On Ancestral Legacy & Repair; an Essay
A piece I've been writing over the past few days, that feels timely to share as the Sun + Pluto conjoin at 29* of Capricorn, the keeper of ancestral legacies.
Our entire world is a complex, breathing matrix of ancestral histories, being lived out through us in every moment. We have found ourself in the place that we are now as a collective human family based on everywhere we have been. This is the nature of ancestral legacy, as an ongoing and ever deepening process. Every day, we create history just as our ancestors did, and this shapes the world. This is the world we hand down to the generations to come — bound to each other by time and love.
Lately, when I look in the face of a stranger, I try to see the complex and beautiful history of their ancestors that is living out through them. It was a magnificent trip to find myself in JFK airport this week, seeing so many faces of so many different lineages.
What if we moved through the world with this ancestral matrix at the forefront of our worldview? What if we really tried to see each & every individual as a unique, living history of those that came before them? What would the world be like if we walked with the recognition that every single person is the dream of their ancestors? How would we TREAT one another, if we walked with this ancestral reverence towards the living, the same way we do towards the holy dead?
I have a deep, curious sense that this lens has the power to change the world.
As the Sun comes conjunct with Pluto in Capricorn, the topic of ancestral repair work on both individual & collective levels is on my heart very deeply. Capricorn, the keeper of lineage and tradition, looks at the world as one giant ancestral matrix of ongoing legacy. There are ancestral legacies that allow for progressive liberation of the generations to come, and there are others that perpetuate systems of oppression & harm in the individual & collective body of humankind.
So much of what we’re seeing in the world right now is an echo of these harmful ancestral legacies that have been left untended, perpetuating harm. There is a concept in the Samoan worldview that once a rupture between two peoples has been enacted, the Manna or life-force must be restored, otherwise it begins to destruct the matrix of the human family. This connectivity and repair is part of our ancestral responsibility, as echoes of our ancestors and the living face of our lineages.
At this point in history, there is the most displacement there has ever been of indigenous peoples from their homelands.
We have scattered ourselves across the blanket of the earth in unnatural & foreign ways, homeless bodies looking for the earth that their bones belong to, the landscapes that their people have tended for thousands of years.
When a person is in deep tending & relationship with the earth spirits of place, they become the landscape itself when their spirit leaves the body.
We can hold this in two ways. First, that when we engage directly with the landscape of whatever land we’re on, whether we’re traveling or in the place we call home — we are engaging directly with the ancestors of that place, that live in the land.
And, if we take it upon ourselves to make it right with those ancestors, we can also begin to tend to the landscape in the ways it’s been tended by its original peoples, as a way of carrying the torch onwards so that the land receives nourishment in the way it’s known for thousands of years. We can build relationship with the ancestors of place, the conscious earth spirits that live in the land.
Every landscape is alive, and every landscape speaks in a very particular way to develop relationship with its original people. We are all extensions of the land where our people come from. We are the clay of the earth, born from homeland soil & stone. This is the way our ancestors learned how to be in communion with their landscape; they learned how to listen to the unique language it speaks. And every land has its own, which forms the culture & ritual practice of the people that are born of it. That is why the language of the ancestral land in Ireland feels & speaks so differently to the soul than the spirit of the Mayan lands in Guatemala. Different Earth spirits, different influence on its peoples. We are extensions of it all.
And so, if you are in a body that comes from a different land than the one you inhabit, you can learn to speak the language of those land ancestors. Go into the landscape and listen. FEEL the essence of what is there. Notice how you come into relationship with the spaces in the area you inhabit, and what it invokes in you. Where do you feel a pull? Where is the land calling you closer? How does it want to be tended? What offerings, what practices does it remember from its original peoples?
This is how we make peace with place. This is how we let the landscape know that it is not forgotten. This good earth wants to be in relation with humankind. Yet we must play our part, in right effort, and remember how to engage in this dance.
I feel it is our ancestral responsibility on behalf of our own people to make right with the ancestors of place. This is how we initiate a level of repair that can only be shared between our bodies and the earth. The earth is alive, and she can feel us. When we are not actively working with her to learn how she needs & desires to be tended in relationship, we are inhabiting space and ignoring the very one who is providing us a home. The earth opens her arms to us, and we mindlessly trample over such a generous offering of mutual care in relationship. This tending is vital, whether we’re on our ancestral homelands or (perhaps even more importantly) we’re on lands as visitors to place.
It gets complicated when our own ancestors might have colonized the land that we’re now living on, they might’ve been the ones that tore up the roots of First Nations people and displaced them.
What’s tricky is that this wasn’t necessarily our personal choice, yet we must reconcile with the consequences that our own ancestors could not. This is the repair work of ancestral legacies that are still untended. So much of the pain running through the land & hearts of indigenous peoples is detachment & displacement without repair.
That’s not to say First Nations peoples have not preserved and sustained their ritual practices & worldviews — however, the larger landscape is still a weeping wound that has not scarred over. There has been no active repair. There has not been Land Back movements brought to fruition, and colonizer cultures are still inhabiting native lands.
Thus, we are still at the moment of “first contact” — there has been no justice nor repair brought to First Nations people, and so we are frozen in time at the moment that colonizers first landed on native shores.
I want to acknowledge that it is likely different for peoples that have been misplaced from their native lands due to colonization. I am speaking from the perspective of being a person whose body holds both colonizer and oppressed peoples in its history, however living in what is now called America, I am mindful that more of my experience is in being conditioned by the perspective of the colonizer — and I do not want to blindly make presumptions on behalf of indigenous folks that have their own experience.
It is likely that First Nations that have been colonized are welcomed with eagerly open arms by the earth, as she plays an active role in healing processes. It is likely that First Nations people are able to maintain their original ways (when it has not yet been completely stripped from their culture) — and that this indigenous way of being in the world harmonizes well with the landscape, wherever they had to move to.
However, this is NOT repair. This is a counterfeit response & necessity, when the real repair that is needed has not come to fruition by the colonizer states that uprooted indigenous peoples in the first place. This is not enough. True & active repair is still needed by the larger culture that caused it in the first place.
For folks with lineages that were the perpetrators of colonization histories, sometimes we OURSELVES still aren’t welcomed by the ancestors of land, because weren’t invited in the first place — and thus, we are somehow an echo of the imposition of our ancestors. This is where our own active participation and effort to make it right with the ancestors of place is vital. This is how we begin movements towards repair, at the very least, within our relationship to the earth, and thus our own belonging to place.
However, this is still not the whole picture — further cultural repair is needed with the indigenous peoples that lost their homeland in the first place. They are not past tense, they are very much here. And in the larger scope of history & the human timeline, colonizer histories are not very old. Maybe a few hundred years, when First Nations people have been tending to place for thousands of years beyond that. The colonizer history is fragile, and it is recent enough that there is still the opportunity to begin movements towards restoration and repair. Land back.
And sometimes, you have two bloodlines that have had traumatic histories with one another, both living in your body. This is complicated, and often requires sitting as the mediator of the two lineages working to make peace & bring repair between one another. Through ancestral repair work, I have found that this complexity of history meeting in the body is often the root of some physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dis-ease that expresses in us. My suggestion is to work with someone versed in ancestral healing to receive support in working those layers out, to mitigate intensity & help heal what is there. Speaking from experience, sometimes it is not helpful to try to move through that work alone. It has the potential to intensify what is already there, as the dormant ancestral legacies are awakened in us.
Yes, we have more global & cultural displacement of First Nations peoples than ever before throughout history. And yet, it is not so long that this has been the case. My point being — our active participation, both by way of making peace with the ancestors of the lands that we are on, AND working towards the restoration of land back movements for native peoples, is very much available. And now is the opportune moment to partake in both, as history deepens itself every moment, and ancestral legacies accumulate without proper repair.
For me, making peace with the ancestors of land is my personal practice & ancestral responsibility. Every day, I take time to greet the ancestors of the land I’m on, to ask how they’d like to be tended. The land spirits are here with us whether or not we’re paying attention to them, and they desire relationship just as much as we do. The land lost this relationship the moment its original people were uprooted — and so the landscape waits, open & raw, yearning for ritual connection. We can give it that. And although it is not like its indigenous kin truly tending to the land on their original ways, it is something rather than nothing.
I want to clarify that tending to the land you’re on does NOT mean appropriating the practices of original peoples. To me, it means learning the ritual ways of YOUR own ancestors, and bringing those into harmony with the land. This allows for an attunement process, as your own ancestors are introduced to the ancestors of place through ritual tending. Sometimes the land resonates with your ancestral ways, sometimes it does not.
For example, my Celtic ancestors worked very deeply with oak. One day I brought an offering of oak to the landscape that I grew up on in upstate NY — and the ancestors of the land responded with confusion. They expressed to me that the plants they knew well as offering were cedar or tobacco. So next time, I came with cedar boughs, and the landscape responded differently.
This is all felt sense, it is subtle, and for those of you who haven’t approached ancestral tending practices before — it happens through the heart & body. Through resonance and attunement. This is how we learn to listen deeply. And it only gets stronger with practice ;) so if you find uncertainty stunting you, do it anyways. That is an active reclamation of YOUR own people’s original ways of relating to the more-than-human world, no matter where you come from. No matter where your ancestors know homeland — we are all indigenous to place, and all our peoples had a rich & alive relationship with the land that they were born from. Reclamation of animist & ritual practice is ancestral repair work in action. Do it with & for your people — and bring them to meet the ancestors of the land that you’re on. Come with love, peace, and offerings. Begin the active repair.