This Land

“The land was ours before we were the lands”.         Robert Frost: The Gift Outright

“This land is your land, this land is my land.”             Woody Guthrie

I love that poem by Robert Frost. Never more so than in 1975, when Randall Thompson set those words to music which the Concord Chorus premiered right here in Concord. A soprano in those long-gone days, I stood on the top riser and sang what I believed were words celebrating our town’s 200th anniversary of “the shot heard ‘round the world.” The poem goes on to claim: “She was our land more than a hundred years before we were her people.”

In the same spirit, whenever I listened to or sang Woody Guthrie’s anthem about America, along with Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and all the sixties’ folk icons, I felt my heart swell with the images of the redwood forest, gulf stream waters, endless skyway and golden valley. Yes, this land was made for you and me.

But wait just a minute! This land was made for you and me?? I don’t think so.

She was our land before we were her people?? No, she wasn’t.

Not once did I consider the arrogance of appropriation that lies behind those words. And to be fair to Frost and Guthrie, both of whom loved the land, I doubt they did either.

We have never owned the land. It was not made for you and me but was here long before we were and will remain after we have gone, if we don’t mess it up any more than we have already.  Those that were here before the European invasion lived by and with the land. They did not own but honored, respected and gave thankful offerings to the bounty of grass and field, the rain that watered and sun which grew all that lived upon the land. The concept of ownership and its ugly offspring, trespass, never occurred to Indigenous communities.

I have been prompted to write this today as a citizen of the town that premiered the Randall Thompson/Robert Frost The Gift Outright over fifty years ago; because our local paper has for ten years followed a story which doesn’t appear to be ending soon. It is a story about a small handful of homeowners who believe that the land abutting their house, a dirt path leading to Thoreau’s “wild tract”  is off-limits to anyone else.   Gallons of ink have been spilled on legal briefs, court documents and news articles while millions of Concord’s dollars are wasted on what is, very simply, a tempest in a teapot. For what? A short stretch of land permitting access to well-tended and long preserved public walking trails, woods and the creatures that live therein. Lawsuits are filed, year after year, bulletin boards covered with threatening messages stand next to the path, closed circuit cameras spy and loudspeakers blare at anyone who puts so much as a toe beyond an imaginary border. The latest news bulletin? “Birdseed tossed at a neighbor,” who, I’m guessing, may have stepped too close! Which is ridiculously funny if it weren’t so pathetic!

I am ashamed of my fellow Concord citizens. I am disgusted with people who already have every advantage and still want more. Have they not reckoned with centuries of wisdom from multiple cultural and religious traditions that teach us to love our neighbor and welcome the stranger and remind us that we are simply temporary stewards of and visitors to our fragile planet?

Long before Woody Guthrie and Robert Frost, the plot of earth which is now known as Concord was called Musketaquid, “river of grasses,”  by the native people who lived upon it. Later and farther west, a wise Indigenous chief declared “The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth.” And before his voice there was another voice; recorded by scribes in the Middle East Fertile Valley, calling human beings to be stewards of the earth. To understand that we are simply visitors here for a while, caring for the land which is, indeed, a gift outright.