I am aware of birdsong outside my window, and imagine I sense the beat of their wings. I am sitting at my desk in my home office, the sun filtering through the open slats of my blinds, forming a play of light and shadow on my desk, on me. They’re important information for how we’ve got our world constructed. They often serve as somewhat humbling reminders of our connection to other humans who feel these things too. It’s important to acknowledge the authenticity of our feelings. Up and down, teeter-tottering between joy and sorrow, courage and fear, energy and fatigue, hope and despair, confusion and certainty, discouragement and elation, and so on. If you’ve been like me, in these anxiety-provoking, sheltered in place times, it’s easy to find ourselves on the edges of something other than inspiration. That all seems counterintuitive right now. What have been your sources of inspiration these past couple of weeks? What have you read, seen, or heard that has opened up your heart in expansive ways, filled you with hope? If you sit there long enough and regularly enough you will feel this, even in your darkest moments. Whatever your problems and challenges, you are, you exist in this bright world with others, with trees, sky, water, stars, sun, and moon. Yeah.There’s no North Carolina - not even its outline,” my inner voice replied one day, as I winced a little self-consciously while studying a map depicting colorful, overlapping shapes seeming to move in all directions as though to acknowledge people who were in relationship with one another and the land they were on, rather than as people who were owners. I was searching for tribal names I found on the go-to website for locating the traditional native territory you’re presently living on. “Where’s North Carolina?” I found myself wondering a few times, furrowing my brow for at least the shape of it as I scanned the land mass we now call the United States. For instance, the look of various maps that depict Indian tribes during a certain period. I have been struck by the silly assumptions I’ve made while doing this research. Such research is called for as part of an Action of Immediate Witness (AIW), which was overwhelmingly passed by congregational delegates during the 2020 Unitarian Universalist Association’s General Assembly (GA),which was the 400th year since the arrival of the Mayflower and the English invasion of Wampanoag territory. These past several months some of us on staff have been researching the indigenous people whose lands we now occupy as Durham, so that we might all know whose lands we ultimately occupy as the Eno River Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. When we look at maps of the Southeast, we do not see ourselves, we do not see our memories of place. The landscape has changed, the surfaces of our histories have been written over: the longleaf pine ecosystem of Creek country’s southern territory reduced from ninety million acres to three million acres in under two centuries the river valleys of the eighteenth-century Muscogean towns now predominantly underwater as a result of twentieth-century damming practices. For a person with indigenous roots in the Southeast who is looking for evidence of your homeland, you have to follow invisible maps.
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