Native Well-Springs: Gaelic Culture and History

The (re)introduction of story to medicine is much more a phenomenon of memory than an innovation. Storytelling and medicine are ancient friends, tracing back through every lineage and culture. Like music, poetry, and dance, Storytelling bears the mark of universal practice, not just shared across indigeneities but often linking distant groups through shared elements, structures, and concepts. These consistencies signify storytelling’s replete methodologies for holistically addressing the needs of all humans, everywhere, across all time. In many traditions, medicinal stories describe journeys to underworlds to retrieve a soul or part of a soul. Storytelling heals community by binding members to memory as well as sharing the wisdom of the group to aid new generations. Stories gather groups around fires on cold nights. Stories provide a direct experience of cultural identity. 

The term “The British Isles” erases distinct ethnicities in distinct regions each with their own wealth of wisdom, knowledge, ritual, and community. Much of these are carried in Story. Without these connections and protections that story grants, we lose our connection to our ancestral line, our sense of place, and our sense of belonging. The result is a pathology of loss of something we can no longer name. If that vaccum is filled by a culture that celebrates domination and consumption, limits our ability to have a meaningful sense of community, and projects its shadow onto vulnerable groups with whom we do not have personal experience and connections, we become vulnerable to the darker demons of our nature.

Cultural amnesia and detachment from our roots manifests as rage. Rage is a public health issue. Cultural amnesia is fomented by enabling complicity with oppression. It cuts us off from the experiences of past injustices and struggles within our own lineages. Mental well-being suffers with physical health deteriorating into insatiable hunger presenting as addiction. Communities disintegrate into polarized camps unwilling or unable to hear the nuances of the stories and the concerns of the other. Unprocessed internal shadows are projected onto the other. As we see in America today, anger, fear, and hate supplant civil discourse. Many feel that something that was their natural birthright is being taken away. The Initiative for Storytelling and Cultural Healing embraces a multi-leveled approach. We can draw upon the ancient, global practice of telling our own stories. We can also draw upon cultural education and history. Just as residents of Scotland and Ireland are reclaiming their traditions and language–long forbidden–descendants here are also looking at cultures that have been “Lost,” under a monolithic mask of whiteness.

What has been taken, we fail to see, was taken long ago. Our ability to feel compassion for ourselves and others has been deadened in a myriad of ways, including the technocratic impetus to reduce the fulness of our humanity through the lenses of objectification and quantification. The distortions of race further distance us from our own family legacies. With the help of rhetorical sleight of hand, terms like “white” and “Scots-Irish” sealed away access to memory. Descendants of communities forced from their homes in Scotland, descendants of families escaping genocide programmed through “famine,” descendants of those whose lives were made impossible by the calculus of capitalism, descendants of those who were embroiled in all sides of colonial projects of an expanding British Empire are told their ancestors braved ocean voyages to build some glorious city on a hill, were of sturdy “Scots-Irish stock.” The American myth of freedom does not spend enough time and energy examining how that freedom has been acquired and at whose cost. At some point in any healing process, we as individuals untell stories that no longer are working for us and adopt new and better stories. The illusion of courage, bravery, and some hyped up manifest destiny is no longer a story that helps. It is a story that inspires tiki torches and mowing down protesters with a car. 

Asheville Wordfest presents Dr. Michael Newton: Race, Whiteness and the Myth of Celtic Appalachia from Laura Hope-Gill on Vimeo.

Dr. Michael Newton, PhD., presented two sessions at Asheville Wordfest in 2018. Dr. Newton is the premiere international scholar on Gaelic History, Culture, and Language. A true story shepherd, he tracks stories to the edges of the Hebrides and publishes them in Gaelic and English alongside eye-opening, heartbreaking facts and data surround the near-erasure of a culture from which countless among us descent. His books and essays (links soon available on this site) provide pathways for reclamation and re-awakening.

Thomas Wolfe died in 1938. In his short life, he left a prescription for national and global health. He warned readers about what he saw in Berlin in the 1930s. He warned readers of the cost of denial of America’s true history of genocide. The Thomas Wolfe Center’s Narrative Health program draws on data that proves Wolfe right: if we don’t tell of our trauma we will exact trauma upon others—through oppression, exploitation, dehumanization, persecution— in an effort to feel better. And that trauma will only continue to divide and poison us. Unaddressed trauma leads to illness and depression, conditions an entire nation can similarly manifest, not the destiny the defeated, broken, exhausted, terrified ancestors, we are told, moved bravely toward. Gaelic Studies is among the first steps to piecing a broken world together in a region in which the moniker “Scots-Irish” looms large in the public imagination about the past.

Information about Dr. Michael Newton’s Spring and Summer courses in 2024 will be available soon. To begin your journey in Gaelic Culture and History, Michael offers courses through Hidden Glen Folk School.