Memorials

For the better part of the last decade, I have spent Memorial Day with my maternal grandparents cleaning up family headstones across the Milwaukee area. This ritual has become a very important part of my complicated relationship to the land on which I live and am made of.

In the mid 1800's, my ancestors from both my Grandmother and Grandfather's families left their ancestral lands of Pommern and the Lorraine, along with nearly 6 million other Germans that century. History says they left due to rampant poverty, political oppression, land rights, war, and revolution. I don't know why my family left.

They settled on Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, Menomonee, Anishinaabe, and Fox land. Wisconsin as a political entity did not exist yet. The Blackhawk Wars had come to their grim conclusion and the ancestral inhabitants of the land I grew up on had been thoroughly brutalized and subjugated. I don't know what thoughts and feelings, if any, my ancestors had towards the people that had been displaced to make room for them.

Nearly 100 years pass. My grandparents are born, each the baby of their respective families. Modest livings, trades, knowledge, and status have been amassed. The upright moral character of the German immigrant family has been well established and perpetuated. Everyone's uncle or grandpa is a Reverend.

Both of my grandparents are the last surviving members of their childhood families. We said goodbye to many great aunts and uncles over the last few years; their brothers and sisters. It is strange to watch this process bring out the child and the proselytizer in each of my grandparents. I am convinced that all time is unprecedented time.

I take this day each year to honor my grandparents, as I owe them everything. Every achievement I've had was set in motion by them & the lives they've led.

-but I also take this time to honor the land. It is the dust that I am built from & it is the dust that my ancestors have returned to. We are the land and the land is us, irrevocably at this point. I am devoted to reparations with a full, human heart.

I vow to share the complicated history of this land through my work. I vow to center native reparations. I vow to heal.