Molly McGettigan Arthur
Molly’s speech at Golden Gate Park, invited by Ejna to speak
I thank Ejna for inviting me today to speak, it is a generous and compassionate and peace-making gesture to include me.
I am a sixth generation Californian, a descendent of Spanish Conquistadors and soldiers who came to California with Junipero Serra and a fourth generation San Franciscan, a descendent of Irish Catholics who came to San Francisco in the 1850s. I grew up a few miles from here. And was educated and formed by the Catholic nuns here in San Francisco, as were three generations of the girls in my Irish clan. I am intimately attached to San Francisco.
It took until my fifties to start looking at my lineage- both Mexican and Irish-here in the place where I live as do my granddaughters. I learned of the myths, ideologies and beliefs of my ancestors that perpetrated genocide, massacres and on-going oppressions, still seen today in San Francisco and California. I realized that my own privilege, insularity and naivete were based on my family’s white supremacy and patriarchy and the ability to assimilate into the colonized capitalist system.
My great great grandfather is General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. California school children learn about him, it is unlikely they learn that he was appointed as Director of Colonization here in Northern California and was an enslaver of the local Indigenous tribes on his Ranchos or that he sponsored a California law that allowed continuing that slavery and voted into law the US policy of extermination of local Indigenous with bounty paid for their body parts and endenturing and enslaving of their children to white families.
My other great, great grandfather settled in Stockton and Redwood City. He was a General during the Civil war and was called by Mark Twain, “The best Indian Killer in America”. He perterated the Bear RIver Massacre in 1863 in Utah.
My Catholic order of nuns ran an Indian Boarding School in the early 1800s in Kansas, financed by the federal government and enslaved people at their school in Missouri. I learned of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery that undergirds the structures of exploitation and oppression in history and still today.
I renounce the Christian horrors perpetrated by my Catholic Church and my Catholic ancestors. I will no longer let them use my name for perpetrating horrors.
I have grasped that this history is a part of me, I embody it, including the perpetrations and toxic poisons. I know that my most important self identity is being a mother, and it is tainted by these inheritances and made my body possible of harming my most precious children and grandchildren. I feel grounded in this inheritance as a part of me. It has given me my path towards reparation and healing.
I stand for truth-telling of what caused and is still causing pain, wounds, trauma and death. I repent for my lineage, my legacy and embodiment. I commit to atonement and to healing. I work with non-natives, colonist settler descendants and in particular the Christians who are also embedded in their legacy of terrible history, who look for their accountability today and their obligation to repair and atone. I call our efforts- Decolonizing our Hearts.
I am privileged to be invited by Ejna to be with her today, to declare together that we stand for life-giving and all of our world and universe’s well being. And we will do everything we can to be the nurturing, caring and compassionate people that our Creator has called us to.
I support MotherBaby and MotherEarth as guidance to be in this world with love and care for our human and more-than human relatives and kin. I proclaim my origins in the stardust of our universe, with goodness and the abundant love of our Creator.
May we honor all life, treat it as nurturers and heart-lovers and embodied goodness and love.
Molly's other writings about being a descendent of colonial violence
