Our first stop on my family’s trip to Scotland this past spring was to Edinburgh. We woke up extra early and grabbed our tickets to see the Edinburgh castle, which is almost 1000 years old. As we were walking up with the rest of the tourists my eyes looked upwards and saw this.
Take a close look. Do you notice anything wrong in this picture? It’s a little hard to see but notice the flags.
What I noticed before the rest of my family was the Union Jack flying above the flag of Scotland. Maybe it’s my American need to tear down Union Jacks. Maybe it’s because we were on Scottish soil. But I was livid that the Scottish flag wasn’t flying higher, or at least next two, the Union Jack.
We learned later that the official coat of arms, for both the UK and Scotland, has a unicorn in chains. While the original meaning might not be that Scotland is being chained by England, we kept hearing over and over again during our trip that England was holding Scotland back. From Brexit to the Monarchy, there is a large vocal population that wishes to break up the United Kingdom. “Free the Unicorn” has become a shorthand to express hundreds of years of pent up frustrations.
Photo retrieved from Wikipedia.
I had plans to write this when we just got back from Scotland. I had a vague idea of “Scottish people got to keep their traditions and land at the sake of their freedoms, while Americans lost their traditions and land for their freedoms.” Two sides of the same coin, which was a nice little bow on a wonderful trip.
But something seemed off, so I put this idea on the back burner. It wasn’t until I read An Indigenous People’s History of the United States that I learned that my ancestors most likely weren’t Scottish folk trying to escape the Empire, but were actually the Empire’s attack dogs. The Ulster-Scots came to Appalachia and first hand participated in the genocide of the peoples that lived in these mountains.
To pair with that book, I read As Long as Grass Grows (seasonal lit-app coming soon!) and realized that even my concept of wilderness was a tool used in Genocide. When I think of Wilderness I think of “nature untouched by people.” On especially hard days in the city, I yearn to be in a place of solitude where I cannot see or hear people.
But America was never a wilderness “untouched by people!” Where I live now the Haudenosaunee and Cherokee nations maintained the lands by altering it drastically! Pulling up trees they didn’t want, controlled burns, selecting crops; all these were done to create a landscape they could live in for generations to come.
Even the concept of “virgin wilderness” dabbles in Patriarchy. “I don’t want to hike where another man has!” as an example of this backwards mindset.
I cannot change that I am a child of the British Empire, morphed into the American one. But by recognizing the chains I can start the hard work of removing them.
Free the Unicorn
