Living The Ancestral Way
What would it be if you had to say one thing about the world you inherited?
I spend a lot of time thinking about how we live, and what informs our lives. None of us, live our lives out of thin air. Whether we would like to admit it or not, a set of values and belief systems inform our views, perceptions, and language about how the world we have inherited operates. If you make the time to dig a little deeper, you might come to the realization that what you believe about the world informs your imagination, your language, your words, your vision, and ultimately what you believe is possible for you in the world, and your capacity to become what you believe. Over the past few years, I have made it a practice to question how I see the world, what informs my beliefs about the world, and how I choose to move through and with the world.
I am holding a baobab flower I found at the base of the baobab tree in Tongo.
Although I am at the very beginning of my journey, my story is a continuation of my lineage and a part of Earth’s larger story. Living the ancestral way is what I am inheriting from this world, but also what I would like to intentionally leave behind. For me, living the ancestral way is about acknowledging in my values, thoughts, beliefs, and actions that all life forces are interconnected. I believe that human beings are connected to the ecologies in which we live, hence, the land, rivers, forests, soil, plants, tall grasses, dry seasons, cows, guinea fowls, and the houses we live in are not merely landscapes or settings or backdrops to human existence but rather they are an extension of us and we are also an extension of them. Our ecosystems do not merely exist to serve human interests, we come from them, they are part of the womb that births our beginning, we are all part of the same story, and they are very much our beginning as they will too be in the end with us.
My father is Akan, from Bekwai in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. Among the Akan people, Mother Earth is referred to as Asase Yaa. Asase means earth and/or land, and Yaa is the female name given to a girl child born on a Thursday. Asase Yaa can also mean an old woman, and/or the great female spirit of the earth. Among the Akan people, during ceremonies, celebrations, or funerals, locally made alcohol will be poured (libation) through Asase Yaa to the ancestors as thanksgiving of her provision of life before proceeding to make a request from Asase Yaa. In the indigenous beliefs of the Akan people, a relationship with Asase Yaa is intentional, interactive, and necessary. Asase Yaa is a spirit, an entity, and an ancestor crucial to the existence and being of the Akan people who can reward or punish. Asase Yaa is the bridge between humans and their ancestors, but she is also the one through which permission must be asked before interacting with the land, and this is reflected in the language, proverbs, traditional prayers, cultural activities, food, and agricultural practices.
Among most indigenous cultures, the earth holds a deep connection to our ancestors, the earth is the way we connect to our ancestors to know the future and to maintain a connection to the past, and the earth herself is an ancestor. In the Upper East region, if you go up to the Talensi people in the Tenzug village up on the Tongo Hills, in the chief's palace, you will notice that they have tied a white thin cloth around a baobab tree signifying a reverence for the spirituality of the baobab tree. Other ethnic groups in the Upper East region also practice reverence for particular trees and nonhuman living things, like my mother’s Kassena Nankana people. In front of most traditional houses, you will notice a shrine made of mud with sacrifices to the gods or calling on ancestors through the earth. If you pay attention to the indigenous belief that honored rivers, lakes, trees, and non-human living things as gods, or holy, or give reverence to nonhuman living things, these beliefs protected nonhuman living things from being harmed. For instance, water bodies such as rivers and lakes that were seen as gods were not contaminated or poisoned, and forests that were believed to house spirits meant they were preserved from extraction. Most of these traditional belief systems protected many ecosystems that humans interacted with. Currently in Ghana and many places across the world, rivers, lakes, and water bodies are polluted beyond repair for the extraction of minerals. So many farms are uprooted to dig for gold mining, life in the ocean is destroyed by the removal of oil, and human labor is used as disposable in the process of coltan mining. We see the extraction of natural resources and the natural world for the political and economic gain of very few people while destroying thousands of years of life forms for all living things. What are we exchanging our interconnectedness for?
A chick in Tongo Oasis
Living the ancestral way for me is about protecting and preserving indigenous knowledge on how to live in harmony and in reciprocity with the earth, our universe, and all living things. I also acknowledge that indigenous knowledge is not the same everywhere but specific to a certain geographic region that draws on a holistic, collective, community, and land-informed way of living. I do not by any means romanticize indigenous knowledge or ancestral ways of living and being. Because each indigenous culture has its history and challenges in context to survival, wars, etc. However, when I draw on indigenous knowledge that informs living the ancestral ways, I am talking about life and living in a way that centers on interconnectedness, reciprocity, community, and love for all living things.
Community and reciprocity is an integral part of living the ancestral way. Community and reciprocity not only highlights the role of the earth and her ecosystems in providing, their provision, and their sustenance for human life and all life forms. The reciprocity here also means that humans are doing their part in giving back through seed saving, planting, protecting forests, protecting animals, protecting living things in the skies and our waters, and honoring their role as humans in the circle of life, and in the cycle of our planetary system. Climate change clearly reveals that human beings have not been honoring their part in the reciprocal relationship to live and be in harmony with nature. Community is about understanding how our decisions in the world impact and affect each other.
Our world is informed by colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, etc. In summary, colonialism is about the expansion of Western and European control through ideas, systems, and institution; capitalism is a political and economic system where resources and people are commodified and controlled through profits, white supremacy is about the organizing of human bodies in a value system that prioritizes bodies aligning with Eurocentrism as more valuable, and imperialism is about domination over other systems through military and diplomacy. These systems operate from a space and belief of extraction, domination, eradication, and the devaluing of life through commodification. Colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, and their related ideologies are more than just the acquisition and accumulation of economic resources and political power but also operate from a belief system that indigenous systems and some groups of humans need to be dominated.
For hundreds of years, these systems of domination have operated from a space of universalizing all human experiences under one umbrella, while dehumanizing the diversity and range of all life forms. There are countless examples of how whiteness is used as the measure of what is considered successful, intellectual, and beautiful; how capitalism turns everything into a commodity, to be packaged, and sold for profits; and how colonialism continues through the genocide and apartheid as one groups assumes their superiority and importance over another.
Touching the trunk of a baobab tree.
Indigenous knowledge, at its core, is about a reciprocal and respectful relationship with the ecologies that form and inform our lives. We are all responsible for the life we are born into on earth and for our relationship with the land, no matter where we find ourselves, the power and privilege we have access to. Living the ancestral way is about protecting and sustaining the source of where all of our lives begin, humans, animals, plants, rivers, planets, everyone and everything, in the making of our choices and decisions, in valuing all life forms as equal. So, if I had one thing to say about the world I have inherited, I would like to honor the ancestral ways that have all collaborated to make my life and community possible.
For me, living the ancestral way is about us all, you and me, our ancestors (even the ones we do not like), our tribe, our histories (also of trees, alligators, and soils), our changing bodies, about peeling layers of the sun and asking what would happen to our existence if the sun died on us, about the impact of light through photosynthesis to plants, about why social connections matter to our health, about how elephants give birth and what we can learn from that, about the migration of birds, about the lost languages, about what genetically modified seeds and agrochemicals mean for the health of bees, the digestion of giraffes, and longevity of an interconnected universe. How can living the ancestral way inform us about what is possible for the world we have inherited?
