Status
Call number
Call number
Collection
Description
Indigenous Peoples have always carried the knowledge necessary to heal. When our people heal, our families heal, our communities heal and our land will heal. You cannot have one without the other. These stories are teachings, prophecy and protocols shared throughout the years by elders, language speakers, medicine people and helpers. They have been the foundation to individual healing and learning self-love. I am Syilx and Secwepemc, and although many of my teachings come from these places, they also intertwine with indigenous knowledge shared through ceremony from many other nations. These teachings not only show us how to love and respect ourselves but they provide protocols and laws on how we are to plan for ourselves, our community and our economy, and they show us how to govern our people through matriarchal and egalitarian teachings. People from all backgrounds have embraced concepts from other parts of the world that promote self-love, healing and well-being through practices of discipline and meditation, yet very little has been shared about indigenous systems and their approach to healing. The stories shared here have taught me how to cultivate safe space for myself and others. It is these teachings that helped me call my spirit back. My story may be rooted in trauma, but it is not my only story.… (more)
Genres
Publication
Original language
Language
User reviews
I first came across Elaine Alec on Instagram. I liked what she had to say in the post that I read and so I followed her. In the year since then I have read many of her posts and I think I’ve loved them all. Many are simply silly things, with her children or just
It’s a slender volume, and the chapters are mercifully short so that if I want to I can get to the end of a particular telling in one sitting. (I like to have certain books around that I can just pick up and read a paragraph or a page or three and just slowly digest my way through the book.) The writing is clear and always engaging.
I cannot say how much I love Calling My Spirit Back. Alec talks about her people, their traditions, colonialism and residential schools, and about her life. Where things were hard, very hard, where things were good, the teachings and relationships that nourished her as a child and as an adult, and how she has used the teachings of her people to heal and to build the life she wanted. It is not enough for her own individual healing, though. She has worked for many years in ways that further the healing of her people and of the larger world. Because she says, "It is not an indigenous problem, it is the responsibility of each of us to take care of each other and strive to be unified and create balance. When one thing is unbalanced, it affects all things.“
Alec's bravery in speaking about her own shame and hurtful behaviours and about the things that have happened to her, her mother, her people, continually inspire me to look at my own being in this world. How am I still hiding, what and how I might want to move forward in sharing some of the more painful parts of my experience of life. I am deeply grateful for not only this book, but for her life, her understanding, and her commitment to help the people around her understand and heal. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Elaine Alec.