Camo As Flagging for Place-based Affinities

When I tell the story of Tatterhood, I tell of a young girl emerging from the woods wearing a dress that looks as through it was woven from the woods itself. When I imagine that girl I imagine dead leaves, weedy stalks, small twigs in her tangled matted hair. I imagine her enrobed, wearing the land. Sometimes I also envision myself wearing the land. I clothe myself in the colours of the Cedar forest where I work and wander, or the dolostone outcroppings where I look for tracks. I am not only wearing the colours, but often the images of Oak leaves, old bark, twigs and grasses. I wear the deep layered images of the land as ceremony and as camouflage.

We all wear camouflage. We clothes ourselves in the fashions of our cultures, of our workplaces and of our identities. When I identified more with punk music and lifestyles I wore my leather jacket strewn with embellishments and flare. My chains, safety pins, combat boots and torn shirts all spoke when I didn’t want to. You could guess my values, my feelings, my crews and my goals from my dress. Punk fashion being a fairly urban fashion created within urban youth cultures reflecting struggles of urban life. It signifies many things to many people, but there is a commonality to the styles; rejection of dominant cultural patterns of dress and behaviour, adversarial tendencies towards authority, and often a nihilistic worldview (though not always). The style addressed this.

I bring up punk fashion to reiterate how we wear the worlds we live within, and also/maybe, the worlds we aspire to live within. I think to the conventional hunting camouflages I wear when I want to show my identification with the land base, when I want to adorn myself with the bioregion I am a part of.

I want to wear the land through camouflage because I want others to know that I care about the land and to know I am striving towards relationship with that land. Through the camouflage I would love if people saw the devotion and respect I have for the place where I live.

My mum used to drag us to church but she’d never make us dress up in our finest. We could wear whatever we wanted as long as it was clean. I think she figured god didn’t care what we wore so it didn’t matter. While I am thankful that I didn’t have to suffer through starched shirts and ties and fancy clothes as other families did, I also recognize the power of “wearing your Sunday best”. There is a connotation of respect, of coming into the presence of holiness with what was there deemed as formal, honouring the space and the god we’ve come to commune with. Not only could our dress could publicly proclaim our devotion, it also builds meaning and power into the communal rituals and ceremony of the space.

I bring this up because I wonder how we could accomplish these same honourific practices of ceremonial dress when we walk through the wilder corners of the world? What if we wore our best, but still appropriate, clothes for our time with the land we are trying to learn from? If we walked into our holy places with our best on then would we hold the wild places we were engaging with in higher esteem?

I also wonder if we can be using camo as a means to not only show esteem for the places we have connection with, but also to create connection between humans (Homo sapiens). In some queer cultures, there is a practice of wearing bandanas or hankies as symbolic descriptive systems to let others know what kinds of sexual acts you are looking for. Some call this system “the hanky code” but I know of it as flagging, same as what we call it when White Tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus) expose the white fur of their tail and backside to alert others in the herd. Flagging works by wearing a specific shade or colour of bandana (light blue, navy, olive, etc) each denoting specific sexual acts (oral sex, anal sex, likes uniforms, etc), in a specific back pocket (usually left for the giver or right for the receiver). Other folks would then see the bandana and decide if whatever they are looking for matches with what you are looking for. In this semi-secretive somewhat safe way, queer folks could meet and hook-up with other queer folks with discretion and peace.
Now, what if we took inspiration from this flagging code and those who have affinity with a specific place could enrobe themselves with the images and colours of place, both as a means to acknowledge and honour the place, but also to connect with others who also have deep connection with that place? I am not necessarily signaling a desire for sex, but instead a broader statement of connection with the land, in whatever forms it takes on a given day. Could there be a subcultural identifier in the camo that lets other closeted naturalists or birders or trackers or herpers know that there are others present? I am still unsure of how flagging came to be broadly understood but I am curious in how we can expand a secure common set of clandestine visual signs and cues which can alert other nature based nerds/queers/trackers of shared affinity.
When I start to think of these possibilities I then get dreamy about what if we all wore specific camo designs relative to our preferred ecosystems or, to dream more broadly, our home bioregions? Could we encounter others adorned in the foliage of local wilds and learn more about them and the places where they hail from? Does this already occur in more mainstream hunting culture? Duck hunters with their Bulrushes and Turkey hunters with their Oaks? Can we be inspired by this and fold it back into our flagging?

Of course this is all dislocated from the real adornment of the earth. Our ancestors would have worn the land in many way, from the fabrics woven from plant fibres, or the skins and furs of animals hunted. I wear a lot of wool these days but I have no connection with the sheep it came from, or the tailoring which went into making the clothes. I wonder when our connection becomes spectacle rather than authentic? Is there a way that camo flagging can help reconnect? Is place-based connection a process of engagement, an intimacy building which we need to reach for consistently rather than try, and likely fail, going all in all at once? I believe it is.

I believe we need to create resilient, resistant, reverential communities to support, co-inspire, and conspire to work together to be in relationship with the land. While most cultures, especially indigenous land-based cultures, are being pushed away from the land through colonial capitalist extractivism, white-supremacist hegemony and a growing fascistic Christian nationalist tendency, we really need to find ways to connect with each other. Perhaps surreptitiously through clandestine flagging, especially if we want our cultures of place-based connection to work in opposition to domination and extinction and in defense of the lands we long to know and be in relationship with.

To learn more:
Hanky Code/Flagging