By Kirsten Mowrey

“Transform yourself to transform the world.”—Grace Lee Boggs, Detroit activist

Humidity weighted the autumn air as I walked across the University of Michigan Ann Arbor campus. Vermilion ivy coated the walls of the buildings while orange trees stood like flames amid the evergreen shrubs lining the sidewalk. In the distance, I heard chants of a protest on State Street as I sauntered through the prismatic glass entrance of the art museum.

Immediately to my left was an information desk whose minder greeted each guest to the museum and directed them accordingly. A comfortable array of lounges and chairs invited me and my friends to pause and chat. We proceeded to our left; tall windows on our right illuminated the hallway. We stopped in a three-story atrium: balconies on three sides with a long black wall filled with text and a photo on our right. The balcony walls were painted with the same words in two languages. The words hit my body like a wave.

Gidayaa Anishinaabewakiin. You are on Anishinaabe land.

I breathe in.

Native American images are woven throughout the United States’ story of itself. Growing up, I played “Cowboys and Indians” with friends, watched the 1970’s infomercial of a Native man crying as he gazed upon a polluted landscape, and celebrated Thanksgiving and its accompanying story of gift giving each year. But slowly, over time, the unexamined edifice of American “Manifest Destiny” began to erode in my mind as I read our history and traveled, observing the difference between the story told and historical fact.

In 2019, I visited the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC. In a spacious upstairs exhibit hall, I viewed the “Americans” exhibit filled with images and items with images of Native people: cans, motel signs, posters, movies, food, seals, coins, clothing, statues, and multiple other items—many were familiar backdrops in my everyday life. I craned my neck to look high toward the ceiling while the exhibit pointed out the pervasiveness of Native images and yet unintentionally, the ignorance of Native people and their lifeways. (There is an online version of this on the Smithsonian website: https://americanindian.si.edu/americans). My takeaway was that, though I am surrounded with images and ideas of Native peoples, I have little experience of them as people; it’s mostly a hazy indistinct amalgam. I know more of other lands and cultures than these people geographically closer. Rarely have I seen them portrayed as embodied present-day human peoples with complex histories.

To become conscious of Indigenous people as peoples and disperse the cultural fog requires bringing consciousness to these hazy, fuzzy memories and ideas. In Becoming Kin, Patty Krawec writes,

“We hold knowledge in ways that we can articulate and explain to others and also in ways that are less tangible….we just know….we don’t have a language for what we’re trying to explain or it doesn’t even occur to us that it needs explaining….The trick is to get those assumptions from where they rest inside you or inside our broader society out to a place where you can articulate them. To move those unspoken things from implicit to explicit so they can be challenged or reconsidered” (17-18).

To make the unconscious conscious—that that is the work of anyone who chooses a spiritual path. It is why we practice meditation, yoga, prayer, contemplation, or any of the myriad of spiritual practices developed throughout human history. We bring our attention to ourselves, our habits, blind spots, assumptions, actions and reactions, patterns, and shadows to learn more about how we are moving in the world so that we can move in the way we want to—to align mind, body, and spirit. To look at my assumptions about Native peoples, who they are—including the variety of cultures that get lumped under the term Native—is to begin to bring awareness and light to the murky learnings and remembrances of my youth, to mature in my view of the world, and then to re-examine them in the fresh light of day.

Future Caches, the University of Michigan Museum of Art installation by Andrea Carlson, is the lens through which I will let other’s stories move me from self-absorption. It takes up the entire atrium of the new wing of the museum. On the left wall are two visual pieces surrounded by a thick zig-zagging black and white border, distorting my vision, and reminding me of when the television screen is blurred; I have to focus intently. A graveyard in the foreground of the leftmost image leads to bucolic lake and sky in the background with the words “Give me knowledge/ so I may/ have kindness/ for all.” On the right image is a beach strewn with discarded towels and swimwear that extends back into another forested lakeside under a cloud studded sky. Another wall has framed paper creations and poems over some items from the University’s Archeological collection. Each display has a QR code that allows you to hear the exhibit in Anishinaabemowin, a collaboration with Ojibwe.net, a non-profit preserving the language. The poems are typeset, lovingly framed editions of heart slicing pain. Beauty in image and word, juxtaposed with stories of pain--particularly the dominant display of the long eastern wall, going up all the way to the building’s highest level, painted black with text in English and Anishinaabemowin.

On it, Carlson tells an abbreviated story of the Burt Lake Band of Ottawa and Chippewa, their meetings with settlers, their dispossession of their land, and the fire that damaged their community. The facts are that October 15, 1900, local militia illegally seized their land and burned their homes. The Burt Lake Burn-out, as it is known, is one of Michigan’s forced relocations. With the loss of their land, the Burt Lake Band lost their federal recognition, their sovereign status, and access to funding and services. I am small standing next to the narrative wall, my neck stretched as I look into the distance at the first words of their story. Facts only ever tell one part of the story—historical events made to sound simple, cut and dried; living the facts is messier. On the wall nearby, an art piece expresses this: it shows a colorful triangle rising to touch a descending starry triangle. The bottom depicts an Assomption Sash, used in Native regalia, while the starry sky is that of October 15, 1900; the past overhanging the present.

Nearby, a map shows Burt Lake Band’s ancestral lands are now part of the University of Michigan Biological Station. The University of Michigan itself was made possible from an Indigenous land grant, part of the 1817 Treaty of Foot of the Rapids/Fort Meigs, with the request that Anishinaabeg children be educated alongside settler’s children. That 1817 “land grant” was actually “land speculation and government pressure [that] pushed indigenous peoples to treat or sell, lest they be smothered by incoming settlers or driven out following violent battle with militiamen and military officers” (Dawn of Detroit, 235).

I think back to the museum exhibit in Washington: the prolific use of Native images allows and encourages me in a false narrative: white people came here and now the land is ours. Sure, there was strife, but that was the past, not the present; it’s all over now, that’s why we have these images, they are memory. Except exhibits like Carlson’s show that those events aren’t past—they are the present and creating the future. Denial of the Burt Lake Burn-out and lack of federal recognition in the present means perpetuating the beliefs of 1900; it means living in a worldview of white supremacy and entitlement that sets one group’s needs above others, it means a daily habit of not looking at our history, my history. The founding of this nation, the creation of these United States, was done through a series of wars, an attempted systemic genocide of the people living here when Europeans arrived. Susan Raffo calls this our “original wound” in her book Liberated to the Bone. Here is my first step in moving from Whyte’s prison of denial: listening to how white settler’s actions on this continent, and specifically here in Michigan, affected the Native people living here which was not only the Anishinaabeg. According to Native Lands website, the area around Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti hosted several groups: the Bodwéwadmi (Potawatomi), the Meškwahki-aša-hina (Fox), the Myaamia, the Wyandot, and the Peoria peoples.

How does one speak of so great a loss—the physical place where hundreds of generations of your ancestors birthed, created homes, raised families, celebrated, and died? A loss that is still ongoing, where you drive by each day? Carlson’s visuals attempt this: though two pieces take up an entire wall, they are predominantly a visual “white noise” of black and white, leading to a much smaller aperture with the landscape. It’s the space around, the silences that communicate grief, loss, and heartache.

I stand before the images, allowing them to sink in, letting that pain touch me, feel my heart clench with pain in my chest. What I discover is an answering ache inside myself. My own ancestors left their homelands, where all the cycles of birth, families, and death had happened, where they were indigenous, and their grief and loss of leaving that landscape is embedded in my lineage. That grief is a wound “raw and bleeding, never able to heal” (Raffo), that spirals out to encompass all of us, adding layers of social, emotional, political, and collective complexity, until we cannot see the original wounding. An immense, multigenerational wound, one too big for anyone to hold alone.

I struggle still to touch that wound, to hold the complex awareness that while the Native people were harmed, the white settlers were also seeking refuge. Raffo writes “Europeans brought their wounds from across the ocean and planted them here. Those wounds included a sense of disconnection from land and the idea of ownership…these wounds had evolved in Western Europe for thousands of years….even those who came seeking heaven on earth brought their wounds” (34-35). Resmaa Menakem calls this “blowing trauma,” when those who are wounded and traumatized take actions that wound and traumatize others. The more I listen, the more I hear the harm of our national story, and the more I recognize that at the root, this story—our story, my story is a tangle of trauma and reactivity, pain fled rather than healed, numbness rather than a rich sensory liveliness of being.

How do I, becoming aware of this history, act to no longer deny or perpetuate it? How do I turn toward my grief of my ancestor’s terrible actions that I benefit from and work with it? And, as a descendant of settlers, where do I belong? These questions are my guides, and the answers are multiple, varying, and circumstantial. Some days, it means to listen and learn, as when I visit the installation. Other days, it means tender work of being vulnerable sharing this process of discovery with other white people. Psychologist Francis Weller writes of becoming the welcome we are seeking: welcoming grief, sadness, regret, and any other emotions our culture labels as “difficult.” I breathe in and out, touching my reactivity, my triggers, being with my own fear, pain, and uncertainty, giving it space and time. Once I calm myself and can be present with my feelings, I know this: these Great Lakes, this land beneath my feet, is home to me. It is where I am at peace—not “the absence of challenge,” writes bell hooks, “but in our own capacity to be with hardship without judgement, prejudice, and resistance. We discover that we have the energy and the faith to heal ourselves through an openheartedness.” She names this openheartedness “love.” Love as action, as under my will, not something that I fall into, but how I choose to face the world. Once I turn toward the world with love, I find myself capable of accepting that this land is full of “troubled relationships needing an ethical response,” to quote author Tiya Miles. What does an ethical response to these historical relationships, and my benefit from them, look like?

One guide is Rebecca Clarren. In The Cost of Free Land, Clarren tells the story of her Jewish ancestors who fled to the Dakotas from Europe and farmed land there that had been taken from Lakota peoples. Her journey begins with this wisdom from Yurok and California Judge Abby Abinanti: “Study the culture and traditions of your own people to learn how to respond to a harm… Every culture has experience with being wrong, with finding a way forward. We’re all human and we all make mistakes” (8). While she untangles the knot of family history, white supremacy, treaty violations, and land seizure, she also pursues hevruta, a traditional Jewish form of paired study. “Every other week,” she writes, “my rabbi and I would meet to read ancient Jewish texts that proscribe how to atone and reconcile after a harm has been committed, even, and especially, one that a person didn’t cause directly but did benefit from. We would find, in every layer of Jewish writing—that, before you can fix anything, you must tell the truth, not just to God, but out loud to the entire community” (8). Clarren and her rabbi then created a course to do exactly that for her synagogue. People’s responses varied, as they will, yet again, a beginning was made.

For those of us not of the Jewish faith, restorative justice offers a path of practice, starting with listening to the harm you have caused another. Visiting Andrea Carlson’s installation and spending time writing, engaging, and dreaming with it is my practice with that step, being present with this particular part of this large, wounding story. As bell hooks says: “Addressing woundedness is not about blaming others; however, it does allow individuals who have been, and are hurt, to insist on accountability and responsibility both from themselves and from those who were the agents of their suffering as well as those who bore witness. Constructive confrontation aids our healing” hooks writes in all about love -232-233. Practicing accountability and responsibility means learning whose land you live on (you can do that here: https://native-land.ca/.) When I offer community events, I name whose land I live on. This is a tiny step, and yet, it is a gesture with meaning. It is a recognition of the nation’s founding wound, that this land was not magically given to white settlers but taken through war and death. I find this step particularly important within the New Age and white healing communities. Acknowledging land theft speaks to history, not romanticism or nostalgia. Clarren and her family, in unwinding their theft of land, contribute to the Indian Land Tenure Foundation (iltf.org), a non-profit with the goal of recovery and control of Indigenous lands to their original peoples. The Clarrens are not alone: many churches, institutions, and organizations back up their land acknowledgments with a financial contribution to the original stewards of the land or an organization like ILTF.

From the first step of listening, the next step is to let the harmed know that we have heard them, and that we will change our behavior to not repeat that harm. We move beyond denial and resistance and toward our grief: for our losses, our errors, our reactivity, and the harm we caused. Abinanti says, “Now is the time for people to come forward and take responsibility for their one tiny thread of this much larger story, which is how everybody in this country has benefited from the murder and theft of Indians.” Patty Krawec says it even more simply: “return to yourself and pick up your bundle.” To accept responsibility for my own bundle: my family, my self, all the ways I consciously or unconsciously contribute to harm, my grief, regret, and shame. All the times I act from my compassion, from connection, from love and my heart, is to be responsible for my own bundle. To act from love, to welcome all that is present in this historical time: It is all spiritual folk aspire to in our practice, to bring our best selves forward in the present moment.

David Whyte writes in Consolations, “Denial comes to a natural end through the force of attention and intentionality to the horizon of understanding.” We can only stop the cycle when we turn inward and pay attention to ourselves, to what we are doing, disentangling our unconscious patterns. Our work with race, with our national history, is no different. As former Supreme Court justice William J. Brennan said, “We must meet the challenge rather than wish it were not before us.”

This is the final essay in a three-part experiment in being present with the experience of Arab-American, African-Americans, and Native Americans. What I discovered is grief—deep grief, and my ability to come into relationship with all of these groups through my own experiences and feelings of grief. In relationship, we discover we are not separate—I am not separate from these communities, but involved in a wide, wounded, historically difficult relationship that will take lifetimes beyond my own to untangle. But I can begin here, with the grief we hold in common. Psychologist Miriam Greenspan calls this our “intervulnerability:”

“We are vulnerable to one another. What happens halfway around the globe, is suddenly right here, in our living rooms, in our office rooms, in our streets and in the innermost chambers of our hearts. Now is the time to break through the bounds and confines of old forms of thinking, acting, and feeling…our only protection is in our interconnectedness. Grief is not just “my” grief; it is the grief of every witness to horror in the world.”

In any relationship I have, listening is a requirement—to understand and develop intimacy with the person before me, to make my heart spacious to others’ experiences, and to experience more of the world and be present with them. It is only the beginning.

Gidayaa Anishinaabewakiin. You are on Anishinaabe land.

Andrea Carlson’s Future Cache will be at the University of Michigan Museum of Art through June 2024. Kirsten Mowrey is a massage therapist, somatic educator, ritualist, and writer who can be found at kirstenmowrey.com.