Ep 58: We are the Product of Our Ancestor’s Choices

In this week’s episode, April shares more about her ongoing exploration around her Indigenous, Cherokee heritage and the impact a healing workshop had on her desire to live and embody this aspect of her identity. Tracie and April use this exploration to reflect on the ways in which we are the products of our ancestors’ choices to survive the oppressions they faced. 

Check out our discussion/reflection questions for this episode:  https://joyousjustice.com/blog/jews-talk-racial-justice-ep-58

Find April and Tracie's full bios and submit topic suggestions for the show at www.JewsTalkRacialJustice.com

Learn more about Joyous Justice where April is the founding and fabulous (!) director, and Tracie is a senior partner.: https://joyousjustice.com/

Read more of Tracie's thoughts at her blog, bmoreincremental.com

Listen to our Thanksgiving episode, part 1 here: https://joyousjustice.com/blog/jews-talk-racial-justice-ep-12-jews-talk-thanksgiving-part-1 

Listen to our Thanksgiving episode, part 2 here: https://joyousjustice.com/blog/jews-talk-racial-justice-ep-12-jews-talk-thanksgiving-part-2

Learn more about the Cherokee Nation here: https://www.cherokee.org/

Transcript

0:11

- [April] This is "Jews Talk Racial Justice" with April and Tracie.- [Tracie] A weekly show hosted by April Baskin and Tracie Guy-Decker.- [April] In a complex world, change takes courage.- Whole-hearted relationships can keep us accountable. So April, I did a guided meditation on Insight Timer today and it was one that he worked through the five elements and had you repeat some affirmations, and when he got to the one about the ether, I had to be like, Tracie, you're thinking, because I was thinking about you. The affirmation was, "The universe has made me unique,"and I will not allow my fears to make me standard."- Ugh.- And I just thought about-- Tracie!- It just really resonated with me and some of the conversations we've had, even on the show about the ways that you want to live into the spirituality and the stuff from your Black heritage- Spiritual inheritance.- And the way that you wanna stop kind of hiding that, for safety's sake. I don't know, I just-(April laughs) Like I was, I had to be like, okay, Tracie, you're thinking. Come back to the breath, because I just wanted to, you know, share this with you.- Ah, Tracie. (laughs) So you cracked me open in what I think was likely our last episode, and now you're doing it again. (laughs)- I love you, April.- Which is what I asked for spiritually, and I think it's awesome that if someone is going to be doing this, that it's a beloved friend and partner.- Can I just, I have to say this, because this makes me so proud, is that when April and I first started doing this, like before we even released a single episode, she had this vision that her ancestors brought me to her, and at the time, I was like, wow, I don't know if I can live up to that pressure. (laughs) To be someone that your ancestors brought you, but I just like, sometimes, I just think about that, and that there are forces out there that put us on the same path and I am so, so grateful that we are here together.- I'm literally dumbfounded. I don't even remember that. I'm starting to remember that and now, I just feel like I'm going to either melt or explode. (laughs)- It was the very beginning, like we were, we had just started having weekly conversations.- And I don't say something like that unless it's like,'cause of how you said it, so what was the, oh, you already said it, you did say it, what was in the meditation.- I can say it again. You want me to say it again?- Sure.- The universe has made you unique. Do not allow your fear to make you standard.- And here's where this is all coming together, from what you started, I mean, I asked to be on this journey, and it was initiated over a year ago, when I joined Kohenet, which I believe would be a safe and Jewish, a safe and beautiful Jewish portal through which I could reconcile who I've been known to be publicly for a number of years, and who I have been becoming over the past 10 to 15 years, spiritually, and in my personal life. And this actually aligns perfectly with what we were thinking this theme would be, where I wanted to share an update with folks about my ongoing relationship with my Native heritage and identity, since it came up during an episode we had a year ago, about, regarding Thanksgiving and my complicated relationship with it. You know, I spoke to the personal impact that the broader culture and lasting impact of the Native genocide, that that's had on me personally, in my identity, and my efforts as someone who was raised knowing that I have Native heritage and identity, and who just perpetually experienced so many barriers, not within my own family. We really embraced it in my family. I have a family member who's a cousin, but more like an uncle, he's my grandfather's first cousin. In some families, they would consider him an uncle. In my family, we generally tend to say cousin, but kinda toy with the idea, because he's an elder, who was a tribal leader for a long time. People don't read me as having, well, actually, some do, but I'm typically seen as a light-skinned African American woman, and because of the culture of genocide, at times, people would question if I had Indigenous heritage or there was just always questioning around it. For me, I've been waiting, I think I might've even mentioned this in the episode that we did, that I reached a certain point in high school where I decided I'm going to pause, I'm going to permanently pause my efforts around this work because it is so painful, and it just feels like constantly confronting erasure, and insignificance, and just all the different elements of genocide culture. It was very different than my Black and Jewish identities, where despite the immense oppression, both of these groups, in the United States, have not been targeted by genocide. And so, when you reach for them, there's something there to reach for. There's books, there's communities. It might be in a different, it might be a few towns away, but there is something, and it's a very specific experience to have an identity where there is so little to reach for, or where you find dead ends, or you find something that you think is gonna be a thing, and then, an awful white dude's articulation of your people that is not what you thought you were getting. You thought you were getting a firsthand account of something, just one story to help you construct a meaningful, relevant, contemporary identity. And so, I decided to wait until a time later in my life, and I envisioned it being around this time. Like I thought it was going to be in like a couple decades. As I grew older, more and more things started to awaken in me and some of the only places where they were normalized, or one of the only moments where some of these things were normalized, and weren't seen as weird was with my Cherokee leader, uncle/cousin, Two Bears, where I was telling, he called me to comfort me about a family member's death. And I gingerly shared with him that I wasn't so sad because I'd had a vision a day or two earlier about a crow landing on my back, and I didn't inherently know what it meant, but I looked it up, because it was a vision. It was different. I don't get visions often, but they're different than dreams. I think it's kinda like lucid dreaming, like it's like watching a movie, and it's very clear but I'm not conscious. And what I could interpret and crows mean a lot of different things in different cultures. Some see them as bad signs, but they consistently are shape-shifters and involve life and death cycles and shifting between worlds, and states of death and life. And so, I had a very, I kinda was able to ascertain, like I think either me, I was a little scared, or somebody I love is going, someone's going to die. And two days later, my Grandma Thelma died in surgery. And may her memory be for a blessing. And when I mentioned this to my cousin, it was like it was Tuesday, it was like, oh yeah, that was a day vision. Like it was just fine. It wasn't you're weird, there's something wrong. He just-- He even had a name for it.- Yeah, he had a name for it, and he's like, when you have ones at night, when the dreams that you reference, those are night visions. There are day visions and night visions, and you had a day vision and a powerful one. And he explained a little bit more about it, and in the spring, I had an opportunity, it happened pretty quickly, but I was able to go to a healing workshop for people with Cherokee heritage. It was monumental. I think that's the word I want. It was spiritually and personally monumental for me. It was monumental going into it. I knew that we were being led by an amazingly respected, wonderful national and international Native liberation leader who's enhanced my life through her students. And so I was very happy to be in her presence, and relatively early on into the workshop, this respected Native leader shared with us that as a nation, the Cherokees chose a specific strategy around navigating genocide. And the survival strategy they chose was assimilation. And that many people, and that a part of the genocidal culture surrounding Cherokee identity is to shame and say, oh, that's everybody, or that's, everybody has a Cherokee aunt or uncle. And part of what that genocidal culture is reflecting was actually a very specific strategy that the Cherokee chose and what she said, it just really, this was one of a few things that really struck me, because as a person in the context of the culture of genocide, of Native genocide that is pervasive and every day in American life, that one of the many impacts of that, that this cuts across other genocidal dynamics and cultures. And I see this playing out with Jews, which has actually been a helpful corollary for me, because I don't feel this about my Jewish identity. As a person whose family, to my knowledge, was not directly impacted by the Shoah, but I do feel this throughout my Native identity of fundamentally not being enough, of you not being enough of whatever that identity is, and that message has been explicitly delivered to me many times, and what this teacher taught is that actually, for each of you, you are the product of not an ideal situation in the context of genocide, but of precisely what your ancestors did to survive. Because to be identified as Cherokee was a death sentence for a very long time, and so they chose to marry into white and Black and Asian families to survive so that you could be here today to continue their legacy. And that reclamation, that's how the weekend started, and to start with that, to eradicate this erroneous shame that I have never felt from my family members, that I have never felt in my spirit work, but that the world regularly delivers to anyone with Indigenous heritage, for the most part, it helped to contradict that and help to recenter in the same ways that there was enough resource in my life for my Black and Jewish identity that even though there was hatred from the world, I had enough resource to be rooted in my family and that identity and that narrative.- When you first came back from the workshop, you shared that with me, and you talked about, sort of like you are the product, you are, I think you said it as that you had been told that you are what your ancestors planned. You are the way your ancestors planned this and dreamed it, and it was a specific strategy. And I sat with that, too, in my own journey. We talked about on the-- Yeah, please.- Show. Well, we talked about on the show that I do have a Native ancestor who also, at least according to family lore, was Cherokee. So it was my grandmother's grandmother on my non-Jewish side. And, but also on the Jewish side, right, like there are stories about my grandmother's grandma on the Jewish side who came over and like immediately worked very hard to get rid of her accent, her Yiddish, or well, her German accent, and like refused to allow German or Yiddish to be spoken in the home. And like assimilation was a really important strategy and a survival strategy. And I think today, looking back, for those of us who have sort of that Jewish assimilation story in America, and there's still, there's corollaries there and there's lessons and what it did for me, I mean, I was enjoying the energy you...- Right, yeah, but you're also.- What it did for me was open channels to compassion for my ancestors who chose assimilation that I didn't even realize had been closed. I had been judging them for choosing assimilation, both the Native one and the Jewish ones without even realizing I was judging them. Like it was so buried, it was so deep and internalized that like, well, "I wouldn't make that choice," but I'm not even sure I fully recognized it until you started talking about like the survival strategy that it was, and that just opened a channel for compassion and nuance that I had been completely closed to. And so I wanna thank you for that.- Yeah, yeah, you're so welcome. And so there are a lot of different things, but some of the key takeaways I had from it besides that was someone in one of the support group circles talked about having chronic confusion. And as they spoke about this, I was like, I totally have that, I totally have that, so much so that a day later, at the virtual gathering, it hit me one morning because throughout the workshop, the leader was saying that there's a lot of confusion, and because the Cherokees were such a large nation, the assimilation, the racist genocidal assimilation culture is extra strong saying like, well, oh, everybody says that. Well, because lots of the everybody do have Cherokee heritage because that was, you know, but also, and how far back it goes, but she was encouraging us to do the research, go back to the lands of your people, look into the register. Some of it's online, look at the Dawes Rolls. There are specific governmental rolls and moments in history that didn't capture everyone, but captured a lot of the Cherokee folks, look those up, see if they align with parts of your family tree and do the work. And it's okay if ultimately you find out that it isn't there, or if it is, but take the time if this is something that's important. It's important as a part of our coming home, and as she was saying, all of this, I was like, yeah, yeah, I need to do the research, like, yeah, I need to find this. And maybe it isn't true, and it wasn't until the next morning and I actually had to go into my email and find it that this is how strong and powerful the culture of genocide and erasure is today, contemporarily, that it's so thick that it allowed me to somehow know a part of my mind, and also forget that I am literally a registered member of a federally recognized tribe because my dad did all this work. And my family has been clear about the story and that I have a family member who for years, and even decades was the Red Chief of the Cherokee Council of New Jersey. Like I have, but the oppression is so thick that I forgot what I know, because I've been told so much that it's not true, that you are nothing, that you are not Native, that it's a lie, that you never existed. The last time that I remember it, although it wasn't the last time, it was when I was in college, and I think I shared this with you, where a Black guy who I respected and still do, he was like, girl, you're not Native. Like it happens all the time. And he's the one with a relatively liberatory mindset. Obviously, he had work to do on that front, right, but it silenced me in that moment. It was just, and then that space around multiracial heritage, right, it's just constant. So that was a huge breakthrough for me of like, I actually don't need to, I am Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw, and I have federally and to also be clear, there are people who have literally grown up on reservations and who have Native identity and who present as Native who don't, and there's all kinds of politics. What I'm saying is there has already been an external validation of my family's Indigenous heritage and story and family. So that was one huge thing of like, of clearing that and also being aware that because things don't just heal overnight have also, I now am aware that there's chronic confusion that I have. And interestingly, I have a great corollary because I have always noticed this. I didn't think of it as being tied to genocide, but it makes sense as I've learned about this, I've always noticed this among a lot of my Jewish friends that they never feel Jewish enough, and I've always worked to proactively contradict that.- Oh yeah.- Right?- Oh yeah.- And I've always worked to say, no, you are. But some part of me, I didn't have the words for it, but some part of me was clear, like, that's the oppression. Even if you come from an interfaith home, you are Jewish. That is not for anybody else to dictate. Aside from maybe rabbis or something, but you know, but that is for us to claim and own. Right? That's not, in terms of sovereignty, right? And so I can kind of leverage that in my own being, of being so clear about that, about another group of people who've been targeted by genocide for myself around how, when it's somebody else, I am so clear about their Jewishness. And my uncle/cousin was so clear about my Native identity. And I also like, I literally, I've been to Native family reunion. Like I have, like... But it's so thick, the sense of not being enough, of exclusion, of erasure been so intense. And so, so that was an epiphany. And then the last piece I wanna share about the workshop itself is, I hadn't had dreams in a year or two. And over the course of that workshop, my dreams came back and that wasn't even something that I was consciously thinking of or wanting, but that something, but that is really a profound piece to me where the oppression had gotten so thick and maybe, maybe part of it also aligned with my decision to stop searching that since I wasn't also contradicting it, but it was so much work that it had pushed on me so much, right, and that this helped to contradict the oppression enough that it literally affected my dream state and my access to this key portal, through which, at times I've received a variety of different messages, mostly about my feelings and thoughts that I'm processing in a day, but also other things that have helped me navigate my life. And it was so sweet to me and interesting that this anti-oppressive healing workshop, liberatory healing workshop reopened up a part of my spiritual life as I came back home to the truth of my Indigenous lineage and identity, and to be in a space where we talked about being Cherokee and discussing our Cherokee identity and noticing, which was actually true that, in this community, that I'm a part of, this was the most beautiful workshop I'd ever attended and not because of the content, but in terms of the organization, in terms of people being kind and caring for each other, and someone naming that as being Cherokee and having something in my life that I could look to, that was real and living and intimate, and be like, yeah, I can see that. I've never been to a workshop in this community that was this well coordinated, that was this kind. And I've been to a lot of great workshops. And of course, that would be tied to the lineage that still lives in us, that we still carry some of which we own, some of us like myself are still coming into having full ownership of, and there's much more I want to say here around my ongoing work. I think the last piece that I'll want to conclude with is, and then coming out of that workshop and this leader sharing, encouraging us to incorporate these things into our daily lives, different books, different radio shows. As they were talking, it made me realize that, just as the internet has taken full bloom, that unlike when I was a kid and just had to rely on encyclopedias, which is where it was, or that there are actually, there's, and even still just this weekend, I found more things, because the internet democratizes or it makes so many more things so much more available and accessible to folks. I went to get some books about Cherokee heritage, which she encouraged, and before I could even do that, I noticed in my electronic book library that I already had a few books about Cherokee heritage. And again, like just noticing until this weekend workshop, I didn't feel that I was worthy of accessing this. And as I began reading this book, Tracie, about Native spirituality, about specifically Cherokee and also pan-Native spirituality, first of all, the divine feminine in the Cherokee language is Elohino, and I'd heard rumors about Jews, about Cherokee, about specifically the Cherokee people being descended from Sephardic Jews. And I always thought it was silly until I was actually reading this book and seeing, as someone who is a relatively learned Jew, lots of different parallels. And as I was reading this book, I just was like a crying and coming home as this Native leader talks about, where I was reading all of these things about Cherokee heritage, that I'd been looking to all these other sources during all these underground years to find, and to make sense of the things I was sensing and knowing. And it was profoundly bittersweet and beautiful to be reading this book and to see all of this was right here all along, and it is my inheritance and I get to claim it and also claim all of the inter-spiritual things I've learned through Judaism, through many other traditions that have helped me support and buttress what I know to be true in my life. And this is the central theme of my Kohenet project, which is a part of my curriculum toward ordination. But I just wanted to share that update with folks, that I'm no longer in a place of stagnation with this, and I'm in a place of active evolution and integration and reclamation around coming home to my Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw heritage and doing work near daily or anytime I think of it in my mind of contradicting the oppression of feeling shameful and not enough, to being just what my great-great grandparents dreamed of and wanted for our future, and that me reclaiming this is not appropriation, it is a part of my identity, that I do need to claim mindfully because there are other folks who inhabit and live this identity more fully, but there are also is space for me. And in the ways that you want to, Tracie, perhaps, you, too. I don't want to speak on your behalf, to begin to cultivate sovereignty and ownership of our inheritance. What I've come to realize, which again, is for a longer episode is that I was actually playing out a intergenerational pattern with my family, both Black and Native. And also, this happens within Ashkenazi Jewish identity too, but around assimilating and around hiding. The reason why I wanted to share this is because I think, as you said very clearly, a lot of Jews can relate to this in different ways, and I think all of us may have parts of ourselves that feel deeply true and tender, and we don't know. Whether it's around gender or spirituality or profession, that feels deeply true to us and it feels terrifying to face it. And so I wanted to start to incorporate it, to start to share it, one, to contradict the genocidal culture and say that it is possible despite all of this pressure to reclaim Indigenous heritage and also more broadly, for folks to demonstrate that over, it has honestly been multiple years, that this can take time and what it's looking like for me, one example of what it's looking like, to face something that I think this is true of a lot of things, that I haven't wanted to face, and I literally decided to hide for a number of years, but now has become so true and so authentic, and fully who I am that to not find a way to be open about it now feels like I'm living a lie. Rather than it being a part of my personal life, it now is something that needs to be reconciled, which I think is a relatively universal experience for a number of us around a range of things. And particularly, to be accountable to the former vice president of audacious hospitality, and even before I was in that role, one of my core bits of Torah in communal leadership has been, you can be who you are and be Jewish and belong, and you might need to shift communities or things, and I want to share that I am now going through a harrowing journey of what that can look like. And so, I want to name how terrifying it can be, and that I still believe what I taught, but I wanna model what it looks like, that it's not always as simple as, oh, I'm just gonna wear a baseball cap in this space, or I'm gonna share this one thought. But at times, that it's tied to our heart and our kishkes, and the very essence of our being, and that it is possible to do, and that hopefully, within some of what I've shared and what we opt to share,'cause I shared a lot, but there's lots of different ways through meditation, through reaching out for resources, through partnership, through chevruta, there's all kinds of tools in our tradition, and in broader liberatory practice that can support us in our own way, in our own time, to step into the wilderness of our becoming the people who we know we need to be, and recognizing there may be a cost, and also, at least for me, knowing that it will all work out and I will be better on the other side, but it's terrifying considering taking that plunge. So thanks for joining Tracie and me, as we, and more specifically, I, explored these themes very personally. Thanks for tuning in. Our show's theme music was composed by Elliot Hammer. You can find this track and other beats on Instagram @ElliotHammer. If this episode resonated with you, please share it and subscribe. To join the conversation, visit jewstalkracialjustice.com, where you can send us a question or a suggestion, access our show notes and learn more about our team. Take care until next time, and stay humble and keep going.