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Articles

Vol. 13 No. 1 (2022)

From the Womb to the World - A Girl Learns Her Mother’s Story

  • Deidra Somerville
Submitted
June 2, 2023
Published
2022-05-26

Abstract

The article explores the continuity of the village through the experiences of four generations of women, each working within her own conscious knowledge of mothering, mothering practices, and her role in village life. The author tells the story as inheritor of indigenous ways of knowing passed on to her, the coloniality that disrupts and dismantles the practices she inherits and how decolonial praxis informs her voice, choices, and practices in response to coloniality. She contextualizes her family experiences through the motherline, the impact of coloniality on the motherline, and how each daughter sees herself in resistance to forces of coloniality and how their stories unfold. The motherline serves as a means through which mothers pass on to daughters strategies to resist coloniality and construct a narrative that centers her in her own womanhood. The author discusses potential ways to restore the motherline and heal connections to familial ways of knowing that have been weakened over many generations. She incorporates motherline theory and decolonial theoretical frameworks to explain how four generations of women reflect on mothering and healing and the act of finding and holding our space in the village.