Reclamation

As modern as we are, as up-to-date our computer software is, little bits of our ancient home is still in us. Like Superman with his crystal from Krypton that grows his fortress of solitude, we, too, hold a piece of a homeland. Knowing it can take some work, especially if we are among the many born to a geography not of our origin. For instance, you might be born into an English-speaking family in the United States. You might say you are American because you were born here. It says so in your passport. Where are you from, though? From where did your people arrive here if you are not an enrolled member of a tribe? Who are you? Where are your people from? So few of us know this. Many of us were given a word at some point: Scots-Irish. It’s something. It has a place, two places even. It’s not enough though. We know that. Deep inside we know there’s something else, something missing. We long for it. There are parts of our personality that are larger than what we feel we are supposed to have. There are emotional dimensions to us that scream for some way to reign them in. We feel an emptiness inside and call it depression or maybe we are very good at masking it and call it patriotism as we rile up against a real or imagined oppression, that dead feeling of having something taken away with nothing at hand to take its place.

Reclamation is the term used by historically excluded people to describe how some engage history, story, and memory to fill in the empty spaces, When members of First Nations receive instruction in, say, braiding sweetgrass, or working with river cane, this, too, is reclamation. For people not of these groups or others whose identity is interwoven with a location on earth, what is there to do? What can be grasped when the past has been erased by a single word: white. What is white? Does it have horses? Does it have bee-hive huts? Does it share dreams with others within the group? What is its song? The word “white” holds no story beyond whiteness. And whiteness holds no journey to tell of because it did not all come from one place. It might speak English, but England might not be its story. This is enough to drive someone mad over time. For someone who holds no roots in the land, it can be very hard to hear one’s story home.

And yet we are not lost. Something still calls to us. It is rising in Medicine, in Economics, in Psychiatry, in the practice of Law. Even in the deepest, densest erasure of a cultural identity, each living group from every living place has somehow wrought story even out of the silence. It’s everywhere now. Story this. Story that. Even when we feel everybody is tearing everybody apart, we are also in stunning ways that story appears, coming together. We are in a story revolution, all of us. Of this revolution, we are all on the exact same side. We are all the teller. We are all the listener. We are all the story. And the story is coming together.

All it needs is a little Shepherding, a little help from our ancestors who already live on in us and through scholarship by those possessed of the task of remembering Indigeneities. The wisdom is not entirely lost, and as long as it remembered, neither are we.

Anishinabe, Dinei, Tsalagi, Igbo, Hutu, Mayan, Gaelic, and countless more. All of them storytellers. All of us storytellers no matter from where on earth we have arrived.