View from atop the Wicklow Mountains, Ireland
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Today’s newsletter is a dive into a well. We’re taking a trip to Ireland, and looking at the strands that weave together the tallgrass prairies of Wisconsin with the peat bogs of Ireland.
St. Patrick’s Day makes me think about my family immigrating to the United States. It makes me reflect on what we in the diaspora have carried to this continent and what we’ve lost along the way. While the stories that follow are about Ireland, we all relate to migration. All of us—whether our ancestors crossed oceans or have resided on this land forever—have ancestries of displacement. Our ancestors have brought stories, seeds, and words from their homelands which shape the place we live today. And many of those things are lost, or don’t translate.
Though we might not recognize it, our identities inform how we choose to take care of the land. Ecosystem restoration requires value judgements: Do we keep this native sumac patch, even though it might crowd out a rare prairie ecosystem? Is herbicide worth the unknown health and ecosystem risks?
The decisions we make about what the landscape should look like are influenced by stories we’ve been told—about wildness and cleanliness, about what makes a landscape beautiful and functional, about which plants are treasured and which plants are feared. Unearthing where we come from, and what biases we hold, helps us understand this work.
Sand formations on the North Coast of Donegal, Ireland
Translations
Westport Drumlin, in the center of Westport Prairie, is a special place many readers have visited. I hope you have. Most mornings I walk up the drumlin, reading the change from the day before and watching my step for animal dens. I was surprised to learn that drumlin is an Irish word. It comes from the Irish druim, meaning “hill,” with the suffix –lin, the same softening ending of duckling. Little hill.
In the Ho-Chunk language, the same feature is xeeš’ok. Little Hill. You can explore and hear that word pronounced in the Ho-Chunk Nation Dictionary Online. The word xee means “hill” as a noun, but as a verb, it means to bury. Thus, when this hill lost its name and was renamed a drumlin, we lost that everyday association of hills with burials. It matters which words we use.
Place-names in Indigenous languages—like Ho-chunk and Irish—are often ecological, describing the landscape; or mythological, capturing a story of something that happened there.
There is a 500-page Irish text called the Metrical Dindsenchas (you don’t have to remember that name) which compiled centuries of poems associated with specific places. In this book, you can find poems a thousand years old written about the hill you’re standing on. It’s an atlas of mythology and ecology. It’s lucky that we have these recorded; old Ireland was an oral storytelling culture. This unique record captures the idea that every hill, every river, and every bog has a story worth preserving.
Likewise, the hills and lakes where we live are laden with old stories. I like to visit the The Encyclopedia of Hōcąk (Winnebago) Mythology from time to time for the deep history of this place. I encourage you to explore it.
The Indigenous place-names that once acted as a field guide are largely overwritten with colonial names. Dejope, the land of “Four Lakes,” is now named after President James Madison. Te Wákącąk, “Sacred Lake,” is now called Devil’s Lake. Wihaqgaja, the west peak of Blue Mounds, once evoked “the Place of the Second-Born Daughter” to everyone who heard its name. I’m thankful for enduring names like Wauwatosa, which refers to “firefly” in Potawatomi; and Menominee, meaning “wild rice” (Manoomin) in Ojibwe. These names carry ecological meaning. I understand what I might find there.
To rename a landscape is to make it illegible to the people who know it, and to hand newcomers a landscape they cannot read. If we could know the old stories of Westport Drumlin, or its name, we could take even better care of it.
A contested place-name in Donegal, Ireland
A Tale of Two Trees
Ireland and Dejope are connected by more than language. Here’s another story of migration—this time, of two trees that ended up in the wrong place.
The Scots Pine is the only conifer native to Ireland. If you had visited the island 10 years ago, a botanist would have told you it was eradicated from the island but living elsewhere. Native forests on the island have been decimated over centuries, having once occupied an estimated 80% of the land. A population of Irish Scots Pines was rediscovered in 2016, tucked away in a remote area called the Burrens. It’s now enjoying a cautious resurgence as seedlings are planted throughout the island.
Irish Scots Pine discovered in the Burren,
County Clare
Photo by Belfast Media
There are plenty of conifers in Ireland, but it’s a Canadian tree—the Sitka Spruce—that’s thriving. Sitka Spruce timber plantations occupy nearly 5% of Ireland’s land mass, the equivalent of all its remaining native forest. Often, these monocultures are planted onto degraded landscapes in lieu of restoration. They are the bane of ecologists and farmers alike—much like the timber plantations of North America, which catch fire only because they’re out of balance with the ecosystem.
These two trees, perfectly co-evolved with their homelands, have swapped places. That same Scots Pine, native to Ireland and deeply missed, is planted by the thousands in Ontario to support another timber industry. It has become one of the “five most invasive species in Canada” (University of Toronto), all while being functionally absent from its native ecosystem.
By all accounts, the impact of Irish migration onto this landscape has deeply affected the ecology, language, and understandings we hold. The same goes for HMoob, Norwegian, and Mexican migrations, as with all of our ancestors. I feel empathy toward the Scots Pine, which didn’t ask to be brought here but has certainly found itself in the wrong place. As I tend to the land, I often reflect on how my identity impacts the way I see the landscape and what tools I use.
I once asked an Irish farmer if he had considered a prescribed burn. The heather grows so thick in Donegal that trees and grasses cannot regenerate. A little fire, I thought, might clear the way. He looked at me like I’d suggested arson. Some things don’t translate.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I hope you enjoyed the stories, and perhaps reflected on your own migration story. If this provoked something, I’d love to hear from you.
Slán,
