Bundles and the things we carry
Becoming Kin: Chapter 1
Eight months from today the book launches! Every month paid subscribers get a glimpse into the book, a paragraph or two, and a reflection on that material. How have I changed since that writing? Where did that idea come from, how does it connect more to my life. Because not everything can go into the book, at some point it has to be completed .. but it’s never truly complete. Just a snapshot of a life in motion.
Indigenous people often talk about bundles. We talk about them literally and metaphorically. They refer both to tangible items, a mix of the sacred and things made sacred by their inclusion, as well as intangible things like language or dress. There are bundles that have significant cultural and historic importance, like the bundles that belonged to great healers or teachers and that carry the power of them to new carriers. And there are bundles that we learn to make in workshops, no less sacred for their accessibility and cookie cutter appearance.
But we all carry bundles. We all carry the things that matter to us in tangible and intangible ways. When my maternal grandmother passed away I took a couple of things from her small apartment, things that had importance only to me and will likely have no importance to my children. We don’t carry the same memories of these things, and not all memories get passed from one generation to the next. I’m ok with that. As much as I want my children to carry with them the knowledge and artifacts of their ancestors, I don’t want to overly burden them with it either. They will pick up their own bundles, a mix of past and present that will tether without suffocating.
My mother and father moved into my grandparents’ home after my grandmother, widowed some 5 years, moved into a small apartment in an assisted living facility. The accumulation of my parents’ decades together merged with her accumulation and the house is crowded. To this my mother has added her own anxiety about scarcity and need to provide with the bric a brac of possibility: blankets and pans that somebody may one day need, canned goods and preserves stored against some imagined famine that never comes and are languish far beyond their expiry date. Her bundle is at once overwhelming and tender.
When my youngest son was a teenager he said we had no history. It was as if we had emerged from the earth with no past and without a past to stand on, how do you build a future? This confused me for a long time but I think that what he was observing was our lack of connection with our history. My maternal family arrived here in 1952, postwar refugees from Germany who had started in the Ukraine and started live over again in Canada. But their life was untethered, my Mennonite grandmother had married a Ukranian, not once but twice because both of her husbands were from the Ukraine and this was not to be born, not by those Mennonites who had lived in German colonies in the Ukraine for generations and remained German. And they settled in Niagara, far from her relatives who had settled mostly out west. His family was completely cut off. He had deserted from the Red Army during the war and had no papers, so when it came time to seek asylum in Canada he had to use the only papers available to him which were those of my grandmother’s first husband.
My paternal family is Ojibwe, from the area of Northwestern Ontario surrounding Lake Superior and further north, a land of mshkeg and blackflies that my oldest son things the Lakota stopped fighting us over and said we could have it, they didn’t want it anyway. But we never knew them, not until I was in my late 20s and even then it was a tentative and uncertain knowing limited mostly to my father and adopted sister living in North Bay.
So we had history, we just didn’t have any relationship with it. No tangible artifacts or relationships that connected us with the past. We were like a house I went into when I was working as a social worker. There was something odd about it that I couldn’t put my finger on and then one of the parents talked about a fire. They had lost everything in a fire, the entire house burned to ash and so they purchased this house and furnished it completely from Ikea. They went in one day with their insurance settlement and bought everything they needed: beds and dressers, living room set, dining room and kitchen. The photographs reflected this abrupt beginning as well, or rather the lack of photographs. There were only a few and they showed the family much as I saw them that day. There was no sense of time passing in that house. No odd bits of furniture or relics that don’t really match but have sentimental value. No books reflecting the passing interests over a period of years. Our life felt like that to my youngest son. We had no history.
Over time we developed relationship with the past, we created bundles and memory. We listened to stories and found our way to the history of our family. We started to pick things up. We decorated our lives with memory and story, carrying the fire of our ancestors, and the things we need to build new fires. And around these fires, long dead ancestors are beginning to speak.