Unsettling Origins, or back where I am from (White-supremacy and Conservation pt.3)

"to be a rock" - video still. nicholas b jacobsen

When I left Mormonism, I went to the sandstone cliffs surrounding so-called St. George, Utah. These cliffs hold refuge for the endangered desert tortoise. From these cliffs, the walls of the St. George LDS temple were cut. Among these cliffs I had a vision that still shapes my cosmology. These cliffs are See’Veets’Eng Nuwu land.

"clinging" - video still. nicholas b jacobsen

I grew up playing outside–the backyard, family camping trips, Scout camp, or later, out to the desert with friends to party and make-out in cars. After leaving Mormonism, I sought meaning and spirituality in nature. As I reshaped my morals I wondered what was natural, i.e. right.

I say this to say: what I used to know as “nature” is/was/always-has-been central to my identity.

"between a rock and a home place" - video still. nicholas b jacobsen

So *naturally* I went to a grad program called Art and Ecology. There I focused on the ideologies that shaped my relationship with the lithic, the rocks–home.

Before grad school when I’d walk out in “nature,” I’d feel this Romantic sense of reconnecting with an ancient part of myself, of being in direct relationship with the sun and stone and all the life between them.
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I thought these were unmediated experiences between my body and its earth body.

"between a rock and a home place" - video still. nicholas b jacobsen

During grad school, I started to learn details of our nesting doll of extinction, biodiversity, and climate crises -- which nest with militarized, extractive capitalist, Christian, imperial, white-supremacist, patriarchal, dominantly US-caused crises -- and with racialized, border, refugee, poverty, pollution, public health, and MMIW crises.
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All of which are grounded in land and our relationships with it.

"between a rock and a home place" - video still. nicholas b jacobsen

I believe that a reconnection with land is essential for white-settlers, as settler-colonization harms us all (we are, in a way, a displaced people).
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But what does it mean to connect to a land that you only live in because of an ongoing history of racialized violence and genocide?

Can we ever build deep relations with these lands if we ignore the often violently extractive relationships we already have?

​Leaving Mormonism led me to nature, which led me to study settler-colonialism which led me back to study Mormonism—back to where I am from.