My family's ashes (Patreon)

I found this picture on my mother’s kitchen counter after she died. I was named after the woman on the left, my great great grandmother (mother’s mother’s mother’s mother?). My mom always told me she was a Chiricahuan Apache shaman and one of Geronimo’s daughters, but I know very little about her other than that. The woman on the right was a traveling school teacher. I wish I had listened to more of my mother’s stories about family history before she died. I was always a little put off by her obsession with genealogy and blood quantum and her unrequited idea of what it meant to be "family." She did her best to preserve the history in pictures and stories despite being severed from it, and wanted more than anything to be a part of it.

Her mother changed her last name from Uribe to Campbell in her adult life in the interest of assimilation. There was so much shame surrounding what it meant to be an Indigenous woman, that within 2 generations we (myself, & all of my maternal cousins) became entirely and systematically swallowed into the homogeneity of White American Culture. I have always struggled with the sacred when it comes to honoring my ancestors, and now with the passing of my own mother, the question of honoring the dead and resting rites is raised more closely than I’d had to consider before.

My mother struggled with this same question; it seems clear in how she held on to her parents’ ashes, and the ashes of her child, until the day she died. There's powerful responsibility in shepherding the ashes of the dead, and I have bodily inherited three generations of my own family. I suppose this is something to think about for a little while.