From Elder to Ancestor

“When we sit with the multiple rejections of our kinship with Nature, we’re left to investigate why. I explain to my students that this lack of connection is the broken path to our present, and in the gap of that brokenness is every cultural wound we experience. It is the heart of our disconnection from and devaluing of each other. It is the colonized projection of the individual, which justifies taking no responsibility for relationship. It is our inability to make the connection between the agency of our toaster, our cousin, and consumerism. It is our traumatic separation from the wisdom of our Ancestors and the disrespect of elders and descendants. It is the advent of trauma itself. It is why we can’t function without modern conveniences even while sitting with the harm they create. It is why we don’t know how to survive in the wild. When we sit with these rejections we also find little to no space held for our Sacred Selves. When we can’t locate our sacredness in that gap, we realize that our settler-centric systems and institutions intentionally propagate the brokenness, and our unconscious biases as folx raised in those systems set us up to, in turn, unconsciously exacerbate the wound.

I tell them that until we make these biases conscious, our best efforts are still breaking the path. Until our models of care include all bone, soil, water, air, and fungi, we’re still breaking the path. After the shock, denial, grief, and humiliation, their heartbreak around that realization and commitment to tending the spirited path gives way to the ancient call of the wild: embody, be, do.”