White Shame Celtic Shame

None of this is scholarly or academic. My knowledge is intuitive and empathetic sharing based on my personal ancestral and spiritual healing path.

But that doesn't mean it's not true.

Shame bound

Most of the healing I've been doing revolves around shame. There are so many levels to the shame we carry. Personal, familial, ancestral, cultural, societal, global. It's like a shame matryoshka doll; luckily the shame gets smaller and easier the further in we go.

The fear of the shame is worse than feeling the shame.

To heal the shame we have to feel it and to begin with it feels like death or damnation. We have all done things we regret; treated other beings poorly, been hurtful with our words or actions. Add cultural and societal participation in harm and trauma and it leaves us with an overwhelming fear of feeling the shame that we carry around while being alive in a body.

Shame doesn't separate the person from the action. Guilt lets us know that what we're doing is harmful. Guilt says 'oooh, not the best choice'. Shame tells us that what we've done makes us bad. Shame wants to turn actions into being and behaviour errors into a flawed existence.

Sin means missing the mark - literally just "oops, I got it wrong" and the understanding that we can try again and do better. Shame shuts that down. Shame whispers that the core and source of who we are is poisoned and bad and wrong. The fear of feeling shame is the fear that we might find out for sure that we're bad and we deserve to suffer for it. If we never look at our shame, we can hold to the hope that we're not as bad as we think; instead of feeling the shame and knowing for sure.

We're never as bad as we think. No matter what we've done, the truth of who we are is miraculous.

Every single shame that I've ever uncovered has at root, been a false belief I held about myself or the world. Every single shame has been believing that I am separate from the loving wholiness of Creation. Every shame has been the choice to abandon myself in the face of conflict, opposition and rejection. Shame is what happens when we don't love ourselves for who we are.

Shame is what happens when we reject who we are to be acceptable or pleasing to others.

It's a double grief of being rejected by others and then rejecting ourselves to be accepted and feel safe. Bam!Bam! Safety and survival are powerful motivators, and rejecting aspects of our self in exchange for safety is a no brainer. Literally no thought, a knee jerk reaction and wholesale rejection of self for survival.

My ancestors hold unhealed shame.

Sitting with my ancestors, I am intensely aware of the unhealed, unacknowledged, unprocessed trauma they endured for centuries. Trauma that was shrugged off because they didn't have the time, emotional or mental space or safety to deal with the magnitude of loss. How can you process when you're just trying to scrape together enough food to feed the family? How can you process when you've been forced onto a boat and headed to a new land? There is a culture of emotional repression in my family that is linked to these traumas. Ignore, repress, cut off... any painful experiences and memories - bury them deep and never look at them again and go forward with a brave, superior face and we can pretend that they never happened at all.

This is the appeal of Whiteness.

After centuries of invaders and oppressive laws that attempted to eliminate our culture, the Celts probably saw "White" identity as a whole new and fresh start in the New World. Whiteness provided, for the first time, the opportunity to participate in the dominant group. Whiteness in the New World, where they could be land owners and never be put off their communal lands. I can't even imagine the pain of being forcibly removed from ancient land that our ancestors lived on for centuries. Our identity and our spirituality and our beliefs about ourselves and our world were formed on land that we held as sacred. To be cut off from that and then steadily fed the message that the way we live and the way we feel about the world and what we believe is backward and barbaric and valueless is... traumatic.

Christianity was a huge oppressor. Celts are very spiritual people and we live our lives in the mythic, so the stories of Christianity likely resonated. The early Christian Celts were only christian in name. They were Druids and children of the Green who saw the advantage of adopting the dominant belief system while still maintaining their love for the sacred physical world.

The Christian church renamed all the sacred wells and holy places in Scotland, Ireland and Wales with Christian names and the people continued to worship as they always had. Beltaine and many of the high holy days of earth worship are still practiced in Ireland, Scotland and Wales by the people in the old way. Some practices have never been Christianized, but I assume that over the centuries the christian church encouraged more christian ideology while demonizing pagan worship.

How long did it take for the Celts to lose touch with the magic of anamchara? How long did it take for the Celts to cut off from buiochas and hide mothaitheacht because it was dismissed and devalued and ridiculed and punished by the new dominant oppressors?

This is what I see when I look at my family, especially my father. Celtic descendants cut off from the roots of their culture which would value, understand and recognize our deeply felt and intense love for the natural world.

Brian Davidson. Lover of birds and storms.

I watched my father struggle his whole life with his feeling sense. He was an intensely sensitive feeling man. His love for the world was not valued in this society and he had no foundation to make sense of why he felt the way he did; so he blamed himself and believed he felt wrong, was wrong, and needed to be corrected.

I assume he felt ashamed of the vulnerability and intensity of the non-specific love he had for the world. He compensated by shutting down and cutting off his feelings and becoming cold and distant. In a society that limits the expression of emotion by men, my father became very good at showing anger, which crippled his ability to process and express the intensity of his love and the grief that accompanies it. My father swallowed his awe and wonder and joy and love and grief for the world in alcohol.

I can only imagine that this has been happening for generations of Celts.

Generations of unprocessed shame and rejected love and grief for the myriad of ways we were shown again and again that our ways were wrong and backwards and barbaric and sinful and against god. Christian invaders and oppressors attempting to eradicate our culture and our language and our spiritual ways and beliefs through lawmaking and social injustice and lies and marketing to turn people of the forest into ignorant, backwards barbarians.

My Celtic ancestors either willingly or forcibly, immigrated to Turtle Island. My mother's people have been here for at least 7 generations, since the mid 1700’s. I haven't yet found the documents to connect them to Europe, but I know they're also Celtic because of my mom's DNA results.

I assume land ownership was the goal for most.

(On Tiktok, my friend Matt made the point that many Celtic immigrants weren’t necessarily forward thinking in their move to Turtle Island. Many just wanted to escape the pain that they came from and that was good enough.)

To own land promised a level of freedom, independence and prosperity that was unheard of in Britain. My Highland ancestors may have stewarded land but they wouldn't have owned it.

Celtic peoples held land in common to be worked by and benefit all in the community. My ancestors were all tenant farmers and crofters. They weren't Lords or landowners. They were common folk - the labourers who had the most to gain by starting afresh on Turtle Island.

Had my ancestors swallowed the Christian kool aid by this time? Had they become Christianized and anglicized to the point that they couldn't see the parallels between their own colonization by the Romans and the Christians, the Normans and then the Saxons, which developed into the current English establishment, and their participation in the colonization of Turtle Island and the indigenous nations already here?

I'm sure white supremacy played a key role.

Another friend on TikTok commented that “Supremacy has a playbook. It uses the same techniques.” We can use any bullshit reason to claim supremacy and it will still be misguided harmful garbage.

“White is right” and Christianity stamped God's approval on the genocide because the people weren't Christian. Was it PTSD? Was it the shame and inter-generational trauma that allowed my ancestors to take and clear land for farms without considering the people that were here first? Was it opportunism? Was it entitlement?

It’s probably not processing their own pain and trauma and healing themselves, for a start.

The colonization playbook rolled out in the exact same way on Turtle Island as it had for my ancestors in the British Isles, except this time they were in the role of oppressor. This time they were the colonizers. This time they were the invading army of settlers sent in to push the Indigenous populations off the land and erase their culture.

Literal little house on the prairie. 1909 & 2009.

I can only make guesses and assumptions around why my ancestors did the things they did. They did what they thought was best and what would be the best for them and I don't think they considered the plight of indigenous people very deeply, if at all.

I suspect my ancestors came to Turtle Island shame bound.

They lived generations of disconnection from the value and celebration of their Celtic cultural identity. No doubt there was a powerful incentive to value, emulate and be accepted by the dominant culture and systems - so I can see the easy choice of embracing Christian anglo culture as a means of survival and safety.

Whiteness holds the offer of safety and supremacy.

Without a deep sense of foundation in our own culture, whiteness offered an identity that promised safety and supremacy. Shame inspires cut off, and Celts on Turtle Island were enmeshed in shame. Whiteness offered a fresh new beginning - Whiteness promised that we won't be at the bottom. Whiteness promised power and value in this new identity. Whiteness promised that we wouldn't be hounded and persecuted like Black, Brown and Indigenous people.

Whiteness promised safety but those in power didn't actually care if White people lived or died. All Whiteness ever really did was prevent "white" people from seeing commonalities with Black, Brown, Indigenous and other People of Colour. “Whiteness” was a tool to prevent European immigrants from joining forces with them to demand a change to the systems of oppression that exploit and commodify all of us.

Visual Capitalist. Click image for source.

Most European immigrants to Turtle Island have far more in common with Black, Brown, Indigenous and other People of Colour than we do with the "white" parasite class that create the laws and uphold the systems and institutions that benefit themselves alone. The Lords and landowners, the parasite class of the 1% have always feared and despised the common people and the power we have as a collective to change... everything.

Divide and Conquer

The easiest way to keep us from collaborating and joining is to fracture us into adversarial groups and keep us squabbling amongst ourselves while the parasites make laws and rules to continue stealing and exploiting our labour and common resources for their own benefit.

Rooting my Celtic cultural identity on Turtle Island seems like a highly individualistic and personal path, which it is - but it is also the path to co-operative strength with all the communities with which I share the common goal of land protection, reconciliation and equal thriving for all people.

Whiteness gets in the way of that.

Identity with whiteness is a tool of oppression used by the parasite class. It does very little to benefit those that identify as white.

White supremacy gets in the way of community - and community is power.

Celtic culture is so much more nourishing than whiteness.

It's ground is deep and solid and provides a bridge of commonality to many other cultures who share the same and similar values and beliefs about the world, what it means to be alive, and our place in this beautiful existence.

The lightness of my skin provides me privilege in white supremacy culture but it does very little to nourish my soul.

How unbelievably powerful, absolutely unstoppable would it be to have millions of Celts on Turtle Island join with millions of Indigenous people to demand the natural world be treated in a way that aligned with our sacred beliefs?

Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms to practice our religion is being infringed on by the destruction of the forests and water we hold sacred. How could we not succeed to place Indigenous people in powerful care of the sacred forests if millions of Celts joined to support in the shared embracing and protection of these sacred lands?

We're magic and we see the future. The Celts are growing strong on Turtle Island and the future is Indigenous.