Lost and Stolen: Finding Real Ancestry in Europe
I am not a historian.
I miss the trees for the forest.
The details escape me, sometimes.
But I have ancestors, just like you. Just like me. And they are listening.
As a person of Northwestern European and Mi'kmaq descent, I have parallel searches for history running, always on my mind. On my rarely-cleared browser.
The Mi'kmaq ancestry was kept a secret, my grandmother always unsure of where she came from. She too, kept quiet. But the the stories behind the documents, the pictures, have begun to pour. Grandma's childhood unfolds before my ears. I sit on the line between family history and embodied identity, afraid to tip the wrong way. She promises we'll make bannocks soon. Just like her mother. Just like her grandmother.
But Settler identity is what I've known, and still what I will always carry. Longing for traditions, for spiritual belonging, I declared myself Wiccan at age nine. The Neo-Pagan religion blends several northwestern folk spiritual beliefs together, in the wake of a Christianized climate. Common Europe once had vast medicine in charms, divination, and other practices. But what was specific to where? And to whom?
There has been talk all around me of European Indigeneity. For so long, I believed the popular story of the Irish/Scottish/Welsh to be Celts, and the English to be Anglo-Saxons. Considering the Gaelic and Welsh languages that sing on, it seems a fair assumption. But it is just that: an assumption.
Deeper (but still easy) research tells me that the divide and conquer narrative of the British Isles, is a warped one. Is this any surprise, with a vague culture settled on "settling"? Supposedly, England was first home to Basque migrants. Hmm. I thought the Celts came from Iberia (modern Spain/Basque/Portugal), too ...
So, what gives? What takes?
What does it take, to be indigenous?
How can I know the clans and tribes of my European ancestors, when those life-ways were long intermixed and washed away for something newer, and newer? When European identity lies within state (or rather, Crown) borders?
It's time to dethrone. It's time to unsettle. This will take research. This will take imagination. Oral traditions rely on relations, with each other and the land. It is impossible purely to reconstruct. We must also re-imagine.
The Saxons conquered. The Norse raided. The Romans colonized.
We cannot honour all of our ancestors. So many of them were fucking assholes.
We must take what they knew, only digesting what nourishes. The rest must fertilize our path forward, as we harken back.
I do not yet know all my traditions, because I do not yet know where I have been.
Perhaps the founders of Wicca sensed this before me. Perhaps they have offered us a plate.
I miss the trees for the forest.
The details escape me, sometimes.
But I have ancestors, just like you. Just like me. And they are listening.
As a person of Northwestern European and Mi'kmaq descent, I have parallel searches for history running, always on my mind. On my rarely-cleared browser.
The Mi'kmaq ancestry was kept a secret, my grandmother always unsure of where she came from. She too, kept quiet. But the the stories behind the documents, the pictures, have begun to pour. Grandma's childhood unfolds before my ears. I sit on the line between family history and embodied identity, afraid to tip the wrong way. She promises we'll make bannocks soon. Just like her mother. Just like her grandmother.
But Settler identity is what I've known, and still what I will always carry. Longing for traditions, for spiritual belonging, I declared myself Wiccan at age nine. The Neo-Pagan religion blends several northwestern folk spiritual beliefs together, in the wake of a Christianized climate. Common Europe once had vast medicine in charms, divination, and other practices. But what was specific to where? And to whom?
There has been talk all around me of European Indigeneity. For so long, I believed the popular story of the Irish/Scottish/Welsh to be Celts, and the English to be Anglo-Saxons. Considering the Gaelic and Welsh languages that sing on, it seems a fair assumption. But it is just that: an assumption.
Deeper (but still easy) research tells me that the divide and conquer narrative of the British Isles, is a warped one. Is this any surprise, with a vague culture settled on "settling"? Supposedly, England was first home to Basque migrants. Hmm. I thought the Celts came from Iberia (modern Spain/Basque/Portugal), too ...
So, what gives? What takes?
What does it take, to be indigenous?
How can I know the clans and tribes of my European ancestors, when those life-ways were long intermixed and washed away for something newer, and newer? When European identity lies within state (or rather, Crown) borders?
It's time to dethrone. It's time to unsettle. This will take research. This will take imagination. Oral traditions rely on relations, with each other and the land. It is impossible purely to reconstruct. We must also re-imagine.
The Saxons conquered. The Norse raided. The Romans colonized.
We cannot honour all of our ancestors. So many of them were fucking assholes.
We must take what they knew, only digesting what nourishes. The rest must fertilize our path forward, as we harken back.
I do not yet know all my traditions, because I do not yet know where I have been.
Perhaps the founders of Wicca sensed this before me. Perhaps they have offered us a plate.
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