When I made plans to visit Boston Harbor as part of my personal rematriation work this summer, I honestly didn’t know the tall ships would be in town. I only found out after my mom warned me to stay out of Boston for that very reason.

She’s not a fan of Boston traffic, but I don’t mind. Navigating the city streets comes back to me just as easy as my accent does. And visiting Long Wharf is the last stop on my summer tour.

I grew up in the Greater Boston area, living in various cities from the time I was three years old to 21. But I had never seen the tall ships before, known for their tall masts, white sails and rope rigging. Many are historic sailing ships, original and replica, dating back hundreds of years.

Aside from the USS Constitution, of course. I imagine most people from the Boston area have seen the Constitution, which lives at the Constitution Museum in Charlestown. My grandfather Frank Clements was a master model ship builder with his own workshop at the museum, and I’ve visited “Old Iron Sides” more times than I can remember.

During the second week of July, I stood on Long Wharf with dozens of other people, looking at the ships across the harbor and taking in the other views of one of the country’s oldest major cities.

While I did have ancestors who came to what is now the United States on tall ships, my mind’s eye envisioned the hustle and bustle of a later time, the turn of the 20th century and the steam ships that would’ve brought my Irish and Acadian ancestors to Boston.

My second-great-grandfather, Patrick Sweeney, migrated to Boston from Ireland in 1891, when he was 19 years old. 40 years after the Great Famine ended and about 30 years before Ireland won its independence from Britain.

One year later, my second-great-grandfather, Frank Comeau, migrated to Boston from Acadia/Mi’kma’ki. He was just 16 years old. Records indicate he left Nova Scotia looking for a better life during what historians have called the second Acadian exodus. More than a century earlier, during Le Grand Dérangement, the British government forced thousands of Acadian families from their homes. Those who made it back found their homes and farms had been taken by the British and given to other settlers, forcing them to resettle elsewhere.

I tried to think about what it must’ve been like for them, migrating to the US so young, without their parents. A new land, a new job, a new life. What it must’ve been like for their future wives who arrived from their respective homelands not too long after. How did they feel about their new lives as immigrant workers? Were they excited? scared? mad? bitter? What kind of prejudice did they experience because of how they talked? Because of their Catholic faith?

The Acadian side yielded my grandfather, the Irish side my grandmother. And the rest is history, as they say.

I wonder what life lessons survived the next three generations to make it to me. For instance, I often expect life to be hard. I thrive during crisis and become restless when things are easy. I need to keep moving and traveling feels very natural. In fact, I remember a time when a particularly abusive ex called me a “gypsy bitch” after we broke up and I took off for another state. At the time, I laughed. As if leaving was an insult!

Humor is a tool to dull the sharpness of life. My constants are my faith and my family, whilst I continuously weigh endurance and escape.

I also feel the heavy weight of truth. The truth that for the ancestors in my family who were not Indigenous, no matter what century or decade they arrived in America, it was not an empty land full of nothing but opportunity for their new lives. It was already home to Indigenous nations whose peoples had lived here for thousands of years. Opportunities for settlers and immigrants were shaped, in part, by the displacement, removal and killing of Native people and the taking of their lands.

My ancestors experienced colonization and traumatic loss. But they also benefited from the colonization and traumatic loss others experienced. If I have learned anything from living in Oklahoma and Texas, it is that 100 years ago was yesterday. When it comes to the harms of colonization and traumatic loss to Indigenous people, much has yet to be acknowledged, let alone addressed.

Looking across the water of Boston Harbor, I say my ancestors’ names and thank them for their resilience. I thank God, I thank the ocean, I thank the land I’m standing on. I share my appreciation for the positives that have transferred to me, what I have received from hundreds of years of survival and continued life.

And I wonder about the balance of it all when taking the negatives into account, not only within myself but also with the weight of my family’s past and present interactions, both with other families and with the land I am standing on.

What to let go, and what to do next.

Don’t miss the fifth and final part to Rematriation after Migration, coming up next.

It was a hot July day as my cousin, Katie, and I arrived at Highland Cemetery in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

We were there to visit our Comeau ancestors, mainly our second great-grandparents, who migrated to Massachusetts from Nova Scotia in the 1890s.

Katie told me she knew basically nothing about our Acadian relatives or our Indigenous ancestry, other than tidbits of oral history that found their way into conversations throughout the years:

There’s a castle in France with our Comeau family name on it.

We’re part Indian, but nobody really knows much about it.

Two years ago, I brought my DNA test results to a genealogist so she could find out more about where my Indigenous ancestry came from. She said it was very clear the ancestry was on my mom’s side, through our Acadian ancestors, who intermarried with the Mi’kmaq people after arriving in Mi’kma’ki from France.

To be honest, for most of my life, I’ve only ever been really interested in my Irish heritage. I didn’t even consider my Scottish or other Celtic history until recently. I knew I had some English ancestry and some French ancestry, but after learning SO MUCH about them in history classes growing up, I felt like I was covered there.

(Side note: If you read my editorial ahead of America’s 250, you know what I “knew” about English and French migration to America was also severely lacking.)

It was only after I moved to Oklahoma, which is home to 39 tribal Nations, met my husband (who is Muscogee and Cherokee) and we started a family that I really became more interested in the Indigenous part of my ancestry. As a family, we made the decision to be more connected to my husband’s tribes, and if I had connections to a tribal Nation, then we would learn more about that connection, too.

After traveling to Mi’kma’ki with my son in December 2025, we learned a lot. And it wasn’t just cultural learning; it was really more of a global awareness. I discovered I knew next to nothing about Canada or its government, and I was very surprised to discover conflict between the Mi’kmaq people and the Nova Scotia provincial government was eerily similar to the conflict between Oklahoma tribes and the Oklahoma Governor.

Through my travels and research, I also became aware of the concept of cultural harvesting, and the need to keep myself in check. If I was taking something by learning about the culture of my ancestors, what was I giving back? Am I being transactional, when I thought I was being relational? All of this work suddenly became very heavy and very complex, and I found myself a bit over my head.

So, let me step back.

I’m going to take a moment to explain what I have come to learn about the Acadian people and their relationship with the Mi’kmaq people, as I explained it to Katie while we walked around in circles trying to find our ancestors’ graves in Ipswich.

Europeans began settling in what is now known as the Americas more than a thousand years ago, beginning with Norse Vikings and ramping up centuries later as Spain, England and France competed to colonize different parts of the continent.

Both England and France wanted Mi’kma’ki, but the ways they interacted with the Mi’kmaq people in the late 1600s and 1700s were very different. The French came to colonize and establish Acadia, but they also developed and ultimately depended on a long-standing alliance with the Mi’kmaq. English and later British settlers wanted control of the land itself, and they were willing to forcibly remove the Acadians and kill the Mi’kmaq people who stood in the way, which they demonstrated during the French and Indian War and after defeating France and its Mi’kmaq allies.

More than 10,000 Acadians were forcibly removed from Mi’kma’ki/Acadia during Le Grand Dérangement (The Great Upheaval), put on ships and scattered among the British colonies, England and France. Some escaped deportation and fought or hid alongside their Mi’kmaq allies until they were eventually able to return. But by then, much of the land the Acadians had lived on and farmed for generations had been given to British settlers. Many displaced Acadians eventually resettled in Louisiana, where their descendants became known as Cajuns, while others were exiled throughout the British colonies, including Massachusetts.

My Acadian ancestors were Doucet, Amirault and Muis, amongst others, as well as Comeau. They had lived in Mi’kma’ki for generations before Le Grand Dérangement, intermarrying with the Mi’kmaq. When the British began deporting Acadians in 1755, my family experienced the upheaval in different ways. Some managed to avoid being deported, while my Amirault ancestors were forced into exile in Massachusetts. They eventually returned to Mi’kma’ki and rebuilt their lives around Baie Sainte-Marie, where the family remained for generations. More than a century later, some of their descendants, including my Comeau ancestors, arrived in Massachusetts again, this time as migrants rather than exiles.

Before my husband and I traveled to Massachusetts with our children this summer, we traveled to Mi’kma’ki. We attended the Sipekne’katik Mawio’mi during 4th of July weekend and visited the Millbrook Cultural & Heritage Centre. Though our children were more interested in where the nearest playgrounds were located, I do believe they also enjoyed learning about the history and the living culture of the Mi’kmaq, one of the Wabanaki peoples, the “People of the Dawn.”

Before I made my second trip to Mi’kma’ki, I met with Claire Maracle, Executive Director of the nonprofit Words of the People. We were discussing a personal rematriation workshop Crosswinds News is working on developing for our Indigenous Roots Community Summit this fall.

I was honest with Claire and shared some of the unexpected difficulties I was experiencing when it came to my own personal rematriation journey. It was hard for me to know what I know now about the experiences of my ancestors and what happened to the Mi’kmaq people as a whole. I felt a lot of internal pressure to do something, to help in some way, without really having much of an idea how.

They gave me some really sage advice:

Listen.

Claire told me to go and listen for what my ancestors had to say. What the land had to say. That’s it. They helped bring me back to the elemental reality of the power of knowing - that truth is power in itself. It should not be overlooked; it should not be hurried. It should take up space and make room for reflection.

And I thought, of course. Everything I do relating to community news and support services starts with listening. Why would personal rematriation be any different? Certainly, listening to ancestors and the land and the sea and the air would be different than listening to people of flesh and blood like me, but I was determined to give it a go.

During my second trip to Mi’kma’ki, I did connect with the land and the sea and the air, and I did connect with my ancestors. What surprised me was how strong the Acadian connection felt during our travels. True, this was and is the connection I still knew the littlest about. But the message I kept receiving throughout our time around Nme’juaqnek, “the place of bountiful fish,” along the Annapolis Basin, was for me to know and honor my Acadian ancestors.

This history literally disappeared from my family’s memory. The only woman alive with a close connection does not want to talk to me about it.

Whether it’s Mi’kmaq history or Acadian history, recovering these stories is truthtelling on the most personal level. It’s honoring the truths, both joyful and difficult, that made my family possible. It’s returning people, places and experiences to my family story. And it’s guiding the pathways for who I want to be, and what happens next.

It was time for Katie and me to make our way to Boston Harbor and reflect with fresh pairs of eyes.

Stay tuned for Rematriation After Migration Part 4.

Part 2 of Rematriation after Migration has taken me much longer than I anticipated to publish, mainly due to my 7-year-old son suffering a severe concussion a week and a half ago. Thank you for your kind words and prayers, those who knew and have reached out. He is doing much better this week!

To dive right back in, during this second half of a conversation with my cousin Katie on our way to Ipswich, Massachusetts, this past July we talked less about reconnecting to the land of our ancestors and more about what is passed on after our ancestors leave. The trauma that leads to migration and how those experiences continue to shape us across generations.

Part 1 was about returning to place, relating to our separate travels to Ireland. Part 2 is about understanding what we carry with us, and why.

Brittany: So, switching gears, when I went to Ireland, I was really nervous. I went by myself. I remember thinking, I’m here, I’m single, I think I was around 26 or 27, and I just decided one night to book my ticket.

I booked my plane ticket, I booked my hostel, and I was like, I’m just going to do it. There’s no backing out. My mom was really scared, and I was nervous too, traveling across the world by myself. But when I got there, I wasn’t scared. I actually felt safer there than I do here sometimes. Even when I got out of Dublin and into the countryside, there was that same feeling, like this feels like home.

So, I’m curious, especially with what you were learning in class, did they talk about that at all? That feeling of connection to the land, or how those experiences might carry across generations?

Katie: Yeah. A lot of it is that you feel it in your bones, and you know it’s there, you just don’t know how. The way you act, the way you do certain things, there’s something behind why we do things the way we do now.

It’s hard to explain.

Brittany: Take your time.

Katie: A lot of what we talked about was how things get passed down through stories. You’re told what your family went through, like the famine and things like that. When you hear that, it hits you differently because it’s your family. It makes you want to look more into it.

It’s kind of the same thing with things that happen at home. Even if kids weren’t there for something, they still hear about it. They know something happened, even if people don’t talk about it. They can feel it, but they don’t fully understand it.

Brittany: That makes sense. I think about it a lot in terms of biology, how things get passed down over time, even with animals, how they know where to go, what to do, how to survive.

I’ve thought about how that connects to trauma and why it’s important to understand what people went through. But the storytelling part is something I hadn’t thought about as much.

I feel like we were disconnected from those stories growing up. Even what we learn in school isn’t always the full picture of what people experienced.

But even if we didn’t hear those stories directly, we still pick up on how our parents navigate life, and that gets passed on too.

Katie: Yeah. They also talked a lot about identity. When Belfast became separate, and the segregation between the two happened, a lot of people didn’t really talk about it. A lot of it was political, but a lot of it was religion too.

When people came to America, they weren’t sure what they could say they were. That loss of identity carried into the next generation. People didn’t know who they were or where they came from. And I think that’s part of why it felt like home when we were there.

I really believe my ancestors were with me. Like, we’re going home for a minute.

Another thing we talked about was disease and addiction. The diseases that came from those times, whether it was the famine or just the 1800s in general, get passed down through generations.

Addiction is a disease, and a lot of people used alcohol to cope with what was going on.

People survived that way, but it came with consequences. It came with different diseases that weren’t as common before, and that shows up now.

Brittany: So, the things they experienced back then can still affect us now?

Katie: Yeah. If you want to look at it in terms of genetics, it’s in your DNA. It’s what gets passed down. It’s just crazy.

Brittany: What are you expected to do with this as part of your program? How is this supposed to inform your future work?

Katie: Right now, I’m about to start working with domestic violence survivors. I really believe that a lot of it is generational. Knowing how trauma that happened to your grandparents or great-grandparents affects you now can help in a lot of ways.

No matter what degree I go for after this, I think this will apply.

There were about 14 of us on the trip. We ranged from 18 to 47, I think, besides our teacher. Every single one of us felt like we learned not just about ourselves, but about our past and why we were there.

A lot of people wanted to keep looking into their own family situations and understand why their parents were the way they were. I feel like everyone who went on that trip is going to be able to use what we learned in their future careers.

Understanding things on a deeper level gives you a deeper understanding overall. People don’t always think that something that happened 100 years ago can affect someone today, but it really can.

Brittany: In simple terms, when you’re thinking about things like the Great Famine or migration, what kinds of impacts are still being felt today, especially for Irish Americans?

Katie: We learned a lot about the famine when we visited the ship, the Jeanie Johnston. The number of people who were displaced, and the number of people who starved to death, was overwhelming. Some families were completely wiped out.

A lot of babies didn’t get the nutrition they needed. People survived off potatoes, and that helped keep family lines going, but there was still a lot of malnutrition. A lot of people also died during the journey when they were emigrating. The ships were overcrowded, and there were diseases spreading. I think a lot of that carried over into later generations.

People learned to ration what they had. That mindset of scarcity doesn’t just go away. It takes generations to change that. It took generations for those conditions to happen, so it makes sense that it would take generations to fix them.

Brittany: I also can’t not bring up the impact of colonization. A lot of what happened during the famine didn’t have to happen the way it did. The British controlled the land and resources in Ireland, and food was being exported while people were starving. That’s something that’s still talked about today. Did they talk about that at all while you were there?

Katie: Yeah. But they really talked more about what happened in Belfast and the Troubles.

Where our (maternal) family is from stayed part of the Republic of Ireland, but when we went to Belfast, you could feel the difference immediately.

When you’re in Belfast, you see English flags everywhere. You wouldn’t even realize you’re still on the same island. Your phone switches over, you’re using different currency, it feels completely different.

I almost felt uncomfortable being there, just because of how recent everything still is. It’s not that long ago. The week after I left, there was a bombing at a supermarket. It really shows that things are still happening.

People are still very loyal to the sides they were on when everything started. That kind of division gets passed down. People didn’t know who they could trust. They didn’t know what they could say. If you said the wrong thing, you could be killed.

That kind of fear stays with people.

So, it wasn’t just the famine. People were dying because of politics, because of religion, because of where they lived. It wasn’t just one thing. There are documentaries about it. One of them is Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, it’s really good.

It explains a lot of what happened during the Troubles.

Brittany: I think that’s really interesting too, because when I think about the colonization of Ireland and the British coming in and trying to colonize it, my mind goes straight to the Famine. I think about how the British controlled the resources and just made life so much more difficult than it had to be. The Irish people fighting against colonization, and how they kept fighting until the Republic of Ireland was formed and they became independent from the British.

But obviously Northern Ireland is still that separate country that is part of the UK.

I think that is an excellent point, the situation with the Famine is not nearly the only negative impacts of the British colonization, and that it is something that, even though it has been resolved in a way, there is still a lot that is not resolved and that there is still that deep, deep conflict with people living in places like Northern Ireland.

And then, of course, that relates to the stem of the problem, which is colonization itself. It was really interesting for me to learn more about my dad’s side, which is Scottish, and also that Scots Irish, which I think people in Ireland refer to as Ulster Scots, my own Northern Ireland heritage. And that side of my family’s epic journey from Scotland to Ireland and then all over America until they finally settled in New Mexico.

For those who maybe are unfamiliar with how this all happened. They had really terrible conditions in Scotland after generations of war, displacement and upheaval driven by English expansion and the ruling powers that would eventually become the British state. And then those same powers basically convinced them that the answer was to go to Northern Ireland and colonize there, where they clearly were not welcome.

So, a lot of people were like, “I am not toughing this out. I’m going to find my way to America.”

And then they went there. They either sold themselves into servitude for however many years or just went over as workers, or however else they came over there. And then as soon as they had done their years of service, they moved again. A lot of them went to Appalachia next, and that’s where a lot of that area and community developed.

And it was just this idea that when they came over, they had no clear identity. They were just trying to survive. They didn’t identify as Scottish anymore, and they didn’t identify as Irish either. In Northern Ireland, a lot of them identify as British now.

Katie: Yeah, so another generational trauma example, for the ones who made it over here, no self-identity. This just goes on to show that it doesn’t matter where you are from, it doesn’t matter where you’re going, if you have a little bit of question, you’re going to pass that down.

And then the next generation is going to wonder as well.

Brittany: I wonder about that wondering. Why is identity important? Why does it matter knowing where someone came from or having that feeling of belonging?

Katie: I think it is important to each person in different ways. I don’t think necessarily everybody needs to know or wants to know the background information. Because if you think about it, no one really did this in our family until us.

Were the questions just not there? Were they not asking the right questions? The generation before us is very much a part of that stay kind of quiet type of generation. If it wasn’t important to that generation, what makes it important to us?

I really believe that’s because we slow down and we ask questions. We want to know why we get angry at nothing. We want to know why certain things make us feel the way they do. I feel like when people dig a little bit more into their background, they do find a little bit more contentment.

I know for me it took years to feel even a little bit content, and that’s when I started digging more into myself and my background. I don’t think it’s the same for everybody. But I feel like the people who don’t know and have the most questions ask and find out the most. They want to know the most.

Brittany: That makes sense. I think about community too. When I’ve talked to older family members, especially people who grew up in bigger families or smaller communities, there was more of a sense of belonging.

And I don’t know what the difference is between our generation and theirs, but I feel like a lot of people now feel like they don’t belong anywhere. Maybe they were surviving, and now we’re questioning more. We don’t just want to survive; we want something better.

I also think the world has changed a lot. We know more now. We see more. And that changes how we understand ourselves.

Any final thoughts?

Katie: No. I think this was great. I’m willing to do this again. I’m willing to share pictures. Everything was just really amazing, and I was really, really lucky to have that opportunity.

My friendly interrogation of Katie ended just as we arrived at the Highland Cemetery in Ipswich to visit our Comeau ancestors.

After we parked and began to walk toward our second great grandparents’ gravesite, I asked her how much she knew about Mi’kma’ki and Acadia, and the history between the Acadians and the Mi’kmaq people. How some of their descendants ended up in Massachusetts. And how we were born thanks to the resilience of some of those descendants.

She told me she knew nothing.

Brittany: Well, let me tell you what I’ve learned over the last two years.

And I did.

Stay tuned for Rematriation after Migration Part 3.

I recently spent two weeks on what I’ve come to understand as personal rematriation work that began 20 years ago. To me, personal rematriation means returning to the lands, cultures and connections of my ancestors.

The first half of my 2026 trip was spent in the unceded territory of Mi’kma’ki, the land of my Mi’kmaq and my Acadian ancestors, and what is now also known as Nova Scotia. The second half of my trip was spent in Massachusetts.

This journey was the second phase of my personal rematriation travels, which kicked off with my first and only trip to Ireland in 2017.

The following conversation with my cousin Katie took place earlier this July as we drove together to Ipswich, Massachusetts, to visit the graves of our Acadian and Mi’kmaq ancestors. It was at the midpoint of this journey, in between places and family histories, that we both learned more about how these two paths (Irish and Acadian/Mi’kmaq) came together to make us.

This time around, Katie had just returned from Ireland, where she studied generational trauma and visited the places our family once lived.

This is Part 1 of Rematriation after Migration, and it begins, fittingly, with place.

Brittany: All right. The first question I have for you is if you could explain how this Ireland trip came about and how it relates to trauma.

Katie: Okay. So, I’m in school right now for behavioral health, and I’m taking Generational Healing. It’s an intergenerational trauma class with a healing aspect to it.

At first, we went over how generational trauma develops, what it does to people, and what it does to future generations. Then we went over how you would go about healing from it.

When we went to Ireland for the class, it was based around the Troubles and the Great Famine, and what the people throughout Ireland, particularly in Belfast, had gone through.

Brittany: Now, you had said there’s a whole facility dedicated to trauma.

Katie: Yes. There is a trauma center in Belfast. We didn’t go there, though. We spoke to one of the women who works at the center. She gave us a presentation and lecture while we were in Belfast.

Brittany: Is there anything that really stuck with you from your trip? Any significant takeaways?

Katie: Honestly, every day was a learning experience.

There was also a weird familiarity to it, almost like I had been there before.

I keep saying this to people: it felt like I was home. It felt like I was going to see what I had already seen before, if that makes sense.

A lot of it was really emotional. A lot of it was very spiritual, and I’m not a religious person.

People who know me know I talk a lot. So, for me to be speechless throughout the trip, through all of the tours and everything we saw, was really out of character for me.

Brittany: That’s actually a really good segue because I’ve done a lot of ancestry work relating to our Irish heritage. I wanted to touch on that foundation and what you knew going into this, before the research I’d done, and what you’ve learned on your own.

Katie: Sure. I really didn’t know much about it before you started digging into it as much as you have. I knew we had some Irish in us, as they say, but I wasn’t really sure how far back it went or how connected it still was to our family.

Going into the trip, I knew what I’d learned from you. I knew we had relatives there, and I knew they had lived in Fermoy, but I only learned that about a week before I went.

I really didn’t know much before that.

When we went to Nora’s gravesite, that’s when I learned more about where our family came from.

Brittany: A little backstory for people who aren’t familiar: I started doing genealogy research several years ago because I wanted to learn more about our Irish ancestry.

In 2017, I traveled to Ireland to connect more with the land and try to learn where our ancestors had come from before they immigrated to America in the 1890s/early 1900s.

A lot of that research started with Ancestry.com, but it only got me so far.

By the time I got to County Cork, it was getting dark and I was running out of time, so I literally started knocking on strangers’ doors, hoping someone knew what I was looking for.

One of those doors belonged to Oliver Slattery, who turned out to be a distant cousin.

He helped me understand where our family had lived, what the area looked like generations ago, and where many of our ancestors are buried.

Over the last decade, Oliver continued helping fill in gaps in our family’s history and even connected us with other relatives.

And so, before your trip, I basically handed all of that over to you. I connected you with Oliver, we made sure you had a car. I’ve honestly heard almost nothing about what happened after that.

So, this conversation is the first time we’re really talking about your experience, and I’m so interested in hearing what it was like.

Katie: Yeah. We got in the car early that morning, around 7:00. A girl I’d met on the trip the day before came with me on my little adventure.

She stayed back and let me wander, but she also pointed things out if I wasn’t noticing them. It was nice getting to connect with her on a different emotional level, too.

It was about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Dublin.

(Thank you to Anam Croí Ireland Tours for getting them around Ireland safely!)

The drive was beautiful. When you’re in Dublin, it feels very much like a city. But once you get into the countryside, that’s the Ireland people picture. You see the sheep, the rolling hills, all of those things you think of when you think about Ireland.

That was the moment it hit me. I thought, I feel like I’m going home, even though it was the farthest place from home I’d ever been in my life. I got a little emotional.

The girl I was with noticed, but kind of laughed it off because I was just staring out the window at the highway.

I’d never been there before. I’d obviously never seen any of it.

When we got there, Oliver was the sweetest man. Legitimately the sweetest man I’ve ever met in my entire life. He was very welcoming.

He walked us into a church in the middle of a First Communion, down to the front of the church, and introduced us to the priest.

It was a beautiful place. That was the church where our ancestors were married and baptized.

Brittany: Was that St. Patrick’s?

Katie: I believe it was, but we went through so much that day I can’t remember for certain. I have it all written down. We were there for probably eight hours, and it was a very long day.

Everything was amazing and very emotional. When I mentioned that the trip felt spiritual, this day was what I was talking about. I’ve never driven down a dirt road, walked into an empty church, and stood where my ancestors had their funerals.

That was really amazing. Oliver knew so much about when those churches were really active and what life was like during that time. He was really awesome.

We also went to a few cemeteries. We visited one where the church was in ruins. There wasn’t really any signage or anything like that. I took a lot of photos of the churches and cemeteries we visited. We also went to a place called the Holy Well.

Brittany: Oh, man.

Katie: It was one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen. You walk through this small opening built into a stone wall, and it opens into this beautiful little spring. There were carvings there. I want to say one of them said 1830, but I have photos of it that we can check. It was just an amazing place.

Oliver brought us to where our great-great-great-grandparents actually lived. The man who lives there now came outside and talked with us.

Brittany: Oh my gosh. I was going to ask about that.

Katie: He was really nice. Someone was sleeping inside, so I wasn’t about to go in and look around, even though I really wanted to. Whoever owns the property now has done a beautiful job taking care of it.

That was another thing that amazed me about being there. Everything is so well preserved.

Everything still has the feel that it probably had all those years ago. Oliver actually pointed that out. He said a lot of it hasn’t really been touched or refurbished. You really feel it when you walk into those churches, especially when no one else is there.

Brittany: It’s interesting about that house because I had tried researching it.

From what I could find out, our ancestors were the first people who lived there. It was part of a few houses in that area built by the local government for families who were still struggling after the famine. The head of household worked some kind of labor job and died fairly young, I want to say in his forties, from lung disease.

Common at the time because of the famine effects, malnutrition, lack of proper housing. Many people had jobs that were very hard on their bodies. He didn’t live there very long before he passed away.

After he died, our family came to America because they weren’t able to survive there anymore.

Katie: Oliver mentioned that the man living there rents the house. I don’t know if he knows the owners, but he said they still take care of the property behind it.

Brittany: That’s interesting. A few years ago, I connected with the family who lived there. They told me they had immigrated there from another country and had bought the house.

Katie: Yeah, the man told me the owners had only owned it for four or five years. I believe the land behind the house is still part of the same property. There were sheep and cows back there.

Brittany: I’m glad you were able to see it. That was actually one of the things I had hoped to see when I was there in 2017. I didn’t know exactly where the house was, where the church was, where the workhouse had been.

Katie: We also went to the school. The school is still being used today. It looks amazing.

Oliver told us that our great-great cousins would walk there every day carrying a piece of firewood because every student had to bring wood to help heat the school. It wasn’t a short walk. It was uphill. People joke about walking uphill both ways to school, but they really did have to carry wood uphill with them every day.

The school is beautiful. It’s a small little school on top of the hill, tucked back behind the trees.

Brittany: While you were going around, you mentioned going to a couple cemeteries. There’s one cemetery, Kilcrumper, that has had a lot of restoration work done.

A lot of people say to just go around cemeteries and look for your ancestors, but that’s not easy. A lot of them are old and haven’t been well maintained. Were you able to find any Sweeneys or Powers?

Katie: I wasn’t able to see anything from those names. Oliver did show me some of his ancestors. In one of the places we went, he explained that a lot of people who didn’t have immediate family only got a stone, no name, no nothing. So, he said it’s a very big possibility that some of the stones we saw in the cemetery with the ruins could be part of our distant family.

He brought me to a couple different cemeteries, older ones and newer ones, but I wasn’t able to find anything with our names.

In the second half of my conversation with Katie, we turn toward generational trauma. As mothers of young children, Katie and I are both interested in how we can heal ourselves, our family lines and maybe even the world around us from the lasting effects of colonization and other causes of trauma.

Rematriation After Migration Part Two is coming soon!

The United States of America is a country built by and for colonizers.

Roughly 350 million people will call the United States home when it turns 250 this year. That’s ten times the number of people living here in 1776, which included half a million enslaved Africans. Another 1 million Indigenous people were also here, but excluded from colonial record-keeping.

Despite the well-to-do imaginings of many colonial descendants, historians estimate at least half of the earliest Europeans who immigrated to what is now the US arrived as indentured servants. The percentage of indentured immigrants was as much as 85 percent in southern colonies like Virginia. These servants were often poor people who sold themselves into servitude, but others were tricked and even taken across the Atlantic against their will: homeless people, children sold by their parents, and captured prisoners of war. Most were English, Irish, Scottish and German.

They came here as a last-ditch effort to survive, like so many others today.

Following two and a half centuries of immigration, the United States is now made up of nearly 200 heritage groups, according to the APM Research Lab “Roots Beyond Race” project.

We are a nation made up of 97.4 percent immigrants or descendants of immigrants, a reality that stands in stark contrast to the sweeping, cruel and often violent immigration crackdowns happening across the United States as we approach our country’s birthday.

While the federal government has taken the lead on the upcoming celebration, 1776 was not the birth of the federal government, which didn’t exist yet. In reality, July 4 is the anniversary of the people of the colonies declaring independence from authoritarian rule and asserting the principle of self-government.

The federal government, as we know it, actually began operating in 1789.

An Identity of Colonization

Some other interesting facts about US history. Though Christopher Columbus is celebrated in certain circles as “discovering” America in 1492, he actually never set foot in what is now the United States.

While European colonization of the Americas began during that century, it really got going in the 1500s and 1600s with Spain, France, and ultimately the British. The latter was, of course, the most sustained colonization effort with the establishment of the 13 colonies, including Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620.

Having lived in Massachusetts from 3 to 21 years old, this is the history I remember learning about in school. The colonists were praised for fighting back against the wretched British and Thanksgiving was a months-long celebration. We fieldtripped to Plymouth Rock. I knew all about the Minutemen, throwing tea in the Boston Harbor, and can still recall the life and struggles of the fictitious Johnny Tremain.

These were the first clues to understanding my cultural identity.

Like many others who grew up in the Greater Boston area, some of those early 1600s colonists are my ancestors. Some fought in the Revolutionary War. This was history I connected to and took pride in. As much as a troubled poor kid from the Northshore takes pride in something like that, anyway.

It wasn’t until I turned 20 that I started getting into genealogy and learning more about my other ancestry lines. Over the last 18 years, I’ve uncovered a lot about who my people were, dating back to this country’s earliest days, and where they likely lived during the birth of our nation. And, perhaps most importantly, I’ve grown to understand why this knowledge matters so much.

When the Colonized Becomes the Colonizer

About 3/4 of my great-great-great-grandparents were living in the US during the mid 1800s. They were Irish, Scottish, English, and, almost entirely on my father’s side, Scots-Irish.

My remaining ancestors were still living in Ireland (4) or Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia (5), both of which were colonized by the British.

Now, I’m not sure honestly where I get it from, be it my Irish ancestors who moved to the US in the late 1800s or my Acadian/Mi’kmaw ancestors who moved to the US in the early 1900s. Maybe it traces back to the English invading the Scottish Lowlands in the mid-1500s, which eventually led to the migration of my Scots-Irish line. Or maybe it’s just the human in me.

Perhaps it was moving to Oklahoma 15 years ago and learning the truth about Indian Country. But I am fiercely against colonial harm, and constantly pondering how to undo it.

It’s quite a conundrum for someone who is also descended from colonizers.

Growing up as a pale, freckly redhead in the Greater Boston Area, I always knew that I was an Irish American. My great-grandmother Norah, on my mother’s side, was the first in her family born in the United States after her parents came over from Ireland.

Irish immigrants often took dangerous, low-paying jobs, building infrastructure like canals and railroads, while facing extreme discrimination and prejudice. And bad behavior wasn’t just vertical, of course. Injustice also moved sideways, as it often does, opportunity corrupting those within the community, right alongside the power holders of the established resident hierarchy.

Talks with my maternal grandmother, Helen “Nana” Clements, about growing up outside of Boston in the 1930s are both the most cherished and heartbreaking discussions I’ve had.

Nana became a ward of the state at age 2, when her mother Norah died of tuberculosis and her father couldn’t care for her and her siblings anymore. She survived several foster homes as a ward of the state, as well as a long-term stay in a sanatorium, treated for tuberculosis after she was hit by a car.

She described it as the best years of her childhood.

“That was the best place I lived because we had swimming and we did all kinds of things,” she told me. “We had to work, too, but we had swimming and we had movies on Wednesdays and ice cream, and I learned to swim and I learned a little skiing and stuff like that. Just a little hill in the back of the hospital. So it was good.”

At the time of her accident, Nana was living in a room with four other foster girls, likely kept to “help with the finances.” When company would come over, her foster mother made her and the other girls dance Irish jigs.

But the truth was, they were starving. Nana didn’t remember eating meals at all. Instead, she remembered the older girls stealing chocolate and coconuts from the store to survive.

“At Christmas time, there’d be a whole lot of presents under the tree and everything,” Nana said. “And then the next day we would get up and everything would be gone. So she took all the Christmas stuff back.”

Her last foster home was better, an Irish foster mother with an adopted daughter. She also worked harder than she ever had before, starting at just 11 years old, doing all of the household chores while also working outside of the home.

“But you never felt loved,” Nana said. “I mean, I never felt loved in any of the homes I was in. So it was hard. It was hard if you found somebody. I could never say ‘I love you’ because you didn’t know what it felt like.”

The Downsides of the American Experience

Like so many of my ancestors and relatives, I didn’t have a comfortable upbringing.

My identity was largely tied to poverty, abuse, and neglect. As a single parent, my mother was forced to work long hours for much of my childhood. She strived to provide my twin sister and I with a two-parent household. Unfortunately, her partners during most of our childhood were abusive and neglectful.

I was also identified as a problem child. As my home life worsened, so did my developmental delays. Children experiencing trauma at home go to school in survival mode, unable to focus and learn, often displaying challenging behaviors. Looking back, I can see I was a prime example of this. At the time, I just thought I was dumb because my brain couldn’t process what I was being taught.

It never felt like I belonged anywhere. I was disconnected. I felt unwanted. After being court-ordered to attend school, I dropped out.

Culture meant nothing to me. We celebrated federal holidays, my sister and I, not understanding that most mainstream holiday traditions were a hodgepodge of the cultures of immigrants over hundreds of years, including that of my own ancestral cultural heritage. Don’t get me wrong- I loved the holidays. It was one of the few times of the year that I experienced true joy. My mom always made sure they were very special. But celebrating a handful of holidays every year was far from being culturally nourished. Especially when you don’t even understand where they come from.

My concept of American culture worsened over time. As a poor kid, later a poor adult, at best ignored and at worst abused by people in power, mainstream American culture just really didn’t sit well with me.

I was burned by individualism. If it’s so good, then why does 1 percent of the U.S. population control nearly one-third of the country’s wealth? Why are so many others destroying themselves to catch up or just survive? Why do we heap on the societal work of what used to be a whole community onto just two people, or worse, a single parent? It’s no wonder nearly half of Americans experience significant daily stress, with work-life balance, childcare costs, and the housing market stressing millennials like me out the most.

I was sick and over consumerism. Why is it so acceptable for advertisers to feed our insecurities, then hype their product or service as the cure? Why are things no longer built to last, despite resources on our planet being so limited? Sold without a thought of where they come from, or who made them?

Long story short, my broad strokes American identity felt manipulated, destructive. And lonely as hell.

Ironically, I was not alone in that. After decades of increasing isolation, loneliness was declared a public health epidemic in the U.S. in 2023. A key finding? Lacking social connection can increase the risk for premature death as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

I moved to the south and met my husband, a Muscogee Nation citizen with Cherokee lineage. A biracial Native with Irish ancestry, he’s also helped me understand secondhand just how particularly hard the loneliness epidemic and other mental struggles can be for multi-racial people.

While conducting research on Native American health disparities, I came across the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The stats on multiracial people were staggering.

Among adults 18 or over, multiracial adults were the most likely to have mental illness compared to all other racial or ethnic groups (36.7 percent). Multiracial adolescents led with the most major depressive episodes the previous year (24.4 percent). And multiracial adults were the most likely to have had a serious mental illness in the past year (14 percent), more than twice as likely as other races. Multiracial adults and adolescents also struggled with suicide the most.

When I shared this information with my husband, he said he already knew that.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I discovered the Great White Paintbrush.

During my last 15 years in Oklahoma and Texas, I have heard people dismiss their European ancestry as “boring old English” and BIPOC community members call white people “plain old white.” Both are swirling around the same poison.

Covering up the diversity of European American heritage with the Great White Paintbrush further strips people of their identity. It disconnects them from the hundreds and thousands of years that made them who they are and the people who made their existence possible. From the hard lessons and fruitful experiences that are their birthright.

Yes, there were stuffy old English people. But let’s not forget, the English also overthrew the monarchy for 11 years during the 1600s. Our ancestors laughed and cried and lived and died so we could exist.

And again, who does painting every European American with a Great White Paintbrush benefit the most?

Reconnecting to Pre-Colonization Culture

Researching my family history over the past couple of decades has not only helped me, it has healed me. Every story, happy and sad, connected me to generations of people who made me who I am today. These connections have slowly but surely filled the gaps in my identity, helping me to understand my own mind and inclinations, and have even helped to deepen my relationship with the natural world around me.

Humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years. This American existence, just shy of 250 years, is barely a blip on the map.

Evolutionary adaptations, such as how our bodies work, how they respond to stress and the environments around us, are learned and passed on through our DNA. That means adaptations that developed before modern society still influence human behavior today.

It’s one of the reasons so many people are still pulled to community, to belonging, despite American society’s constant push for individuality, for separation. For roughly 95 to 99 percent of humanity’s 300,000-year history, humans lived in small, interdependent communities. Even today, an estimated 85 to 90 percent of the world’s population lives in community-centered societies.

It’s only been over the last 500 to 700 years or so that something different began to take shape.

Which brings us to Western culture, which is arguably the most disconnected and unbalanced kind of society, a conclusion underscored by the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) field of study. WEIRD research shows these cultures are behavioral outliers, oddities in their individualism and detachment from land and community compared to the rest of the world.

In a disconnected society, pain is often an isolated and unhealed experience. Given how many of our ancestors experienced painful trauma relating to colonization, it’s no wonder that reconnecting to pre-colonization culture and ancestral knowledge can be a powerful tool for healing.

When I traveled to Ireland for the first time in 2017, it felt like coming home.

Fast forward to 2019 and the birth of my son. My ancestral journey intensified. Wading through my husband’s generational trauma, saddled with my own, I knew I would do anything to give my son a less traumatic, more connected life.

Part of our journey at Crosswinds News has been understanding historic and generational trauma, and the most effective ways to heal from it. We’ve talked with clinical social workers who practice somatic therapy, in which people physically work through their trauma. We’ve interviewed experts who have found that strengthening cultural identity in Native youth can lower suicide risk later in life.

So, in addition to supporting my family’s reconnection to their Muscogee culture, assisted by Tribal elders and resources, I’ve also been helping us reconnect with our Irish heritage through volunteer work at the Irish American Club of Tulsa and forging connections overseas.

My journey to Mi’kma’ki this past winter was the last piece to my ancestral heritage puzzle.

Mi’kma’ki is the ancestral homeland of the Mi’kmaq Nation. It spans what is now Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, parts of Quebec, and Newfoundland.

After coming to what is now Nova Scotia in the 1600s, my Acadian ancestors lived and intermarried with my Mi’kmaw ancestors. These allies joined forces to fight off the English and later the British, but ultimately lost the fight. The British committed genocide against the Mi’kmaw people and deported the Acadians.

According to the Mi’kmawey Debert Cultural Centre, the Mi’kmaw economy was based on sharing and reciprocity. Social status was measured not by what a person had, but by how much they gave to others and how deeply they were connected to the natural world.

This resonated with me, profoundly.

Ahead of my trip to Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia, I talked with Shannon Monk, a member of St. Theresa Point First Nation in northern Manitoba, an Anishininew fly-in community. Shannon also has Mi’kmaq roots from Lanark Island and Celtic roots from the eastern shore of Nova Scotia. She is the cultural tourism project manager for Kwilmu’kw Maw-klusuaqn, the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq Chiefs.

When I brought up the notion that Canada appeared to be ahead of the US in regard to Indigenous relations, her response was akin to “not quite.”

My assumption of the friendlier Canadian neighbor deflated.

“Canada has a ways to go,” Monk said. “I think what’s happening in the States is absolutely disgusting. I don’t know if it’s just more visible in the States, but I would say that we still have a long way to go in Canada. We’re nowhere near where we need to be by any stretch of the imagination. And that’s why the Mi’kmaq Rights Organization exists and why all of the other rights-based organizations exist all across the country.”

She told me some Mi’kmaq communities received running water in just the past 10-20 years, and others still experience third-world conditions.

When asked about how people like me can reconnect to Mi’kmaq culture and support communities connected to our ancestors today, Shannon referred me to some resources (such as the incredible Millbrook Cultural and Heritage Centre), but reminded me that community members can be wary of those reconnecting, as there are always those looking to take instead of give.

“From a reconnection standpoint, there’s a difference between a genuine interest in reconnecting and then there’s like, okay, I’m going for my status card so I can get in there and get all the free stuff I’m entitled to,” Monk said. “And I’m being obnoxious to prove a point.”

Living in Oklahoma, home to 39 tribes, this was a reality I was unfortunately already familiar with. People viewing tribes as cash cows, focused more on how they can profit from connection instead of how they can support it.

“It’s really sad,” Monk said. “I mean, welcome to colonization and mission accomplished. In terms of that eradication of culture and pride in identity, a shift is happening. But I think we’re only at the beginning stages of that shift. We’re only 10 years into that shift. So, we have, according to the seven generation teachings, generations to go before we get that all reestablished. But we have to start somewhere.”

Interested in sharing your Indigenous thoughts and experiences in the U.S. ahead of America’s 250th anniversary? Crosswinds News is now accepting Indigenous Editorials. Please email Crosswinds News for more information.

Reconnecting to pre-colonization culture has been a radical and powerful tool for bettering my own life, awakening my long-sleeping identity and driving a newfound sense of belonging. So, I can’t help but imagine what could happen if we were all more connected to the centuries of cultural heritage taken from our ancestors? If we were balanced back to community, and less isolated from each other? If we were more focused on what we can give, instead of what we can take?

More healing, less suffering. More room for the wonder of nature and appreciation of one another, less destruction of our planet and fear of one another, and of ourselves. Improved understanding of who we truly are.

I’m not saying we have to throw the whole book of American culture away. That individuality should be avoided at all costs. That we should cancel all consumer culture. What I am saying is America has a balance problem.

The first 250 years of the United States has proven we can do great things, but also terrible, self-destructive things.

True patriotism is not blind allegiance to a flag; it is the steadfast pursuit of a country that lives up to its people and its ideals. To achieve this, we must fully acknowledge and address the harmful impacts colonization has had and continues to have. We must begin to prioritize the importance, the success, the power of the whole, as well as our unique connections to that whole, to the land and to each other. We must find balance.

Without it, we are unfinished. An illusion of overall success. Always falling short of fully realizing our power and potential as a country and rarely achieving the peace and comfort of knowing our true selves.

Thank you to the many people who interviewed with me for this editorial, especially my Nana Helen. Thank you also to the Tiny News Collective “Spark Fund” for supporting my research trip to Nova Scotia, which helped inform this editorial. Finally, thank you to my dear friend Shannon Shaw Duty for editing this editorial and giving me the final push of confidence to publish it.

This editorial was originally published on Crosswinds News

I wanted to take a quick moment to update you on this space.

This Substack was originally created in August 2021 as part of Verified News Network, a news organization I cofounded with my husband Kelly Tidwell in 2018, using my Verified News email. For several years, it served as a place to share news, updates, and reporting.

On October 4, we officially rebranded VNN News to Crosswinds News. As part of that transition, all news content (including archives) was moved to the new Crosswinds platform.

(Learn more about this exciting rebrand here)

Since then, this page has largely remained dormant, though a few new subscribers have joined along the way. I want to take a moment to clarify where things stand and how this space will move forward.

• If you are looking for news coverage, current reporting, or archived stories, please visit: https://www.crosswindsnews.net/

• All paid subscribers were also transitioned to our new system in October. If you are unsure whether your subscription carried over successfully, you can visit the site and click “Sign In” in the upper right-hand corner to confirm your access.

• Moving forward, this Substack will take on a new purpose!

This Substack will now serve as my professional space where I will share personal stories, reflections, and updates on my work centered around community, identity, and cultural reconnection, including my experiences as the matriarch of a multiracial family.

Thank you for being here, whether you’ve been part of this journey from the beginning or are just joining now.

I hope you will stick around!