All My Relations
After discovering more about my mother’s ancestral background, I encountered a deeper level of healing. I have always known my father’s ancestral heritage. My dad’s father was a Hungarian Jew and his mother was German. The only revelation from getting my Y-DNA screened was that I realized that my father’s side of the family was strictly Jewish for thousands of years – it was only until my grandfather married a “shiksa” that other blood came into the family. My dad continued in that tradition, marrying outside of the faith. Both women converted; my mother did so out of obligation and my grandmother out of love. The real revelation for me was uncovered while looking further into my mother’s DNA (mtDNA). I knew she was Irish but I never really thought much about it until I started to analyze my mtDNA results and look for answers concerning my maternal lineage. Every person inherits mtDNA from his or her mother. MtDNA testing allows us to look far back in time for genetic clues to our origins but, because it mutates rapidly and is not very stable, it is difficult to test. I wasn’t able to afford the full genomic sequence match, so the results of my mtDNA screen goes back 52 generations and further. My mom’s ancestors, according to the test results, were primarily from Ireland and Norway; Ireland had the highest number of genetic matches. In addition, I had matches in England, France, Germany, Poland, and Scotland, but these were all relatively low. This led me on a quest to find out more about people in Ireland and Norway 1600-1700 years ago. I also wanted to investigate the American Indian question; my maternal grandfather may have been Choctaw but I don’t have any DNA evidence without further testing.
I know that my mom’s father grew up in Oklahoma on an American Indian reservation. He never talked about it with any of his children. My grandmother and other relatives circulated stories of his mysterious upbringing. Eventually, after searching an American Indian census called Dawes Rolls that was taken on Oklahoma Reservations until around 1915, I found his name on the Choctaw Dawes Roll. This still left me with many unanswered questions. What was my grandfather doing on the reservation? Why was he there? Was he American Indian? In the future, once I am out of school and working, I would like to pay for the full genomic sequence mtDNA match, confirming whether or not I am Native American by blood.
American Indian Heritage
In the past, the Five Tribes counted everyone on the Dawes Rolls as part of their tribes. Recently, they passed a law excluding Freedmans who were slaves owned by the Five Tribes and freed by the United States government after the Civil War. It is shocking to think that my grandfather, Henry Lawrence, may have come from a tribe of Choctaw who were slave owners. Nobody ever talks about American Indians as oppressing slave owners, only as the oppressed. Looking back at my childhood interaction with my grandfather, I realize that he was ashamed about his heritage — being brought up on a reservation. He was a man of very few words and mostly kept to himself. I cannot remember him ever having a friend. His skin was dark and weathered. Thinking back, he did not fit in with the rest of my grandmother’s relatives at all the holiday gatherings.
My grandmother, Virginia Calhoun, was from a long line of Irish farmers. I have been able to connect my grandma’s family tree to Donegal by reading well-kept diaries. Both my mom’s parents loved to work the earth with their hands. They always had large vegetable gardens and many fruit trees—primarily to ease the burden of feeding seven children. It makes sense if I look back on their ancestral heritage that working with the earth would be in their blood. My mother taught me how to garden at the age of three or four. A few years ago, I began to garden again after years of loosing myself in alcoholism. Working with the earth has been very healing in my recovery.
Alcoholism is another aspect of my ancestral heritage that I have been looking at. My grandpa and grandma never touched alcohol. They never talked about why they did not drink. Maybe they should have because six out of their seven kids became serious alcohol and drug addicts. My sister and dozens of other grandchildren including myself became addicts. I have now been sober for eleven years and my sister for eight months, yet we are the only two to have any kind of sobriety out of my grandparent’s children or grandchildren. In fact, three of my mom’s siblings died as a result of addiction. Reconnecting to ancestral spiritual shamanistic roots has been one of the greatest strength in keeping me healthy in sobriety. Sometimes, I wonder why my grandparents did not speak openly about sobriety and whether or not that would have stopped the last two generations from the destruction of addiction? I wonder if they were sober for a reason? Did they have a family history of alcohol abuse or personal issues? Was it a choice they made as adults? Was it unconscious? Is that why they never brought it up? These are questions I am still search for in my ancestral understandings.
The Sami
During our class readings on the Sami, I did not feel connected to the Sami people. I was interested in the similarity between the Sami and the American Indian. Awhile back, I watched a show on PBS called the Journey of Man where a genetic scientist follows the Y-DNA trail from Africa to the Russian Artic and across to the American Indians. When our class meetings ended, I began to research the Sami on my own. It was then that I felt that there was something spiritual calling me. The more I connected to the Sami, the greater I felt a healing taking place. When I finally discovered the difference between the Finnish Sami and the Saami in Northern Norway, I began to understand. I mentioned earlier that, besides being of Irish ancestry, my grandmother was also of Norwegian descent. It all began to make sense to me. The Saami of Norway are more connected to the sea and fishing than the Finnish Sami who are the famous reindeer herders. When looking at a world map, the Donegal coast would not be far off for nomadic travelers during the end of an ice age, when it was easier to cross to the Britain and Ireland.
Laurence Flanagan wrote the book Ancient Ireland Life Before the Celts. According Flanagan, “The discovery of the then exceptional site at Mount Sandel, County Derry, and the increasing availability of radiocarbon dates changed the chronological picture drastically, with an observed beginning shockingly early, at around 7000 B.C.” (P.19). Most anthropologists did not believe that humans lived in Ireland before the Celts arrived in 500 B.C.E. until rather recently. The British Museum drawing of the dwelling at Mount Sandel shows a structure identical to a Sami Teepee. Flanagan suggests that the teepee at Mount Sandel would have been covered with deer-hides and held close to three people. I feel that I connect to the way that these Irish Mesolithic settlers lived in comparison to the later Iron Age Celts. I believe that there was a spiritual loss when humans began to work with metal. I see the European Iron Age as the first steps away from the natural world and toward the industrial ages.
Looking for the souls of your ancestors can be a painful and confusing, yet healing journey. In my life, I have never grown without facing pain and hardship. During the last ten years, I have been learning how to live with the mother earth from American Indian cultures. Now, I feel that I have much to learn from the Sami. Reading books offers a different kind of knowledge than personally experiencing shamanistic knowledge. I would like to travel and spend some time with the Saami in Norway. What is calling me to choose a relationship with the Saami traditions? What do I want deepen?
Sweat Lodge
I believe that I will find the Saami shamanistic traditions to be similar to the American Indian traditions I discovered when I first got sober in the late 1990s. In 1999, I began attending a sweat lodge for sober addicts. The sweat lodge was held every weekend on Felton Street a few blocks from the San Francisco Panhandle. I had been practicing Buddhist Vipassana meditation for a while before I went to my first sweat lodge. I was told to bring some food to share after the ceremony; that idea was familiar to me since we often did the same thing for daylong meditation retreats. When I arrived at Felton Street, I put the food on an outdoor picnic table and met other people who were doing the sweat. Dark- or white-skinned, we all bonded over our shared experience – being recovering addicts. We sat around the fire that was heating the stone people and then the ceremony began. We all walked around the fire pit and spoke the names of our relations as we entered the sweat lodge that represented the mother earth’s womb. We all sat in the dark, touching the cold dirt, listening to the drum pounding and the chanting. Then the drum stopped and a prayer was said as the first stone person was brought in. When water hit the stone, steam and heat radiated out across our skin. Soon the drum sound filled the space and I began to journey. When the drum stopped again, people took turns, saying what they were grateful for in their life. I remember a journey deep within myself—much deeper than Vipassana meditation. I remember placing my face against the cold dirt to escape the scorching steam. I remember the leader of the sweat lodge continually thanking nature—the forest, soil for food, water for drinking and swimming. That had a profound affect on me.
I recall connecting to that because I had lost connection with the natural world so long ago. My alcoholism had ripped me away from a childhood of living in redwood forests, spending weekends at a family cabin in Big Sur, surfing, and gardening. I traded in my connection to the mother earth for sleeping all day and sitting in dark, smoke-filled bars. When I got sober, I was bloated, sick and almost dead inside. At the sweat lodge, I was sober with my face pressed against the nurturing earth, praying to my ancestors, begging the mother earth to heal me. That sweat lodge changed my path. After that day, I began to walk in Golden Gate Park and take walks on the beach. I eventually I moved back to Santa Cruz, began surfing again, and taking weekly camping trips. Looking back, I see now that I was suffering from what Richard Louv calls nature deficit disorder. According to Louv, “Genetically, we are essentially the same creatures as we were at the beginning. We are still hunters and gatherers . Our ancestors couldn’t outrun a lion, but we did have wits. We knew how to kill, yes, but we also knew how to run and climb—and how to use the environment to recover our wits” (p.43). I agree with Louv that I am still that hunter and gatherer and I feel that the American Indian and Sami traditions connect me to that more than other ancestral shaman traditions.
Believing in one G-d
I have explored my Jewish ancestors on my father’s side more than my mom’s family. I know that the Jewish people have a great nomadic history of surviving on the earth. I can connect to that survival instinct. I have just never been able to connect to the one G-d who looks like a human. I see this as the point in time when humans began to feel superior to the mother earth and somehow separate from it. That is one of the main reasons why we are about to destroy the entire ecosystem that supports our life. We do not respect the natural shaman world by praying to a single human like G-d. We have forgotten how to say thank you to the trees for air and shade. We have forgotten how to thank the clouds for providing us with water. We as a society have forgotten how to be humble before the mother earth and it is costing us our health. It is important not to fall into a trap, believing all American Indians still practice shamanism or pray to the earth elements. My Choctaw ancestors are very successful by Western standards. They adapted to western society. They accepted the missionaries’ Christianity as their main religion. In fact, even the Choctaw are unsure of what their original practices were. It is believed that they had a strong faith in the supernatural connection between humans and animals and that they were sun-worshipers, which was very different from most North American tribes. Greg O’Brien writes, “A person who possessed power, similar to the sun, produced items and forms essential to Choctaw survival. Both males and females among the Choctaws possessed power represented by the sun and related to reproduction” (p.5). The Choctaw discontinued the worship of the sun after being influenced by Christian missionaries. The Sami similarly held the sun as a powerful giver of life. Vigdis Siri confirms this connection in the article, “Dreaming With the First Shaman”. According to Siri, “In traditional Sami understanding, the sun is the giver of light, warmth, and fertility. She is considered mother of all living creatures and the one who takes care of the reindeer calves” (p.35). Today, there is a movement in the Choctaw Nation to relearn their traditional shaman ways and spiritual practices. The Choctaw could probably learn from the Sami about rediscovering your ancestral ways. It makes me sad to see that Western society has destroyed so many cultural relationships with the mother earth and now it has to be relearned and, in some cases, recreated.
Nature’s Healing Powers
I can remember being a kid running through the redwood forest with my friends pretending we were different woodland creatures. I can still envision the shelters we made of redwood branches and fern leaves along the side of the steep creekbed. We would fish for trout and cook it on a creekside fire with the matches we stole from our parents. We would chase trespassing kids from the other side of the creek out of forest with our homemade redwood spears (not sharp). Where did we learn to behave in such a manner? All of our parents were just average middle-class Americans, caught up in the hustle of daily industrial life. I believe that over the years the forest, the creek, and woodland creatures began to teach us. The natural habitat transformed us—made us one with it. I feel that it is never too late for any of us to experience what my friends and I did as children. If you begin to spend time in raw nature, you can feel the spirit take a hold of you. When I go camping I start out setting up camp still very much in a city set of mind. But the more I work within the realm of raw nature, the more it takes over me. By the time I need to leave the woods, my soul is resisting; it telling to stay in nature, it’s letting it be known that I’ll be spiritually healthy and safe within the forest. It is a spiritual feeling that I have never experienced in a Jewish synagogue, Christian church, or Buddhist temple. According to ecopsychologist Craig Chalquist, “In our time of religious intolerance and extreme polarization, it is easy to forget that the creations of nature remain potent expressions of the scared, and that the first temples were to be found outdoors. Some would say that the earth itself is a vast temple where, with faithful practice, humans can regain spiritual grounding and come home to the world ensouled” (p. 237).
DNA and my Ancestors
What role does DNA mapping of the human genome play in ancestral knowledge? DNA can show us where our ancestors lived throughout the world and helps us see that we are all interconnected. It cannot tell us how they lived, their spiritual beliefs, or the way they thought. DNA is great for getting an outline of your family ancestral journey. DNA can also be used in a negative way—to strip you of your ancestral knowledge. The Five Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw) and the United States Government have recently used DNA to strip the Freedman of their tribe status. The Five Tribes owned slaves in the early 1800s, with the Cherokee owning the most slaves out of the five tribes. When the South lost the Civil War in 1865, slavery was outlawed in the United States. The tribes were allowed to own slaves for another year but, in 1866, the United States government forced the tribes to free their slaves by signing a treaty. The treaty allowed the slaves to become a part of the tribe. The slaves had been a part of tribal life and had even traveled the Trail of Tears when Andrew Jackson had the Five Tribes removed to Indian Territory in Okalahoma in 1830s. After 150 years, it must be devastating to have your identity ripped away, leaving you asking who am I and wondering whose ancestral traditions you have been practicing for the last 150 years. This is the down side to DNA mapping. I have to wonder what it would feel like to have my full genomic sequence mtDNA checked, only to find out my grandfather was not Choctaw by blood. Many Europeans lived within the different Five Tribe Nations. They were an integral part of tribal life and even participated in the forced migration during the Trail of Tears. Most eventually mixed by marrying into the tribes but some have always lived amongst the American Indians without integrating. Those Europeans were counted on the normal Dawes Rolls right along with the American Indians but the Freedmans were count on a separate Dawes Roll. The strange thing is that because my grandfather is listed on the Dawes Rolls, I would still be counted as Choctaw even if my DNA showed no blood relation. DNA has made family history and ancestral traditions a much more complicated realm. Would I feel any less connected to my grandpa’s experience of growing up on a reservation? What makes him Choctaw – blood or growing up on a reservation experiencing the day-to-day life? These are ancestral questions that I must face before finally finishing a full genomic sequence mtDNA.
Conclusion
I probably do not find ancestral heritage as important as most people. There is a saying – you can choose you friends but you cannot choose your relatives. You are stuck with your blood ancestors’ history if it was healthy or not. That is why I prefer to learn about my ancestors, learn their ways that fit with my life, learn from their mistakes, and throw out the things that do not fit in my life. An example is that I find Ohlone Indians’ way of living with the land much more in tune with how I live. I live on land once lived on by the Ohlone, it only makes sense that their indigenous ways of living will make more sense than the my ancestors: the Choctaw, Norwegians, Germans, Jews or Celts who survived on completely different terrain. It would not make much sense for me to become a reindeer herder in Santa Cruz, California. My Jewish ancestors have taught me a lesson about adapting to your environment by incorporating the indigenous culture’s traditions into your own ancestral knowledge.
I know that this ancestral journey has just begun for me and what I believe now might be completely different years from now. I am invested in ecopsychology—learning to live in relationship with the ecosystem again. My ancestors have already helped me on my journey. They have reconnected me with the earth, helped me be thankful for my relations with all things, and showed me that all things, even the rocks have a lifeforce. I know that they will continue this journey with me and keep me safe. The Ohlone spirits will also show me insight; they will know that I am grateful for their knowledge and respectful way of living they lost to the Spanish. I cannot think of a better way to show gratitude than to say I wish to live as you did—you lived in harmony with the earth and the European invaders did not. Please show me the way home again.
Work Cited
Chalquist, Craig and Buzzell, L. (eds.). (2009). Ecotherapy. San Francisco, California: Sierra Books.
Flanagan, Laurence (1998). Ancient Ireland life before the Celts. New York, New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Louv, Richard (2005). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
O’Brien, Greg (2002). Choctaw in a revolutionary age, 1750-1830 (Indians of the southeast). Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.
Siri, Vigdis (1998). Dreaming with the first shaman (Noaidi). Revision, 21, 34-39.
COMMENT:
Your questions and reflections on the readings are thoughtful and evocative. I was especially struck by your comments (based in part on your neighbor’s remarks) on colonialism and the need for the dominant society to listen to the wisdom of indigenous cultures. I also appreciate your remarks on the ways in which shamanism is being brought in to the mainstream (or at least an attempt is being made). As you point out, shamanic experiences are part of an individual’s spiritual path and do not lend themselves to research and examination. It is clear from your incisive comments that you have given these issues a good deal of thought over the years. Your engagement with the readings comes through in these paragraphs.
I have rarely so enjoyed reading a final paper as I have reading this one. Your relationship to the land is so closely aligned with my own that I felt as though I were reading my own words. Perhaps our shared history of addiction and recovery play in to it – but I think that our shared healing through ritual and connection to the land are what resonates so deeply with me. You are searching for what is alive and real – and you rely on direct experience to be your primary teacher. That is how land based peoples have “educated” themselves throughout human history. We only truly know what we have lived – it settles in our bones and becomes part of us.
There are so many points that you discuss in your paper, I don’t quite know how to begin. Your comments on the pros and cons of DNA testing are spot-on. It is really quite amazing to me the ways in which the dominant culture can take almost any scientific tool and use it to separate and alienate. Still, your mtDNA results have very solidly connected you to the northern most regions of Europe and Ireland. I can see why you would feel drawn to the coastal Sami culture and would be happy to provide you with more references and resources. However, the main “learning” will come when you can travel to Sapmi and allow the land to speak with and to you.
This brings me to your wonderful description of being guided by the land when you were a young child – that the land itself was teaching you and your friends how to be in the woods in ways that mimic ancestors back through thousands of years. The Earth speaks to me when I allow myself to be still and listen. Like you, meditation has never taken me to places of such profound awareness and openness as has being in the wilds. My dreams often come from the land as it attempts to teach me and tell me the stories that live in it.
Thank you for brightening my day today with this excellent piece of writing! You speak from the heart with clarity and integrity. That is something the Earth teaches us when we listen.
Kimmy