Homely Entanglements

Thinking with Caragana

Abstract

Marking two boundaries of my prairie home is a caragana hedge. Attending to this introduced species, now ubiquitous in this region – in the spirit of habitat studies, reading its prairie habitats and literary ecologies – brings me deeper into the tangle of home: of here and elsewhere, of Indigenous and settler, of domesticated, wild, and feral. The complex meanings of this translated nature at once reflect and urge me to rethink my relationship to this patch of ground – its roots, branches, and colonial hedging ways, along with its frayed edges where categories unravel and new relationships become possible.