Hunting Season

Confronting our history

Carina Dieringer

Sometimes I wonder if yellow traffic lights are meant to invoke our most primal instincts. They represent the place between: that split second decision when the light changes at the worst time and you have to decide whether to slam on the brakes or book it. Flight or freeze: the fight is just collateral damage, in the form of those who feel the need to rush through an impending red light just to feel rebellious. Or maybe I spend too much time driving. I could go on and on about American infrastructure and capitalism but you get the gist. 

If you asked me “What is the Midwest,” I would say that it is long winding roads and trees and windmills and cows and deer. If you gave me a bit more time to think, I would say that the Midwest, like everywhere else in the U.S., is a tangled mess of love and violence.

As a young child, I would sit quietly and listen as friends and family complained about damage to their cars caused by some unavoidable collision with a deer who was “not meant to be there,” instinctually frozen in the middle of the human-paved, human-invented road. The road that divides animals from shelter, earth from itself, and humans from each other. I wonder if deer understand highways and speed limits and horsepower. I wonder, are we meant to be here? “We” referring to us, the descendants of colonization, genocide, industrialization. I am reminded of the names and crops and knowledge we have stolen to build the so-called Midwest. I am reminded of the way we dismiss deer and other beings of the earth, who have historically sacrificed their lives to feed and clothe humans on this land, as annoyances or trophies to be hunted.  

The Midwest is a place of mourning and reckoning. It is small towns who turn their struggle to survive into racist vitriol. It is a place juxtaposed to the Canadian border, where humans are denied their inalienable right to walk across the land of their ancestors by papers and state forces and weapons. It is my home, yes, but I cannot (and should not) forget how I got here.