#Inherited Silence – Anna Citrino—Poetry, Place, Pilgrimage

“…she knew her memory was failing and she said to me, ‘I can’t forget them. If
I do, there will be no one left to remember that they ever existed.’” –Anne Berest, The Postcard

Moving back to the United States after living abroad in six different countries for over two and a half decades, I now want to get a better understanding of the country I live in and the land I live on. Something I’ve noticed in adjusting to living in different cultures and in visiting countries occupied by various other cultures over long periods of time is that people who have left one region of the world for another carry the world they came from with them.

When early settlers from the East Coast came to the western states, they learned that the land there had different needs and requirements. The soil and climate were different. More land was needed to achieve the amount of food production desired. The world one arrives at after a move is not the one that is left behind. It takes time to understand and adjust to a world not your own and cultures that function with different organizational structures, have different ways of seeing and follow different rules. The environment in one area isn’t the same those in other areas, and the needs aren’t always understood when moving to a new area.

When I moved to Sonoma County two years ago, I encountered a part of American history I was formerly unaware of–that portions of the county were formerly a Russian colony. Years ago, I visited Sitka, Alaska, and learned of its history as a Russian settlement. Called Novo-Arkhangel’sk by the Russian colonists, Sitka came into existence for the purpose of expanding Russia’s fur trade in the area. (Read more about the history here.) What I didn’t know when visiting Sitka, was that Russia had also set up a colony on native people’s lands north of San Francisco in the early years of the 1800s. Because of the cold climate, it was difficult to keep Russian colonies in the northwest adequately supplied with provisions. As a result, the Russians sought a settlement further south on the American continent’s western coast.

Russians used Bodega Bay’s outer waters as a harbor and renamed it Rumiantsev Bay, and built a fort further north on the Sonoma Coast using building styles similar to those in Sitka and in Siberia. The stockade, blockhouses, and log buildings were completed on August 30, 1812. Cannons were placed in the stockade and blockhouses and the flag of the Russian-American Company was raised. Known now as Fort Ross, its name likely coming from the fort’s connection with Russia, Rossiia, being an alternative from of the word Russia, and Ross a shortening of Rossia, is now a California State Park.

Craftsmen at the fort made barrels, plows, and built ships and boats. People at the fort gardened and raised cattle. A chapel was built at the fort in the Orthodox style where weddings, baptisms, burials, prayer and other religious practices were held. The fort’s inhabitants carried out experiments in farming. Grape stock was brought from Peru and peach trees from Monterey, as well as apples, cherries, pear, wheat, corn, beans, and tobacco–all of these crops and activities familiar to their own culture.

Icon at Fort Ross, Sonoma County, California

According to the Sonoma Index Tribune, Russians brought Gravenstein apples to the Fort Ross area. Later, in 1850s, the apples were brought to the area around Graton in Sonoma County. More orchards were planted in the area, and apple production was a central agricultural product in the area, giving Sebastopol a nation-wide reputation for its apples.

The architectural forms the Russians’ buildings took and the way they were made are unique to their culture as well. They didn’t use the structural methods of the people native to the lands they were occupying. Additionally, the Russians hunted for otter along the coast until their presence was exhausted, leading to the collapse of the Russian colony.

Though stories of the Russian colony on the US western coast is one we may be unfamiliar with, it nevertheless helped to make the world we walk around in. There can be a variety of reasons for our not knowing the stories of the land we inhabit. The people who came before us may have endured such hardship that it was too painful to tell the stories, alternatively, sometimes shame surrounds how the land we live on was acquired and people don’t want to tell the story or create an alternative story or simply keep silent about the story, as Louise Dunlap suggests in her book Inherited Silence. Other people are so caught up in their own daily story that they haven’t considered the story of the land they live on. Nevertheless, as Berest writes in The Postcard, “I carry within me, inscribed in the very cells of my body, the memory.”

Author Dale M. Kushner, in her blog post, “The Things We Carry: How Our Ancestors’ Traumas May Influence Who We Are,” explains how research findings in the field of behavioral epigenetics, “have documented that trauma can affect the expression or suppression of certain genes, not only for the person involved but also for succeeding generations,” as can experiences of familial shame, guilt, despair, rage, hopelessness, evidence suggests,” says Kushner, but she goes on to explain how Jungian psychologist James Hollis suggests we “look to our imaginations as a portal to healing,” to the “arts of ceremony and ritual, and to our in-dwelling creative spirits that remain alive no matter what terrible thing has happened to us.”

Sunset looking toward Fresno, California

Alberto Rios in his poem “A House Called Tomorrow” writes

When you as a child learned to speak,
It’s not that you didn’t know words—

It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many,
And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.

From those centuries we human beings bring with us
The simple solutions and songs,

The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies
All in service to a simple idea:

That we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,

Is ourselves. And that’s all we need
To start. That’s everything we require to keep going.

It’s important to consider what we bring to the communities we interact with so that we co-create the kind of world we want to exist. Though it’s not humanly possible to know every culture’s perspective, we can be aware that our way of seeing is but one way and that there are others that may be more fitting. As Rios says, what we bring into the new day, every day is ourselves and that is what we need to start and to keep going. We don’t live separate lives. Many cultures and ways of seeing and acting form our world. We each participate in making the world we inhabit as well as the one those after us will live in.

The natural world is one of generosity and community. Trees, for example, give shade to anyone who walk beneath them. Rivers give water to all who drink from them without withholding. Charles Eisenstein states in his article, “The Relationship Between Gifts and Community: on the Daily Good website offers a beautiful way we can begin to create community and a more generous world. “Community is woven from gifts,” Eisenstein states, and suggests creating gift circles where people gather to express their needs, share with each other something they would like to give, and then later gather to give gratitude for what was given. As Rios points out in his poem, “we can make a house called tomorrow.” That tomorrow begins with becoming gifts to each other and recognizing the gifts that abound everywhere in the around us.

“Our work is to call each other home, to call to one another’s spirits and say, “This is for you. This is what it means to be human, to love and be loved. Let’s learn from one another as we go.”
Kaitlin B. Curtice, Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day

Recently, I travelled to Cheyenne, Wyoming via Fort Collins, Colorado. Though I never lived in Wyoming, I have ancestors who once did, and I wanted to experience what it felt like standing on that earth and to absorb some of the history of this part of the US through being there. Traveling across the landscape to get to Cheyenne, I felt the wide embrace of the grassy plain, and a calm, deep presence of the earth’s steadfastness. The sky holds you inside its rich, blue center and presents you with its expansive heart. There’s a sense of oneness between earth and sky, as when looking out over the ocean where the sea meets the sky.

In Cheyenne, I could sense a part of American history still alive there that one is less aware of when living far from that part of the US. Wyoming’s history plays an important part in the creation of present day US. After the US Civil War, the US government wanted people to move into Wyoming and Nebraska and settle there. The Homestead Act gave people 160 acres of land for a small fee if the independent farmer would live on the land and cultivate it for five years. Building the railroads was fundamental to that effort. Homesteaders needed supplies, and the railroads brought supplies to them. The US government gave extensive grants of land to the railroads in order to encourage settlement, 175,000,000 acres, an area greater than one tenth of the whole of the US. Building the railroads decimated the bison that roamed the plains. Buffalo Bill was hired by the Kansas Pacific Railroad Company, and is reported to have killed more than 4,000 buffalo. Former trappers, turned to hunting the buffalo as well. 200,000 buffalo were killed annually, nearly annihilating the population. Native tribes depended on the buffalo for sustenance. As Gilbert King’s Smithsonian article “Where the Buffalo No Longer Roamed,” states, “By the end of the 19th century, only 300 buffalo were left in the wild.” The decimation of the buffalo in turn decimated the way of life for the plains Indians.

Driving in the final stake of transcontinental railroad drove a stake into the heart of Native Americans’ ability to sustain their way of life. As King’s article states, “Sheridan acknowledged the role of the railroad in changing the face of the American West, and in his Annual Report of the General of the U.S. Army in 1878, he acknowledged that the Native Americans were scuttled to reservations with no compensation beyond the promise of religious instruction and basic supplies of food and clothing—promises, he wrote, which were never fulfilled.” Native people were stripped of their culture, forced to assimilate for survival, in turn this resulted in the US winning its war against Native Americans and their possession of the land.

Cheyenne is known as one of America’s windiest cities. It’s perhaps less well known that in 1882 Cheyenne was the wealthiest city per capita in the world. Wyoming was a lucrative location in those early days, where cattle barons sunk millions of dollars into their deep pockets with the extensive herds they owned. Electric lights brightened streets, and the city had an opera house and a men’s club serving fine food, liquor, and fancy cigars. In 1886 and 1887, however, subzero temperatures and blizzards killed thousands of cattle at one stroke, an event referred to as the Great-Die Up, bringing an end to cattle drives across free range.

What we become isn’t usually the result of a single story. We live in an interconnected world. We inherit layered histories and stories as well as layered silences. Our understanding of who we are and how we connect with the world around us is lifelong work. While bison and Native American populations were being exterminated and crushed the women’s suffrage movement was also occurring. In 1869 women in Wyoming were the first in the US to receive the right to vote.

As Potawatomi American writer Kaitlin B. Curtice points out, in Simian Jeet Singh’s interview with her on “Anti-Racism as a Spiritual Practice,” America is “a settler colonial state and it’s difficult to reckon with.” Coming to terms with our past is and what it suggests is challenging. Nevertheless, in recognition of the difficult and problematic history regarding how America came into being, I want to better understand and respond to the place I inhabit in American culture and what that means for how I should live.

Coming home to ourselves means in part to understand what our home is and the forces and people that came together to create it. As May Sarton writes in her poem, “Now I Become Myself,” it takes “Time, years, and many places;” perhaps one will be “dissolved and shaken,” as she describes as well. History is complex, our own, and that of a nation or a culture. We are many worlds in one body. Louise Dunlop, in her book, Inherited Silence, writing about how the difficult and uncomfortable history of how America came into being writes, “Settler people experienced a different wounding in this terrible history. We, too, need healing practices to transform the shame and trauma we carry and continue to pass on. That shame is the root of our silence. We need songs poems, inspiration, spiritual practices, and affirmation that make it positive to acknowledge our history.”

Our very existence depends on the support the natural world offers us, as well as the support of people all around us and what we’ve inherited from those who came before us though we may not even know their names or be aware of their actions. I come from a line of settlers, though much of their personal stories I don’t know and have only learned from reading about the history of the time period, the area, people’s histories, and oral stories. Because I know little of my ancestors’ stories, and because they didn’t tell their stories, as a way to try and understand their lives and their challenges, I’m imagining what those stories might be and am writing them. I’m calling to the spirits of my ancestors, so to speak, saying, “This is for you. I’m reaching to understand more of what it means to be human. I want to learn from you.” Recently published in Waterwheel Review, “Remembering Adella,” is written in the voice of a great aunt imagining the voice of her mother, a woman of the grasslands.

Your story may not connect to a grassy plain or rich blue sky. Your story might be rooted in the tropics, a cityscape, snowy mountain or desert, but all stories touch each other on our great web of interbeing of life on this planet. Whatever your story, I wish for you to find a way to be at home, that all wounding from your past be healed, that you find peace with yourself and with those around you. I leave you with this 1888 Antonio de Torres guitar piece, “Home,” played by Andrew York, and a photo from my home in California.

Tag: #Inherited Silence

Worlds We Carry With Us

Histories of Home