By: Francesca Mundrick, Founder & Executive Director
My grandmother’s name was Adelaide Beatrice. From Italy, she emigrated to the United States in the 1940s at the age of 20 on one of the last Trans-Atlantic voyages to Ellis Island.
My grandmother knew how to do everything. She knew how to garden, how to forge life, how to identify plants and animals. How to grow her own food, how to cook, how to preserve food. How to sew and make clothes, how to reuse, renew, and recycle items. How to speak her native language, how to practice spirituality and religion. How to do rituals of the old world, how to heal us. How to connect with other people, how to host, how to build family, how to share and connect.
Since 1950, modernity has bred safety, convenience, and comfort. While our advancements have many benefits, these changes have altered our purpose and our overall self-sufficiency. My grandmother grew up in a harsher world but, at the end of her days, she was free. She was not dependent on modern society, she was independent. If modern systems failed, she would have been fine going on living.
While I learned many things from my grandmother, I have come to starkly realize that I did not learn enough. Where was I? I can tell you where I was. I was at the mall on my iPhone buying things that I didn’t need with my friends. She always told me that one day I would see- it wasn’t until her passing in 2018 that I did. She tried to teach me more all those years ago but I was distracted, taken away from my family by the promises of modernity. I was being told that it was important for me to do xy and z but what was really important was safeguarding the generational knowledge of my grandmother. This is a shared experience for most people all over the world- facing a choice between preserving familial culture or joining the modern world.
I now know that I am exponentially less sovereign than my grandmother was. I am less equipped, less resilience, more vulnerable. Where does that leave me? It leaves me feeling disempowered. It leaves me feeling tricked. It leaves me feeling stupid. It leaves me having to learn her knowledge on my own. I now see what she was trying to tell me- what she was trying to share.
If you are awake in this world, you know that you feel like a cog in the machine, unable to break free from what is provided for us, from the control all around us. This is by design. We have been conditioned away from things that give us power- our ancestry being high on that list. Ancestry is our survivance, familial bonds, and the soul of our identities. It connects us to generations of human knowledge and spiritual belief. In a world that wages war on our knowledge, localism, spirituality, health, and land- ancestry is a major part of our resistance. If we maintain the connection to our ancestors and continue to preserve generational knowledge, we can harness power for ourselves that is much needed.
My grandmother is a reminder that our willingness to let go of our sacred ancestry for the comforts of modernity is a complete detriment to us. She is a symbol of the sheer power of the old world and its lost ways. The Advice of Adelaide helped me to see the significance of human rewilding as part of our revolution to regain sovereignty.
To learn more about Fran, visit About the Founder.
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