Crossings

“OU species monitoring 4.7.25 – beaver with LONG branch”

The trail cam footage that Dr. Sandra Troxell-Smith makes possible on Oakland University’s campus provides a medium for situating ourselves within multispecies ecocultural possibilities. Beavers are elusive and their wetland complexes are difficult to access. Well-placed cameras and regular monitoring offer a lens into a world that once dominated the North American continent and that is continually threatened by agriculture and the loss of wetlands to urban expansion and infrastructure construction.

The invaluable footage of the tree-worlds that beavers create and the biodiversity that returns because of their brilliance is a kind of narrative of what Donna Haraway calls the “ongoingness” necessary to embracing the “embodied connections to places, corridors, histories, and ongoing decolonial and postcolonial struggles” (3, 138). The beauty of this video lies in its capture of a crossing—a beaver momentarily seen swimming across the boundaries of a camera lens with a spectacularly long branch, on its way to turning the branch into structure that will maintain the ongoingness of biodiversity and multispecies relations.

And it’s a glimpse into the possibilities for our own ecocultural identities and spaces. The vast library of the trail cam footage of our resident beavers is an archive of crossings by a species that was nearly made extinct in the 19^th century through the fur trade. These images, in all their varieties of seasons, interspecies encounters, beauty, sound, behavior, personality, and humor are a glossary of a space that is alive with interdependency and thriving because of it. As a wetland world taking up precious space on the campus of a neoliberal university, these crossings are important demonstrations of ongoingness and “persistence” within a culture that insists on private, capitalist “squares-within-squares” and the violent legacies of colonialism that inhere in them (8).

What can these crossings teach us? How can they make our interdependency with a more than human world more visible? How can they help us make sense of the kind of future we want and how to become within it?

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