On lost ancestors

and how rediscovering them can illuminate our world today

Today’s essay engages with the complexity of Indigenous heritage on my father’s side of the family. I have written previously about my Ashkenazi Jewish heritage on my mother’s side. Both of these legacies have a profound impact on my life and work.

Dear Soulful Revolutionary,

About a decade ago, I was driving through Coastal Northern California with my grandmother, when she unexpectedly and casually said, “This is where my great-grandmother was from.”

I had long heard that my grandmother’s great-grandmother was the daughter of a Native American mother and a French Canadian fur trapper father. But that was all I really knew. Being in the place where she had lived suddenly made her much more real to me. I was eager to learn more about this ancestor and the people from whom she had come.

Clear Lake, California — where we were driving when my grandmother remarked that her ancestor was from this area.

Fortunately, my Grandma Lou had spent several years putting her journalism degree to good use researching and writing an extensive family history. I devoured this book, and over the years I’ve returned to read it when pangs of longing to connect with my ancestors hit hard. This has been especially true lately.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about Sarah — my great-great-great grandmother — and her mother, whose name has been lost to the violence of history. I’ve been thinking about how I am not Indigenous, and grieving what that means in terms of lost relationships with the land and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. And I have been lamenting how this is precisely what settler colonialism was designed to do.

As I have been pondering the ways in which settler colonialism shaped my family story, I have also been witnessing the ways this same violent system is actively, brutally shaping the lives of Palestinians today. The analogy is illuminating: I more clearly perceive the settler colonialism in my own family history in light of Palestine, and I better understand what is happening in Palestine as I am more deeply acquainted with my family story.

So, first a bit of my family’s story, which I’ll then put in conversation with stories from Palestine:

My ancestor Sarah was born in 1862 in Garberville, CA, in what is now southern Humboldt County. The circumstances of my great-great-great-grandmother’s birth are unclear. My grandmother, Lou Ellen Grubaugh, wrote in her book that with “few white women in the backwoods… it was not unusual for men to take an Indian wife.” The verb “take” is apt — many Indigenous women were kidnapped and forced to marry white men.

Cut off from cultural practices

Her mother may have been from the Sinkyone tribe, who had lived in the area for hundreds of years. This tribe was one of several that called the Eel River area home, where the redwoods grow tall and proud. The redwood tree — “Kahstcho” in Sinkyone — is a cousin in sacredness to the olive trees in Palestine. Treated with love and respect by the tribes of Northern California, its materials were used for clothing, canoes, shelters and woven baskets.¹

Sarah did not have opportunity to learn these cultural practices and traditions, because her mother died in childbirth with a younger sister. The girls lived with their father when he wasn’t away trapping, or with family friends who were white.

Meanwhile, an intensifying settler movement was violently disrupting tribal communities. Settlers were incentivized by the Homestead Act (passed in 1862, the same year Sarah was born), with its promise that “any citizen could claim title to 160 acres of public land if he lived on the land and improved it over five years.” They were backed up militarily by Federal Indian Policy, which forcibly removed people from their ancestral homelands.

Consequently, “In the 1860’s, the Sinkyone, along with many of the other tribes, were moved to reservations at Hoopa or Round Valley as part of Indian policy. There they suffered malnutrituion, smallpox, homesickness and other maladies… the end result was near extinction in only a little more than ten years.”

Likely because their father was white, Sarah and her sister were spared from removal. But in the process they seem to have lost any contact with their mother’s tribe.

At 18, Sarah married a man who had his heart set on raising sheep. In my grandmother’s telling, Sarah wanted to stay in California, but her husband pestered her to move to Arizona for two years, ultimately threatening to leave her if she didn’t agree to go. Planning to take advantage of the Homestead Act, the couple rode a cattle train south with their two small children.

A few things of note about the Homestead Act of 1862:

1. Citizens were eligible to take advantage of it — meaning white people. Single women were eligible, but not married women, who were not considered the legal head of household.

2. The land homesteaders could claim was “public.” In reality, this meant traditional tribal lands from which indigenous communities had been forcibly removed, or treaty lands which the US government wanted an excuse to remove tribes. The government effectively set up a situation where tribes would be threatened by incursion onto their lands, and would resist this incursion, at which point the US military would be called in to defend homesteaders, thus justifying more massacring and forced removal of tribes.

3. The land needed to be lived on and “improved.” This was in opposition to the the traditional practice among many tribes of traveling to different locales from season to season. Having settlers on the same land all the time meant greater governmental and military control.

4. A homesteader also had to be someone who had never fought against the US government. This meant that anyone who had resisted US governmental incursion into their lands (or assisted those who had tried to resist) was ineligible. There was no “right of return” for those who had resisted their land being taken in the first place.

It is a tragic irony that the daughter of an Indigenous woman would participate in the same system ethnically cleansing the land of its Indigenous peoples. A motherless child from a young age, cut off from the culture of her mother’s people, married to a man whose head of household status barred her from economic opportunities, and with two small children to feed, perhaps Sarah felt she had no choice. Maybe her reticence to leave California suggests some sense of shame she felt in becoming a homesteader.

Still, Sarah’s move to Arizona marks a shift in my family story, from indigeneity to settler colonialism. My ancestors dedicated themselves to cattle ranching (the whole sheep-raising venture didn’t pan out well). Relationship with the Sinkyone people was lost to my family. Yet there is some spiritual level on which this relationship remains intact — this was certainly true for my grandmother, who deeply valued this part of herself. I am grateful to my Grandma Lou for her work of preserving known stories and researching concurrent histories. Their telling helps me more clearly perceive the world around me.

Which brings to me to Palestine.

I have just watched the remarkable new film Where Olive Trees Weep. In it, the multilayered system Israel uses to ethnically cleanse Palestinians is devastatingly illustrated through the personal narratives of Palestinians. Its similarity to the system used by the US government to remove Indigenous people from their ancestral lands is striking.

Why settle? Cheap housing and free policing

Bassem Tamini — Palestinian political prisoner and father of the celebrated young activist Ahed Tamini — is one of these featured speakers. Surveying an Israeli settlement abutting his family’s historic land, he explains how land is rendered unlivable for Palestinians and taken by settlers:

1. Israel steals water from Palestinians, providing it to Israeli settlers at low cost while charging Palestinians exorbitant fees to access what was theirs (relatedly, Palestinians are not allowed to collect rain water).

2. The landowner stops using the land for lack of water.

3. “Israel has an Ottoman (Empire-era) law… if you don’t use your land for three years, the government can take the land.”

4. The military demolishes homes, farm equipment and water storage, confiscates the land, “and then they give it to the settlements.”

5. The settlers are then protected by the military.

This whole process of settlements has become a crucial strategy of the occupation, to the point that, according to Israeli activist Neta Golan:

“Recently, the commander of the military said that the settlement enterprise and the military are one. When the government can’t do something legally, they do it through the settlers, and then support them to legalize it. You can buy an apartment for much cheaper than if it was inside Israel. You get a quality of life that you would not be able to afford inside Israel. The state will make it as comfortable as possible in order to encourage the takeover of the land. Colonies historically function this way.”

Settler colonialism is designed to make occupying someone else’s home comfortable. But those experiencing occupation remind us that the human spirit will not tolerate this indignity.

It is terribly dangerous to resist. Violence awaits those who would dare stand up to the indignity of their ancestral land being occupied. Yet those who are oppressed cannot but rise up, the conviction of truth in their souls and the will to live in every fiber of their being.

Watching the film, I was continually reminded of the importance of listening to Palestinians telling their own stories of what has happened and is happening to them. We have the privilege and responsibility to bear witness and act for justice.

I wish I could hear my Indigenous ancestors relate their own stories. I am sure they would have told powerful stories of soulful resistance. Instead, I attend to history, unearthing what I can. I listen to those stories unfolding right now, which resonate so closely with the pain — and resilience — of the past.

And I listen to those who know that the earth’s sacredness is to be protected, like Sinkyone elder Priscilla Hunter, speaking of the land of her people:

"Here is a strong Spirit. The Creator of Life, of all the animals, the trees, everything."

Questions for reflection: What have you unearthed about your own family story? Which of your ancestors could guide you on the way to seeing this history from a new vantage point? Who helps you see the world more clearly?

1. By the 1950s, the logging industry threatened total destruction of the redwood forests. In a similar vein, by the 1990s, overfishing off the coast was threatening key supplies of fish. In recent years, powerful collective efforts have been made to realize tribal sovereignty in the region, resulting in the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council and the protection of 4530 acres of land for traditional and cultural practices.