OP ED

Word Dreaming, World Dreaming

Leny Mendoza Strobel

Ethno. Auto. Biography.

When Jurgen Kremer and I introduced this word to the undergrads at the college where we team-taught a course, the students were baffled. They know what an autobiography is. But ethno?

We asked students to state their location and position in U.S. society. This request was often met with eye-rolls or blank stares. As we discussed the categories of difference—race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexual orientation, age, religion, language, nation of origin, and others—many of the students balked at the task of identifying their location and position within these categories.

Why? Because they have never been asked before.

“I am a human being just like everybody else.”—was a common response.

Fast forward. It’s 2021. We feel the winds shifting. We feel the ground beneath our feet shifting.

We feel that the Strange Fruit of the modern age and the Matrix that bore this fruit is now Seen more clearly. No more denial and turning away.

Mostly, it is the young ones that see it. They center their Ethno in their autobiographies. They are finding and reconnecting with their Ancestors, sometimes even healing the trauma they have inherited. They are holding the Grief of unrepentant generations before them. And they rise up and learn to trust each other to up-end this modern life.

Through the lens of Ancestry, History, Community, Place, Myth, Storytelling, Dreams, Spirituality, Holosexuality, the young ones are telling each other that they must right the wrongs of the past. They will carve different paths that would honor their Ancestors and bring back to life the Original Instructions.

Ethno: to come from a particular place.

Autobiography: To tell one’s story.

In this ReVision issue, Ethnoautobiography offers a decolonial framework for dreaming the world anew.

Stories Are Alive

A china cup and saucer. Hunting rifle. Necklace. Photos. Crests. Bible. Rebozo. Sombrero. Recipe. Rosary. Ring. And many more. Imagine the story of each artifact—the ancestors and their journeys from homelands and ending up as settlers on Turtle Island. Each artifact held the story of a life, of a people, of a place.

In the middle of the classroom, the students laid their artifacts down after each story was told. We stood around in a circle in silence. Something felt sacred in that moment. The students saw and felt the braiding of their stories and they had a taste of community in the whitened space of a university.

Stories are alive. They live in the body.

Ethnoautobiography invites us to live in Story.

***

Years ago Filipino comfort women of World War II were being interviewed by a group of young Filipina Americans to document their history. As the old women told stories of violence, the young women could barely carry the grief. One of the old women said: You must let the stories enter your body. It’s the only way that wars will end.

Martin Prechtel writes that War is unprocessed Grief. Grief that hasn’t been told, shared, acknowledged, held, wailed over, released, forgiven—within the context of community and history will fester in the shadows and keep the culture sick.

Ethnoautobiography is a decolonial framework that can create a container for the healing of Grief—personal, cultural, historical, civilizational.

***

In 1855 U.S. General William S. Harney led the massacre at Blue Water Creek. A peak in the Black Hills was named after him. In 1890, James Forsyth led the Wounded Knee Massacre. The Hotchkiss gun was manufactured by Benjamin Hotchkiss; this gun was used by the U.S. military in the genocide of indigenous peoples on Turtle Island.

In 2014, a descendant of William Harney connected with the descendants of the Blue Water Creek massacre on the Pine Ridge Community. A descendant of James Forsyth and Benjamin Hotchkiss connected with the descendants of the massacres on Pine Ridge. They asked for forgiveness. In 2016, Harney Peak, the mountain named after Harney, was renamed Black Elk Peak.

These days this movement of apology and forgiveness is happening in different forms around Turtle Island.

In Pomo and Coast Miwok land where I write, the movement is welcomed by a small cohort. They began by asking the questions: What does it mean to be a settler in Sonoma County? When did your ancestors come to settle on Turtle Island and in this county? How does the history of genocide of natives in California impact your sense of self and sense of belonging to this Place?

Ethnoautobiography (EA) is guiding our process as we are decolonizing whiteness and uncovering ethnicity. It is also a re-connection with all the disconnected parts of the modern self from its indigenous roots. EA asserts that we all have indigenous roots. To do so, we begin by making History come alive again and invite the Shadow of imperial/colonial and modern history to be seen and heard.

When the Heart speaks and engages the Mind and Soul, Healing begins.