Belonging by Toko-pa Turner

Author:Toko-pa Turner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Toko-pa Turner
Published: 2017-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Occasionally you meet someone who knew their great-great-grandmother, who wears the handmade, ceremonial clothes of her people, who still stewards the land and sings the songs of her ancestors. But most of us are not so rich. Most of us have been orphaned from our ancestral land, and with it, our people’s history, including the songs, teaching stories and wisdom ways of our lineage. And we may find ourselves looking in on families who are more intact than our own with a kind of unassuageable grief. This ache for something deeply familiar, yet entirely unknown, is our longing for a home we’ve always-never known.

Distant now from the generations before us who spent their lives escaping and willfully forgetting, it is like we have lost the context for our longing. It blinks in and out of our quiet moments like a faint but constant signal, muffled by the fog of modernity. Author and soul activist Francis Weller says there is a part of us that expected, when we emerged from our mother’s womb, to find forty pairs of eyes anticipating our arrival. Indeed, we keep missing those forty pairs of eyes throughout our lives. It isn’t so much that something important is missing from us, but that we are missing from something important.

There is an intactness we intuitively feel in an unbroken lineage, whose structure or set of traditions not only guides its members in the ways of the world but confers upon them a responsibility and position inside belonging. We imagine, and sometimes witness, the pride a person feels in carrying an ancestral heritage. It is as if they are made richer, stronger and more dignified by their inheritance of a long-standing tradition. Maybe in hearing our ancestral songs or language, or seeing a dance in ceremonial clothes, or even tasting a meal that’s been prepared the same way since anyone can remember, we are suddenly transported into the depth of our longing to be woven into an older story that ennobles our own life as the fruiting from an ancient tree of kin.

Instead, many of us have a broken story. It starts when our parents or grandparents landed in the West either by choice, or because they were escaping persecution, or were brought to the Americas, Europe, and Asia against their will in the African diaspora of the slave trade. In North America, we have a horrifying history of colonialism, in which the Indigenous children of this land were stolen from their families, put into residential schools, abused, and forced to assimilate with the Eurocentric culture.

For many of us, our ancestral culture is either deeply damaged or on the brink of extinction. While many have fought to keep their traditions, language, recipes, and art forms alive, globalization is a powerfully homogenizing force. While this process of integration has provided many with opportunities and freedoms they might not have had otherwise, culture loss is a devastating consequence of surviving the demands and pace of the New World. Many of our predecessors had to focus on adjusting to modernization, rather than upholding ancient ways.

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