Stolen Land

Your Monthly Myth

Stolen Land

“Now I'm in the land of liberty where plenty it does abound

Where the labouring man gets full reward for the tilling of his ground

There's naught I can see that can comfort me as an exile I must roam

And end my days far far away from Erin's lovely home.”

Karan Casey, Erin’s Lovely Home

I am eleven years old in camp, sitting on a high rock after a long hike throu gh the woods. A white man sits in a circle of white children.

“And Gluscabee gave a deerskin medicine bag to each man and warned them - do not open this bag until you are safe at home in your village.” 

I know the men in the story will not listen because at eleven I know how these things go. Two of them will open the bags as they row their canoes home. The one who wished to be the tallest man in the village will be turned into a tree. The canoe will capsize, spilling him into the ocean where he will grow until only the very tallest part will stick above the water. 

The other, who wished for a long life, will be turned into a rock. The canoe will capsize and he will spend the rest of his days at the bottom of the sea. 

“The last man waited,” our counselor says, “until he was safe at home in his village. He wished to be a fine hunter, so that his people would never go hungry. He waited until a bad winter came and then he opened Gluscabee’s medicine bag.” 

Inside he found a hunting bow. He went out into the woods. One deer walked by and the man let him go. A second deer passed and the man did not draw. 

The third deer he shot and brought home to feed his people. And they were never hungry. 

I raise my hand. “Whose story is this?”

The counselor looks at me. He has shaggy brown hair and bright blue eyes and I adore him. He knows how to find paths in the woods and start a fire. These are skills I wish for desperately. 

He shrugs. “A Native American story.” 

One of the other kids nods virtuously. Our counselor used the correct word by the standard of the time. Native American, not Indian. 

We were sitting criss-cross applesauce. Not Indian-style. 

“No, I mean, what tribe?” I ask.

I am the type of kid to whom these things matter. I have a notebook at home divided into sections, each carefully labeled for the different tribes. I write the stories down based on who they belonged to. The Lenape, the Ojibwe. The Inuit and the Navajo. In the margins I put words in each of the languages, anything I can find. 

The counselor cocks his head. “I don’t know. One of them.” 

That night I write the story down in my notebook, under the section titled "Unknown." 

*

“And the man told the leprechaun, don’t you move that red ribbon now. Give me your word that you won’t.” 

I am thirteen at a ceilidh and there is a Seanachie, a Storyteller. I’ve been sitting beside him for so long that he’s started to address his stories to me.

The leprechaun gives his word, of course. But I know better than to trust it. The man goes off to fetch a shovel to dig up the gold buried beneath the red-ribboned rock and when he comes back the whole field is filled with rocks and each has a bright red ribbon tied on it. 

“So,” says the Seanachie, “he never did get the gold. But he had plenty of ribbons to give to his sweetheart. Not such a bad day.” 

I laugh. And he smiles down at me. “What’s your name?”

“Bess Trout,” I say. “But my middle name is Donohue.” 

He nods wisely. “Of course it is, fine listener like yourself. I would have known you for an Irish girl.” 

But I’m not an Irish girl. I’m American.

I go home and write the story down in my notebook under the section labeled “Ireland.” 

*

“No, we don’t have any Native American ancestors,” my mother tells me. I am fifteen and I want this so badly I can taste it. 

I study the skin on the inside of my arm. It is white, so white I can see a trace of blue veins in my wrist. So white I have freckles and burn in the sun. 

“Even just one?” 

She sighs. “We haven’t been here long enough.” 

She is impatient. It’s summer and it’s hot. We’re trying to go to the pool, but that morning we watched the movie Smoke Signals and the beauty of those stories made my chest ache.

I want to bury my hands in the earth of this land and know that it recognizes me.

I am so afraid that it never will. 

*

I am eighteen and there is a castle in front of me. A real one made of stone. 

“This is Ross Castle,” my father says. “But it used to be called Donoghue castle.” 

For a moment I’m afraid to breathe. A castle with our name on it. 

We’re in Ireland for ten days. A big trip as a family before I go away to college. 

We’ve seen the Burren. Inch Beach. Doolin and the Dingle Peninsula. I’ve seen many places that carry the names of my family. Donohue. Devlin. O’Neill. Each time I find one it feels like a miracle. 

I am the Storyteller now. In each place my parents ask me, is there a story for this one? If there is, I tell it. My fourteen year old brother is so jet-lagged he sometimes lays down with his head in our mother’s lap as if he is much younger.

I am drawing from a lifetime of listening. A lifetime marked by a desperate need to belong to one of these stories here, or those stories on the other side of an ocean. 

We take a tour out to a place where you can see the Arran Islands. 

“Those are the islands,” says our tour guide, pointing out over the sea.

They are beautiful. Brilliant green and shrouded in mist. A seagull wheels over head keening and I watch it struggle against the wind. 

“If you look hard,” says the guide, “and the day is clear and fine, you might be able to see Tir Na ‘Nog beyond those islands, just a wee bit of green between them and the horizon.” 

He is playing it up, leaning into the brogue as if it were a walking stick. We are mostly Americans and he knows we are charmed by the word ‘wee.’ 

A few of the people among us look confused at the name. The Land of Youth. I am so pleased I know what he means. 

At eighteen I believe I know many things. I’ve read so many Irish authors. I’ve hung on the words of every Seanachie I could find. I took Irish dance and pestered my aunts, uncles and grandparents with questions. 

The tour guide grins, watching us lean forward, squinting for green.

“And beyond that,” he said, dropping his voice as if letting us in on a secret. “If the day is very clear and you’ve grand eyes for looking, you might see Our Lady of the Bay over in New York City.” 

We laugh in surprise. The Statue of Liberty. 

My family left from here, I think, and sailed for there. 

I want to bury my hands in this soil and see if it recognizes me. 

I don’t, because at eighteen I’m scared that it will not. 

*

I am twenty and I am taking an anthropology class. My major is Environmental Studies, my minor is Creative Writing. But I am desperate to understand and I don’t believe in free time so I am quietly also minoring in Anthro. 

My advisor has noticed this and sometimes teases me gently for it.

“These are the cave paintings in Lascaux,” my professor says. “Some of them record animals that have gone extinct. But when you look at these paintings by torch light they almost breathe again.” 

Is that far enough back? I wonder. Do those stories belong to everyone, and so do they belong to me? 

This is the question that haunts me.

My family crossed an ocean to survive. They fled starvation, oppression and colonization. They carried very little with them, but their hearts were full of stories and love for a land that had been stolen from them. 

They grew a family here. They raised me in a land that had in its turn been stolen by those same forces. Starvation, oppression and colonization. 

I am the daughter of a stolen land. 

And I am a woman who lives on stolen land. 

At twenty I think that this has left me bereft of story because I don’t know what I’m allowed to claim. 

*

I am twenty eight and living with my husband in Chicago. I know the word ‘Chicago’ comes from the Illinois and Miami people and means ‘striped skunk’. Which they also use to mean Allium tricoccum, or wild leek. 

On a river boat tour a guide tells us the word means ‘broad shoulders.’ 

Wild onion, I think. Your city is named for onions because they grow so well along the lake. 

I spend almost every day with my hands buried in the soil helping plants to grow. It makes my heart lift, my blood sing, to stand in the wind beneath that blue prairie sky and see the flowers bloom. We are collecting seeds for the seed vault and I am deeply soothed by this because I am doing good for the land that I love so much. 

The land. Not the country.

As I carefully clean the seeds, the chaff rasping against my fingers, I think how like a seed a story can be. Easy to save, easy to carry and so essential for the future.

So easy to steal. And so easy to lose.

I’m writing a book full of the Irish myths I grew up with. I find that soothing too because in writing them down I am coming to know the fabric of those stories.

A co-worker invites me to go to an exhibition of Irish art with them and a few other friends. Because of our work we get into all the museums for free, and I love this. So I go, even though I don’t know the other women very well.

There, in the foyer of the exhibit, is a bodhran drum painted with Celtic knotwork. 

I am thrilled. I want to touch the leather, to pick up the striker and hear the quiet museum fill with sound. 

I have been to many ceilidhs and they are always full of sound. Music and dancing and story. This museum tastes too sterile. But the drum gives me hope that inside the gallery there might be something that reminds me of my family. 

The exhibition claims that it highlights Irish art created between 1840 and 1900, and I brace myself for the pain of those years. There was a famine in 1844 and then another, or perhaps merely a continuation of the first, in 1847. 

It is sometimes called “Black ‘47” or simply, Gorta, which means hunger. 

“Black ‘47, I’ll never forget/When the fever it stalked the land/And the famine without mercy it/Stretched forth its dreadful hand.”

I sing the words in my head as we step into the exhibit. 

Walls of beautiful, pastoral paintings stretch around us. Lovely glens and lochs. Forests and quaint cabins done in oils and watercolors on huge canvases that no one in my family could have afforded to buy. 

The other women stand beside the paintings. “Beautiful,” they say. “So green.” 

I read the names on the cards beside the paintings. They are all English. 

“This isn’t Irish art,” I tell everyone. 

One of the women raises an eyebrow. “What do you mean? This one was painted in Wexford.” 

I point to the name. “By an Englishman. Look, he was from London.” 

“So?” she asks. “It’s a painting of Ireland.”

“That doesn’t make it Irish.” It matters to me that they understand this. I’m angry. There is nothing of the flavor of my family here. “Look. It was painted in 1847.” 

To me that number is huge. It means something. But they look confused. 

“Black ‘47,” I tell them. “Gorta. The Irish were starving then, the potato crop had just failed for a second time. One million people died. One million more immigrated.” 

“Oh.” My coworker looks sad. It is the proper response to a famine. “Still,” she says, turning back to the painting. “It’s a beautiful mountain.” 

“No it’s not,” I tell her. I’m being too loud, the museum feels very quiet. “It’s a painting done by a rich man who didn’t care that people were dying.” 

She half shrugs. “That’s awful. But it was a long time ago.” 

It was. I know that it was.

“Is that why your family came here?” she asks. I’m sure she is looking for an easy reason why I would be so upset about this.

“No,” I tell her. “We came later. I just hate colonization.” 

This is a safe thing to say. We all nod. Colonization. A great evil to be denounced by a group of white women standing in an art gallery in the heart of the place of Wild Onions. 

But I do hate it. Because these paintings should not be of hills. They should be of a people desperate to survive. There should be a musician in the back corner of the gallery and a Storyteller by a fire. 

“Listen, na cailíní,” the Storyteller would say. “Let me tell you now it actually happened.” 

I am filled with a burning need to write it down.

* 

I am thirty-four and it’s 2021, in the dark heart of that Covid winter. I have a Zoom meeting scheduled with the Storykeeper and the Herbalist of the Lenape Tribe of Pennsylvania. I have no child care for my son, who isn’t two yet, so that afternoon I tell him very seriously that mama needs him to take a very good nap today, ok? A very long nap.

It has taken me two months to schedule this meeting. And I could have given it to my boss to run because she doesn’t have a toddler at home. But I want so much to do it. I marked it on my calendar in a different color because I was so excited, so desperate to speak directly to the two members of the Lenape tribe who do the work closest to my heart.

I have three reminders set. One in my personal calendar, one in my work calendar, plus an alarm on my phone.

My son wakes crying midway through my meeting. 

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I need to go and get my baby.” 

All the little faces on the zoom screen nod. “Yes, yes,” they say. “Go and get baby! We don’t mind.” 

It is a politeness we offer one another. We are all scared. We don’t know when this pandemic will end. 

I bring my son into my office and sit him on my lap. He smiles and waves at the little faces on the screen. They coo at him. A baby! How much brighter it is to see a child’s face, rather than the news. 

We keep meeting, but it doesn’t take long for my son to start signing for milk. His little hand opens and closes. Milk! Milk! 

Because that’s what we do after his nap. I cuddle him in his chair and we nurse. His face grows red and scrunched and I can’t give him to my husband who is working one floor away. He’s employed by a medical database company and we need him to keep his job. 

“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s just – My son is nursing. He needs to nurse. I can get off, we can reschedule– Or I can turn off my screen…”

I am certain that I should have given this meeting to my boss. She would have done it. She wouldn’t have even made me feel guilty for it. But I am a woman, and I am a mother, and I am an employee and it is February of 2021.

“If the baby is hungry you have to feed him! Go ahead and turn off your screen,” says the Herbalist. “We can keep meeting.” 

“No, no,” says the Storykeeper. “I’ll tell him a story. When was he born?” 

“This month,” I say. “Late February.” 

“A maple sugar baby!” says the Storykeeper. “I will tell him how the people learned to tap the maple trees for sugar. Long, long ago, you see, Maple Tree had a problem…” 

He tells the story to my son as he nurses, and outside people grow sick and die and the winter stretches on and on into a future that no one knows how to recognize. 

“And that is the gift of the maple tree,” the Storykeeper says. “A taste of sweetness that comes in the darkest days of winter. A reminder that better times will come.” 

I tell my son this story every year on his birthday.

*

“I think you’re overthinking it.”

They are my husband’s words. We’re out on a date, there’s a babysitter at home with our children. The pandemic is over and it seems normal now, to pay someone to watch our kids so we can go eat, unmasked, in a restaurant. 

“Well, I think you’re underthinking it,” I tell him. 

It is only partially a joke. 

He sighs. “I think if you love these stories, you should tell them.” 

“But they don’t belong to me.” 

We’re eating hotpot. He picked the place so he could order as many mushrooms as he wanted to put in his soup. 

I don’t cook with mushrooms. I tell him they are too smart. I feel guilty every time I cut them up. 

He swallows his noodles. “Well, then who do they belong to?” 

I wave vaguely. I can’t eat any more soup, it’s 90 degrees outside. “I don’t know. Who ever told them.” 

“Well, wouldn’t that be you?” 

“But cultural appropriation–” 

“I don’t think you can culturally appropriate Irish stories when they were literally handed down to you by your family.” 

When my husband uses the word literally he means it. He is not given to hyperbole. 

“But I’m not from Ireland.” 

He rolls his eyes. “I think you’re splitting hairs.” 

“But it matters.” 

He drops the last of his mushrooms into the soup pot. “Right. It matters to you. That’s why I think it doesn’t matter.” 

“That doesn’t make any sense.” 

He rolls his eyes. “I listen to you tell the kids stories. The Irish ones and the Native American ones. And Anansi the Spider, and the Viking ones. The Stone Cutter one from Japan. You love all those stories. You tell them well and you tell them respectfully. And you always give credit. How is that cultural appropriation?” 

“I just want to belong to them,” I say. 

“You do. You always have. Definitely the Irish ones.” 

It is a strange thought. I poke at what’s left of my bok choy and Chinese yams. 

“How about this?” he asks. “Just keep the stories and tell them. Like Gerald McDermott in those books the kids love. Isn’t that better? Stories die if you don’t tell them.” 

“Do you think that’s good enough?” 

I want it to be good enough so badly it pulls in my stomach. 

He shrugs. “Yeah I think so. I think it’s always better for someone to tell stories.” 

And I think, maybe I can manage that. I can be the person who tells stories.

Maybe I already am. 

And that might be enough, to be just one more link in a chain that keeps these stories alive. I think we need them now, if not more than ever than at least as much as we ever did.

We need them, and they need us. 

And we belong to one another.