... Then Maybe I Can Give It Back

 

 Part Deux

How do I look back at the loss of potential relationship with my relatives? How can I blame my deceased mother, searching for her own place in the world as a 10-year, post-last-child accident who was raised by her siblings, for leaning into it?  Moreover, how do I look at myself? How much was I leaning on the teenth percent to belong somewhere? I always thought I would find out my tribe someday, and then! Then I would finally belong. This world has not been kind to me, and I had TOTALLY identified with the ideologies of Red People, also being pushed around, marginalized -- not always out of existence, but always out of sight, out of mind, out of care. 

 

Silly me, the upstart that I am, I was going to change all that! I have an art degree, a vision, and just about to WILL my dream into existence. I just needed my studio. I had plans!  I have a whole tab on my shiftnext.space website dedicated to The Legacy Project, trying to bring a sense of mixed identity pride into the 23rd century. That was my vision. What is it now?

In the growing of new feathers (reference the Icarus post), I have found that who we THINK we are is at least, if not more, important than the biology in our veins. Partly nature, partly nurture, we are indeed a construct which, at one point in time, begins to show more of our own making. Which meant it was MY job now. I wanted to know, and now I know.  And you know what? There was a time for GRIEF and a time for SEARCHING. When it was time for the Cloak, I began with the number ONE.

 

I'm still exploring the craft of movement, and the physics of a human mind. I still have relationships with animals and places, and dream about Bear Spirit. I still talk to the sky, and the earth, and ask the trees questions. Recent interactions with people, some familiar and some not, have revealed to me just how much stock I have put in OTHER people putting stock in ME. It is a hard lesson that when someone becomes 18 and here, legally responsible, alas there is no magic wand that turns all you have learned and all your experiences into BING! healthy, happy, responsible choices. Those are muscles, emotional ones that take "time in the saddle" to develop properly. So it's okay if I go slow.

And I realize that, while people who have various body and chemical trauma residuals are inadequately equipped to navigate current systems, it is precisely because they are the ones least served by those systems that we are perhaps best poised to lead society into the future. The problem is that as Magic People, our Spells are only temporary, they can take all of our Concentration, and can only affect Willing Creatures who will allow themselves to be Touched.

~

If I Can't Take It Back...

 

 

 Hello, my friends, and thank you for being here. Guess now is the time I get to write this, it is so difficult... I heard a wise man say that wounds need air. This is me attempting to model and form neuronal pathways in heretofore unchecked territory... and another opportunity to use my Cloak (reference The Traveler's Cloak post).

Many decades ago, when I was in the single digits, my aunts and uncles came across a family secret and blew it open. My Indiana farmer predecessors, farming there since the 1600's, had mixed with the Red People and kept it a secret. We were part Algonquin, which seemed to explain certain features and thick, black hair. My grandfather kept saying, "I ain't no prairie n---!"  He probably just wanted to keep his family fitting in, after generations of genocide. I remember arguments, family going against family, in a gradient of feelings on mixed race, and what did it mean anyway? Some trying to teach Gramps how to adapt to diversity and inclusion, while to others it didn't matter, only what you did with your life regardless. That what makes you isn't who you are. If we got this far without knowing, ...


Many family members tried to hunt the few teeny tiny strands of history that could tell us who we were so we could belong. Mom just began embracing anything Indian. Well, anything she liked. I was told that I had a proud heritage and that I should acknowledge it; we are still here, and representing not unquietly. Great Uncle Arzie and Great Aunt Fern died before anyone could get anything out of them, if I remember. Grandma died soon after, then Grandpa died, going to the grave in denial. Parts of the family have died off not talking about it or acknowledging it. It was divisive, and I've always wanted to get to the bottom of it. Enter the pandemic, stimulus money, and Ancestry.com.


The results came back. Nope, no "Asian" blood detected, which is how they categorize indigenous peoples on this continent. I had to immediately talk to my ex-husband and current friend, since he was there at the time, experiencing all that with my family. He thought it was quite interesting, in his clinical physicist/computer genius way. My dad and brother weren't hung up on the idea and didn't express any sense of loss. But my moccs... ? Now would be considered appropriation. My artwork, my thin connection to a rhizome of time... wasn't true. The chorus of spirit winds I thought were my ancestors, now silent. Not now, mama, not quiet now! Were you ever there? Why was I feeling hollowed out? How could I end up statutorily canceled from a culture who didn't know me anyway, in which it turns out -- hey! I am not welcome



And OOPS, I. Never. was