The lineages healers have to contend with.... working with ancestors of purpose

Gratitude to Laura Ulrich who has been updating this chart. This was from July 22, 2021. By the time of this writing, more children will have been found. This chart doesn’t include the over 400 children found buried outside of US boarding schools. This, too, is only a fraction of the truth.

Throughout the 1980s, during my 20s, I lived in England. Bristol, to be exact. I remember walking with a friend, someone about ten years older than me. It was a happy sunny day. I remember skipping down the sidewalk, a horizon of Victorian buildings and winding streets laid out in front of us as we strolled down the hill. I made some kind of exclamation, about how I couldn’t believe I was there and how funnily DIFFERENT everything was, even though we all spoke the same language and had some amount of shared history. My friend smiled at me, I would imagine somewhat indulgently. And then they said that one of the biggest differences between us is that in England, everyone is surrounded by the past and so it is harder to imagine something new and different. Whereas in the States (Turtle Island), the opposite is true. We are all high-focused on what is possible, on what comes next, and act as though history is not something we need to worry about.

That conversation has stayed with me, these forty-plus years later. If I were retaking that walk with my friend, I would agree with him…. to a point. Not all people in the States, I would probably whisper or even shout. Generally, it’s the people who can most afford to not notice how history is still here, defining the present. This only works for those who are protected from the unfinished histories that are still around us, lodged in bodies and systems and Fourth of July celebrations.

I notice this thing, this historylessness, when I talk with healing practitioners, especially white practitioners who came into their practices without having yet done deeper work on what has shaped their people, especially and including the impact their people have had on the lifelines of others.

When I talk with folks about ancestor work, I most often break down our people-before into three different categories: ancestors of blood and bone or all those ancestors who come through the egg and sperm that resulted in you which includes nonhuman relatives, ancestors of kin and intent or all of those ancestors who raised loved and shaped those who came before and therefore made you possible and yes this also includes nonhuman relatives and then ancestors of lineage or purpose meaning all those who are the layers of wisdom that results in that work or creation you name as your sense of purpose and again this includes nonhuman relatives. This includes the food growers, the medicine makers, the home builders, and the parents and grandparents. You are, I am because of all of these lines, all of these webs.

Most healing practitioners have a sense of being called to their work. Something you can name or something impossible to articulate says this… this…. this is your work. This is your life. There is a reason we call it a practice because that is what it is, for the rest of the time we are in our work, we are practicing. There is no endpoint. There is no arrival. There is only practice. Just like there is no healing as an endpoint, there is only the process of it.

We can not claim a practice, an identity, without also claiming all of its histories. All of it, even the parts we don’t like, the parts we want to separate from. We all come from people who were glorious and who were fucked up, every one of us, and still, some of us come from people who have mixed this realness with social and economic, and political power, using military tools and technology to ramp up the impact of what are otherwise the basic human flaws of greed and derision. And being the people whose people used this control to level up impact for personal - or family - gain, this shapes you as well. After all, it’s a contradiction of over 300,000 years of our species’ wisdom, and longer than that of all life, that our best chance for long-term survival is through connection and balance. Did your ancestors of lineage remember this as they were practicing what they believed or did they do the 17th or 18th-century version of trade-marking?

After the abolition of the institution of slavery was (legally) complete, there were thousands of white people, abolitionists, who looked around, rubbed their hands together, and said, ok, what next? What do we fix now? These white Christians who had fought against the wrongness of slavery, looked around and asked, what else can we clean up?

Northerners who believed that the United States had atoned for the great national sin of slavery through the “blood and fire” of the Civil War listened to reports of western atrocities (against indigenous people) with growing alarm. After the war, they had looked upon the federal government with a new sense of optimism but worried that it could easily lose the moral high ground if other national wrongs were left unaddressed……Just as the Civil War had been necessary to purge the sin of slavery, another cleansing would be necessary to redeem sins committed against the Indians. from Federal Fathers & Mothers, by Cathleen Cahill

Hundreds if not thousands of white Christian women began organizing. They fought Congress to maintain or repair the nation’s honor by upholding treaties. They called out treaty violations and organized mass petition drives to fight Indian Removal. They started with fighting for these basic tenets of respect and sovereignty….. and then they changed.

There are layers here, things I want to be careful with, as naming the entwined and tangled histories of the US policies towards Black and Native folks. I am telling these stories for how my own ancestors of lineage have been part of causing harm.

It matters deeply that one of the promises the United States made to those who were formerly enslaved was the promise of 40 acres and a mule. This promise of 40 acres is the same promise made to European and other immigrants who, through the Homestead Act, were given 40 acres by the United States government in exchange for farming land recently seized by those Native people forced out through battle and treaty. With this central tenet of Reconstruction, equality now meant forty acres for everyone. It matters, deeply, that this promise made to free Black people was never kept. It matters that this is only one part of the violent history of racial capitalism that finds ways to continually reframe and recenter its origins; its desire to keep Black bodies as objects for white bodies to use for profit and control. This is a true thing. And those hundreds and thousands of white women, caught up with the promise of a free individual’s right to own land and farm that land, to apply a body’s work to the care of themselves and their own families, believed that the same guarantee should apply to Native people, whether they wanted it or not.

Thousands of white women felt called to join the Indian Service (now called the Bureau of Indian Affairs), established in 1824 as the vehicle to meet treaty obligations which then morphed into organizing policies of assimilation and “civilization.” These thousands of white women became the primary force for the intimate work of forced assimilation; the violent remaking of home, children, and bodies that was the next wave after military occupation. White Christian women were lifted as the most suitable people for this work of assimilation, having a perceived “moral strength and virtue” as the source of her power.

Notice what is coming up for you, What is happening in your body, your mind right now. Stay with me, non-indigenous healers, stay with me for this history. I am getting to our role in this story. Indigenous healers reading this, or those whose lineages contain all of these lines, as mine do, this is written to honor - deeply- those whose sovereignty, bodies, cultural ways were stolen.

One of the directives made by the federal government to these white women was that part of their role was to model what civilization looked like, to just “be” their disciplined Christian selves. They did this through teaching, nursing and sometimes just living in homes on reservations or in other places where native people lived. The language of the times is different from the language of contemporary healing but much is the same. White women responded to the call from cities and towns and rural communities, especially in the East and Midwest, feeling called to attend to those less fortunate, to gain skills to support the healing and the cure of those who were (perceived to be) struggling. These women felt called in to the Indian Service and, in answering their call, brought their personal and cultural lens of freedom, healing and the pursuit of happiness and rolled up their sleeves, ready to give and serve and care and love. On their terms. In their own ways.

And so what started as Christian women moving onto tribal lands and living among communities by being “examples” who volunteered their care and services became women who staffed and taught at boarding schools. They became the moral example as their federal government violently stole children from their families and kin, forcing those children to forget or deny their own languages and cultures and to learn English and Christianity. These white women, fervent with missionary zeal, believed and so taught that owning private property, farming the land, and accumulating wealth is the only option for being alive. For being civilized. For being equal. This, they believed or else avoided really thinking through, was important enough that it justified separating a child from their family in order to keep them safe; to ensure a “better” future for them.

Over time these white women shape-shifted from an ethic that centered honoring and fighting for tribal sovereignty to one that enacted forced assimilation. This shape-shifting was only possible because of this kind of belief system, of inner dialogue: I know the way. I know what is best. I have insight that you don’t have. There is something I don’t know but if I share it with you, your life will be better for it. You poor and unknowing person who has suffered, here I am. Here I am. I have something you need.

Hello healer friends, friends who are care workers, friends who are organizers, have you ever felt these things? Tell the truth, please. At least to yourself. I know that there have been many times throughout my practice where I have sat across from someone and believed that I knew things that would make life better for them. That I knew things about trauma, about how the body holds pain, about how to help someone’s hips feel fluid rather than stiff and that if they would listen, take what I was offering, then things would be better. After close to 20 years of practice, there are still times where I have to pull myself up strongly as I feel this urge, this need to “help,” to show up with the right answers that will, in some way, make everything happier for that person in front of me who is struggling. It’s the same thinking, the same roots in all of these stories: if you catch the spirit the way that I have, if you do what I do and believe what I believe, then you will be happy, you will heal. Oh, these Christian patterns are deeply rooted in and it takes time for them to unwind. And until they are unwound, they create the conditions for harm rather than for healing.

I am a part of an ancestral lineage of Christian white women who have felt deeply moved to attend to those who are struggling. I am part of the lineage of those who forced their ideas of health and healing onto the bodies of those who then died or disappeared because of it. Some of those white women who joined the Indian Service also worked as nurses, a word that comes from the same root as nurture. It literally means to attend to the health and vigor of another person. Up until the mid- to late 1800s, what most nurses did is very similar to the kind of care work that a lot of people who call themselves healers provide: supporting the nervous system to settle, for someone to feel less agitated, more in the present moment and less alone. Mix some parts of regular therapy and social work, community organizing, education, physical therapy, some parts of occupational therapy, some parts of energy work, some parts of somatic trauma work, some parts of nutritional counseling, some parts of body realignment, massage, chiropractic, and on and on….. it all overlaps.

As healing practitioners, there are two ways we are accountable to our ancestors of lineage. One is by knowing the concrete and specific stories of what our predecessors did and didn’t do. Who is named as the founder of your field? If your practice is born in a culture other than your own, then what about the people you share culture with who were first introducing this practice to people like you? When did they live? How did they - or did they not - honor the lineages that had taught them? What did they believe about healing? What did they understand as the role of a practitioner and how has that shaped your field? What about the people who directly taught you, whether in classrooms or online? What did they say about what they believe healing is? What did they say about your responsibility, about what this practice offers for people? What are the stories that need to be named, the harms that need to be witnessed and the repairs, when ready, that need to be addressed?

The other way we are accountable to our ancestors of lineage is by recognizing how care work has existed in our lineage, even if the practice we work with now would not have been recognized by our fourth great grandparent. It’s about understanding this lineage of care work and then listening for how this lineage has shaped you. Is there a way, and listen right now with deep humility, is there a way that your generation has some version of action and belief that is similar to those same white women who believed it was the right and best thing to force Native children to leave their homes in order to become a different “better” version of a human being?

That’s a trick question because the answer is yes, there is. You, like I, see it repeated everywhere including, sometimes, often, in our own practices. Please don’t override the truth of that. Instead, let it in.

And let it sit next to the lineage you, we might claim with pride and honor. This is not a binary brain moment, but about holding contradiction and not trying to make anything smaller to feel better (or worse) about yourself. Some things managed to come through, to last despite the bullshit. Whether you call it the bright and wise ancestors or the resilience of your people, these moments of right relationship, when they are there, are pieces of oxygen that get through the cracks. Let them sit next to each other, neither minimizing or cancelling the other, both true.

I recently wrote a piece for a project I hold along with Cara Page, the Healing Histories Project. In it, this paragraph is quoted:

The work of the school, then, is to build up from the beginning “the whole child,” to expiate the sins of the past by heroic work in the present. Free gymnastic exercises and breathing exercises, introduced into the classroom work, would be very helpful to these students to relieve the tortured muscles unaccustomed to long sitting, to expand the poorly developed chests and to form a habit of quick obedience. From a teacher’s standpoint it might seem a doubtful expenditure of time to introduce a ten-minute exercise between recitations, but the drill would be very beneficial, and progressively so, as the students advanced in years, and became able to take more complicated exercises. This would, in a measure, take the place of a military drill, where that is impractical, though I believe that something like a military inspection is always possible and always healthful and should be recommended both for MORAL AND PHYSICAL REASONS Martha Waldron, “The Indian in Relation to Health,” read at the Convention of Indian Educational Associations, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1896.

It was reading this that led to me writing this piece you are reading right now. We don’t have a single word in English for how the violence of ableism, racism and colonialism work together as a single unit to weave shame and disconnection and deep physical/spiritual harm together and to force it into the bodies of those being controlled (pause here to honor how much brilliant resistance there always is to the shape of this violence). I read that sentence about students having ten-minute exercise breaks while they are learning and I thought, well fuck. Here is one of the often-repeated suggestions for supporting good self-care; step away from the screen and move your body on a regular basis.

There is nothing wrong with the suggestion. It’s a good suggestion. What is at play here is the context for the suggestion. Why is this being shared? What’s the purpose of it? How is it being named and what else are you naming as well? WHY are you suggesting this? What do you believe will happen as a result? What do you believe will happen if someone DOESN’T do this? If they don’t, gasp, follow your suggestion, your direction, your orders?

This is where these thousands of white women got lost. This is how they moved from honoring sovereignty to forcing assimilation as a kind of care work. They forgot how to fully honor another human life, the radical consent it takes, the clarity that your life, individually and collectively, is your life and my life, individually and collectively, is mine. All life is complex and can only be fully known and experienced by the one who is living it. They forgot that change is only liberatory when it is defined and held by those in the center of the change.

Hello practitioner friends, social workers, therapists, organizers, faith leaders - take a moment and really listen, really sense in and ask yourself this question: how are these ancestors of lineage still informing and shaping how you do your work? And how are you resisting? And then, in prayer or with a shout, reach out to the bright ones, your ancestors of lineage who are from before this violence or who have shifted it since passing, reach out to them and ask them for help as you reach out to those within your practice and ask the questions again: how are we honoring the sovereignty of life rather than trying to control it so that we feel like we have done a good job?

This piece is written with grief and rage as I, like you, stay attending to the children whose bodies are being brought back home.

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This piece could not have been written without the work of Cathleen D. Cahill and her book, Federal Fathers & Mothers: A social history of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933. UNC Press. 2011.

….and I am talking about cisgender white women here, primarily, because those are part of my people and because this story is not as often lifted. (White) nonbinary, trans and cismen beloveds, you have your own part of this story. And non-indigenous beloveds of color and possibly some indigenous, even as this is not entirely your story, I know that many of us share shaping around that final question: how are we honoring the sovereignty of life rather than trying to control it so that we feel we have done a good job?