Humanities Vertical Line

 Native speakers will introduce themselves by saying what tribe they are from and who each of their parents are and also often their grandparents.  This has to do with a deep sense of kinship and also vertical relationship - connection to ancestors and to descendants.  This is very different than American colonist sensibilities.  Steeped in a sense of individualism, often separated by an ocean or a long journey by wagon or train from relatives to far to see again,....and even now the average American moves every 7 years so the roots do not go long.   We are not rooted to family or land.

By contrast, when not destroyed by genocidal boarding schools, indigenous people have a deep sense of connection to ancestors and the wisdom that has passed to them by spending time with them, as well as a sense of responsibility for descendants not yet born.  This is the vertical line...most settler descendants exist on only a horizontal line  - looking off to the future or goals we make for ourselves.  Most Native people I have known are deeply resilient because they are after all the descendants of the ones who survived the genocide - the 5% are so that made it through displacement, massacres, battles, deliberately inflicted epidemics, starvation policies and boarding schools.  (About half the original population - while US white population exploded and grew 251 times since arrival.)

It can also be said that all of us are the descendants of the ones who made it home from wars, from pandemics, survived droughts and childbirth, etc.   But we don't carry the oral histories that tell the stories the survival information, the resiliency information.

Like many people I did not get to see my grandparents regularly because they lived in another state, but some of my fondest childhood memories are about visits with them.  I felt unconditionally loved by them.  Maybe if they had more day to day care from them I would have memories of conflict but I mainly just remember being treated as special and getting to have special experiences with them.  While they did not talk about it they were survivors of the Great Depression and had to use creativity and determination to live through those times.  I learned only recently that my great great grandfather came to the US escaping conscription in his homeland.   My grandmother was an artist her home infused with creativity and my grandfather's garden was another work of art.  Creativity is like a family value passed down, as is an idealism and determination on my father's side.

I recently was doing the exercise again with white people of asking us to look at where in this country our ancestors landed, what tribe was impacted?   It is a hard exercise.   Many folks don't know any of their family history because of the individualism, disconnection, or dysfunction that colonialism has created in our heritage.  Ancestory.com has opened up to many people for the first time to find out about their ancestors but sadly in a sort of "searching for someone to be proud of" sort of way.  It is quite different than what comes down in oral histories.   It is also a hard exercise to have to look unflinchingly at the role that really all our families - even those who came much later - played in the colonizing and "homesteading" of America.

In my therapy world I have been doing an exercise of connecting to happy memories - many for me our with my grandparents, and then sending the energy of that memory through the body.   As I do this I am consciously focusing on the vertical line - on noticing that death does not have to separate us forever from the love and energy of those who we are a part of.  I think again because of the Settler mentality of separation and individualism - I have felt that my grandparents, parents and aunts and uncles were no longer available to me because of death.   This exercise has brought me into touch with what I think indigenous folks have always know - that the dead are only unavailable in linear time - but in "deep time" they are always available.   It changes your own walk when you know that you are always connected to those who love you.

Recently while doing an Active Hope workshop we did the exercise again where we present beings are talking to future beings.  The future beings ask: "what was it like?  How did make change happen? How did you nourish yourselves.   In other words we imagine talking to our grandchildren or great grandchildren...people not yet born.   I had been a bit worried about whether people would be able to do this exercise.   It had been many years since I had done it with folks and climate change is much worse.  Would people rebel at the idea that there is a future?   But several people commented that the questions made them feel - it had to happen and that they understood then that they are responsible to these unborn ones to see that it indeed does happen.  Let us ride the gifts of our grandparents ...to create a liveable future for our descendants.