They Danced Here First…

I stood in the stands with the diverse crowd, watching the Grand Entry of Dancers at the Gathering of Nations Powwow this March in Albuquerque. As the drummers sang and drove the beat, the different kinds of dancers entered: Jingle dancers, Grass dancers, Shawl dancers, Traditional dancers, and so many more! They came from around the country, and Canada and Mexico, too.

At first they formed a thin, spare line circling the massive convention space, but as more and more streamed in, moving clockwise, they began to fill the floor. All of them dancing, showing off their regalia, moving inexorably around to the left. They kept making room for more, more. Until the floor was packed with a spectacular spiral of beautiful dancing bodies.

My eyes teared up, as I realized: their ancestors were here before mine, doing things like this. They preceded us. They came first.

There were many European-descended people watching in the stands. We were genuinely welcome! And it felt like a fierce and loving declaration to us, the white descendants: We were here first. You came later. We danced before you came. We precede you. We still dance.

For centuries, it has been declared – the Europeans are first! They are the best! They are more loved by the divine and know best Spirit’s ways! But this has been literally untrue. These peoples were here first. Honoring precedence, we learn in constellations, when it has been ignored and violated, relieves an invisible, usually unknown burden from us.

I’ve “known” the truth all along, of course – I learned history’s outlines in school. But the ritual declaration of precedence was something I could feel in my body. In the stands, I finally truly knew it. It was liberating. My ancestors came here later, at great cost to the ancestors of these dancers. To just say it – you were here first, we came later.

What a blessing the truth is:

• I have ancestors who arrived in Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620, the land of the Wampanoag. I have ancestors who fought and died in St. Phillip’s “War” – really a terrible massacre of those people.
• I have ancestors who fled persecution as Quakers in England in the late 17th c., made their way to Pennsylviania, and eventually found sanctuary and established themselves as a wealthy aristocracy in Philadelphia, the land of the Lenape and others.
• I have ancestors, the most recent immigrants, who left Germany – likely due to war and poverty – and who then settled to farm in Illinois in the 1840s, not so soon after the local Potawatomi and other peoples had been massacred and removed.
• I have ancestors who, having lived many generations already on the USA East Coast and Quebec, Canada, moved to Colorado in the 1870s, right after the infamous massacre of Arapaho and Cheyenne peoples at Sand Creek.
• And today, I live near Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’ve lived here only a year. This remains the land of the Puebloans and their ancestors.

I can claim my people have been in this land quite a long time. I can claim connection to this place, as the land that nurtured my ancestors and me, that shaped our culture, and which has born our guilts, joys and heartaches for hundreds of years. It’s good when I do that.

But they were all here first. They danced here first. We came later. They still dance.

Who came before your ancestors? And/or, whom did your ancestors come before? What truth, if named, will lift the burdens of the lies we’ve been told? Please share on my blog, below.

Note: I did not take pictures at the powwow. While not prohibited, it didn’t feel respectful. So, please enjoy the other southwestern images I’ve shared today!