Ancestral Shadow Work

My cousin emailed pictures of my ancestors in Tennessee, including this farm. I grew up on this farm. My grandparents raised seven children here. My father and great uncle Robert built the big barn. None of it exists anymore.

This precious aerial photo of my ancestral home floods me with memories and reawakens a connection to my bloodline ancestors.

I’ve been mad at them for years, for what they stood for, and believed, and how much damage they did as salt-of-the-earth, good Christian people.

I also hear the charge to heal our ancestral line seven generations back.

I realize that I must connect with those ancestors, the Sanders ancestors and the others who’s name are lost to me.

Seven generations back. My grandfather was born in 1896, and his father was born in 1876. The colonization of west Tennessee was within my seven generations back. It includes the Trail of Tears.

The land I grew up on, my ancestors within seven generations moved in and claimed the lands vacated by the forced migration, the small pox blankets, the genocide.

When I show up at the Global Gathering of Matriarchs this coming weekend, I will carry these ancestors with me.

In her book, Sacred Instructions, Sherri Mitchell asks us to connect with our ancestors and heal.

When she spoke at the Belfast Free Library in 2018, I asked her, “How can I connect with my ancestors when I know that my ancestors murdered your ancestors? I want nothing to do with them.”

I do not remember her exact words to me, but I do remember the energy of her words. She was full of compassion. She spoke of love.

I rejected those ancestors. When I seek how I want to be in this world, I reach back farther than my ancestors in this life, and stretch back in my imagination to the older ancestors.

Not the ones who lived in the so named British Isles, but the ones longer ago, the ones who lived in the plains and mountains before the great migration through Europe. I seek the ancestors who knew that god was a goddess. Who lived before Patriarchy.

It is an imagination that will carry me through the rest of my life.

At this weekend’s Global Gathering of Matriarchs, when Sherri invites us to heal the wounds, to “Decolonize Relationships, moving from lateral violence to lateral kindness”, I bring that seventh generation who colonized the Chickasaw hunting lands, and I allow their needs, desires, hatreds, prejudices, and their violence to sit at the table within me.

Whatever is asked of me as a white woman in this space, I pray to be open, willing, and available to heal my ancestors, to set aside my own prejudice and shame and fear, and fragility.

I choose to be and pray for the humility and strength to allow this healing to transmute all that happened before, and all that brought me to this place.

Let me be willing to awaken to lateral kindness, whatever the journey feels like and looks like.

Coming together with women to vision and imagine a new world built on the values of women, I must have my ancestors with me. Healing, reparations, and forgiveness is necessary.

Preparing yourself to manifest your visions and desires is a healing journey. It has a shadow side. You can’t create the future without acknowledging and healing the past.

Ancestral shadow work!