INTRODUCTION

AMBER FIRELIGHT PATTERNS A FLICKERING DANCE on the circle of friends seated on stumps around a crackling blaze. A few yards away, the mounded shape of a sweat lodge hunkers between cedar trees, waiting with open doorflaps for the ceremony to begin.

There are no American Indians present, though one of the men sundances on the Crow reservation; the ceremonial leader’s mentor is a Potawatomie medicine man; one of the women is involved with a tribal member of the northern Diné, and another has ties with an Apache shaman. During a pause in the drumming, a discussion about ancestry reveals that everyone in the circle this night is descended from Scot’s heritages. It seemed a congenial coincidence then, but as years passed I began to reflect on the nature of resonance between American Natives and Celts, affinities that in early times manifested in intermarriage and, today, in the interest many Celtic Americans feel in Native spirituality. Four aspects of traditional life appear as taproots of commonality between Celtic and Native people: orientation to tribe or clan; high regard shown women; a fluid perspective of reality; and an integrated spiritual relationship with the land.

It is often forgotten, despite present-day “Troubles” in Northern Ireland and the undying Scottish autonomy movement, that Celts suffered invasion, religious persecution, and removal from their lands. Ireland went from being the most densely populated country in Europe to the least, losing three-quarters of its people. Vikings invaded in the eighth century, Normans conquered in the twelfth; in the sixteenth century Elizabethans cut down Ireland’s forests in pursuit of Irish (and Norman-Irish) guerrilla fighters, and the Calvinist Cromwellians came close to committing genocide of the Irish in the seventeenth century.

Oliver Cromwell obliterated one-third of the Irish. One hundred thousand others were shipped as indentured servants (slaves) to the New World, particularly to Barbados. In 1654, Irish were forced to a reservation west of the river Shannon in Connacht; resisters were immediately executed. Sir William Parsons, seventeenth-century Master of the Court of Wards, noted that “We must change the Irish course of government, apparel, manner of holding land, language, and habit of life. It will otherwise be impossible to set up in them obedience to the laws and to the English empire.”

In the eighteenth century, English penal laws denied Irish Catholics the right to purchase or lease land, become educated, practice their religion, own a horse worth more than five pounds, keep profits from rented land, or speak Gaelic. The people were sequentially stripped of the vitality of their paganism and the acceptability of their Christianity. To the Protestant conquerors, Catholicism was an intolerable relic of the past.

A century later, attitudes had not changed. An English official traveling in Ireland during the potato famine (in which nearly one million died while England turned its back) referred to the people as “chimpanzees,” and mused about how strange it was that, though the Irish looked like white people, they were not really human.

One and one-half million Irish emigrated during the famine. By 1914 another four million were gone, and the total population was less than four and one-half million. Scotland’s Highland population evaporated also; the Highlands are one of the only areas in the world once containing a larger population than it now sustains. Famine and the merciless Clearances of the late 1700s and 1800s emptied the glens and replaced people with sheep. After centuries of warfare with England, the battle of Culloden in 1746 brought a final shattering of the Scottish clans. Celtic culture was proscribed: the playing of bagpipes, wearing of tartan, carrying of weapons, and speaking of Gaelic were banned. Today, in some parts of the Highlands, one-third to one-half of all properties are either vacant or are holiday homes for non-Highlanders.

Recall of these tribulations is not meant to divert attention from or absolve Celtic Americans from participation in wrongs perpetrated on Natives in North America. Between 1778 and 1871 the United States’ government ratified 371 treaties with American Indians. Every one of those treaties was either broken or annulled. As Chief Red Cloud of the Lakota said, “They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land and they took it.”

There is much oppression to be addressed. Healing occurs in an immediacy that takes into account past as well as future. Understanding where we have been offers insight and perspective on how to unfold an honest future; not a return to or perpetuation of the past, but a flowering of the most honorable potentials held within our roots.

In the spring of 1997, Dr. Joseph McDonald, president of the Salish Kootenai College on Montana’s Flathead reservation, gave a talk at Sabhal Mor Ostaig, the Gaelic business college on Scotland’s Isle of Skye. Dr. McDonald’s ancestors include Glencoe’s MacDonald chiefs. Earlier in the spring of 1997, members of the Nez Perce tribe met in Assynt, Scotland with crofters who had made history by buying their land back, as a community, from the lairds holding it. The meeting of crofters and Native Americans, like Dr. McDonald’s talk, was to discuss commonalties and to share experiences and perspectives. At Assynt it was noted that crofters’ ancestors, coming to North America as a result of displacement from their own lands, were among those who displaced ancestors of the Nez Perce now sitting with the crofters. The realization brought not guilt or blame, but a sense of history’s patterns and how things can change when human relationships align with commonalties of principle and heart.

This book touches on similarities between American Indians and Celts, but its purpose and focus is not to legitimize Celticism’s value by comparing it to Native culture. The aim is to present the spirit of Celtic culture in its own light and strength, in its uniqueness as well as its relationship to other ancient ways of life.

It is an exploration of Celtic heritage that seeks both rootedness and transcendent evolution. That quest, reflected in many Celtic American lives, was apparent in the firelit circle of friends preparing to enter the sweat lodge. We ask ourselves: What and where is homeland and the continuity of ancestral spirit?

Return

In dreams forever walking

moors and shores in Hebridean wind,

forever seeking lee ward reception,

in breath of heritage: Take me,

to quivering heather, promiscuous wind,

the eyes of working people peat cutters,

bus drivers, plain-dressed women

with satchel handbags.

Not tartan but stone,

curling North Sea breakers, the Cuillin,

the wind Oh, the wind! streaming

in centuries as though history

is a sea journey.

In dreams Gaelic-greeted, curlews

and the panic of grouse wings,

evenings silk in stillness over the firth.

Come back, whispered (never aloud)

to disappearances and white-sailed ships

making me tourist in this homeland.