Reorienting To Earth
On running from and towards place as a settler.
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So-called Australia is a colonial project still getting started. The last 240 years of European occupation are a drop in the ocean of time-immemorial Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Songlines and ongoing Dreaming here.
How do we non-Indigenous settlers (wherever you might be based) wrestle with the displacement, damage, and devastation of colonialism? How do we make sense of our duty, as uninvited inhabitants of a place we, regardless, call home? How do we, as witches, pagans, or otherwise mystics, reorient to the land as a foundational step in a committed caring for it?
While these are philosophical questions, they eventually require actual pragmatic answers. Only you can answer them for yourself, and use those answers to honour the land you’re on and accomplice the people who own and belong to it.
Right now, I’m interested in how we as spiritually, politically-engaged settlers reconnect with and find belonging from our own cultures and places of origin. This is important, challenging work. Challenging, because it begs another question: how do we invest in our ancestral connection and divest from the modern social construction of whiteness *while* not denying our position within its matrix and the ways the social characteristics of whiteness have been internalised by all of us.
Because those characteristics (defensiveness, individualism, the right to comfort etc) can play out insidiously in all the earnest and flawed ways we attempt to invest and divest. One way this manifests is the act of running from the reality of one’s complicity in settler life, society, and in the processes of power—named whiteness but reaching well beyond the categorisation of complexion—it upholds.
Rather than fighting to unravel whiteness, many in Western-based spiritual communities will take a “flight from white” as Wiradjuri researcher Suzanne Ingram put it. She used the term while appearing on Insight to discuss the trend of self-identified First Nations people. However the same commentary is taking place in many spaces, such as online in the Romani community where people have critiqued those who publicly self-identify as Roma despite having no cultural upbringing, knowledge traditions, community ties, nor the desire to genuinely forge them.
Whatever the specifics, the flight from white is conspicuous. No one wants to be white. Or straight. Or cis. Or [insert thing]. I can understand why. We seek liberation. We crave absolution. We yearn for comfort. For home.
Contending with “home”
My mum’s father was an escapist; a refugee twice in his life who kept his paternal cultural origins shrouded in mystery in his lifetime. At around age 10, he witnessed the Burning of Smyrna, his hometown in Turkey. His family’s house destroyed and his mother dead, he miraculously escaped genocide and fled to Egypt with a few siblings. There, he grew up and got a job as an engineer, married my grandmother, and had children including my mum. Eventually though, Egypt nationalised his workplace, the Suez Canal Company, and expelled all “mutamassirun” (Egyptians of foreign descent) from the country. My family held on to their home for another decade, then war came. And so with one suitcase, off he went again with family in tow.
This time to Australia. Much to his chagrin. He would often (jokingly but seriously) daydream out loud about leaving the country. He would say, “when I die, I go water, go home!!” Which meant: I want to be cremated and my ashes scattered at sea, so I can make it back to the homeland. Instead, he was buried.
This annoyance of his—at being “stuck here”, at the alleged dearth of culture, at the racism they endured as wogs—permeated the family narrative, just as it does in so many immigrant families who found themselves in this country, following the end of the White Australia policy in 1966. This climate gave us a generation of millennials who grew up asking each other “what nasho are you?” As in, what nationality. Because only skips (anglo-saxon kids named so after children’s character, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo) would ever deign to say “Australian”.
The area my family lived is Dharawal Country, belonging to the Wodi Wodi people. It’s where mountainous escarpment meets breathtaking sea. Where 200 million years ago, there were immense volcanic flows. Where there was rich soil, dense rainforest, and ancient cedar trees and basalt deposits and a 36km squared lake that opens to a coastline containing five islands. And coal. Since colonisation, the cedar trees are gone. The rainforest is now cleared paddocks for dairy farms, save for a few protected tourist spots. The land is now pocked with quarries and mines. The coast now home to the nation’s largest steelworks factory since 1938. And yet culture and law continues.
The steelworks is where my grandfather worked, shoveling coal. It’s also where my other grandfather worked. It’s also where my dad worked. This was common for thousands and thousands of immigrant families. It’s the whole reason we were all there. The steelworks is a part of my life story as a settler. It’s part of my destructive legacy to wrestle with, integrate, and own. We all have this work to do.
If I fixate solely on my identity as a wog, as a person of working class origin, even on the lands of my ancestors—I am being an escapist too. Because I’m ignoring where I am, what harm’s been caused here by me and mine, and what it means to be here. And what I could help make it mean.
I don’t want to long for lands I’ve never been to and romanticise ways of life that likely don’t even exist anymore. Perhaps they never did. Because if I sink into the mythos of struggle, of hardship, of otherness, I might get stuck there. And I might miss it! Miss the chance to find a sense of place. To reimagine my relationship with *this* land, so that I might assist in its renewal and flourishing.
Applying a critical anti-colonial lens to my life and work means carefully tending to and embracing my ancestral and cultural roots, yes. This is crucial to liberating my lineage and myself from trauma, disconnection, and from the very real force of assimilation that has meant so much knowledge has been lost. As a multi-cultural being, this is part of my magic.
Applying this lens also means discerning where the embodied ideologies of whiteness and individualism might lead me to over-step, to appropriate, to signify “specialness” to myself or others, or to deny. Deny and refute my status as occupier, in an attempt to escape from my very real role in the colonial project I find myself in. Where, in situating myself on the side of the oppressed, I revoke my social power and belie my real-world privileges and responsibilities. This discernment is part of my magic.
Advertising and marketing (including tech products and their algorithms) that co-opt activist language and efforts often position the use of oppressed identities as a kind of cultural cache. For settlers on stolen land (and chronically online), replicating this rhetoric and creating a self-concept that centres all the ways we’re persecuted is, I believe, a subconscious act of washing our hands of the guilt of colonialisation. It’s burying the lede.
Because no matter how great our struggles, we all have a greater obligation to place. Especially in the face of climate catastrophe. We all know how to seek out the example of Indigenous peoples of the unceded land we call home, and amplify it. We all know how to pay the rent, even if it’s not as much as we’d like. We can pay in other forms of listening, learning, and supporting. We can pick up rubbish. We can plant. We can read. We can offer help. We can do whatever small, quiet thing within our power.
I believe we can learn to forget everything we thought we knew. We can learn reciprocity and real care. We can commit to the practice of entering into right relationship with nature, without ever assuming we’ve “got there” or we’ve figured it all out. We can learn from our own unique ancestral histories, including the heartbreaking ones, and we can firmly situate ourselves in the present colonial project we’re inside of and benefitting from. And we can trouble it. This is our magic.
We can find a shady spot to sit, get very quiet, and listen. We can reach out to the earth and sky and sea of the place we live, as a form of meditation. Of prayer. Of situating ourselves. We can whisper “Here I am. Do what you will with me”. And listen some more.
Tarot card of the week
First, my books are OPEN for February tarot readings! And I still have some time in the second half of Jan too. You can read more about what to expect in a tarot session with me (as well as a bunch of reviews) here. Keen already? BOOK YOUR SPOT.
Now, on with the collective tarot card for this week. Click to view and read the caption <3
Xo Jerico