Ruth Burke
Two hundred years ago, white settler “prairie breakers” harnessed oxen to rip up native prairie, reshaping the biodiverse landscape to reflect Anglocentric attitudes toward land use and create what is now the epitomizing aesthetic quality of the rural Midwest: mono-crops. Simultaneously, a parallel and still-ongoing campaign of dissettlement and genocide ripped Native people from their homelands. How can art provide novel experiences to realign settler colonial approaches to land and its more-than-human inhabitants? In this chapter, interdisciplinary artist Ruth K. Burke (she/they) discusses Domestic Rewilding , a series of native plant, draft-animal-powered earthworks grounded in the practice of reciprocity between the human and more-than-human worlds. The earthworks use the capacity of art to address pressing social and climate issues in unconventional ways and carry overarching goals to activate a viewer to consider the interconnected past, present, and future of our environment and the living beings who have and continue to inhabit her. The series’ flagship site (in progress), located in Central Illinois and positioned as a Living Land Acknowledgment, is discussed in depth in this chapter. Thinking with perspectives from authors like Patty Krawec, Winona LaDuke, Jocelyne Porcher, and Melissa K. Nelson, among others, this chapter uses Domestic Rewilding as a case study to explore the overlap between interspecies kinship and labor, Indigenous Knowledge, contemporary art practices, agroecology, land acknowledgments, site specificity, and the urgency of reattuning to a reciprocal relationship with the living world.