Osprey Orielle Lake
she/her
Founder and executive director of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN), Osprey works internationally with grassroots, BIPOC and Indigenous leaders, policymakers, and diverse coalitions to build climate justice, resilient communities, and a just transition. She sits on the executive committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature and on the steering committee for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. Osprey’s writing about climate justice, relationships with nature, women in leadership, and other topics has been featured in The Guardian, Earth Island Journal, The Ecologist, Ms. Magazine and many other publications. She is the author of the award-winning book The Story is in Our Bones. Osprey holds an MA in Culture and Environmental Studies from Holy Names University in Oakland and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area on Coast Miwok lands.
Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network
ospreyoriellelake.earth
Overview: Ancestral work is powerful in that it can address the roots of both patriarchy and racism. It’s as if our long-ago ancestors hold out their arms to us, fastening us back to our Mother Earth–umbilicus, to each other and the entire web of life. This is the remembering and reintegration of a land-based identity that existed before the adoption of deleterious social constructs, and it wholly needs to be liberated from the vicissitudes of a patriarchal and colonized history.
Adaptation from The Story is in Our Bones (New Society Publisher).
Although all humans can trace their ancestry back to Indigenous roots at some point in time, for many of us those roots have been withered under colonization, religious conquests, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression. Thus, reconnecting with our own long-ago ancestries is to commence on a long tracking expedition because many of us do not live in the lands of our ancestors or have access to ancestral knowledge directly. We need to engage various ways of knowing through a shifting landscape.
The journey can begin by recognizing we each have had, somewhere in our past, Original Instructions, Origin Stories, and homelands. When we realize the importance of this knowledge together, we can collectively embark on research, learning, and remembering. Even if we only find bits and pieces of our ancestral knowledge, every part is filled with layers of meaning, palimpsests holding ancient wisdoms. Through sharing research and scholarship, communicating with people who live where our ancestors once walked, and perhaps, when possible, even traveling to places our ancestors called home, we can learn about our pre-patriarchal, pre-colonized homelands and older Earth-based stories and songs. Through this collective effort, we can find important trails to help us regenerate deeper belonging to each other and place, and a more Earth-centered worldview and code of conduct. This task is not easy after hundreds and hundreds of years of violence and purposeful obliteration; rather, this is intergenerational work that we take on for generations to come. We repair and heal what we can of the tattered historical tapestry as we also weave in new threads that may have been unknowingly stored away in our great-great-great-grandmother’s distaff held deep in our memory waiting to be spun.
Portions of this process can be likened to the biological and psychological phenomena of atavism and genetic memory. An atavism occurs when an organism regains an ancestral trait that was thought to have been lost through generations of evolution. This might happen through a variety of organic processes, but it points to the remarkable fact that the gene sequence never really disappeared; it was simply dormant. Genetic memory is a memory that appears to have been inherited, without our having experienced it directly or even been told about it. For example, suboscine birds raised from birth in soundproof rooms will sing the songs of their ancestors, and many human savants display great artistic or mathematical prowess after an injury or disease—scientists hypothesize that these shocks to the brain activate their genetic memories.
We can lucidly but inexplicably know things if we listen deeply, because inside of us, as designed by Nature, there is a way of keeping alive what we have forgotten. The stories are in our bones, calling to our ancestral memories, waiting to be retrieved and spoken and sung to the people and the land once again. Inside our bones is life-giving marrow, which makes the components of our blood that we need to survive and is also a carrier of our DNA. Every day, billions of new blood cells are produced in our bones, and this involves hematopoiesis, a term originating from the Greek words: haima (blood) and poiēsis (to make). Our bones are a place of life, memory and world making. Relearning and reweaving our Earth-based story tapestries from our homelands wherever they may be is our task at hand.
The reintegration of our ancestry and cultural identities may involve not only learning social and political histories, languages, geographies, and ecologies, but also entering mythical dimensions that should not be devalued. Specifically, they can be understood as other ways of knowing. They arise from collecting the threads of our ancestral origins, even as they may come to us in our dreams or intuitions—for the stories are in our bodies still, held fiercely and tenderly deep in the marrow of our bones. The stories also reside in the landscapes where our ancestors walked and in the food traditions, dances, customs, and songs lingering just at the edges of colonial spaces. These various assemblages of knowledge carry the magic of the old traditions because that is where our ancestors hid them when patriarchal, monotheistic elites forced them to relinquish their Earth-centric rituals and ceremonies. The Earth-based wisdoms are alive in the Goddess figurines lovingly hand-crafted long ago, in folk tales, cave paintings, in antique songs and texts, in old family stories, in the dream world, and in the rivers, forests, mountains, and skies wherever we may live. As we rekindle these knowledges and bring them to light, they can help re-harmonize us and our various communities. Like a sprouting ancestral seed, if approached with respect, alert thinking, intuition, and love, these sources of information can guide us to healthy relationships with the land and each other.
One powerful aspect of ancestral work is that it can address the roots of both patriarchy and racism. It’s as if our long-ago ancestors hold out their arms to us, fastening us back to our Mother Earth–umbilicus, to each other and the entire web of life. This is the remembering and reintegration of a land-based identity that existed before the adoption of deleterious social constructs, and it wholly needs to be liberated from the vicissitudes of a patriarchal and colonized history.
Were the dominant culture’s pre-colonized ancestors perfect people? Did they live in a utopia, free of human foibles and community struggles, and live socially and ecologically ethical in every way? Of course not. But we can surely learn from their land-based knowledge and expand our horizons by leaning into our long-ago indigenous roots, and in so doing, learn more deeply how to re-embrace an animate and relational worldview.
Finding the story filaments of my own rooted heritage is an ongoing odyssey still far from complete, with threadbare parts, given suppression and conquests. Yet, every part of our ancestral story from ancient times to modernity is of import—a braided cord of histories, lands, and peoples we carry with us. Of keen interest for me is the healing that comes from restoring and renewing Earth-centered roots through pre-patriarchal and pre-colonial explorations. To offer some encouragement, I share a taste of some initial findings.
From ancient times, I have begun to track my lineages of both agrarian and nomadic peoples when they were immersed in Goddess traditions celebrating the wild, fecund Earth. Through the research of Maria Gimbutas, as well as other scholars, I have learned about Earth-honoring matriarchs who were healers and wise seers, whose ceremonies bound them to the cycles of nature, the moon, the waters, and the land. In this search, I learned that in the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture, which flourished from 5500 to 2750 BCE in the countries known today as Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine, thousands of female icons were discovered. One Cucuteni–Trypillian artifact is of a circle of ceramic female figurines, each uniquely ornamented, and depicted assembled in council seated on thrones. According to archeologists, this artifact, found in a ceremonial container, indicates that this ancient community revered a Mother Goddess, and looked to women as leaders. Women rode horses, led their communities, conjured ceremonies, and lived in one of the most sophisticated, egalitarian urban centers of Old Europe. Learning of this, I wasn’t only intrigued, I felt pieces of myself being returned to me, somehow making me more whole.
In further seeking how to approach this ongoing heritage quest, I learned from Great-Grandmother Mary Lyons, Ojibwe Elder from Minnesota, “Know why your ancestors left their homelands if you are not from the lands you stand on. Honor them, sing their history.” Maybe those of us who are not living in our places of origin can find something we are longing for by remembering our long-ago ancestors and singing their stories that have been silenced for too long. This ancestral singing out is to regenerate a vibrant memory of who we are as people in a story initiated ages ago. A story that weaves us into multiple realities, worldviews, and ways of knowing that can provide a foundation for a re-imagined present and future.
