Disciplines:
March 2026 (edited May 2026)
Your latest addition comes to me as a wonderful and intriguing gift at a time when I'm thinking a lot about how West African and Caribbean spiritual practices have been fearmongered over and criminalised by the dominating culture. Jamaica still has anti-Obeah laws on the books, and who are these laws for? In 1760, uncle Tacky used Obeah to help motivate enslaved Africans to rebel against oppression. If the chattel slavery period is over, if the government is truly independent and represents Jamaicans, then why is Obeah still outlawed in 2026? Nonetheless, this form of West African spirituality that survived the middle passage persists in Jamaica despite the shifting continuation of enslavement and colonisation through legislation.
Even as a habitual intellectualiser, I recognise that spirituality can't be acquired or understood through intellectual debate. It can take years or even decades to turn knowledge into felt wisdom, and I'm a very slow processor of my experiences.
During childhood when I attended catholic school and church, I often felt I had been born an atheist. It's dangerous to conflate religiosity with spirituality, which is exactly what the school and church did. Having experienced only oppression and abuse from catholic institutions, I rejected both religion and spirituality. I now find myself challenged to meet your revelations with something substantial of my own.
Having a more literal perspective, my spirituality has more to do with physical / tangible realities. Since I was born and raised on Treaty 7 territory, Lands that once hosted expansive rolling grasslands cared for by Bison and humans alike, this defines the physical reality I'll reference.
When I was in school, I was taught that Indigenous Peoples of the prairies used every part of the buffalo. The animal is a bison (Turtle Island), not a buffalo (Africa, Asia), so settler education started me off on the wrong foot. Using every part was presented as a schedule of stuff you can make from bison; clothing from the hide, tools from the bones, vessels from the organs, dried meat from the flesh. All these products might take up to, say, 1 to 3 months to process.
After years of studying Indigenous Worldsense, I realised that what was missing is that 'use every part of the bison' isn't just the beginning when you make stuff; it's also the end, when you return the bison parts to the earth. If someone makes an object that becomes an heirloom, passed down through generations, suddenly 'use every part of the bison' could be 100 years or more, and the 3 month timeline becomes ridiculous. Even the 100+ year timeline is just in reference to objects.
The biggest part of using the bison is eating the meat. When you eat the meat, using every part becomes what you do with your life. Every action you take, you could be either honouring or dishonouring the sacrifice of the bison's life. Using every part becomes a way of organising your world, it becomes government, it becomes a spiritual imperative. The impact of what you do when you eat the bison spreads infinitely from you to your descendants, and infinitely to you from your ancestors.
Indigenous Peoples of the grasslands didn't / don't live only in linear time, they live in cyclical time when they use every part of the bison. The bison is not just a source of material or food, the bison is family, home, past, and future. I believe this is part of the context when Indigenous people refer to trees or other parts of landscape as ancestors. Within eurocentric worldviews, this statement is often interpreted as being metaphorical, or fantastical, or even disparagingly labelled as silly, but it's not.
Every time we bury ancestors, the nutrients from their bodies feed the soil. Soil is alive, constantly being churned by insects and rodents, or kicked up by bison or other grazing animals, and sometimes shifted en masse in powerful natural events. You may not plant your vegetables in your family's graveyard, but eventually the nutrients from hundreds or thousands of generations of ancestors are distributed throughout the Lands. Animals, including us, eat the plants grown of ancestor nutrients, and animals, including some of us, eat other animals grown of the plants grown of ancestor nutrients. This lifecycle is one in which everyone and everything is sacred and related. Trees as ancestors isn't a fantastical concept; rather it's a historical and scientific fact.
Of course, as a newcomer to these Lands, these are not my ancestors, nor is any Bison practice mine to take and use as I please. My ancestors lay mostly in the soil in Europe, Jamaica, the Atlantic, and West Africa, with one generation in Ontario. My parents were the first to live in Treaty 7, and I am the only one in BC. It's unlikely I will ever live on my ancestral homelands. I can not transport the plants, animals, and lifecycles of my ancestral homelands to where I live now. My spiritual challenge is to determine how I can contribute positively to the life cycles here, in this profoundly out of balance settler society.
When Indigenous people use the phrase, “All my relations,” it includes not only people, plants, animals, and environments Indigenous to Turtle Island, but all of us including settlers, colonisers, and newcomers alike. This has only occurred to me since beginning my writing for this entry, an invitation heartbreakingly undeciphered in the dominating culture. I think the collective failure of the dominant society to recognise that we walk on sacred Lands, on the bones of ancestors who are not ours, keeps us sick and disconnected. Our path forward is to choose to walk softly, to examine and understand that we must honour the ways in which everything is connected.
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May 2026
There have been major shifts in my life since I first started working on a response to your last entry. I've moved into a new world, 7 blocks away from where I lived for the past 14 years. I also turned 40 and have released my first album of music today. Moving was a difficult experience for many reasons, but what remains now that it's done is the countless ways in which my family and community supported me. I'm grateful and lucky to be so loved.
I have my own outdoor space for the first time as an adult! I have big dreams and plans for my garden; where I've started to accumulate cuttings of vegetables and local plants. I'm not expecting to harvest much this year, this is learning, collecting, and nurturing time. This is a place where in a short time, I have expanded rapidly. The opportunities to create and to explore my relationship with plants, fungi, and the animals that visit are endless in this moment. The sunlight shines on me on my patio, and I am filled up with joy.
