Greetings all.
I hope your heart is expanding to be with the growing pains of this beautiful and troubled world.
I’ve been savoring snowy mountain hikes and also appreciating from afar the bold, beautiful resistance of Minneapolis residents to the U.S. government in the form of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) terrorizing their community. See below for more on all that.
As Minnesotans are intimate with cold and ice, I also appreciate how some locals have been intentionally icing sidewalks and streets to press the tactical advantage. There’s something really beautiful about this that aligns with the vision I hold for our future.
Our younger daughter’s name is Isa. Not Isabela, not Isadora, just Isa, the Proto-Germanic word for ice and the rune of the same name. In the old Nordic poems, ice enforces pause and stillness and also opens a path over what was previously impassable. The force which binds also transforms an impassable river into a bridge.
The way many of us have been living, especially in the Global North, is unsustainable and must change for the sake of life itself. This includes challenging white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and the arrogance that separates humans from the rest of the living world. Such transformation isn’t passive and won’t come from outside saviors; it’s something we all must actively work toward. For communities that have maintained or are reclaiming Earth-rootedness and deep community, resistance may look like those in Minneapolis–diverse in identity and united in solidarity–standing together against outside interference and partnering with a local friend ice to impede the work of ICE.
I think of my father’s time as a young man with U.S. forces in Vietnam and how the North Vietnamese outsmarted American imperialist interests with shrewd politics, tenacity, and intimate knowledge of the jungle. Or, in the centuries before my father or I were born, the long history of Indigenous resistance to European occupation in what later became our home state of Ohio. Or two thousand years earlier, as Arminius led Germanic tribes to lure Roman occupiers to their demise at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, lands of my father’s paternal lineage.
The patterns repeat and are not so different; those with a more intact, generational connection with land draw on those relationships to protect their home from occupiers.
Another octave of this ancient pattern of defending one’s beloved home from invasion and conquest is the struggle between ways of seeing the world, the cultural struggle for how we organize our economies, governments, and education. And whether these include diverse human voices (living and ancestral) and our other-than-human kin.
Because culture has never been and will never be only human.
The vision I hold for the future, and that our offerings at Ancestral Medicine support, is of a world where local culture both arises from and is accountable to the Earth. A world where we not only show respect to that which sustains us, but where our extended kin are a conscious part of important decisions, our education, our communities of care, and our ways of life. This is not just an Indigenous attitude, it’s wholesome human values. And it’s the way of the future.
We’re doing our best over here to produce nourishing, culturally dynamic offerings that meet the times and help you to live your best life in service to the Earth and life. If you have thoughts on how we could be doing an even better job at that, we’re listening.
May you stay kind, honest, and rooted in what is local,
Daniel
– IN PRAISE OF GOOD WORKS –
Abolish ICE, Stand with the Twin Cities
In Minnesota, especially Twin Cities area, massive protests have been unfolding in response to heightened ICE activity and terrorizing, racist forms of immigration enforcement in local communities. Residents, organizers, and allies are gathering in the streets to call attention to the fear and harm being instilled by U.S. forces and emphasizing the broader impact these actions are having on the everyday life of immigrant communities. Consider learning more with links like this, this, and this.
If you’re wondering how to support, Stand With Minnesota offers up-to-date information and provides opportunities for direct action (from donating and mutual aid to learning about initiatives happening on the ground). Solidarity with those of you here who are in or near Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and we encourage others to stand with those on the front lines of resistance from within the United States.
