I am Carole, daughter of Frances, daughter of Jesse, daughter of Annabelle, daughter of Melissa, daughter of Sarah, daughter of Jane, daughter of Nancy.
I laboriously chased one maternal mother after another back until Jane's birth in 1776. It is a colonist’s privilege, this tracing of bloodlines and has a lot to do with promising purity and inheritances.
Nancy is Jane’s mother. Jane is my seventh grandmother and the first to be on this continent. I believe Nancy was born in Wales, married a Morgan and he moved to the wilds of Kentucky as soon as the first fort opened, and was killed by Indians on Bear Creek. Jane remained in Fredricksberg, Virginia until she married a well to do colonist, Jacob Warren LaRue. She became his second wife and gave him three more children late in life.
I have not been proud of my colonizing family roots. As far back as I can see on my family tree, I have been riding the wave of the patriarchal, oppressive westward movement characterized by killing forests and indigenous people.
I can get all the way back to Turkey in the 12,000 BCE. My DNA is farming with livestock. There is indication we were settled goddess worshippers and lived in societies with an equitable distribution of labor and resources.
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I have wanted to be an Indian ever since my brother and sister began the family story that the Indians paid them to take me. Or that Willie B, the famous gorilla in the Atlanta Zoo was my real father.
I attempted to study social work when I got to the University of Georgia during the last four years of the seventies. My mama, Frances, was a social worker and it seemed a noble profession.
My professors did not think much of me, We tangled on Patrick Moynihan- - I thought he had a point when he spoke of culture of poverty in the United States. My professor thought as a social worker, it was not polotic to speak of cultures of poverty. It seemed to me, after listening to my mama come home from work every day telling me that the social inequities in this country were too large - that there would be a reckoning one day. “There will be a revolution,” my mama would say sometimes. Nothing about my peaceful middle class existence looked very unstable, nevertheless, I internalized the idea that maybe the world would look quite different when I was older woman and maybe I should live my life with that in mind.
Back to the culture of poverty, somehow acknowledging differing cultures was the wrong answer. We couldn’t talk about the differences in society that way. It didn’t fit in with the curriculum. I was denied admission to the social work club and I traipsed down to the anthropology department where they believed in different cultures for my degree work.
Alas I am not an Native American and my indigenous roots, as I mentioned, are far far far in the past.
Therefore I adopted a few other world views along the way to help me overcome my Westernism. There was a decade long journey thorough the I Ching, and an 11 year excursion into the Mayan calendar.
After resistance, I have come to understand that cultural appropriation sits squarely on my shoulders. I do not get to pick and choose from the world’s histories as a consumer. If I want to tell stories, I really need to tell my own.
So here I go, here we are together, exploring what it means to be white, a settler, a colonizer and to try to understand how in 2023, the world the colonizers built is splitting apart at its seams. What are my responsibilities? How do I need to evolve, move over, save carbon, do as little harm as possible and be of service?
Damn if I know, but at 66, typing and writing and imagining are about all I am good at besides gardening. But I will tell you about gardening another time and how Annabelle and I both did something real similar relating to gardening later in our lives.
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