Healing within the context of land and history

This is a week when people are either celebrating or resisting the story of how first contact between settlers and Native people happened. This is something I wrote as part of The People's Movement Center, as we sat within the questions asked below. Any mistakes I have made in the telling of these stories, especially the stories that are not my history to tell, are my own mistakes and I am accountable for them.

It always starts with the land….

What does it mean to do healing work, to do any kind of change work when the land below your feet still carries stories that are not finished?

For 50,000 generations people lived right here, on this land that is under my feet. If you, too, are sitting on this land mass that got called North America, then you, too, are living where for 50,000 generations people lived and continue to live. Real people. Complex people. People who were loving and mean, who laughed and who got overly dramatic. People have lived here, right here, before the glaciers came and after, lived here for, as the stories tell us, 50,000 generations, that is how long we were here. Some of the stories of those times are still here, held by the grandmothers and shared with the children. Some of these stories are gone, scooped out along with water from the slough, dried out and then dust flown in the wind. Ghosts that scattered along with top soil, settling in the cracks between here and there.

This the Dakota homeland, here where I live. My home is about 3 miles from the confluence of the Mississippi and MInnesota Rivers, Bdote, the Dakota homelands.

This is land that is soil on top of sand, loose below us where the glaciers ground their way down through mountain and stone to leave sand and boulders, soft land that lets the water run through it, weaving and snaking its way into rivers and springs. This is a land where there is water.

50,000 generations of real people lived here and they did many things but there is one thing they did not do: they did not forget their relationship to the land and all living things in relation to that land. They did not bring the violence of disconnection and control that destroys life. This is why they could live here for 50,000 generations, within a land that was wild even as it was known, was loved even as it was farmed.

I work and live in south Minneapolis. Dakota people hunted and their children played right where the pavement runs through. Their families were here in 1500 when French trappers first portaged and then river-wandered from the northern lakes to the southern prairie and oak savannah.

I am not going to do this alone. If you are reading this, I want to know: Do you know your original peoples and your traditional ways? If they are not your people, then do you know the people original to the land where you live? Do you know the people who walked the land for generations before you rented your apartment, bought your house, planted your garden, and put out your recycling bins? Why are you reading this story? How do you want it to help you?

20 generations ago is when the first settlers arrived to the northern parts of this land, bringing with them the separation that they had already learned on the lands where they began. They brought their understandings of private property and land ownership and they began to settle. These people were French trappers who wandered rivers and lakes making business deals with original people. After them came the army, first wave of the surge that would take trees and furs and ore including someday oil from pipelines, the army came and over time drove the Dakota villagers who had lived along the river banks for generations,  drove them further away. Some settled along Bde Maka Ska, settling with a small farm where Lakewood Cemetery is today. Here is where Chief Cloudman lived and where some of the first Christian missionaries also set up, working to enforce western language and cultural traditions with the intent to break the cultural link the Dakota people have with the land. When you look at very old maps, there is a trail that goes from Bdote to Bde Maka Ska and it passes very near to where my work, the People’s Movement Center, stands.  

By the time the French and then the army came, there would have been squatters here, too; Europeans who came and just put up a tent, a shack, a rough house. So many of those early settlers were young people, just like young white US travelers today, young people who leave their homes to go to different lands where they can have adventures before they go back home to their families.  Collecting stories like empty skulls. Some people came because they didn’t fit in back home, because it wasn’t safe anymore to be back home, or because they felt the call deep inside for something that was wilder than cities and farms. Some became friends with people from local tribes and some did not.  They hunted. They fished. Sometimes they farmed and then they died or else, when the city got bigger they went further north and settled in whatever corner they could find. I think of them when I drive up to northern Minnesota and see the houses that are made of plywood and twine, the old white men with beards down past their knees who live by hunting and gathering, signs with pictures of guns posted along their fences.

And there were treaties. Did you know that even as the first settlers began to establish St. Anthony and what would later become St. Paul, what is now Minneapolis remained only Dakota territory until 1851? 50,000 generations lived on this land and it is only been seven generations since settlers overtook this Dakota territory. Seven generations since the Twin Cities went from being held by original peoples to being controlled by settlers. Seven generations against 50,000.

Agreements between nations, agreements like we have free trade agreements today, agreements as a tense compromise between the rich and greedy and the poorer in need of work. Or the poor and greedy, hoping to be the winners this time.  Land gluttony. It happened fast, like a plague. Within a generation, the balance tipped from mostly original peoples to those who were not. In 1862 the US government passed the Homestead Act, opening up ceded (and violently taken unceded) land for settlement. That same year, 1862, Dakota families were hungry and had not received the food and supplies promised through treaty. Young people, frustrated with weeks of promises and growing hunger, fought, protested, raged, and this became the Dakota War of 1862. President Lincoln sent in troops, many the same troops who had just fought in the Civil War, and at the end of the battles, those Dakota families remaining along the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers were removed, exiled, such violence, the uprooting of a people from their land, their history.  Their warriors, 38+2, were murdered and after all of that, what mattered most to those who came was that now there was more land.  The stories shared in newspapers to the east told the stories of land, free land, not the stories of the families whose lives had just been traded for federal profit.

More settlers came, buying farms along the Minnesota River, the Mississippi River, the St. Croix, spreading and calling their families to come and then spreading further. Trees cut down to make railroad ties. Swamps filled in. Banks and more banks opening and then closing as money changed white hands, exploded into wealth for some and disappeared over night for others. The squatters were kicked out and now land was bought with legal paper. Irish carpenters and tavern keepers, Swiss and Welsh laborers, German butchers and cigar makers, English masons, and Scots bakers joined farmers from Germany, Canada, and older areas of the United States, wagon makers from New York, hotelkeepers from Virginia, lawyers and merchants from Pennsylvania, millwrights from Ohio, ministers, teachers, and tailors from New England, and French-Canadian voyageurs and blacksmiths to spread over Minnesota including these neighborhood blocks just outside my door. 

Where were your people between 1750 and 1850? Did they have sovereignty over their own lives? Were they owned or did they own? Do you know the stories of who you were for those years? Do you know specifics or only something general? What happens for you when you think about that time, about what you know or don’t know? How close do you feel to them? Seven generations, .00000001875 percent of the time that we have been evolving on this planet, .013 percent of the time since the last ice age crossed the land below our feet. What do you know about your people from just  seven generations ago? Six generations ago? The time of your great-grandparent’s great grandparents.

The city grew.  US policy towards the original peoples moved to Kill the Indian/Save the Man, and boarding schools were set up, the children and grandchildren of those who lived along the river, who might have hunted where my home now stands, being removed from their families, from our families, and sent to Christian schools to disappear the Dakota, the Anishinabeg.  And the memories of those who remembered when there were more oak trees than people faded in the way that the stories of our great grandparents become only vaguely told sentences without the feeling of what it was like.

But not all of the stories disappeared. And they did not win. Even as the story, the violences, are not finished it is important to pause here and say this: they did not win. The stories are not gone. The people are still here, stronger and fighting back. Which side are you on?

The city grew. Flour mills and lumberyards growing fat off of the homesteading of the prairie and the cutting of the great north woods. And Minneapolis grew. Almost tripling in size between 1900 and 1950, we are creeping into the memories of your grandparents and parents, of the stories those of you who grew up here might now remember.

In 1910 all over the United States, “racial convenants” were legal instruments inserted into property deeds that prohibited people defined as “not Caucasian” from purchasing or inhabiting homes. This happened all over the country and also in south Minneapolis. The list of excluded groups reflected the racial assumptions of developers, real estate professionals, and homeowners. A common covenant read, “[this property] shall not at any time be conveyed, mortgaged or leased to any person or persons of Chinese, Japanese, Moorish, Turkish, Negro, Mongolian or African blood or descent.” Penalties for anyone who tried to break these covenants was severe and included losing your home and any money you had put into the property (equity). Looking at the map linked above, you can see the demographics of south Minneapolis laid out along with these 100 year old expression of legal segregation. Each economic development choice, when weighed against these racial covenants, defined the city, who lived in it and therefore who had access to all of the benefits of a livable city.

Who in your family was alive in 1914, how many generations before your birth? Did they live in the US? In Minnesota? How many of them lived in Minneapolis? Or were they even allowed to? This was the time of eugenics in the United States, when people of color, the poor, folks with disabilities, queers were being institutionalized, sterilized. Radio was new. Catholics were following Father Coughlin by the millions as he ladled up his version of sacred normalcy. This was World War 1, the Great Migration. When many of your family stories are still remembered. What did your grandparents, great grandparents tell about this time? How did it make who you are today?

This is around the same time when the Mexican community in south Minneapolis began to grow. Sugar beet companies in rural Minnesota began to recruit families to come up from Texas to work in the sugar beet fields. Some of the betabeleros returned to Texas during the winter months but others stayed and built homes in the Cities. While the largest community lived in St. Paul, a smaller community lived near the PMC on Chicago Avenue and further north to Nicollet avenue. In the 1930s and 50s, as the sugar beet industry began to wane and as economic controls after the Great Depression were put into place, many of these families were deported, both those who were undocumented and those who were legal residents. Just like now.

The Great Depression and everything afterwards when frightened people were looking for scapegoats. In poorer neighborhoods in Minneapolis, unemployment was over 25% In 1931, nationally Minneapolis became known for its food riots as neighbors broke into grocery stores, stealing food to feed each other. In 1931 white residents stormed a Black family's home in south Minneapolis, demanding they leave, demanding that their neighborhood stay white. Economic fear and white control have always gone hand in hand.

What stories exist in your family from the Great Depression? Were they here in the US? Food and housing insecurity was at an all time high. People both gathered together in collectives and support systems and they turned on each other, looking for people to blame. Eugenics continued to gain national traction as the reason for everything bad. During this period, 2,350 people were involuntarily sterilized in Minneapolis, most of them defined as “mentally ill” or “mentally deficient.” How did your family fit into this story? What themes from this time are coming up again today? Why?

The Minneapolis General Strike of 1934 ended in riots with the police opening fire on labor union organizers and protesters. Two were killed and 67 injured. The strike closed down all transportation in Minneapolis and the state declared martial law.  Many of the workers lived where I live and where I work. This was 7 years before my mother was born. I grew up hearing stories of the Great Depression and of the strikes from my great grandparents and grandparents. This is recent history. This is yesterday.

In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration developed a system for classifying homes for home buyers based on their resale value and were marked green for the most desirable and red for the least desirable. And thus was redlining born. At this time, race in Minneapolis was defined as Native-born white, foreign-born white and Black.  In 1930 and 1940, Black families made up .9% of the population.  If you pay attention to local politics, then you know how redlining impacted North Minneapolis. Funds dried up. Economic segregation became tied to racial segregation. And that history has still not recovered. Four blocks north of the People’s Movement Center, where I work,  just as you cross Park Avenue, you enter the redlined zone. The PMC was not in a redlined area but the PMC is on the transition space, the border. Two blocks down, at 41st and 4th, was Mrs. Little’s boarding house. Here is where Black folks new to town stayed in order to figure out their next steps. What we know about all border towns and border areas is that this is where the likelihood of conflict – as well as of creative transformation and power – increases.

In the same year, the Indian Reorganization Act demanded that, in order to be recognized by the federal government, tribal communities must organize themselves in cookie cutter ways, not by their own traditions and cultures, but by a management system that made sense to the government. And for those who were not tied to a tribal community through a reservation or for those tribal communities that the federal government decided no longer existed, the US brought in a policy of assimilation, moving Native peoples to urban areas for resettlement. And so some of the children and grandchildren of Dakota and Anishinabeg peoples were moved into federal housing in Chicago and Cleveland and Milwaukee… and also to south Minneapolis, back to their original lands but now as relocated persons within their own land.

Did you grow up in an urban area? What do you know about your neighborhood in relation to redlining or the Indian Reorganization Act? Did you grow up in a rural area? What was the racial make-up of your community? Where did who live? Was there formal or informal segregation? Were there visible indigenous people, indigenous to this land? Again, what did this all mean for your family? What did you not know because of these things? How do these stories relate to your family's origin stories, the story of how they came to be? Of where they come from and who they are? Is there a connection or were those stories told as separate things? 

There is so much more history to tell about this land where I now live. There is history to tell about the land where I was born, Cleveland, Ohio, the land of Tecumseh and the first pan-tribal resistance to the violence of settlement. There is history of busing and civil rights, history of hate crimes like the Duluth lynchings in Minnesota and the Black uprisings in the Hough neighborhood in Cleveland the year I was born and multiple times after. There are also so many stories of survival and resilience in all of these lands where I live and where I come from.

As healers and healing practitioners, these are the stories, the contexts that weave through the bodies that come to see us, sometimes visible, often invisible. This is the broader imprint that defines how the person sitting across from us feels: the food they eat, the air they breathe, the violence their people experienced or enacted, the shape of their home growing up and their home now, whether or not their was a yard, a safe place to play, other children who looked like them, the concern of threat from the sound of a doorbell or the fact that their neighbors would call the police if strangers came by. Private property or public housing, there are stories behind those homes that come up through the floorboards and settle in our bones. 

Plantain root. Dandelions. Some of the elms planted along the boulevards, pineapple weed, thistle, comfrey, all of the kinds of clover, motherwort, mugwort, and mullein. These are all medicinal plants. They grow in the alleyways behind Minneapolis homes, you find them along the roads and in public parks. Their ancestors were 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. They are medicinal plants. They heal. They are also colonizer plants. They have crowded out plants that are Native to this land, the plants that form the oak savannah and the water logged sloughs of what is now south Minneapolis. Both of these things are true.

And this is the challenge in being healers on this land who are not original to this land. This is the generosity shown by those who are original to this land who turn to those who are not in order to heal.

There are ghosts that walk our streets, right this second, as you take a deep breath and listen to the stories that you know and don’t remember, do you know who you are and why you are here? Do you know what your life has been created for? And why you are here, on this page, hearing this story, and remembering? What is that you are here to heal? And what is it within you that needs to be healed?

To purchase the map at the top of this post and others like it, go to http://www.tribalnationsmaps.com/.

Dealing with the original wounds

This is not a trigger warning, but it is an invitation that you pay attention to yourself. I am going to talk about the violence that is the foundation of the creation of the United States. It is easy to read history and turn it into information: something that a person “knows” and “understands.” Please don’t do that. Everything written here is about real people; people like you and your kin. What is written here might be about your kin or your people might be the kin who were committing the violence. Either way, notice yourself as you read. Listen deeply, listen to how your ancestors might whisper to you through your DNA, through your spirit. Read this as a prayer, not a school lesson. And then breathe.

I just finished taking a walk along the Mississippi River. The leaves are mostly fallen, the sumac is bright red, and the ancient cottonwoods loom large along the riverside. I usually walk near Coldwater Spring, a sacred Dakota site that has been taken over and domesticated by the park service, and along the river just north of Fort Snelling. I never go there without remembering where I am and what happened at that place. I never go there without remembering that eight generations ago, there was no Fort and this was only Dakota land. I never go there without remembering the 1600 Dakota families who were interred at the Fort after and during the Dakota war, only six generations ago. I go there and remember the expulsion of the Dakota people from their homelands, still six generations ago, all of these actions taken by President Lincoln within months of his signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

As a bodyworker who studies craniosacral therapy and learns from other modalities, I know that if you can identify the original wound, the first significant hurt, and if you can support that original wound to get what it needs to transform, then many of the things that happened afterwards will transform at the same time. I have seen that kind of unwinding, this moment of deep healing, within the cells and tissues of people who invite me to be with them. Held trauma is a moment of unfinished history. Life wants to come back to the present moment, to feeling connected to other life. This means that held trauma will find a way to resurface again and again until it is finished. This is why a person seems to get involved with the same kind of person, the same boss and situation at work, the same feeling of isolation and sadness. Until we can heal or shift the original conditioning or experiences, we will get tangled up in the same tangles.

The same is true of what happens to the collective body. I believe that for those of us who live on this land, there are two significant original wounds. These wounds overlay a whole range of histories that we have separately brought as people coming from many different places but when we settle here, on these lands, then we settle in relationship to the original wounds.

The first wound is the attempted genocide of those people indigenous to this land. For over 500, 5000, some peoples say 50,000 generations there were people who lived on these lands. They moved and migrated like people do, from one ocean to the other, from the south to the north and the north to the south. Real people who did all of the glorious and absurd things that real people do, who had wars and who got sick and died and who lived contented lives, real people who never lost their relationship to the land. Real people who understood - and understand - that we are the land and the land is us. The first wound happened when Europeans brought their wounds to this land and planted them. Those wounds were the wounds of disconnection from land and the idea of land ownership. Their wounds included the idea of profit, something that is not possible without inequality. They included rigid and specific gender assumptions that subjugated anything seen as feminine and they included a patriarchal and transcendent God who expected harsh discipline and service from his followers. These were the wounds that had evolved in western Europe for thousands of years. In their European homelands, people were (and are still) fighting for a connected life that does not depend on violent inequality at its base. Many of those who first crossed the ocean to come to this land came because they wanted to find a place where they could live more spiritually grounded simple lives. But even those who came seeking heaven on earth came bringing their own original wounds, this deep disconnection from life, and they carried it like a virus as they built their farms and towns and expanded across the land. This is the first original wound: the attempted and unceasing disappearance of the original people of this land through murder, forced assimilation, land theft, and cultural policing and minimization.

The second original wound came soon after first contact with these lands. This was the wound that enabled those who settled to increase their profits and to feel justified in doing so. First the land was turned into an object to be sold and used for personal purpose and second, human beings were turned into objects to be sold and used for personal purpose. The second wound is the institution of slavery, the economic system that depended on the creation of race as a way to organize the complexity of life. The European system of slavery or the owning of people has its roots in European feudalism, anti-Semitism and the colonizing mix of the Catholic inquisition and crusades. The way the institution of slavery developed in the Americas is born of these histories with each colonizing country putting the pieces together slightly differently. This second original wound is entwined with the first; both together creating the foundation of the creation of the United States: indigenous disappearance and the violent policing of anti-Black racism. The institution of slavery had already been started in the islands and lands to the south of us. This means that as Europeans first started coming north to settle and colonize, they brought with them enslaved Africans. The first settler’s legal code, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, legalized slavery in the colonies. After the Bacon Rebellion, a shared fight by Black slaves and Black and white indentured servants only two generations after the first large scale settlement in the East, race rather than class became the tool for social control.

When you attend to an original wound, are not distracted by all of those things which show up at the same time, you increase the potential for transformation.

There are many other wounds that exist here on these lands: gender oppression and classism and ableism and religious persecution and anti-immigrant hatred and all kinds of phobias. But they are not the original wounds of this land. Most flavors of US-based class and gender oppression have European roots, not indigenous or the many different kinds of Asian or African cultural roots. Forms of gender and class based oppression might well exist in those lands, but upon settling here, in the United States, those other homegrown inequalities merged with the European form of cultural divide.

The one thing all of us share who are living on this land that is now called the United States is the experience of being raced. This is true whether we are new immigrants or our people have been here since first contact. This is also true for those who are indigenous to this land but it doesn’t quite work the same way. Being native to this land exists before race and so identities like Lakota or Ojibwe or Cree are cultural experiences that exist before they were raced. Being raced means having the complexity of your history, your culture, and your understanding of yourself and your kin aligned with a category that you have no power to shift. The only people who get to experience life without the awareness of being raced are white people.

White supremacy, I believe, is a system of coddling European-descended people so that they don’t have to feel the impact of the wounds they brought with them over the ocean and then transplanted directly and indirectly into this land and into people’s bodies. White supremacy is a system set up to maintain these original wounds so that they are raw and bleeding, never able to heal and then transform into something new. White supremacy exists so that European-descended people don’t have to experience the profound contradiction between the life they are leading and the values they claim to hold.

To me, healing justice is about directly addressing these original wounds. Period. This means healing justice seeks to stop the violence of these histories as they show up in the present day, including in how newer immigrants are defined through the lens of anti-Black racism and anti-indigeneity or with the added layers that are defined in relationship to US global economic interests.

As healers and healing practitioners, we work most of the time with individual bodies. Life shows up in healing spaces in very local ways: as an experience of pain, of emotion, of disconnection, of compromised movement or energy. We are there in response to how the truth of someone’s life shows up in any given moment.  This is healing. What makes it healing justice is how we hold the truth of the present moment within the larger context of the original wound. How we do this is part of what I will keep reflecting on in this blog.

I want to be clear about one more thing: paying attention to the original wound does not mean ignoring the real pain of gender and class and all other forms of oppression and violence. But it does mean still and always paying attention to the original wound. There is no gender or class liberation possible on this land without attending to the original wounds. Without attending to and healing the origins, other fights will eventually become aligned one way or another with white supremacy. It matters deeply that profound class divisions, sexual violence and rigid gender binaries did not exist on this land prior to colonization. They are not native to this land. They were brought here and transplanted, just like a Monsanto seed, fighting its way into the reproductive cells of native seeds as they are transformed against their will.

Beneath all of what I wrote here is the foundational hurt: the one that these histories made possible and maintain. Beneath all of this is our separation from the life that sustains us. This land, right here, below our feet. The kin who are within arm's and heart's reach. How we experience the connection of all things, spirit, life.  And the ancientness of our selves, our ancestors joining hands along our DNA. Notice your breath. Right now.