Swampy Relations & Imperfect Restoration
This essay on Indigenous land relations, colonial conservation, queer swampy belonging, and imperfect restoration is part of the Companion Species series, which investigates a complex, interconnected, and co-constituted web of beyond-human relating. Series editors: Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Kuhelika Ghosh, Ellie Kincaid, and Bri Meyer.
I think someone was living in the sinkhole in my swamp for a while. Bedded down in a depression created by a precarious Moses-era Amtrak alluvial drip, it was a disaster waiting to happen. I never saw them, but they left footprints across our little ecosystem: a few butts from a Newport’s box, ostrich fern fiddleheads flattened, and a trail, marked by the absence of the omnipresent jewelweed and leading towards broken fencing, that could only be anthropogenic.
We set up a trail camera and found me—awkward, sweaty, tripping over bald cypress knees—and children playing Triassic tag. We strung corrals of rope to defend the most delicate native plants, but in doing so, we effectively dispossessed someone else of their home. I felt uneasy, knowing displacement is a familiar story here.
Indigenous Stewardship of the Swamp
The Swamp, barely 3,000 square feet, lies in what is now Riverside Park on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Four centuries ago, this swamp was the mouth of a creek flowing down 80th Street into the Shatemuc, “the river that flows both ways,” now called the Hudson River. This hilly island was once Manahahtaan—part of Lenapehoking, the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people, who today include the Delaware Nation, the Delaware Tribe, the Stockbridge-Munsee Band, the Ramapough Lenape, and others, each with distinct governance and cultural practices.
For millennia, the swamp bore witness to glaciations, tidal inundations, and the migrations and habitations of Munsee-speaking Lenape to the north and Unami-speaking Lenape to the south. Thriving alongside the Indigenous inhabitants were their kin: white wood aster, marsh blue violet, sweetgum, red chokeberry, bald eagles, redback salamanders, painted turtles, and red-tailed hawks. The land was not something to be conquered or controlled, but a living, breathing presence that deserved care and co-creation—a sink for deciduous decisions in sync with epochs and shifting tidal rhythms.
Steps away from this fragile wetland, a different monument stands: a giant glacial erratic boulder etched with the face of Cyrus Clark, neighborhood hero and civic financier. The Swamp sits at the confluence of capitalist pride and riparian-carved history; the irony is palpable. A monument to one man’s legacy persists unquestioned while the land’s longest stewards are erased from the narrative, their presence overwritten one plaque at a time, remembered only in dedications or land acknowledgments that sit at the edges of public consciousness.
No sign tells the deeper history of this place—of the river once lined with fishing weirs and dugout canoes, of the people who moved with the seasons rather than against them. History here is curated, mulched over like a carefully landscaped Olmstedian path. But the Lenape are not relics of the past, nor can their stewardship ever be a footnote.
When the Dutch first arrived in Lenapehoking in the early 1600s, they saw a resource to claim, not a family to foster. The infamous 1626 “purchase” of Manahahtaan, which traded land for trinkets and tinctures, marked the beginning of a violent unraveling. For the Lenape, land was not something to own but a shared home to nurture. You couldn’t buy land any more than you could buy the sun. But the settlers, with their walls and their streets, their fences and their deeds, carved it into something unrecognizable, something owned.
What followed were broken promises and bloodshed. Diseases carried on European ships swept through villages like unrelenting coastal winds, thinning their numbers and weakening their hold on their homeland. Treaties, written in languages not their own, turned into tools of deceit that signed away land never truly offered. Despite centuries of settler’s saws, forced migration, and government removal laws attempting to sever their connections, Lenape people have continually maintained, remembered, and reclaimed their ties to this land.
Today, the Lenape people live as a diaspora. Their communities are also rooted in Oklahoma, Ontario, and Wisconsin, and their stories and their spirits remain tethered to Lenapehoking. The land remembers with them; the sweetgrass soft marshes, the billion oyster tidal rivers, and the towering sweetgum tree’s rings still echo their care. Through the work of the Lenape Center, American Indian Community House (AICH), and many others, Indigenous voices are reclaiming their presence in the city that grew atop their homeland and reminding us that their ties to this place were never truly broken.
Conservation as Colonial Control
Today, in spaces like Riverside Park, conservation continues to shape whose hands hold power, whose presence is encouraged as a natural part of the landscape, and who is removed as invasive. With its soupy soil and tangled roots, the Swamp is a site for calamity, confusion, and conservation conundrums. It is artificial: a reconstructed fragment of a native wetland ecosystem designed to evoke what once was. Its native plants—swamp milkweed, turtlehead, and iris versicolor—exist alongside invasives like bishop’s weed and common privet.
True restoration is not a return but a recognition of what persists, what remembers, what refuses to be erased.
It performs nativeness, but it cannot fully reclaim what has been lost. Without the relationships and stewardship of the Lenape, this place is a facsimile curated by modern gardeners and managers like me. Even my work feels like a paradox; I weed and plant according to a prescriptive vision, knowing that my care perpetuates control. The fencing, signage, pathway paving, and boundaries I enforce echo the same systems of domination that displaced Indigenous peoples and continue to dictate who gets access to land.
To write about the Swamp is to participate in the same system of narrative control that I critique. It is to shape, to name, to claim. Writer Joshua Whitehead asks, “Who names an event apocalyptic?” and I find myself asking, “Who names a place worth saving?” Is writing about the Swamp a form of stewardship or ownership, of witnessing or overwriting?
And yet, I cannot, will not, abandon it.
In 2017, the Swamp was formally enclosed after the unofficial “big-dog” dog run group based at the adjacent copse of benches raised enough money to put up a fence. Only then did the park’s Conservancy deem it worthy of revitalization and assign the space a paid gardener.
Precarity and Queer Belonging
What does it mean to belong to a place like this? If conservation dictates who stays and who is removed, then where do I fit? Now, I call this place home—or, not precisely, as I live further uptown, in a less-resourced neighborhood in West Harlem. This neighborhood is also along the park, but red lines—both literal (the 1, 2, and 3 trains) and figurative (disenfranchising real estate practices)—divide it from the Upper West Side.
Racial inequality and Ivy League pride, with Columbia University squarely in the middle, bifurcate this space, creating a liminal experience between exclusivity and inclusion. Is it diversely flourishing or irreversibly gentrified? They feel tied, and in this patchwork of inequity, finding room to grow feels precarious for both the swamp and me.
In all its messy mycorrhizal existence, the Swamp feels like a queer space—it is unapologetically ugly, sinking, and out of sync with the polished façades of the Upper West Side. It is a place that resists categorization and flourishes in its contradictions, too. I’m a nonbinary person and a transplant to New York City; I exist here, but not fully rooted, uninoculated by the mother tree. I am both privileged and precarious in my place here, a newcomer occupying land that is not mine, trying to cultivate care while grappling with my own and others’ displacement.
Together, we are tangled in a shared effort to claim space without erasing the histories and ecologies that came before us—to exist in contradiction without apology. But what does it mean to care for a place that is always changing, always sinking? Can restoration ever be more than a pause in an ongoing environmental descent?
In moments of despair about the state of the world, it is tempting to think of an absolute end, to see the Earth’s future as an inevitable spiral of collapse and loss. However, this kind of thinking does not leave room for reciprocity or repair. It centers on human destruction instead of mutual survival.
According to contemporary thinkers on the subject like Doug Tallamy, we need a reckoning, an understanding that nature is not ‘somewhere else’ but happening right here, together with us. To prevent an unprecedented other-than-human species extinction event and the end of life as we know it, we need to plant “native” ecosystems. In this call for the restoration of the past, we gesture toward a solution, but these ideas often echo Indigenous teachings and post-humanist philosophies without fully crediting their origins.
Imperfect Restoration
Not immune to this rhetoric, the Swamp is an attempt at restoration. It’s an all-New York native plant bog/swamp ecosystem pollinator garden intended to provide a habitat for some of the park’s rare and specialist species. For example, the park offers native loosestrife (Lysimachia ciliata) for Macropis bees, willows (Salix) for Andrena andrenoides bees, and swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) for monarchs.
By extension, these plantings sustain the insects that do all the stamen tickling, flower pollinating, fruit enabling, and bird, reptile, and amphibian feeding. For millennia, these plant communities have existed in coevolved relationships with insect species and animals in interwoven cobwebs of consumption.
However, the Swamp is not an untouched remnant of the past but a curated, reconstructed version of what once was. It is not simply a site of loss but of constant revision. Restoration is often framed as a reversal of damage, but what does it mean to ‘restore’ an ecosystem that can never return to its original form? Is it still an apocalypse if it is ongoing, if it is cyclical, if it is lived with rather than recovered from? True restoration is not a return, but a recognition of what persists, what remembers, what refuses to be erased.
The Swamp’s precarity—like that of all urban ecosystems, like our own—is not a call to despair. It is an invitation to reimagine care as shared survival. To love this land is not to save it for ourselves but to make with the inanimate and inhuman a place where all life can flourish together, even in uncertainty. True stewardship of this land requires not just restoring native plants but restoring relationships and recognizing Indigenous land caretakers as essential partners in shaping what conservation means in Lenapehoking today.
Tangled Time
I appreciate the now. Together, the sinkhole and I cultivate a pocket park of entangled possibilities. Currently, the Swamp is (ineffectively) fenced off, with signs politely decreeing, “Please stay out,” but a new pathways project is underway where access to humans is invited, and park patrons are encouraged to immerse into the unique, ugly landscape, to embrangle in the bramble.
We host “forest bathing” walks, where we kiss the fronds of sensitive ferns and spores reshape in our Jetstream; we lie in the cypress leaves and feel their knees. It’s a work in progress– I will learn to recognize my place in the larger narrative of Western colonialism’s embroilment with organic exploitation and hubris-filled infrastructure and do my best not to replicate these systems of destruction.
Often, my boss asks if I want to fill the sinkhole. I don’t.
The sinkhole is a repository for decay, a construction site for mason bees, a home, a companion in composting and erosion. One day, the steel beams holding us up will corrode and drop us to the Acela line to New Haven, and I will have no way to materially hold this ecosystem in stasis besides in my temporal lobe. But for now, I sit in the sagging bowl of the sinkhole, cradled by roots, tangled in time.
And the Swamp will go on sinking.
Featured image: Cords and cones crisscross Riverside Park. Photo by author, 2025.
Nat Xu is a horticultural practitioner based in New York City. They hold a certificate in Therapeutic Horticulture from North Carolina State University and degrees in Gender and Women’s Studies and Environmental Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They are currently writing and pursuing research at the intersection of urban placemaking and environmental psychology. Contact.
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