big rocks and descending from people who flee hide and get rich easy
This video is about unpacking the layers of complications with my ancestors. It contains alternating audio between me venting about my ancestors becoming white and what I feel they've given up in the process, and me remembering a piece of land. The audio where I am venting is intentionally cut to add spaciousness to it. I reference traumatic things that have happened to my family in my lifetime and before my lifetime that were never fully talked about, or I got the impression that big things were left missing from the story.
Parts of this are about me learning to build a relationship with my ancestors and also my family. Parts of it are about the desire to know the full truth about one of my parents who kept a part of their past intentionally hidden, and feeling that my dad's biological father was someone different than who I was told he was. There was a way denialism or intentional omitting of truth seemed to work in similar ways in my family as it did with white washed American history.
A year after making this video, it’s a bit cringy to watch. It's always uncomfortable to hear myself complain about my class and racial privilege since I do benefit from them while also experiencing dissatisfaction.
If it is connection I seek with my ancestors, how do I go about building that connection? If it is answers I seek, why do I need to know these answers? What would these answers bring me? How would it affect my relationships with my living family members and our ancestors? The video ends with me bringing myself back to "the rocks, the sun, my feet on the sand" and what I don't know. Attuning to the Earth and the unknown.
“Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants are beholden to the Indigenous laws and epistemologies of the land they migrate to. Settlers become the law, supplanting Indigenous laws and epistemologies.” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 6-7)