Hunting the ancestors

Been thinking about dead people lately. I know, you're thinking, 'eeuw'. But I've become a bit besotted - in a good way. Ancestors, after all, mean a lot.

We don't often think about the dead, except in our private mourning for people we've loved. And truth to tell, as time passes, even those thoughts diminish.

Life takes over. We have bills to pay, jobs to do. The need to get through each day tends to turn departed loved ones into shadow people - warmly thought of but insubstantial. Which is as it should be. Nobody wants the pain of grief to stay sharp for ever.

Then there are the people further back, the great-grandparents and great-greats, strangers all. Pop back 100 years and many of us barely know our ancestors' names, let alone the places they came from. How different we've become from the ancient peoples who could recite their lineage back through 40 generations or more.

This was true for the Maori and every other culture whose traditions were spoken, not written. Their memory stores were in their bones.

Two stand-out conversations in my life have led me to write about these things now.

First up: a brisk debate, maybe 20 years ago, with a Maori workmate about the differences between his Polynesian background and my British colonial one. 'Your trouble,' he declared loftily, 'is that you have no culture.'

Miffed, I talked back at him about Stonehenge and Shakespeare and St Paul's Cathedral. But at the same time, a hollow kind of feeling rose in me because, really, what did any of that have to do with me? My ancestors had left all that behind 170 years ago when they set sail for a new kind of life.

It was 100 years since anyone in my family had called Britain 'home'. What culture could I lay claim to now other than a bunch of modern New Zealand icons? Jandals, or Marmite. The Milky Bar Kid, Sir Ed, Jean Batten and number eight fencing wire.

My second 'ah-hah' moment came about 10 years later. I went with a bunch of travellers to see a Maori matriarch much respected for her wisdom. As she proudly talked about the vital role indigenous people have in protecting nature, I felt my small protesting voice rising again. Okay, so I was white, lived in town and knew no plant lore or ancient chants, but couldn't I be allowed a skerrick of indigenousness too?

'Aren't the Finns indigenous to Finland?' I asked out loud. I seem to recall the room went a bit quiet. 'And the Koreans to Korea and the Portuguese to Portugal? At some point, weren't all of our ancestors indigenous? Didn't we all grow up on the same Earth out of this same soil?' I felt like stamping my feet to make my point.

Suddenly it seemed like a burning issue to me. I was no jungle or tundra dweller, and didn't want to be, but I hated this feeling of 'otherness', of being thought of as somehow shallow and uncaring because I was distant from my basic roots.

I decided then that the world would only get serious about fixing its problems when we could all think of ourselves as indigenous to the planet.

And then I forgot. Normal life resumed. It's what happens. Caught up in our everyday dramas, we trundle along paying little attention to who we are, where we came from and what long histories forged our substance and our souls.

Long story short: I fetched up in Maui, Hawaii, in February to spend a week immersing myself in ancestor talk. At last, I'd found a course that paid attention to it. And it was okay to be an ordinary, suburban kind of gal with pale, freckled skin.

Dr Apela Colorado, whose DNA derives from France and the Oneida tribe in North America studied for her doctorate at Harvard and Brandeis University and now supervises Masters and PhD courses in Indigenous Mind for California-based Wisdom University.

About a dozen women from around the world did seven days of story-telling, listening, singing, dancing and learning. This was no new-age fluff. Apela's courses require rigorous research. Students have to be prepared to journey far and deep - physically and mentally and spiritually - to gain more appreciation of their own 'native' backgrounds.

Why do they do it? Because it helps you know who you are, deep down in your bones, and gives you inner strength. 'In any indigenous gathering the first thing you'll be asked is who your people are and where you come from,' says Colorado. 'It's painful to see visitors struggle over this, unable to say more than their name and what they do for a living.'

I've been there myself, fumbling over my personal ID when I first visited a marae. 'My river is...' you are supposed to say. 'And my mountain is...' I could only think of Auckland's Mt Hobson, a placid green hump that I could see from my bedroom window in childhood. And as for a river, did the Orakei Basin count, a shallow estuary long since hemmed in by a railway line? My hosts smiled gently but I felt foolish and slightly bereft.

But now, in 2010, I could watch as students gave presentations rich with pictures and stories from their ancestors' homelands. We went deep into the Philippines, into Wales and Ireland. We did sensual old dances from southern Italy and learnt about the Jomon people of ancient Japan.

Some speakers wore clan or tribal clothing as they told their stories. They spoke of finding villages where long-dead family members had lived, could tell the myths and legends known by forbears whose names go so far back they can longer be established. They'd been to their ancestors' sacred sites and burial places and circles of standing stones. They'd discovered ancient lineages that hinted of Celtic or Saxon or Pictish or Norse blood.

It was inspiring to see the pride on their faces as they stood to recite generations of their lineage. Some could trace families back through several centuries.

In preparing for the course I too had become a genealogy nut. You can do it so easily now via the internet. If you're lucky enough to have photos it makes the search even richer. Early photography makes 19^th century 'rellies' look grim and stern. It's hard to think they might flash you a cheeky grin. And yet they cannot have been stiff. They laughed and argued, just like we do today, but it's hard for us to imagine them being young and sexy.

I'm delighted, however, to now know the names of all of my 16 great-great grandparents. I know what the men did for a living. Sailors and farming men mostly, plus a grocer, a missionary, an artist and a writer.

Women didn't have occupations - too busy churning butter and having babies. But I love knowing about Jeannie, who sailed the world with her Glaswegian sea captain husband in the 1870s but was felled by consumption before she hit 40. I'm intrigued by Marion, orphaned at eight in Edinburgh, who met her future husband on the ship that brought them to New Zealand, though because she was so young they had to wait eight years for their trip to the altar.

I'm amazed by Helen, a doughty Shetland Islander, whose husband Andrew died at 29. She hauled her three children out here 140 years ago and outlived all of them to last until she was 95. I'm fond of chubby George, a Dover artist. I feel for Henry, my only writer ancestor, bankrupted in 1851. And I'm thankful that Thomas, an Irish kid who joined the Royal Navy at 13, survived a shipwreck near Lisbon in 1828. If he'd drowned then I'd never have been born.

We tend to know about just a few ancestors, forgetting how many there are. Go back seven generations and you are the progeny of 62 individuals. Go back 10 generations and you are descended from 512 people. At 20 generations the ancestor pool expands to more than half a million; at 21 generations, a million-plus.

It's true. Every generation doubles the numbers. You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great- grandparents, 16 great-greats, 32 great-great-greats etc. Go back far enough and the numbers are vast.

I came away from my week of ancestral immersion with a keener appreciation of the humming throng whose DNA is now part of me. Finally, I'm understanding why indigenous peoples give such honour to their ancestors.

And now I can declare (should anyone ever ask me) that, 'I am Lindsey Dawson, daughter of Peter Buddle, son of Frederick, son of Joseph, son of Thomas, son of Matthew. And I am the daughter of Marion Strang, daughter of Rose Knowles, daughter of Marion McWilliam, daughter of Jane Nicol, daughter of Eizabeth Coventry.' That's just my direct line, back to people born in the late 1700s/early 1800s.

If you haven't a clue where you come from, you're not alone. Millions of people live in places far removed from their cultural and biological roots. Many have been ripped from their original parents by wars, disease, disasters and unrecorded adoptions. We can't all trace our families back into the past. Lost records, stalled memories and long-kept secrets get in the way. But it's probably true that most of us are affected to some degree by what anthropologist Gregory Bateson once dubbed 'dissociative schismogenesis'.

It means, says Apela, that we are cut off from the earth. 'And we don't even know it.'

In today's high-tech world you might say, so what? This is now. Why do our ancestors matter?

Apela likes to quote a student of hers, Barbara Dean (now deceased), who wrote that in investigating her own story she was leaving new footprints of ancestry for her grandchildren to follow, adding: 'We are the ancestors of the future.'

I like that thought. It's a grand tag to add to all the usual labels; wife, mother, wage earner, shopper, consumer, cook, nurse, driver, gardener, business owner, or whatever.

Begin to appreciate your story and you realise that you still carry a hint of indigenous soul, even while being just one of the crowd. But hey, what a crowd!

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