“I’ll Fly Away”: A Genealogy of Maternal Loss and Leave-taking

By Rozanne Gooding-Silverwood

 

The over-medicalization of dying often renders family conversations about what constitutes a “good death” fraught with confusion and denial. This thesis examines one family’s breach of that forbidden storytelling terrain in a search for meaning and belonging in the face of death and loss. Incorporating Charlotte Linde’s theories of “narrative acquisition” and Cree historian Winona Wheeler’s indigenous perspectives on generational memory and kinship/relations, this intergenerational project veers from distinctly Western perspectives of interviewer/interviewee power relationships to consider familial “obligations” as essential to the preservation of ancestral knowledge about death and dying. To make meaning from deeply personal narratives of loss, the project’s narrators rely upon a shared emotional language they call “the maternal dialogic.” The resulting “conversations” evidence the valuable role that oral history serves as family members negotiate the end-of-live needs of loved ones while also navigating the varied emotions arising from bereavement and the reality of our own inevitable ends.

 

Rozanne Gooding Silverwood graduated from the Columbia University School of General Studies, receiving her undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology at the age of 63. Her thesis “The Indigenous Uncanny: An Ethnography of Erasure and the Resurgence of Chickasaw Identity” examines genealogical artefacts evidencing her Chickasaw ancestors’ efforts to preserve indigenous identity in the face of territorial and cultural erasure. During her graduate studies at Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts program (OHMA), Ms. Gooding Silverwood recorded family members’ narratives about death and bereavement. Putting these deeply personal memories into conversation with archival photographs and mementos, Ms. Gooding Silverwood produced an audio-visual project “I’ll Fly Away: A Genealogy of Maternal Love and Leave-taking” that demonstrates the usefulness of oral history in helping family members make meaning from the loss of loved ones while also serving as a tool for the preservation of traditional knowledge and collective memory for future generations.