In my work I hear many folks express a similar ache. And it usually sounds something like:
“I don’t really have a culture.”
Or:
“I feel disconnected from my ancestors.”
Or:
“I’m drawn to earth-based spirituality, but I don’t know where I belong.”
And beneath those words, there is often something much deeper than curiosity. There is longing. There is grief. There is a yearning for belonging that lives not only in the mind, but in the body.
For many of us — especially those of us who are white Americans — the longing for healing is deeply entangled with the longing for belonging. We are looking for something rooted. Something older than consumer identity. Something more nourishing than individualism. Something that connects us back to land, body, community, spirit, and the ancestors who came before us.
And yet, when we reach for those roots, many of us find fog.
We find silence.
We find a family story that begins only a few generations back, often after migration, assimilation, and loss have already taken their toll.
This is what I often think of as ancestral amnesia.
Ancestral amnesia is not the absence of culture. It is the forgetting of it.
It is what happens when we are severed from the earth-based traditions, land relationships, ritual practices, languages, traditional foods, songs, stories, and communal structures that once helped our people know who they were and where they belonged.
And this forgetting did not happen all at once.
For many white Americans of European descent, it happened in layers. And I would like to explore three distinct layers of ancestral disconnection trauma that I often guide clients in tending.
The first layer: spiritual severance
The first layer is spiritual severance from ancestral lands and ancestral lifeways.
For many of us with European ancestors, this severance began generations — sometimes many centuries — before our people ever crossed an ocean. Through conquest, empire, colonization, Christianization, and the suppression or absorption of older earth-based traditions, many of our ancestors were gradually disconnected from the ways their people had related with the sacred.
This does not mean our ancient ancestors were all innocent, enchanted forest witches dancing peacefully under the moonlight. Let’s not romanticize here. Our ancestors were human. Complex. Capable of beauty and harm. Just like us.
But it does mean that many of them lived through real disruptions in their relationships with land, seasons, affinity spirits, ancestors, community, and the more-than-human world.
Older ritual calendars were interrupted. Sacred places were renamed, destroyed, demonized, or folded into new religious structures. Local spirit relationships were condemned or forgotten. Communal ways of tending the dead, the land, and the cycles of life were reshaped under pressure.
And over time, many of those ancestral ways became harder and harder to access.
Not because they were meaningless.
Because they were severed. And most of the time, intentionally.
The second layer: physical severance
The second layer is physical severance from ancestral lands.
Even after older spiritual traditions were disrupted, many of our ancestors still remained physically rooted in place. They may not have have still related with the land in the same ritual or religious ways their older ancestors had, but they still lived among familiar hills, rivers, plants, seasons, cemeteries, dialects, foodways, and community memory.
There is a kind of belonging that comes simply from being held by place over generations.
But for many of our people, even that was eventually broken.
Through famine, poverty, war, displacement, enclosure, economic pressure, forced migration, or the desperate hope for survival, many ancestors left the lands their people had known for generations.
Some chose to leave. Some had very little choice at all. Many carried grief they had no time, language, or support to process.
And when people leave land, they often lose more than geography.
They lose relationship with local plants.
They lose sacred sites.
They lose language and songs.
They lose the daily intimacy with the mountains, waters, meadows, and groves.
They lose the places where their ancestors are buried.
And that kind of severance lives in families. It echoes through bodies. It becomes part of the inheritance.
The third layer: cultural severance
The third layer is much closer to home for many of us: cultural severance through assimilation into whiteness.
For many European-descended immigrants to the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other settler-colonial contexts, survival and belonging often came at a cost.
To become “white” was to flatten.
To soften the accent.
To stop speaking the language.
To change the name.
To distance from the foods, songs, customs, rituals, and ethnic identities that marked one as foreign, poor, dangerous, undesirable, or not-yet-assimilated.
Irish, Italian, German, Scandinavian, Slavic, Jewish, and many other lineages each carry their own complex stories. These histories are not all the same and they should not be collapsed into one tidy narrative.
But many of them do share a painful pattern: distinct peoples who were gradually absorbed into a constructed identity of whiteness.
And whiteness is not “culture” in the way our ancestral cultures are culture.
Whiteness does not give us a rooted relationship with land. It does not teach us how to tend the dead. It does not give us songs from the village, prayers from the hearth, seasonal rites from the fields, or stories braided through place.
Whiteness offers proximity to power in exchange for forgetting.
And many of our ancestors made that exchange under pressure.
Some did it for safety.
Some did it for survival.
Some did it for access.
Some did it willingly.
Some did it harmfully.
Most did it without ever fully understanding what they were signing up for and what would be lost in the forgetting process.
“I don’t have culture” often means “I inherited disconnection”
So when white folks say, “I don’t have culture,” what I often hear is something more precise:
“I have inherited disconnection.”
“I have inherited forgetting.”
“I have inherited the ache of severed belonging.”
And I want to say this gently but clearly: that disconnection is not your fault. But healing it is part of our responsibility!
Because ancestral reconnection is not about escaping accountability. It is not about bypassing the realities of colonization, racism, whiteness, patriarcy, or historical harm. It is not about inventing a fantasy past where our ancestors were all wise, innocent, earth-loving mystics who never participated in harm.
Absolutely not! We are not doing spiritual cosplay in this house!
The work is deeper than that.
Ancestral reconnection asks us to become honest enough to hold complexity.
It asks:
* Who were my people before whiteness?
* What did they lose?
* What did they choose?
* What were they forced to abandon?
* What harms did they survive?
* What harms did they participate in?
* What grief was never metabolized?
* What beauty is still waiting to be remembered?
* And what healing can I participate in now?
Remembering responsibly
I believe many of us carry ancestral cultures in our bodies that are not gone, only sleeping.
No, they are not always intact. They are not always easy to find. And they are not always available in the forms we wish they were.
But they are definitely not entirely lost!
There are still records. There are still places. There are still names. There are still stories. There are still songs, plants, foods, seasonal practices, folk customs, prayers, and fragments of memory waiting to be approached with humility and care.
And there are ancestors, dear friend!
Not as abstract symbols. Not as aesthetic accessories. But as real, relational beings who can be engaged, healed with, learned from, and brought into the work of repair.
This is not only an individual healing project. It is lineage work.
We are not meant to carry these disconnection traumas alone. Our ancestors are part of the wound, yes — but they can also become part of the healing.
And for those of us who have felt like cultural orphans, this matters.
Because the absence we feel may not be emptiness.
It may be a doorway.
A doorway into grief, accountability, and remembering.
A doorway into more honest belonging.
In the video I’ve included, I walk through what I see as the three major layers of ancestral amnesia: spiritual severance, physical severance, and cultural severance through assimilation into whiteness.
My hope is that it offers language for something many of us have felt but have not always known how to name.
And perhaps more importantly, I hope it offers an invitation:
Not to romanticize the past, bypass harm or pretend we can recover everything exactly as it was.
But to begin remembering responsibly.
To ask better questions.
To grieve what was lost.
To reckon with what was carried.
And to listen for the whisperings of your ancestors and their beautiful cultures that are still waiting, somewhere beneath the forgetting, to be re-engaged, reanimated, and tended with love and care.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit healingwiththeancestors.substack.com
