A forest grew amongst the hedgerows on Park Avenue the other night. Even more remarkable? All this happened on the 17th floor. The roots reached right through that steel and concrete without a hint of trouble.
Kathy Scott & Manchán Magan of The Trailblazery’s Irish language & culture program, Scoil Scairte
In fact, the root system had been well-established for centuries.
This week, I visited the Irish Consulate in New York City for the first time. I had been invited to a celebration of Scoil Scairte, the online Irish language and culture program I’ve been part of for the past year.
Scoil scairte means “hedge school”; it’s an Irish term dating back to the 18th century when traditional forms of education and language were outlawed for the native Irish people. Hedge schools were a form of preservation, resistance, and survival.
As the Trailblazery website says, “Hedge Schools gathered wherever people could find shelter; along hedgerows, fields, mountains, by rivers and under the stars. Out at these wild edges, our culture was kept alive…”
That night, in a skyscraper at the center of our modern American world, a culture on the western fringe of Europe continued to thrive.
Irish Culture on American Soil
Ireland is a unique country for so many reasons. It is defined as much by the people who have left it and the people who colonized it as it is by the folks who were born there and stayed. In fact, much of the reason that the music, dance, literature, and folklore thrived (and became a global phenomenon) is because so many “from away” kept the memories and practices alive.
And so, when I say that the root system is well-established, I am speaking of the enduring “Irishness” of New York City, but there’s more to it than that.
Those of us in the diaspora, those of us who know our Irish ancestry well or have a single name of a great-great grandmother from County Cork, are also part of the cultural ecosystem. Even if we never heard the language growing up, even if we haven’t had a chance to develop a relationship with the land, the connection to “the old country” is still there. We can return to what came before the story of separation and colonization. My experience and the experience of millions of Irish-Americans (and Irish-Canadians, Irish-Australians, and more) proves that the culture will happily greet you with a fáilte abhaile, welcome home.
Irish Culture on Lenape Soil
Recently, our European-dominated society is waking up to what indigenous cultures have always known: explorers, colonists, and settlers weren’t just groups of people in social studies books looking for freedom and opportunity. They were invaders who eliminated and erased nearly every corner of the indigenous world.
In most cases, the people of those indigenous groups lived across wide oceans and had brown or black skin. Before the English ever took to Africa or Australia or the Americaa, however, they honed their colonial powers on the island next door.
We’re all becoming more and more aware of all that we lost in this journey to this modern, globalized moment.
We have a lot to re-member and there’s so much to repair. It’s a time to uplift minority cultures that suffered under colonization and to look at what our own ancestors lost in this process of displacement. Once upon a time, of course, every culture was “indigenous” - born or originating in a particular place; native.
Right now, there’s a rising awareness that we need to look backward in order to look forward. We need the old stories, the old cosmologies, the old roots in order to find ourselves in a liveable future. The answers aren’t all to be found in the age of the horse and cart and the small farm, certainly. But there’s more vital wisdom there than we’ve been led to believe.
The Lands and Peoples Forever Changed By Colonization
Kathy Scott, creative director of The Trailblazery organization and founder of Scoil Scairte, began her remarks with a land acknowledgement to the Lenape people.
She was also the one who conjured the image of the forest to that function room so far from the soil. Kathy’s way of blending English and the Irish to lead group meditations and visualizations is remarkable. Over this last year in Scoil Scairte, her voice has connected me to the language in a way that no standard classroom teaching ever could.
Kathy spoke of Suzanne Simard, the renowned scientist who discovered the “wood-wide web.” Kathy invited us to imagine that we were a grove of interconnected trees, bound by shared roots and networks of mycorrhizal fungi. Conscious explorations of language and culture unite us together, just like trees in a healthy ecosystem.
Once, Ireland was a country of forests, but now it is known for its emerald fields. British colonizers cleared the trees to build the ships that would help them colonize much of the globe. The Irish people of the 1700s couldn’t create “forest schools” because the trees themselves had been stolen. All they had left were hedges, fields, stones, and stars.
Once, New York City was Manhatta, an island surrounded by whales and dolphins, a home to migratory birds and the native Lenape people. We know what happened once waves of Europeans arrived… The people who lived for millennia on the bounty of their salty river would be moved thousands of miles to Ontario, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma. They had to leave this place and, with precious few exceptions, all that’s left of the tribes whose name meant “original people” are the placenames and the few factoids told to American school children.
I could go on and on, letting the metaphors branch and graft together. I’m still savoring the experience of being in a room with Kathy, her collaborator the author and broadcaster Manchán Magan, and all of those passionate fascinating people who care about both preserving a sense of Irishness and creating a global culture.
Everyone I have met through the Trailblazery honors “what came before” with a spirit of creativity and innovation. These are the kinds of folks who make you want to help craft the future, and goddess knows that’s what we need right now.
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Marisa Goudy & Kathy Scott