From Ireland to Turtle Island, how trees become a tool of the colonizer.

I recently finished the book, To Speak for the Trees by Diane Beresford-Kroeger. She mentioned two things that relate to my ancestors, their trauma, and how it was perpetrated upon the soil of their new home in Northern Ontario.

The Celts build their alphabet, the Ogham, from the trees that surrounded them. For example, the letter L for luis (rowan), the letter S for sail (willow), the letter D for dair (oak) and another 17 characters/letters and trees round out the alphabet. These symbols are still visible throughout Ireland on standing stones. Aware of these deep connection, and with a desire to rule the emerald island, the English quickly laid axe to wood and now we think of Ireland as a land of rolling green hills, and not endless forests.

“The Celts were a woodland people, their culture born from the deciduous rainforest that once covered the country. As the English subjugated the Irish, they cut down these ancient wood. They cut them to sever the most tangible links the Celts had to their culture and language.”

The trauma of this action I imagine created a numbness. When my kinfolk moved to Turtle Island, I’m sure they must have been enamoured with the lush forests. And yet the pain of separation from their own homeland trees allowed them to repeat the process.

“Settlers to Turtle Island were told by colonial authorities that to own their land they had to cut down all the forest on it.”

Ownership of land was originally a foreign concept, and of course the land wasn’t free but was actually cared for by the Indigenous nations. Yet that unresolved trauma allowed my ancestors to pick up an axe and start chopping. It might have hurt their hearts. It might have felt like a release, a frenzy of anger that was unfortunately offered a victim that was once at the heart of their own culture.

The initial trauma of the Celtic people needs healing. The cutting down of trees and theft of land here on Turtle Island needs healing too. I am committed to this work. I will speak with my ancestors to find a spiritual resolve, and in this world I plan on discovering the usual size of a plot of land “given” to the settlers and the approximate number of trees that could live there. And then I will donate to tree planting charities until that deficit is replenished.