Practices & Portals of Connection
There are many entryways to reconnect with our ancestors. We don’t need all the historical facts – we can find our way home through the body. We can sing, cook, plant, paint, pray, praise, and listen our way back into relationship. Some arrive to their ancestors through grief rituals to acknowledge and repair disconnection and erasure. Others tend ancestor altars, offering flame, water, flowers, and whispered prayers. Some walk mindfully in pilgrimage, returning to their homelands, their feet tracing the steps of their ancestors who left in search of a better tomorrow. Others cook the meals of their people, remembering the medicines and memory held in spices, grains, plants and herbs.
Ancestral wisdom and tradition can be found through the portals of myth and folktale. Our dreams can lead us back into connection and conversation. In our radical imaginations, we can wonder why our ancestors made the choices they made to survive. We can write poems and letters and speculative fiction about their times, their context, and their lifeways. We can enact their stories on the stage through ritual theater and dance. Traditional songs can rise up again in our voices and throats.
The ways of ancestral recovery are as diverse as the cultural and spiritual lineages we carry. Our ancestors live in us—in our bodies, in the land, and in the stories waiting to be told. Through embodied, spiritual, ecological, and imaginal practices and rituals of reciprocity we can connect to the past and become good ancestors to the future.
This section is an invitation to explore, unearth, reclaim, and reimagine the practices and portals that will guide us back into connection with our ancestors.
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This co-authored piece offers an overview of the foundational practices and apprenticeships orienting the Re-Calling Our Ancestors team's framework of ritual inquiry in ancestral recovery, truth-telling, and collective repair.
This recorded practice invites our ancestors to back us up in our organizing work and inform our strategies for justice at this time. They are reaching for us always. They support our movements for self determination at the level of our bodies. We only need to develop our capacity to reach back. I do that through bodywork, aikido and prayer in the lineages of generative somatics and Vipassana meditation.
This is an offering for memory collection, of upholding a day of reckoning in 2019 for white bodied people to acknowledge the 400 year anniversary of the first enslaved African people brought to the shores of what is now called the United States. The sharing of this Ritual of Remembrance is a way to keep it in the collective memory and to inspire us to be in ritual, to seek ancestral memory while creating new rituals, to acknowledge the history, while also dreaming into the future.
From my perspective, participating in culturally attuned ceremony is one wing of the bird of solidarity. The other wing is an active commitment to being in right relations, based on unity and support for all Peoples. My submission is a radical invitation to reconnect to a reciprocal engagement with all living things, by exploring the intact land-based practices of the Latvians, who have survived over 800 years of occupation.
This piece emerged over the course of several visits to an Amalia Mesa-Bains exhibit, as I interacted with my friends, parents, and children around the exhibit's themes of culture, history, immigration, spirituality, violence, and much more. I was moved by the exhibit’s beauty and power, and I wondered what it meant to deeply engage with the artist’s work without needing to make it familiar or see myself reflected in it. And, too: how to relate to the histories of oppression portrayed in these works, without (on one hand) retreating to defensiveness or (on the other hand) seeking to detach myself from my own heritage in all its complexity. My gratitude to Ariana for introducing me to the exhibit.
From 2019-2022, we served as the tenders of the “white branch of humanity” for the Decolonize Race Project. This writing is our effort to capture how this experience reshaped us and our relationship to our whiteness. We extend deep gratitude to all of our Decolonize Race colleague friends, and to all of the white people who participated in the cohorts we hosted in 2021 and 2024, where much of what we write about here came alive.
I share about the process of recovering one's indigenous mind and a prayer for all those of European descent to find a way back to their indigenous ancestral roots as a path of healing and repair.
This article offers white-identified people an applied and cyclical list of practices for reckoning with our colonial lineage and healing the internalized patterns that sustain white supremacy. This piece highlights that white people's internal healing is essential, not separate from, collective liberation and solidarity with BIPOC communities. Be gentle with yourself as you apply the list in your own life and find friends and family to partner with on many of the activities listed.
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.
I created this ritual because one way or another, there will be white people in the future, and it's up to us to shape how we'll show up. It is an offering to anyone looking to work with their own ancestors using a liberatory lens. How might we evolve if we learned to meet our people–and therefore ourselves–with both an outpouring of deep love and gratitude and the hope and expectation that we can do better? Curse-breaking ancestor work can help us break multigenerational legacies of trauma and do our part to dream our families and communities into a liberated future for all.
These paintings form a visual residue of my explorations into the pre-Christian spirituality of my European ancestors, reaching towards the collective consciousness of a time when “white people” were indigenous to specific places and revered rather than destroyed the land. They are my prayers and spells; they are my synesthetic responses to music and light; and they are improvisations based on the knots and rings of the raw wood underneath them.