GORSE & (G)HOSTS
SEPTEMBER 2025 by RACHEL JANE LIEBERT
Here we are
In the thick of it,
The thicket.
Gorse (of course)
Settler, knotty, entangled
Pricking our thick skin,
Our settler colonial (mind)state.
Bleeding, stuck.
Breathing, fuck – Is something happening underground?
I write from the thick of it, the thicket. A white settler femme in the middle of our collective experiment into the decolonising possibilities of communing with our ancestors – settler and pagan, human and non-human. Sheltered as ‘participatory action research’, TTP is ultimately performative as we co-researchers explicitly engage our ancestors as co-researchers too, hoping to disrupt in ourselves the figure-cum-standard of the human that lies at the centre of the colonial episteme – detached from flesh and earth and, therefore, ancestors.
Over just the past three years (since TTP officially began), we have seen more and more white settler folx around the globe take up this wero of ancestral engagement.
And over just the past three days, we have seen: The murder of a US white supremacist leading to a presidential war cry against people who say fascist; Over 100,000 UK fascists rallying to ‘unite the kingdom’; Far-right members of Destiny’s Church trying to block a march against fascism by 10,000 community members in Aotearoa.
Is it a coincidence that a rise in white supremacy and fascism is happening alongside a rise in white ancestral engagement?
For us in the Pākehā collective, our project remains haunted by violent intersections of these forces:
Heinrich Himmler, who orchestrated Nazi concentration camps and their SS militia, was a prominent patron of Ariosophy – a belief in the inherent divinity and superiority of ‘untainted German blood’ because it literally carries ancestral memories of national greatness – such that ‘national greatness’ was thought to be restored through ancestral practices including, the recording of folk tales, music and traditions; honouring mysteries, irrationality and nature; engaging in sun worship, rune magic, nudism, paganism, vegetarianism, biodynamic gardening and excursions into nature or sites of ancient presence (Gardell, 2003).
After WWI, this ancestral reverence collided with a sense of unjust victimhood (as stoked by Aldolf Hitler) and the SS militia became, “not just a physical elite, but a spiritual one” – their HQ was a castle that was turned into an occult academy – both a centre of ceremony (including seasonal pagan festivals) and a research institute - archaeologists and historians were joined by astrologers, magicians and mystics – all black-uniformed SS officers committed to terrorist violence and ethnic cleansing, and all in the name of honouring ‘blood and soil’ (Gardell, 2003).
While forced underground post-WWII, this same ancestral reverence resurfaced in the 1990s in not just Europe but across the Atlantic in US white nationalism, as white Americans began to feel under threat with increasing challenges to their supposed superiority – aka ‘The Great Replacement' - soon thereafter, paganism became the largest vehicle for white supremacy, with its markings all over sites of the alt-right – including symbols on the gun used in the 2019 Christchurch mosque attack (Emore & Leader, 2020).
And then of even more relevance for our mahi in TTP:
While not all forms of paganism are racist, ancestral veneration appears to be the common denominator in the ones that are - e.g., within ‘Heathenry’ (the Northern European form of paganism most affiliated with white supremacy), honouring ancestors is where and how race, ethnicity and whiteness are constructed - with the distinctive feature of its supposedly non-racist sibling (‘Inclusive Heathenry’) being its explicitly waiving of membership through blood connection (Snook, 2015).
All suggesting that ancestral engagement through bloodlines is specifically what is dangerous when combined with whiteness, as it can be used to assert or reinforce a violent sense of purity and entitlement.
Perhaps this Is also why a keynote at a 2020 pagan conference described anti-racism as, “arguing with the ancestors”.
Pictured here in its native home in Urgagh, Ireland, is perhaps the most well-known thicket in Aotearoa - gorse - our thorny non-human settler ancestor that both colonises the landscape of Aotearoa and, underground, enriches soil for the growth of Indigenous flora.
Nazi Germany, US white nationalism, white supremacist shooters. Not to mention a booming wellness industry for ‘spiritual awakening’ that convinces its tens of millions of white consumers to bypass decolonial politics. All examples of how white ancestral engagement can be weaponised by the settler colonial state.
And all examples of how the thicket of TTP is full of knots that threaten to become ‘nots’. Sometimes it’s as though we cannot move – things are just “too complicated”.
And this all-too-familiar situation smells of the binary-thinking that dominates settler colonialism – organising the world into two mutually-exclusive categories, often as a dualism that casts one category as superior to the other (white ancestral engagement is good or white ancestral engagement is bad). In turn, when confronted by paradoxes – situations that feel contradictory (white ancestral engagement is good and bad) – they become totalising, creating a sense of immobility.
These (k)nots are not just happening through cognition. They are tied through centuries of socialisation by colonial forces that detach us from flesh and earth – sold(i)ering our feelings, spirit and relationality so they no longer move us – emotionally and politically. In turn, for white settler peoples at least, our very bodies can and have become the weapons of settler colonialism – supplanting Indigenous peoples in order to steal their land, whether we (choose to) know it or (k)not - while reproducing our detachment from flesh and earth and thus a more-than-colonial world here, now.
If we allow ourselves to be tied in (k)nots, are we surrendering to the settler colonial (mind)state?
The tree-house in Kuratau, Taupō.
In February last year, we in the Pākehā collective had our second wānanga on the edge of a huge volcanic lake surrounded by sheer dark cliffs that give the area its name – Taupō Nui a Tia – the dark cloak of Tia – a place where Ngāti Tuwharetoa are mana whenua, and that feels liminal, in-between time and space.
We were excited to see each other again, and from the very beginning it felt like it wasn’t working – people were hours late and exhausted, they seemed frustrated – like they didn’t want to be there – I worried they felt like they were getting nothing out of it (except migraines) – all compressing a pressure to leave with a plan for our PAR project and thus with a feeling that we were actually doing something.
Least we be accused of spiritual bypassing.
We got stuck in questions of how we could – or should – “include our ancestors” in this planning – questions of history, politics, relationship, desire, budget – and who were we talking about anyway? Did/should it have to be our settler ancestors or could it be the witches, pagans, Gaels from whom we also descend? And were our ancestors only human? Weren’t they non-human too?
We were going in circles (not even spirals).
To be clear: this wasn’t pretty. We weren’t dressed in flowy white cloth having some kind of transcended mindful discussion – this was impatient, ungraceful.
I don’t actually know how to describe what happened next, other than that, all of a sudden, we realised we were already doing it.
Inspired by a poem that had irrupted during the night enroute, one of our co-researchers, Wren, had opened our session that day with an invocation to our grandmothers – the bitch, the witch, the scientist, the fallen Catholic – whether because their presence felt so ordinary, or that our latent ageism, sexism, coloniality ignored them – we had already forgotten they were already there – had never not been there – indeed that us even being here was evidence that they were ‘including’ us in their ‘project’.
It was a moment of hesitation, possibility… A more-than-human what if... A sudden intake of fresh air within the settler colonial (mind)state…
In tears of joy we started to change our language: maybe this was not a project about ‘including’ our ancestors so much as sensingthem? And maybe we needed to show a bit more respect and start acting a bit more like mokopuna – that we are not the boss, not the centre of the universe. Basically our grandmothers had given us a slap on the bum.
My great, great grandmother - Grannie McCarthy.
The thicket of our entanglement with forces outside of ourselves has been both hanging over us and irrupting from below in ways that crack our colonial episteme, our thick skin, destabilising our sense of exhausted possibility with underground whispers from and of an/other/world.
Obliging us to breathe in the tangles, the (k)nots, paradox, move in mystery, find and follow an/other/way, do such irruptions ultimately require us to cede control? Are they also destabilising our colonial tendencies to assert authority – over earth, flesh, ancestors? Over Indigenous peoples and worlds?
If so, what kind of decolonial response/ability might emerge from this thicket? What could it suggest for the white settler ability to respond to coloniality?
In the Pākehā collective, we are experimenting with TTP as a practice of being (g)hosted: Can our ancestors (and their in/actions) haunt us from the past so we can be guests in the present – not just of our ancestors but also of whenua and Tangata Whenua aka the two sovereign beings of Aotearoa: our hosts?
Recalling that for the late Moana Jackson, decolonisation is about Pākehā be(com)ing manuhiri.
While previously I’ve responded to the ‘issue’ of our more-than-human entanglement with practices of hosting - TTP (alongside conversations and collaborations with Tehseen Noorani), is reorienting me (us) to guesting - practices that decentre ourselves (as humans, as settlers) and instead ask: How can we be good guests?
Wait and listen for an invitation, take something, follow hosts’ lead, be attentive, appreciative, try not to make a mess, clean up if so, be comfortable? While it doesn’t feel right to make a list, it’s of note that all of these ideas invoke the “leap of faith” called for by Ani Mikaere who, when speaking back to a recurring assumption within decolonial activism that white settler peoples need to earn trust from Indigenous peoples, ends her seminal lecture with a challenge to Pākehā that we actually need to learn it.
Could communing with our ancestors ultimately enable us, white settler folx, to trust in our more-than-human and Indigenous hosts? Is this a leap that could help us to become a counter-colonial kind of human?
