American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Bloodroot, puccoon, and Sanguinaria canadensis are three of the names used to term a particular plant with blood-red roots. It is ever-present below the soil of continental America’s East Coast, Central, and Northern woodlands, but it is not always visible. The plant, which I call "bloodroot," requires close attention and bears a fast orange-red dye to those who respect its limits. Yet its histories, livelihood, and futurity have been deeply unsettled by the promulgation of settler colonial extractionism and exploitation.

In my efforts to understand bloodroot as a locus of Native kinship and colonial violence, I undertook a hands-on, site-specific project of listening, watching, and waiting. I worked intimately with the plant to coax out its dye for wool and weaving canes, and I traced its appearance in colonial records from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century, where it became a signifier for colonial fears of alterity, a tool for the settler-salvage rhetoric of the "disappearing Indian" and, recently, a site for Native-led restorative care. 

My work is informed by Zoe Todd’s critique that "realizations" of environmental sentience risk erasing millennia of Native kinship with land; by deepening my personal relationship with bloodroot, detangling colonial namings, and tracing settler understandings of Native-bloodroot relations, I aim to elucidate the obfuscation (not absence) of Native land stewardship under colonial occupation. With bloodroot as a case study, “Digging for Dye” highlights the need for hands-on scholarship and historiographic redress in support of Native land kinship.