Leaf Trace / Land Trace
Follow @leaftracelandtrace on Instagram. Download and print Minneapolis Edition booklet.
As individuals, we are caught up in the fabric of systems we often do not notice. In observing trees and nature, we gain a sense of the interconnectedness of the forest. We can notice pattern and repetition, relationship and also competition. In observing, we unlock curiosity as a vehicle for transforming the way we think.
In the unexpected isolation of the pandemic and all that has unfolded since it began, what questions have confounded you? What revelations have you arrived at? Can we, by tracing natural systems, build a deeper awareness of systems created by people? How might trees help us find our way?
AN INVITATION
Leaf Trace/Land Trace is an invitation to converse with trees and people and reflect on our connections to each other and to the places we live.
WAYS TO PARTICIPATE
IN PERSON: Go to Rochester Art Center to see Walk With Us. Find the wooden kiosk in near the front desk. Grab a booklet and red pencil and go for a stroll in nearby Mayo Park. Experience the project in person at History Center of Olmsted County and take a deeper dive into the history of the PLSS and its implications.
AT HOME: Follow the numbered posts in @leaftracelandtrace and use any plain paper to draw and write your responses. Or download and print the booklet.
ANYWHERE: Cultivate conversation using the prompts in the booklet and resources on this website. Share your insights and experience with others.
WAYS TO SUPPORT THE PROJECT
$ -HOST: Host some friends and do Leaf Trace/Land Trace together. You can purchase group sets of booklets to support the project.
$ -DEDICATE: Did Leaf Trace/Land Trace make an impression on you or someone you know? If you found the conversations and skills you practiced using Leaf Trace/Land Trace useful, consider donating to support ongoing costs to keep the work evolving and coming to more communities.
$-COMMISSION: Leaf Trace/Land Trace is seeking funding to bring the project to more communities. If you are interesting in commissioning an edition for your location, please contact sarah@sarahnassif.com.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Leaf Trace/Land Trace acknowledges the ancient and ongoing ties of indigenous people and their ancestral lands. Wherever you are, the land has been stewarded for thousands of years by indigenous communities intimately familiar with the landscape. Settler colonialism has wrought and perpetuates deep harm through land theft, genocide, forced removal and erasure.
The Leaf Trace/Land Trace project is located on the stolen land of Dakota people. The project encourages all to seek knowledge about the history of the land and the legacies that brought you to reside there.
Refer to Native Land to learn about the land you reside on, and find more resources in the BOOKSHELF section below.
THE BACKDROP
Public Land Survey System map showing baselines & meridians used to map land seized after the American Revolution. https://glorecords.blm.gov
THE PUBLIC LAND SURVEY SYSTEM
SYSTEM ORIGINS
Land seized in the American Revolution was cataloged and distributed by settler-colonists using the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). This was made possible and is still maintained by the Public Land Survey System.
When you drive a long straight stretch of road, or when you make a right angle turn walking around the block, you are tracing the PLSS. Also known as a “rectangular survey system,” the PLSS was a highly efficient method of separating people from land and from each other in order to assert sovereignty in seized lands and generate revenue for the state. It is the groundwork for systemic inequities still evident today.
Settlers granted land through homesteading were able to build wealth over generations, while enslaved and indigenous people, who were prevented from owning land or were removed from the land, were not afforded the same.
SYSTEM METHODOLOGY
The lines of the PLSS etched a grid still visible from the air.
UNSETTLING
Or how I got here
by Sarah Nassif
I am not unlike a wide swath of Americans. I’m descended from hard-working European immigrants and homesteaders, daughter of self-made entrepreneurs. I enjoy of a life of ease because of the groundwork they laid and the work ethic I’ve inherited. At least this is one version of my story, and I’m learning to unsettle it, look above and below it, and reframe it to include the pieces missing from the narrative. Leaf Trace/Land Trace is my personal journey to understand how I got here–Minneapolis in 2021. It is also a public art project I hope you will find engaging and helpful as you feel your way forward.
As a white, suburban girl of the 1980’s, this is vital work I was blinded to by design but have no excuse not to begin immediately. My public education omitted basic truths about my home state of Oregon‘s black exclusion laws while steeping me in the lore of the Oregon Trail. I learned very generally of the local Indigenous people’s history, but always as if it were fleeting and small. To this day, the City of Lake Oswego, where I grew up, website minimizes native history in one post while providing somewhat more detail in another:
“A very brief history of our city...
Until the mid-1800s, Lake Oswego was a sleepy assembly of homesteads and farms between the Willamette and Tualatin Rivers in Oregon. A small population of Native Americans--the Clackamas Indians--had occupied the land, but diseases brought by early explorers killed all but a few. Those who remained ceded their territory to the Federal Government in 1855, and moved to the Grand Ronde Reservation in nearby Yamhill County.” (link) (An update was also found here)
This work has no beginning or end. Please stay tuned for writing, resources, events and ways to connect and create your own unsettling journey.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Sarah Nassif is a multi-disciplinary public artist focused on connecting people, nature and place to question the way we live today. Nassif’s project Leaf Trace / Land Trace will engage the public in exploring the Original Public Land Survey System and local trees to spur conversations about the intersection of natural and human systems. Follow @leaftracelandtrace on Instagram or visit sarahnassif.com to learn more, participate and join an artist-led event at Silverwood Park this summer.
I identify as a white-bodied, heterosexual cis-female member of Generation X. I am a third/fourth generation immigrant descended from Irish, German, Slovak and Hungarian ancestors. My great grandparents were homesteaders and settlers in Oregon, North Dakota and New York. I was born in Anchorage, Alaska on Denaʼina Ełnena, raised in the Willamette Valley on Clackamas homelands, and have lived since 2000 on Dakota Land in Minneapolis, MN.
BOOKSHELF
My Grandmother’s Hands
Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
Resmaa Menakem
Central Recovery Press (September 19. 2017()
The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. In this groundbreaking work, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of body-centered psychology.
Slavery's Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State
Christopher P. Lehman
Minnesota Historical Society Press (October 1, 2019)
A set of mutually beneficial relationships between southern slaveholders and Minnesotans kept the men and women whose labor generated the wealth enslaved.
The Relentless Business of Treaties
How Indigenous Land Became US Property
Martin Case
Minnesota Historical Society Press (June 1, 2018)
How making treaties for land cessions with Native American nations transformed human relationships to the land and became a profitable family business
Mni Sota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota
Gwen Westerman and Bruce White
Minnesota Historical Society Press (September 1, 2012)
An intricate narrative of the Dakota people over the centuries in their traditional homelands, the stories behind the profound connections that hold true today.
The Essentials of Theory U: Core Principles and Applications
Finding the Mother Tree / Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
Suzanne Simard
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group May 4, 2021
Simard writes – in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways – how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies – and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.
CREDITS
I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to produce this work through an Art(ists) on the Verge 11 fellowship from NorthernLights.mn. I am also thankful to the many fellow artists, community members and family who have supported me in vital ways over the last two years.
This Minneapolis, MN Edition of the project was supported by a grant from the Jerome Foundation. Commissioned by Northern Lights.mn for the 11th round of Art(ists) on the Verge.
The Rochester, MN Edition received support for the Rochester, MN Edition History Center of Olmsted County, Rochester Art Center, Bolger, Inc, and a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board.
Sarah Nassif is a fiscal year 2022 recipient of a Creative Support for Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board.
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
Copyright Sarah J. Nassif 2021-2022