There are birds, and there’s Palestine. There are birds, and there is Gaza. There are birds, and there’s Turtle Island. There are birds, and there’s a long history of occupation and Indigenous erasure still unfolding in front of our eyes. 

For a long time, I despised the term “nature poetry,” and thought it a dismissive space insistent on writing beauty where there’s violence. The truth is—whoever we may be and regardless of our stories and backgrounds—we are always writing nature poetry of a certain kind, poetry that weaves us into the fabrics of our worlds. 

Palestine is undoubtedly a nature issue—an urgent environmental issue of our times—an occupation of air, water, and land; a forced removal and genocide of its Indigenous population; an irreversible damage to its natural landscape and resources; a violent erasure of its ancestral villages; a persistent violation, exploitation, and continued harm to its wellbeing and ecology at large. We, after all, are an element unextractable from our surroundings, extract as they may try. 

This issue comes at a time of heightened awareness of genocide. Founded in 1948, the settler state of Israel continues to occupy Palestinian land for the seventy-eighth year. And although extensive advocacy and writing have documented the violence of this occupation and the stories of the people who suffered it, Palestine has gone global in the last two years like never before. Suddenly, it’s as if the world has finally understood, or could no longer turn away. Suddenly, every conference, magazine, organization, event, or university somehow alluded to Palestine explicitly (or implicitly, by refusing to comment on the genocide). 

But this is not my people’s story alone. As a Palestinian writer and guest editor for The Dodge, it was not only natural but necessary to expand this issue to speak to Global Indigenous struggles and to welcome writing by non-Palestinians. I live in Ohio, the Indigenous home of the Erie, Shawnee, and Kickapoo nations, all of whom have been forcibly removed. Everywhere we look, we are confronted by the history of the land we’re trying to call home. 

I am grateful to The Dodge and its remarkable team not only for bringing this issue to life, but more so for trusting a vision beyond mere curation. I didn’t want to simply collect writing relevant to the moment but to truly put together a useful resource for years to come. 

Return to Roots: Writing Toward Land houses works from established and emerging writers and spans a long distance from Gaza and Hawai‘i to Southern California, East Palestine, Ohio, and beyond. The issue also includes visual art, and a few contributors are teenagers still living in Gaza, whose words you’ll encounter in translation. Collectively, these works ask of us to listen, to witness, to pass them on. They are not about devastation, but of it, though they refuse to succumb to it. They remember, memorialize, haunt, translate, protest, and coin language where one might see only death. 

Many of the featured pieces name their geographies; others explore the feelings associated with them or document the violence endured over time and across different generations or locations. With return, roots, and land, the title was a way to foreground what’s contested for Palestinians and Indigenous communities as well as to reorient toward the natural elements of our causes. For Palestinians, as well as any Indigenous peoples forcibly (re)moved, land is not merely territory—it is the vessel of generational memory, holistic connectedness in which the people and their earth are one and the same, and collective, deeply rich and rooted identity. Similarly, return is not only tangible or physical, but spiritual, mystical, challenging, and demanding of an imagination beyond our current understanding of borders or community. 

Indeed, resistance writing is unlike any other. It is writing with higher stakes and larger aspirations—it contains entire homelands, cities, streets, bodies, funerals that could not happen, massacres that could be escaped, ancestors still speaking. It is writing that demands willing audiences. 

Out of a desire to activate the power of these works and to give their authors a larger role, I suggested reframing it as a teaching issue and inviting reflections or prompts to accompany the works where possible. At a time of extreme censorship and silencing, I commend the educators and institutions still choosing bravery—the college encampments alone reminded us that students remain the heroes of any cause. The daughter of a lifelong teacher, I can also imagine how difficult it is to speak about what one may not have experienced firsthand, which is why we turn to literature to enter other worlds. My hope is that this issue gives educators as well as general readers permission to speak about social justice in terms of craft in addition to content and to inspire further writing. 

In the spirit of generating fruitful conversation and extending the afterlife of this issue, I offer these discussion questions: