A Forest Grows on the 17th Floor: Irish Culture on Lenape Soil

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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Thank you!

Go away, box!

Marisa Goudy & Kathy Scott

Can a Story About Tansies Heal the Rupture of Our Reproductive Rights?

Once again. Still. We’re in “a time like this.”

A time when rage, grief, helplessness, and a need to do something all swirl about and cancel each other out. And then “the everything” leaves us feeling exhausted, confused, and caught between numbing out and being unable to look away.

On Friday, six unelected people in black robes decimated reproductive rights in the US and endangered the lives of women and pregnant people across fifteen states (for now). 

I was on a call with colleagues when the news came through. We wept. We sat in silence. We tested out the words to articulate “we knew this was coming, but still…” 

Later, I would speak with clients and hold space for the inevitable questions. 

“What’s the point of writing this memoir or this novel when women don’t even have control of their own bodies?”

The Writers’ Dilemma That Never Goes Away

It’s not the question of having the time. It’s not the question of inspiration. It’s not even the question of whether the writing is any good. 

The question that is most often asked and that I most often need to answer as a writing coach and writing community leader is what’s the point?

What is the point of writing the book, the article, the post when the hills are on fire, the elected officials have no shame or no clue, and the kids aren’t alright?  

What is the point of working on the long term project or adding to the noise of today when everyone has put down their books to get lost on the social media feeds that are full of coat hangers, handmaids, and offers to welcome any woman who “needs to go camping” to stay in a “camping-friendly” state?

First, we must remember that it’s always “a time like this”

The last six years have just been the most obviously egregious example of this, but ever since someone concocted the phrase “if you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention” there has been something to be outraged about. And that’s just in the bumper sticker era. You can trace the outrageous frailties, failures, and cruelties of humanity back to Eden or to that Neanderthal who was murdered 430,000 years ago (depending on when you begin your understanding of human history). 

So, once we can root ourselves into the truth that we are not living in truly exceptionally fucked up times (even if they do feel exceptionally fucked up), we can live the next question. 

The initial reaction to the erosion of our fundamental human rights may be rage, despair, or a deep, pervading numbness. But then, we must ask “what happens next?”

What is Mine To Do?

During the summer of 2020 when the public attention was focused on George Floyd’s murder and Black Lives Matter was central to the conversation, one particular image (it’s so much more than a “meme”) caught my attention and has stuck with me.

Deepa Iyer, Building Movement Project. SM, © 2020 Deepa Iyer. All rights reserved. All prior licenses revoked.

Deepa Iyer created the Social Change Ecosystem Map in 2018 and revised it further in 2020. I’ve only just scratched the surface of her work, but let your eyes move around this web of possibilities. 

Since you and I travel together, I have a sense that certain words will stand out for both of us. I can breathe into Storytellers. Healers. Weavers. I wonder what other roles resonate for you and feel like “Yes, I can do that. Yes, I do that.”

Since it isn’t possible to reshuffle the Supreme Court this afternoon or go back in time to when anti-choice advocates decided that they’d prevail by installing conservative judges at every level of the legal system, we have to look within and find our skills and our passion and ask how we can effect positive change in the ecosystem we inhabit right now. (Because the smallest parts do influence the whole, and what we imagine, say, and do does make a difference.)

Sometimes, Our Work Takes Place in a Fictional Tansy Field With a Couple of Druids

On Friday, when I was too soaked in feelings to come up with anything new or relevant to say, I realized I had already written exactly what needed to be said on Day Zero in the Post-Roe World.

I wrote about my abortion in The Sovereignty Knot, but I didn’t need to tell that story again.

Instead, I went to chapter one of my long-neglected novel-in-progress. In the KnotWork Storytelling Community Facebook, I shared a few rough paragraphs that were terribly relevant to the moment, even if they were set in an Irish meadow at midnight nearly 2,000 years ago.

An Excerpt from my Work In Progress, Above In the Bog

She was to remain nameless.

Móna and Síle had not spoken at all as they made their way under the dark summer moon to the fields where the homely yellow flowers grew. They did not allow her name to enter their minds. They knew better than even to conjure her face. That way, the babe in her belly would have nothing to cling to, no claim to stake. A woman without a name or face cannot be a true mother, and this was not a tribe that would force a mother in the world. Not if Móna had anything to say about it. And in this tribe, she would always have her say.

If they didn't have to unmake a mother, neither woman would have chosen to be out on such a night. Their own wombs were heavy with release and both could feel themselves being subtly unmade as their monthly blood seeped down their thighs. This would have been a night to prepare the tea, to sit in the darkness of the women's hut and let the old and new stories dissolve into the silence, but nothing was as it should have been that summer. The stores had been ravaged in the days leading to Bealtaine and all of Móna 's herbs had been swept away with the smashed crockery and the ruined thatch of the roundhouse roofs.

Móna sighed as she stood to straighten her back and hunched shoulders. She sighed at the stiffness of a spine that had seen nearly forty summers and she sighed because she knew she was telling herself an unnecessary sort of lie. They wouldn't have been able to sit quietly on this dark moon, even if the last cattle raid from the tribe across the valley hadn't gotten out of hand. Móna and Síle always told their bodies to hush and mind their duties to the other female bodies when the growing season demanded it. Each year, they need to collect the flowers, leaves, and stems of the wild tansy under the darkest sky of the season. Usually, it was easy to allow the women who would take this tea to remain nameless and faceless. Though the wise woman herbalist and her daughter surely knew the women who would come to them over the next year, they weren't yet pregnant with a child they couldn't or wouldn't bear. This time, however, they had to force their ears to unhear the young woman's cries and unsee her terrified face as they worked in the dark, using their tiny crescent moon blades to cut the tough stems. They were well skilled at seeing in the dark, after all.

In Times Like These, Do Not Put Down the Pen

I let my novel about “druids and drawing rooms” to languish when I started working on the podcast. It’s almost always easier to choose the project with the immediate gratification of weekly publishing than it is to craft a book that will take years and may never see the light of day.

But then… there are days when we need the ideas that can only emerge in fiction, that can only take shape after years of work, that can only have meaning for an audience because it was written without a reader in mind.

Next week, the Sovereign Writers’ Knot welcomes new members for the summer session. In this online creative community, you can work on your long term projects and wrestle with the emotions and events of the day.

We’ll gather five times to write and share in July and August. I would love to have you with us as we all continue to dance with “what’s the point of writing when…?” We’ll find it. Together.

A Fight Without Weapons

At the start of every writing practice session with our Sovereign* Writers’ Knot Community, I invite the writers to participate in the act of “invocation.” I ask them to write a particular prayer or blessing.

On May 25, we held our closing retreat. Writers from around the world gathered for three hours to review the work, the tangles, and the wonder of the last season we’ve shared together. We gathered to imagine the next three months of creative becoming.

This was a time of celebration, and yet…

We entered this particular call, hearts heavy with the news of nineteen third and fourth graders and two teachers killed in their classroom in Uvalde, Texas. I knew I needed to give us space to grieve, contemplate, and pray. 

It is terribly, wildly, horribly true that we need to advocate for policy and change. Thoughts and prayers are empty without action. But, those actions begin with stillness and the stirrings of new language. 

The stillness that breeds a prayer can breed a great outer revolution if we remember that prayer is meant to be a catalyst, not a pacifier. (Plus, in this community, we are writers, our change always begins on the page.)

This is the prompt I offered our writing community:

Write a prayer or a blessing for this moment. 

Remember the dandelion that pushes through the concrete, the single house that withstands the storm, those who walk through hell and then heal enough to tell the tale.
And remember those who do not.

I always write along with the group. I wouldn’t send anyone into territory I myself wouldn’t dare to tread.

And so, I began here…

A blessing on a day when we all grapple with the killing of nineteen elementary school students. I think of Yeats and his poem, “Amongst School Children”...

Then, I put down the pen and reached for my battered grad school copy of W.B. Yeats’s Collected Poems. I was about to ask an Irishman who lived and died a century ago about his opinion on violence. While Yeats writes of death and war in Ireland and Europe (observed from an aristocratic distance), I stopped myself when I realized he didn’t have the medicine I needed to navigate this moment.

There is a time to turn to art for solace. And, there is a time when we turn to certain art because it feels easier and safer to escape into well crafted lines, rather than weep and respond to the mess of modern life.

This was not a time to escape into the yellowed pages of poetry or numb myself with well-crafted verse. Instead, I needed to do the harder work of opening my eyes to the full sorrow and anger of the present moment.

I returned to my own, in-this-moment story and to the first line I wrote: “A blessing on a day when we all grapple…”

That word, grapple. It’s rather a strange one. It speaks of struggle and challenge. For me, it calls to mind the life or death quest of the mountain climber trying to find a way up the cliff face.

Resisting poetry, I went to the dictionary, seeking something other than my vague impressions of the word. Further down in grapple’s definitions, there it is: “engage in a close fight or struggle without weapons.”

A. Fight. Without. Weapons.

Yes, it seems that the magic of language is alive and well, and we cast our words like a spell even when we do not know it.

We Have Words, Not Weapons

Poetry has its place, everywhere and always. There is always a place for stories and mythology and flights into the mythic imagination as well. Prayer, too. 

As filmmaker Kerra Bolton said in a Facebook post about the sorrow she feels about this event, but also the grief she feels about the comparative silence she witnessed in the wake of the murder of the Black elders in Buffalo,  “We don’t pray to change God. Prayer changes us.” 

As we are forced to grapple with gun violence in America, and with the perpetual list of human crimes and failings, betrayals and sins of omission, we must engage in a fight without weapons.

For that, we have poetry, stories, mythology, the mythic imagination, and prayer. And protest, too.

We have our lips to speak the unscripted truth, our arms to embrace, our legs to march. We have our phones to call senators and reach friends who are afraid to send their kids to school. We have front stoops to sit on to talk to neighbors who are brokenhearted by their own numbness and helplessness as we all face another day of death in America.

I haven’t got a single answer beyond all these wordy ideas

Except this…

Words are not enough, until they are enough. Words make stories, shape minds, and gather across hundreds of pages to make laws.

And one person isn’t enough to change our reading of our Constitution, the chasms in our culture, the generations of unhealed trauma, or the layers of toxic masculinity that makes all this keep happening again, and again, and again. Until that one person is enough when they become one with others.

When the individual ceases to be an island of fear, grief, and anger and becomes part of a collective that’s finally (finally!) driven to transformation…

When enough of us form an US that realizes that there can be new bridges and boundaries, new ways of interpreting the law and enacting “community,” then maybe (just maybe), we’ll have something - each other, a nation, a dream - worth fighting for.

---

*A note on “Sovereign,” which I use to describe our writing community and which I explore extensively in my book, The Sovereignty Knot: A Woman’s Way to Freedom, Power, Love, and Magic: sovereignty is not about obsessive individualism or “I alone” consciousness. 

It took me a couple hundred pages to describe just what I mean by “sovereignty,” but love how Seán Páidraig O’Donoghue, a KnotWork Storytelling guest and a brother who walks a similar path as an American who sources his soul in Ireland and the Celtic world, says it on his blog: 

I see a lot of people using the word "sovereignty" to reinforce and justify their ideas of individuality.

I have said before and I will say again: to understand the concept of sovereignty, we need to go back to its oldest iteration. The first Kings were sovereign because they wedded the land and took responsibility for the well being of the land and the people.

Over time, this marriage became more and more abstracted, especially in cultures where kingship was hereditary. In time, people rose up and put an end to kingship, and rightly sought to reinvest authority in the people.

But because they were separated from the concept of what sovereignty first meant, in seeking to make the people collectively sovereign and the individual self sovereign, they missed something fundamental: true sovereignty means taking responsibility not just for yourself, but for the land and the people (human and other-than-human) and the impact your decisions and actions have on all with in your web of relation.

May we all abandon the myth of individualism and reanimate true sovereignty.

---

If you resonate with this belief in the power of words and are seeking a writing community where you can explore the ideas that are hardest to speak aloud, consider the Sovereign Writers’ Knot. We’re enrolling for our Summer Mini-Session, which begins July 6.

On Making Up Myths (Or, Will the Real Cana Cludhmor Please Approach the Harp?)

There once was a poet of great skill and fame. Ireland, of course, was a country known for its poets. It’s filid.

And, Ireland was known for its banfhile, too.  The story I shall tell you is of Cana Cludhmor. Cana Cludhmor was a banfhile.

Cana Cludhmor was a woman, a poet, and a person of great skill and great renown.

Her story was folded into a couple dozen lines. Her story has left much room for interpretation. And yes, misinterpretation, too. If your passions tend toward the mythic, the Celtic, and the obscure, you might have heard that Cana Cludhmor was an Irish goddess of poetry and inspiration. You might have heard she’s the inventor of the harp.

In the great modern quest for goddesses and a deep desire to resuscitate ancient magic, someone not so very long ago spun such a tale by editing the very last line of what we find in a medieval book called Imtheacht na Tromdháimhe, or The Proceedings of the Great Bardic Institution. That modern twist on the story endures, making a woman a goddess and crediting her with the creation of Ireland’s most powerful symbol and most beautiful instrument. 

(I’m grateful to Morgan Daimler for tracing the origins of this revised Cana Cludhmor tale, which recasts the poet as “Canola,” and refers to her as inventor of the harp and Irish goddess of poetry and inspiration. I was able to find what seems to be the first mention of “Canola” - a 1916 book called called Celtic Mythology, that offered no traceable citations - but the choice to credit Cana Cludhmor with harp making and divinity seems a totally new invention.)

This is all a lot of “inside baseball,” falling into the research rabbit hole and getting into the nit-picky details that can make scholarship (and scholars!) so tedious, bear with me.

Honoring the sources of the stories and mythology we love matters. If we all pass our inventions off as “fact” we end up destroying (and colonizing) the precious, fragile traditions we purport to love.

I believe the “real” tale of Cana Cludhmor is actually even richer and more full of possibility. Even more because it’s true. Well, true in the sense that it has endured for eight hundred years, and likely long before the monks recorded it in the Book of Lismore in the fourteenth century. It’s up to you if you want to believe what the lads inscribed on vellum or you feel more comfortable with what you find on Wikipedia.

In my story, I will rob this mythic woman of none of her power, even as I strip her divine status and place the harp-maker’s tools in the hands of another. I promise. We’ll land at a different place. A place that feels a bit more human and a bit more like what we need right now.

The Poet Asked Me to Tell (and Heal) Her Story

The paragraphs above serve as the beginning of my telling of Cana Cludhmor’s story, which you can hear in Episode 13 of the Knotwork Storytelling Podcast, “How to Heal a Poet’s Heart, or The Invention of the Irish Harp.”

I discovered this story because I wanted to tell a story about the Irish harp but knew a tale of the Dagda, the Good God, with his deadly war harp was not the story for Maureen Buscareno and me to explore together. It’s an art, matching a story with a guest, and not all harp stories hit the same notes. (Sorry… the pun was inevitable!)

This great female poet, or banfhile, Cana Cludhmor is mentioned only briefly in a long, sprawling satire about the annoying habits of the bards who hang about, taking advantage of the king’s hospitality. This is a lot left to the imagination.

Below is an excerpt from the manuscript, which includes the dialog that frames this tiny scrap of story:

"I question thee, Casmael,” said Marvan, " whence originated the science of playing the harp; who was the first that composed poetry, or whether the harp or the timpan was the first made?"
"I don't know that, prime prophet," said Casmael.

"I know it," says Marvan, “And I will tell it thee. In former times there lived a married couple whose names were Macuel, son of Miduel, and Cana Cludhmor (or, “of great fame”) his wife. His wife, having entertained a hatred for him, fled before him through woods and wildernesses, and he was in pursuit of her. One day that the wife had gone to the strand of the sea of Camas, and while walking along the strand she discovered the skeleton of a whale on the strand, and having heard the sound of the wind acting on the sinews of the whale, she fell asleep by that sound. Her husband came up to her, and having understood that it was by the sound she had fallen asleep, he proceeded into an adjacent forest, where he made the frame of a harp, and he put chords in it of the tendons of the whale, and that is the first harp that ever was made.”

When you listen to the story, you’ll hear my inventions, including the curse, the bloodied hands, and the moment of healing. You’ll note how I inject motivation and emotion into the tale, as is the storyteller’s way.

This is an old story of mysterious origin–how did the monks receive this particular bit of narrative? why did they decide it worth their scribal time? But still, this isn’t a particularly mystical story, at all.

I’m all for the magical and the divine, but I think we do a disservice to the goddesses, as well as the culture, the history, and the mortal human condition, when we force women out of this world and into the otherworld to serve our desire for life on the other side of the veil.

The Work of Remythologizing is Delicate, and Important

"In order to remythologize their heroines' stories, the authors must retain basic aspects of the tales and characters and infuse them with fresh energies that comment on the age in which they were written."

Oh, from the mouths of baby academics!

That line is from my 2003 essay, Dethroning the Goddess, Crowning the Woman: Eva Gore-Booth and Augusta Lady Gregory's Mythic Heroines, which was published in New Voices in Irish Criticism 4, published by Four Courts Press in Dublin.

While I wouldn't construct a sentence like that now (and would ask my writing coaching clients to dial back the scholarly rhetoric and speak to the heart), I am proud of my young grad student self.

And I would love her to know that I am actively doing the work of "remythologizing" those beloved stories almost half a lifetime later,

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Cultural Appropriation, Toxic Masculinity, and a Story from the Scottish Highlands

The Oxford English Dictionary defines cultural appropriation as: “the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the practices, customs, or aesthetics of one social or ethnic group by members of another (typically dominant) community or society.”

Often, the concept of cultural appropriation involves white people “borrowing” (though it’s likely more correct to say “outright stealing”) from) the culture of Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples. Everything from Halloween costumes to sacred ceremonies can become part of this disrespect and theft.

Cultural appropriation isn’t always a question of color and race, however. 

As an American who studies Celtic mythology and Irish folklore and then reshapes these stories, I always need to be aware that, even when I’m working with material that’s in English, I am working at the level of translation. Though my ancestors were Breens, Donovans, Kellys, and Russells, centuries in North America have crafted my perspective and my inheritance.

And yet, of course, there’s the soul-deep knowing that reaches beyond contemporary boundaries and has little to do with the nation that issued your passport. It’s an energy that comes before the modern divisions and migrations. 

This sense of being bound to what came before, even if it’s largely unknown, is what keeps the Irish diaspora connected to “the old sod.” This is also why you may be pulled to a particular culture or part of the planet, even if you can’t find evidence that your family tree was planted there.

There’s a tremendous risk of romanticizing the old world, locking a beloved place in nostalgia and forgetting it is full of the bustle and bruises of real, contemporary life. Real folks living real lives that have just about nothing to do with your imagination and projection. 

History without modern context, reviving folk practice without awareness of who lives on the land now… The work of “reviving” old traditions is rendered meaningless if you’re not curious and cognizant of today’s native residents and practitioners.

So then, how do we avoid picking up cultures, rituals, and practices and turning the ancient truth of a place into fodder for a narcissistic collage of half-understood beliefs and hobbies?

Ultimately, the way to healthy cultural appreciation is in education and exchange. It’s in respectful listening and even more respectful speaking. It emerges when we open to wonder about all that’s known, all that’s been recorded, and all that’s been lost. It’s about establishing a nourishing reciprocity between those who are born and live each day upon the land and within culture, and those from “away.” 

In this moment on the planet when multinational corporations shape tastes and trends and almost nowhere is further than a commercial airline can reach, we’re all coping with dislocation of one kind or another. We’re all called to weave the ancient wisdom with the modern. We all must merge the local with the global. 

We’re all called to hold the infinite truth that’s embedded in the earth and the language beside the lightning-fast communication and bottomless well of information (that may not necessarily yield useful knowledge).

This Week on KnotWork Storytelling: Michael Newton tells a Scottish Gaelic Story, “The Man Without a Story”

Michael Newton himself has countless stories, and he also has his PhD from University of Edinburgh and many books and scholarly articles to his name. He brings tremendous depth of knowledge and sensitivity to this story, and to all of his work.

Like me, Michael is an American who was called back to the land, stories, language, and culture of his ancestors. He has founded the Hidden Glen Folk School of Scottish Highland Heritage, which is dedicated to reclaiming and revitalizing the authentic native culture, history, and traditions of the Scottish Highlands and its diaspora.

Part of his mission, as a scholar, teacher, and community leader, is to explore “social (in)justice and decolonization from Gaelic perspectives.” These ideas came to the fore in our conversation as we followed Michael’s story into a conversation about toxic masculinity and the way Celtic symbols and Highland culture have been co-opted by white supremacist groups. 

These ideas lurk at the dark corners, existing at the opposite end of the spectrum from beliefs that Celtic culture is all about Aran sweaters and Highland games. It might be tempting to ignore “those people” and the way they’ve twisted their perception of a “rebellious warrior culture” to suit an ideology of hate, but we need to reckon with all aspects of the tradition: the hidden, the beautiful, the ugly, and the emergent.

Oh, and our conversation did take us to that other cultural phenomenon, begun by an American: The Outlander books and tv series. (Spoiler alert: Jamie Fraser is an example of the full humanity of Scottish Highlander, rather than the one-dimensional warrior stereotype that equates the wielding of broadswords with what it means to be “real men.”)