Complex Ancestral Legacies: What We Celebrate and What We Don't
Feliz dia de gracias. My son learned this phrase in school this past week. It means happy day of thanks. It sounds so simple and clean in Spanish, and I admit to feeling a sense of relief that this how Waldorf preschool addresses Thanksgiving. I’ve been thinking about this complex holiday, especially in relation to our evermore mixed lineage world. It’s so healthy to celebrate gratitude and share whatever abundance we have. Yet, this holiday, which allows for time and space to gather with family and friends, for sharing warmth and comforting foods, has such a dualistic origin that I am never certain that I want to celebrate it at all. Is it more appropriate to wake up before dawn and join in the amazing gathering of Indigenous communities on Alcatraz for ceremony, remembrance, and solidarity, or to travel towards family with baked goods and the sense of gratitude for the chance to be together one more year? It’s kind of hard to do both with equal zest.
Honestly, what may seem like a small decision about how to meet this particular day and tradition is reflective of a larger tension. What do our mainstream traditions, the ones we likely grew up with, really mean to us? How do we want to carry them?
It makes sense that this kind of questioning is happening in many areas of our culture. It’s good to ask what part of our cultural heritage we are going to celebrate and what we are not. We can consciously choose how to meet traditions, and engage or question their meaning, rather than simply doing them out of habit.
Yet, as we become more and more a mixed race society, a similar conflict also exists inside of us. With which aspects of our histories do we align and which do we disown? Do we have more of a right to guilt than to indignity when we think about colonization? Do we belong to a lineage at all? I have met a lot of people who struggle with this sense of not belonging to either (or any) of the races that battle or blend in their bloodlines, and those who exalt one heritage, while feeling shame about another. If we understand our world, and often ourselves, as somehow both colonizer and colonized, spiritually and emotionally aware yet wounded and forgetful too, perhaps both privileged and disempowered, then, as adults, what traditions, what rites do we actually need to perpetuate, to invent, to adapt with new eyes and hearts, or to cancel altogether, as we address the multiplicity of our time?
Just beyond the need for ancestral healing, the transmutation of our generational trauma and painful cultural legacies, is the reclamation of ancestral gifts. We all have wisdom traditions and specialized knowledge to recover, if we look back far enough in our family lines and within our soul memories. Feeling disconnected, feeling like you may not belong to your own heritage is a distinctly post-colonial and, perhaps, American experience. Colonization has a system. It separates a people from their connection with the past, their ancestors, their traditions, their spirituality, their language, and then it replaces what has been usurped with a new culture. When this, and far more, has been accomplished, the colonizers generally leave to rule and influence from afar. However, in our country, the colonizers stayed, creating a cultural expectation for other immigrants as well. The U.S. became a place to leave behind cultural history, to blend in, if possible, and over time to forget.
The reasons for this are complicated, but it begins with colonization. In The Sibling Society, poet Robert Bly says “It’s possible that American culture now exhibits many qualities we associate with a typical colonialist society. We know now from twentieth-century psychology, if from no other source, that, given the nature of human life, people and nations cannot practice destruction of tribal cultures without having it come back on them.”
This makes it all the more important to really think about the traditions we’ve been handed, and those about which we may only have been given fragments, perhaps in the form of stories, recipes, rituals, and dreams. If I were a teacher, I would assign us all to use our intuition, deep listening, and investigation skills to find some aspect of how our families or ancestors have met the holidays of late Fall and early Winter, recover it, and then expand upon it. I would suggest reworking this Thanksgiving holiday to include the sharing of food and of gratitude for our abundance, an acknowledgement and honoring of what it’s true history means, and a recovery of some aspect of our indigenous knowledge and practices, no matter how far back we have to look. Add to that the nuances of family gatherings past that still have special meaning to us, and maybe we have the beginnings of creating our own tradition. How can you consciously meet this complex holiday, while embracing the complexities of your own heritage? What will you celebrate? What will you not celebrate? What have your traditions been, and what will they be? Ask with the aid of the oracular arts, or just ask within.
May your holidays and your life be rich with meaningful ritual this season!
Ometeotl.
-This blog was written by Melusina Gomez, originally for publication with the eleventh house.