The Gifts of the Ancestors

 

I wrote this story to tell at a storytelling circle in April 2023.  The guest storyteller, Lori Oschefski told the story of the British Home Children.  Between 1869 and 1948, 100,000 poor children were forced to emigrate to Canada because they were orphans or their parents were too poor to keep them.

My parents emigrated from England to Canada in the 1950’s and I was, as far as I can tell, the first person in our family to be born on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.  My parents and their parents before them were born in the Northwest of England, in Greater Manchester, specifically, the town of Oldham.  There is evidence of people living on that land for the past seven to ten thousand years.  Neolithic, Roman, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon people lived there but it was the Danes or Vikings that established a permanent hamlet there from 865 and called it Aldehulme which means a “high place”. 

Indeed, Oldham as the hamlet later became known, in the historic county of Lancashire, is situated on the west side of the Pennine Hills which form the “backbone of England”.  Since the land is rocky and hilly, it wasn’t very good for growing crops.  However, it was excellent for raising sheep and the area became known for wool spinning and weaving.  That was, until the Industrial Revolution.  It turned out that Oldham also had coal deep beneath it that was good for running the machines of the Industrial Revolution and the wet climate was excellent for working with textiles.  Oldham went from being a small hamlet to an urban centre with 400 cotton mills over the period of one hundred years.

In the 1800’s people were being forced off of the land by rich landlords and into the industrial towns.  Some of my great grandparents and many of my great great grandparents moved to Oldham from Ireland, Yorkshire and the south of England around that time no doubt as part of that rural to urban migration. In Oldham, the new spinning and weaving machines put the people who had worked in cottage industries out of work.  At first, the mills hired only women and children over the age of 4 to work in the mills.  They could pay them less than men and the increased productivity led to even larger profits. They began importing cotton from India and cotton that was grown by enslaved people in America.  During times of economic recession, there was huge urban unemployment and poverty.

In medieval times, the poor were taken care of by the monasteries but after 1536 when Henry VIII destroyed them there was a gap.  By the end of his daughter Queen Elizabeth I’s life in 1601 there was a huge problem and the government enacted the Poor Law under which aid was given at the parish level. This worked for about two hundred years.  However, with the influx of people into the towns and cities during the Industrial Revolution this system broke down.  And so, in 1834, the Poor Law was amended but not for the betterment of the poor.  Instead, poor houses were constructed that were so horrible that only the more destitute of people would accept that fate.  This attitude towards the poor was probably part of the decision to send poor children to Canada and elsewhere as “Home Children”.

During the Industrial Revolution, Lancashire was known for revolts, trade unions and people fighting for more equity.  They didn’t just accept that this was their lot in life.  My great uncle Stirling Marron was a counsellor, alderman and for a time, mayor of Oldham. Once the National Health Service was established in 1948, he fought to have the mentally ill taken care of under the NHS instead of under the Poor Law.  By 1959 this was achieved.

When I think of the strengths that my ancestors have passed down to me, one of them is this working towards a more equitable society.  That runs very strongly in me.  As I learn about what my ancestors had to live through, I can see that they have also passed resiliency down to me.  I also connect to the work of spinning and weaving through my love of working with textiles and the through the metaphor of weaving together people in community, or the weaving of ideas.  I also learned that I come from a line of Lancashire storytellers and that form of expression feels very natural to me.

 I recently decided to listen to an audio book on the History of Britain by Simon Schama.  The combined three volumes took 55 hours of listening. The history of Britain is a history of power-over hierarchy in which the monarchy, the churches and the governments battle endlessly for power and fund these battles through sucking wealth up from those at the bottom of the pyramid. It is a history of systematically creating poverty.   And that story didn’t change when they came to North America.  It was the same old, same old.  Take the land you want, kill or starve those who were already there and force assimilation on them.  The story is at least two thousand years old.  And so, my ancestors couldn’t teach me how to live here on Turtle Island in a good way.  They had no idea how to do that.

Instead, it has been the ancestors of the people Indigenous to Turtle Island who are teaching me how to live in a good way, on this land.  I hear their voices in the Elders and Knowledge Keepers, in the voices of Indigenous authors and in the voices of the children who are being found in unmarked graves on the sites of former Residential Schools.  They are sharing their worldview and ways of knowing and they are my teachers. They remind me that the earth and the water and all of life is sacred.  They teach me about a worldview in which all of life is interconnected and valuable without a hierarchy.

And so, it seems that only by putting together the gifts that my ancestors from the UK have passed down to me with the gifts of the Indigenous ancestors on this land can I learn to live here in a good way, working for more equity, weaving a worldview that has room for everyone and telling a new story.