Obsidian
an essay on history, ancestry, and cutting ties
Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter that is currently all about whatever I am interested in. For today, that means ancestry.com, crystals, cutting ties with toxic myths, and learning to listen the past. TW: I discuss violence against Native Americans and explore some pioneer mindsets and mythology in this piece. If you would like to support my work and join a community of people interested in getting in touch with themselves and nature, join us!
On the morning of Thursday, November 28th, I knew I needed a ritual. I was trying so hard to be calm, when in the background of my mind was the running commentary that something was wrong. I, myself, was wrong.
It was a holiday in the United States, one that I had been celebrating ever since I could remember. I had learned the stories of the pilgrims and the Native Americans coming together to share a meal in my Christian homeschool textbooks and in the Charlie Brown specials that aired on TV. I remember going to my grandparents’ house, where I felt safe and warm and where we ate the same comfort foods, year after year. I remembered some of the bad years, when my mom’s mental health was so poor that my dad had to take me and my two sisters to one of the few places open in Cody, Wyoming — a local hotel restaurant filled with other sad and stressed out people.
I remembered so many memories, and I was filled with so many feelings. More than anything, I wanted to be done. Done with showing up at family holiday events that severely stressed out my nervous system. Done with pretending that everything was fine, when the Christian nationalists I had spent the past decade of my life warning people about were poised to take over my country. Done with celebrating a whitewashed genocide and calling it “gratitude.” This was my third year of ruining the extended family holiday and I knew I was done the traditions I had been so carefully trained to observe, and the dysfunctional country and family dynamics that it only exacerbated.
On Thursday, I looked at the altar I had set up in my writing room. It has a picture of my cat from childhood, a picture of my brother who passed away many decades ago. It has a metal dish filled with salt and special herbs and a few metal keys. It has candles and various rocks and scraps of incense cedar wood that I foraged on a hike. I found myself drawn to a small crystal I had just purchased for $3 from the local witchy shop: a piece of obsidian, black and shiny and almost sharp in some places, worn and brownish in others. I lit a black candle, burned a tiny bit of the cedar wood, and grabbed the obsidian, holding it in my hand. Giving it care and attention, allowing myself to notice how drawn I was to this black and shiny fragment of the earth. I lit a small black candle, and then I pulled out a small illustrated book of crystals and began to read about this piece of the earth that I felt so drawn to.
Right around the 2024 election, I knew I needed something to distract myself. I had been hard at work on my STRONGWILLED project, showing the connections between authoritarian parenting methods and a population that willingly — even gleefully — ushered in an authoritarian leader. I decided that the last week of October and the first week of November was a perfect time to try out a free two-week trial on ancestry.com1. As I had been drawn into the pagan way of life, I had naturally wondered about what my heritage was beyond white American Christianity. Where was my family from, and what rituals and beliefs and relationship to themselves and to the earth did they have before they were colonized?
I was soon sucked into the world of documents and sources and names and images — names I had heard of and names that I hadn’t. I realized how little either of my parents had ever told me about their extended families. I knew that both of my parents were born in Kansas, and that my mom’s family was Irish Catholic while my dad’s was Scottish Protestant but that was it. Through my research, I discovered that my great-great-great grandpa immigrated to the US from Kilkenny, Ireland through Ellis Island in New York. He got married in Iowa to another Irish immigrant named Mary Ann, and then in 1852 traveled the Oregon trail. 1852 was the busiest year the Oregon Trail saw, and a few years after arriving, my great-great-great grandpa was given several plots of farmland from the US government as his own. To my great shock, the land he was granted was 30 miles away from my house. My great-grandfather and my grandfather were both born so close to where I ended up, all without my ever knowing it2.
I couldn’t believe these revelations. At first I was weirdly excited: what an American story come to life! The penniless Irish Roman-Catholic immigrant who sets off on the Oregon Trail for a chance at making it in life. My great-grand father and my grandfather were born so close to me, making my connection to Oregon all the more stronger. I have always felt at home here, drawn to the greenery and the rain and temperate climate. I was born in Northern California and have lived in so many states, but I can’t imagine living anywhere but here now. Thirty minutes away from my ancestors, the original pioneers. The destitute, oppressed Catholic immigrants. The ones who risked their lives for a different, better life. The ones who took land that didn’t belong to them and believed that they had earned it. The ones who profited off the devastation and suffering of others. The ones who did not pass down their full history. The ones who settled a land that was already occupied, and who eventually weaved together a mythology of how harmonious a process this was.
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