Echoes of Resistance (Part 6)

Read Part 5

“Have you ever considered that Mildred might represent your higher self?”

The energy healer with whom I was working posed that question. Mildred was a grandaunt whom I had never met. She was my grandmother’s older sister. She died at age twenty-two after being hit in the leg with a baseball. The trauma created a sarcoma, which, according to her death certificate, eventually spread to her lungs. Mildred was an infant when her mother, Estelle, enrolled her on the Cherokee Guion Miller Roll. She was the last officially enrolled Cherokee in our family.

I had mentioned to my practitioner that I had developed testicular cancer at the same age that Mildred died of the sarcoma. Some type of supernatural connection existed between us, I had said. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. When Mildred was battling her own cancer, she was just a couple of years younger than her great-grandaunt, Mary, when Mary moved west in the Cherokee removal. The echoes of resistance, whether they be about oppression, disease, or something else, are ever-present. The multi-generational transmission process, or intergenerational repetition, is obvious.

I’ve heard the echoes of Mildred’s whispers. They were whispers to reconnect, as best I could, to the tribe that claimed our family. I heard the echoes and I responded with my own.

If one listens closely, one can hear these echoes in one’s own family. We all have a heritage that calls out to us. We can’t respond to the echoes, however, if we aren’t listening.