Ancient tribes and families of generations past gathered about the firelight at night to hear and recount the sagas of how they had come to be at that place and time. For millennia we have felt ourselves compelled to pass along the stories of our forebears, for we are the living and they, the dead. We are linked together by birth and time and by remembering them, we remember ourselves. The Keepers of the Stories record each ancestor's name with a birth date and death date and, between them, to represent the life of each, is placed a hyphen: 1900-1980. It seems as though the genes we inherited from them implore us to decipher the hyphen.
By respecting their lives, we respect our own. In their seasons they were shimmering green leaves upon the tree of life and at the closing of their days, they withered, and falling from the tree, became the forest floor. Without a remembrance of them, our own tree of life is rootless. They travelled the same journey that we now travel and we know that our destinies are one. Their stories are of bravery and determination as they embarked upon treacherous seas, seeking better lives. They were fearless before the primitive land. They felled trees, planted crops, constructed homes and reared children. As their legatees, we received a goodly heritage.
We, the Keepers of the Stories, seek their final resting-places. They were the Early Americans and we honor their sacrifices. A great land emerged from the sweat of their brows and the fomenting of their ideas. They relentlessly fought the wars to preserve freedom and the pursuit of happiness, purchasing our liberty with toil, great danger, treasure and blood. To have participated in the building of America was not a small endeavor. We find the overgrown cemeteries, bury grounds, graveyards where they lay resting. We know that the hallowed bones, in the earth beneath our feet, are our own bones, with our own DNA, and we protect them from the desecration of modern times, as this is what respectful people do.
We Keepers of the Stories name, number, record and keep track of the ancestors because they are our own. We know them from the primordial, mysterious love that lies embedded in our beings. We believe that if we allow their past to be lost, our future is imperiled, for the dead are our teachers. We are living not only our own lives, but also the lives of our forebears, for they are us. We are who we are because of them. So, with great pride, we scribe what we can find of the ancestors and, as we do, there comes a faint whispering - "never fear those far off mountains, never settle for the path of least resistance, take chances for they are worth it and, most importantly, make us proud". For though our forebears are dead, we Keepers of the Stories believe that they speak still. ~~Edna Barney
