Where do I come from?

Our "assignment" was to write about our origins. For the sake of anonymity, I've edited out some specifics.

I know very little about my origins. No non-English languages, songs, dances, art, ceremonies, or recipes, and almost no stories have been handed down in my family from one generation to the next. I do not know where all of my ancestors came from. I don’t know what their cultural and spiritual traditions were before Christianity or capitalism. I don’t even know what kind of Christianity they practiced, once they started doing so, except for my parents. I don’t know how my ancestors felt about coming to North America from Europe. Nothing has been handed down – there is a great silence where ancestral knowledge could be. I’m a little angry at my ancestors for not passing anything on in the family, but I also know from reading history books that they were under the pressure of religious and economic empires in the past couple of centuries, and may have stopped passing on traditions as a matter of survival. My feelings about my ancestors are very mixed.

I was born and grew up in North America, in the U.S., a little bit in [city], but mostly in [other city]. I’ve lived in [four cities]. Also in [country] for one year. I came to Australia in [year], because of George Bush. I got a job at [university] and moved here by myself. I have one sibling in [city] (two nieces/nephews through him), my parents are both still alive and still married, living in [city] and I have lots of cousins, in [cities]. My parents met being civil rights activists in the late 1950’s. My father’s parents both came from middle-class small-farm families in [southern state], and both of them worked for equal rights for black people in their area, in ways that were a bit radical for those times. For example, during the Depression in the 30’s, the U.S. govt gave out relief cheques to everyone, but said that people had to come pick them up in town, knowing full well that this meant poor rural blacks without cars couldn’t get their cheques. My dad’s mother didn’t think that was right, so she took the family pickup truck and organized a kind of "bus service" to bring poor rural folks into town to get their govt relief cheques. I’m telling about these things here, because I think that my family’s past planted seeds for me to think about indigenous issues and justice.

As far as we know, most of our ancestors on my father’s side, on both his parents’ sides, were from Scotland. We know that my grandfather’s family came from the Mac[name] clan in Scotland. They were removed from their lands by the English in the 1700’s, as the English tried to break the Scottish clan system. Some, including my ancestors, came to the U.S. around then, continuing the process of displacing others from their lands; others went to Northern Ireland. No Scottish Gaelic was passed on in my ancestral line; the language stopped when they got to the U.S.

On my mother’s side, her mother grew up in rural [state]. My grandma and my great-aunt were orphaned when my grandma was 8 (parents taken by tuberculosis) and grew up poor with relatives in a one-room shack. We don’t know all our ancestors on her side, but we do know that at least one line of them are English, and came over with some of the earliest colonizers in the 1600’s, from London to Massachusetts. I don’t know whether they came before, during, or after the period of time in which smallpox decimated the Native American communities of that region. I don’t know whether they were Puritans, seeking "religious freedom" in "The New World" (which had civilizations older than any in Europe), or whether they were capitalist entrepreneurs, trying to make money off a newly discovered continent full of things they saw as resources they felt entitled to, or whether they were just poor sods who signed on to a colony ship because it seemed better than living in filthy London, and someone told them there was "free land". I wish I knew their story.

My mother’s father came from a Scandinavian family. My great-grandfather fled to North America in the 1880’s, because his country had been conquered by another, and he didn’t want to be drafted into the conquering nation's army. Two years later, my great-grandmother followed him. They settled in [western states] where there were many other Scandinavians. Eventually, when the U.S. govt revoked yet another Indian treaty and opened up more Native American lands for "claims" for settlers, they moved onto a small claim in Montana and became farmers and ranchers. I believe it was the Crow Indians, specifically, whose land they moved onto. I have been to the village my ancestors came from in Europe, but I don’t know any relatives there. Neither I nor my mother speak any of the language, so we couldn’t ask or investigate easily. I have read that theirs was one of the last countries in Europe to accept Christianity, and I strongly wish I knew how that process of adopting Christianity and leaving behind their native traditions had unfolded for my ancestors.