The Constellation Project is pleased to announce the publication of our second “Prayer Book,” by HDS student Morgan Curtis. “The Decolonial Dames of America,” is a landmark essay about the importance of ancestral repair work needed to be taken by the white descendants of oppressors to cultivate the soil of healing. This event featured a reading by Morgan Curtis in conversation with Melissa Bartholomew, associate dean for diversity, inclusion, and belonging.
This event took place April 19, 2023.
Full transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Decolonial Dames of America, Book Launch and Reading. April 19, 2023.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: In her story, Decolonial Dames of America, I experienced both a reckoning and an awakening. I couldn't help but look inward and ask myself what harmful history lies within my own ancestry. Her words speak to this transformational moment. What has been hidden is exposed, what has been deemed acceptable in our collective pasts is now seen as a shameful record of oppression and intergenerational trauma. This pain spills over beautiful bodies brutalized by this history and seeps into those who denied it ever happened.
I have denied my own ancestry and the harm that has been caused. A reckoning and an awakening is happening within each of us. Descendants of white colonizers are finally recognizing the harm that has been done to people and the planet. The acts of repentance required and the reparations and land return needed to cultivate the soil and soul of healing.
Morgan Curtis is a courageous writer who has brought another layer quote, "of what it is we are responsible to remedy in this lifetime," end quote. Please welcome Morgan Curtis.
[APPLAUSE]
MORGAN CURTIS: I'm going to invite you all to take a deep breath with me because I need it so much, so. Yeah, just grounding into ourselves and taking a deep breath in and letting it out. Thank you so much each of you for gathering here to be with me, with community, with this story tonight. Thank you, Terry and Melissa especially for being my teachers and being such a huge part of this project, and this event being possible.
Yeah, I begin really aware of our location tonight. Here we are at Harvard, here we are at the Divinity School, and here we are on Massachusetts territory. Harvard is in the midst of its own reckoning with looking at the legacy of slavery at this institution, work that is long overdue and just beginning.
The Divinity School has, under Melissa's leadership, taken up that mantle of how do we look at this institution's soul ties to slavery. And as I was shaking all day in preparation for this evening, words from Dr. Jennifer Harvey kept staying with me. She's a liberation theologian.
And what she speaks to is that white people need to be as particular in our theology as Black liberation theologians are. And that the only white theology is a theology of reparations. Because we have been so divorced from our humanity by racial violence that the only way we're going to find ourselves back, the only way we can create a moral self in the face of this history is through repair.
So what does that mean for a Divinity School at a predominantly white institution? I think reparations is the theology we need to be with. And here we are on Massachusetts territory, and my own history in my family is bound up with the colonization of these very lands.
Yeah, I think what I have to say about that is this essay. So yeah, dedicating this to healing, to justice, to repair. I'm excited to read for you all.
In the place that has always been known as Copiague, on the Long Island still known to its people as Paumanok, next to an automobile repair shop is a small patch of grass with scattered headstones. Three are of human form, earthen effigies, Brown skin with Black braids. It was these I found myself carefully cleaning one morning in November, 2021.
An elderly woman hummed her approval, happy her ancestors were being tended. Other tribal members gathered around snacking, chatting, and raking leaves, happily catching up after months of pandemic isolation. I imagined I looked quite out of place, a young white woman no one had seen before at this family reunion in a Montaukett graveyard. Quite a few people asked me how I came to be there.
My story begins in the Victorian townhouse where I was raised. I grew up surrounded by portraits of my American forefathers, their biographies on the coffee table, their silver in the safe under the stairs. I had what my parents called an "upper middle class upbringing." They instilled gratitude for its privileges, but questions of their provenance were absent.
As a child, I was fascinated by the framed, hand inked family tree commissioned by my great grandmother Isabel Ramsey Buckley. I remember noticing the blue squiggly lines beneath certain names. The legend indicated they were each a founder of Family in America. No ancestors preceded these names. According to this tree, between 1620 and 1673, our family spontaneously appeared across so-called New England, an apparent Immaculate Conception.
I carried this myth with me when I went to college. I remember meeting a Cherokee student and thinking, perhaps even saying out loud, wow, I didn't know your people were still here. Not long after, I sat in a dark underground venue listening to a Lakota classmate's poetry. I felt her gaze directly on me as she powerfully named the pain of Urban Outfitters stealing from her people, appropriating Indigenous culture for fast fashion.
I was wearing a t-shirt with the wings of an eagle atop a totem pole. Hot shame flooded me as I covered myself with a cardigan. For the first time in my life, I had a sense that colonization was not just a historical event, but is ongoing.
In the years following, I followed a childhood love for the Earth into a fossil fuel divestment campaign, making a moral and financial case for my college to leave behind this death dealing industry. Soon after, I learned my own family was invested in the same corporations that we were campaigning against. I felt I had both blood and oil on my hands.
I drifted from my environmental engineering major opening myself to the political, cultural, even spiritual crisis beneath our fossil fuel-powered economy. As the depth of my complicity sunk in, I was tempted to once again cover myself up to try and turn away. The trajectory of my elite education offered that possibility of refuge and denial.
There was no unseeing what I had seen. As I got more deeply involved with the climate movement, I found myself in Indigenous-led spaces where I was asked for the first time in my life, "who are your people?" I began to understand myself as white after a childhood in which race had never been mentioned.
I remembered that family tree, and it became clear to me that my family's early arrival in North America was a story of immense violence against the land and its original peoples, we saw both as expendable subhuman resources for our own "progress." Meanwhile, we sacrificed our connection to our own homelands and the cultural and ecological practices that had sustained us. These are the deeper causal roots of the climate crisis.
This was a history I had never been taught. I was furious and directed the anger at the living face of this lineage-- my father. He sieved in response, "how dare you say that about my ancestors," attempting to wrest them back from my rewriting of their story.
I would shake with indignation and argue right back. I saw him and myself as bad, wrong, even evil. Perhaps, if I was only more forceful, more righteous, more persuasive, he would change, I would change, everything would change, but it didn't.
Part two. "Go do the work with your own people." This was the mandate I kept hearing from social movements, but I'd managed to put such a distance between myself and the White wealthy world I came from. I didn't want to go back.
It took time for me to learn that as long as the intergenerational trauma of colonization and enslavement is still carried by Black and Native people today, the descendants of the perpetrators must come together to take intergenerational responsibility. This rebalancing of relationships between the land and all of its peoples is necessary for all our survival. It would require learning how to love those parts of myself enough to turn back towards my family, my people, and our history.
So one evening in late 2019 when visiting Granny, my father's mother in Connecticut, I went to the attic to see what family records had survived her hasty, grief-stricken move after my grandfather's passing. I was on my hands and knees when I found a handmade book, cracking at the spine, spilling pages and photographs. It was titled, A Gay '90s Childhood. Gay meaning jolly, '90s meaning the 1890s, and it kept me up most of the night.
It was written by Marian, my great grandmother's first cousin. They were raised as sisters in a Brownstone in Brooklyn. Marian's writing carried me from our time into theirs. Her lilting prose describes the family's devotion to that particular part of the Earth on the Hudson in upstate New York, where they spent their summers on a country estate.
She remarks how green the grass, how fragrant the air, and what a beautiful stillness broken only by the birds singing their late June afternoon love songs. We share a love of horses. A horse's lips are one of the loveliest things on Earth, she says, and of the unseen world. Under the harvest moon, she says, the cornfields were mysterious. I knew there were fairies lurking among the corn stalk, ladies.
Both Marian and Isabel were proud members of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America. The dames still exist today. An invitation-only membership organization that considers themselves entrusted with history's future.
Marian was one of many members who wrote memoirs in response to the duty of a dame to impress upon the young the sacred obligation of honoring the memory of those heroic ancestors whose ability, valor, sufferings, and achievements are beyond all praise.
The organization was founded in 1891 when those of colonial descent wanted a story that could set them apart from more recent arrivals from Ireland, Italy, and Germany. My stomach turned with the twisted irony of being anti-immigrant as settlers, asserting our superiority through seniority on stolen land.
As I continued reading Marian's neatly typewritten words, I saw how often another truth is hidden in plain sight for those who are willing to see it. I read Marian's favorite story of her grandfather's robbing graves at a nearby Indian burial ground as a boy in Geneva, New York.
I read of the families, hero, son, Alexander Ramsey Thompson, who had died fighting the Seminole Indians. I saw a young Black boy named Hiram standing stiffly in the back row of a family portrait. I connected the dots between the time period and geography, the country estates, oil paintings, and numerous servants, seeing a family living luxuriously during the time of remarkable inequality known as the Gilded Age.
Searching online, I found a series of obituaries that revealed the source of our family's wealth, a cotton and wool mill, dry goods, railroads, gas, insurance, mining, and ports, including contracts with the Committee on Indian Affairs. All industries intricately bound up in enslavement and genocidal westward expansion.
My great, great, great grandfather Thomas Townsend Buckley did so well that his sons never had to work. I shook my head with grief and rage, grimly receiving another layer of what it is I'm responsible to remedy in this lifetime. For I found many such stories in my journeys around the cupboards, file folders, and bookshelves of my extended family in so-called New England.
It turns out the papers that are proudly stored away by generations previous kept for posterity are so often a perfect record of our participation in the theft of land and labor. Sometimes it feels like they've been waiting for me, ready to be repurposed for my generation's reckoning with our family's past.
Part three. I used my ancestral stories as a map from the past and into the future. I am guided to the places where memories may linger upon the land, historic houses, graveyards, massacre sites. One time, I took my parents with me. We went to Riverview, that estate on the Hudson in Marlborough, New York that was in our family until 1918.
On arriving, my father commented on how the landscape had been ruined by the "down market housing" on subdivided lots. I thought to myself that it had been ruined long before that as Munsee, Lenape territory was manipulated to resemble English manor gardens.
We could see the house was uninhabited, the garden wild, the paint peeling. A plaque from the National Register of Historic Places hung beside a permit notice warning of upcoming construction. We walked around the house, past the empty swimming pool, past the veranda where a photograph of Marian in her girlhood finest was taken.
The basement level of the house was open to the air on one side and we stepped inside the cool brick structure. Before I knew it, my father had pulled himself up through the floor joists, opened the basement door from the inside, and beckoned me up the stairs. He shushed my remark about the white privilege that led us brazenly enter.
Together, we walked the halls of our ancestors. My father spoke his imagination out loud of them receiving guests in the front room eating at a long table in the dining room, sitting for cocktails in the living room, and tinkling on a grand piano.
All I could see was how that world was gone, unraveled, decayed, remaining furniture dusty and broken, wallpaper faded and falling. I traced my fingers across the serving counter between the kitchen and the dining room and found myself walking up the back stairs to a small room with low ceilings.
The steepness of the stairs reminded me, this house was also a place of work. Perhaps some of those who served my family as butlers, footmen, cooks, maids, governesses, and groundskeepers slept in this very room. This was their home too, however, uneasily.
It was only in 1827 that slavery had finally become unlawful in New York State. I cannot know the texture of these relationships, but the inequity feels clear. These people gave immense amounts of labor to my family while all of the family's ill gotten wealth went to their descendants, including my great grandmother who never had to work in the household or beyond.
I believe I am the first generation of my father's family in North America to not experience being served by Black people in the home. And my great grandmother's trust fund is still generating wealth today. I said a quiet prayer, of gratitude and apology.
Back outside, I gathered a bunch of mugwort, that protective herb Native and sacred in both Europe and North America. You, witch, you, my father said with a half smile as I whispered my goodbyes.
When I got home, I reopened A Gay '90s Childhood, searching for a story, I remembered about one of the people who lived and worked in my ancestors homes. His name was Charles Squires. In Marian's words, Charles had come to Montague Street when he was 17 and had been grandfather's valet.
After grandfather's death, he succeeded the coachman in the country and was houseman in town. Charles always walked behind me. This bothered me for I should have preferred to skip beside him, holding his Brown hand, but he would force me as it were to stay in my place. He was half Negro and half Montauk Indian. His mother was the last pure blooded Indian of that tribe.
The tribe owned a vast acreage on Long Island. And as the Montauks died, they left their lands within the tribe. Consequently, Charles was actually a rich man, but so faithful to us that he remained with us over 50 years, dying at last because of his sorrow when my father died. They were the same age, one day apart.
With a lump in my throat, I began to research, yearning to see beyond the white gaze of Marian's storytelling. According to the 1850 federal census, Charles Squires was born in 1848 to Daniel enumerated as Black, and Charlotte, deemed by the census-taker Mulatto.
I found him again in 1860, a young boy, mulatto, birthplace unknown. He and his family living in Huntington, New York, not far from their ancestral homelands in the far reaches of what we now call Long Island. By 1880, he was an unwed coachman at Montague Street in Brooklyn. His name in cursive, next to those of my ancestors.
By 1900, he was married to Martha Fowler with a six-year-old son Arthur at home. Charles's mother lived to 99 years old, passing in February, 1916. Just six months later, Charles himself was with the ancestors. I imagine that if he died of sorrow, it was for the loss of his mother and not his master.
Next, I turned my attention toward researching his people. Squires, it turns out, is a common Montaukett name, and Martha's family name, Fowler, is too. In 1906, the Montaukett people received a devastating blow at the hands of New York State judge Abel Blackmar when he declared to the over 200 Montauketts sitting in his courtroom that their tribe no longer existed, and they had, therefore, lost their claim to any remaining tribal lands.
Marian's idea of Charles's loyalty to our family, despite his wealth in vast acreage dissolved. I could now see, almost none of her story about Charles held true.
Part Four. One mention of Charles and his elderly mother was in a 2015 article written by Sandi Brewster-Walker. Looking Sandi up, I learned she is a historian, genealogist, freelance journalist, and executive director, and government affairs officer for the Montaukett Indian Nation. She works closely with present day Montaukett Chief Robert Pharaoh on the effort to restore the tribe's state recognition.
Eventually, I found the courage to hit send on an email introducing myself and describing the book in case any of Charles's descendants might wish to read the part of his story preserved in my grandmother's attic. Sandi responded right away, called me with her number.
My hand shaking, I typed it into my phone. And an hour or so after beginning my research, I was speaking with Charles's living relative. Sandi's family intermarried with the Squires family many times. Charles is a cousin of hers in multiple ways, and she was very excited to read the book.
We dove into stories of her Montaukett family and my white wealthy family just 40 miles or so apart. Sandi's grandfather job was a prize winning gardener growing acres of dahlias. At the same time, another great, great grandmother of mine was a decorated member of the Garden Club of America on Long Island. We marveled at how close and far our stories come.
Sandi told me about how the tribe's loss of recognition was often accompanied by news coverage of the supposed "last Montauk Indian." Just as Marian had described Charles's mother, for centuries, she shared the two families who have led the Montaukett Indian Nation are the Pharoahs and the Fowlers. Charles's mother was a Pharaoh, she told me.
I found words to make clear that I don't consider Charles as serving my family, to have been just arrangement, especially as a Black man, a Native man serving a white family within living memory of slavery. I shared that my ancestors had enslaved many people of both African and Native descent over 200 years in so-called New England. And Charles's story shows me how the peculiar institution morphed only slightly through the 19th century.
"Don't go feeling guilty," Sandi reminded me before we closed the conversation. I shared about the work I now do, organizing white people for reparative, redistribution of wealth, and offered that fundraising is something I can do if needed. She found my website and called me back. "You're serious, aren't you?"
A flurry of emails followed. History books and articles for me to read, book clubs to be part of, photographs of her own beloved ancestors. Some months later, came an invitation down to Long Island to that day of gravesite restoration. I was invited to arrive early to help ready the burial grounds for a Native American Heritage Month event.
I was up late the night before, deep in my family tree, learning of another branch of my family who were early colonial settlers on Long Island. I arrived with some trepidation, perhaps reverberating with ancestral memory, a projected fear my settler ancestors had of the people of this place.
Despite my shyness, I was met with an abundance of warmth from everyone Sandi introduced me to. I was honored to meet another family member of Charles, Myra Squires. She knew about Arthur, Charles' son, after whom a local American Legion Post was named. She also recalled that a number of tribal members had worked for wealthy families at that time, including as respected coachmen. We hugged, took pictures for her to show her family, and wondered what our ancestors were making of our reunion.
Sandi had invited me to contribute financially, and we got to sit together on one of the two stone benches she bought with those funds for the burial ground, for visitors to sit, meditate, and acknowledge the homelands of the Montaukett Indian Nation. I'm excited to keep supporting her efforts, in particular, her vision to build a museum for the Montaukett to tell their own story, a form of historic preservation so sorely needed.
I pray and write letters to the governor that their nationhood will soon be re-recognized by the state of New York as a step toward, one day, having sovereignty over their ancestral homelands once again. I'm learning that Native peoples dream of futures we all need. We are a dozen generations into colonization of these lands. May it not take as long for those dreams to come true.
Part Five. I dedicate these pages to the memory of my great grandmother Isabel. Perhaps it would be easier to leave her behind, to cast her off as a relic of another time, to distance myself from any notion of being a colonial dame. That's always there, the choice to vanish into whiteness, to pretend these are not my stories, not America's stories.
But if we do not claim these narratives, they will just be continued by others in much the same way as they have for generations in the memoirs, statues, textbooks, house museums, and archives of the colonial dames and their lake. Only when we, the white descendants of the perpetrators, claim these ancestors as our own can we take responsibility for what was done in our names and see what we still do in their image.
Our history requires of us a profound reckoning, the willingness to make different choices than our ancestors did before us. For injustice haunts us until it is put right, even over generations. It is through this work of repair we will find our way back to our own humanity. This is both material and spiritual work.
I imagine one day, I, too, will be an old white lady of colonial descent. I hope that by then, we stand for something different than we do now, perhaps a decolonial dames of America with a reimagined sacred obligation to act swiftly and with courage, to stand with Black and Native communities in their efforts to bring about long overdue reparations and land return.
Through this, we, too, can keep the memory of our ancestors close by telling the truth of their times, committing to transmute the trauma they caused, and not letting wealth, inequality, racial violence, or climate chaos be the final chapter of their legacy.
If white supremacy is to end in this country, its own children must turn around and face its history, saying, yes, those are our people. We are them and they are us. We did this, and now, we will work to undo it. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: My name is Melissa Bartholomew, Melissa Wood Bartholomew. I am the descendant of Africans who were enslaved in this country. And I am the descendant of Indigenous people of this land, of this country. I told Morgan that I did not plan to say much, and I still don't. I want to honor your words, and I want to allow as much space as possible for this community to engage with you.
What I will say is that I am deeply grateful for you. As I indicated in my afterword, reading what Morgan wrote brought me to tears. And as I was sitting here, I was thinking about the fact that it's not just what she wrote, but it is who she is and the work that she is doing. Because it's easy to write about it, it's different to be about it.
And Morgan is about the work in a very deep, intentional way that requires risk and sacrifice. And until there are more white people like Morgan, willing to take these risks and to give up what she's given up, until there's a groundswell of folk like Morgan, we won't see the type of reparations that this country requires.
So I wept knowing the full context of Morgan. I wept knowing the totality of her experience. So I want this to be an opportunity for you all who don't know the full totality to be able to engage with her. And then I will come back and read Bronte's prayer. Thank you.
MORGAN CURTIS: (WHISPERING) Water.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you, Melissa. It means a lot. Yeah, we have some microphones. I think, maybe there's one over there, and yeah, I would love to hear from you all. I welcome your reactions, questions, and yeah, may we be in conversation. And we're going to make sure we use the microphone, so our friends on Zoom can hear us.
AUDIENCE: I'm Bob Johnson, a friend of Morgan's, a parent of a Divinity School student. First of all, thank you. Beautiful, beautiful read. I hope you don't mind if I share one thing that you told me, which is that you're also descended from John Graham.
MORGAN CURTIS: Distant cousin, yes.
[LAUGHS]
AUDIENCE: But the point still holds, which is as you go back 200 years, of course, the number of ancestors and peasants and invasions is great explanation. And in those stories are also some John Brown type stories of courage and abolitionism and so forth. How did you-- as you go back so far, how did you choose the ones you chose as opposed to others who might have chosen you.
MORGAN CURTIS: I feel more chosen by them than I did the choosing. Yeah, the stories I shared just actually happened. And so that's what has unfolded. And there's something intimate for me about building relationship with my great grandmother through this process. I never met her. She died before I was born. But I talk about my father being the living face of this lineage, and it's his grandmother, his father's mother, who's kind of the first female face of this lineage closest to me. And so there's something about being with her, and the people immediately before her that feels needed.
And I'll share-- the title of the book comes from a friend, Jeff Conant. We were on a prayer walk with the monks and nun-- Hi, Clare, of the New England Peace Pagoda in Plymouth, Patuxet two years ago. And we were standing on that hill by the replica, Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. And this just like, monument multiple monuments to colonization.
And if you've been there over Plymouth Rock, there's like a Grecian temple, pretty much. And it says in huge letters, "National Society of the colonial dames of America." And Jeff turned to me and said, what if there was Decolonial Dames of America?
[LAUGHTER]
And that really got me thinking. And it was amazing when Terry came to me with the opportunity to make this little book because that was one of the first things I had imagined was, I don't want to start an organization, but I want to make like a little thing that could be like passed around to make this an idea, and what becomes of this idea, so. Yeah, that was some of the choosing.
AUDIENCE: Hey, Morgan, thank you. I'm curious what you see the role of spirituality as in the project of reparations. I'm a spiritual person. I know not everyone identifies that way maybe. But I'm curious how do you see spirituality fitting into this-- the [INAUDIBLE].
MORGAN CURTIS: I came to Divinity School to ask that question.
[LAUGHTER]
And I will leave with it.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm thinking of-- I had dinner with someone a number of years ago, Carlos Saavedra, and he said to me, if the first reparations that happened were the federal government doing reparations, white Americans would be left off the hook. The systems would continue as they are.
And so I have a sentence in the essay where I say, this is material and spiritual work because if all that happens is money, land, compensation, restitution, moves, but the way in which the system of white supremacy lives in the soul ties, to quote Melissa, of white people, white institutions, white stories, to-- yeah, supremacy superiority.
If that continues, like, whatever resources have moved will come right back because we will continue our ways of theft and accumulation. And so something has to happen at a much deeper level that doesn't turn away from the material imperative. It's like, deeply both at once.
And there's also a piece for me that's spiritual about this work, that's about-- yeah, it's about surrender. It's about knowing that I don't know. It's about being willing to ask like the deepest questions of what it means to be human and why I'm here and what life is for, the kind of questions that people turn to religion, to spirituality to answer. Reckoning with the violence this deep requires that of us.
Yeah, thanks, Hendricks.
AUDIENCE: Thank you, Morgan. You are leaving here with that question of mine, and I also want to post that you have created somehow answers to it as well. This, itself, is a sacred cast and you gave it the [INAUDIBLE], the interiority of your dream, like, externally you were honest to share something challenging, so thank you.
My question is out of detailed curiosity, you mentioned in your homestead that space, what happened there, which is now [INAUDIBLE] historical marker coming. And I wonder what that historic marker says. And if you have injected yourself into, perhaps investigating that, but maybe even rewriting it.
MORGAN CURTIS: Yeah, I know we have some history students in the room that could maybe tell me more about the National Register of Historic Places. It's a good point. And yeah, that house is still a private home. I'm curious who lives there and how they understand the history of it. So work yet undone, yeah. Hi, Sue.
AUDIENCE: Thank you, Morgan. This is-- it has able to got me through, and I will cherish forever. Thank you. It's a very important work. I'm a member of the National Society of the Colonial Dames. I'm the chair of the committee for their property [INAUDIBLE] next year who are in their land, when there are many like me [INAUDIBLE] with two different meanings tribes.
This book is a guide to how to hold yourself as you face the present moment in history trying to shape a better future. I'm connected to the past president of the Colonial Dames of Massachusetts, and to the president, and to the manager.
One of the dames is particularly conflicted and grieved about her ancestry [INAUDIBLE], and we're going to have many more conversations. And she's going to get a copy too. And I can see people squirm and avoid me and try and not think about decolonial. Thank you for being the guiding mind, and thank you for opening this door we desperately needed to be. Will you please help me in the future?
[LAUGHTER]
MORGAN CURTIS: Thank you, Sue. Sue was in the writing class with Terry where I wrote the first draft of this essay. And when I read it that time, you came up to me, and were like, I'm a colonial dame.
[LAUGHTER]
And I've loved our conversations since then. And I'm so grateful that you get to be my way in. And I've started to hear from more colonial dames the last few weeks from different-- there's a chapter in every state, y'all who are beginning to think. Some of them have been thinking for a while around what is this form of historic preservation doing, and how might it be reimagined. So I'm grateful for you and them.
AUDIENCE: Morgan, I love this and you. And I'm interested if you're willing-- if you could speak to your ongoing conversations with your father. And I'm asking because you and I are just-- we call it our ancestral journey. We're together in our ancestry, cross race, and class syndrome of what we call comparative genealogy.
And I'm finding at the point where I am-- in uncovering truths and retelling stories about ancestors, how it creates conflict in family conversations and defensiveness around the memory of those ancestors. And so I'm interested in how it's going-- the conversations with your father.
MORGAN CURTIS: Thank you. Yeah, yeah, and the longer version of this essay, there's like a little more about my dad. And I realize I kind of leave everyone hanging in this of like, what's going on with Morgan and her dad. Yeah, it's been a powerful journey that my father and I have been on the last few years.
Something I don't name directly in the essay is the choice I made to redistribute the wealth that he gave to me, about $600,000, which I've moved to Black and Indigenous organizing and land projects around the country, and internationally also. And I think that's very hard for him.
And one time, he said to me, "I thought that the purpose of my career was to maximize the inheritance of my children, and you're asking me to question all of that."
And it was powerful for me to hear, that to be like, oh, he is questioning all of that through naming that. And there's been some incredible highs in the journey where he's joined me in moving resources, joined me in telling our story. My dad and I ended up doing a podcast on NPR together about our differences. And there's been some lows. There's been really some difficult periods too.
And I'll speak also a little bit to the extended family picture. And yeah, it's been really moving to become closer to many members of my extended family through having my attention on our history in such a way. Yeah, a lot of my family members are getting used to receiving very long emails from me about things I've learned about our people, and things I'm doing in response and invitations to join me.
And I was really moved a few days ago by an email from my great aunt Molly, who is the daughter of Isabel. And yeah, she shared so powerfully about what it was like for her to read this, and her willingness to name some of where she felt defensive and how she was able to move through that. And so that's probably like the most powerful feedback I could get from someone so close to the story.
Yeah, thank you. Speaking of family, my cousin once removed, John at the back had a question. Or Dan first, OK.
AUDIENCE: As a distant cousin of yours to Sir John Winthrop. I'm incredibly grateful that you are my cousin. And I'm very grateful for another cousin who I'm sitting here too, and to say that you two are my relatives and that you're doing this wonderful, wonderful work [INAUDIBLE]. Thank you so much.
MORGAN CURTIS: Thank you, Dan. I'll use that as a link to say there's currently a campaign here at Harvard from the generational African-American Student Association and Native Americans at Harvard College to de-name Winthrop House in recognition of his story of being kind of an arch colonizer here in the story of this land, having written the first laws that legalized slavery in North America.
So in collaboration with those undergrads, I'm starting a descendents petition. So if there's any other John Winthrop descendants out there, there are a few million of us, I would love to be connected.
AUDIENCE: There's someone [INAUDIBLE] Meredith.
MORGAN CURTIS: Sure, yes. Come on over.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Hello, my name is John Reichenbach. I have known Morgan her entire life. I've also known her mother her entire life, and I've lived with her there for two years. I read her book. And one, I agree with every story told within it. I am fairly sure I will not adopt any of the solutions, but it caused me to think about things and consider it. And I also discovered that I'm also related to her father, although it's about seven generations back.
MORGAN CURTIS: Thank you so much for coming, John. I'm really glad you're here.
AUDIENCE: You're welcome. And I enjoyed it.
MORGAN CURTIS: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Hello. I'm-- [INAUDIBLE] I'm here entirely by happenstance mostly, so very grateful. Thank you. I was curious if you had any advice on how to broach the subject with other family members and friends who are not involved in any thoughts similar to this, besides giving them the book, of course, which I don't think they would read.
[LAUGHTER]
MORGAN CURTIS: Every family is so different. And as I speak to a little bit in the book, I think, yeah, part of the stages of what they call like, white racial identity formation is, there can be a lot of guilt, shame, self-hatred when we begin to face this history. And also as I described, it can be really easy to throw that at one's family.
And yeah, the question for me has been, what does it take to love myself enough to have dignity enough to not need something from them, but to have something to offer. Because I truly believe that being on a path of repair is something to offer. It's how do I live it to the extent that those around me and my family are like, I want that too. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
MORGAN CURTIS: The one right behind you, Tom.
AUDIENCE: That was beautiful. Thank you. In my own journey of having met you and you've helped shape your life helping my life in reconciling with my own heritage and also being descendant of-- several of those who came over in Ireland.
Just think I had an experience that was-- I did not expect it at all, of having a realization of a connection I have with my aunt who passed away before I was born and the trauma that she suffered in her life. And so I'm wondering in your journey, how you've then-- you're working on the intergenerational coherence that was playing part in unraveling and repairing.
MORGAN CURTIS: Yeah, I've been spending a lot of time with this question academically recently-- graduate school, and I've been thinking a lot about the distinction between intergenerational trauma and moral injury. And the way I understand my family's story, when I look at our deep history in Europe, when I look at like, a medieval history a Roman history, there's so much pain back there in terms of what people in Europe did to one another. And I don't think that has ever been healed.
And then there's our experience here on this continent and the form of injury and trauma that comes from causing violence and comes from benefiting from violence. And we're carrying that too. And each of those, I think, compounds upon themselves to create cycles of intergenerational pain in so many white families.
And yeah, I know it's going to take many generations for that healing to happen. And the first thing that came to me when you asked was community. And I think the most powerful healing that I've been able to access in my lifetime has come through not trying to do it alone and through holding it together with others who want to be in that journey, of seeing one another, supporting one another, witnessing one another, speaking truth to one another.
And there's parts of that work that can happen in multiracial groups. And there's a large part of that work that needs to happen with white people together. And so I'm in practice learning how to feel and be out of my head, and be in my body, and figure out how to be human again after a lot of generations of trying something else. Yeah, thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm Mia. Thanks for this. I was wondering if you could tell us a little like how the writing of this came through, whether that's like, people or text people, books in conversation with, or even just like the process of receiving this, what that was like in relation to the work that you're doing now.
MORGAN CURTIS: Yeah. I wrote a lot of the first draft at Bob's dining table, I'm glad you're here, Bob, as an assignment for Terry's class. So I had some healthy deadline pressure.
And I had the title before I had anything else. And it was what story wants to come with these ideas. And there are many stories I could have picked. And as I said earlier, yeah, I felt chosen by this one, and I just let it come out.
And yeah, I think the draft that we eventually printed was the fifth draft. Another big process of getting it to, I think, the fourth draft was I went to the Colonial Dames House Museum in Connecticut, Wethersfield, Connecticut, where my great grandmother was very involved. And yeah, I spent the weekend alone, which I never do. Those of you that know me will know. I spent the weekend alone in an Airbnb next to the Colonial Dames Museum just with the essay.
And I wrote an email to the 35 people I had already shared it with. Being like, help! And so I had a lot of community support too. And yeah, there was one point when there was comments from 25 different people on the Google Doc being like, this works, this doesn't work, cut this, keep this. And yeah, ultimately, having to make my own choices because people disagreed with each other and those dialogues were happening in the comments. And so it was a community process. Thanks.
AUDIENCE: Thank you, Morgan. It was great hearing this today. It was really wonderful to encounter this for the first time in your own words. I wanted to ask how the role of being a storyteller has helped you grow into these conditions. I know that communicating your efforts and putting them in front of the community, and in community is very important to you.
And so I'm just curious how, in this role, that you've been exploring a lot lately as a storyteller, as a presenter, how it helps you grow in this work, specifically also referencing your coaching work.
MORGAN CURTIS: Yeah, as a young person, I loved to write. As a young climate organizer, I really identified with storytelling. Diana knows. And yeah, it was like, leading storytelling workshops and all about the most positive thing we have to offer is our story.
And I think as I-- yeah, began to be educated and examine more deeply my whiteness and positionality, there was really a period of shutting up for me, of like, I have nothing to say, and I'm going to be quiet. And yeah, just like the last two or three years starting to be like, OK, I have a responsibility to say something.
Yeah, it has been terrifying. That perfectionist, that fear of failure, that wanting to be a good person, all of that is there telling me like, don't talk about this in public. And yeah, so to get to this point of being able to share this story out with the world and to be here with you all tonight, it definitely feels like a big deal and a turning back towards that identity of storyteller and someone that let's story move into the world.
And I think, Terry, when I applied for your class last year, I said something like, I've been a writer for the last eight years. I just haven't written any of it down yet.
[LAUGHTER]
So yeah, I feel like I've been living the stories rather than telling them, and beginning to be ready to tell them.
AUDIENCE: Hi, Morgan.
MORGAN CURTIS: Hi, Dan.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] so beautifully mastered the old bridge [INAUDIBLE] it's humble to have written of this work, [INAUDIBLE] anymore. What kind of lightness or brightness are you discovering as you do this work, as this unfolds? Is there a sense of that [INAUDIBLE]?
MORGAN CURTIS: Yeah. Yeah, again, the first thing that comes to mind is community. Like, how do I hold this? Not alone. And yeah, I have the immense privilege to live in intentional community at a place called Canticle Farm. I think some of them are on Zoom.
Yeah, I live in multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational, intentional community where we're like, working to figure out how to practice beloved community as best we can. And yeah, it's both where I'm faced my greatest challenge and receive my most support.
And I unequivocally know that I would not be doing this work if it was not for my friends and elders and community who have sent me to do it, and been like, this is what we need you to do, and that send me flowers and tell me I got it, and hold me in this circle of belonging.
And then also the community that I've built through the work, and both like the political home and organizing work I've found in organizations like Resource Generation, some folks are here tonight, Solidaire Network, and then also the communities of more spiritual practice and grief work that have come together like Jubilee Justice, and other spaces, the ancestors and money cohort where like, do we learn how to feel again, and how do we let ourselves break down with one another, and hold one another.
And yeah, your other question-- joy, lightness. Yeah, I mean, sometimes it feels like, wrong to say this or something, but it's like this work is the best. Yeah, like, the highest highs of my life have been like stepping towards this work and feeling like I'm doing what I came here to do. Like, there's no better feeling.
It's very, very powerful, and it absolutely involves raucous laughter and hilarious games, and just absurdity in the friendships and relationships that come through the work. And yeah, I love it. And I feel like that's the sort of movement that we need to build is one where people love to be part of it. Like, that's what will allow us to build another culture and identity beyond whiteness as it is, is for it to be like, here's this symbol. So I'm practicing best I can.
What's the time?
[CONVERSING QUIETLY]
So Melissa is going to close us with the words of Bronte Velez. Bronte is a beloved friend, artist, creator, producer of Led to Life, an incredible project, weaving ritual art, creative practice with ceremony for Black liberation.
And yeah, I'm so grateful to you, to them for being part of this project, for offering their words. And I'll say it was about a year and a half ago, Terry, Melissa, myself, and Bronte did an event called Weather Reports, where we kind of began the four-way conversation between us. And so tonight, and especially holding these words, is full circle on that.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Alchemy of Atonement, a prayer. Mantra means to "protect the mind." Protect your mind after reading by repeating after Lucille Clifton. Quote, "white ways are the ways of death. Come into the Black and live," end quote. May this epistle be a prophetic embodiment of the grace, belonging, abundance that becomes available when we offer ourselves to the crucible of accountability, and quote, "intergenerational responsibility," end quote.
May we wander toward the fire of our lineage with the trust that our inheritances change us and that we have agency to transform our inheritance. May we be with the wisdom that the remnants, wake, hauntings will keep rippling harm until we refuse to continue their legacies.
May we be prepared for the fire's rage. May we craft a path that offers the fire their dignity and intelligence. May we trust the way truth flickers back and forth like a flame that needs food. The fire can be saved, staved on the rot of forgetting. A hungry gnawing fire that consumes everything in their way, or they can be fed integrity, memory, prayer, reparations, surrender.
When the fire is fed humility, we can offer back a clearing. The fire gives back in multitude what they are fed. If we memorialize and eternalize ghosts maintenance, their violence and call it legacy instead of trauma, we and the Earth will not survive. May this text never be a map. May it never set sail. May it stand-- I'm sorry, may it stay uncharted, fugitive.
Ships, and maps, and shit, you know that's how we got here. Instead may this practice in atonement sink you an unmooring quicksand that slips you into dart company of mystery. May you notice how much deeper you breathe in the blackness.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: We want to thank you for being here this evening, bearing witness to courage, beauty, and the work that is all of ours. With Melissa's blessing and permission, I just want to close with her words in her epilogue, called "Truth Telling."
With gratitude, for all of you being here, for you, Morgan, for your truth telling, for you, Travis, for your love, and acknowledging Gordon Hardy who is also part of this circle that has helped create this prayer book called Decolonial Dames of America. Melissa, thank you for this closing.
Melissa writes, truth telling is a spiritual discipline. It liberates our soul. We need the truth to sever our soul's entanglements from the routes of colonization and slavery. Truth telling led Morgan and Sandi together, descendants of different sides of this country's painful history, and engineered their embrace.
Truth telling is the sacred root work required for the creation of a new path for future generations to come through, unburdened by the wounds of slavery and colonization. It is the medicine required for creating a world healed of racism and oppression. This is the work that will get our hearts right, so that we can all be right in relation to divine love, ourselves, the Earth, and each other. We have work to do. Blessings.
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, The Constellation Project.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.