Land & Lineage
Where I Stand, Who I Come From, How I’m Showing Up.
I live, work, and offer presence on the traditional territory known today as Toronto, land stewarded for thousands of years by many nations including the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Chippewa and multiple Mississaugas. This land is shaped and sustained by its life-giving rivers, streams, and wetlands, home to six main watersheds - the Etobicoke Creek, Mimico Creek, Humber River, Don River, Highland Creek, and Rouge River - that flow into Lake Ontario.
This land is part of Treaty 13 and the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, a sacred agreement to share the land in peace and care for it together.
These teachings call me as a settler into right relationship. They ask not just for acknowledgement, but for presence, action, and repair.
A Personal Path of Learning and Unlearning
As a white settler woman of European descent, my journey with land, belonging, and repair began in childhood. My mother, quiet and attuned, made the choice to expose me to Indigenous cultures early in life. Her care planted a seed I now recognize as one of responsibility and reverence.
During my time at the University of Toronto, I studied Indigenous history, trauma, and spiritual traditions, learning, too slowly, how deeply colonialism has ruptured body, land, and lineage. Yet it wasn’t until I received healing and soul guidance from Joanne Okimawininew Dallaire, Cree Elder and Senior Advisor, Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation at Toronto Metropolitan University, that something truly softened and took root in my bones. Her presence continues to ripple through my work.
My Ancestral Lineage
My lineage is rooted in Scottish and German ancestry on my mother’s side. Her family, farmers, have lived on this land for five generations, settling in Manitoba and Ontario. Bringing with them the shadows of persecution from Europe they came seeking a new life, and in doing so, became part of the settler-colonial history of this place. Their relationship with the land was shaped by both reverence and the blind spots of inherited systems.
On my father’s side, I carry the blood of German displaced peoples, whose lives were profoundly impacted by the violence and dislocation of World War II. They came to Canada only one generation ago, carrying both trauma and tenacity, grief and hope.
I name these roots not to centre whiteness, but to honour the complexity and responsibility of being a settler on Indigenous land. My ancestors were shaped by survival, by longing, by rupture - and I walk with the echoes of their choices in my body.
I honour the gifts in my line - the connection to land, to tending, to medicine.
And I hold with care the unspoken complicities, the privileges, and the forgetting.
This is part of my healing work: to remember, to reckon, and to repair, not just personally, but collectively.
This is a Living Practice
This page is not a static statement - it is a devotional practice of listening.
It asks me to return again and again with humility, courage, and curiosity.
It reflects both my personal and professional commitments to collective healing, embodied justice, and the ongoing work of repair.
My ongoing commitments include:
✨ Redistribution: A small portion of my income is donated to Indigenous-led organizations and healing initiatives:
✨ Relational Learning: I seek out Indigenous wisdom-keepers, educators, and community-led teachings, and remain mindful of cultural boundaries and permissions.
✨ Ceremony & Consent: My offerings centre slowness, consent, and relationship - a gentle antidote to extractive, colonized ways of being.
✨ Embodied Unlearning: I continue to reckon with how colonialism lives in my nervous system - and how somatic work can support deeper relational repair.
✨ Collective Accountability: As a member of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Toronto, I participate in education, action, and redistribution efforts aimed at dismantling racism and building solidarity with Black, Indigenous, and racialised communities.
✨ Continued Education: Through Comrades Education, I’ve deepened my understanding of whiteness, identity, and liberation by completing the courses Before We Were White and Foundations in Anti-Racism Work. This learning has included study and dialogue around anti-Zionism, antisemitism and islamophobia as part of a broader commitment to liberation for all peoples. These teachings continue to shape how I meet discomfort, accountability, and the embodied edges of change.
✨ Liberation Across Borders: Through my ongoing participation with The Pocket Project, I serve as a Practice Group Leader and am currently a Global Social Witnessing Facilitator in training. This work engages collective trauma healing and the systemic imprints of oppression across generations and geographies. It invites me to listen deeply to the pain and longing held in our collective nervous system, and to stay tethered to love as a form of resistance.
✨ Earth Connection & Climate Care:
Through my study and practice of Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, I continue to deepen my relationship with the living Earth and the more-than-human world. This work roots my activism and healing practice in reverence, grief, and gratitude - recognizing the climate crisis as both an ecological emergency and a spiritual invitation to remember our interbeing.
I’m also nourished by learning from regenerative farming practices and local sustainability efforts that honour the cycles of renewal and reciprocity. These teachings remind me that restoration begins close to home - in how we grow, consume, compost, and care. They inform how I listen to the land, tend to despair and hope, and orient toward collective regeneration.
I invite you too, to pause and gently trace the storylines that live in your bones, consider your own lineage and your relationship to the lands you walk.
What are the lands and longings your ancestors carried?
How might their stories inform your own path of repair and return?
May we each step into the work of repair and restoration.