Our Ancestors are asking Forgiveness through Us

Last updated on: November 1, 2016 at 7:47 am by Jason M. Brown

Our Ancestors are asking Forgiveness through Us 2016-11-01T07:47:34-08:00 Jason M. Brown

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During the Pagan celebration of Samhain, the veil between the worlds is said to be thin. It is a time when we can speak with our ancestors, to give or receive messages. For most of my life, I have not had a relationship with my ancestors, scattered across North America, and the British Isles where my people came from. With both my grandparents on my mother’s side dying over the past two years, I had been thinking more about those that came before me.

This weekend, I attended a Samhain Ritual here in Vancouver put on by Reclaiming Vancouver, an activist oriented Neo-Pagan movement started in San Francisco. During the ritual, which is focused on the transition of the seasons of the land, and our hearts, we were encouraged to think about the ways that our lives might contribute to oppression, and commit to ways to change. The facilitators invoked the struggle at Standing Rock directly in addition to the many other struggles we face.

As the facilitators cast the circle, and welcomed the four directions, they began a guided meditation to the land of the dead, where we were supposed to greet and communicate with our ancestors. Not being very good at this type of thing, I went along, trying to imagine myself face-to-face with my unknown ancestors, asking my blank mind, ‘well, what do you want me to know?’

As I sat, mind wandering in and out, the face of Tom Hardy as a grizzled John Fitzgerald in Alejandro Iñárritu’s ‘The Revenant’ flashed before my consciousness, his brutal frontier nihilism in full display. With Standing Rock on my mind, he seemed to represent the darker side of the long lineage of European men and women that made me who I am today.

The brutality with which my ancestors dispensed with the First peoples of this continent is indisputable. Benjamin Madley, a historian whose controversial new Book American Genocide argues that our history is one of intentional systematic slaughter that is not unlike the Jewish holocaust of WWII. Between 1846 and 1873, the Native population in California declined from at least 150,000 to under 30,000. This was not just vigilante settlers killing whilly nilly, but state sanctioned, tax dollar funded campaigns against Native men, women and children with the explicit goal of wiping them off the face of the earth. The ground I grew up on is stolen land. The ground I live on in Vancouver is unceded territory. But what can I do about it? I was born almost 100 years after the killing campaigns stopped.

Standing before a fuzzy image of John Fitzgerald in mind, I understood that things were different back then. I understood life was tough; that there was killing on both sides. But that somehow, things should have been different. So I asked, ‘what now?’ Standing Rock, he said, and disappeared.

It seems to me that our ancestors are asking for forgiveness through us. By listening to Native people, respecting their holy sites, and helping them reclaim what they can of their heritage, we can not only work toward reducing climate devastation, but toward righting the wrongs of history, and looking toward a shared, livable future for the earth and all her creatures.

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