‘But who were you in it?’

Wildtending, sometimes called ‘the Hoop’, was in 2014–2017 a loose movement of mostly white non-Indigenous aspiring nomads in the US northwest that appropriated Indigenous ecological practices to denounce civilisation and enact alternative ways of being human. Those who practised wildtending were specifically committed to gathering and propagating plant foods across the Columbia Plateau and Great Basin regions in the US northwest. Wildtending was a counter-cultural group that strived to distance itself from cis-hetero-patriarchal and ecocidal social norms. They were also a settler network that benefited from – and did not materially disrupt – extant anti-Indigenous relations of power and property. This article traces notions of human and non-human in wildtending narratives, engaging Indigenous studies critiques of anthropology’s ontological turn as well as Black studies analyses of how discourses of ‘Man’ reproduce white supremacy. The conflicting ontological claims enclosed in diverse wildtending narratives, which reflected ambivalent stances toward the environing structures of US settler empire, provide an opportunity to re-examine the ways that ontology is theorised across the social sciences. Wildtending’s utopic-dystopic narratives attest to the deeply felt desire of ‘hoopsters’ to re-form the human, and to the great capacity for imagination and hope that exists within communities wishing to re-create their socio-ecological lives. The contradictions among ‘hoopster’ narratives show that ontology is not only socially received but is something we make and do together, albeit under power-laden conditions. At the same time, the limited scope of wildtending’s critiques of colonial ‘Man’ suggest that achieving wildtending goals – healing the land, becoming better humans – also requires anti-colonial action, the return of lands to Indigenous nations, and the transformation of social and political-legal conditions throughout the US west.