Our convocation marking the beginning of Field Station 2: Anthropocene Drift took place on grassy banks of the Mississippi on the western most border of present day Wisconsin. Those gathered were invited to consider, not so much when the uncertain and maligned historical Anthropocenic moment began, but where. Locating the Anthropocene’s where brings us to the places and stages upon which actual worlds ended and new ones began—the new worlds of world history and of universal time—the Anthropocene’s time, as told to participants of Field Station 2, through its rendering of “The New World. For the purposes of this short piece offering reflections on FS2 we can locate the origins and legacies of these moments in questions and breaches of trust, in legitimacies and their intersections with land use—as well as the social relations and exorbitant environmental changes that these land uses, and breaches of trust, configured.

The place, for the beginning of FS2, is the banks of the Mississippi in present day Blackhawk Reserve, De Soto, Wisconsin. The moment is August 1, 1832. Sauk Chief Black Hawk is fleeing the United States’ militias with a band of 500 that includes large numbers of women and children trying to cross back into Indian territory in Iowa during the Black Hawk War. Starving and exhausted, the band were relieved to discover that the US steam boat that appeared on the Mississippi called the Warrior was captained by someone Black Hawk knew—and knew to be trust worthy and honorable. The Warrior’s captain, Joseph Throckmorton, had been alerted to Black Hawk’s group by the American army in advance, and after some alleged confusion over signals of surrender, deceived Black Hawk’s trust and fired his canon onto the banks, killing 25 in the group. The Battle of Bad Axe that ensued was later renamed a massacre and earned Throckmorton the moniker Caligula, for the wanton killing of hundreds of non-combatants trying to reach safety in the days the followed. These moments, at this place, marked the end of Native American embattled resistance to US militias in the region and opened up the rest of Illinois, Iowa and present day Wisconsin to American settlement. Breaches of trust underwrite the beginnings of the structural formation of settler colonialism and the changes to land uses that followed.

Our five-day encounter constituted the second of the Anthropocene River field stations and created a narrative and physical journey across locations in these three States. Our journey traced the trajectory and origins of the political and philosophical roots of what we are here calling the Anthropocene, told through actual territories and moments of the US’s “Midwestern” geo-histories. The organizers declared the decision to forgo a formal land acknowledgement, now a widespread practice for institutions in colonial contexts of the unceded territories of the Sauk Tribe. These enquiries, visitations, conversations, and the entire Field Station, instead, were positioned as an extended land acknowledgement—since our Field Station curriculum has been designed to peel back the layers of habitual “non-noticing” that constitutes particular kinds of white subjectivity. Field Station 2 was also crafted to be an acknowledgement of land, and the role that historical changes to its stewardship and uses has played in inducing and accelerating climate change, in addition to its potential to abate the worst of these trajectories.

One form of non-noticing was conveyed to us through the experiences of the Chi-Nations Youth Council, a Native youth group, who are trying to achieve the trust of the City of Chicago to maintain access to a disused plot of land in the city so that practices of togetherness, community, and safe spaces can be forged. The Chi-Nations Youth Council negotiate the ongoing securement of this plot of city land to maintain a medicinal garden, to grow foods, and act as a teaching and learning hub. In these efforts, we heard about the distrust of authentic Native American identity, of perceived inadequacies of performed indigeneity, used to undermine and question the legitimacy of this agenda. Distrust of Native American identities has a long lineage in which the anthropology discipline has played a central role. Such agendas maintain energy through bio-scientific legitimacy diagnosing techniques, energized recently by disputes involving US Senator Elizabeth Warren’s heritage.

We meet Christine Nobiss, a “De-Colonizer” working with indigenous women’s organization Seeding Sovereignty, and Founder of Indigenous Iowa and Little Creek Camp, at Standing Rock and hear about the already existing indigenous land practices, that with appropriate endowments and acknowledgement—representational, but mostly legal and financial—could readily blunt the worst effects of climate breakdown. After a panel, Sovereign Foods, Languages and Futures Pt II, Christine is at pains to emphasize that the answers are right in front of us, in our relationship to land, so easily obscured by abstracted data-scapes of atmospheric chemical budgets:

We think of climate change as an ethereal thing that is about gasses in the air and causing severe weather. However, it’s not about that, but our relationship to the land, and the spaces we live in… And no one on earth has more to say about that than indigenous people who are literally protecting 85% of remaining biodiversity with their bodies and their lives. The fact that this isn’t made more prominent within the climate movement is really disturbing to me.

During the days that also saw millions participate in Youth Climate Strikes across 150 countries, with Christine and others comprising the panel, we discussed as a group the indigenous and black youth activists and movements that have come before Greta Thunberg. Themes of trust were foregrounded. Celebrating the achievements of Greta Thunberg’s Youth Climate Movement, but not the institutional system that privileges a white voice over others that have come before, questions were asked here, and have been elsewhere as to why it took “a Greta” for the UN to organize a youth climate summit, and one that left the indigenous youth sessions sparsely attended. When asked why this might be the case, Christine provided an answer:

…because in the end people want a white savior and still don’t trust what black and brown people have to say.

A Land Trust “is a legal entity that takes ownership of, or authority over, a piece of property at the behest of the property owner.” Land Trusts, which often hold conservation easements to permit tax breaks for landowners that forgo development in favor of legitimized practices of conservation value, are mechanisms that Native American groups are increasingly using to regain access to stolen lands. Complying with bureaucratized and Statist institutional mechanisms, Land Trusts entrust legitimacy to afford and enable the extra-institutional expressions of relational, affective, and symbolic dimensions of land and territory in Indigenous life ways. Access to and stewardship of land, in these situations and for these life ways, finds validation by and through its coincidence with scientific biodiversity conservation objectives. Native American Scholar Beth Rose Middleton shared with us her research and work with Native American Land Trusts. We heard about the strategic recourse to legalistic tactics for validating access to lost lands through the accrediting of uncut timber forests as carbon storage facilities, to raise necessary funds for the acquisition of this territory. Legitimacy and trust are co-dependent. A constitutional and legalistic substitute for interpersonal trust produces carbon credits, attached to the trees left standing, to form currencies that perform as economized tokens of trust between buyer and seller, reconfigured from land steward and polluter.

Turning the trust in the other direction, together with the River Semester Group, during car rides between events that comprise FS2 and over beers in a damp campsite on Saturday night sheltering from the storm in the Illiniwek Forest Preservation camp, we reflexively consider our position. We considered the position of this wider project, Mississippi: An Anthropocene River, and its reception or perception among those whom comprise its happenings. As visitors to these places and the lives and histories of the peoples that live here and who we are learning from, trust is not something that we can take for granted. Trust that someone will trust audiences with whom they share their personal histories—often painful and charged—for purposes and other audiences that are opaque to them, is a process to be negotiated and carefully acknowledged. It is for this reason we are grateful to the participants and contributors convened for Anthropocene Drift, who afforded us the opportunity to think these sometimes-uncomfortable thoughts.

Facilitating the panel that Christine Nobiss spoke to us from, Jackie Rand of the University of Iowa shared a reflection to convey this jarring of legitimacies, lines of trust, and these teachings:

We have been trying to teach the visitors for over 500 years; for how much longer are we going to be asked to teach them?

These are questions and openings that emerged from FS2. Who should be trusted? Which new lines of trust might be attended to? We are left wondering why these groups would take the time to teach yet again, and what these histories and their legacies can teach us all about our present and futures. Certainly, there are many people that have been engaged in this important work for a long time. To those who are, I am thankful.