Language Reclamation and Accounting for Lineage

I recently started taking a Pennsylvania Dutch language class.

This is the language of my ancestors, and not just long-time-ago ancestors, but of my still-living grandparents and some of my aunts and uncles. My grandpa, for example, did not speak any English until he got to school.

And so pieces of the language have made it through to my generation and even on to my 6 year old (yes, they have given all the barn cats Deutschy names).

What’s incredible about this is that my Anabaptist Mennonite ancestors have been in North America for hundreds of years. They were among some of the earliest waves of white settler colonists coming from Western Europe to so-called Pennsylvania and then Ontario.

And because of their sectarianism (more on the complexity of that another time), their (our) dialect has survived miraculously for several centuries in an English-language hegemony.

So it is such a gift to be learning more of this ancestral tongue.

And it feels so familiar, so right in my mouth. Like it was already there.

It fits somatically.

And it helps me make sense of many pieces of culture, of some of the intergenerational inheritances that live on in me, that stand out in the embodiment, the tone, the phrasing, of my relatives.

What a potent window in is language. What a trip!

And I am especially grateful for this thread of cultural reclamation and ancestral connection as I’ve found myself moving closer to Mennonite community these last months.

I’ve taken a lot of space from the Christian Anabaptist Mennonite community that raised me in many beautiful ways, needing to step back from an institution and lineage that has and continues to perpetuate so much harm and violence.

And as Mennonites, along with many other Christian lineages have stepped up to organize for a Ceasefire, I’ve been reengaging.

It is absolutely complex and crunchy for me, and also such a gift to get to be with other folks of Christian lineage who are ready to look at the way that Christian hegemony and Christian Zionism are fueling the genocide of Palestinians.

It is a gift to inch closer again to my communities of origin, and find the powerful gems within our theology and values that point us toward collective liberation, that help us remember that our liberation is bound up with that of Palestinians, that none of us are free until all of us free.

I am still deep in the excavation and inquiry of how to orient to the pain and beauty of these parts of my lineage, but also deeply moved to be showing up in a way that helps me be accountable to its legacy of harm.

I would love to hear:

How are you connecting to ancestors and lineage, of both beauty and harm?

How are you reckoning with the grief and the joy?

How are you finding your stake in the call for a ceasefire?

Truly I would love to hear from you.