If Our Ancestors Could See Us Now - Part 1
I am a restless person. I crave change. Five years seems to be my saturation point with just about everything, except parenting. There are two things in my life that have lasted longer than five years that I am proud of. I have been married to my husband for 13 years. Marriage is hard, and I’m proud of that. We have lived in the same town for 10 years, eight of those years in the same house. It’s been hard for me, but we’ve put a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and love into this house in an effort to make it a home.
I have always blamed my parents for my penchant for wanderlust and need for change. We moved a lot growing up. I’m not a military brat, which is what most people ask. We just moved. Lately I’ve been digging into some of my ancestry, and I realize that my parents and I come by this honestly. My family history is varied, and we have no real roots anywhere. There is no town or county, or even state, where I can say that my family put down roots and stayed for more than a couple of generations. I was born in a county where four to five generations were born, but the last three generations moved away. With my grandparents and my parents no longer living there, it never felt like home to me.
I can trace my family lineage, in all directions, to before the Revolutionary War. We have been here since 1620. We have moved west as the nation has moved west. We have helped make this country what it is today, for better or worse. I cannot look at my family tree and not recognize the violence inherent in our history. We are the colonizers.
I am currently grappling with decolonizing my identity. I am a geographer by training and spent seven years of my life working in jobs that are fraught with all the trappings of a white supremacist culture. I spent two years wandering Anishinabek land, inventorying trees and helping to prepare for the harvest of said trees for the profit of huge timber companies. I spent five years mapping countries we are, or were, in conflict with for the federal government. I enjoyed the work, but I never felt comfortable doing it. Morgain remembers me saying I knew what the work was being used for. I could try to pretend I didn't, but I did. Now, as I sit and flip through my National Geographic every month, images of Columbus, The English Patient, Edmund Hillary flip through my head. Breaking down the romance of colonization is hard work. It's simultaneously recognizing and appreciating the beauty that is everywhere and realizing that I don't need to touch it, possess it, control it, or consume it. All the beautiful things don't need to belong to me.
It is tempting to want to cling to the more “favorable” members of our family histories. I certainly am tempted to align myself with the abolitionists, the Union soldier, the girl teaching escaped slaves to read while they wait for her father to move them along the Underground Railroad. But that’s not entirely honest. I also have to align myself with the slaveholders, the Confederates, the whole mess. I am all of it.
As I look at the world today, I see my role as a leader and a follower. As white people, we have a responsibility to reckon with what we’ve built. A lot of talk is happening over deconstructing white supremacy. Good. We need to lean into the work of deconstruction. We need to press a little longer and a little harder than we are comfortable with, and then we need to do it again. We must build endurance for this work. We don't have it.
But I want to talk past this just a little bit. I want to talk about what happens next, or in tandem to, deconstruction. There will have to be a reconstruction. America will have to be built again. My fellow white people, in this moment, we need to lead the deconstruction of white supremacy and follow in the reconstruction of the nation. Read that again. There’s the rub, right? In this moment, we have a responsibility to not only pave the way, but get out of the way; to relinquish control.
If my ancestors could see me now, they may ask why I am doing this. Why do I want to tear down what they worked so hard to build? I would remind them: they built me, too.