I stand at the opening of the wooded path that leads into the thirteen hectares of protected stream land near my home. Closing my eyes, I expand my field of awareness; downwards into deep earth, upwards into eagle-eye view, inwards to my heart, and outwards to the relations that surround me. I call in my elder ancestors and their field of wisdom. The quality of presence palpably shifts, and familiar sensations run the track of my spine responding and resonating as I move into multi-seeing/knowing. 

Attune. Greet. 

I request the guidance of my elder ancestors to be close with me as we walk this place again, introducing ourselves to the beings here. I ask them to help me greet the elders of this place, of tree and plant and bird and animal kin, and of the human ancestors who have been stewards here for millennia. I ask to be supported in offering gratitude, good-will, and prayers that we may be received well here. I ask that the quality of our heart be known in a good way. 

The piercing cries of the pileated woodpecker announce our arrival while also circumnavigating me to communicate that we are noticed. I slow my footsteps and listen. The wind is gently intimate with the cottonwood and maple leaves. I rest my eyes on a bald eagle perching in a long dead tree kin; a snag offering respite and home to many. It is salmon spawning time, and the small creek is teeming with life and death. Its scent is on the cusp of exploding into pungent decay. 

I offer a song – more a series of sounds emanating through my ancestral field and vocal cords – to participate in the call and response of the ecology of relations here. I pause a moment longer, listen to our voice being received, and continue up the path. I am drawn to return to the maple grove we had visited a few days earlier. This is a place that holds a certain stillness and fullness. I will offer a strand of my hair today.

I do this often for months.

I call in my elder ancestors and the collective wisdom that resides in this inherited spiritual ecology of relationships, lineages, and lives. I ask that the knowledge of the ways my people tended and related to land and animate intimacy enliven and guide me. I ask that this wisdom lead the way in re-membering my place and responsibility here. 

I invite my ecosystem of ancestral elder wisdoms to converge and meet the field of relationships that are here with/in this land, now and through time. Two deep time relational ecosystems of past and present, incarnate and beyond, meeting and converging towards the possibility of a mutual reciprocity and emergent rituals of repair and right-relationship. 

From this convergence, this meeting place that is bridged within and through my corporeal being, I offer prayerful requests to meet an elder tree who is willing to support me connect to the larger spirit of this place. I listen, follow, offer strands of hair, dried plant and herbs, and songs to various places and beings that intuitively call my/our attention and exude hospitality and reciprocity. 

From my new home in the K’omoks Valley, I can look to the west and see the ancient mountain range that beholds the stunning glacier; the White Whale in the local Ayajuthem language. This is an elder being that holds a significant part in the creation story of how the Pentlatch and K’omoks Peoples came to be a part of this place. I learn of the archaeological sites that were seasonally used for rites of passage and for foraging camas root. I learn of coastal sacred sites where petroglyphs tell stories to those who are patient enough to sit and listen and study and care. 

I learn that one of the popular public beaches is an historical burial ground that has not been protected due to colonial bureaucracy and lack of resources. So, we the public, many who still bear the colonizer’s face, are asked by K’omoks elders to tread lightly there while still being in the joy of beach time with friends and family.

I am a colonial settler to Turtle Island, and like many racialized white folks, I am down lineage from a complex history of both oppressed and oppressor experiences that have led to my Northern European people being here now. Experiences that have also led to a deep rupture in knowing who we are while living ancestral patterns of unconscious longing and trauma.

By way of my maternal lineages, we came from Scottish Celtic lands, likely in the 1700s by way of the Highland clearances, although records are sparse. We were afforded land and privileges and rights at the expense of the dignity and livelihood of Indigenous communities and enslaved Black people. I have come across patterns of secrecy and shame in my family: whispered hints that we may have had ancestors who were involved in plantation operations in the south, and who later played a part in colonizing Grand Junction, Colorado and earning livelihood through mining and other extractive industries. I excavate this history ongoingly, digesting the impacts and learning my response-ability as their descendent. 

By way of my paternal lineages, I am second generation to Canada. We arrived as Mennonite refugees escaping the Bolshevik revolution in Ukraine in the early 1900’s. Despite this lineage nearly being stamped out due to starvation, my great grandfather and his family were promised safe passage in the nick of time by relief aid from the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization. Our language, foods, farming knowledge, musical traditions, and ethnic heritage disappeared within one generation. However, we were given land, alternate livelihood, and whiteness. Unmetabolized trauma and grief still haunt my family through patterns of neglect, silence, and alcoholism. 

These histories continue to shape me.

The price of entry into grappling and fumbling into healing and right-relationship is grief. And it is grief that has invited me back to the heart of my, and our, humanity, over and over. And invited me back into my commitment to re-member, in the least, fragments of what was lost in ways of being and relating from my ancestors who were once indigenous to a place. I do this so that I may learn to walk with more dignity and act from a place of relational reciprocity towards collective healing and cultural remediation. 

In this time of violent supremacy culture and ecological collapse, there is no one answer, only ongoing responses towards repair. Responses that can be healing and right-sized when they come from a place that is deeply resourced and interdependent with other relations, human and more-than-human, animate and spirit, seen and unseen. Responses that come from a place that moves at the speed of relational trust, listening and witnessing. 

I am but a toddler. Please elder ones, show me the way. 

***

It has been almost 6 months since I started introducing myself to this place near my home. One morning, in a liminal state between dreamtime and waking, Maple appears in my awareness. My heart is guided in vision to a grove where I am to meet this elder. I hear the message “I am the heart of this place.” Maple is waiting, willing to welcome my bids for reciprocity and to whom I will visit often, listening and communing alongside my elder ancestors to learn how to be here in right-relationship towards a mutual vibrant future.