Remembering
Over the last five years or so, the solstices have felt like vital times for very intentional quiet and reflection. And from that, the teaching that the last few winter solstices have brought forth for me is a renewed focus on remembering. This started out in a pretty straightforward sense, grounded in one of my core beliefs that in a human experience that’s redefined by each formative loss and rupture, our stories and our memories may be all we get to take with us to the other side of the veil between this terrestrial lifetime and whatever comes after.
Under that logic, I feel it’s our responsibility to be good stewards of our stories and memories. I guess I believe there’s important wisdom in them for our journey through this plane of existence to the next. And while I’m talking here about more spiritual lessons that may be quite personalized to each individual, I feel like I can relate this premise to events that play out in the generational collective, because there are real consequences when we make the unforced error of amnesia.
As an example, I think of the current class of people who either hold, or will soon be assuming, statewide elected office in Montana. Prior to 2020, it seemed like the memory of the copper kings and the general outrage about wealthy industrialists effectively buying elections—and in at least one instance a U.S. Senate seat—was resonant enough as a cautionary tale to make people think twice about casting their votes for the modern copper kings: folks able to self-finance their political aspirations.
While William Andrews Clark’s term as a Senator from 1901 to 1907 is nowhere close to the stuff of antiquity, outside of Butte where a toxic lake in a pit that’s displaced entire neighborhoods reminds everyone of a legacy of corporate greed, this state seems relatively unfazed by Clark’s modern counterparts who are absolutely using their official positions not to serve or represent their constituents, but to improve the efficiency and profitability of their business interests, and maybe wage a few culture wars along the way. We’ve been here before, but the evolutionary lesson that should help inform future choices and behaviors doesn’t mean shit if few remember it.
There are all kinds of other examples of unforced amnesia with serious implications for the collective. I think specifically about this past year’s deluge of campaign mail underwritten by super PACs that I hope are done feigning interest in the outcome of Montana elections for a long-ass time. It was eye-opening to briefly spend a week of October in the western Washington town I used to live in because my hostess’s mailbox was noticeably void of campaign mail. People in Montana were right to bemoan the onslaught—none of our neighboring states were getting hammered with mailers like we were. And yet, I found it wild when people would ask earnestly, “Why can’t this somehow be regulated?” It’s like they’d forgotten or genuinely didn’t know that until pretty recently, it fucking was.
I was in my first year of undergrad when our then-Attorney General Steve Bullock challenged the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, arguing that Montana’s flat ban on corporate political spending was justified given the state’s history of corporate-financed (read: Anaconda Company-financed) corruption in state government.1 The higher court’s opinion that Citizens United applied to Montana in 2010 dismantled our stringent campaign finance laws, and set the table for this fall’s Senate campaign that saw in excess of $255 million in candidate and outside group spending—the most expensive per vote in history. I’m more galled by the disgusting heft of that figure than the prospect of being represented exclusively by white dudes with overgrown frat boy energy in the 119th Congress. $255 million could fund the current agency budget for the domestic and sexual violence victim services program I work at for 170 years. It could fund the current maintenance backlog for Helena’s two public high schools almost five times. It could fund the estimated damage cost from a 15,000-acre fire that burned on the other side of the Canyon Ferry Dam this summer 10 times.
Of course, I think about these things. I do so in the spirit of James Baldwin’s statement that, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” I believe we have to be lucid and vigilant about these pricey, but still basically arbitrary and unnatural outgrowths of a society organized under extractive capitalism without letting it all consume us. Context can be liberating in that way—it underscores how new some of this bullshit is in the grand scheme of human history, never mind geologic time. You can’t control whether or not others seek out that context to make sense of their experience, and obsessing over whether they do is no way to build resilience within ourselves. By contrast, I’m convinced that the act of remembering is.
Of late, my remembering has taken on an added dimension. Besides consulting history to put my quibbles with the dismal state of things into perspective, I try as much as I can to call on the counsel of our ancestors. I say “our” because something every human being has in common—regardless of the last place their people were Indigenous to—is that we’re all descendants of successful hunter-gatherers. Their survival was improbable given the existential threats they faced and yet, here we are as evidence that they lived at least long enough to reproduce. Shouldn’t we all be tripping out on that? Shouldn’t we be more deferential to how they made meaning of their lives, how they found time and inspiration to make art when faced with their own mortality daily? I think so. Especially as the lethal factors far beyond anything we’re evolutionarily wired for in our current epoch, and far beyond our individual control continue to stack up. And I think you, like me, might be surprised by the ways you do still remember and pay homage to your ancestors when you strip away the bullshit of this Anthropocene that none of us—not us humans and certainly not our greater-than-human relatives—are built for.
Let me try to explain with something that will probably sound banal at first: Back in October, I carved a pumpkin for the first time in many years. Inspired by one of the stencils the National Park Service shared online called “The Close Encounter,” and unexplainably possessed to subject myself to the seasonal ultimatum of “trick or treat,” I went for it.
It was a time commitment that felt more than worth the effort when I was done, and you bet your ass I admired the hell out of that little homemade gourd lantern nightly until it was colonized by fuzzy rot to the point that it collapsed in on itself. I carved on a Sunday and Halloween was a few days away at that point. I chalked my satisfaction up to our very human sense of accomplishment anytime we’ve made something with our hands that ends up being cool to look at, touch, smell, taste, or hear. Fast-forward to Halloween, which happened to coincide with one of my semi-regular phone chats with a good friend from my DC years. I’m not as far along on this journey as she is, but we’re both pretty invested in honoring our ancestors and trying to make sense of the blueprints they’ve left us for living with humanity and intention in the face of hardship, full-blown tragedy, political nightmares, violent colonization, etc. Because we care about this shit, we discuss it often.
I got on some kind of a roll early in our conversation about how I always have to will myself to believe that—as distant and displaced as we newer North Americans might be from the last place our people resided for millennia (she’s a child of Egyptian immigrants and I’m 7+ generations removed from most of my European ancestors)—as long as some of this planet remains marginally in tact, we have the ability to relearn some of the knowledge formed over centuries of living in a forever sustainable relationship with a particular landscape.
When I say I have to will myself to believe this, it’s because I know that something like 99.9% of carbon-based lifeforms that have ever called this planet home are already extinct. I’m no mathematician, but that sounds like a lot of relatives (and by extension, relational knowledge and memory) already gone. Even so, we still have so many species, some that we share up to 80% of our DNA with if we’re talking vertebrates, that are worth knowing and protecting. And that’s where my willful belief in our ability to relearn, our ability to remember, comes from. It’s not blind optimism because I know how dire the stakes are, and how little time we have.
Prior to this exchange about not just our ability, but the sense of obligation my friend and I both feel, to practice remembering, I told her about my unexpected pumpkin carving exploits, and putting out a self-serve bowl of candy for trick-or-treaters that I hoped would get depleted during the course of our conversation.2 On the tail end of it, she alluded to something that left me both dumbstruck and deeply validated.
She had gotten a children’s book for one of her nieces or nephews about the Halloween traditions brought to the United States by Celtic immigrants. It turns out the Celtic festival of Samhain, celebrated every October 31, bears a strong resemblance to Día de los Muertos in Mexico, particularly in the rituals of offering food to deceased ancestors and dressing like the dead (though for slightly different reasons).
This was news to me, but also not entirely surprising. Something that Mexican and Celtic culture have in common is that many of their defining qualities that have stuck are the result of a reverse-assimilation, where Catholicism had been introduced by outsiders with the intention of colonizing other cultures, but in the end, the Indigenous culture put their own stamp on it, integrating it with their existing cosmologies and superstitions. There are of course striking differences between these distinct cultures’ beautiful ways of honoring the dead at what is both the end of a harvest season in the northern hemisphere and a time that, seen through the Catholic lens of All Souls’ Day, the spirits of the deceased and the living can briefly commune. One of those differences is the jack-o’-lantern. It turns out we have Celtic immigrants and their root vegetable carving traditions to thank for those.
I think my friend was surprised when I shared that this was new information to me. In response, she said in a callback to the earlier part of our conversation, “You’re remembering.”
I have made a concerted effort in recent years to try and understand the historical context under which my Brennan and McCallister ancestors left Ireland between the 1840s and 1850s—partly because their DNA is laughably overrepresented in my chromosomes according to 23andme, partly because I now understand with the biography of Thomas Francis Meagher as a touchstone the starvation and cultural genocide that made boarding coffin ships leaving the island to cross the Atlantic for the U.S. seem like a worthy gamble to some 2 million people like my ancestors in the years during and after the Great Hunger.3
I’ve accepted that I can never know much about my Irish American forebears as individuals. After enlisting in the Union Army for the Civil War, the men became industrial workers in Andrew Carnegie’s industrial fiefdom, specifically at the Homestead Steel Works. The women generally listed “keeping house” as their occupation on census records. Biographies aren’t written about these extraordinarily hyper-ordinary people and I doubt they had much time for journaling and letter-writing because shift work at the time was such that when they weren’t working, they were at home either sleeping or getting ready for their next 12-hour shift. Domestic labor was similarly nonstop—in addition to cooking and cleaning for a gaggle of kids, usually with a nursing infant in the mix, these immigrant families toiling for an industrial conglomerate unlike any the world has seen before or since often took on single working-age men as boarders to make ends meet.
My ancestors’ relative anonymity is mystifying when I consider the number of ways their physical traits and cellular memory must exist in me. And yet, in seeking to apprehend them—for that’s the closest I can hope to get to them—my McCallister ancestors in particular have come to feel like a source of spiritual guidance through the start of my third decade. And while my connection to my Brennan ancestors feels fuzzier, they have given me maybe the defining clarity of my first 32 years on this rock: a clan name averring that I’m not fucking crazy for the core sense of sorrow I carry with me in the world…AND my sense of kinship with corvids. Apparently, some meanings of the pre-anglicized version of our surname, Bhraonáin, are little raven, drop or moisture (as in teardrop), and sorrow. I’m also not the first to find real validation in the fact that there’s no Irish language word for immigrant—the closest they have are phrases that convey exile.
To be clear, I can never be Irish as many of my ancestors were. But I don’t think that’s the point—it’s certainly not the teaching that I feel the Brennans and McCallisters have for me. Rather, I think their legacy is to show me how to survive in the face of an industrialized, highly colonized society that feels totally alienating to me. They show me that my kinfolk have endured alienation. They definitionally endured a life of exile. Their ancestors came from a worldview where leaving their homeland could only be understood in terms of exile. They’ve helped me see that I’m not the maladjusted one for objecting to my own experience of alienation in the Anthropocene, or what I’m more inclined to call the Misanthropocene for the ways it demands that we reject and betray our nature as human animals.
What I’m talking about when I talk about our nature are the qualities that enabled us to become apex predators in the first place: we’re imaginative, we can adapt our behaviors and choices within certain environmental conditions, and we work together. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb in observing that even though we still possess these qualities in some measure, if they are what indeed have set us apart from our other carbon-based relatives, we’re not exactly at the top of our game.
Sure, we’re imaginative…but mostly when we’re developing drugs for hair loss, weight loss, and erectile dysfunction, or coming up with ways to make smartphones more manipulative and addictive so we think we’re getting the same sustained dopamine activation we’re supposed to get from true emotional attunement with other beings, when really, we’re just getting a series of small and quick hits all day long that we’re constantly crashing from. Am I wrong?
Do we still show the ability to adapt? Maybe. But those environmental parameters we need to be living within to adjust and pivot? Those are under siege. The less habitable the planet becomes, the less pliable we are behaviorally, and the less cards we have to play.
This next question is a doozie: Do we work together? For millennia, we largely did. We had to. We didn’t have a shot at survival if we didn’t. And while I know lots of people are convinced that violence and greed are an inevitable part of “the human condition,” that’s just not fucking true. People who’d subsisted together in a place for millennia did not make the decision to go to war often or lightly. If they did, they knew everyone would be affected by it, and they weren’t fighting from a place of hubris. In fact, they were more likely to cast out somebody from their community on the grounds of greed, self-interest, and bringing harm upon the collective. To be banished like that was considered the ultimate punishment. It’s a far cry from this context of global empires we live in now, where wars are most often waged from a place of entitlement by a far-away ruling class who will gladly order killing, and profit handsomely off the industries needed to carry it out, all while living comfortably and never having to face the atrocity of their decisions or sacrifice any of their security and privilege. This brand of war couldn’t be more antithetical to our nature. And I would argue the armed struggles that Indigenous people are engaged in today are much more akin to that older outlook on war—it’s understood that everyone from the leaders on down to the rank-and-file can expect to be affected by the choice to engage their oppressors in conflict.
Somebody has coined a term for this bizarre knack that modern humans in settler colonial societies have for submitting to norms that oppose our very nature. In an interview conducted for The Myth of Normal, a book the Hungarian-Canadian physician and addiction expert Gabor Maté co-wrote with his son Daniel, psychologist and researcher Darcia Narvaez throws out this term “species-atypical” in reference to humans. This is what Maté writes in unpacking it:
…materialistic cultures generate notions…of selfish, aggressive striving and dominance as behavioral baselines, encouraging characteristics that place a lesser value on connectedness to others and to Nature itself. In our present capitalist society, [Narvaez] suggested to me, we have become “species-atypical,” a sobering idea when you think about it: no other species has ever had the ability to be untrue to itself, to forsake its own needs, never mind to convince itself that such is the way things ought to be.
Something else that Maté addresses over and over in The Myth of Normal is this reframing of disease not as some foreign entity or malignancy attacking our bodies, but a complex process that manifests how we’ve lived our lives—particularly in the wake of suffering wrought by trauma and our toxic social and physical environment. For those who seek to profit off myopic solutions (like pharmaceutical drugs) for people’s problems, I imagine that this framing is disruptive, bordering on threatening. Viewed this way, many illnesses might be more accurately understood as healthy reactions to living in a society that’s chronically ill in just about every way. This has to be threatening because the illusion that billionaires and imperialists are all banking on us staying under starts to crack when we see that their schemes, their inventions, and their self-interest are the sickness, not us. They are the malignant cell growth on this collection of organisms that before industrialization, before global empires, functioned symbiotically and regenerated itself between life-eradicating cataclysms. I don’t know if we can recover that state of grace before the sixth mass extinction event does us all in, but that doesn’t exactly bother me.
If I’ve arrived at any kind of personal spirituality or partial grasp of what the fuck we’re all doing here to start off another year of my terrestrial allotment, I’m comfortable looking at All of This™ as a complex process.
I don’t believe my life is a build-up to some grand flood of enlightenment or moment of clarity or repentance for past transgressions. Our spirit’s passage through this part of our journey has only ever been a process and ideally, it’s one that transforms the way we relate to our fellow beings from a place of self-actualization. And this is a point I want to harp on a little bit as it relates back to that question about whether or not we still work together as humans. I want to be clear that I don’t think that rekindling that aspect of our nature requires us to become indiscriminate joiners. Quite the contrary, I think part of the reason the question is such a head-scratcher is because of how backasswards our understanding of ourselves as social creatures is. Self-actualization should be the prerequisite to all of our engagement in community, not an afterthought. Or as Lily Gladstone puts it beautifully in this early 2024 interview, self-actualization is the starting point that’s then upheld by our community (relevant quote runs about 7:45-9:30).
Gladstone’s deconstruction of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs from the Blackfoot perspective underscores that it’s in our nature, not to be mindless drones, but to recognize and encourage each other in being exactly who we are and understanding ourselves as part of some lineage, some relationship with our ancestors that we’ll eventually join.
When I think of facing my mortality, I don’t think of dying in and of itself as some kind of tragedy. Death is natural after all, part of life, even. At the same time, I think the marker of a life well lived is that it would be a source of grief to say goodbye to the carbon-based relatives that it’s in our nature to love. When we’ve developed that, I think that just means we’re prepared for when it’s out time to join our ancestors who did the same when it was theirs. As for the ancestors that didn’t? I suspect some are stuck here doing extra innings as dung beetles or something ecologically necessary, if a little debasing, after fumbling the human gig. Others—the real depraved assholes and abusers—I think are probably bumbling around here as confused and combative spirits, haunting the occasional mortal in their path until somebody performs a strong ceremony that finally sets the reset button for them.
Until we get our summons for that big family reunion in the mysterious beyond, I welcome whatever guidance, whatever full-blown clarifying visitations I get from the exiles that have gone before me. The Irish Celts have left a steady impression through the start of my thirties, but I look at the illuminated evergreen tree maybe four feet away from me as I type this and wonder if maybe the ancestors of my German immigrant grandmother start carrying the torch for a while from here.
Similar to the reverse-assimilation that explains Samhain and Día de los Muertos, Germanic tribes celebrated the winter solstice by lighting fires and candles and bringing evergreen trees into their homes to symbolize the slow return of daylight and the coming of spring. Similar to my jack-o’-lantern from this October, my tree decorations very much signal my status as an exile raised in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. It’s covered in ornaments that were distributed annually to Yellowstone concessionaire employees like my mother, and it’s a pretty representative sampling of the most charismatic fauna found in that ecosystem, including a gray wolf and their pup in a sleigh for what was probably the first new ornament of my lifetime as a late 1992 birth.4
Of course I feel fortunate for the series of coincidences that set the stage for my upbringing in one of the last mostly intact temperate zone ecosystems on the planet. Put in different terms, our state’s current poet laureate Chris La Tray often points out that Yellowstone is one of two places where all seven Grandfather Animals corresponding to Anishinaabe teachings still exist together.5 Without that childhood foundation of greater-than-human life being part of my everyday life, I wonder if I’d have ever even found my curiosity for my human ancestors. What’s crazy though is that, at least for the first and second generations of Brennans and McCallisters settled squarely in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, they may well have harbored fantasies about their progeny someday finding their way to Montana Territory of all places.
Because of the time those families immigrated, if they were invested at all in the struggle for Irish home rule and unification for those they left behind, they might’ve been familiar with the revolutionary figure Thomas Francis Meagher. If they weren’t when they left Ireland, they almost certainly would have been following his service in the American Civil War, where he gained hero status for his leadership of a brigade of predominantly Irish immigrants in major battles like Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Bull Run. After the war, he was appointed territorial governor of Montana, where he ultimately died suspiciously in 1867, falling into the Missouri River from a steamboat docked at Fort Benton.
Meagher somewhat famously hoped Montana Territory could become a home away from home for all the exiles of Erin. If the state as a whole never lived up to that aspiration, Butte eventually would thanks to the aggressive recruitment of Irish immigrant labor by Marcus Daly, the most powerful Irish American capitalist at the turn of the 20th century. Daly was a rival of the aforementioned William Andrews Clark—the one who famously bought a U.S. Senate seat. He also chaired the committee for the bronze equestrian statue of Thomas Francis Meagher that has presided over our state Capitol building’s front lawn here in Helena since 1905, facing the Big Belt Mountains and the Missouri River, maybe 100 miles downstream from the site where he left and joined the ancestors.
This past Halloween, after I concluded my conversation with a friend about honoring our ancestors, I found the candy bowl I left outside emptied when I stepped out to bring in any remnants along with my jack-o’-lantern and the camping chair that I had set up with some unnecessarily well-designed signage for my treats in case the unattended container of processed sugar didn’t speak for itself. If there were a lot of kids out and about that night, I didn’t hear any of them. More than likely, a small number of quiet trick-or-treaters or passerby depleted the entire supply. But there’s a fanciful part of me that wonders if my McCallister or Brennan ancestors—signaled by the light of a carved gourd out my front door while the veil was thin—visited the Rocky Mountain state they had only ever heard of, a promised home for the exiles of Erin, a place they hoped their descendants might someday see. Maybe they wanted to see with their own eyes if it lived up to the hype. Maybe they wanted to visit the storied monument to their guy, above whom the tricolor flag for a unified Ireland gets flown every March—something that any of their younger relatives back home in the north of Ireland would be banned from doing for over 30 years.
And maybe at the precise moment my friend on the phone pointed out that I was remembering, they discovered that they shared my fondness for peanut butter cups, and made off with the sugary offering into the night, back to wherever they rest on the other side of the veil.
Or maybe I’m full of shit and all that vision ever will be is fanciful. To which I say how wonderful. How wonderful that I can entertain these ideas of spirituality and my ancestors passing outside my door without having to attack or discredit anyone else’s beliefs about why we’re all here. How wonderful to have found some bearings in this shitstorm, this Misanthropocene, that aren’t based in fear, dehumanization, control of other people, or needing to be correct. I’m not driven by any of that. I’m just trying to remember.
Featured Image: Early December view from Mt. Ascension of our Waxing Crescent of the Cold Moon and Venus, the evening start, rising in the southwest after sunset.
Notes
- In a development that feels like it should be the stuff of satire but just goes to show you how reliably power can corrupt any idealistic firebrand into playing the game, Steve Bullock is now co-chair of a progressive dark money group called American Bridge 21st Century PAC. ↩︎
- Exclusively peanut butter cups with exactly one alternative snack for any unlucky kiddos with peanut allergies, in case anyone’s wondering what the spread was. ↩︎
- Which, to be clear, should never have been a famine. While about a million Irish people starved to death, the country was producing enough livestock, grain crop, and other food commodities to feed the country. It was just all being exported by England, to England. ↩︎
- Interestingly, this critter would’ve been selected for that year’s ornament over a year before the species was reintroduced to Yellowstone in January 1995. Even for a for-profit enterprise in the park, it seems that the gray wolf’s belonging in that landscape was never questioned, even through a prolonged absence. ↩︎
- Bizhiki, the Ojibwe word for bison, is the avatar for the teaching of Respect, which feels very apt when you consider the scenario playing out in “The Close Encounter” that clearly spoke to me back in October. ↩︎