Saturday afternoon, August 12th 2023, with the smell of wildfire sharp in my throat I picked wild blackberries. This was my Lammas/Lughnasadh celebration, my Eucharist with the place I now call home.
Back where my ancestors’ bones rest beneath the heather, the midsummer festival of Lughnasadh (Lammas in Christianity) celebrated the first of the harvest season and fell when the bilberry was ripe. But I no longer live in the place that knew my ancestors so well, that cared for them, and they for that place.
I live on Native American lands, on the wild and windy shores of the Pacific where the Duwamish people once partnered with spruce and cedar, salmon, and blackberry. People who were cleared from the land their ancestors’ bones knew so that people who looked like me could clear the trees, dam the salmon creeks, and plow up the dark rich soil.
Learning to decolonize my own life will take me the rest of my life. It begins with unforgetting* (“unforgetting” and “becoming kin” found in this article refer to the concepts in Patty Krawec’s important book Becoming Kin) both the history of how this land became Washington state, part of the United States of America and how its original inhabitants were pushed out of the way for European settlers. And unforgetting what I can of my own ancestors.
They were complex people, pushed off their highland crofts to make way for commerce (the raising of sheep as a cash crop by wealthy land owners). And instead of suffering the fate of the working poor in Edinburgh or Glasgow they chose to get on a boat and come to North America. I don’t know if they understood that the land on which they settled had once loved and been loved by native peoples. I don’t know if they cared. But I do.
I care that my ancestors had a second chance to love and work land because native peoples had been removed, because promises and treaties were ignored or broken again and again. I care that we, the settler culture that took root here, has done horrible damage to this sacred ground. And that we continue to ignore, erase, and dismiss our indigenous neighbors and their depth of knowledge.
And in this complex tangle of caring I care that the land my bones know is forever closed to me, I am welcome to visit, but they don’t want me to stay. And that the stories and traditions of my eldest ancestors were wiped out with ruthless efficiency by the Church that I serve. I care that there is trauma everywhere we look, and none of it excuses the rest of it. I care about having roots that go deep, without replacing or erasing. All humans need, in our souls and our bones, to belong to and love a place; deeply. To be well, to be whole.
We don’t know anything of how my preChristian ancestors would have celebrated midsummer or the first harvest. We can only guess from what the church allowed to continue. And as I unforget both the history here in this place, and my ancestors, I find that tying a festival of first fruits to an arbitrary date on the Christian (Gregorian) calendar does not feel right. It might not back in Europe either, it especially does not on Duwamish land. Instead, I wait and listen for this place I am building relationship with to speak. This year the blackberries were finally ready on August 12th. And so I put a little bucket over my arm and picked with the sun at my back, my pony grazing next to me.
Plink.
Plink.
Plink.
Firm ripe berries dropping into an empty plastic horse supplement bucket like prayer beads, like a drum beat. There are little native bees, and flies that want you to think they are, and European honey bees dancing on the flowers that will be the fall crop of berries.
Soon the berries fall quietly onto the soft layer of their kin and I pick in silence now. Broken only by my pony’s occasional sigh, and my own indrawn breath when a thorn takes its toll for the fruit it offers otherwise freely. The berries I pick are settlers, like me. An invasive species brought in because it seemed like a good idea to some human settler long past. Why I do not know, maybe they found the native berries too slow, not bountiful enough to be a cash crop.
But as I pick, working my way down the hedgerow I notice there are still a few native bushes in this woodland, their berries smaller, their leaves and flowers just a bit different from their invasive cousins. I pick a few to taste the sweetness, but leave the rest for the birds, the bears, the rabbits who will spread their seed and give them a chance to not disappear beneath the wave of endless runners that are their invasive neighbors.
The Himalayan blackberry is invasive. It does not belong here. But like me these have nowhere else to go and they feed black bears and native birds in abundance. As always, it is complicated. They are an icon to me, as I fill my bucket, knowing that once the sun goes down and we humans have shut ourselves up in our homes these berries will feed our other than human neighbors too. There is no putting this thorned genie back into its bottle (habitat). There is no returning millions of descendants of settlers from whence our ancestors came.
But we are different from the blackberry, because we have a choice. We can remember, we can listen to one another and learn the history we were never told. We can learn from our indigenous neigbhors. We can choose to live not as settlers, always taking, but as neighbors, as friends, maybe even someday as kin. We can take seriously that this land belongs to native peoples. That their ancestors have held it in trust for thousands of generations, and that they continue that trust. That they can still show us how to live well with it, how to love it and let it love us.
Settlers will never be native here, our bones long for other shores. But we can learn to take seriously that these lands are known and loved by our native kin, and that we can live side by side, with their knowledge and expertise to guide us. We can do this without appropriating their beliefs, we can do this without abandoning our own ancestors.
In this new place we must find ways to redeem our ancestor’s ways of knowing. To reckon with the harm they did, with the lies they handed down to us, and to imagine a new and better future with our indigenous neighbors. One of trust, mutual care, and respect.
And it starts with our own work. With rediscovering our roots, with the good and the bad. Reclaiming that which can help us build healthier lives, and laying to rest that which will not serve our descendants. And then we build new/old traditions here in a land that would very much like to love us. We find ways to weave our past into a new future. That someday our descendants might also live on the land their bones know, land which knows them.
Land they share with their native kin. This is the spiritual work of a lifetime. This is my blackberry Lughnasadh prayer.
