on conflicts of whiteness, belonging, land & witchcraft

Walla Walla, Nez Perce, Umatilla, Paiute and Cayuse land. Original Oregon trail ruts to the left. Conflicting intersections.

I would like to preface, that I am not a sociopolitical expert or politically correct persons. I am not an academic on these topics, I am not a historian. I am not interested in using coded and exclusionary academic laced activist language that is largely inaccessible to many without profuse googling of words and tip-toeing around rapidly changing meanings. After all, it’s more anarchist if you use language people understand (Jake Stratton-Kent I believe). I am a simple neurodivergent autodidact who thinks about these topics and then expresses them on my personal social media platforms. I will speak plainly and from my own experience, because that is all I have. I also realize and am in recognition that I am just another white voice in the void. What I have written is not perfect, but it is from the heart.

This post is a reply of sorts to the recent words of Carolyn Elliott on being white and being, as she put it, also indigenous. I recommend reading that before proceeding any further. Furthermore, I do not participate in cancel culture. I look on Elliott’s words and am responding with compassion and a sense of internal urgency of my heart’s expression.

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Hi, I’m not indigenous — but my ancestors were once, a long long time ago. My DNA is a fun mix of Scots, Irish, British, Germanic, Sardinian, Dutch, and Saami. There are large and missing gaps in my knowledge of my ancestry because of movement, famine, blind assimilation, broken marriages, abuse, religion, and the more obvious factors of colonization, imperialism and the one that opens the road to much of this shit storm, that so many overlook: is civilization. Long long ago, my ancestors were colonized by outsides forces, such as the Romans, or maybe even the Vikings. My lines of connection are broken. That wound is very old, buried very deep and I will never heal from it in my own lifetime, nor likely will my descendants — should I choose to have any of my own. This belongs to me, this is my work.

I live and was born on a continent, that has been colonized by my people and I am a benefactor of this movement and violence. I am a part of the dominant group. I am not, in the traditional definition of the word, native or indigenous to the place I was born. As a matter of fact, I had a very nomadic youth — which further perpetuated a sense of displacement. I settled in so-called Oregon, 13 years ago. The longest place I have ever lived in my life and the first place I was able to say, “home” and feel a sort of peace in the familiarity. But, you see, I am still an uninvited guest (which would imply some rudeness). I was born into this storm and as much as I desire to resist it, it is inescapable. Do I long for a return to my ancestral ways of being? Do I long for the stories, myths, food, plant knowledge and tools that my ancestors once held knowing of? Of course I do. Part of our wound is a lack of belonging, lack of community, lack of mutual care — you’re very lucky if you have those things. The cult of alienation seem to grow stronger with every wheezing breath that the bloodied machine takes.

Am I native to the earth? Yes, obviously. I wasn’t born in space! Does this give me the right to claim indigeneity? No. Especially in the context of the social-political climate I find myself in. I accept that I am a lost child of the earth, who longs to find belonging and community, culture and ceremony that connects me to something solid and foundational. Does this absolve me of my ancestral inheritance and the ills and spiritual disease of colonization that I am a part of and that I have also benefited from? Abso-fucking-lutely not. There is ceaseless work to be done. I will do the work until I die. I am not shaming myself, and I am not interested in self-depreciation. This is my inheritance like we all recieve in one way or another within family and blood. Like my alcoholic father, I too, carry the curse of alcoholism. It is my duty to face it and heal it and to not shame or guilt myself or hide it. Or worse, bypass it —  a festering wound that desperately needs the salve to heal.

Like the Three of Swords, healing happens through, not around. Allowing oneself to grieve, softens the brittleness, and makes way for supple flexibility and future resiliency, gentleness, and understanding. Perhaps it is time to acknowledge our collective need to grieve. In trying to connect to a line of my ancestors recently, I discovered that some of them didn’t even mark the graves of their dead. They left them and willfully forgot them. My dead are lost to me and I cannot find them. They buried them and forgot, buried them and forgot to cry, buried them and did not grieve. What is the learned genetic effect of this? The question is rhetorical. It is generation on generation on generation and it is time to untangle the knots. This is my work.

My soul hungers for medicine and ceremony and culture that I do not have, just as Elliott expressed. I get that. So do I adopt and capitalize off of the shared knowledge of native people of my locale — should I be so lucky to be invited to experience their lifeways? No. That is cultural appropriation. I do not throw that word around lightly. To do so, does violence to those on the frontlines of colonialism, who are still defending, protecting, and standing up for their lifeways, with their very lives.

The questions feel crucial, they feel critical and I feel them with urgency and great need. How do I connect? How do I make ceremony? How do I find belonging? Where am I invited? How do I find sacredness? All amid ecological collapse, global pandemics, ever-present and growing uncertainty, on land that was stolen from the original inhabitants. I feel lost.

What feels most overlooked by my fellow lost white folks, as we search for some anchor to ground us, to moor us into belonging and while we often reach for cultural practices that do not belong to us — is right beneath our feet and in front of our eyes. The land. Why has our birth rite to be in communion with the land been ignored and even demonized? Why do we seek to fill the insatiable maw within us by theft or willful ignorance? It’s in our DNA to do so. We can rewrite the codes, we can heal. We can remember.

Some have suggested that white folks in America shouldn’t touch native plants, that they shouldn’t interact with land that has been stolen. Overwhelmingly I hear this horizontally from other white folks. Should I continue to perpetuate the puritanical colonial ideology that “out there” is where the Devil lives? That, “out there” is where I become impure? Should I build a white picket fence around my rented land, rip open the soil, force my seeds into them to grow plants that are not meant to even be here? Or do I turn to support the very land base that desperately needs our attention and hands on the ground, right now?

bitterroot a first food, who require digging to proliferate and survive.

Witchcraft defies dominant, puritanical social orders of religion, state and polarities within politics and this is where I weave in the red thread. Witchcraft will defy even your politically correct ideology. Witchcraft is what lies beyond the hedge and fence, witchcraft is what is on the other side, witchcraft is “out there”. Witchcraft is not here to serve you in your solipsistic self-empowerment feminist journey, you, witch are here to serve the land from where you orient yourself.

I cannot, in good faith and in good intention, sit on my hands behind locked doors and garden gates. I will create my own ceremony, I will ask my ancestors for guidance, I will ask the land to show me the way, I will go out there. I will fuck up, listen and learn and try again. I will address the wound and heal it.

Why do we trust that they (land, plants, ancestors) will not illuminate the path? We grasp at something else, we thieve and appropriate because it is easier than facing our deep wound. I feel it is possible to do this work while being respectful of the original inhabitants — and in all my conversations with native folks, connecting with your local ecology is encouraged. It is needed more than ever, no matter your location.

While Elliott’s post was, in my eyes, intentionally inflammatory for the hunger of algorithmic reach, she was missing this piece and she was missing humility. And through deleted comments of black people, indigenous people, and people of color — showed the still rawness of this wound and how much it needs healing. How much we need healing.

It is just after the new moon in Aries, and soon, my solar return in Aries. Chiron the wounded healer is astride my Mercury/Venus conjunction in Aries, and the Moon activates my Mars in Taurus. I step far outside my comfort zone in writing this. Action, “what’s next” is always on my mind. So what is next? What is the next step?

It starts with noticing our orientation in the landscape we occupy and then with presence. It starts with surrendering and acceptance. You can begin by going outside, and breathing, and noticing. I understand, even this act has been one that is controversial to do and at some times of the year even hazardous (I live in wildfire country). Who, of the non-human inhabitants grab your attention? Ask, listen and let them guide you. You know how to do this.

Let land lead, let indigenous folks who have knowledge of the land you occupy lead, listen, engage, rest, address the truth of your lineage and respectfully, do witchcraft.