Relationships With Ancestors Are Vital Self Care Practices
Part Of Reconciling With Myself Is Reclaiming My Indigenuiety
It’s been weeks since I wrote something. I haven’t picked up a pen to even journal or write poetry. Ancestors remind me that it is my feeling world that is the source of my creations and to come back to my creative energy. I’m in court right now with three corporations. I launched a human rights complaint in 2021 and started talking to my mental health therapist about it since early 2022.
Since the proceedings with the human rights tribunal started, I have been spending more time in union with my Ancestors. Ancestors have been supporting me to use my emotional world to walk this path. I sit with them by my altar. I bring water, candle light and incense as offerings as I sit with the feelings in my body and talk to them. I noticed the more I would come to sit with them and talk with them, the easier it became to connect to their guidance. They remind me I belong to a People with a cosmology and culture and to always come back to being in relationship with our cosmological guidance.
I told my neighbour it’s no accident it was me, in the sense that, I am learning to hold more responsibility collectively. I have an education from a known canadian university with a minor focus in politics. I studied local government structures, policy and macro geopolitics. I say all this to say I was intuitively guided to cultivate my knowledge and this was all guided by Ancestors.
Before I went back into white academic institutions for an undergraduate degree, it was the Rasta at the flea market that made sure the Ancestors would reach me. Growing up in Guyana, the people around me was my skin color, it was jarring to say the least being taken out of my culture and placed into something foreign. It took years of self healing work to come to this acknowledgement. European culture imposing itself on me did a number on me. While I was surviving european culture, the displacement of my Ancestors would become a radical healing journey unraveling the way I would relate to life and make meaning.
Part of my care practice is being with my Ancestors as a daily ritual. I still live in a society absorbed in european culture and colonial consciousness. A well established colonial practice is the displacement of the indigenous people from the land. I’ve reconciled with myself for the ways I took up this practice of abandoning myself, my culture, my People for colonial culture and indoctrination.
Part of reconciling with myself is reclaiming my indigenuiety. Growing up in a settler colony, I saw nothing about my People. My family were immigrants from the West Indies settling in Toronto. I had to actively look for the history of Guyana to piece together the story of my Ancestors. Reclaiming disaporic indigenuiety in a white settler colony was a contention I noticed as an untouched discussion for Guyanese of “Indian” ancestry. Living abroad, how could I possibly belong to indigenous peoples…
Native American and First Nations Peoples indigenous practices and knowledge helped me to find my way back to my Ancestors. As I noticed the toll the society was having on me, indigenous knowledge helped me navigate my own contentions inside. The more I could see and observe the ways I had absorbed european indoctrination, I was finding myself closer to my Ancestors, learning who I am and liberating myself.
I can recognize the way Ancestors have shaped my political and societal beliefs and how their guidance is clarifying the choices I make. Their histories become parallels I drawn on as I find inner standings with my own feelings as I pursue legal proceedings against corporate violence. When I breathe with my Ancestors, I’m reminded we are inseparable, we are one in this body, as they make up the shadow that walks with me.
When we can feel with our Ancestors and be with them we can access a self renewal from within. When we hand over our emotions to our Ancestors they help us meet our needs of nurturance, belonging and validation. We learn to spend time inter-relationally meeting our dynamic needs; like the symbiotic feeding of nature.