Working with the ancestors
Last winter, I studied with Eleanor Hancock, founder and director of White Awake and Chris Crass, labour organiser and political educator on their course: Before We Were White. This programme was supported by White Awake’s Advisory Council.
In this programme, we did a lot of work with the idea of ancestry, with our own ancestors (genetic and otherwise), and explored what all this meant for reparative work around racial justice.
To give a bit of background about what is meant by ancestry by the teachers in this course, I list below the types of ancestry they work with as well as the kind of work this course is not doing to give you a sense of the shape of the terrain we covered.
The types of ancestry worked with in this course:
Family ancestry (kinship - which includes but is not limited to genetic ancestry)
Cultural ancestry (of specific ethnicity or region)
Ancestry of a collective or social location (primarily whiteness in this course but could be gender or class)
Ancestry of a chosen lineage (spirituality, religion, lineages of collective liberation)
What this course is not doing:
Not engaged in shamanic work to heal the current spiritual state of a particular ancestor
Not encouraging you to adopt cultural practices (spiritual or otherwise) of any member of your ancestry
Not discouraging you from engaging with spiritual traditions or other lineages that are not of your own personal, biological (or adopted) ancestry
Digging in to family histories, histories of those in my own ancestry who were ‘English’, ‘European’, ‘white’, ‘middle class’, as well as ‘Danish’, ‘Irish’, ‘Scottish’, ‘working class’ in my own lineage, as well as the ancestors of my chosen lineages of ‘Quaker’, ‘gender queer folks’ and ‘lineages of collective liberation’ started helping me to map the entanglements I find myself in - born of the oppressors and the oppressed, those in struggle for liberation and those who uphold / benefit from the systems of oppression in their multiple forms.
These reflections perhaps map onto the goals of this course where were listed as follows:
Understand your family story and place yourself in a wider context including larger historical, colonial and cultural storylines you have inherited
Bring clarity and healing to your relationship with your ancestry including building skills in this field
Integrate a deeper understanding of colonialism, white supremacy and capitalism into your life, relationships and sense of self
Build a healthy relationship to and understanding of ancestry as part of a larger call to engage in the work of repair and restoration that is needed today
The programme takes you into this work through four windows to support looking at the issues raised by ancestry through a few different lenses.
The Four Windows
1.Violent Foundations: Genocide, human trafficking, and the Birth of Capitalism
Crimes against humanity on which contemporary society was built
Some of our ancestors participated in or committed these crimes
During these violent foundations, many of our ancestors were also brutalised by these systems
2.Earth-Honouring Traditions: Ancestral origins and older ways of life
“Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human” Graham Harvey (religious scholar)
3.Separation, Loss, and Harm Endured
This system is not good for anyone - we all have something at stake
4.Legacies of Resistance: Then and now
Who are the ancestors who resisted both the harms to themselves and their own communities and who stood and said ‘not in my name’ when harm was inflicted on peoples around the world?
What can we learn from these legacies and lineages of resistance today?
——————-
This course builds on White Awake’s introductory programme, Roots Deeper Than Whiteness that seeks to explore how the ideas of whiteness and its structural power was built as capitalism was coming into being in certain settler colonies.
David Dean, one of the teachers on this course, wrote an article by the same name as the course. In it, he explores his own ancestry tracing lineages of people who came to Virginia in the 1600s. He explores how some of his relatives, English labourers, crossed the ocean and were made white.
A Romanian piper, a Slovak mother and son, an Italian woman. Photos by Augustus Sherman, Chief Registry Clerk at Ellis Island.
He talks about what they lost - their traditions and connection to the land, part of their humanity, as they turned on their BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) neighbours and co-workers, in service of whiteness and capital - which were intimately connected, according to Dean.
He talks about the role this ancestry work has for him in his wider anti-racism practice:
This deeper knowledge of my ancestors past has helped me replace what was once a debilitating feeling of shame about the reality of racism with a clear understanding of how my well-being is directly linked to the freedom of people of color. I believe that recovering these stories of those who came before us can support us all as white Americans to find the emotional strength and political analysis necessary to rebuild lost multiracial alliances and to challenge both white supremacy and the economic system it serves.
What I have found powerful about the work of White Awake, is this capacity building practice to hold, that as people with European ancestors, there will probably be those who committed, participated in and benefited from the violence of racial capitalism as well as those whose livelihoods, connection with the land and the seasons, spiritual practices and rituals, and communities were also violently uprooted some to the point of being stamped out entirely.
Being able to tend to these multiple histories and lineages without by-passing one for the other has been a crucial piece in my own understanding of the work needed in repair / reparation. And it has made me curious - how to work more with the ancestors who are working through me in myriad ways, how to become a good ancestor myself, and what repair might that entail?
