The Land Keeps the Score

I often find myself revisiting the words of Robin Wall Kimmerer: “The land knows you, even when you are lost.”

As someone who comes from a legacy of forced displacement due to colonial violence, I understand how the wounds inflicted by the separation from our native lands and waters extend across many generations and timescapes.

I carry a deep yearning to return home, to feel the earth my ancestors stewarded, to embody the memories the land has preserved, and to seed the dreams of my future kin.

Presently, I reside on the unceded, ancestral lands of the Anishinaabe peoples. These lands also carry the memory of displacement, genocide, and settler violence. I wonder about the rich lineages of freedom fighters, land defenders, water protectors, and stewards who have tended to these lands in reciprocity and with tenderness.

Under the colonial mandate, land has always been a commodity and target for conquest because separating a people from their land removes their lifeline to sustenance. But many of us know the truth: land as a living archive, a body of profound wisdom, and a witness to those who came before and those who will come after us.

In her book, The Land in Our Bones, Layla Feghali echoes this truth: “By displacing us from the inherent connection we have with the earth as a kindred creative and material source of life and nurturance, we lose leverage with reality itself as it becomes reconstructed around something contrary and rootless—something oppressive and damaging to the earth itself, desecrated as we suffer in unison.”

The land remembers, not just the horrors of plunder at the hands of the colonizer, but the medicine, prayers, and rituals of those who care(d) for her. When we surrender ourselves to the earth, we are actively remembering and opening ourselves up to the gifts she has to offer. We are returning to the ancient, sacred wisdom of our ancestors who knew how to listen to what the land knows.

After all, the land keeps the score. Bearing the wounds of displacement and separation. Carrying the abundant and rich knowledge preserved through generations. Echoing the whispers of the mountains and the trees.

I think of the lands I come from, the ones where my ancestors are buried and returned to the earth, the ones they were forced to leave and separated from. The places that once knew their prayers and yet continue to hold their freedom cries.

We often talk about colonial trauma from a human-centric perspective—living in our bodies, passed down through our lineages, lingering in our cultural practices—but I also wonder how the trees grieve, how the land mourns, how the water moves. What about the forests that have witnessed centuries of extraction? What about the soil that carries the memories of cultivation and the scars of destruction?

As we navigate ecosystem collapse and planetary suffering, it is important to remember our ancestral ways of being, to remember that we cannot heal in isolation, to remember that our well-being is intertwined with the ecosystems we are part of. To heal the land is to heal ourselves and our ancestors.

If we listen closely, what and whose stories is the land telling us?

Western Eurocentric models of trauma and healing often fail to capture our lived realities because they cannot grasp how our livelihoods are deeply rooted in place and space and intertwined with our ancestral histories and relationships.

Across multiple timescapes, colonial violence has sought to sever our connection to ancestral, cultural, and land-based practices of healing. Indigenous wisdom is grounded in the truth that land is an active source of connection, energy, and renewal. Many of the answers we seek at this particular moment already exist within and around us. If the land keeps the score, it also holds the pathways toward repair and remembrance.

So, where do we begin?

Perhaps by listening to and meditating on how the land grieves and continues to tend to her wounds, by slowing down and noticing what requires attention and care, by recognizing that healing is not a destination but a way of being in right relationship with ourselves, each other, and the ecosystems that hold and nurture us.

Some knowledge can only be embodied and felt—in the way the earth responds to our touch, in the way water knows where to return.

Healing is not just about tending to the body. It is in how we move in rhythm with the land and in how we reclaim the connection that colonization tried to erase. It is about remembering who we are. It is about imagining what possibilities emerge when we see land as kin with whom we are in constant dialogue.