Where I am Native

My European roots are long pulled out of their spiritual ground, my pagan spirituality excised and supplanted by by a rampaging judeo-christian overlay that made sure nothing remained of the cosmic connection between divine human and mother earth. Why, I have asked for many years? Why do we do that? Why do we do it to each other? To whales? To bees? To corn?

I could spend a lifetime – I already have – pondering that question, nursing my wounds, being shocked, angry, and hurt. Who dunnit and why did they do it? You can look, but never really find the enemy. The perpetrators are elusive – behind every tree and nowhere at all – except, mostly, inside. Inside me. Inside most anyone who looks.

That piece of information is helpful, obvious when you look for it, but not really easy to see at first. It takes a lot of looking.

And you have to know what to look for. Which is this: what is my spiritual lineage? Where am I indigenous to? Everyone, says my teacher, Marlo Paige, is indigenous to somewhere. It’s been so long since I was there that I don’t rightly know.

I do know a lot about my recent culture. Since 1799 I can trace my family to northern and central Europe. We were Mennonites, early and earnest Protestant activists, German and low-German speakers. Also, early hippies – travelling northern Europe in search of freedom to practice our religion (direct link to God through prayer and introspection without the need for priests and ritual) and culture (we were pacifists in an era of war, as well as communal socialists who believed in private property for individuals in the context of a community of people who worked together for the whole).

The Mennonites negotiated land contracts throughout the Ukraine with the Empress Catherine who wanted to colonize her new territory with hardworking farmers. The Mennonites got her to promise they wouldn’t have to go to war, and for that they received tracts of land to manage and govern as they wished. And when those colonies became crowded, the adventurous pushed east and north, into Russia near the Ural Mountains, up to eastern Siberia, and even to what is now Kazaktstan, where they farmed with camels.

They may have been Protestant activists, part of a new wave of religious thinking that eshewed the need for priests in favour of a direct line to God, but they were very much people of their day. They believed the Bible was the Word of God, and lived by its tenets. They didn’t differ from the Catholics in the original sin theory, and believed that all humans were born into sin—essentially born bad—and that our only hope for deliverance from our inherent evil nature was to accept Christ as personal Saviour and follow the laws of God. Judeo-Christian to the core, they believed both the old and the new testaments. They were also landowners and farmers and German, and so when Stalin’s government came to power after the revolution that aimed to displace landowners and religious people, the Mennonites were no longer chosen people, but suffered persecution, famine and displacement from the place they’d called home for 150 years. Members of my family were sent to Stalin’s infamous Gulags, some died there, a few as martyrs for their faith.

By the time I was born in the early 60s, my parents’ families had come to Canada and were in the process of putting down roots in this newish country with many opportunities and religious freedom – at least for the white, northern Christian Europeans. My father in particular, who came to Canada as a Displaced Person when he was fourteen, saw Canada as the promised land. And he would brook no criticism of its policies, governance, or leaders.

In the middle of the twentieth century I was raised with fundamental judeo-christian beliefs like original sin, and rules to live by if I didn’t want to burn in hell forever. It was not trivial to be raised with this kind of brainwashing. It was everything I knew. And because I disagreed, at my core, with so much of it – the patriarchy, the religious roles and rules, the hypocrisy, the superstitious ignorance—I was thrown off balance when I became an adult, and responsible for my self in the real world.

The religion was no nature-based philosophy with guidelines for how to move in harmony with the seasons and cycles of life. The religion didn’t provide any comfort unless one followed its rules, and these rules came from a book considered holy, which I learned had been translated to serve certain cultural, political and historical means, and interpreted by men. The religion taught us to be “in the world, not of the world,” creating a sense of separateness for me, setting me up for life on the fringe.

Rejecting the religion and culture, as I did when I was a teenager, triggered in me an identity crisis, a lack of direction, and a lack of grounding. Although my roots were not very deeply planted on this continent, rejecting these religious beliefs meant rejecting my culture and to a certain extent my family.

Luckily my mother left the church at this time, when she was fourty-four, so I had an ally in her, although she recalls her experience as very solitary. Her family of ten siblings did not understand or support her decision; my dad certainly did not see eye to eye with his wife. All my siblings too, dropped out, and only my dad was left to practice. This created a split between us – I felt he didn’t understand me and he felt I was wrong.

I remember the confusion I experienced when I left home. Partly I was excited, and mostly I was terrified. I wondered constantly: What happens if I don’t follow these rules? What happens if I don’t believe this? At that time, I didn’t have much cultural capital – a high school education – and certainly no financial capital. I really did leave to seek my fortune. But I wasn’t looking for money.

No, I was looking for meaning. If I didn’t believe that, then what did I believe? If I wasn’t that, then who was I? I’m still seeking answers. Though I have learned a few things, I still have many – more than ever – questions.

Like, where am I indigenous to? What is my native or innate spirituality? What did my ancestors believe before they were bowled over by rampaging Christianity? Or were my ancestors part of the Christianizing hordes?

There is no clear documentation of who the Mennonites were before they were the Mennonites. They have no original mythology – only the judeo christian stories trasmitted via the Bible. I come from, likely, some northern European tribe – either Germanic, Nordic, or Slavic. It’s easy to guess we were Germanic (or Teutonic) because we spoke German and Low German and our first recorded history starts in Holland. But a lot of Europeans spoke Low German in medieval Europe because the German tribes contributed to the Christianization of Europe after the decline of the Roman Empire.

Before Christianization, the Germanic tribes practiced paganism, which seems to be a blanket term, used to describe pre- or non-Abrahamic religions, indigenous and aboriginal spiritualities around the world, and contemporary non-Christian eastern religions. Pagans believe in many gods or no god at all, and have no written text or code to follow. Pagan comes from the Latin, country-dweller, and Pagan practices were nature-based. Spiritual, rather than religious.

Even as a young child, my mom says she was aware that the core beliefs of her culture and religion did not make sense. She disagreed with the fundamental belief that the human is born bad, thus requiring salvation by certain beliefs and practicse. At first she defined her beliefs by what she didn’t accept. Thinking about what she does believe she says, We are all divine, all part of the divine, each person part of a whole. All of life is interconnected; it comes from somewhere and goes somewhere. She accepts that not everything can be explained.