Ancestral Ground

Place, Ecology and Homelands

On both sides of the Atlantic – in the hills of Tipperary and the woods of Minnesota – the trees remind us to acknowledge the past and step with courage in the present. When we stay connected to our lineage and to one another, the earth will always welcome us home.
— Nora Murphy
White Birch, Red Hawthorn

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 a space for grappling with the questions and contradictions that arise on this journey.

Plantain root. Dandelions. Some of the elms planted along the boulevards, german chamomile, pineapple weed, thistle, comfrey, all of the kinds of clover, motherwort, mugwort, and mullein. All of the plants I just mentioned, medicinal plants. Carried over in the pockets of settlers who brought their pharmacy with them, seeds they spread in their gardens who then escaped and became, like their sowers, transplants that crowded out what had been here before. This doesn’t stop them from being medicinal. This doesn’t stop them from being colonizers. And here is the challenge in being healers here on this land who are not original to this land.
— Susan Raffo

QUESTIONS to CONSIDER

How do white people repair our frayed belonging and ruptured sense of interconnection with the Earth?


How can the process of reconnecting with ancestral homelands strengthen our commitment to anti-racist practice and help us show up with greater wholeness and solidarity?


How can the deep place based knowledge of our ancestors guide us to live in a more respectful and reciprocal relationship with the lands we inhabit today?

Content will be featured here Summer/Fall 2026.

If only Indigenous Peoples practice land-honouring rituals, then we are in deep trouble. All land wants to be honored, and all people have a land-honoring duty and joyous obligation. The challenge, then, is for all people to find their way “home” to their own culture’s land-feeding rituals, and practice those on the lands they have the privilege of living upon, while carefully listening to the lands’ expressed preferences for how it wants to be cared for and related to.
– Rachael Knight