Ancestresses

Happy Indigenous People's Day! We are here! Indigenous communities are striving and thriving across the Americas in defiance of 500 years of oppression and genocide.

In this episode, I share a little about my identity, why knowing your ancestors and ancestry is important, and a bit about one of my great-grandmothers.

Thank you for tuning in!

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Produced by White Hot

Transcript

Bernardette 0:00

The past and present wilt. I have filled them, emptied them, and proceed to fill my next fold of the future listener up there, what have you to confide in me, look in my face while I snuff the si if evening talk. Honestly, no one else hears you and I stay only a minute longer do I contradict myself very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes. I concentrate toward them that are ni I wait on the do slab, Who has done his day's work? Who will soonest be through with his supper? Who wishes to walk with me? Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late? Walt Whitman when I started this podcast, I thought that my ideas would flow easily and coherently outta my mouth. I had such a clear river of thought and insight flowing through my mind at midnight as I laid awake nursing my son that I thought surely all I would have to do would be to open my mouth and out a podcast would flow. Uh, not only that, but my maternal side is well known for their ability to keep up a steady conversational monologue under virtually any circumstance. But it turns out that this is hard. Y'all, I tried to make a podcast map of the season and it looks like that crazy conspiracy wall gif from, It's always sunny in Philadelphia. So rather than an extemporaneous, witty flow of banter, you are getting scripted episodes, at least until I get more practice, or I'm gonna try and make them sound as little scripted as possible. But I think inevitably my perfectionist side is going to raise her head and demand that I try and make them coherent. although I have to say that I always did struggle with organizing my essays in college and that this experience is giving me major, major flashbacks. So in my uh, previous episode I mentioned that race, identity and spirituality do not exist in a vacuum. And what I meant is that the same social forces that act on people's lives, In terms of where they live and how hard or easy it is for them to get a home loan or to buy a car. Uh, their ability to travel freely and without feeling, uh, any restrictions in where they go. Those kinds of forces, racism and history also impact people's spirituality and their practice. So, for example, you know, you wouldn't necessarily, you don't necessarily find a whole lot of black people at Drew it and Celtic event. That is not to say that there are not black pagans because there are definitely folks who are black, who are brown, who feel drawn to Dred Re who feel drawn to the Celtic pantheon, and I think that's wonderful because I know that there's definitely an idea and a feeling that those gods choose whom they choose and that people's spirits matter. It doesn't matter what their skin color is, but I think that social forces and racism get in the way of people freely experiencing those spiritual communities, both because some of those communities, like the RY community does have white ethnonationalist issues within the movement. but also because of people's own internal assumptions about the kinds of people that participate in Pagan or drew it or other, uh, more Eurocentric earth wor worshiping earth centered religions and spiritual practices. Just like a lot of Americans are surprised when white people are Muslim, because Americans racism teaches them that Muslims are all brown people. From the Middle East, or there are folks like me who are looking at non-European traditions that. Honor the earth and that approach our relationship with the other beings on this planet in a more relational way. And I think that a lot of those folks tend to look first at Native American spiritual traditions. And that's for a lot of reasons. That's exoticization. That's a history of. Maybe guilt or just ignorance about the genocide that was perpetrated on native people here. And that honestly is still happening in Central America and South America and in subtler ways here in the United States. That's because they don't feel connected to their own past, or maybe they're seeking a way to connect with. Land and where they live, and the only thing they can do is look at what other people have done to try and take from that. So there's a lot. There's rampant theft and appropriation of native people's ceremonial garb of their prayers, of the drums that they beat, the way they meditate, or the way that they. Pray or practice or believe in the spirit world or not, and I'm not an expert, but you can see that in our culture, the widespread use of Palo Santo to the point where Palolo, santo and white sage, both of those sacred to native communities, both of those plants are being driven to the edge of extinction because they're being sold in Urban Outfitters to people to try and give them a, a spiritual touch to their home. When I read the book, Braiding Sweet Grass, there's a part where the author talks about how we can't go back to pre conquest, pre-Colonial America, and I mean broadly, North America, South America, Central America. And so we have new people here, and we are new people. I am a new person to. This area to Chicago where I live now, and my people are from all corners of the earth. And so as these new people here, how do we become native to a place? What does it mean to become native in the sense that you have a relationship and your own relationship with the plants and the animals that are here now, instead of just pretending that you're completely separate or pretending that colonialism and genocide didn't happen or wishing it. and not moving forward in our lives. And I'll talk a little bit more about this feeling when I get more into how I came to the idea of identifying as an animist and what that means to me right now. But I just think that hopefully what you understand is. What I'm saying is that we interact with the sacred and how we conceive of it can be circumscribed by our social, racial, and ethnic identities. Both the ways that people put those identities on us and the ways in which we perceive those identities to restrict our way of being in the world. So in my previous episode, I talked about how I would try and start at the beginning and I would try and start with my identity and who I identify as and where I come from. And the reason why I wanted to start at the beginning is because I think that exploring who your ancestors were and having a relationship with them is important to understanding your role in life and giving your life structure and meaning. Without feeling that tie to the people who came before you and a sense of responsibility to the people who come after you on this planet. I think that we miss out on the understanding that we are a part of a long chain of being that stretches backwards and forwards in time, and I think that contributes to a feeling of Rootlessness and meaninglessness, and I think that's at least part of what has driven some of my personal, psychological and emotional struggles in my life. The question of who I am and how I identify as complicated, I like to say that I identify as a multiracial, multiethnic woman. I also have been exploring what it means to claim myself as an indigenous chiana, and I think the one thing that I wouldn't identify myself is, is white, and that is complicated. I think that that is partly due to the fact that I am uncomfortable with, and I dislike the history of white people and most of the places where my ancestors come. and it's also because it's not everything that I am. It's not the whole story of my people, and I feel like I have a duty to those ancestors of mine who fought against colonialism, who fought against oppression and racism to elevate their struggle and with their gifts. To me, in my. And while I respect and I love my ancestors who fought hard for the wellbeing of themselves and their children, no matter what their color is, I personally don't feel that I can identify as a white person without erasing the other parts of my identity. I'm sure this will come up in future podcasts, but there's also a sense of. Shame and anger in looking like the people who you know oppressed and hurt. The people in your family whose skin is darker than yours, there's shame and there's anger in that. Maybe through this podcast experience and talking to people, I'll find a way to resolve that shame and that. I think what happens when your connection to the long chain of being that forms your ancestry, when that is forcibly. Cut and that's forcibly severed. I think that pain trickles down and extends out through time. And so even though that injury happened a long time ago for some communities, I mean, Mexico was colonized back like four, 500 years ago, right? The injury in the insult continues forward through oppressive social practices, marginalization through intergenerational trauma, within families inflicted on each other and also laterally between oppressed and marginalized communities. And so all of those things that we know about our history, those are continued insults that echo through the fabric of black and brown communities in the United States and in other countries as well So, although I'm sure that I could continue to meander on and on about this, I think to start the question of where I come from, the answer to the question of where I come from, I want to begin by telling you the stories of two of my ancestors. I think that's the word. My great-grandmother Catherine, and my great-grandmother, Theto Catherine is my maternal great-grandmother, and Theto is my paternal great-grandmother. So I think I'm going to start. With, uh, one woman, I had the good fortune to meet and to know, my great-grandmother, Catherine. Unfortunately, my great-grandmother passed away many years before I was born and. The stories of both of their lives are honestly mostly filtered through other relatives. And because time has really eaten gaping holes in their narrative, I'm never really gonna know what they thought about who they were or about any of their private struggles, any of their beliefs and their. Personal relationships with the divine and the sacred. Honestly, neither of them really had much education. And if any, I don't really know how comfortable either of them were writing or reading or any, Well, actually no, that's not true. My grandmother, Kate, she had a rather extensive Haren romance novel collection, so I think she did okay on that side of things. Their lives didn't really lend themselves to the kind of naval gazing that I can indulge in. They both worked incredibly, incredibly hard their entire lives, and I am sure that they had rich internal lives, but those aren't really accessible to me. But their stories really encompass so much of the history of the United States and the ways in which they, the things that they lived through. And the way that history formed and shaped the experiences they had in life really echoed out or echoes out through their children's and their grandchildren's lives, and vividly illustrate the ways in which cultural forces shape our identity, our sense of self, spirituality, and culture. Because your spirituality and your religious practice and how you relate to the sacred is part of your culture. I could get really fancy right here and try and quote Fuco. Uh, although I wouldn't really be honest, I didn't read Fuco. I read a paper on Chicano indigeneity and they had a quote, from Fuco that basically pointed out that identity is a creation more imposed from external forces than it is from internal processes. So I'm going to tell you the story of my great-grandmothers to illustrate the kind of forces that are at work in my life and the lives of so many other people because there are so many of us out there whose and grandparents met and married people from outside of their culture, from outside of their race. Grandma Kate, if you wanna close your eyes and envision a short woman compact, but still kind of soft and round with soft round cheeks. White skin and bright eyes and a short, no nonsense haircut. She would wear her glasses on a chain around her neck and when she needed to look at something, she would lift the glasses up and squint her eyes and purse her lips. She had a sharp New England accent. She pronounced Connecticut sst, which I can only imagine as probably a mashup of Schenectady in Connecticut. And I remember when we visited for the family reunion when I was 10, she looked at me because I had been waiting patiently while she talked to my mom about something in the kitchen. And I had been waiting for probably about 15 or 20 minutes. And my grandma looked at me and she said, Girl, if you want to get a word in edgewise in this family, you're gonna have to learn to interrupt. and I was a little bit shocked because I had been told to wait patiently until adults acknowledged me to participate in conversation. But that is how the Fry family was loud and boisterous and talking over each other and my grandmother. It was just always in the middle of it. She had lots of grandchildren and six children, I think all of whom, with the exception of my grandfather did live in Pittsfield. She was pretty cheeky her whole life because she visited us later in California, and I remember her. We were at a mall and she was staring at this gentle. And then she wrapped on the glass and gave him a coil little smile. And we said, Grandma, what are you doing? And she looked at us and she said, What? He's got a nice butt loud enough that the man inside the, the shop heard her and started laughing. And it was, it was pretty shocking to us as teenagers just thinking that a woman in her seventies was checking out a man's butt. It was. It was pretty funny. Her joy and her energy were, I'm sure her life was not always that joyous, and she had a lot of struggles and trials in her life. She was born in 1919. And just for a little bit of context where we are historically loving V Virginia, it won't be decided until 1967. And although Massachusetts made interracial marriage legal in 1843, uh, they did pass a 1913 law. So just a few years before she was born, that blocked people from coming in from out of state to get married. So it was not. A state opened interracial relationships, and I'm sure at this point there was still, if not in law, definitely in practice, segregation. My grandmother had two sisters, I think, and maybe a brother, and her father came over from Ireland and stayed with his aunts, and I think he worked in a paper mill. According to my mom, I don't know what her mother did, but her mother wasn't very present in her life and by her, by my great-grandmother's own words, she and her siblings ran pretty wild in Pittsfield. and the only words she had about her father when she talked to my mom was that he was a mean son of a bitch. And so clearly there was a lot of trouble in the house. He was an alcoholic. He was abusive. And when she was 13, she met Louis T. Fry, a black man, 12 years older than her. And the story she told my mom, and the story I think she would insist on is that this was a relationship that she entered into willingly. And that he, as she said, was the great love of her life. And although we know now of course, that that relationship couldn't have been consensual because she was too young, she was still a child. So, when she became pregnant as a result of this relationship, her parents disowned her and she was forced to go to a home for unw mothers, and Louis was sent to prison for seven years. My grandfather was born while she was in the home for unwed mothers, and she was forced to give them up for adoption to a white family in Ohio. Still. Somehow she and Louis remained in touch and after he was released from prison and she was old enough to leave the home, they did marry and they went on to have three more children. Unfortunately, Louis was a violent alcoholic and she told my mom that she had, there was a lot of conflict in the house and that she gave as good as she got, which sounds like it was a very challenging relationship. And my mom did imply that there was a frying pan involved with her defending herself. My mom never met my great-grandfather because he died in 1958, only about four years after she was born. my grandmother did divorce him, and she had a brief marriage after that. But then after that ended in divorce, she never remarried. So she had six children and she was pretty much on her own in supporting them and taking care of them. And when she talks about her experience or when she talked about her experience in Pittsfield raising a family of interracial children, she was very clear to my mother that she felt very isolated from the black and the white community. And in her words, she was too white for the black community and her kids were too black for the white community, and so they didn't have a lot of support from either community when she was trying to, um, to raise them. She was a devout Catholic for her whole life, but after an incident where she went to the Catholic church seeking resources to help her family for food. For jackets, for clothing. Uh, she was told by the church in her town that they would not give her the resources because her children were interracial, and after that she never set foot in another Catholic church. So she kept her practice private and she didn't really talk to me about it because I don't think that, it just wasn't one of the things that we talked about at that time. I don't think adults usually discuss their inner most spiritual thoughts and feelings and practices with their young grandchildren, but I really wish that I could have talked to her a little bit more about her experiences and how her feelings about the church and her spiritual practices enriched her life. But unfortunately, I can. socially. She also had trouble. Seeking housing for her kids whenever they had to move or when they needed a new place to live. She remembers being told that she could live someplace, but her kids couldn't because she was white and they were not. I'll talk a little bit more about my grandfather and my mother later. Probably when I talked to my mom about her life and how she found out that her dad was half black. Um, just for context here, he did come back and find my great grandmother. but he spent most of his early adulthood, middle adulthood passing and claiming that he was Portuguese and he did not return to Pittsfield and introduce my mom and her siblings to my grandmother and his family. So my grandmother was a really, really tough lady. we visited her toward the end of her life. When I was in my twenties, we'd heard that she had fallen a couple of times on the ice in front of her house. And she finally had, I think she'd broken a hip or she'd had a stroke as a result of a blood clot or something related to the break. And so she was in a home when we finally visited her. And I remember that it was, it was so sad to see this woman who had been so vital and so independent, just sitting in a chair staring at the floor. And we got to take her out and we got to sit with her in the garden and we sang a few songs with her and I remember she whispered the song along with us and gave us little smiles, but she wasn't really present anymore. She knew we were there to visit her, but you could tell she was really struggling to come forward and to be present with us through the stroke or through. Depression even, maybe because she really, she lived on her own and she cleaned houses and she was very independent until she was very old. But she passed away at 91, I think, maybe a year later after we saw her. And I feel really honored that I had the chance to know her and to feel her energy and to feel her. I wish that we could have asked her more questions about her aunts or about her dad's family in Ireland, or about her mother's family. And I have a little bit to go on because out of the. Luck of history. I can go through ancestry and I can look back and I can see the people that they came from. But other than knowing that my great, great grandfather was a, was a mean son of a bitch, I don't know anything else about that side of the family. And my great grandfather, he passed away and his ancestry story is pretty opaque. It sort of meanders out and. It's hard to tell from the records that are available, exactly who his parents were and then who their people were. We were always told that he was not ascended from enslaved people, that he was descended maybe from somebody who came over as an indentured servant. Uh, and. ended their indentured servitude in the United States, but it's hard to find that in the records. So hopefully someday I'll have a chance to sit down and look more carefully and see where his people come from. It seems like from my 23 and me search that that part of my ancestry comes from Ghana and from West Africa, so. I don't know if the story that he came over as an indentured servant was accurate, or maybe it was a story that he told or that he related to my grandmother or my great-grandmother. Maybe he was ashamed of his heritage. Maybe he was ashamed of having come from enslaved people. It's really not. It's really not clear. Um, so it's not, It's one of those things that is lost to history. And it's nice that I have that tie through modern science that I can look back and I can potentially even at some point be able to find the area within West Africa that my ancestors came from. but right now I have two little ones who keep me running around, and so it's hard to do that. I think at some point I would like to sit down with somebody who practices VO or. Uh, related African diaspora religion and just see if there's a way to contact or to ask the, my ancestors and my spirits from that side. Um, if they have any wisdom for me or if there's any part of that tradition that's open to me or that I should be examining. Um, I think I've been hesitant to embrace or to look at African diaspora religion. Because they are living traditions with rules and they are init stories, so you have to go and seek out a practitioner. And there are pretty well developed rules about how you approach the OSHA or the, the, the deities within African diaspora religions like condom bla or sania. And so there are pretty strict. guidelines around how you worship those deities and how you work with your ancestor spirits. And so I think in a way I felt a little bit shy because I don't look like I have African heritage. And so I think I've always felt uncertain that I would be welcome, um, by a practitioner that I would be welcome in those circles, although I'm sure that they are. A rainbow of practitioners, but I think also it just seems like an all consuming kind of a practice. I might do that for this podcast. I might go in and talk to a practitioner and ask if there's a way to work with my ancestor spirits from that side of my family. And it would be interesting. It'll be interesting to. What answers I get or don't get? I'm pretty sure that here in the United States, my great grandfather was probably at least nominally Christian, I think. I think that any African diaspora, religion or non-Christian probably was pretty discouraged on that side, and as far as I know, none of that got passed down to my grandfather or to any of his siblings. that tie to our ancestry isn't available to us through my grandmother. I did think that I could look back at Ireland. I could look back at Irish Celtic mythology and the Gods and Spirits that pre-Christian Irish people worshiped. And that's part of my journey that I'll talk about in my sort of why anm. Why not Christianity podcast episode? But for now, I just want you to think about how strong my great-grandmother Kate was in her life. And also the kind of in between place that she and her children and my grandfather occupied that kind of rootlessness of neither community fully accepting you. And I look forward to talking to my mom a little bit about how she has integrated that into her way of being in the world because I think that she's thought a lot about it. So reflecting back on what I shared about my great-grandmother and my great-grandfather, you might be able to understand that parsing an identity for myself as a child and as a teenager and as an early adult was sort of complicated. And I think that part of the reason why I don't say that I'm black or that I'm African American is because I don't visually present as a black person. I have not lived in the United States with the experience of being a black person and the kind of hostility and danger that comes with darker skin and with more obviously African features. So what I've settled on is saying that I can, and I do claim the experiences of my ancestors, that they are black people who live through the worst kind of violence and oppression in this country. I also can't claim blackness or being a black person because I wasn't raised within black culture, and my grandfather very deliberately hid that part of his history from his children. He did not pass along anything to my mom about who his people were, and I'm not sure he even really had that to pass along since he was raised by white people. I wish I could ask him how he identified and how he saw him. and how he viewed being a black man, and I think my mom probably has or did ask him those questions when she spoke to him, and so maybe I'll save that or I think I'll save that for when my mom comes and talks about her experience and her spiritual journey I thought I was going to talk about both of my grandmothers, but I think that I'm going to end this episode with my grandma Kate, because my great-grandmother, Rancik, is a more complicated story that requires a little bit more research, both into the history of my family and also the history that she was living through as somebody who was born in the late 18 hundreds, either in Mexico or the United States, because as a teaser to the next episode, We are not actually sure where she was born. Thank you for tuning into this episode, and I look forward to welcoming you next time on episode three of Casa The Rainbow House. Until then, be blessed, get rest and stay healthy.