I have gone to anti-racism trainings since I was 27. I have spent so so many hours looking at my relationship to African Americans - feeling shame and guilt about my families heritage there. I have been encouraged to reconnect with my original European roots so as not to be one of the endless culture-less white people who simply assimilate everyone else's culture for want of having any cultural identity. But what I suddenly realized in absolute shock was that while I had known more than most white American's the shameful history of genocide against Native people, I had somehow learned that history as what "some white people a long time ago did." I had participated in endless rallies in Seattle that acknowledged that we were standing on stolen Duwamish land. But I was the first person in my family to come to Seattle or the NW so for me this was actions, some other people's white ancestors took. I was shocked to realize that I had never checked in with what role my ancestors had played in Native genocide in the US.
The moment I turned my gaze upon it, it was painfully obvious. My father's family were some of the original "settlers" of colonial Virginia. Clearly the land was inhabited by native people before they came. I had focused so long in their role as slave holders and apologists for slavery that I had missed this other evil. I had always thought of my mother's side of the family as not into the evil since they arrived to Michigan escaping the Swedish Potato famine decades after the civil war was over. However, they received their land under the "Homestead Act" and there has been a family member living on it now for around 120 years. Yet, again as I turned my gaze on this I realized: "and that land was inhabited by Native people before it was "awarded" to my ancestors".
I realized that I had been blind to all of this because of how American history is taught to children in school. We are taught that the original 13 colonies were settled by people seeking religious expression and new opportunities. We have a fake Thanksgiving story that completely white washes that was going on there. Then we have stories of people "expanding west" , exploring the "frontier" or the "wilderness". These ways of describing the "settling" of the US fails to mention that this land was not empty or uninhabited or "available". Oh sure there are some stories of army skirmishes with Native tribes, and the stories of Custard's last stand, etc. But even these stories sort of militarize the story in a way that takes out the role of settlers in creating the pressure to take the land. I was shocked to realize that I had been taught this story in a way that made me blind to the role my individual family had played in the taking of land from Native people. We are all descendants of squatters on someone else's land. Maybe it would have been more clear if I had grown up in Michigan or Virginia...but I doubt it. I have looked it up. The Manahouc Tribe inhabited the land before the Fitz-Hugh's came to Northern Virginia. A tribe of only about 1,000, by 1728 they have disappeared from recorded history.
Do you know? Do you know where your family "settled" America? Do you know what role they played in the taking of land and the genociding of Native people? I have been asking white people for many years to identify whose tribal land they are on to begin to try to raise consciousness but this is new to ask people to actually notice what your ancestors did. I have sat in rooms where people have tried to tell me that if they immigrated after colonial times or after the US was "settled" that they are not involved in this history. I would agree it is less obvious, but if your family came to lands long ago "taken" by previously settlers, it does not mean that you don't "benefit" from the historic taking of Native lands. All land which is available "for sale" in the US is for sale because it was taken by colonizers which you now benefit from. We are buying land from descendants of squatters.
Beginning to face this, to look at this squarely in the face has been a seismic shift for me. It suddenly makes a new understanding for me about the old paradigm versus new paradigm shift that I laid out in my original post. I am asking us to look at how a paradigm of separation from the land got in place and how we can come back into relationship with the land. Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about it as becoming indigenous to the land. It is more clear to me now than it ever has been that White Americans who came to the US whether fleeing religious persecution, or wars, or famine or simply seeking a new start, left behind family and a way of life, they cut off from their heritage and in so doing they came into a land they were unfamiliar with. They lived in a paradigm that saw them as "taming the land, managing the land, conquering the land (and "the savages"), and farming the land. But they did not see the land as having a history, they did not understand the flora and fauna and the ecosytem they came to. They were uprooted and they transplanted badly. They made decisions like to infill wetlands, that were bad for the land and out of touch with its truth. We have lived that way for 300 years - disconnected from the land we live on. The average American moves every 5 years. So how then do you have a connection to the land?
So where you live right this minute - it may be an accident of job transfer, marriage or perhaps decisions your parents made. But what if you learned both your "settler history" and the history of the land you live on. What if you learned the true nature of the eco-system you live in. What if you began to heal the relationship you have to land and to make restitution to the Native people (how ever you think of that) for the lands we live on?
Look it up: https://native-land.ca/ whose land are you on? Whose land did your ancestors take?
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