When Your Ancestors Are The Problem

A conversation with Rev. Sara Jolena Wolcott

With the unfinished histories of racism, colonialism and white supremacy in the United States (and beyond) at the top of the news headlines and weighing on our hearts, Rev. Sara Jolena Wolcott joined us from California to reflect on our shared inheritance of false security and unjust systems. We recorded this conversation as a follow-up to the live session held on 8th June, 2020 — a chance to share Sara’s work with those of you who missed that session and to ask some of the questions from participants that Sara didn’t have time to answer on that call.

Sign up here for news of future sessions, courses and events with a school called HOME.

TOPICS & QUESTIONS

0:00 — introduction from Dougald Hine
6:50 — ReMembering
12:20 — the Doctrine of Discovery
16:00 — something missing from the climate activism Sara had been part of
19:20 — Willie James Jennings and the story of when race replaced place
32:06 — tracing climate change back beyond a story about “the unintended consequences of the inventions of clever white folks”
36:55 — Christopher Columbus, his slave-trading ancestors and understandings of security
42:42 — talking about ancestors
48:28 — becoming conscious of the ancestors
50:41 — the need to ask your ancestors “Why?”
51:58 — the pressure to make sense of your life on the scale of an individual lifetime

Questions from the group

56:30 — “How to move through/ reconcile the double trauma of an ancestor having been both coloniser and colonised (Scottish Hebridean emigrated to South Africa), and yet very little known about the details, even their first name?”

1:00:35 — resources for beginners

1:02:45 — “Can you explain more why the emphasis on the body, it’s physicality, why it’s important for healing ourselves and society?”

1:10:00 — “I am imagining speaking with my white ancestors who might look to me to do the work they couldn’t do, and bringing them together with the ancestors of black people, (specifically my husband), so that they might still have the opportunity to apologize, communicate… In this way, they can still do the work, I am still doing the work… do you have experience with this?”

1:14:10 — “My grandma was a Holocaust survivor, and her entire family were killed. I was so very close to her and I feel I know oppression in my white body cells. And, to be honest, as Bari eluded, I’m finding myself lost in this work. Particular in relation to ancestry and even knowing who they are, and what they may have done, given the persistent uprooting.. How can I find out more? My beloved lefty (all too white) activist spaces often don’t feel safe for me…”

1:22:05 — “All my ancestral stories are about oppression and struggle — they were working class white Scottish peasants. As the first generation in my family to escape poverty, I honestly feel more guilt and shame about being complicit in the current injustices we live with. Particularly through the time I spent working in international development, foisting the broken story of progress onto the rest of the world. It seems like this goes far beyond the wrongs of colonialism. This is ongoing violence on other people and other living non-human beings. What do we do with the awareness that, despite our best efforts and trying to live as morally as possible, we have benefited more from these wrongs in the world than any of our ancestors?”

LINKS

Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race and After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging

Dara Molloy, The Globalisation of God: Celtic Christianity’s Nemesis

Daniel Foor, Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing

Bespoken Bones podcast with Dr Pavini Moray

Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

‘Notice the Rage; Notice the Silence’, Resmaa Menakem interviewed by Krista Tippett, On Being podcast

Howard Thurman and the Pilgrimage of Friendship in the 1930s

Sara Jolena Wolcott, ‘From the Darkness’, Dark Mountain: Issue 12 (SANCTUM)

Dougald Hine, ‘Death and the Mountain: John Berger’s Enduring Sense of Hope’, Dark Mountain: Issue 1

Bio

Rev. Sara Jolena Wolcott is an elder, student and recognised minister in the Quaker and Judeo-Christian tradition and is carrying Witchy lineages which actively guide her work.

She runs the ecotheology company Sequoia Samanvaya which offers online and offline courses to enable decolonisation and enchanting pathways through the Anthropocene Age. She is also a speaker, writer, artist, healer and acts as an advisor as requested.

She actively collaborates with indigenous-led organisations and black and brown-led organisations. She’s worked and lived in more than ten countries including Kenya, India, England and Indonesia.

She holds an M.Div. degree from Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University and an MA in international sustainable development from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, England.

Read more about a school called HOME on our website — and sign up for our newsletter to get updates about future live sessions, courses and events. To learn more about Sara’s work, check out the organisation she founded, Sequoia Samanvaya.