Connecting to Our Ancestors

Many years ago on a Suffolk field I had an experience that eventually changed my life. I had returned to England with the task of researching my genealogy as part of being an active member of the Mormon Church. Having lived in Australia since childhood, I was thrilled to see my parent’s birth county again and stopped the car to get a closer feel of the place. On a whim, I walked out into a farmer’s beet field and stood taking in the sights and smells. I was overwhelmed by emotion, and as I felt the energy of the place, an understanding dawned that I was the end product of hundreds of people whose remains had long since become part of the soil of this land. As such, not only was I related to the ancestors in that past whose DNA composed my very being, but that I was also related to the Land itself which also shared that common DNA through the food the ancestors ate from it and their return to it after death. For the first time in my life, I began to get and feel a connection to the past that was not intellectually history based. I began to realise that the present and the past met in me. What I did with my watch laid the foundations for the future that my descendants would inherit.

Ancestor honouring was not part of my religious beliefs at the time, so I found it difficult to equate this realisation with any important spiritual understanding that was re-enforced around me. I buried it deep in the mistaken belief that it might be wrong to think that way. Years later, fighting for a new identity in a Psychosynthesis training session, I recalled this event in my homeland and began to understand its relevance in my life as a way of grounding my identity in the reality of my own traditions. I looked at indigenous traditions around the world, finding a wealth of understanding of just such a concept as connection to our ancestors and I took hope. But it only went so far, as I quickly realised I was not Native American, nor Aboriginal. I did not come from Eastern stock. I began to feel lost and sad as I tried to find out what were my peoples traditions.

I began a self-induced program of research and the more I dug, the angrier I became. I found systematic destruction of the indigenous traditions and beliefs of the native peoples of Europe, desecration of sacred sights, persecution of wise elders and healers and in fact anyone who upheld our traditions in any way. I have covered this in depth in my book “Reweaving the Web-A Shamanic Journey Of Connection’ so I will not repeat myself here. However, the realisation that what had been done to our own people first and then repeatedly used to attempt to destroy other indigenous beliefs inflamed me and encouraged the search for my roots. At some point, a kind of inner momentum began. I found myself being drawn to information through a more intuitive process. Ideas and feelings would come, and soon after I would find hard copy reference to that same information all pointing me to a discovery: the Ancestors wanted me to discover them! They were guiding my footsteps. Maybe they had been all along?

Bit by bit, this became my own personal spiritual way: a connection with my people’s past, my ancestral knowing speaking to me from within my DNA, and the continual search for that which had been destroyed or lost, piece by piece, building a picture of the people we were. I knew that at last I was on my path, but I did not realise the relevance to others until I began to see other white heritaged people struggling to learn other’s culture as a substitute for the corporate based, commodity driven social order that passes for white culture in the world today. I started to read reports of indigenous people feeling violated by us yet again as we strip-mined their ways of being as a substitute for our own. I was given arguments about people’s reincarnational linage being their link to these cultures, but that was not an acceptable excuse for the indigenous people whose current world linage was being co-opted. They became even more irate. Not that I am saying we haven’t been all kinds of races in other lives. Once again, I cover this strongly in the book. However, we have a physical linage in this life for a purpose. We came into this gene pool for a reason here and now, and we have not yet plumbed the depths of the possibilities of that, believing as we do, that our culture is what we see around us at the supermarket; materialism.

As the years have unrolled and we have moved closer and closer to nature’s demise through our disconnected actions and as we have so successfully convinced the remaining indigenous cultures to abandon their ways in favour of it, I have come to a conclusion: like other cultural groups, once we lost our traditional spiritual ancestor-based ways, the despair that followed caused addiction to whatever the commercial magnets offered us in place of our spiritual journey; certainly to those substances that numbed us to our lost condition. Other cultures have come around to understanding that the way out of the dilemma of glue-sniffing youths and alcoholic fathers who abuse and rape weak mothers who no longer have the will to stand up for themselves nor the support of their sisters, is to return to older, more spiritually connected ways of life. Fortunately their connections to the traditions and ways of their ancestors were not so totally destroyed with the coming of the colonial era, (and are not as many generation into the past as ours are), that they cannot be recalled sufficiently intact for use today in making a new start for their next generations. This has occurred in Native American circles, in Canada, in Australia, in our own New Zealand Maori culture. And as the old ways are renewed and the ancestors honoured, so the people of those heritages come into their own.

In a politically based discussion in one of my groups, a student referring to a Maori politician’s reference to ‘her people’ said, “What about us?”

“What about the rest of New Zealanders?”

So yes, what about us???

What about our own renewal as a spiritual cultural identity?

I believe the other indigenous races would like nothing better than for us to rediscover who we really are and stand side by side with them as white indigenous people, who have an understanding of where they come from and their own ancestral heritage. I believe that when we do, the tide of our own cultural and social disintegration will turn. We will ‘find ourselves’ again and dig deep into the roots of our being to fund the understandings from our ancestors to pass on sustainable ways to our descendants. Then we can stand beside the other tribes as part of the solution, not the cause of the problem.