The smell of home

I got off the plane in Provo Utah this morning to the smell of my childhood.

It’s hard to describe the smell of the Russian Olive. A kind of fuzzy crisp sweet smell at the back of the nose. I only put name to smell a few years ago on another trip when I had the inspiration to just ask my Mom what the smell was. I had a hard time even then communicating what I was smelling because the smell exists as a backdrop for everyone that lives in this area of Utah. I grew up in the Salt Lake Valley until I was a teenager when my family moved to Virginia. My Mom reminded me that there was a Russian Olive on the banks of the irrigation canal behind my childhood home. I remember watching that tree’s slender slivery leaves flutter and ungulate in wild patterns in the ever present northward breeze coming from the point of the mountain. As I type this a memory comes back of watching the tree one day in utter bordom and seeing goofy muppet like faces emerging and vanishing in a raucous gabbering mass.

My brother picks me up from the airport and on the drive I can’t help but feel the irony of the Russian Olive being the smell burned into my olfactory senses being an invasive species. Because I too am an invasive species of sorts. My ancestors came from Southern England and sailed to Lousisiana in 1852 as some of the first Mormon converts from missionary efforts in England. After tragically burying their first son who died shortly after their arrival in port, they traveled up the Mississippi river to one of many staging grounds for wagon caravan companies heading west. Some for areas that would become modern Utah and others for the pacific coast. All of them part of the seemingly unstoppable force of settler colonialism that ethically cleansed and reshaped the ecology of North America; the Russian Olive being a humble footnote in that story.

On the trip just before this one I spent an unhealthy amount of time reading back through family and Utah history to try to recontextualize where my family sat in this overall timeline. The thorn in my heel was wanting to know where my family fit into this story. My acestors arrived in Salt Lake in 1854 just seven years after the original vanguard arrived and declared this is the place. Funny enough there were a few in that group that thought California was a much more attractive sounding place. I was surprised to learn that my family arrived to a sizable town of 20,000 people rather than a fountier outpost. I’d be surprised if they didn’t encounter Ute and Timpanogos people passing through but there’s no direct mention in any of the family history books I have access to. It seems they arrived into and existed in a rather insular cultural experience. By the time they arrived the two major conflicts, Battle Creek massacre and Battle at Fort Utah, that effectively ousted the Tempanogos from Utah Valley to the south were already said and done. They would have been very aware of the Black Hawk War (1865-1872) which would have taken place during the years my great-great-great grandfather was a young adult. But I imagine those conflicts would have felt far away.

All of this was a natural seque from my recent interest in early colonial history in Virginia. But unlike the history I learned in school, taught from the perspective of the colonists, I read primary sources and histories from the indigenous nations and groups. I can’t do that history justice other than to encourage people to prefer stories that people tell about themselves rather than the stories told about them.

Looking back I think I only knew one kid of native ancestry. His name was Parker and I only indirectly knew him as a classmate for a year before he moved away. Short of a young boy’s fascination with the adventures of “mountain men” and living off the wild, indians were either people living down in Arizona and New Mexico or the archiological curiosity of the Ancestral Puebloans from fourth grade social studies. I did make a Puebloan pit house diarama that I was proud of. I did not even think, let alone internalize, that the space I occupied was someone else’s home. Not a home that my ancestors were welcomed into as a refugee from real or perceived religious pursicution. Not a home built on an organic creole of mutual understanding and shared culture forged over 150 years of bridges of dignity built between different people. A place I likely would have wanted to live and raise my kids in. Instead I drive down I-18 with my brother and I’m bored. Bored with the vaguely polite utopia.

I think my lack of interest is easily attributed to simply thinking of Indians as a monolith. One people, one generic culture or as some innocent ideal of Rousseauean primitivism, to handwave away as a curio of a past age. That changed when I started to see the mind boggling diversity of a history of people just being people. Living in Virginia, I sit between two epochs of expansion and colonisation separated by over 200 years. What frustrates me most is how stories of history are told by pointing at a moment in the timeline and saying “this was enevitable”. Thankfully a growing number of people are responding, “history didn’t start on that day”. When I look at the point on the timeline, I say this was a collective failure of imagination to find a world where many worlds fit. Every day I have the choice to affirm or deny the dignity of others.

Today I do so with the smell of home on the breeze.