My Saint is a Weed

Holy Pigweed

SOPHIE STRAND
12.11.2022
98

17

Share
Saint Lucy for blindness and eye troubles. Saint Anthony for lost objects.
Saint Peregrine for illness. Saint Christopher for safe travel. Saint Jude for
impossible problems. In medieval Europe, there was a saint for every
problem. Yes, a fever necessitated an herbal remedy. But it also needed a
saint. Saint Patroclus of Troyes to be specific. Christian saints in the middle
ages were syncretic animist deities from pre-Christian pagan practices. These
beloved figures survived imperial control and Christian conversation by
slipping sideways into the silhouette of Christian figures. Good examples of
this are Saint Brigid, the chaste counterpart of the earlier Celtic fertility
goddess Brigid and the mysteriously dog-headed Saint Christopher who
harkens back to legends of the “dog-headed” Cynocephalus people who once
lived in Europe. What we tend to forget, post-Enlightenment, is that early
European Christianity was hardly monotheistic. It was a polytheistic romp of
theriomorphic animal saints, magical grove and spring madonnas, and
specific land spirits that saw the opportunity to survive by fusing into
symbionts with Christian symbolism. Christianity was a cult of saints: unruly,
folkloric, and inextricably entangled with the oral mythology of the people it
tried desperately to convert.

Saints lived in certain places. Their relics were nestled in grottos and
churches built over stone formations that had been sacred for thousands of
years prior to the life of Jesus. You went on pilgrimage to a holy place,
knowing full well that place and saint were synonymous. To touch the soil of
a certain place was to touch the body of a being that could heal you. Saints
were medicine. They were prescribed for ailments and heartache and conflict.
Cunningly smuggled into the sterile realm of celibate sky gods, saints offered
the feral medicine of specific ecosystems and landscapes. Covertly costumed
as human beings, they continued to offer the medicine of the plants and
animals and mountains and forests they had originally been understood to
embody.
Hundreds of years and an ocean removed from the saints of my European
ancestors, I wonder whom I should ask for help? Who are the landscape
saints of North America? Who is the saint of this current moment? Who will
provide a personalized medicine for me and my tricky body? Who is suited
for this particular flavor of patriarchal capitalist death cult collapse? I think
the answer is growing next to my car. And in the field near my house. And
in-between countless rows of soybean and cotton plants. I think the answer
likes disturbed soil. Polluted landscapes. Likes to salvage and adapt. Most of
all, it likes to mate. So quickly, with half a million seeds per plant, that it
genetically outpaces all the pesticides thrown at her. I think the answer is
studded in cow manure. I think it is drifting, glittering against a gust of
photons shot from a blistering August sun. I think my saint is a weed.
Pigweed. Palmer Amaranth to be exact.

Palmer Amaranth is the bane of American monoculture. And, like the

European land saints, it predates both Christianity and modern agriculture.
Pigweed is a staple of indigenous people’s diets and medicines stretching
from South to North America. The tender spade-like leaves can be cooked
like spinach or added to a salad and the emerald seeds are high in protein and
useful as a grain-substitute. The plants are high in Vitamin A and C, while
also providing niacin, iron, and calcium. The Hopi and Pueblo also used the
seeds to make a rust-colored dye.

A New York Times article was recently published about the threat of
Pigweed. It is officially resistant to the pesticides Dicamba and RoundUp.
Recent studies show that it is uniquely equipped to outwit novel pesticides.
The article characterizes the plant as invasive. As a bully. A poison. A
problem. It says that the only way to get rid of it at this point is something
called “flame-weeding”, where fields are literally set on fire. But it is
important to remember that Pigweed was here before colonial agriculture
regarded it as fodder for pig’s at best, and a weed at best. It is not an invasive.
It is not a bully. It is an original dweller of American ecosystems.

Let’s adjust the lens of the story. Let’s center pigweed rather than late-
capitalist monoculture. Maybe Pigweed is a gift. A saint providing a medicine
again and again. Saying, “These crops you insist on growing are not good for
your body or the land’s body. What if you tried eating me? What if you tried
listening to me? I’ve lived here much longer than you.”

The most salient aspect of pigweed is its ability to metabolize and survive
constant chemical assault. Pigweed is no victim. Pigweed survives. Pigweed
is resistant to Dicamba, a poison so potent that only a teaspoon could kill a
human being. I think of my grandmother. Just this last year it was legally
proven in a class action lawsuit against RoundUp that she was one of the
victims of that chemical pesticide. Her heart-failure following Non-
Hodgkin’s Lymphoma was caused by the chemicals she used on her roses. I
think of my own body’s tendency to adversely react to every chemical and
pollutant with which it comes into contact.

We are in a toxic soup of our own making: cultural and chemical. We will not
be able to escape contamination. It is well known that pesticides drift. And so
do conspiracy theories. And panic. And bad stories. There is RoundUp in our
drinking water. Flame retardants in breast milk. The answer is not to try and
escape. But, like Pigweed, to send down a deep tap root, and start to
chemically, creatively, metabolically adapt. The master’s tools will never
dismantle the master’s house, writes Audre Lorde. And pigweed is a tool the
master of American Capitalism does not recognize. This tool doesn't
dismantle the house. It overgrows it. Digests its stone walls. Grows up
through the floorboards.

As we seek to survive in an age of ecological collapse and cultural chaos,

perhaps it is to the weeds we should look for advice. I think of Pigweed,
invading Europe as Europe colonized America. As Europeans took over
America, Pigweed flowed back on the ships, into the countries that were
invading its original ecosystem. It performed a reverse colonization. Pigweed
originally only from the Americas is now dispersed across Europe and Asia.
Pigweed says plant me in disturbed landscapes, dirty soil, chemical sludge.
Plant me where the pain lives and I will learn how to survive. I will learn how
to turn this poison into greenery, into stalk and seed and a tap root so long
and sturdy it is almost a sword, capable of sucking up water not available the
shallow rooted soy and cotton plants. My body needs to learn how to adapt to
an increasingly chaotic environment. It needs a saint that teaches me how to
get I touch with the wily, cunning knowledge of place. My saint is a seed on
the wind. A vegetal plague. Pigweed.