———————– ** Fresh Green Beans ** ———————– Grown in Kansas. Eaten Worldwide.

Despite my many visits; I had never really seen the Haskell-Baker wetlands until I had saw them through the eyes of Mike Caron, a passionate scholar and activist of wetland habitats who has a way with words.

As a fellow environmentalist I mirrored Mike’s respect for the wetlands and was eager for the tour by a man who knew so much about its dynamics and history. But before our trek even got started, a sad and disturbing sight confronted us.

Not 20 feet from the edge of the Haskell Indian’s Memorial Grounds, noisy earthmovers were mindlessly digging up the land and hauling the dirt away. The Memorial Grounds are recognized historical site and a memorial for the many dead First Nations children that attended the Haskell Boarding School - an assimilation institution intent on, as Mike put it, “killing the savage and saving the man”.

What these titans of construction were doing is unknown, and how they had permission to do so is even more confusing. According to Mike, a historical site should have no construction done around it. This fact, however, did not stop the erection of sewage lift stations, which pipe sewage near the symbolic headstones (the actual graves are mythed to be under the basketball courts) and the wetlands for processing.

Sadly, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the many cultural and environmental injustices that have befallen Haskell land.

The Haskell-Baker wetlands are a historically and culturally significant area for many different First Nations people. It is significant because of the way people of many Nations were forced together for their reeducation. The land is imbued with the traces of these people and the many trials they faced here together.

From a Eurocentric perspective, the land was seen as unproductive and a dumping ground for vagabonds and waste. However, from an ecological perspective; wetlands serve as an important, and continually rarified, ecosystem. The wetlands ecosystem exists in a delicate balance of environmental factors and life cycles which make it home to hundreds of environment specific plant and animal species. For the First Nations people the land is sacred and life-giving. These contrasting views represent the struggle of these people while modernity encroaches onto their lands and into their world.

This struggle continues today. Presently, there is a critical issue that has been raging for the past 20 years: the proposed South Lawrence Trafficway (SLT). This highly contested highway, intended to relieve traffic congestion in the city of Lawrence, threatens to rob the wetlands of its cultural significance and ecological diversity. The wetlands has long been a place where people have come to take comfort in its wild refuge, to study, to pray, to come together in solidarity with their families and their community. The construction of the SLT would result in the loss of one more valuable wild area, just to be replaced by more development and sprawl. One more loss for our increasingly diluted culture, and one more win for our market-driven globalized world.

What we are seeing here on the local scale in Lawrence is a severe clash of values, and assumptions made by our Western views and values. It seems difficult for immigrated peoples to realize the integral nature of an environment and its peoples. Instead, non-natives view their relationship to their habitat with neoliberal economically tinted glasses; that is as individuals’ divorced from the land that they view as a commodity and nature being something to control rather than to respect and nourish. These views of our neoliberal globalized society further perpetuate environmental injustices on land that is, in the view of many, priceless.

-Juliana Tran

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A Rainy Day at The Wetlands By Juliana Tran

Top Photo by Wally Emerson