Ancestry Roots in Your Tree of Life
How can finding your Roots in your Tree bring you life? These are questions I pondered as a child and grew up learning step by step, until the day I realized, that I had been talking to my ancestors my whole life. Not only were they real people who came to live a mortal life on this Earth, carving a path preparing me to travel, but also are still very quite real and alive in Spirit. Our ancestors continue to carve the way, continue to guide, teach and protect as we now inhabit the Earth in which they once walked.
A little peek into my past. I was taught at a very young age how to collect names and stories to put into the family history data base. It started with microfilms before the internet existed. On Saturdays I went with my father to the public library to search for family information from newspapers, magazines, or any other documents, before indexing existed in a cloud database. On those special occasions, when we could sneak away from my mothers disapproval; my father, his mother Marion, my grandmother, and I drove the roads from Duluth to near the White Earth Reservation. My father brought a tape recorder, to record my Great-Uncle Pitchey’s stories; stories of his childhood, and his Native American roots. We would then continue on to visit my great-grandmother, Emily (Pitchey’s and my grandmother’s mother). I remember going into her trailer home and it always smelled wonderful, usually fresh baked bread or cookies for me to snack on while the adults talked. It helped pass the time of boredom, with a long day of being seen and not heard, while the adults talked, and recorded stories.
I now realize how wonderful those stories were, and also imperative it was they were preserved. As our roots define our connection to a network of history, culture, diversity and belonging. It also helps us to remember the old ways, how to use and live off Mother Earth. There is also a sense of kinship in knowing where we belong in our own family tree, our own tree of life. As when you know from where it is you come from, what makes you you, reduces the questioning of who you are. For example, when a tree, or sapling, is left to grow alone, separate from other trees, it tends to grow faster in order to keep up with the surrounding nature, and changing of seasons. In the acceleration of growing, the tree has weaker roots, the trunk and crown is not developed as it normally would be if growing in its due time, along side of other trees. In growing too fast, the tree becomes weak, susceptible to disease and won’t live as long as other trees that grow together in a family group. Just as we are like trees; when we do not have the support of our ancestors and knowing from where we come from, it can lead to uncertainty, a sense of loneliness. And as we age, become more susceptible to stress and disease in the mind, body and soul.
My goal and hope is that I may help guide others to learn of their family tree of life, that there may be healing and guiding along side the ancestors to find roots, protection and guidance. And above all, love.
Pictured from left to right: my grandmother, Marion Dorothea Sealand; her mother, my great grandmother, Emily Amilia LaFriniere; her bother, my great uncle Pitchey’s headstone; and lastly their mother, my second great grandmother who lived on the White Earth Nation Reservation.
