Who am I?

When I first introduced myself in a Cultivating Safe Spaces circle, my heart was pounding. I gargled my heart as I waited for my turn. We were prompted to introduce ourselves using these three questions: Who am I? Who do I belong to? What is my purpose?

Before attending my first Cultivating Safe Spaces workshop, I had already been on a healing journey for nine years and had been researching my family history for six years. Who am I? was the hardest question to answer. Patience was needed to understand, Who am I? I knew I needed to work on my patience, and understanding who I am strengthened my patience muscle. It's been three to four years, and I now have a pretty good sense of all three of the introduce yourself questions.

I'm Sarah Jessie Tucker, my pronouns are she/her/they. I come from a complex heritage: settler lineage from Toronto and Newfoundland, and mixed heritage from England, Ireland, and Scotland. I'm a 7th-generation settler to Turtle Island. Born Treaty No. 13 People. Notice how I haven't mentioned that I'm "white"? When did we stop saying I'm Irish or I'm Scottish? That was a question that grabbed me while scrolling reels on my phone. I'm intrigued by the question, and it lights a bit of a fire within me to fall back in love with archival research.

I have so many stories to tell, that's why I'm raising funds so that I can focus on my manuscript for my first book. The following are a couples snapshots of who I belong to:

I descend from an English Fishing merchant. In the late 1700s, they claimed land that wasn't theirs in St. Philips, Newfoundland, a village 15-20 minutes' drive from St. Johns.

I also descended from an Irish British Loyalist, a soldier in the crown's guerrilla army of refugees: the Butler's Rangers. After the American Revolution, my ancestor was the first white settler in Scarborough, Ontario.

What I've been trying to figure out over the last 3-4 years is how to I live in resoprosity with the land where I was born, Indigenous land.

I'm a founding member of Cultivating Safe Spaces. I came across Elaine Alec's work during her pre-sale marketing campaign for her first book, Calling My Spirit Back. At the time, I was living in Gleichen, Alberta, doing just that, calling my spirit back. On the Great Plains, I realized that saviorism was a symptom of trauma. I would sit on the carpet of the upper level of a century-old home and plead to the sky in meditation. I realized I was trying to save others because I wanted to be saved from the pain and abuse I went through. Avoidance and guilt tried to deter me from doing the inner work. But a lesson I keep learning repeatedly is that I cannot save anyone else but myself. I'd plead out loud, What am I supposed to do with all my knowledge and recovery experience? Make all this trauma make sense. What is it for? Through mediation, I was hoping to find the answers. A year later, I found Elaine Alec's work.

While living in Gleichen, I dug deep in therapy to help process traumatic, recurring childhood memories that haunted me. I grew up in an alcoholic home, and I'm a survivor of abuse. I was in the middle of reconciling with the fact that everyone around me took part in normalizing the abuse I was going through, and no one stood up for me. No one protected me. I had been researching Gleichen and came across Arthur Bear Chief's memoir, My Decade at Old Sun, My Lifetime of Hell. I read Arthur's memoir a few years before the Pope came to Alberta to apologize for the harm caused by residential schools. I was horrified and disturbed by what Arthur Bear Chief went through at Old Sun. I was utterly perplexed as to how this could happen. Why didn't anyone speak up? Why didn't anyone do anything to stop it? At that moment, I understood why so many around me growing up were silent. Everyone was programmed and conditioned to take an oath of silence, but no one had any clue of their ignorance. Colonization didn't disappear; it was normalized (a lesson I would learn from Elaine Alec).

Decolonization is a word that causes adverse reactions in certain people. The adverse reactions are out of fear that decolonization means to dismember, and everyone goes back to their land of origin. At one point in my navitie, I felt that way too. But then I learned about Treaty People. I was born on Treaty Land - Treaty No. 13, but I hadn't realized it until living on Treaty No. 7 territory (a future article to watch for!). Once I got into a program that studied England's pre-colonization history and identity, I fully understood what decolonization meant.

In community, we worked on our shadows. We did most of the shadow work independently, and we'd meet to discuss, followed by a ceremony. Shadow work was coined by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, and it involves acknowledging and integrating the unconscious hidden parts of oneself. Essentially, it's understanding self, understanding the unresolved trauma within. It's not about ridding ourselves of the shadows; it's about acknowledging them and befriending them. Shadow work and practicing understanding self is to hold both the light and dark within us all. It's a balancing act and a consciousness that recognizes when our shadows are leading versus when our light is leading. Decolonizing is about breaking the conditioned mindset to remember who we truly are.

Maybe decolonizing is about answering the three introduce yourself questions: Who am I? Who do I belong to? What is my purpose? If you're consistently in a position of saving other people, let me be the lighthouse in the fog. You're not responsible for anyone's healing except your own. I want to add a fourth question that I believe is also essential to answer: How did my lineage get here?

So, Who am I? I'm open to the gift of correction, a lifelong learner, bone collector, truth-teller, land listener, and death doula. I'm a poet devoted to remembering and Understanding Self as I reconnect to my lineage’s severed culture. I'm the changemaker, healer, and guardian of the untold stories in my motherline and fatherline. I'm committed to learning to live in reciprocity with the land that birthed me, Indigenous land. I'm thankful you're here to witness me. I also moonlighting as a grant writer at SJT Writing.

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