THE GIFT by Louise Mandell, QC LL.D. (hon.)

"...Jewish people survived, as distinct Peoples, living centuries without land, because we kept alive our laws, prayers and traditions, allowing the law to speak to us, and through us, to guide our lives day-to-day. For Indigenous land based cultures the same is true but both the law and the land is alive and carried through this way. I venture to say that these great living and powerful forces of laws and land speak through our DNA. Survival depends on this.

Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, presented the astonishing hypothesis that “you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

But other forces are also are play through our DNA. There are now over 400 papers published on the transmission of Holocaust trauma. It is scientifically confirmed that trauma transforms the DNA, and is passed down the generationally, altering behavior and immunity. Our biology becomes our biography. The holocaust is alive in me. Colonization is alive in Richard. We carry sorrows that are passed to us from early generations, those to handle besides our own and cruelties lodged where we cannot forget.

Richard and I ask questions: Can we also pass healing through our DNA? Can the powerful healing of ceremony change our DNA? Can we align with the wisdom contained in Indigenous laws, providing a kind of inner map, a geography of the human spirit, bringing together the fragments of our lives by taking up a new way?

One part of this answer depends on science, which I leave to the scientists, but another part of this mystery I know something about..."

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