Paper short abstract:

Diasporic Indigenous women of Turtle Island, in particular adoptees, migrants and their descendants, are using ceremonial cultural remnants, inter-tribal relationality, somatic memory, earth-epistemology and creative praxis to restore and create tribal birth and mothering traditions and realities.

Paper long abstract:

Diasporic Indigenous women and communities of Turtle Island are remembering, decoding, restoring and restorying their Indigenous culture of birth and mothering. Generations of colonialism, migration, denial and hiding have left me, and many other diasporic Indigenous people, bereft of Eldership. We exist in racialized brown bodies without access to traditional knowledge keepers, healers or culture bearers. This lack of access to cultural resources, and community reduces individual's resilience in the face of traumatic experience and also in coping with the stress of motherhood. I will build on the work of Jeannette Armstrong, Patrisia Gonzales, Leanne Simpson, Linda Smith, Susy Zepeda and others by using ceremonial remnants, Elder epistemology, and community relationality as regenerative tools in creative cultural restoration across landscapes, generations, gender and the other-than-human world. My presentation responds to the question; is it possible to use the limited fragments available from Elders along with listening to body and earth relationally within diasporic community of Indigenous women, to remember, recover and restore what has been lost? Susy Zepeda describes a method for constructing decolonized memory and knowledge by enacting forms of remembering through art. She identifies collaborative sacred ceremony across generations as a means by which hidden stories are remembered. I hypothesize that ancestral memory is uncovered in the performance of ceremonial trauma resolution, or trauma-driven performance protest which leads to further re-membering of ceremonial wisdom that holds potential to restore and revitalize healing practices of new generations of Indigenous mothers and, as a result, their diasporic communities.