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Samhain Ceremony

POORMAG

By Seamus O'Quill


October 31st is known as Samhain in Irish (pronounced saw-when). It's the start of the new year and the time when the veil between worlds is thin, a time of honoring ancestors and the spirit of the land. As the churches colonized Irish culture and language the day became known as All Hollows Eve and then Halloween, but many indigenous cultures continue to find voice even within the systems that tried to silence them. The practice of Dia de los Muertos is a cousin of the Irish Samhain. 

In solidarity with oppressed people around the world and standing in my Irish tradition, I'm going to join my song with the ancestors in the Pauper's Graveyard in the Steilacoom and Puyallup land named Tacoma, Washington, where those too poor to afford a grave or funeral were buried. 

The poor of every tribe and clan have been the primary victims of colonization. My poor Irish ancestors starved off their homeland, rejected as refugees and sold the lie that land out west was free for the taking. The Chinese who built the cities and railroads and were then excluded. The Native kin who faced the awful choice facing colonized and oppressed people even today: where are we supposed to go but the land of our ancestors? 

We will likely never know who all lies in the Pauper's Graveyard and can only guess at the stories, but we know them too well because we keep retelling the myths of supremacy and manifest destiny. We sweep unhoused kin where we can't see, dump their bodies in mass graves, bomb their hospitals and schools, and blame them for fighting back. New graveyards are sprouting like plague where the unnamed tell the stories of our undoing. 

Every indigenous knowledge system, that is cultural worldviews of native humans living in balance with the land, has a teaching akin to the Native American idea of living for the next seven generations. To consider our actions today as they will be understood by those who follow after us, to become future ancestors. And it's impossible to think forward seven generations without looking back and understanding the stories that got us here. 

It's why I study the history of colonization to understand how my people who were oppressed came to be White and oppressors. It's why I seek to learn the history and living culture of the native kin on whose land I dwell. And it's why I sing to graveyards. Because I want to be a part of a story that's changing. 

On Samhain I will sing funeral songs to the paupers, perhaps some never had. But not just to ease the spirits on the day when they are most restless, but to connect to a future ancestor story that I see in the Homefulness project of Poor Press. 

Since learning from Tiny in People Skool and joining them for the first visit to the Pacific Northwest with the vision of Homefulness, I've seen a dream and story that can last seven generations. Unsell mamma Earth. Stop charging rent. Start listening to women and indigenous voices. 

Faced with the daily violence and grief and rage of the alternative, and all the new pauper's graveyards being filled by stories of men needing to own land and bodies, it is the one story that gives me hope, that continues to transmute my grief into joy. I see lot after lot of land being unsold as neighbors and communities realize that the unhoused have always known what they need. I see the generations that can grow without rent or the threat of eviction hovering always. I see a small graveyard dotted with White Oak and Douglas Fir, where my bones may nourish the trees for seven generations, at least. 

To paraphrase Chief Si'ahl, the White Man will never be alone, the spirits of the people who love this land, love her still and throng in the forest and street and shop and in the quiet of the woods. I sing because I am not alone. 

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