What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?

John Hausdoerffer, Brooke Parry Hecht, Melissa K. Nelson, Katherine Kassouf Cummings, John Hausdoerffer, Brooke Parry Hecht, Melissa K. Nelson, Katherine Kassouf Cummings

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780226777436
  9780226777269
• Subtopic: Ecology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226777573

As we face an ever-more-fragmented world, What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? demands a return to the force of lineage—to spiritual, social, and ecological connections across time. It sparks a myriad of ageless-yet-urgent questions: How will I be remembered? What traditions do I want to continue? What cycles do I want to break? What new systems do I want to initiate for those yet-to-be-born? How do we endure? Published in association with the Center for Humans and Nature and interweaving essays, interviews, and poetry, this book brings together a thoughtful community of Indigenous and other voices—including Linda Hogan, Wendell Berry, Winona LaDuke, Vandana Shiva, Robin Kimmerer, and Wes Jackson—to explore what we want to give to our descendants. It is an offering to teachers who have come before and to those who will follow, a tool for healing our relationships with ourselves, with each other, and with our most powerful ancestors—the lands and waters that give and sustain all life.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• poem: Unsigned Letter to a Human in the 21st Century, Jamaal May
• I. Embedded
• II. Reckoning
• III. Healing
• IV. Interwoven
• V. Earthly
• VI. Seventh Fire
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Contributors
• Index