Jake Skeets writes: “I am not arguing that poetry should come with a land acknowledgment. Instead I am arguing that the field of the page should do what the land does for us on a daily basis.”
Is a page an archive? Is a poem? Is the land itself?
Several summers ago, my husband used an ax to decapitate a baby rattler in our own doorway. In Indian Vedic texts we find the story of an astronomer leading a mason to the exact place where he is to lay his cornerstone, underneath which a primordial snake lies. When the mason’s stake penetrates the ground, the snake is decapitated, obliterating chaos, bringing form into the world. The house is consecrated.
Is a snake an archive? Is a stake?
Is there an unbuilding, an unnaming, an unclaiming to be found in form?
Can a poem unconsecrate?
The poem’s wisdom turns to unknowing and unowning.
Sources
Susan Briante, Defacing the Monument, 2020
Rose L. Brinks, History of Bingham Hill Cemetery, 2nd edition, 1990
Roy G Coffin, Northern Colorado’s First Settlers, 1937
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz, 1998
Mircea Eliade, Mystic Stories: The Sacred and the Profane, 1992
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Their Claims, 1882
Intertribal Alliance for Right Relations, Reply to CSU System Board of Governors statement regarding Hughes Land Back, August 17, 2021:
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, 2013
Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone, “Land-grab Universities: Expropriated Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system,” High Country News.
Scott Lyons, X Marks: Native Signatures of Assent, 2010
Joaquin Miller, Life Among the Modocs, 1873
Paisley Rekdal, West, 2023
Jake Skeets, “The Memory Field,” Emergence Magazine, October 14, 2020
Ansel Watrous, History of Larimer County, Colorado, 1911
All website content copyright © Sasha Steensen, unless otherwise noted.
The Christman Airfield photo and the Piñon Pine photos in the preface are anonymous.
Web design by HR Hegnauer.