Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

As part of a new emergence series, we're publishing a selection of essays from kinship, belonging in a world of relations.

A five-volume collection edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Moore Kimmerer, and John Hausdorfer.

Diane Wilson is a writer and the executive director for the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance.

She is the author of The Seedkeeper, Spirit Car, Journeyed to a Dakota Past and Beloved Child, a Dakota Way of Life.

In this essay, Diane reaches for practices of love and care in the face of the aggressive plants

that colonize the landscape around her home.

A Dakota grandmother, she carries a deep grief for what her people have lost,

alongside a desire to nurture connection and carry forward an ancient healing relationship.

A long gravel driveway leads to the 10 acres in East Central Minnesota that I call home,

winding past tree-lined hills, marshy areas that host

peeper frogs in spring, and ending with a glimpse of a majestic tamarack bog. Migrating birds follow the nearby

St. Croix River Flyway and often visit our feeders. The pilliated woodpecker

calls from the Tamracks, a jungle cry piercing the quiet that surrounds this land, a place of

serene, wild beauty. Over the past 16 years, I have come to know another side of this beloved place.

Beneath its lush serenity, I see disturbed land slowly losing its mature trees, displaced by rampant perennials.

When I first moved here, an ancient, perfectly formed bur oak, a remnant of the original oak

savanna, dominated the land near the road. A year ago, on a calm, clear night, the oak's mighty

branches simply dropped away from its massive trunk with a crack that I heard from the house.

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