Indigenization through Relationship and Reciprocity

For many people today who have been displaced from the land and culture of their ancestors and raised in a westernized societal framework, it is a strange and mysterious quest to restore a true indigenous mindset and way of walking in the world. Did my ancestors once walk harmoniously with the land? Am I helpless and hopelessly stuck with a permanent status of colonizer? Of immigrant or descendant of immigrants? Of slave & descendant of slaves? Of ‘other’ displaced and brutalized by the legacy of colonization and stolen land? Am I locked in to the identity I have been raised with? Is there a way to restore authentic connection to my ancestral practices?

These are some of the questions we must ask if we are to forge the path for a just future.

A Chaplaincy of Homecoming

- A Living Draft begun August 2021 -

Author: Shannon Michaela Doree Smith, Women of the Water
Born in the Quinnipiac River Watershed named for the original people, the Quinnipiac, People of the Long Water Land
Writing from ancestral lands of the Tuatha de Danaan, Eiriu (Ireland)
Mother’s lineages: Irish, Scottish & English
Father’s lineages: Polish-Lithuanian, Latvian, Belarus, Russian & Spanish Jews

A Chaplaincy of Homecoming is a framework of support for the both / and process of both disentangling our bodies and our consciousness from the dominator paradigm of white supremacy and having an authentic place to root and grow culture. Homecoming is something we experience in the body and can most effectively be achieved when consciously supported in kinship with the land and with other bodies. The land is the receiver and container for our awakening. It is the composter of our grief and the alchemizer of our tears. It is the compassionate heart that holds us as we transform. To be in community grants us human witness, to fully metabolize our healing process which then transforms the fabric of the social nervous system to be more informed and more settled. 

At the root of ecological crisis and the many calls for justice, is the imposed belief that the body and the body of the earth are not sacred: that a woman’s body is profane, that black and brown bodies are less than human, that Indigenous people who live with nature and who’s spirituality is connected with the earth are savages who must be converted, assimilated or face genocide. This false doctrine, and the accompanying doctrine of discovery, have led to as yet, still untold violence against human bodies, non-human bodies and the destruction of our planet. Ultimately this is what we now see as white supremacy, ideological, violent, and cannibalizing ‘whiteness’.

The antidote is in embodied decolonization.

As Dr. Dianne M. Connelly wrote, “All sickness is homesickness.”

The antidote is in coming home to the body as sacred.

The body is sacred.

All bodies are sacred.

All humans, all animals, all of nature and the Body of the Earth are Sacred.

So we commit to do with our bodies what expresses and preserves the body as sacred. 

• We sit in circle to practice equality

• We practice listening - with our whole body

• We care for and tend our bodies, our sisters’ and brothers’ bodies and the Earth as sacred

If the dominator mind set exists and survives relying on our shame and our disconnect, the antidote is to shift into this embracing which is

• Non-violent

• Life supporting

• Generative
  

A Chaplaincy of Homecoming is a container of support that can be expressed through 

• Components of sanctuary, providing and modeling spaces of unconditional safety, with pause, active listening, silence, consent, equality, and encouragement to thrive

• Resources for reconnection to ancestral traditions and understanding the multi-layered aspects of intergenerational trauma from individual and communal perspectives

• A community of practice for returning to the body as home, to ceremonial communion with the land, to ancestral traditions and spiritual sovereignty 
  

We respond to the call from bodies of culture asking white bodied people to do their work in service to collective liberation. We are inspired by these recommended inquiries for white bodies articulated by Sonya Renee Taylor:

• To heal the relationship with your ancestors

• To grieve the loss of their humanity through their violent acts

• To learn what it was that it made them

• To seek who they were before they became white 

• To see what can be salvaged from that place that is within your own culture 

• and to account for that which was done in harm to gain power.
  

We offer up these inquiries for when we begin to ask, “How can I begin to restore an authentic connection to my ancestral practices?”  Explore your relationships…

• Relationship to time (knowing your ancestral methods of timekeeping)

• Relationship to the land (working in the earth  -  gardens, farming, agriculture, husbandry)

• Relationship to the landscape (knowing your land and water)

• Relationship to sacred sites (knowing the history of the land and how to tend the sacred or thin places)

• Relationship to ancestors (knowing the stories of the ancestors, creating a relationship with them spiritually, through the land, restoring rituals, grieving, etc.)

• Relationship to original language 

• Relationship to original crafts, skills, survival techniques (boats, baskets, blankets, etc.)

• Relationship to music (singing the songs of the ancestors and the land)

• Relationship to our physical bodies (how do we work, how do we listen, how do we perceive, how do we nurture, how do we rest)

It may benefit to choose 1, 2 or 3 that most stand out to us or feel juicy as we get started on our journey. This level of inquiry is a jumping off point, for what could be a life-long process of ‘coming home’. For more information contact the author Shannon Michaela Doree Smith, Founder, Women of the Water: connect@womenofthewater.org