Can White indigenous practices be a thing? (Please read before you @ me.)
A few months ago, a dear White-bodied kindred spirit asked me if I would hold space for her as she discerned an important question for herself: should she continue to wear her long hair in locs?
As a person with a deep sense of activism (and one who truly does walk the talk), she understands how in our American culture it’s very problematic for a White-bodied person to wear the hairstyle, and her locs also hold a deep spiritual meaning and narrative for her.
She asked me to bear witness to her discernment because she knows I am a White-bodied woman who works in anti-racism and specifically with White bodied people to deconstruct Whiteness, White power dynamics, and White pseudosupremacy. She also sought out the counsel of a beloved who is Black for her discernment process as well.
My friend and I share a Celtic heritage and during our conversation — and this is the reason I bring this up — she told me that she had recently learned that before they were colonized by the British, the Celts often wore their hair in locs just like hers. In fact, many White-bodied cultures historically wore the style before they were colonized, separated from their land and their indigenous practices, and forced into the pristine confines of Christianity…
…the kind of Christianity where Jesus was most certainly White with ripped abs, and most definitely not Brown-skinned or loc-laden…
…and I’ve held this info in my brain ever since, because I never knew it before.
The other day I had cause to look up the history of Shamanism, and I was surprised to discover that the word is actually derived from languages spoken in Europe and Asia (specifically the Tungus people in Russia).
I’d always associated the word with either Native Americans, South American medicine people, and perhaps African tribal customs. That’s what my White ignorance will get you. But this got me thinking.
White people are often (rightfully so) accused of cultural appropriation…
…mostly because we are very good at culturally appropriating a lot of things…like yoga and music and food and geometric patterns on clothing and yes, hairstyles, too…
…and we should be called out for this practice. As the dominant culture we are a hungry and insatiable beast, and the problem with the ways in which we appropriate is at the very least twofold.
First, there is the problem that when the populations that originated a particular style or practice do it, they are often punished, policed, or somehow Othered for it.
But stick a box braid on a White chick and suddenly she’s a fashion-forward style icon.
Which brings me to the second issue, which is profitability. We take what we as a dominant society deemed less than and “savage”, claim it as our own then profit from it, all while telling the people who actually are from that culture that they need to align more with Whiteness in order to be “professional” or “acceptable” or “respectable”…or something.
We build whole industries around these ideas that are not ours, which also leads to whole fortunes.
And we have no real obstacles in our way while we do it — at least not systemic ones. In our hubris, we even sometimes decide the cultural ways need some good ole’ fashioned White-washing, label it a “refresh” and sell it for ridiculous prices (you can see that kind of caucasity here, along with the non-apology that was issued).
All of this does harm to the communities we’re stealing from. It devalues their cultural practices and the real meanings behind the things we’re stealing; it perpetuates their oppression and our dominance; it maintains the pseudosupremacist system of insatiable White consumption.
In other words: White cultural appropriation = bad.
But hold up there, Skippy.
What if…
What if it’s also indicative of something else?
What if it is not just an ugly byproduct of dominance and our systemic oppression of others?
What if it is actually pointing to something deeper, something important, something that could lead us to our own (White) healing if we’re willing to travel that road?
A while back, author Carolyn Elliott made a typical White faux-pas when she posted on her instagram feed that she, as a White person, is indigenous too. Right on cue — and rightfully so — she experienced a vitriolic backlash and soon after, offered an apology.
I didn’t actually see the post at that time — I only read about it after the fact and then looked it up — but it resonated with me deeply.
Although it was poorly delivered, dripping with a sense of White entitlement and the hint of a middle-finger-if-you-don’t-agree kind of hubris (which, when coming from Whiteness to an indigenous population, is REALLY problematic), I think Elliott was on to something.
In fact, I think she was onto something so deep and so true that it scares the shit out of all of us.
In case you go and read Elliott’s post, let me be very, very, VERY clear about something be for you @ me with vitriol similar to what she got when she posted.
When it comes to the whole idea of victimhood or victim mentality, I have clear boundaries around this, especially when it comes to issues of identity and systemic oppression. I know that spiritual gurus love to tell us that “victim mentality” is keeping us oppressed and we can only be a victim if we allow it. I get what that kind of teaching is trying to do.
HOWEVER.
It’s super cozy to be a member of the oppressive group and tell someone else…
…especially someone else that we’re oppressing — even if we don’t realize yet that we’re the oppressive ones or feel like we are…
…to stop feeling victimized already.
So my rule is that you only get to tell your own self to stop being a victim.
But if you tell me that you are being structurally oppressed and I have the power to do something about it, then my only job is to help dismantle that oppression.
It’s NOT to tell you that you suffer from victim mentality and that you should “free your mind.”
That’s some serious spiritual bypass-y bullshit and I’m not here for it. I do feel that Elliott’s post — and a lot of the comments supporting her — included a pretty heaping dose of victim blaming and spiritual bypassing, and I want us to do the exact opposite of that.
So now that we’ve got that out of the way, before I get to the crux of the matter I want to make another point: the bend toward justice that the moral arc of the universe is doing is indeed in motion, and motion indicates movement. That means that as we as a society travel toward justice — that place some people might call the realm of God — we are also moving through stuff. We move through phases of understanding and learning and evolution, and a lot of that feels really shitty.
Like right now. Right now feels pretty shitty if you ask me.
But it also means that we need to expand into the movement rather than resist it, even if it means that we release old paradigms that were aligned with justice so we can hold new ones that are more aligned with justice. Or at least with the kind of healing necessary to get to the justice part.
Stay with me here.
Because what if what Elliott was pointing to was true?
When I learned about White people wearing locs, and shamanism coming from European origins, and as I have learned about trauma (and especially the White on White trauma that my European ancestors perpetrated against each other), I’m realizing within me a deep longing for my own old ways.
I want to learn the ways of my people — the old Irish wisdom that is buried somewhere deep in my DNA, right there next to the trauma of the famine and the arranged marriages and the alcoholism and the abandonment at orphanages.
I want to reclaim the women’s wisdom that was beaten out of us with hangings and drownings and burnings at stakes.
I want to reconnect with the land and draw out its medicine — not this stolen land on which I am an unwelcome visitor but the land of my own people. I want to find the old language and hear it spoken over me in the Irish — shamanic blessings of suaimhneas over my very being.
As I feel this stirring within me, I began to wonder if the insatiable hunger for all things indigenous in White people like me is — buried deep beneath its harmful ways — actually a search for our own reclamation.
We call the Africans who we kidnapped, trafficked and enslaved feral and we called the indigenous Americans savage, then we did our best to shove them into the box of Whiteness and told them they’d never actually fit, but they should try.
But we shoved our own selves in that same box and lost our wildishness. We tamed our own selves, domesticated our natures with grocery stores and refrigerators, office machinery and cell phones, capsules and chemo and we’ve segregated ourselves from our very own healing Mother to such a degree we don’t recognize Her or ourselves anymore.
When we look at the people who are still human — the medicine people and the shamans and the earth mothers and the weavers and the people who work the land — we don’t see ourselves in them anymore. So we attempt to animalize them but really — they are the most human of all. And we — we have lost so much of what makes us human for trying to hold dominion over all of it.
So this is what I wonder:
If the journey toward justice that we are on — this slide down that moral arc of the universe — is going to bring us through different phases of evolution, is it possible for White people to rediscover our indigenous nature in a way that is not harmful?
What would that require? Of White people? Of the BILPOC communities we have irreparably harmed?
Do we even get to ask for any more grace?
My hair grows wild these days. It is down to my waist and holds an indecisive curl, so in the summer months I let it air dry and do what it will. Brushing it is pointless — it only goes to frizz if I do that.
Every time I look in the mirror and see my unbrushed hair — its unruly and wild and completely untrained waves — I wonder what it would be like to exist unboxed.
I also wonder: would I do it well? Or would I render my freedom pointless by stomping all over everyone else’s?
This is the question White people need to ask ourselves as a collective. If we were to peel back the layers and find our inner shaman, to connect with our own indigenous natures, is it even possible for us, at this point, to set down our association with dominance?
Could we practice our own ways well if we indeed were able to rediscover them? Will it always look like appropriation even when it is authentic seeking?
The BILPOC communities who have been decimated by Whiteness owe us nothing, and they especially don’t owe us this. Should they choose to offer us healing through their practices they would be offering a gift of incredibly generous proportions, and hopefully we would use it well to find our way back to our own.
I don’t know what any of this would look like. This is a matter of my own wondering, my own seeking. I do know White people — we’ll probably screw it up. We will make mistakes. We will require more than our fair share of grace, and I fear we’ve already used it all up.
But I also know that right now, I feel more aligned with wildishness and the lilt of the Irish.
I know I want the ways of the witch — the women’s wisdom that sought peace and harmony with the earth and all who are in it — not the dominion of man and men over everything. In fact, I’m really tired of that dominion. It hasn’t served any of us.
So I’d love to hear from you — do you think that we, as White people, can rediscover our indigenous nature in ways that are helpful, healing and healthy, rather than harmful? Let me know your thoughts.
I’d love to connect with you! Check out my website at www.kerryconnelly.com
If you’d like to book a call to talk about having me speak to your organization, consulting services, or my new curriculum, Deconstructing Whiteness, you can book a call with me here.
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