In the Dagara Tradition that I study, mineral is the element of memory. It is the stones and rocks that remember the old ways -- the time when our people lived in communion with the animate world, when rites of passage were recognized and marked collectively, and one's sense of well-being was intrinsically connected to that of the community, nature, and spirit. 

For our mountain elders, the 200,000-year history of humans on the planet is relatively recent. They can go back further still to the very forming of the earth -- volcanic eruption and magma flow, Pangea, the age of the conifers, the age of the dinosaurs ... 

Imagining what the rocks around us have seen gives us an expansive perspective. I believe we can find solace in their wisdom.

These great ones remind us that this age of modernity is just a sliver of time, a blip on the radar of a much vaster human history. It has only been a mere 500 years (or so) that we've lost our way. Our disembodiment from ourselves, discrediting of spirits and the powers of the unseen, denial of interdependence and so on is an aberration -- a break from the norm.  The world of today would not make sense to our shared Black mother, nor her children, or her's, or her's, extending for thousands of years. 

The majority of our ancestors (regardless of how your body is racialized today) lived in reverence to the more than human world.  We all come from people who engaged in ritual practices; whose somatic intelligence was intact as they moved their bodies, told stories and sang around a communal fire. Our ancestors trusted the unseen and honored these spirits, protectors, gods, goddesses, and mischief-makers. They knew a tree was not lumber but a teacher; so too The Deer, The Mountain, The Stream, The Beetle. 

From the Druids to the Tribes of Caledonia; from the Mayans to the Aborigines; from the Huli People to the Harappa; from Northern Sweden to Siberia to The Congo, Japan and Vietnam.  North, South, East and West, we all can trace our origins to a people who were indigenous to some place and who recognized their relationality with a living world imbued with intelligence.  This knowledge sustained our ancestors and is waiting to resuscitate us. 

Amid the seemingly intractable systems of extraction and domination we live within today, this way of organizing ourselves feels lost. Is it even possible to resurface?

The mountains remind us that our knowledge of these practices and ways of being are not as far away as they may seem. They're just behind. Just ... There.  Turn your head over your left shoulder and can't you hear it? The steady beat of the drum? The faint call of a body in exclamative prayer?  

Our mountain teachers show us more than this though. They remind us, we are mineral. Our bones, made of the same material as rock and stone, carry this living knowledge. It flows and informs us just as it flows and informs the wisdom of our mineral elders.

When we imagine what the stones know, we also imagine, what our bones know. Our bones, without which we would be a puddle, shape us in obvious and profound ways. 

"But how do we access the indigeneity that lives in us? How do we reconnect with the practices of our people?" 

We let our relationship with our mineral teachers guide us. We go to the mountain places where we feel a sense of home and lay on stony bodies. Like the striking of a tuning fork that then makes the guitar sing, we let the tune of the mountain awaken what is already within us. 

If we can't get to the mountain, we hold a stone, or a shell, something smooth and cool. We roll it in our hands and we get still. We place it on our belly. We place it on our heart, and we listen.