Healing History
The inspiration for this and so many things in my life come directly from becoming a student of Martín Prechtel via Bolad’s Kitchen 7 years ago. My perspective is my own but any clear-sightedness there-in is most likely due to reading all his books many times and sitting and listening to his rap over the many years in an attempt to actually hear and understand. If anyone longs for ancestral healing through jumping in, I highly recommend his class and all of his many elegant soul and heart-filled tomes. https://floweringmountain.com/ In addition I have learned an endless amount from so many teachers including all my teachers at AIMC and Atava Garcia-Swiecicki, my maestra of Curanderismo who just published this remarkable book: The Curanderx Toolkit.
We live in a culture without a root. There are times when between busy schedules, or after a loss, we find our emotions wound into a knot. We try many distractions: food, desserts, alcohol, other substances or simply running from our problems to a new apartment, new town, new friends, or running nowhere into the shiny allure of the internet. We may turn to psychotherapy in hopes that this knot could be unwound by a professional. This may help but then we again run into a kind of painful numbness and wonder “am I forgetting something?” The ache is great but the desire to run usually wins over looking directly into the abyss. There comes a time when nothing can soothe this inner storm, though we continue to grasp, searching for anything to soothe it. It is in these moments that we ask, “What is wrong with me? Can I handle this life? Am I going insane? Why aren’t I comfortable in my own skin? Why do I feel so lost and at a loss? Will things ever be better?”
These are important questions, though there are few answers to be grabbed or bought the way you might pick up some fast food. These questions will have to be cooked for a long time at a low simmer to be given their due time and respect. It probably won’t taste too good for a long while either! There won’t be any answers waiting for you to “discover” them online. This feeling of insatiable inner hunger is not a flaw in your psychology or your thinking. You cannot medicate or meditate yourself out of it. But it can begin to be carved, burned, composted, and cried out into a more core form from which could sprout something beautiful again, something that our ancestors knew.
The first step is to go backwards. We believe in progress as though it were a given or a religion, and yet, the further we’ve come into the promises of more convenience and technology, the further we’ve gotten from knowledge of how things actually work, wisdom that was hard won by our ancestors. In the race for some attainment of control over the environment as a civilization we may have also run over all of the old ways of knowing, belonging and sustaining the basis of life. Our ancestors, no matter where they originated, though for some of us an incredibly long time ago, had songs they sang to the world, to the seeds, seasons, birds and winds. They worked with their hands making exquisite foods, clothing, jewelry and all manner of sacred beautiful things often not for themselves or fame but for the life-giving power of the beauty that surrounded them. They had a very personal relationship with the Earth. Without the sanitized spaces of homes, cars and offices constantly surrounding them, their hearts were in a rhythmic conversation with the world all around them. Today we take an occasional hike, and slightly refreshed, we then return to the computer and convenience driven-malaise we were just in and pick up right where we left off in our state of loss and bereavement from so many generations away from the Earth.
We live in a culture that is uncultured. The mistakes we’ve made haven’t had time to ferment, to compost and die back enough to be able to sprout again more vibrantly or beautifully. Our memories are short and our curiosity about the past is spotty if present at all. We long for a bright bountiful future of our Disney-imprinted dreams, but the past did not disappear into thin air and it cannot be ignored as it is living in the cellular memory of everyone today.
Despite our manicured textbooks that speak of the Native people who “lived” here or Africans who were enslaved but then freed, the endless wars, government coups, genocidal attacks on entire continents, and slavery across the world hasn’t ended but lives on in people’s bodies and psyches. We live among hundreds and in some cases thousands of years of unexpressed grief and unresolved enormous harms against people and places. Though our progressive worldview encourages us to let the past go, and move on, the ghosts of hundreds of years of oppression haunt our daily experiences, whether we admit it or not. We are sitting on top of many layers of murdered and forgotten people. I grew up in Berkeley, CA which is right on top of ancestral ceremonial and burial grounds for the Ohlone people. Their places of prayer have been covered over by shopping malls and trash heaps. They continue to seek Federal Recognition because their homeland is too valuable of property for the government to allow them to have any of it for themselves. I barely thought about that day to day living there. It’s very hard to do. How can I hold in my mind the thousands of people murdered and then forgotten by the settlers in that area? It’s so mind-bogglingly painful that we actually can’t continue to think of it. So instead we go about shopping and throwing out plastic cups pretending that we “have a good enough life,” while our spirits are dragging through hundreds of feet of amnesia and pain and still feel it all. Despite our mind’s insistence that everything is “pretty good,” there’s a gnawing pain that continues to fester below this facade of getting by. This cultural amnesia is raging an inner war all the time and we just imagine this horror is normal. Where can we begin to apply a balm to our longing for wholeness and our inner wild beauty who is rebelling against nearly every part of our surroundings. We might just need to sit down and actually feel all the endless pains that are lurking like elephants in the room.
We must grieve. We must let the tears flow. We owe it to our ancestors who killed and were killed, we owe it to future generations to not leave them any more layers of turmoil to unlock. We owe it to our country. This would really be the most patriotic thing I can imagine. To stop for a day, a few days, a week and just recognize all the ills brought upon the land and people and actually let ourselves cry and grieve and wail and apologize and be moved by the hugeness of it to make amends. Though there are generations of loss and killing within all of our pasts we can heal. But to turn away continuously from history’s memory and lessons, only embeds the genocides, wars, and hatred deeper into our collective cooking pot and sours the stew. It is worth our time, our frazzled mind’s attention, our hearts’ deep compassion to be turned towards the true history all around us and of our own families.
We do not live in a “new era” or some surgically removed island of modernity, somehow independent of the centuries and eons that we descend from. We are part of a long string of events and the present and future are very much tied together even the painful memories of the past that we’d rather not recall. But it is time we remember. It is time we let the tears flow and the healing begin. We cannot know peace or choose a more beautiful future if we don’t give our attention to what has come before us. I myself have been devoting myself to reading more accounts of history. The last few years I have been on a search for more versions of history and have read: California History Through Native Eyes by William J. Bauer Jr., An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States by Kyle T. Mays, Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson, Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and many novels by Black authors that never made it into my schooling. I have also been doing my best to learn as much as I can about the history and current struggles of the Nisenan people who are the original people of the place I now call home - the Sierra Foothills. In learning more I have also chosen to donate to them monthly via my business to pay something back to those that made this land so incredibly beautiful and resilient. They have a wonderful website for their nonprofit: https://chirpca.org/
It is time we pause our great fleeing to stop and just look deeply at all the ways we have arrived where we are. Let us begin the long journey to ask, who lived here before I did? Where are they now? Who stole their land so that I could be here now? Who worked the land to make it how it is today? Where did my ancestors come from? Why did they leave? What were they running from? Were they forced to leave? How long ago did my ancestors have a relationship with the earth? What were their songs and dances for the harvest, for the springtime, for the coming of age rituals? What did they eat? What was their relationship to their food? How can I learn from their mistakes, the horrible things they did and from the beauty they made also?
The medicine of grief, the medicine of facing true histories, and the medicine of repairing the losses are a few of the gems that might lead us out of our modern illness of insatiable hunger and this constant simmer of gnawing pain. But we must turn to the past to learn our next steps.
