Many of the soils I collect for dif/Fused Ancestry will be contaminated in one way or another. That’s an environmental issue I need to incorporate into the project. The grounds at and around Central State Griffin Memorial, the psychiatric hospital where my mother worked as a nurse and was treated as a patient, contain asbestos, lead, and other contaminants.

The soils from Lake Texoma’s banks near the Buncombe Creek boat ramp contain contaminants such as petroleum hydrocarbons and physical impurities such as plastic and metal from fishing line and lures. The same goes for the soils along the highways I traveled with my father.

I have to be careful collecting these soils and working with them. I might get samples tested if I can afford it. I want to see which are the most contaminated and if there’s a correlation between environmental, political, social, and personal abuses. I’ve hypothesized that rich lands like those found in Oklahoma lead to abuses of the land, the culture, the people, and all living beings who live in and on those lands.

As Daniela Naomi Molnar said in her keynote speech at Tulsa LitFest, environmental, political, and social violence tend to occur in the same place. Where you find one, you find them all. It’s clear to me that the shift occurred when stewardship of the land was lost and ownership was imposed, when nature was commodified and a colonial mindset took hold, one that persists to this day. Places lost in this equation, especially the most fertile ones and, in the case of Oklahoma, those that are oil-bearing. But every living thing in those places lost, too—including our living soils.