A Ship of Orphans: Exile, Belonging and the Celtic Diaspora

An American teacher of Celtic shamanism remembers a first teacher, trained in Guatemala, who described modern Americans as “sailing on a ship of orphans.” He meant that those whose families came from elsewhere had severed their ties with the spirits of their original land, their ancestors and their traditions, and had not yet been adopted by the land they now lived on. Part of that teacher’s ancestry came from Scotland and Ireland, and the phrase struck home. The Irish has a word for what it names: uaigneas, loneliness, the hollow feeling that comes when a foundation that should be there is not. In a line from An Droighneán Donn that this teacher quotes, the singer has nothing but that loneliness, “like the tree that is without a root.”

The Hollow Feeling

Many people come to Celtic shamanism through exactly this feeling. The descendants of the Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish emigrations number in the tens of millions, across North America, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and South Africa. Most of them know little of where their people came from beyond a surname and a county, and some not even that. Yet the old stories, the music and the landscape can stir them with a force that surprises them. Writing from Nova Scotia, the shamanic practitioners of EarthSea observe that North Americans often feel the ties of clan and kin that people in Britain and Ireland shake their heads at, “because they are at home while our ancestors have been feeling disconnected from the land since the great migrations of war, famine and sheep enclosure.”

That longing is real, and it deserves respect. It also deserves examination, because what one does with it can heal or harm.

Why They Left

The emigrations were rarely chosen freely. In Ireland the Famine of 1845 to 1852 killed around a million people and drove out a million more, and emigration continued for a century after. In the Scottish Highlands and Islands, the Clearances of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries evicted tens of thousands of families from land their people had worked for generations, to make way for sheep and later for sporting estates. Alexander Carmichael recorded the testimony of Catherine MacPhee of Iochdar in South Uist, who had seen it with her own eyes:

I have seen the townships swept, and the big holdings being made of them, the people being driven out of the countryside to the streets of Glasgow and to the wilds of Canada, such of them as did not die of hunger and plague and smallpox while going across the ocean.Catherine MacPhee, recorded by Alexander Carmichael

The Welsh went to the coalfields, to Pennsylvania and to Patagonia, where a Welsh-speaking colony was founded in 1865 to escape English pressure on the language at home. The Bretons went to Paris and the Cornish miners to every hard-rock mine in the world. Again and again, the loss of land came with the loss of language, and the loss of language with the loss of the stories, the blessings and the names of places. Irish teachers, as the network Mad in Ireland put it, speak of their own indigenous healing practices and even the words for them as having been “disappeared.”

The Double Inheritance

Here the story gets harder. The Scottish writer and activist Alastair McIntosh, who grew up on the Isle of Lewis, ten miles from the stones of Calanais, wrote in 1996 that many of those who were driven out of the Highlands went on to do in the New World what had been done to them, and became settlers on land taken from its own Indigenous peoples. The orphans on the ship were also, very often, colonists when they landed. The descendant of a Clearance family in Canada or a Famine family in the United States inherits both stories: the dispossession and the dispossessing.

At a conference in Killarney in 1994, McIntosh recalled, the Anishinaabe activist Winona LaDuke explained to a child that “Alastair is a kind of white Indian,” and that there were people like that in places like Ireland and Scotland, though you did not hear much about them. McIntosh, moved, wondered why we could not all be white Indians, and answered the question in the same breath: what makes a people indigenous is connectedness with folk and place.

We honour the generosity of that moment, and we understand what McIntosh meant. But we would not use the phrase ourselves, and we ask those who practise with us not to. The Irish and the Gaels suffered colonisation and the near-loss of their languages, and that history matters. It does not make a person of Celtic descent in Ohio or Ontario an Indigenous person, and claiming kinship with Indigenous peoples on the strength of a shared grief can easily become one more taking. Our ethics page says more. The longing for rootedness is shared; the standing is not.

The Bonds of Milk

So what is the orphan to do? The tradition itself offers an answer, and it is not about blood. Early Irish society was built on fosterage: children of good families were sent to be raised in other households, and the tie between foster-child and foster-parent was often closer than kinship. McIntosh quotes the Gaelic saying that the bonds of milk are stronger than the bonds of blood. Belonging, in this view, is made by nurture: by being fed by a place and its people, and feeding them in turn.

McIntosh suggests that we might redefine belonging as a “willingness to cherish, and be cherished by, a place and its peoples.” The Irish word dúchas already holds both halves: what you inherit from your blood and what you take in from your native ground. For someone whose ancestors came from Mayo and who lives in Minnesota, the first half points back across the ocean. The second points out of the window.

Community, Spirit, Place

McIntosh’s essay was titled “Community, Spirit, Place: a Reviving Celtic Shamanism,” and in it the three could not be separated. A Celtic shamanism worth the name, McIntosh argued, would not be an escape into the mists but a way of facing what has happened to land and people, and acting on it. McIntosh was one of the founders of the Isle of Eigg Trust in 1991, which helped bring about the community buyout of the island in 1997, and described crossing Eigg on the night of the speech for it and feeling the voices of the old people, the cleared and the transported, coming up out of the rocks. McIntosh called what was needed a cultural psychotherapy: a healing of the wounds of the broken communities left behind in the old world and of the uprooted ones in the new.

That is a large idea, but it comes down to small acts. Learning the story of why one’s people left. Learning the history of the land where one lives now, and whose it was. Supporting the language at home and the people of the place one has landed. Keening the losses, both of them, and then getting on with the work of belonging.

A Practice: Two Homecomings

This practice has two halves. Do the first over a season, the second for the rest of your life.

The Homecoming Back

1. Learn the leaving. Find out what you can about who left, from where, when and why. A parish, a townland, a ship’s name. Write it down.
2. Learn the ground. Read about that place: its hills and wells, its saint, its stories, the Irish or Gaelic or Welsh name it carried. The Library lists the archives where you can begin.
3. Keen it. Make a small lament for the leaving, alone or with family, as the essay Keening the Dead Across describes. Grief that was never voiced can still be voiced.
4. Journey. Ask to meet an ancestor who made the crossing. Ask what they carried, what they lost, and what they need from you now. Bring back what you are given.

The Homecoming Here

1. Learn whose land it is. Find out which peoples lived where you live before your family came, and whether they live there still. Learn their name for the place if they share it. Support their work if you can.
2. Choose one place. A hill, a creek, a tree, a stretch of shore. Visit it every week, as the daily orientation describes, and learn it as a foster-child learns a household.
3. Make a bond of milk. Give it something regularly: clear its litter, plant what belongs there, defend it at a planning meeting. Let it feed you too.
4. Praise it. Make a song or a poem for it, naming its features in order, as the Dindshenchas named the places of Ireland.

The ship of orphans does not have to keep sailing. It can come to land, not by claiming the shore, and not by sailing back to a homeland that has moved on without it, but by learning, slowly and with courtesy, to be fostered by the place where it has arrived. The old Gaels knew that a fostered child could be as dearly loved as any. The land, we have found, knows it too.