Family Stories—Inherited Silence and The Cost of Free Land
Two recently published books both describe surprising revelations about the authors’ families’ settler colonial pasts. In spite of their common themes, the circumstances and geographies of their families’ migrations and the specific Indigenous peoples and landscapes impacted by their presence are very different for each.
In Inherited Silence—Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind (New Village Press, 2022), writing teacher and Buddhist practitioner, Louise Dunlap tells of a family she loves and the land they settled in California’s Napa Valley in the 19th century and where they remained into her lifetime. She is moved to look into the circumstances of her family’s acquisition of this land as she becomes increasingly aware as a social justice activist of the violent removal and genocide committed against America’s Indigenous people by European settlers. Dunlap discovers her family’s involvement in the removal of Wappo and Patwin people from the land nearly a century before she grew up there—a story kept silent for generations.
As she grapples with the grief of this revelation, and looking for explanations for her family’s complicity, Louise considers the concept of “colonizer mind,” defining it as “lethal disregard for the Indigenous people and their worldviews, fellow humans who’d evolved with the and knew its ways” (p. 15). It is a consciousness that allows humans to believe they can own the land, and in otherwise rational people, makes it business as usual to cheat, injure, and murder people who get in the way of possessing land that they want. In the settler worldview, Indigenous people did not know how to use the land productively and didn’t need it anyway.
Colonizer mind allowed people to compartmentalize their emotions so that they could believe they were doing extreme harm for the greater good. They could even forget that it happened and made sure to the extent possible that no one else ever knew. It is an attitude that persists when one group of people believe they have some sort of dominion or sovereignty over others. It is not limited to our country, but our country perpetuates it in other colonized countries around the world. It is what keeps certain people under the thumbs of some governments, people who are called “terrorists” when they respond violently because no other form of resistance elicits justice.
I appreciate Louise’s sensitivity to the trauma the stories she shares carry with them, and the care she takes to prepare the reader for the difficult feelings of horror and shame they may elicit. She asks the reader to take a quiet moment, a deep breath, and a meditative attitude. Not only was there trauma for the victims, but also for the perpetrators, some of whom were her own kin. She quotes Indigenous therapist Eduardo Duran who says, “the one doing the wounding wounds himself” (p. 233). Louise describes how this trauma of colonization is passed down generationally. Repairing the harmful past actions of European settler-colonizer ancestors (of which I am one also), therefore, is not just a nice thing to do, it actually becomes necessary for one’s own physical/emotional/spiritual well-being. Louise speaks about her own experience of shame and grief.
Louise also provides the reader with comforting news that harmful ancestral actions can be repaired in the present. This work of healing is an act of honoring the people who gave us life, knowing that their past harmful actions that were part of the social world they lived in, and at the same time now knowing the pain they caused that lives on into subsequent generations.
This is the story of Louise’s journey, one she would say she is still on, told with authentic, compassionate, self-awareness. It is a love story to the land and to her family and to the Wappo and Patwin people, past, present, and future. It connects for the reader the woundedness of human relationships with suffering in our natural environments. Her settler family’s story is set in California, and she also covers their initiating experiences in New England before moving westward. It is a call to every American reader of European ancestry, however, to uncover what has been silenced in their families’ histories wherever they settled. And she provides a path for healing and repair for ourselves and others.
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In The Cost of Free Land—Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance (Viking, 2023), journalist Rebecca Clarren, recounts her Jewish family’s flight from czarist Russia and settlement in the Black Hills of South Dakota at the turn of the 20th century. Her ancestors were able to avail themselves of the opportunity to own 160 acres of land offered by the Homestead Act, land taken from Lakota people before they arrived. Rebecca found herself wanting to know more than she had known about her family’s settlement in South Dakota because of a conversation with a Lakota man during a truck ride with him while she was there on a writing assignment. (She lives in Portland, Oregon.)
She stayed in conversation with this man who became a friend and helpful guide while she researched her family story alongside the story of the Lakota people there. Over several years she worked through volumes of complicated, half-hidden Indigenous history. She also was able to tap the memories of many relatives who had known her settler great-grandparents. She had access to massive amounts of family photographs and documents—a historian’s dream.
Rebecca would come to understand that her family created wealth in this country by using their initial 160 acre land grant to continue obtaining mortgages for new tracts until they owned a total of 5,840 acres, all of it originally inhabited by the Lakota. Her book deftly weaves together the stories of her ancestors’ lives in Russia, their immigration to South Dakota and the challenges they faced there, the fraught history of Lakota on that land, and her own journey to face the truth of her family’s wealth built on the tragedy of Indigenous removal and genocide. With great love and compassion, she skillfully wraps her family’s story around the darker political history of what was happening simultaneously to the Lakota people.
When Rebecca was confronted with feelings of shame and guilt over her family’s wealth obtained at the expense of what the Lakota lost, she turned to her Jewish faith to learn how to make amends, now generations later. She studied texts with her rabbi and learned that the word for “sin” in Hebrew comes from an archery term that means “missing the mark.” “Repentance” is related to the word “return.” She finds within her faith tradition the call to seek forgiveness from those harmed as a result of missing the mark, and then to return to the inherent goodness of our nature. Clarren wrote The Cost of Free Land to honor her ancestors and at the same time as an act of truth-telling, a prerequisite for repentance. As she wrote this family story, she also sought and found a way in which she and her family can make financial reparations.
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These books caught my attention because I, too, have been on a journey similar to theirs, having spent the past five or so years delving into my ancestral legacy. I had not known while doing this that others had taken up the same task, investigating the lives of ancestors who came here from Europe, and finding themselves, as I was, burdened with the legacy of settler colonialism and the genocide and removal of Indigenous people it incited. My research followed multiple lineages and migrations from England, the Netherlands, and Germany in the 17th, 19th and 20th centuries. Many of the plot points in Dunlap’s and Clarren’s journeys and mine are uncannily similar—especially as we each begin to see the moments when our ancestors’ lives come into direct opposition to the well-being of the people whose land they are settling.
If I am honest, I was initially worried that if these stories had been told (and beautifully so), then there would be no interest in publishing mine. I believe Louise would call this fear is an aspect of “colonizer mind,” a mindset of scarcity rather than abundance and generosity. I am less worried now (though of course, I am still anxious to find a publisher and move my story out into the world). All three of us find that there is a reckoning to be made on behalf of our ancestors, but each of our stories plays out in different geographies and time periods, and with different Indigenous nations.
And we bring different personalities and family circumstances to bear on our stories, each is potentially relevant to different readers. More and more descendants of European settlers are newly discovering similar stories within their own families. The variations within this theme illustrate the importance of understanding the particular circumstances of one’s own life.
The writing in both Inherited Silence and The Cost of Free Land is heartfelt and engaging. I recommend each wholeheartedly. Focusing on similar themes is the forthcoming Becoming Good Kin, by Hilary Giovale, which I also recommend. The publication of these books signals a new genre of family history work that is similar in theme though the stories are distinctive for each family, a genre I look forward to contributing to soon.
And I hope that when you read these books or any of those to come, you will begin to wonder about how your family’s past has influenced your present, particularly if you are a descendant of European settlers, what that means to you. And what it asks of you.