Your Ancestors Don't Need You to Grieve Quietly. An ode to celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day and how BIPOC Cultures grieve outside of colonization.
Someone in your family might have told you to be strong at the funeral when you were younger. Perhaps it was your auntie who placed her hand briefly on your shoulder before she turned back to the guests. Or maybe it was your mom running throughout the house since dawn, arranging food, greeting people, and holding everything together that from afar, it seemed like she wasn’t grieving at all. Perhaps it was a message that wasn’t spoken but felt, you know the way silence shifts when someone’s sorrow becomes much... You could sense the room change when crying lingered too long and when the expression of grief reached unspoken boundaries.
You absorbed something at that funeral, not through direct teaching but by observing how the adults navigate through their feelings in real time. Children pick up the most important lessons this way. You realized grief has a certain volume it’s allowed to reach before it becomes a problem. The women in your family were tasked with maintaining that volume, and this effort was equated with being strong, which in turn was synonymous with love, but at what cost?
The Grief That Was Taken Before It Could Be Felt
As we reflect on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we are confronted with the ongoing reality of what has been taken from the original inhabitants of this land. How we grieve and who shaped our grieving practices isn’t just an abstract historical inquiry. It relates to what you feel in your body right now.
From studies I’ve read and from conversations I’ve had with Indigenous Native Americans, there’s a continued existence of grief among Indigenous Native Americans that span generations, a grief deeper than any single loss. This grief is so foundational that it predates living memory. It encompasses the loss of practices, the severing of languages, and the erosion of mourning traditions systematically dismantled through displacement, forced assimilation, and federal policies meant to erase the ways their people traditionally mourned.
Indigenous peoples of North America specifically (only speaking to America because of national holiday but recognize this statement to extend outside of America, naturally) had mourning practices that viewed grief as a communal experience. These rituals were ceremonial and unfolded over time. They didn’t rush resolution or pathologize prolonged sorrow. Instead, they centered the entire community around the process of grieving rather than burdening the bereaved to navigate it alone. I want to provide an example of what this looks like. Reservation Dogs is a show about indigenous adolescents living on a reservation in Oklahoma and their community. There’s an episode of an elder, one of the main character’s grandmothers on her death bed. The community came together in the home as she took her last breath, taking turns to be with her, and share the communal grief. If you haven’t seen the show, I deeply encourage you to watch the series.
Did you know that mourning ceremonies were criminalized under the Indian Civilization Act and other federal policies. The boarding school system forcibly separated children from their families, severing the intergenerational knowledge that would have guided them in mourning. The pain of that severance is still present. It lives on in descendants reclaiming their heritage, discovering that returning to ceremony isn’t nostalgia but a form of healing. It resides in Native women who were raised with the directive to be strong, who absorbed that lesson through the same familial silence we began with. They didn’t realize that behind that silence was a living tradition that had been actively and systematically taken away.
The notion of being strong that was pressed onto your shoulder at the funeral didn’t originate with the women who communicated it, no. It continues to travel through generations of women who had to maintain composure because their reality required it. Composure and capability were necessary for survival.
We must no longer survive but thrive in our culture and when specifically speaking on Native Americans I want to support the culture and normalize their cultural and spiritual practices within the clinical space.
Don’t Appropriate
It’s important to clarify something, the grief stemming from severed lineages and the desire to reconnect with ancestral practices can lead women to make a mistake that should be addressed….
Returning to your own lineage isn’t the same as borrowing from another.
If your lineage is Indigenous to a specific nation and you’re learning its mourning practices with guidance from its living community, that’s reclamation. Those ceremonies, songs, and specific rituals that your ancestors carried are yours to rediscover, regardless of how imperfect your path may be.
However, adopting the ceremonial practices of an Indigenous nation that isn’t yours especially those still actively preserved by communities that endured centuries of persecution is cultural appropriation. Even with good intentions, it causes harm. On this day, when we remember what was taken from Indigenous people, we should be cautious not to continue the cycle of taking. Practices like smudging, sweat lodges, and specific prayers of nations whose children were removed from their families aren’t available for casual appropriation, because we don’t do that in this space.
If you’re not Native but are drawn to Indigenous ceremonies, the invitation isn’t to take but to explore what in your own lineage may still be waiting for you to rediscover. Every colonized lineage had mourning practices before colonization. Every community silenced from speaking to their dead had been doing so long before suppression took hold.
Your ancestors are ready to guide you back to the traditions of your own people. You don’t need to step through someone else’s doorway.
The Ancestors Aren’t Waiting for You to Have It Together
In my sixteen years of doing spiritual work, I’ve learned that ancestors aren’t waiting for you to reach a certain level of spiritual sophistication before they connect with you. They don’t hold off on reaching out until you’ve built the right altar or learned the proper prayers. They’re interested in establishing relationships, and that connection can begin from wherever you are, with whatever you have.
Research on continuing bonds in grief has shown since the 1990s that people maintain meaningful connections with those who have passed. These connections manifest in ways that differ from the simplistic images of spirituality. They can appear in dreams that carry a unique message. They may also show up in body memory such as when you cook a familiar recipe and suddenly sense knowledge from your grandmother’s hands, or when you step into a particular landscape and recognize something you can’t consciously recall.
They arrive as repeated signs: a certain bird appearing at just the right moment, a song playing as you face a significant choice, or a familiar scent wafting in without a source, immediately recognized as belonging to a deceased loved one. These experiences are reported across cultures and among people with varying degrees of spiritual belief, including both devoutly religious individuals and skeptics.
Societal norms often state that grief should be contained and private. Speaking to the dead out loud in front of others is deemed inappropriate, embarrassingly primitive, or a sign of unresolved emotions. Yet your lineage the part untouched by suppression understands this behavior differently.
You have permission to speak to them. You can speak their names aloud and feel the impact of doing so.
Three Ways In
You don’t need to start by creating an elaborate ancestral altar or conducting a formal ceremony. Reconnection can begin small, and often these smaller steps prove to be more authentic than grand rituals, which can sometimes become performative rather than genuine.
1.
You might begin by learning one more name from your ancestry than you currently know. Whatever name represents the furthest ancestor you recognize, seek out the next one. Ask the oldest family member available or explore any existing records, even if they’re incomplete or difficult. Find that name, say it aloud, and feel the weight of having acknowledged someone who has previously gone unnamed in your presence. If the records are non-existent and names were lost, articulate what you do know instead. You might say: I call in the women of my lineage who crossed the water, or the ones whose names I don’t know but whose blood lives in me. An open call can be just as powerful as a specific one sometimes even more so, as it acknowledges what has been taken.
2.
Consider cooking a dish that traveled through your family. This week, prepare it with the intention of connecting, not just for nourishment. Allow the act of cooking to become a conversation. As you work with your hands, recognize that they’re building on the knowledge passed down from other hands. The kitchen has historically been a space where ancestral knowledge survived even amid suppression. They could take the prayers, but the memory associated with food transcended the bounds.
3.
You could also set a simple offering of water and a candle. A clean glass of water alongside a candle on any surface you use with intention does not appropriate anyone’s specific tradition. Water offerings are a universal gesture across cultures, acknowledging that the dead may thirst. Offering water communicates care: I remember you, I honor you, and I recognize that your existence made mine possible.
Light the candle and speak to whoever comes to your mind in whatever language feels right. Say: I am here. I am thinking of you. Come if you are willing. Then take a moment to sit quietly, noticing whatever arises, without attempting to evaluate its significance as it comes.
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Which grief did the women before me never get permission to feel, and am I willing to feel it for them now?
Let this resonate in your body before you translate it into words. Write from where it settles not from the part of you that can present grief nicely, but from the part that has held something on behalf of your lineage longer than you’ve had a name for it.
Additional Resources
🍂 The Elements of Grief Course opens October 25th
A self-paced psychospiritual course moving through Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Spirit as frameworks for the full complexity of grief, including the ancestral grief this post touched. The waitlist is open now and cart opens in two weeks.
🎓 The Psychospiritual Grief Method Training is this Saturday, October 17th
For clinicians ready to bring this framework into their practice with the clinical rigor and spiritual literacy the work actually requires. Six CE credits, small cohort, last call for registration.
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary
For the women who want to keep going after today. The Grief Sanctuary provides weekly Thursday content of psychospiritual content that will include a ritual, meditation, and or journal prompt. This is where the ongoing practice lives.
📞 Grief Counseling Consultation is free and available for California residents seeking individual grief counseling inside a framework that was built to hold all of what they are carrying.
With care + intention,
Amber
