Place, Ecology and Homelands
The work of reconnection is not just with our human ancestors. Reconnecting to ancestral homelands can offer profoundly healing opportunities for people to face the grief of all that was lost to assimilation in the U.S., and create renewed relationships with foodways, languages, cultural traditions, ecologies, music, histories and ancestral memories held deeply in the body. These regenerative experiences can reorganize one’s understanding of self and nurture a sense of belonging to a greater whole and to the Earth.
Across generations, diasporic peoples have long struggled to hold onto ancestral food, music, folktales, and medicinal practices rooted in the lands they left behind. Yet alongside this inheritance is another truth; as humans carried seeds, humans and animals across lands, they sometimes displaced or overwhelmed the native plants and ecosystems. Our ecological lineages live on in both the gifts and disruptions. As we reconnect to our “plantcestors”, through the trees, the herbs, the plants and animals that nourished our ancestors, we invite their presence into our lives with discernment and care.
This is a space for weaving the threads of our ancestral homelands into the fabric of our homes now, tending both memory and place. This is also a space for grappling with the questions and contradictions that arise on this journey.
Inaugural Edition
- All Posts
- Place, Ecology and Homeland
This is a poem I wrote during a course with Susan Raffo on land, land connection, and repair. It illuminates the complexity in us as colonizers, the way we've been trained to be predators, and the work of seeing ourselves in each other and in land as we unravel from these cultures of violence we've inherited.
I feel strongly that until we do the work of acknowledging, reconciling with, and working to heal the harm in our lineages, we continue carrying that harm into our own lives. There are also well ancestors in all of our lineages—even if very far back in time—that are worthy of our attention and care. It is by a stroke of well-timed luck that I was able to explore the places mentioned in my essay, but visiting ancestral homelands isn’t the only way we can heal our lineages. I hope my experience sheds some light on the joys and complications of connecting with ancestors can help us be better allies.
Widdershins weaves indigenous technologies of story, dream, pilgrimage, and timekeeping to ritually restore balance.
This sacred site of the Apache People is now owned by a private mining company after a federal land transfer in 2026. The company plans to mine deep under Oak Flat in a process that would cause the land to collapse and leave a crater nearly two miles wide. Apache Stronghold and others continue to resist these plans in the courts and in prayer. Dr. Wendsler Nosie Sr., leader of Apache Stronghold, explains that Apache People can still see the chains of colonization, while those of us descended from Europeans were colonized so long ago that we no longer see ours. He invites Euro-settlers to re-member our land-connected ancestors and remember how we became entangled with colonization. He calls on all people to break free from the chains of colonization and capitalism together. This piece is inspired by that invitation.
In this essay, I write about moving from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest alongside the question of how to build right relationship with land/place. I describe the ways in which I found myself wanting to reach for belonging, but not wanting to replicate the settler logics of my ancestors who supplanted colonial ideals of "home" onto lands and original people of place, often violently. I illustrate a process of learning the history and present of place/land with a blend of place-based historical research and body-based communication with land while thinking alongside Indigenous scholars who call for settlers to "accept responsibility " for the places we reside, "for a proper relationship with the land… is essential for our survival".
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.
This poem seeks to excavate lost practices of relationship to spirit, land, and lineage. It explores the many languages we have: cultural, somatic, unconscious, and numinously sourced. These expressions lift us out of the cultural poverty of displaced and colonizing peoples, reminding us of ways of being where cultural power does not mean power-over, and is not tied to the false paradigms of whiteness or rationalism.
Reconnecting with the strengths and struggles within the ancestral homelands of settler colonialists is a critical step in healing the systems of violence and power over we have adopted and used to cause great destruction in America. But can you go home again? This non-fiction essay explores my quest to return home to Ireland, to the motherland. I explore some of the challenges and gifts I discovered in going home, including a transformational visit to the Cailleach, a goddess who bears witness to the living power of Ireland's ancient but ever potent matrifocal traditions.