Overview: My submission is a personal story about a gathering in the Scottish Highlands this summer. It focuses on my experience of cultural poverty and how we can divest from whiteness by creating new/old, Earth-honoring and life-giving cultures. It also grapples with the complexity of being a white settler doing cultural reclamation work on stolen Indigenous land.

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When the door fell off the taxi, I knew my ancestral journey had officially begun.  It was not my first – I’ve been taking these kinds of trips for over a decade: to lands in Europe as well as places on Turtle Island where my ancestors made their homes as settlers, received land grants, and enslaved people.  Bizarre transportation snafus often accompany these trips.  When travel logistics go sideways, I sense my ancestors prompting: “How committed are you?  Will you keep going when it gets difficult?”

My taxi driver, Eddie, and I were parked at the visitor center of Culloden Battlefield near Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands.  I watched from inside the car as he and a fellow driver tried to re-attach the door.  Gazing at the misty rain sprinkling the windshield, it dawned on me: we were stuck here for a reason.  The ancestors were nudging me back to the moor.

A brutal battle was fought on Culloden Moor in 1746, between the Jacobite army (composed largely of Scottish Highlanders, including clan MacLaren, with whom my father’s clan was allied) and the British government (with whom my mother’s clan Campbell was allied).  The British government prevailed and this battle became a turning point, leading to the end of Highland clan- and kinship-based forms of governance.  In subsequent years, British rule brought devastating cultural and linguistic oppression to the Highlands.  A century of clearances ensued.  People were pushed off their lands to make room for sheep pasturage.  Often, survivors’ only alternative was migrating to faraway places like Turtle Island or Australia, where they would merge with similar systems of dominance.

When the door fell off the taxi, I’d just returned from walking the battlefield, where some 1,500 people met gruesome deaths in 1746.  A foggy sensation in my head (one that often accompanies my ancestral journeys) made me feel disconnected from this place.  After realizing that we were stranded, I walked purposefully back to the moor by a different path.  Brilliant sunshine emerged, a fresh breeze swept through, and raindrops sparkled on the summer wildflowers.  I passed memorial stones engraved with the names of clans who had fought there.  A particular stone caught my eye: one dedicated to “mixed clans.”  I made an offering and then took a picture of it, not yet understanding why it resonated so.  The car door was still detached when I returned from my walk, so Eddie generously arranged for a friend to drive me back to my hotel.

The next day, Eddie secured a different car and took me to begin a week-long gathering with the Scottish organization Deep Roots Alba.  Driving through the rain, we laughed over our recognition that the ancestors had intervened in the previous day’s outing.  Pulling up to the site, we were greeted by smiling faces, bagpipes, lush trees and ferns, and a swift river.  With a hug, Eddie sent me on my way.

Twelve years prior to this gathering, I began a commitment to Indigenous-led solidarity work.  In more recent years, I’ve also been accompanying other settlers as we reckon with settler colonialism, racial healing, lineage repair, and personal reparations.  Like me, the attendees of this gathering were of Gaelic descent, members of the Scottish and Irish diaspora whose ancestors left home due to colonial pressures.  Most of our group was involved in solidarity work with land-based cultures and other marginalized groups within our home communities.  We convened in Scotland to receive nourishment by reconnecting with our ancestral land and culture.

Indigenous friends were the first to plant the seeds that led me there.  Often, they see things about me (and fellow white settlers) that we cannot see about ourselves – like the Diné Elder who admonished: “Next time we meet, I want to hear you singing one of your ancestral songs.” At that point, I had never even heard an Irish or Gaelic song and had no idea how to learn one; whiteness had infected me with ancestral aversion (fear of learning about my forebears) for much of my life.

Eventually, I summoned enough courage to act on their suggestions by building relationships with teachers of my European lineages, reading books, learning songs, attending classes online, and eating ancestral foods with my family.  I tried to bring aspects of my cultural heritage to life while traversing the grief of being a white-identified descendant of colonizers, far from my ancestral lands and cultures. 

My research and practice lodged some tidbits in my consciousness.  For example, our Gael ancestors honored water at sacred wells.  They drove livestock between two fires for purification and protection.  They renewed their hearth fires every year at the seasonal festivals of Bealltain* and Samhuinn*.  House parties called cèilidhean*, where they shared singing, dancing, storytelling, and jokes, fostered cohesion and cultural vitality.  Salmon and deer were important to them, as were oats, turnips, potatoes, milk, and butter.  They wore woolen kilts, and spun, wove, and waterproofed their own cloth.  Through stories, rituals, and cultural taboos, they maintained balanced relationships with the Otherworld and the Sìdh*.  Keening women once wailed over the bodies of the dead, and communal rituals helped families process loss.  These tidbits of knowledge imparted a sense of who my people used to be and sparked the beginnings of a more nuanced identity.

On the first morning of the gathering, I stood at an outdoor sink to put in my contact lenses and brush my teeth.  Immediately, a gust of wind blew one contact into the bushes.  Problems with my eyesight often convey ancestral messages: Watch carefully! Be discerning. See clearly.

Over the coming days, my curated tidbits of knowledge vividly came to life in ways that had previously been limited to the ethers of imagination.  I would soon discover that our experience of being on the land while collectively weaving ancestral threads into a cohesive garment met a profound need I didn’t even realize I was carrying.  For example, we walked deosil* (sunwise) around two sacred fires on the side of a fairy hill and heard songs that had been caught on the wind.  We gathered around the fire with nightly cèilidhean*, sharing stories from Gaelic cosmology and voices that brought Highland Elders of yesteryear to life.  We sat on the riverbank singing the salmon home, and we made a prayerful procession with the body of a deer whose hooves had recently kissed that glen.  We ate homemade oatmeal bread and other traditional foods at every meal.  Our new friends wore kilts and woolen capes each day, and we observed how this fabric is perfectly adapted to living close to the land in all kinds of Scottish weather.  We even worked collectively to kindle a neid-fire* (a fire of necessity) as our people once did, while singing and using an ancestral technology called teine éginn*.  We feasted at an abundant table of culture, community, and ceremony.

In the years prior to this gathering, I mourned the colonial circumstances that made my ancestors abandon their homes in Scotland and Ireland.  Now I received embraces from the descendants of those who stayed, hearing how they’ve missed us and longed for our return.  Previously, my ancestral connection to the Highlands registered when I saw my family’s clans on a map.  Now, the welcome of this glen pulled tears out of my eyes that fell to the ground like an offering.

After the gathering, valiant Eddie pulled up to the Inverness train station in his original car, the door now reattached.  He drove to the airport, and I returned home to Flagstaff, Arizona.  Returning to my “regular” life, the garment of these shared experiences began rapidly slipping through my fingers, and I felt adrift.  Tasting the failte* (welcome) of embodied cultural experiences on ancestral land catalyzed an intense realization of what my ancestors lost when they became white settlers on Turtle Island.  More than ever, I felt stranded in the cultural poverty I inherited from generations of settler colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and Protestant work ethics.

Navigating grief has always been part of my ancestral healing work.  But viscerally understanding that these nourishing experiences cannot be replicated where I live on Hopi, Havasupai, Diné, Apache, and other Nations’ land unearthed new layers of grief.  I live surrounded by the exquisite desert canyons, red rocks, mountains, and Ponderosa forests of these Nations.  The leafy glens, fairy mounds, sacred wells, bog myrtle, and lochs of my own people are a world apart.

A few days after returning home, my dog and I hiked to a secluded spot surrounded by immense boulders and wild raspberries, to glimpse the sacred mountain of kinship who stands above our town.  Throughout my years of relational tending with the local Indigenous community, I’ve been making offerings to this mountain.  For the first time, I offered some oats, one of the sacred foods of the Gaels.  While sitting with her immense, loving presence, the mountain reminded me of the slow, steady relationship we have been building for over thirty years.  She summoned a memory of the day I asked her permission to include her image on the cover of my book, Becoming a Good Relative.  I was guided to a fallen pine tree that had somehow inscribed my initials into its bark, highlighted by brilliant green moss.  She conveyed, “although your people are new here, remember – you are also my grandchild.”

The “mixed clans” memorial stone at Culloden Battlefield came to mind.  This phrase captures how I feel as a displaced child of the Gaelic diaspora.  I descend from mixed clans, places, and legacies.  Once, my ancestors lived according to the deep wisdom of these lands and waters.  Later, they manipulated, oppressed, and even tortured or massacred each other.  Eventually, this pattern was unleashed on the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island and Africa who were dehumanized, displaced, abused, and enslaved.  Now, heartache walks beside me like a ghost.

For those who want to contribute to healing this legacy, what does it mean to be a descendant of “mixed clans”?  For instance, how can I walk within the paradox that a sacred mountain on stolen land accepts me as her grandchild, and that I can only visit my ancestral lands as a guest?  I must learn to inhabit the betwixt and between, fully belonging neither here nor there, but weaving these strands together nonetheless.

An Irish Elder once told me that it has taken several generations after An Gorta Mór* (the Potato Famine of 1845-1852) for the pain of our ancestral trauma to subside.  In this generation, we are building the capacity to understand what we lost when our ancestors assimilated into whiteness.  In that process, many of us are finding our way back to familial lands and cultures.  This can spark joy and wonder, as well as grief, longing, and the self-doubt of feeling culturally impoverished.

Challenging emotions arise when we contend with the legacies of settler colonialism.  I’ve found it helpful to work with these emotions ritually and move through them purposefully.  Somewhere in generations past, our ancestral cultures included life-giving elements that we can respectfully reclaim now.  BIPOC movement and thought leaders have been calling us to divest from white supremacy by building balanced, ancestrally grounded cultures for ourselves.

A few weeks after returning from Scotland, I got unstuck from the most recent layers of grief by turning my attention back toward the cultural bridge-building I’ve been doing for a long time.  I co-hosted some gatherings with Sacred Land Alliance, where we are cross-pollinating the reclamation of European ancestral knowledge with Indigenous-led solidarity to protect sacred sites.  With careful discernment, we wove a few threads from these experiences in the Highlands into the fabric of our community.  We drew on teachings from local Indigenous Elders who encourage settlers to build right relationship with our ancestors and this place.  They are asking us to show up as good relatives who can walk beside them and protect this land.

Just as people have done everywhere since the beginning of time, we gathered around sacred teine* (fire) and uisge* (water).  Seeing the faces and hearing the stories around these circles, my own curiosities and longings were mirrored back to me.  I re-membered: we make new pathways by taking one good step and then the next, recognizing that the path will emerge through multitudes of steps over generations.  The hybrid vigor of our “mixed clans” can contribute to developing old/new cultures that honor the past while creating livable, equitable, and honorable futures.

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Taingealachd* (gratitude) to Cindy McPherson, Stevie Moss, Lydia Breunig, and Ben Reid-Howells for your kindness in reviewing this essay and offering astute feedback.  Many thanks to Eddie for being a generous, fun, and serendipitous guide throughout this journey.

Note: all non-English words are written in Gaelic, Irish, or Scots

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