Welcome back, everyone, to our end of life conversations weekly dispatch. Dispatch. Dispatch. It's fun that we landed on one. This week, we've had a little bit of check-in uh since Ana Luisa returned from some journeys. And we thought that there were some really uh juicy insights and experiences that she had that we would like to chat about in the podcast space. In our friendship page. In our friendship space. That's right. So all of you get to share. That's right. Well, and friendships and spiritual space, right? Like it's it's all of it because it is this is a both a spiritual yearning and an actual historical piece. So it's a lot of ands. And yes, and yes, yes, and yeah. So you want to take it away? Sure. So I was just traveling through Ireland and Scotland. And the whole purpose of me going there was that I wanted to dig deep and touch base with the indigenous aspect of people from this land. Because oftentimes, well, it's not oftentimes, a few times in my spiritual direction career, a few pretensies. Um, I've had people who are not indigenous or people of color from this continent who call to me and say, Hey, I want to know more about your spiritual ancestry and your spiritual ways of being connected to the divine. And I am called to what you do. And my response is always, I this is this feels like an appropriation rather than an appreciation. And I and I've told a few people for the last two years, like, I think you should go and research your indigenous background. And people are always kind of flummoxed by that notion because what do you mean? I don't have indigenous backgrounds. As a white person, I'm just a white. I don't have culture, I don't have a racial background, I don't have anything, right? And that always surprised me when that when that was given to me. And so I had an opportunity to go to Scotland and I started researching this because there are places in there that are very old, and there have been peoples from beyond, you know, our historical time capture capturing. And so I went there and I started out with Belfast because I wanted to learn more about uh the troubles. And the troubles are the time when the Catholics and the Protestants were fighting each other violently. And so I spent some time there, and I want to tell you that I felt such grief being in Belfast and walking through those spaces and recognizing that this happened, you know, decades ago, but we're still in that same space when my religion trumps trumps your religion and you know you don't you don't count. Uh that is a very big uh loss of our humanity, I think, in terms of how we can understand each other and love each other. And care for each other, yeah. And care for each other, yeah. Yeah. And and it, you know, when you were talking about that before, I was really relating, resonating with the whole thing, because my my indigenous, if if they're indigenous, would go all the way back to that same part of the world, um, England, more likely England and Scotland. And um and I have done some exploration of those folks, uh, not not as far back as when they were actually indigenous. Right. But but you know, at least back into the and and the suffering that's been caused forever and ever, and is being caused today by um by that divise divisiveness and that dip, you know, that vi division of you are you are right and you are wrong, um, is just is so real and it's caused so much pain and suffering. I have a you know many of my um relatives going back were Christian uh missionaries, and I have a special bug in my bonnet about missionaries, you know. Uh because, you know, what are they doing, you know? Um so anyway, it just it just it has caused so much harm. And I think about that because for me and my my people and and I'd love to hear more about what you found as far as because it's another it's an exploration I'd like to do sometime too. Um what how what what do you what do you find when you're looking for the actual indigenity of the European, of the European folks, Western, you know, European. Yeah, and I haven't I haven't gotten far enough back, but I did when I got to the Orkney Island, I uh that was where the Picts, the Celtics, the Vikings, all these folks actually went through this space. And I was reading a book by Bernard Um Cornwall, uh Stonehenge, which was such a great book, and it was about the building of Stonehenge. But, you know, there were there were people who were less than, even in those times. Yeah. They were the the peasants, the country folk, the the ones who, you know, I also read the book on Scottish witchcraft, which also, you know, I wanted to honor the fact that there's a bunch of people trying to use Palo Santo and Copal, you know, and they're white presenting, and they're like, this is mine for giving spiritual spaces, it's sacredness. But we have mugwart, you know, we have Rose from these other places, we have other scents that those ancestors actually really delighted in as well. So I found that there's a lot of grief and sadness and loss based on how others came and decimated a group of people. The the Picts were, you know, I in my mind right now, I don't know, I have not stopped studying this, but they were the indigenous crew that were kind of around, they were land-based people. They were doing things in their own ways, right? The Celtics were very land-based, uh spiritually grounded. You know, and why did some of these people get moved out? It was because when capitalism rose, they needed to get off the land in order to clear the land for capitalist growing of, you know, sheep, animal husband animal husbandry. You know, they needed to clear the land. And some of the trauma that I also found out about was that they would take these very poor country folk and they would ship them to Australia. They would ship them to the United States. So imagine that big void in you that is taken away, that you're taken away from your land. Your, your, your ancestors. I think there is some, there is a loss that a lot of American US citizens who come from this background, they must feel it and they're they're searching for something, and they're asking, you know, the Native Americans in this land to help fill it. But there is something to be said to go back to your land and find the ways. Sam, take it away. I think you have a lot of information on this. Yeah, you've been doing some work with this too. You have been doing some this and and just to like maybe plug a little bit, like this is a critical part of the ministry that I'm developing. Um, and I have started helping some people. I haven't traveled. I haven't been like financially able to travel to any of these places. And there's a great like um longing in myself to do that because of these kinds of experiences of like first-hand information and stories from my dad when he went on his walkabout and backpacked through Europe and the the Near East um in his twenties, and how he recounts his sense of magic and personal attunement, a personal like m medicine power. Yes, yeah, being totally different on that land. You could feel you could feel in his body the attunement to those places. Yeah. Um so just the disclaimer that that the work that I've been doing is remote but long and and intentional and um and yeah, the what you're saying, Ana Luisa, about you know, being dispossessed of your ancestral lands and then shipped to another place to become the colonizer is part of the trauma that we carry and part of that void. And a lot of the conversations I've had of people who have stories of grandparents um or parents who immigrated to the United States is the cultural assimilation pressure that is the myth of the melting pot. The myth in the sense of a falsehood. Myth can be, you know, also metaphorical, deep, deep understanding, but but the the false narrative of the melting pot that we have in this country, which is much more uh in in reality is assimilate or suffer. Right. And what are we assimilating to? I just that's so crazy. I hadn't thought about that since like second grade when they talked or third grade when they're like the melting pot. The United States is the melting pot for all of these immigrants, which you know, I was raised thinking like, yeah, we're all becoming Americans. But what does it actually mean, right? Like nonprofit. The religion of money. Exactly. So, you know, we we do have a loss when we can't come with our own cultural pieces. Uh, I don't know. I just it's just so huge for me. It's it really is a painful, it is painful. It vexes my soul for all of us. Yeah. Yeah. You know, for everybody who's been, like you said, dispossessed and taken from their land, taken from their ancestral knowing. Right. And so, and so, you know, there's there's the pressure to fit in. And so, you know, people aren't speaking their native language, which is a codex of of understanding, place-based understanding. Because of the because of the way a language develops in place. Right. And then there's also that trauma of I lost all this stuff. And so it's so painful to talk about it, to reference any of it. Uh and dangerous. And dangerous. And dangerous. That's a whole other piece. Yeah. But why do you say that, Wakil? Oh, because I'm not sure. Yeah, go ahead, Wachil. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because well, what what I'm realizing, or what I'm thinking about with that is a lot of people when they came in, my my uh wife is Jewish, so a lot of people who came from Jewish backgrounds um didn't want to speak the language, didn't want to speak Yiddish, didn't want to admit they were Jewish, they wanted to change their names because it was dangerous to be other. You know, and I think that's true. My experience was talking to people of other other cultures too. When you come here and and think of that too, we talked about uh last time, I think uh Sam and I talked about the plants that get transferred here and we decide to rip them out of the ground, right? That hubris we have. But what's lost by that? What how much have we lost by not bringing that culture with us, by not uh sharing that culture? If there actually was a melting pot, this could be an incredibly dynamic and wonderful and full and creative uh culture. But because of that ripping it out and that sense of you're not safe, you're not safe if you if you don't fit in. We've lost so much. It's it is deep, deeply painful. And I wonder if that's part of that yearning that so many people have that they can't identify it, right? And so they glom onto something and they're or they are asking, they're begging for something that could be theirs too, but it's really not really what they're looking for. They need to fill their cup with their own medicine, with their own history, with their own ancestral uh connection. Yeah. And how do we do that in this space? That's a really good thing to think about, you know, because there, I mean, on the one hand, we're in a position now in our world of communication where we can actually learn about, tap into the cultures of any place, anywhere, anytime, right? And so if we do have that deep hole in our hearts, um, you know, is it better or worse to reach back and find the the pics or the you know, the the folks that are from our culture? Um, or is it, you know, can't should we all just be sharing? I mean, that's the that you know, as I was saying earlier, if we could have ideally brought it all in and just shared, then maybe we'd all just be sharing. And I think but then you know, you're right, you've got to be very careful about, and it's very important not to just be appropriative, which is what ends up happening, because that's our culture. You know, we come, we take what we want. Extract it. It's extractive. Yeah, yeah. Sam, what were you gonna say? Yeah, so there's there's two parts to that that I want to speak to. One is that we talk about reaching back and finding traditional knowledge, and that is certainly a useful and a noble effort, but uh it is also integral to understand that none of these cultures can have not been touched by colonial processes, right? Christianization and and and uh concerted efforts to destroy them. And so eradicate them have to eradicate them, so we don't have a full container to refer to. Yeah. And we don't have teachers. We don't there are there are knowledge keepers. There are knowledge keepers, and and they are coming up in Scotland. I met a woman, I didn't I I through a different source, but she actually just had a festival to try to get all those wisdom keepers together because it's resurging. Oh, good, good. And there was uh there was an Icelandic lady that I followed on Instagram like years ago, and and she lives in a place where they've been practicing the traditional knowledge. They were untouched by Christianization in that place, which is really interesting because she had a lot to say about people who are doing cultural reconstruction. But there's some cultural workers that I've encountered that talk about the importance of having the preservers of the old ways of the knowledge and the reconstructors and innovators. Because these also part of that reaching back into the past is we can get trapped in trying to find a pure version, right? Which leads and and opens the door for the ways that European traditional knowledge seeking has been hijacked by white supremacy, nationalism, ethnonationalism, and xenophobia. Yeah. Because they it tries fascism tries to crystallize and static and cultural. The purity, a purity and unchanging version of a culture. And all of these are dynamic cultural forces. Right. And so the the reconstructors are are doing the work of incorporating and adjusting and evolving these traditions and the pieces that we have to a modern world, to where we are now in the entire context to like heal the wounds of Christianization, to heal the wounds of culture loss and assimilation and shame and you know, the wound of over two generations forgetting that you even have ancestors. Right, the displacement, right. Right, right. Um, and so the other piece of that that that I wanted to talk about with the ideal of free sharing is from my experience, um at some point in my in my development and what woke me up to really needing to do this work was that when I was in doing my undergrad in anthropology and archaeology, we studied European archaeology and pre-history and stone age culture. And I could not have cared less. Because I didn't have a per I didn't have a personal connection to it. You didn't have a scaffold about how it affected. How do you put it in there for your the framework? And I grew up in Montana with parents who were like very close to indigenous American and Turtle Island First Nations um people, not just like I read it in a book, and so now I'm walking the red road. But like, you know, lived in community in those places. And so I was like, my body was built here. And that's what's important, and that's what I'm gonna focus on. And then and and struggled with the appropriative qualities of that. And how do I do that without being appropriative? And just let that inform my behavior and not say, hey, look at me, look what I could do. Yeah, yeah. Um I got I got touched. Right. And I I'm valid and I've got permission because of such and such and such. Yeah. No. Listen, I've been I've been to sweat lodge with 25 people, and 23 of those people are white people, and 23 of those people have been pipe carriers. And I'm like, how are there 23 people who are white who are pipe carriers? And me and the indigenous woman are not. Right. Right. It's I've been in those circles. So it feels like ugh, I can't I can't come back to this. Yeah. So so after I had graduated, my dad is also an anthropology sort of oriented person. And I should caveat when I say anthropology, there's a different branch called radical anthropology, which is very like heavily critical of the colonial uh Western-centric, Eurocentric school of thought that birthed modern anthropology. So, um, but we found out through all sorts of different research and some of the 23andM stuff and some family efforts and a chance encounter with some Eastern Orthodox or uh Russian Orthodox priests who recognized our last name, which is Zemke, which was a clan. Basically, it's the Baltic Druid clan. And they said, This is who your family is. Um and once we found that out and started researching that, the hole in the bottom of my vessel began to patch. Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah. The root, I found the root, right? And so the things that I was encountering didn't fall out the bottom and leave me hungry still. Yeah, yeah. It's it's I think that's that's so key. That really is. And and not everybody's going to have the chance encounters, but I think that having the, so I mean, have some my similar story is that uh about six, seven years ago, I had an opportunity to do some shamanic journeying to find benevolent ancestors, and I was surprised by somebody who showed up. And this person, I and I was just shocked. It was like uh a Spaniard in like their metal gear, right? And I was like, oh, I have a colonial dude in my in my my benevolent ancestry, you know, circle. And I remember for a few years it was really hard for me because I thought that's the person who came and probably like raped and pillaged, you know, to the land, the people of this land. But then I had a chance to go two places. I went to France, where my last name originates, Armandadis, which is a Basque French name. And I went to Spain and Balboa, where a lot of these folks live. And I I was walking El Camino de Santiago, and I bumped into somebody who was a historian, and I told them, I was like, Yeah, I have like, I think I have this like this Basque, you know, military person in my as my ancestor. And he said, I want. To remember that those people were conscripted during those times when they were going out to colonize. They were probably poor. And they got just shoved on the boat and said, You're gonna do this work. And he said, A lot of those people actually came back and settled back into the Balboa area. And so that also filled my cup, made me like, okay, so this is my vessel. This is like who I've come from. And the healing has to be for that person too, who probably was traumatized and had to endure XYZ exploits by the hand of the capitalists, colonizers, right? So not all folks are going to be doing these kind of things, but just even like reaching back through your prayers or through your imagination and saying, you know, benevolent ancestor, I I don't know who you are, but you know, I'm here to support you in this journey of reconciliation. And reconstruction. And reconstruction. And re-emergence. And reckoning, not just reconciliation, but reckoning. I think that's a big part of that work. And and we talk about benevolent ancestors. And I know that like it's dicey to connect with who you might feel is a less benevolent ancestor. Yeah. But it's just as important. Yes. Because they're you know, as we understand like traumas and the conscriptions and colonization, loss, all of this stuff, like there are wounds that we carry from those people. That's right. And we have to reckon with those parts of the people who to survive these situations. It's like the epigenetics of these, this, right? They're still with us. We're still absorbing the trauma of ancestors from time to time ago. Right. I think I think about like like witch burnings, especially. Yes. And the loss of the loss of connection to traditional knowledge in that way. And maybe your ancestor wasn't burned, but maybe your ancestor watched one of their community members get burned in front of the town or executed in front of the town. Yeah. Yeah. And so the trauma that you carry around it's not safe to do that. I have to, as uh John Trudel says, I have to love the thing that I fear and fear the thing that I love and the cognitive dissonance in there. And you carry that, and that wound carries along. You don't know how to process it. Yeah. Yeah. You've got all these wounded people who you know are reproducing trauma. Yeah. I was at a I was at a sewing dinner uh a few years ago, and there was this young, young baby queer, bless their heart, who we were, you know, it's a sewing dinner. We're talking about our ancestors, we're honoring our ancestors. Sewing. Yeah, I gotcha. Okay. I thought you said first I thought you said sewing, and I was like, oh, cool. I feel like we're mending. We're mending. Also magic. Also magic. Um, but they said, my ancestors were all colonizers and slaveholders, and so I will not connect with them. I've just decided to ignore them. In that space, I was just like, oh, honey, like, oh, like it doesn't just go away because you don't look at it. Right. It gets worse, it gets deeper, it comes out sideways. Right. The way it's impacted. It's impacted. Yes. Yes. Yes. Um that'll uh I want to circle back to finish out the the point about rebuilding that route and how that changed my relationship to intercultural dialogue. Mm-hmm. In that I no longer felt it was it was humbling. There's a twofold piece that it's humbling, and I realize how damaged my lineage is. All of our lineages on the case. Exactly. All of our lineages are everyone. And it and it it horizontalized my relationship. So rather than being like, I don't have any culture, so I have to look to all of these other places that have culture for the answers for something I don't have, and could say, I have this somewhere, it's been impacted, you have yours, it's been impacted. And not in a not in an oppression Olympics way, not in a hierarchizing suffering or colonizing process. But the practices of colonization, assimilate assimilation, and cultural genocide were tested on the European stage. They started there and then it was exported. And so there's been less absolutely slightly less time to decimate the cultures here. And so there's more residue, there's more surviving stuff at this point. Oh yeah. And so if you can say that without like putting one above other or saying I've suffered more, whatever, you can it's it's this like we have gone through similar things at different times in our ancestral process. Yeah, but it builds a kinship relationship where it's I'm I don't have, I'm not trying to take, but I can ask for help. And I can I can bring something to the table. Yeah. I can say this, you know, if I'm researching my pick, we're so many of us are mutts. Pick one you like, pick one that you feel connected to, you know, it's it's part of the like buffet. We have to kind of engage with that being messy, muddy people. And I think that exists sort of throughout history. Nobody's it does. But it yeah, it changed it changed how I approached these the these spaces. And and you stop being so obnoxious about that. When you when when you can be humble and when you can can see and connect on that like person to person, we are family. We're all in the same way. In this in this way. Right. Right. Right. We're all bozos on the bus. We're all bozos on the bus, and we all have different uh sacred stuff in our in our satchels, right? Like, not everybody has Palo Santo. No, yeah. I love that sense though that you've mentioned a couple of times of of, you know, kind of like one of the things we like to do here is think about how do we go forward from this, how do we deal with this as a community. And and I love it, just a sense of um recognition that we're all in that, we're all on the same bus, we're all and we're all bringing what we bring, and having humility and compassion for each other, and uh and setting that intention to say, okay, let's see how what we can share together about our our ancestors and what we can share that that can lift us all up and in a way that is not denigrating to anybody and is not competing with anybody. Um and wow, what a great work that would be if we could do that. And it's healing, right? It it it it it fills that void. I love the idea of like packing in the bottom of your vessel so that your roots can be safe. I'm like, that's exactly right. Otherwise you're a sieve, which is why you're always hungry. You're like a hungry ghost, always wanting to grab and you're hungry, hungry, but nothing's gonna fill it until you actually get and put a stopper in there. Yeah, find a way, find a place. What a great plan. So well, it's been a really good. Are we do we feel like we've finished this or do you have any more? I could talk about this for hours. We could talk a long time, but I think I think I do want to just say that for our listeners, and they're trying to figure out why is this on our death, our death podcast, but I wanted to say this is a a death of a part of ourselves that we may or may not be aware of. And going into history and sharing with people what died somewhere in our lineage that needs to be just tended to at this point. Yeah. So, you know, just how do we honor that? How do we honor, how do we grieve the loss? How do we come out of that grief cycle with like the yearning that we might encounter in ourselves of what we are hoping to have, but we can't figure out what it is? Yeah. Right. So it's it's just about this loss and grief. Yeah. And that that brings up uh another point that I thought was really important in in our uh non-recorded conversations about this, which is in understanding that collective sort of experience of domination culture loss, whatever it is, the the search, especially in a commodified sort of influencer culture of reconnecting with ancestral teachings, traditional knowledge, indigenous um worldviews, whatever you want to call it, can be presented as a pretty sunshine and roses kind of thing. And it'll give you all these tools to feel great and you know, it's just magic, and it'll it'll uh lift you up and ascension, ascension, ascension, and light and love, and light and love. But no people who have carried traditional knowledge have gone unscathed, as we said at the beginning. That's right. And so it's really important to understand that stepping into these spaces is one of like a a I want to say a critical piece because it's my work. And and I've seen the impacts of it. But it is not it's not a light work. There is grief and loss. Grief, yes, yes, and and so much pain and trauma and shadow work that comes with the beauty of reconnecting with a land-based animist, you know, uh connective worldview that you have to carry those at the same time. Yeah. And so to not uh not forget that anytime you step into those spaces, you're gonna have to deal with all that stuff. Yes. Yeah, it's gotta all be integrated to be allowed to be integrated. It's gonna be ouch. It's gonna be ouch. It's gonna be ouch. Yeah, it's have some people hire some people to be with. Some people reach out. Yeah. I can help with that. Yeah, but yeah. Um That's what we're yeah, and the and the tears in that process are medicine. Yeah. And that is part of healing the loss that your ancestors went through that maybe they couldn't process on that. That's right. Yeah. Go scream. Yeah. Yes. Very, very good. So good. So good, so important. Well, I love you guys. You guys are brilliant. And uh so everybody, thank you so much for listening. Um we would love to have you get on to our chat in this in the pod uh podcast notes. You'll see a link to our chat on Substack. Um, please subscribe and tell all your friends and uh and like and do all that good stuff. Uh yeah, and yeah, really, we'd we'd love to have people get uh into the conversation. That's something we've just kind of started promoting, and we really love when people talk to us and that we can learn, we can all learn from each other. So thank you so much. Yes. See you next time. Adiós, adios conversations.