Alli Joseph Leonard, a Maplewood resident, is the president of Seventh Generation Stories.
In our busy world, people too often focus on today, not tomorrow. Saddled with smartphones, laptops, tablets, social media and more, we are more and more out of touch with our past – simply put, we are losing where we come from. Many times, because things are moving so fast and each of us is pulled in many directions, we may lose family members before their time – and before their stories are told. I know, because it happened to me.
When I was a journalist and producer in my twenties and early thirties, I never focused on my own family history. My mother Barbara, the family historian, was diagnosed with cancer just before I found out I was pregnant with my first child. Subsequently, I spent much of that pregnancy desperately trying to capture my mother’s thoughts, voice and face on different media before she faded away. Mom died just six short months later – eight years ago today – and never got the opportunity to meet her grandchildren. I felt cheated: my daughter would not have Grandma Bobbie’s wonderful stories about our multicultural family at her fingertips, and I knew this could have been avoided. It remains my greatest regret.
My mom, a professor of American Studies, was one of only a few women of color to get a PhD from Columbia University in 1985. She lived her life in the service of others. The service of love and helping, you might say. She liked good wine, but never spent money on other material things. She wasn’t rich, but she had abundant gifts of wisdom and the kind of love she taught me to pass on. She gave her nights, her weekends, and her holidays to her students and perfect strangers alike, counseling them as she had done as a young social worker in the 1960s. She helped them through love, relationships, unwanted pregnancies, abuse, and much else of difficulty. Barbara, in the truest sense, paid it forward. Learning of her illness, I wondered when she would be paid back in the currency of love, which she expended so much of. She turned her helping heart and history-focused mind to me countless times throughout our lives together.
With this impetus and inspiration, in 2009 I founded Seventh Generation Stories (www.7genstories.com), bringing to it my 19-year background as a reporter, producer, writer, published author and documentary filmmaker. My rich ethnic heritage –I’m Jewish, English, Irish, Shinnecock Indian and African American — informs the work that I now do, as does Native American oral-history traditions and the conservation philosophy of the Seventh Generation (act in a way that will positively affect seven generations living after you). Seventh Generation Stories celebrates life, project by project. I offer personal historian services (also known as life story-telling or oral history) to individuals and groups; as such I have developed sensitivities to family pain, joy, and hope, and the tremendous humility I feel when an elder chooses to entrust me with their life story cannot be simply explained.
Honoring our elders is a key theme in my Native American heritage. I see beauty and light, release, and sometimes, redemption in the stories of my clients and the feelings they experience once they share their stories for posterity. It’s so important to get mom, dad or grandma’s stories while they can still tell them clearly, before they become confused or infirm — which may well happen at some point. I like to say I specialize in the living, leaving the dead to genealogists, generally speaking. All of our elders have a rich legacy to leave, and wisdom to impart, whether they think so or not.
So when you are buying holiday gifts, consider this: unlike material things that will be forgotten by next year, doing a personal history for your elder is something that will get pulled out around the Christmas table or fire year after year. And even if the project ends up in a bookcase one year instead of on the coffee table or the TV stand, I guarantee that after all the food has been eaten and the presents opened, or the menorah candles have burned down — someone will remember. And then, even after grandma is no longer physically in the room, she will be.
This Thursday, December 3 at 9 am, I will be appearing on First Voices Indigenous Radio on WBAI (Pacifica Network) out of New York, 99.5 FM. We’ll be talking about saving family stories at the holidays, the oral and matrilineal storytelling traditions of Native people, and how listeners can very simply begin the process of saving their own or their family’s stories for future generations. Call or listen in to learn more about oral story-saving traditions, and tips for saving stories around the holidays.
Sure, I get paid for some of what I do, but I also lecture to non-profits and other groups about the import of saving their elders’ stories as I failed to do, and in so doing teach people how to do the work themselves. I evangelize to audiences and particularly younger people; implore them to care now, not later. As a result, perhaps, I see more people caring — showing the kind of love to their families and elders that I learned the need for, the hard way. It’s like the old adage, “Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.” If more people know how to do this work, they can help themselves save stories of love, and in the service of love, teach others. It’s my way of paying it forward, and hopefully, paying Mom back. At least, I like to think so.
Our very lives, we owe to our elders. So this holiday season, I want to give each and every reader here a gift – and that gift is one of foresight, of legacy, of hope. There is no time like the present to save the past. Start today.
