Episode 8: Trauma, collective trauma, intergenerational and epigenetics.

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In Episode 8, I will be discussing ideas around trauma, collective trauma, intergenerational and epigenetics.

I was driving home yesterday, the day after the presidential election in 2024, through the canyon along the Rio Grande Gorge. There was a dusting of snow on the cliffs on the right, with mist and sprinkles of snow. The river looked full of water lined with golden cotton woods with sprinkled with snow. I imagined I was in the Scottish Highlands, the place my ancestors are from, it all feels so familiar to my soma, a deep knowing of belonging. I do believe the place I live found me and I found it. It is a home that deeply resonance with me, living with four seasons in the mountains in the high desert of Taos, New Mexico. There is definitively something similar between here and the Highlands. They are both remote places belonging to indigenous people.

Between the years of 1750 to 1860 is a period of time known as the Scottish Clearances, where the people were forced to move, often with brute force, from the lands they inhabited by generations before them. They left for Canada, USA, and Australia in large numbers. This is a deep part of my own ancestry. As I study the history of my people, I am reminded multiple times of how it resonates in my own bones and fascia as a deep memory of despair and grief. I also appreciated the resilience of the people I come from. Twenty Five percent of the Highlanders died in the potato famine of 1846 to roughly 1856. More were killed, robbed and raped during the clearances to make way for the British landowners and sheep, completely decimating a way of life and raising cattle.

As with other cultures, who have experienced similar forms of occupation and genocide, these memories are carried in our epigenetics as a cultural trauma across multiple generations. I was brought to Highland games as a child in the Northwest of the USA. I saw Scottish folk dancing; log tossing and experienced the bagpipes—my grandfather even wore a kilt. What was not shared is how we ended up so far from the Highlands. It would be later in my adult years that I would return to study the history and gain a broader understanding of my people. One quarter of my lineages descends from enslaved afro-indigenous ancestry, which carries similar stories and are people of the diaspora.