If it is abundantly clear that trees have profoundly influenced ways of thinking, techniques of decision-making, modes of orientation, and methods of classification, what’s less evident are the ethics that are implied or entangled in the morphologies of a decision tree or a tree of knowledge. What values are embodied in its root node? How might the sequencing of its branches be informed by politics? What order, what ontology, is being expressed? 24
"Momentous decisions have been made under the shelter of trees."
Such questions arise as well when we ponder the long history of trees (I am referring now to actual, physical trees) that have served as sites for passionate and partisan deliberation. Many momentous decisions have been made under the shelter of trees; trees have witnessed and even seeded the germination, hybridization, invasion, and, on occasion, destruction of peoples and nations. 25 As told in the first pages of the Bible, it was Eve’s choice to consume forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that condemned humanity to sin, suffering, judgment, and death. Its counterpart in the Garden of Eden was the Tree of Life, a variation of which is central to many religions and mythologies. It was beneath the Bodhi Tree, the “tree of awakening,” where Siddhartha Gautama achieved the spiritual enlightenment that transformed him into “the Buddha,” and where he made the decision to devote his life to teaching. 26
Centuries ago, in what is now North America, the Great Peacemaker of the Iroquois and his disciple, Hiawatha, brought together leaders from the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca nations to form the Haudenosaunee confederacy. The Peacemaker directed those gathered to uproot a great white pine and thus make “a cavity in which to bury all weapons of war”; the Great Tree of Peace (Skaęhetsiˀkona), with its needles in clusters of five, has come to symbolize the union. 27 In 1681, the French trader René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, summoned representatives from the tribes of the Great Lakes region, including the Potawatomi, Miami, and Illinois, to propose joining forces against the Iroquois. Allegedly they gathered beneath an immense oak and there signed a treaty that would give rise to new alliances and divisions among Native tribes, the French, and the English; for centuries afterward the tree, located in what is now South Bend, Indiana, would be memorialized as the Council Oak. 28 The hardy trees that stood on battlefields of the Civil War and have survived — the Burnside Sycamore in Sharpsburg; the Sickles Oak at Gettysburg; the Manassas White Oak, among others — are today revered and protected as “witness trees.” 29 Many of their sylvan siblings south of the Mason-Dixon line served as scaffoldings for the lynching of Black people well into the 20th century — witnesses for a perversion of justice in Jim Crow America.