In Search of My Lost Tribe
By Jay Ray
( First published, Southern Crossings Magazine,1991.)
Update 2023: I wrote this article during a time of exploration of my own indigeneity. It is something that I feel we all need to attend to if we are to understand, other and ourselves. We are all indigenous to somewhere. 'Where' dictates much of what makes us who we are. Without this examination of our deeper selves, we become minions of an economic system that sees us only as customers.
The search for Self is multifaceted. There is not one thing that describes us, or who we are. We must find ourselves on all planes. We must ask ourselves;
Who am I Physically?
Who am I Emotionally?
Who am I Intellectually?
Who am I Spiritually?
Who am I Genetically?
We have to keep asking ourselves that question, time and time again, Now and now and now, for we are ever changing beings. A new aspect of me has been trying to emerge over the years. Maybe it will also apply to others. It is an increasing awareness of a deeper me. I can perhaps better describe it by asking the question ; “Where is My Tribe?”
It has bothered me for some years. I have felt the need for a tribal root system, and envied the Koori (Australian Aboriginal) and Native American peoples, the Eskimo and the Maori. At least what is still left of it in some cases. But all these people have the potential to know who they are on a tribal level. All have a people to return to, a culture to reclaim. My heritage has been systematically dispersed by my own people.
White, female, called Caucasian! What does that mean? Like members of all ethnic groupings, I have needs peculiar to me, beliefs that are mine, special diversities to offer a colourful world. But where do I find the network of ancient knowing that enables the expression of this diversity? Where are my tribal lands? Where are my People? Disbursed across three Continents! I find emerging within me a desire to find my larger identity, but I don’t know where to begin I come from England, but I lived for many years with many other white Caucasians that were born in Australia. What are they? Are they Australian because they were born there? What does that make a Maori born in Australia? What do you call an English person born in India and raised in Australia from an early age? It seems to me that nationality does not define ones tribal or genetic heritage. It’s a superimposed delineation designed to make us feel loyalty to a politically defined landscape. Some might say that the idea of tribes amongst the Caucasians is outdated. It seems to me that we've become a hotch potch of a people with no identity, and no respect, or regret for our forbears part in the personal or generic identity disintegration of others. Without our own greater identity, it seems as if that would be inevitable.
Spiritual dissatisfaction has lead many of us in search for ourselves. It has led us inwards to discover our own inner boundaries, our personal uniqueness. Maybe we have reclaimed our Inner Self, and it now becomes important that we find our spiritual boundaries as a people, a spiritually unique group of diverse tribes with something to offer each other out of our difference, not just exploiting in others what we as people have lost. I feel it is important that if we are to understand and respect the rights of other spiritual and ethnic groups, we must to rediscover our own.
Historically, a great deal of information has been lost and destroyed by wars of the mind as much as the body. I would have to go back to pre-historic times to begin to find out what happened to my ancestors. I would have to decipher the genetic interbreeding pattern of a nomadic seafaring people, who spread themselves far and wide. I started asking myself if this was how it was meant to be - a 60’s vision of a great melting pot. I could see there would be certain advantages in a racial standardization program. Hitler was quick to propound the benefits of ‘one people’, although his purist vision was a far cry from the melting pot concept. Standardization of all sorts of things has become our ‘norm’. It’s so much easier to package and control. That’s true both corporately and politically, it would seem. But the wonderful diversity of the planet is the thing that helps us survive. We only have to look at what happens in a monoculture when a disease whips through fields and fields of wheat. Permaculturalists will tell us that biodiversity prevents diseases and pests from making a clean sweep because they run out of food if we mix our crops up. Wheat diseases do not thrive well on cauliflowers. It struck me that a world full of only pine trees, as much as I love them, would have lost a great deal,.
What happens to us when we lose our boundaries? On a personal level, we lose the power of Self. We lose our ability to define and meet our own needs. We ‘become’ other people. We think, feel, and operate from a skewed perspective, unable to differentiate for whom we are speaking, or the basis upon which we are making choices in our lives. This also has to be true in the larger picture. If this were to happen to a people or a race, what would be the outcome? What ‘has’ been the outcome? We only have to look at the sociological problems of the white Anglo/Celtic people to see the answer to that question. We have become a people devoid of spiritual understanding. We have lost touch with our allegiance to the Earth and the other ‘beings’ on it. We have lost all concepts of the consequences of our actions, and the impact they will have on future generation. We don’t care! Our lack of caring leave us empty inside and that emptiness we fill with substances that make us care less again. We yearn for something we can’t find and we don’t really know where to start looking.
My own questing seems to be paralleling what is happening on a global level. Throughout each continent, ethnic groups are fighting to regain their own sovereignty, either politically, legally or spiritually. We all seem to need it. How can we come together as Earthlings, until we find our own individual natures? We have nothing to bring to the negotiating table, the Global Tribal Meeting Place that I so dream of, until we do. How can we learn to take care of the Planet, if we have no roots with the land? That’s what this planet of ours is made of. If we have no spiritual connection to it, and therefore no love for it, how can we know how to care for it. I don’t believe it is possible to love what we don’t know. I cannot possibly know the whole globe, but I can respect it, and respect the people that are the caretakers of their own piece of it. What’s more, I will only do that if I have my own piece to look after and understand the responsibilities of. It's not possible to respect in another person what we don’t see the need to respect in ourselves. We find this reflected in the state of relationships with individuals and families right now. Maybe it's not enough to just buy a piece of land somewhere and call it home. Money doesn’t make it so. The bones of our ancestors make it so. The spirit of our tribes makes it so. The personal spiritual relationship we have with it makes it so. I cannot buy ‘home’. I can build it with love. I can inherit it, but I still need to feed it with love or it will die. I can buy land anywhere, but that which is mine is made of me and mine.
That brings me back to the question "Where is mine? Who are mine?" What do they look like, and how do I recognise them? Are they looking for me as I am looking for them? Am I a voice crying in the wilderness for a people long gone? Or can we, should we, regroup? It seems there are many tribes within the Caucasian Race, just as there is in any race, but we of the Celtic/Anglo people don’t see ourselves in that way. If we do band together, it is based more on economics than on the spiritual. The cry of "Germany for the Germans, Foreigners out" as it was heard recently in street marches there, struck terror into the heart of the average Jew, but they too are involved in their own tribal battles with the Palestinians. Why do we need to do battle? Is it fear of the ‘other’ that brings about distrust? Is it fear that they may do to us what we have done to them in the past? Maybe, once we have addressed these issues in our hearts, the external boundary issues can begin to be solved. Perhaps it's not about owning ‘more’ land, but about being caretakers of the land that we personally, as individuals, tribe, or family are privileged to be part of.
When I try to define my tribe I hit lots of stumbling blocks. Although I was born in England, I don’t know if I come from Celtic, Norman, Roman or Anglo-Saxon root stock. As my family come from East Anglia, maybe Saxon is close enough. I have a strong pull towards Celtic spirituality. Maybe a Celt got into the Saxon stable long ago. Maybe, if I go back far enough, I will find that the Saxons were themselves a distant cousin of the Celts anyway. Certainly there are many similarities that go across all Europe. Where should I start? I know nothing about the Sassonach as the tribes of the north called them. If I know the isle of my birthright, does that mean I can't live anywhere else? Practically speaking, if all the Saxons went back to England, the island would sink. Nor am I a follower of the National Front ideology, which espouses sending all foreigners ‘home’. For most of us, to go home, we first have to find out where home is, spiritually as well as environmentally. If this is the beginning of the "Return of the Lost Tribes", as predicted in the Bible, it must be an evolution from within, not an eviction from without. I feel that it may well be time to consider some of the implications of ‘rootlessness’. We can, at least, address the issue inside of us and see where it takes us. It’s not about racism or prejudice. For me it’s just a deep felt desire to ‘find ones own’ so that I can understand myself and ‘other’.
Footnote:
This article was written 31 years ago. During the intervening years, an immense spiritual drive and longing lead me to the Otago Peninsular in Dunedin. It also lead me through a path that lead to the discovery of the Inner Celt that continues to teach me today. All that we ever were is encoded in us genetically. To discover the past, we simply need to be open enough to go to it, inside ourselves. In re-reading this article, I realise that many of the issue that were so pressing inside of me at that time have now been resolved. I feel very much a part of my own heritage as a Briton, and free enough to make New Zealand my physical and spiritual ‘home’. I have come to see Britain as the Mother and New Zealand as the lover who called me to her. I came, and I’m glad that I did!