Time Travel and Land Acknowledgment

I was thinking about time travel the other day, and specifically wondering who or what period I would visit if Time Safari, Inc. had a shingle hanging on King Street.

No doubt I would get a ticket to this place. 1400 CE? 

It would be incredible to see what this landscape looked like. Maybe not so different in some places, in others, unrecognizable. 

A view of place would be secondary, however, to the opportunity to talk to a fellow river nerd. What do they see? What cool things have they experienced? Given some leisure, where’s the hang out spot? 

I can’t pretend to understand what the Susquehannocks and others felt about the river; or the natural world for that matter. I know what I have read. I know what I have heard, but I won’t go on for fear of romanticizing something I know nothing about. Beyond that, even if I knew what an indigenous person in 1400 thought about place and space, I wouldn’t really understand since it’s outside my cultural experience. 

What I can assume, I think, is that people throughout time have enjoyed the beauty of the world’s natural spaces and the power of sharing these spaces with people they love. That’s what I want to know about. What about the river and all that happens on it do they think is beautiful and worthy of wonder? Have they heard the sound of a wake tinning against the ice pocket on the bank? Or do they know sounds I have never heard? 

I guess this is all, really, just a roundabout way to acknowledge thousands of years of native presence on the Conestoga River and its surrounds. Spaces that through displacement and murder they can no longer enjoy as their ancestral lands.

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