Rematriation: A Decolonial Act of Returning Our Bodies To the Land

Inspiration from a future opus- The Handbook On How To Be A Human

Every time I type rematriation into my computer, auto-correct changes it to repatriation.  I get it, for the English lexicon, repatriation is a commonly used word for returning to one’s native land as defined by paternal lines.  Rematriation has been the province of Indigenous activists as a response to the call to return to a spiritual way of life and connection to Mother Earth.  Auto-correct has not caught up yet. 

Rematriation is an invitation to connect to the indigeneity within: the indigenous identity that lives within us all, as we are native to the Earth.  No babies born on the Moon or Mars just yet.  Earth Mother is not just a concept, it is a stream of consciousness that is part of our own consciousness.  If you lay your body down on the Earth in a restful way, tune into your own heartbeat rhythm and then tune into the Earth rising up to hold you from beneath, you can hear the heartbeat rhythm of the Earth herself.  Stay a little longer in this heartbeat connection and the two rhythms will become one.  Your body softens into relaxation and enters deeper liminal states between awake and asleep.  

Decolonization of sleep is intentional in the design of the capitalist-imperialist system of which we are all oppressed.  They have you out here thinking you are not productive if you sleep and you will be praised by how much you can do on little rest.  Then you think you only need 5-6 hours of sleep, which plainly isn’t true.  Instead, your body will draw from its deep storage vessels until those run empty and all that is left is to decay.  

According to the dominating institution, this outcome is just fine.  Your laboring body has run its course and you may now die in the most efficient and cheapest way possible without much vocalization.  Pick a poison: alcohol, prescription drugs, poisonous food, cigarettes, recreational drugs, negative emotions, etc.   

Excerpt from Gather by Octavia Raheem

I’d like you to know you have other options.  You can pause, put the labor down and explore what kind of radical act you just engaged in.  You can create more spaces in between activities and allow for processing time.  By doing this, you begin to address the backlog of experiences, stressors, trauma, intergenerational trauma, PTSD, race-based stress and trauma, stored memories, suppressed pathogens, and more.  

Embodied land acknowledgment is a simple practice that is an intrinsic part of Indigenous world view.  Any opportunity we have to acknowledge our connection to the Earth and All Our Relations, is an opportunity to acknowledge the interconnected web of life of which we are an integral part.  It is the cumulative energy generated by the strength of our connection that informs the many fields of consciousness we call Divine.  

Be it the Creator, the Universal Wisdom Mother, Yahweh, Allah, Great Mystery or any other conceptualization of the Divine, humans arrived to these understandings of interbeing through the life-giving connection to Earth.  As informed by the grandeur of the human imagination, divinity concepts are an opportunity for interplay of self and something beyond self, perhaps initially perceived as bigger than self at the beginning of the journey.

This is how we have developed practices of devotion and prayer to sacred archetypes such as the many goddesses in the South Asian pantheon, singular creator beings, or the cumulative energy of all things as the Most High.  Humans need archetypes to aspire towards.  We need goals to reach.  We also need games to play.  This spiritual developmental journey is meant to have humor, play, pleasure and joyfulness sprinkled throughout the challenges, obstacles, and suffering.  

I keep threatening to write a short book called ‘The Handbook On How to Be a Human’.  I’ve shared this teaching many times, especially to young adults who frankly, this is their first time here on the game-board of the Earthly realm. They are usually extremely gifted, neuro-emergent in some capacity, and ready for this high-level overview of the rules of the game board, the basic universal laws and the purpose for being.  They are usually from some extra-special-cool intergalactic realm and they carry so much wisdom and memory with them as a result.  

Part of their suffering is that no one clued them in on the distinct rules in one of the most unique places in the whole universe - Earth.  Once they know the purpose for being here they usually don’t require much more intervention.  They were mainly confused as to why things are so different here, particularly exacerbated by the grotesque nature of the social system we are oppressed by.  The other part of their suffering is how bodies are judged for the labor-ability in this modernity construct and placed within a hierarchical model of who is deserving of proximity to power.  We all share in this aspect of suffering no matter if this is our first round on Earth or not. 

Rematriation and Land Acknowledgment are two tools from the Handbook.  When we name the ancestors who have stewarded the land where our bones reside, we connect to the time-continuum of ancestral knowledge that lives in the stones, waters, soils, plants, crystals, etc of the land.  The whole of the Earth is a text that can only be deciphered through dwelling in liminal spaces like meditation, rest, dreaming, play and trance.  

 

Radical acts of rest where we put down the work and lay these tired bones to pause are some of our most powerful tools we have to break the internal and external chains of subjugation.  At first you will fall asleep.  That is totally ok.  Let yourself sleep.  Stop resisting.  See what lives on the other side of your resistance.  Use your imagination.  See yourself resting on a giant osmanthus flower or a bed of warm volcanic mud.  Perhaps a mossy greens bed or bubbling hot spring.  It doesn’t have to be real, might you rest on a big fluffy cloud or ride a river of magma deep inside the mountain’s landscape?  

Our collective liberation relies on us remembering we are of the land.  Rematriation is a call-in to this re-membring.  You only need lay down your bones and tune into the heartbeat rhythm within.

Images of Morocco & An Invitation to Rematriate

Resources:

Embodied Land Acknowledgments by Yoli Maya Yeh:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/iuvzylznnjbag0gom83nz/Land-Acknowledgment-Land-of-this-Body.m4a?rlkey=byaf98jqssaeqywnzypzlmn0k&dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/1ew793k6gs70jg6w3j8cu/Land-Acknowledgment-Healing-In-Time-Meditation.m4a?rlkey=zroz3u6n3dytwfkecj0xa6xtq&dl=0