This piece, written by Trevor Swoverland, considers the complexity of the colonization of populations of European migrants and how the process of being colonized by imperial powers has placed many descendants of European migrants to these shores in the position of being descended from both colonized peoples and colonizers; additionally, forces of colonization continue to attack traditional communities and lifeways here. In a follow-up piece there will be conversation about the implications of the dissolution of human relationships in small communities when they are broken apart. 

Conversations about decolonization and the phenomenon of colonialism that makes that process necessary are prone to oversimplification and the use of broad strokes to understand very complex realities. One of the most challenging aspects is that peoples who are often thought of monolithically as colonizers are actually composed of many groups with wide-ranging experiences, and often significant proportions of those peoples were directly harmed themselves by colonialist policies. We have said here on threads in the Decolonizing Heathenry Facebook group and in essays published on our website that the colonized make good colonizers; it is often the case that those populations who have benefited in some ways from colonialist policies and perspectives have also been victimized by them. This reality is important to understand because it ignoring it hamstrings us in our efforts toward decolonization in our society in general and in the reconstruction of heathen religions and cultures in particular.

We have all been colonized. We just don’t all know we have been. I have been, you have been, and it doesn’t matter how much we deny it, our lives have been altered from what they may have been by forces that are antithetical to tribal and land-rooted ways of seeing the world that were endemic and foundational in the thinking of Germanic tribes before conversion. We cannot possibly rebuild a religion and tribal social organization while denying this in our effort to champion, carte blanche, the whole of the modernity we know. Colonization is a wound that is buried for many of us but which has definite consequences in how we understand the world and our relationship to it. It affects our thinking and behavior, and it also manifests in many types of emotional pain and feelings of disconnection. But if we allow ourselves to be honest about it, to face it and confront its implications, we can start to move forward with healing and determination; this is critical to the process of decolonizing our worldview, and therefore our efforts at tribal reconstruction.

To illustrate this point I decided to use my own family history as a case study. On the surface and looking back a generation or two, I come from a blue-collar family from a rural and small town setting in the north of Wisconsin dairy country. My last couple of generations of ancestors have farmed the land as did their ancestors who came over the course of three different centuries from various locations in Europe. For the part of the country in which I was raised this background is fairly typical of working-class white folks, and it is easy to think of this population as the descendants of people who stole land, dispossessed indigenous populations of it, and to then take on (or expect these people to take on) the burden of responsibility for the dispossession and atrocities associated with it. The perception that European migrants all came here to take something, and that they came voluntarily, is widely held. But it is not accurate for at least a substantial plurality and that bit of nuance is important to consider because it has significant implications for decolonization work.

My first ancestors to arrive on these shores were from the Scottish Highlands, in particular from Ross-shire. They were members of Clans Munro, Ross, and Dunbar, and in the 1650s they fought a series of desperate battles against the Parliamentarian forces of Oliver Cromwell, the English ruler who is famous for purging Celts from Scotland and Ireland. In those years the battles of Worcester and Dunbar were fought to prevent English colonization of Scotland and the displacement of Scottish people from their ancestral homelands. My ancestors involved were captured, imprisoned in London, and then exiled to the Massachusetts Colony in chains. When they arrived they worked to eke out an existence in this new land that they were forced to; 100 years later their own grandchildren were instrumental in launching the rebellion against British rule in the Massachusetts colony, the Munro Tavern being a rallying point for the Lexington militia.

The second group of my ancestors to come here came from northwest Bavaria and western Swabia in Germany. They were farmers, and in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the region in which they lived was torn by war. They left as refugees in order to find a chance for survival in a new place with land available for farming, but without the constant threat of war between European powers. They came to Pennsylvania initially and then settled in Wisconsin where they ran small, German-style dairy farms. My grandparents are buried within a mile or two of land my paternal grandfather’s family farmed for 150 years.

The last group of my ancestors to arrive in North America were Irish and Welsh farmers and laborers. The former fled Counties Cork and Galway to escape the ravages of the potato famine that was a direct result of English colonization of Ireland, which had been going on for 800 years at that point. If they had stayed in Ireland they very likely would have starved after watching their children die miserable deaths, all of them sacrificed to English colonial desires for control of Irish people and land. My ancestors from Wales faced similar challenges as a result of the same insatiable English desire for conquest of Celtic peoples and usurpation of Celtic lands. Those who came here settled in Chicago where they were laborers who worked long hours for the hope of providing their kids better lives than they would’ve had back in the lands of their own birth.

None of my ancestors came to this land with the desire to exploit indigenous populations or to eradicate indigenous cultures. They didn’t come to abandon their own cultures or to see their descendants become drones in a global consumerist overculture that demands false individualism and egocentricity. Many were forced to come here against their will, and all came here because they had no valid option to stay in the places in which their people had lived for centuries. This continent was initially a prison to some, and a narrow and tenuous toe-hold on survival for the rest. They all came here because they had, literally, no other choice.

This is not to say that my ancestors and I have not also benefited from colonization. I want to state unequivocally that cultivating this awareness of ourselves as descended from victims of colonization does not mean we share the same sorts of challenges that indigenous peoples in the Americas face as a result of their own experience of colonization; the differences in scale and relative chronology are of critical importance. Colonization of indigenous peoples here is an ongoing problem, as state and federal governments and corporations continue to try to undermine tribal sovereignty that has existed for thousands of years. But unless we see ourselves as something other than a monolith of colonizers and instead understand ourselves as descended from a very complex mix that includes people who were victims of colonization as well, we risk the bipolar reactivities of dismissing the concerns about the legacy of colonialism as not our problem on the one hand and of refusing to acknowledge the cultural traumas our own peoples faced that made them susceptible to participating in the process of colonization on the other.

So, what does this have to do with the reconstruction of Heathen religion? Everything.

For starters, the stories above illustrate that not everyone who participates in a process of colonization does so with malicious intent or even consciousness of their role. The fact that all of my ancestors came here because they had to does not negate the fact that, to a person, they settled on land that was not won in battle but was stolen from the indigenous population through broken treaties you can still read today. Most of the people in my ancestry, as far as I can tell from studying family history were pretty good folks who loved their kids and helped their neighbors. But in the course of coming here, of being deprived of their own geographical roots, of losing their languages and the cultures that produced them, they all eventually came to be part of a system that required a shift in worldview to one that undercut the values of connection to family and community and replaced them with racial and nationalistic identities more conducive to colonialist goals. The process was subtle; it mirrors the way in which colonialism skews or warps our understanding of what our tribal ancestors were doing prior to the conversion, and can thereby result in our failure to really recreate and rebuild their religions and worldview.

A second way in which a more nuanced understanding of colonialism and our history can assist the effort of reconstruction of Germanic tribal religions is to help us understand how colonialism brings negative consequences even for the people who derive some benefit from it. Even if we are people who happen to benefit in some ways from the process of colonization as it happened here in the Americas, many of us have also descended from people who were viciously and continuously traumatized by that same process. Historical trauma is real, and we know from genetic studies of the survivors of trauma that epigenetic changes in the DNA can be passed down to their children and grandchildren. This is as true for those people who were Christianized in Europe as it is for our migrant ancestors who fled Europe for the Americas. With regard to reconstruction we may be better able to understand that even if the conversion brought with it some perceptible benefits – such as growth in material wealth, increased power, mild improvements in literacy, and so on – it also likely caused some disturbances and reorganizations of social structure and lifeways that made things more difficult for those subjected to it. The fall of tribal social structures in the face of monotheism and feudalism was undoubtedly a net deterioration in the quality of life for a large number of people in Europe, and it shifted their understanding of their place in the world considerably. Our efforts at reconstruction require us to try to see through those changes to the time before them.

The changes that were forced on the common people of Europe between conversion and the modern age were not accidental. They were deliberate. A worthwhile read on the subject is the book The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. The author, Michael Perelman, provides copious reproductions of the letters of early capitalist/corporatist thinkers like Adam Smith and his contemporaries. Their own words make it very clear that they saw the chief impediment to the generation of capital in Europe to be the “slovenly” peasants and farmers who stubbornly resisted leaving their land where they were self-sufficient in their small communities. Smith and others knew that the growth of industry, and therefore capital, required a large supply of labor. While this tangent is a critical one for people to engage, it is beyond the scope of this essay to provide exhaustive evidence of this position, particularly when the book noted above is brilliant at doing so. Nevertheless, a couple of quotations illustrate the attitudes held by economic policymakers and drivers of corporate capitalism and colonialism.

The first is from the writings of Adam Smith’s contemporary Jeremy Bentham:

Human beings are the most powerful instruments of production, and therefore everyone becomes anxious to employ the services of his fellows in multiplying his own comforts. Hence the intense and universal thirst for power, the equally prevalent hatred of subjection. Each man therefore meets with an obstinate resistance to his own will, and this naturally engenders antipathy toward beings who thus battle and contravene his wishes.

Patrick Colquhoun took this idea a bit farther when he wrote in 1815 that:

Poverty is that state and condition in society where the individual has no surplus labor in store, or, in other words, no property or means of subsistence but what is derived from the constant exercise of industry in the various occupations of life. Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in a society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.

Early capitalist and corporatist thinkers lobbied the governments of western and northern Europe to make it difficult on rural communities, and even impossible for them to continue a way of life not dependent upon wage slavery in the cities. They argued that erosion of local identity and sustainability were absolutely necessary to the growth of capital, the accumulation of greater wealth for the rich, which they argued was the only way to progress “civilization”. There was no thought whatsoever that tearing people away from the lands in which they had deep roots, away from communities that had grown together for generations, and away from lifeways rooted in the living earth, might destroy the souls of peoples who had been living in such circumstances for hundreds or even thousands of years. Their self-sufficiency simply had to be removed if they were to depend upon wage work in cities away from the land.

This shift, this forced urbanization, was colonialism. Whether it happened in Europe amongst people who stayed there or amongst people expelled or otherwise forced from there is immaterial to the point. It was all colonization. People who no longer feel this sufficiency with the people close to them sometimes feel the need to tear down others who are sufficiently integrated and adapted to their place in the world. In this way those who had already made this transition often despised those who hadn’t. They saw them as impediments to progress as well, loathing them while many were probably also jealous of the capacity and quality of life lived by people rooted deeply to the land as sufficient providers for their families and communities. Their continued existence there “on the heath” was a reminder of losses already experienced.

In his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger explores the seemingly inexplicable tendency noticed by early colonial leaders in what would become the United States of people on the frontiers being captured by Native tribes but to then refusing to return to “civilization” when given the opportunity. Benjamin Franklin described that there were many cases of this known, and he juxtaposed this to the observation that captured Native people never made the same decision when given the opportunity to return home; they always returned to their tribes if given the chance. Consideration of this phenomenon by Junger provides some insight into what was happening. People who were taken from growing colonial societies where they were viewed as a commodity for labor were shown tribal societies in which there was real equality, where leaders were chosen and deposed at will by the people. Women had dramatically more freedom in these societies than they had in Puritan colonial society, and these tribes were collaborative and given over to the purpose of creating the highest quality of life for all of the people who lived together in relationship with one another. They were not utopian. There was still violence and uncertainty. But the people were not cogs in a machine meant to generate wealth for someone else. They mattered. They were connected. And having spent time living in that situation many people didn’t want to go back to a life with less connection to the people around them and the land on which they depended.

We were all tribal peoples once. Our ancestors lived in deep relationship within their tribes. They were not slaves to the generation of money, but were focused upon the building of lives of purpose interwoven with the people around them and tied closely to the land of which they were a part. Germanic tribal religions existed in this context for as long as Germanic linguistic groups have existed, up until the century or two prior to conversion when Germanic tribal society was well on its way to becoming Christian feudal society. The work of decolonization is the work of recognizing that colonization has affected ALL of us, not just those most recently dispossessed of land by it. These dehumanizing forces have shaped our consciousness since at least the industrial revolution, and our failure to recognize how that colors the lens through which we look back at pre-Christian religions in Europe is a critical barrier to building real tribal relationships and reconstituting the spiritual and ritual life that springs from them as it did for our ancestors. This is a project we must engage if we are to develop anything lasting and worthwhile in our efforts at reconstruction.

We do not argue here against all of modernity. We like modern medicine, science, and many other advantages and conveniences of modern life. We are not arguing that people who live in urban settings are hopelessly separated from the possibility of really rebuilding what was lost, though we truly value our rural and land-based laboratory for rebuilding tribe. Our point in this piece is simply that unless we are cognizant of the way colonialism has insidiously damaged all of us, we will be unable to remove the blinders it has created and which dim our perception in ways that will derail our efforts to rebuild what was taken from us. This project is our passion and we want to see it succeed.