Examining our Settler Ancestors

 I wrote a previous post about my own surprise journey to re-examining my ancestry through the lens of what did it mean to have settler ancestors?  Since that moment of awakening I have a number of times in workshops I lead, asked participants to look at their own settler ancestry.   What I find most notable is how white supremacy has operated to obscure this reality from us.  There are always people who understand clearly (usually when the history is most egregious) that their history is one of colonizers who took the land from other people.  However, there are also people whose relatives came over in poverty and were immediately grunt labor in this country (perhaps even indentured servants) who therefore argue that they were not settlers.  But when you ask the next question: "How did the land they first lived on come to be "available"...the trail still goes back to colonization.  For example, a family that comes to NYC from the potato famine of Europe, and are renters in a slum.   Clearly they are not oppressors, however, this land of NYC was native land before the original settlers of NY took the land, and created ownership of individual plots of land.  Someone took possession of that land, built on it and started charging rent.  The poor immigrant family who became that rent payer are still benefiting from the original forced removal of the tribe.   Because of the suffering that many white families have also suffered there is this way to distance from the inherited benefits of white settler taking.

I also find that one of the struggles white people have with this exercise is the ways in which, unlike Native people, we do not know the histories of our families. Whether it was in shame, or disownment, or emotional disconnection from older generations, or early death of a parent, or just the failure of cultural habit to honor elders....many white people do not know the history of their families.  So they can only say: "I only know my grandparents, I don't know what generation came here first."  Or they can say:  "I know that the first people on my father's side arrived in Tennessee in 1820 and that is all I know."  Well I would say 'look up how was land being made available in TN in 1820?"  One would quickly discover that the Trail of Tears forced removal of native tribes began in 1830, so it would be pretty clear without knowing the precise history of ones family that the time of its arrival helped contribute to the pressure to remove Native people from the land.  

I have also encouraged people in workshops to use this map to look up what tribe was on the land that your immigrant ancestors first inhabited.   If you learn the history of that tribe it also will give you clues. It is how I know that the Manahouc Tribe that inhabited Virginia before my ancestors inhabited is now extinct.  It is how I know that the Anishinabewaki tribe that inhabited upper Michigan where my mother's family immigrated to has been pushed up into Canada.  It is how I know that the land on the shores of Lake Michigan where I grew up was inhabited originally the Myaamia who were forced on the Trail of Tears and now live in OK far from the water that was sacred to them.  It is how I know that where I live now at the bottom of Puget Sound (or the Salish Sea has it should be known) was a place frequented by three different tribes (unlike capitalist culture that draws lines, creates owners and keeps out others, much of the US was land frequented, usually peacefully by more than one tribe.)  It was the land of Squaxin, Puyallup, and Nisqually - all tribes still living (although heavily genocided) with reservations near by.

When I invite people to share this history a common thing that emerges is: "this was not talked about".  So right? We talk about things we are proud of.  The family stories that are passed down are of valor, success, of business and of marriage, and also often of suffering and trauma.   But even for a generation or so quickly lost is the telling of stories of scalping Indians, of deliberately giving small pox laddened blankets, or scam land trades.  Who would brag about such things?  So these stories are lost and our school systems teach us false Thanksgiving stories or of one tribe guiding fur traders, etc.  Or simply tell of settlers "braving the wilds" and fail to mention at all that the US was not a vast wilderness - that all of it was inhabited. So it is high time we break the silence and start telling the truth about our relationship to this land.

It is time we tell the truth about taking because even now our government and our corporations are taking native lands where the oil is and either drilling it or running pipelines across their lands without their permission.  Even now the treaties are being broken, and even now the taking continues.  This has always been the basis of climate change, a taking and an extracting of resources that ignores the original harmony and ecosystems in balance. When we are connected again to our ancestors and to the land we are on, to natures equilibrium then can we begin to live in balance with Earth.