In this dissertation, I have described particular kinds of agency exhibited by plants and plant materials. They do not manifest this agency as solitary actors in a void. The Tuscarora artists of Robeson County, and the plants and plant materials they work with, show that they – whether human or plant – work together to create their worlds. To borrow a word from Kriti Sharma (2015), their actions are contingent upon other actors who are helping to make those actions happen. The way plants and Tuscarora artists interact says something meaningful about how we all relate to congeners and members of other species. To carry one step further a description by Marisol de la Cadena of different people, cultures, and places: Humans and plants “emerge in each other forming a complex hybridity in which the different elements composing it cannot be pulled apart for they are both distinct and part of each other” (De la Cadena 2015, page 187).
I have followed plant materials as they traveled through a network that also includes the plants they came from, the artists who fashioned them into art, the political activists who mobilized them to amplify Tuscarora sovereignty, the buyers who bought them and ultimately displayed them over their hearths, and the politicians who allowed the pieces of art to inspire them to work for Tuscarora sovereignty. I observed plant materials and artists at work in their studios, engaged in “an affective ecology shaped by pleasure, play, and experimental
propositions” (Hustak and Myers 2012, page 78). The agency of the plant materials is evident in their complex interactions with the artists in the studio, in ways that engage all five senses.
Finally, the agency of the plants and plant materials manifests in the political lives of
Robeson County’s Tuscarora. The plants do not always join enthusiastically in the networks that mobilize Tuscarora sovereignty. The greenbrier (Smilax laurifolia L.) held jealously onto its rhizome for hours as Rick Jones and I sweated and swore, attempting to dig up a massive complex of tendrils with a shovel. It took the ministrations of a backhoe – a massive piece of earth moving equipment with an internal combustion engine – to separate the rhizome from the rest of the plant, and from the ground. This was an emphatic display of the plant’s own agency, announcing it was not ready to part with all of its rhizome. But once mobilized, the plant materials in art form help tell the story of the Tuscarora to the world and pull members of the community into social networks that include members of other tribes, and citizens and officials of the settler state, finally joining all together into what Bruno Latour has termed a “Parliament of Things” (1993).
And the plant material’s agency is perhaps never more pronounced than when it inspires human artists to recognize their ancestors in its knobby forms, and when it inspires them to carve it to highlight these shapes, a process that, to paraphrase Gell, does not result in a depiction of the ancestor, but rather the body of the ancestor in artefact form (from Gell 1998, page 99). Tuscarora artist Francine Scott experienced this process as she watched the forms of Native American chiefs, and a mother and her child, emerging in the wood.
What has not been explicitly explored above are the disadvantages for indigenous people of seeking recognition from the settler state. The irony of seeking confirmation of authenticity from outsiders has not been lost on Native Americans. Native Americans are essentially asking
Carolina museum. On the one hand, it impressed a state senator with an “authentic” example of Native American arts, and by telling the story of a Native American leader and a dear loved one to Bear Clan Chief Leon Locklear. On the other hand, it is an example of how Native American arts are misappropriated in certain instances. The piece might inspire a representative of the settler state to recognize The Tuscarora in North Carolina, but is it worth the trouble? It is unlikely that Francine Scott would have carved the sculpture to impress the settler state. The process of seeking recognition itself carries with it a measure of humiliation from those who do not need outsider confirmation of who they are.
The Bethea Locklear memorial cypress knee sculpture serves as an example of the
representational power of wild-native-plants-based arts in the political lives of the Tuscarora. This sculpture, carved out of the materials of a wetland plant, moved a North Carolina state senator to work on behalf of the Tuscarora. Based on state Senator Jane Smith’s emotional response, it was more eloquent in advocating on behalf of the Tuscarora than an hour-long political speech by Tuscarora Beaver Clan Chief Mitchell Locklear (Leon’s son) to Smith, which immediately preceded the museum visit. The encounter between Mitchell Locklear, the cypress knee sculpture, and Senator Smith begs another question, however: Why do the Tuscarora have to reach outside their own community to find approval?
I spent the fieldwork summer of 2016 collaborating with the Tuscarora Nation of North Carolina in their quest for recognition, and helped bring Senator Smith to the Tuscarora Nation. By the end of the summer, however, it appeared that Mitchell had begun to sour on the decades- long recognition quest. In a one-on-one, informal conversation toward the end of my stay at the Nation that summer, Mitchell told me that he had been in conversation with some longtime
first place. “From now on, it’s going to be all about sovereignty,” he told me. Indeed, whether the settler state recognized the Tuscarora Nation of North Carolina or not, the sovereignty of the Tuscarora overall was something over which the settler state had little control.
This was my last conversation with Mitchell Locklear before these words were written. A few months later, on 16 March 2017, federal agents arrested Mitchell and six others. The federal government charged them with drug trafficking, and Mitchell was sentenced to 15 years in prison the following year (Staff 2018.) It would not be the first time a Tuscarora had run afoul of the (settler) law. Militant action had led Tuscarora activists on a collision course with the settlers since the 18th Century, and continued into the 20th Century with occupations of the Bureau of
Indian Affairs (1972) and the Robesonian newspaper (1988,) and the opening of casinos in 2017 on the basis of an argument of Tuscarora tribal sovereignty (see Figure 8.1). Another well- known Tuscarora activist was arrested in connection with the operation of one of those casinos: Timothy Jacobs, who was also involved in the Robesonian occupation in 1988. It would be inappropriate for me to speculate here on the motivations that led Mitchell Locklear to his present situation. One thing is clear, however. The Tuscarora are likely to continue to act as a sovereign people, with or without settler state approval.
Figure 8.1: A sign outside a Robeson County Tuscarora casino in 2018
Source: WRAL Federal agents arrested the operators of the county’s Tuscarora casinos on 23 July 2018. The Tuscarora in North Carolina are not recognized by the state or federal governments, and do not have a reservation recognized by the settler state. This fact left the Tuscarora undeterred. A sign outside a Robeson County Tuscarora casino highlights Tuscarora sovereignty as justification for the casino itself.
Future research
Considering plants as agentic beings opens many possible avenues of future research. Given the prevalence of agribusiness monoculture in the state of North Carolina, primary crop plants could be considered as exploited workers who are alienated from the product of their labor. Soybeans are one of the most important field crops in the state (www.netstate.com). In the case of soybeans, their offspring are the product of their labor, and they are alienated from their offspring as the crop of beans is harvested. This circumstance would allow for a Marxist
(2014) and others to pursue multispecies ethnography. This could involve participant
observation on a soybean farm in North Carolina, tracing the processes involved in cultivating and harvesting soybeans. Ethnographic interviews with planters and farm workers could also be part of this project.
Tuscarora artists, and the swamp cypresses, tupelo, and greenbriers with whom they work, are fighting together to survive and thrive in one of the most ecologically, economically, and politically threatened places on Earth. The Robeson County forests on which the Tuscarora have relied for centuries for sustenance and gratification are in a century-old process of being
devoured by swamp drainage and urban and agricultural development. The historic longleaf pine savanna that once spread across this landscape has been decimated. The very activities in which the Tuscarora engage in Robeson County’s forests are therefore reason for hope and research for the future.
Forest product extraction by the Tuscarora artists with whom I have been working appears to be on the level of very limited extraction for small-scale personal and commercial (artistic) use. A possible route for future research is to evaluate these extraction activities as engines of
conservation. The hypothesis here would be that those who stand to gain from a landscape economically and culturally have an interest in conserving it. This would involve a paradigm shift for some conservationists and members of the public, who tend to label all nontimber forest product extraction as parasitic and environmentally damaging. As Fikret Berkes (2017) has shown, the ultimate result of extraction depends on who is doing the extracting, and how. Gazing out at the swamp behind his house, the same wetland system that has yielded him the
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