Nurturing Deaf Flourishing Sustainably 239
for independence, and they distributed information when returning home. The
“freedom tree,” or “independence tree” as it is called today, is now a heritage site
(Ssebuyira, 2013a, 2013b).
The first sign language classes at Kyambogo University in the mid-1990s were also
held under a tree because it took time and negotiation for the university to recog-
nize UgSL as a legitimate taught subject that deserved a classroom (Lutalo-Kiingi &
De Clerck, in press). In Lira, in northern Uganda, deaf community members still
meet around a tree on Sundays and sometimes daily in vacation periods.
A tree is also traditionally planted where celebrations are held during Interna-
tional Deaf Week. After a community development meeting in Gulu, also in north-
ern Uganda, a deaf man pointed at the row of tall trees along the road, looking
over the grounds of the District Disability Union (which hosts the regional deaf
association and deaf church), and said: “These trees are very strong; they are older
than me and have always been there.” Trees are often seen as witnesses of time and
containers of collective memories (Ingold, 1993). When documenting Ugandan
deaf heritage as part of the British Academy project on emancipation processes
(Lutalo-Kiingi & De Clerck, in press), we met with community members around
a tree for four days, sharing experiences through creative methods (signed multi-
media storytelling, photographs, performance, and dance). In Kampala, members
recalled planting a seed on the site of the Ugandan Deaf Society (which had hosted
the Uganda School for the Deaf, as well as the UNAD’s first meetings and premises)
during the Danish cooperation. There are other special trees around it, such as an
old mango tree near the entrance that no longer bears fruit but reminds members
of eating delicious mangos at school and another tree from which students picked
berries that became very sweet when boiled.
In Mbale in eastern Uganda, deaf people shared their memories, experiences,
and views on development through drama in the shade of a tree near a building
that had been constructed for the purpose of a deaf church but that was never
finished or given to the community. During four days of storytelling, they danced
and relived the joy of establishing the Mbale Deaf Association, while also recall-
ing their disappointment and shattered hopes when its funding ceased, and they
called for the UNAD and international bodies to support their progress. (This
community-derived multimedia storytelling can be viewed on http://www.signlanguage-
projects.com.) It would seem that these individuals “are as much bound up in
the life of the tree as is the tree in the lives of the people” (Ingold, 1993, p. 168).
Challenging naturalistic perspectives that situate landscapes at the background
of human agency and culturalist perspectives that imbue landscapes with meaning,
Ingold (1993, p. 152) formulates an alternative “dwelling perspective,” a relational
view in which humans and nature create shared worlds: “the landscape is consti-
tuted as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and the works of past
generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left something of them-
selves.” Similarly, Cruikshank (2007, p. 374) argues for a holistic appreciation of the
embedding of local knowledge in collective memory narratives: “Local knowledge
in... narratives is about unique entanglements of culture and nature, humans and
landscapes, objects and their makers.”