“The Nettle Meddles”: Queer Joy and Settler Belonging on the Salish Sea

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This is the fourth post in the Succession IV: Queering the Environment – “Queer Joy” series. This series, edited by Jessica DeWitt, Tina Adcock, and Sarah York-Bertram, invites contributors to build off of scholarship and lived knowledge that envisions queer joy as a way of knowing and being in relation with the environment and more-than-human beings.

Light filters into a dense Pacific Northwest forest. A figure, hunched over, gathers greenery into a paper bag. Grainy super-8 footage moves up overgrown steps, pans across plant life, and scans a crowd assembled in a clearing near a red painted shed. These shots are spliced between the camcorder-quality film, suggesting a DIY punk aesthetic and twee sensibility. Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf” plays over this and opening title screens announce, in a rune-like death metal font, “The Third Annual Olympia Spring Punk Rock Festival…Nettle…Fest…‘87.”1 Over the ensuing 12 minutes, narrator and filmmaker Nave Nitrof (self-described “Butch carpenter drag f****t/Documentarian) explains from a ratty couch in a trash-strewn yard (of what looks like the legendary Track House punk house—burned down in 2023) why we should care about nettles (Urtica dioica) and demonstrates how nettle-human relationships can produce queer joy. Clips depict revelers assembled in overgrown yards, dancing, laughing, sharing nettle foods, and singing songs honoring the formidable and subversive power of nettles. They celebrate a queer kinship with a plant often seen by dominant society as weedy, worthless, perverse, or irritating.

“They celebrate a queer kinship with a plant often seen by dominant society as weedy, worthless, perverse, or irritating.”

Fig. 1 Nettle Fest and queer kink: flogging with nettles to the soundtrack of queercore band King Cobra
Fig. 1 Nettle Fest and queer kink: flogging with nettles to the soundtrack of queercore band King Cobra.

Olympia’s position on the I-5 corridor, between Vancouver and Seattle in the north and Portland and San Francisco to the south, has maintained a steady flow of young people and ideas in and out of the region. I became part of a larger pattern of misfits and weirdos finding their way to The Evergreen State College (TESC), a major engine of Olympia’s cultural and political ferment, in the years just before Nettle Fest ‘87 (2004) was made. Evergreen is known worldwide as an incubator for Riot Grrrl, but has sustained a unique music and arts scene since at least the early 1980s that continues today. Nettle Fest ‘87 appears to be a student film produced through TESC’s “Mediaworks” program, reflecting a community deeply tied to TESC and its alternative pedagogical mission, influential even to those who never set foot in institutions of higher ed. 

“Nettle Fest is a venue for meshing backgrounds which are not traditionally thought to be congruous,” Nitrof explains. Olympia’s DIY punk scene has long fostered fertile overlaps between subcultural categories: punks, metalheads, and hippies, urban and rural, trashy and pedantic, the tough and the tender. “Nettle fest is radical. Nettle Fest is rock and roll. Nettle Fest is camp. Nettle Fest is backcountry wholesome. Nettle fest is beer-swilling, nettle chompin’, Dionysian revelry. Nettle Fest is performance. For us, by us. Nettle Fest is cutting-edge, queer, urban chic.” Many of the commentators in the film, Nitrof included, describe a Goldilocks experience: Y2K-era Olympia offered urbanity, a queer bar scene, and leftist political organizing, balanced with a rural, earthy sensibility that queer people often sacrifice to seek community. 

“Nettle fest enthusiast” Ashi, for example, describes how in spaces like Nettle Fest “you get queers clashing with like country crafts and…inheritance…our right to inherit knowledge, making our own food and medicine and crafts and wild craft and like every ancestor group, person, on this planet has that.” Ashi was articulating a socioecological relationality often missing from queer punk spaces in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Up to this point, this kind of environmental ethos was more commonly associated with hippies or new-agers who eschewed social justice movements for self-expression/self-realization, or with radical environmentalists who often espoused homophobic, transphobic, and even white supremacist views that envision “nature” as separate from all human intervention. Ashi trusts that a recouperation of ancestral relationships with nettles can facilitate this reconnection. 

“It reminds me of where I came from, and when I first felt a queer joy that emerged from a rootedness in place, caring for place, and how it speaks to the possibility of queer flourishing, living on your own terms, producing your own culture and sustenance outside of or despite capitalist relations.”

  • Fig. 2 Nave Nitrof explains the purpose of Nettle Fest]
  • Fig. 2 Nave Nitrof explains the purpose of Nettle Fest]
  • Fig. 2 Nave Nitrof explains the purpose of Nettle Fest]

Fig. 2 Nave Nitrof explains the purpose of Nettle Fest.

Watching this film now, as a historian of settler colonialism in North America, provokes a complex set of thoughts and feelings. It reminds me of where I came from, and when I first felt a queer joy that emerged from a rootedness in place, caring for place, and how it speaks to the possibility of queer flourishing, living on your own terms, producing your own culture and sustenance outside of or despite capitalist relations. Though the film provides an alternative model to settler colonial ecologies of extraction and commodification, it’s also part of a settler archive that occludes Indigenous presence past, present, and future. Missing is the presence of the Squaxin Island (specifically st̓əč̓as people) and Nisqually Tribes, descendants of the signatories of the Medicine Creek Treaty of 1854, who, like other Coast Salish peoples, have always maintained land- and water- based relationships in the place in which the city of Olympia is currently located.  When nettles speak, as they do in the film, ventriloquized in a high, ethereal voice, to whom are they speaking? We may claim them as kin, but would they claim us, that is, the predominantly non-Native settlers among us?2 

In an article for a special issue of Diacritics on “queer environs,” literary scholar Natalia Cecire considers the “mycological turn”: the possibility for queer flourishing in environmental apocalypse many find in becoming-fungus. Cecire wonders whether the “allegorical gestures, exhorting, ‘Let’s become fungal!’” reproduce a modernist romantic vision that “elides the historicity of scientific knowledge and sexuality alike.” These works may simply “reverse the polarity on a classic instrument of heteropatriarchy—the naturalization of heterosexuality—in order to reclaim the natural as queer.” In the process, they dehistoricize categories of sex and gender by arguing, for example, that fungi are nonbinary.3 

Nettle Fest ‘87 likewise depicts nettles as fundamentally queer or insinuates that queering relationships to nettles (embracing a plant deemed weedy, pesky, unvalued in dominant settler colonial capitalist culture) does the work of decolonizing relationships with more-than-human beings. All of this occludes a Coast Salish understanding of nettle relations as normative, not queer. For example, Lower Elwha Klallam storyteller Roger Fernandez (“How Nettle Saved the People”) relates how nettles, or sčx̣áyč (Klallam/Straits Salish) or sc̓ədᶻx̌ (Lushootseed/Puget Sound Salish) taught Coast Salish people to make use of their powers and thwart attacks from raiders to the north, offering their bodies as medicine to strengthen Coast Salish bodies and minds. Nettles taught Northwest Coast peoples when edible seaweed was ready to harvest (as their seasonal growth is roughly parallel) and when Pacific halibut fishing is at its peak. This connection between land and sea is exemplified by the importance of nettle fiber to make cordage for fishing nets.4 

At best, consuming this nettle knowledge can help non-Native newcomers appreciate the work that nettles have done and continue to do to provide for generations of Indigenous peoples in this place but at worst, it can lead to an appropriation of Indigenous knowledge and practice that settlers use to indigenize themselves without addressing ongoing settler colonialism. Another approach might be to historicize nettles in place: to follow them through the settler colonial archive: where do nettles show up? How do nettles help bring into relief the environmental dimensions of Indigenous dispossession and ongoing settler colonialism? Can the nettles imprinted in the archive speak to settler colonial violence, perhaps speaking in support of their Coast Salish relatives past, present, and future? 

The deposition transcript of Duwamish et al. v. the United States (1934)—the first substantial lawsuit brought by Puget Sound tribes against the US Federal Government for broken treaty promises and inadequate compensation for lands and resources—is a rich text for this purpose. Much of the testimony was given by individuals who were alive during the initial waves of US settlement and describe in detail how individual settlers as well as state and local law enforcement acted with impunity to dispossess them of their homes, fragmenting relations that had sustained them as people. Nettles were part of this story, and to follow them through the deposition transcripts is to catalog this history of settler violence as well as paint a picture of a previously thriving network of socioecological relations that composed the land and peoples of the Salish Sea—relationships in the process of being restored today. 

From Duwamish et al. v. United States. This deposition taken in 1927 demonstrates the extensive cultivation of nettles by Lower Skagit people and the very ordinary violence perpetrated by settlers to remove them from their land and sever their relationships to nettles and other important relations.
From Duwamish et al. v. United States. This deposition taken in 1927 demonstrates the extensive cultivation of nettles by Lower Skagit people and the very ordinary violence perpetrated by settlers to remove them from their land and sever their relationships to nettles and other important relations.

From Duwamish et al. v. United States. This deposition taken in 1927 demonstrates the extensive cultivation of nettles by Lower Skagit people and the very ordinary violence perpetrated by settlers to remove them from their land and sever their relationships to nettles and other important relations.

Settler colonial texts like Duwamish et al. must be read against a settler timeframe that forecloses Indigenous futures. To interpret the voice of nettles imprinted within it should be done through Indigenous epistemologies and temporal reckonings that understand human-nettle relationships as dynamic and ongoing. For its part, Nettle Fest ’87 can also be read against a settler temporality that would consign it to the dustbin of history, of failed, and perhaps naive utopian projects. Though it should be critiqued as a settler text that assumes a terra nullius to build a foundation of anti-capitalist ecological relations and queer conviviality, it might have something in common with Indigenous, and particularly Indigiqueer ways of knowing and being in its rejection of settler capitalist relationality and embrace of ambiguity, contradiction, and in-betweenness.  

Two-spirit writer Joshua Whitehead (Oji-Cree/nehiyaw and member of Peguis First Nation) describes Indigiqueer as emerging from the experience of “not knowing and knowing” which is “the whole damn point to me. That’s the whole futuristic key of Indigenous sexual, and by relation, environmental sovereignty because to be undefinable is to be unknowable to colonial powers – that’s radical freedom. In my opinion, at least.”5 In a similar spirit, the lyrics of Bikini Kill’s “Jigsaw Youth” (which plays as queer punks dance at the end of the film) proclaims “We know there’s not one way/One light, one stupid truth/Don’t fit your definitions/Won’t meet yr demands/Not into win-lose reality/Won’t fit in with your plans.”6

“Rejecting Western epistemological supremacy and reestablishing a human-nettle connection cannot automatically do decolonizing work, no matter how “queer” nettles are, and how anti-colonial a celebration of nettles might feel.”

Rejecting Western epistemological supremacy and reestablishing a human-nettle connection cannot automatically do decolonizing work, no matter how “queer” nettles are, and how anti-colonial a celebration of nettles might feel. Yet identifying sites of epistemological and political overlap, embracing epistemological plurality, and by learning how to hold the contradiction of belonging to and yet never fully belonging to a place, settlers can move to support Indigenous resurgence. Watching Nettle Fest ’87 in 2026 reminded me of how I came to care about the places that have given me life; the necessity of understanding the deeper histories (including more-than-human) that led to my inhabitance of these places and the joy I can safely feel there. The question of what responsibilities this knowledge entails is an animating force in the work I do as a historian today.  

Notes

  1. The “‘87,’” goes unexplained. Perhaps it is an ironic pean to the 1986 short film Heavy Metal Parking Lot, or perhaps another especially rich time in Olympia’s music scene history that spanned the late 1980s and early 1990s. ↩︎
  2. For the experience of one Coast Salish punk/Riot Grrrl, see Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe’s memoir Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk (Counterpoint, 2022) and essay collection Thunder Song (Counterpoint, 2024) (nettles make an appearance). ↩︎
  3. Natalia Cecire, “Enchanting Austerity: Genre and Fungal Allegory,” Diacritics 52, No. 2 (2024), 74-75. ↩︎
  4. Nancy Turner, Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). ↩︎
  5. Joshua Whitehead, Indigiqueerness: A Conversation About Storytelling (Athabasca University Press, 2013), 18. ↩︎
  6. Bikini Kill, “Jigsaw Youth,” recorded October, 1992, track #4 on Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah/Our Troubled Youth split LP with Huggy Bear, Kill Rock Stars, vinyl LP. ↩︎

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Kaden Jelsing

Kaden Jelsing lived in Olympia, WA on and off from 2002-2016. Because he has drunk from the artesian well there, he knows that he is destined to return. Jelsing received his PhD from the University of British Columbia in 2023 and is currently completing a third year as a lecturer of American studies at Smith College. He is beginning a faculty appointment at Eastern Washington University this fall in social studies education and history.

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