Somehow I made it through high school and college without reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. I encountered it as an audio book and listening to this passage, it took my breath away.

The Joads are tenant farmers and have been told that they need to move out. The owners want the land, first to exhaust with cotton and then to sell to easterners who want to build houses on it.
You'll have to get off the land. The plows'll go through the dooryard.

And now the squatting men stood up angrily. Grampa took up the land, and he had to kill the Indians and drive them away. And Pa was born here, and he killed weeds and snakes. Then a bad year came and he had to borrow a little money.

An' we was born here. There in the door—our children born here. And Pa had to borrow money. The bank owned the land then, but we stayed and we got a little bit of what we raised.

We know that—all that. It's not us, it's the bank. A bank isn't like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn't like a man either. That's the monster.
Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up.

We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster.

When I heard this passage I thought about how close Steinbeck came to understanding. These tenant farmers felt connection to the land, connection that came through working on it, being born on it, dying for it and on it. Grandpa killed Indians, Pa killed weeds and snakes.

But it’s an enlightenment era understanding of land ownership; that you owned the land because you worked it, not because you bought it. Ownership through buying would come later, but early in the period of colonization ownership came through claiming and working.

It’s not wrong, it’s just incomplete. It leaves no room for the land to claim you back, for reciprocal relationship. And if the land had relationship with the Indians, what did it think about Grandpa?

The Grapes of Wrath begins in Salisaw, Oklahoma. Recall that Oklahoma had been part of that vast geography that the US government called Indian Country and into which it deposited all the Indians it didn’t want living east of the Mississippi.

These plains knew the Cherokee and Choctaw. They had longer memories of the Oceti Sakowin, also called the great Sioux Nation. Before that this land knew the Wichita and the Caddo people whose presence goes back at least two thousand years through the mound builders.

This land had absorbed the blood and sweat of generations, civilizations rise and fall, the land continues and it holds memory of us all. It is an act of extraordinary hubris to stand before a presence that large, and that old, and make one sided claims of ownership.

The squatting men are calling on the land itself to witness their plight, they aren’t only arguing with the men who represent the owners, they are appealing to the land itself to bear witness to their presence, to their right of ownership. And the land is silent,

It does not put up any resistance or offer any comfort. Throughout the book the land bears silent witness to the destruction of people and food and it makes no response, no complaint. Tractors plow the land and it offers up only dust.

In the Bible drought is often connected with mourning as a result of human transgression. In the ancient world a mourner would fast and pour dust over their head and body, so too the land fasts and covers herself in dust.

Was the land mourning the loss of those with whom it had deep relationship? Mourning the transgression of treaties made between people with no thought to the land itself? Was it mourning the way that the newcomers despised and disrespected the new world and all it contained?

The land is an ancient presence, she remembers things that are long forgotten. What hubris it is to stand before her and think we can mark her off in a grid, buying and selling and digging and claiming with no thought about what being claimed back will mean.