Call of the Ancestors: An October Practice of Remembrance, Reflection, and What We Carry Forward

Every October, I observe something I call Call of the Ancestors.

I made it up.

And the first time I really said that out loud, it felt a little strange. Who gives me the authority to create my own observance?

Then I thought: I do. It is my life. It is part of my spiritual practice.

We already organize our lives around days that governments, religions, cultures, and institutions have decided are important. Some of those days mean something to us. Some do not.

I have learned that I can also create intentional places in my own year for what I consider sacred.

Call of the Ancestors has become one of those places.

It is not an established religious holiday. It is not a tradition I inherited from a particular spiritual system. I am not claiming that everyone should observe it.

I am creating it for myself.

And it is still becoming.

What is Call of the Ancestors?

For me, Call of the Ancestors is an October observance centered on remembrance, study, family, spirituality, and responsibility.

It is a month when I intentionally turn some of my attention toward the people who came before us.

I know some of them by name.

Many of them I never will.

And that matters to me because I do not believe ancestry begins only when we can build a complete family tree.

Personal ancestry is the people whose lineage I can trace directly.

But there is also what I call collective ancestry.

These are the generations of people whose lives, labor, culture, choices, survival, creativity, traditions, resistance, relationships, and sacrifices helped shape the world I inherited.

As a Black American woman, much of my attention right now is naturally turning toward Black American history and the lives of enslaved and formerly enslaved people.

Not because those are the only ancestors who matter.

They are simply the ones speaking the loudest to my curiosity in this season of my life.

I am especially interested in the everyday ancestor

We know historical figures by name almost everywhere.

Those people matter.

But most of our ancestors were never famous.

They were somebody's mother.

Somebody's father.

Somebody's daughter.

A farmer.

A carpenter.

A blacksmith.

A cook.

A midwife.

A healer.

A caregiver.

A person who knew how to grow something, build something, repair something, prepare something, teach something, or help somebody else survive.

They loved people.

They lost people.

They worked.

They rested when they could.

They laughed.

They celebrated.

They worried.

They created.

They raised children.

They made mistakes.

They adapted.

They lived entire human lives that may never appear in a history textbook.

Call of the Ancestors is especially for the everyday ancestor.

The people whose names may not be remembered publicly, but whose lives mattered anyway.

Part of remembrance, for me, is research

I do not want ancestral remembrance to become only an abstract idea.

I want to learn.

That may mean reading books, studying historical records, visiting museums, walking through cemeteries, visiting historic sites, listening to oral histories, learning about trades and occupations, studying religion and spirituality, or understanding what was happening politically during a particular time.

I want to know more than what happened to people.

I want to know:

What were they doing?

What did they know?

What were they creating?

What did family look like?

How did they care for one another?

What did they believe?

What did they celebrate?

What did they have to navigate just to make it through an ordinary day?

That is one of the things history can lose when we reduce human beings to categories.

An enslaved person was not only an enslaved person.

That person also had a personality, relationships, abilities, responsibilities, knowledge, preferences, fears, values, humor, skills, and a life.

Part of my work during Call of the Ancestors is putting the humanity, dignity, worth, and respect back into the historical story.

I want to understand people within the environments they lived in.

That is also where my social-work lens naturally enters the conversation.

What was happening to the individual?

What was happening within the family and community?

What systems were surrounding them?

What choices were actually available?

Who had power?

Who did not?

What did people have to do to adapt?

And what meanings have generations carried forward because of those environments?

I do not always know the answers.

Sometimes the question itself begins the work.

Call of the Ancestors is also about the living

October also sits near the beginning of a season when many families start spending more time together.

And family connection isn't automatic just because people are related.

Lives get busy.

People move.

People marry.

People have children.

People work.

People become caregivers.

Some family members remain very close while others may only see one another a few times a year.

So Call of the Ancestors also makes me think about the people who are still here.

Who haven't I talked to?

Who haven't I seen?

What stories do I still have time to ask about?

What does my grandmother remember?

What does my mother know that I have never asked?

What happened before I arrived?

What traditions do we still practice without knowing where they came from?

What have people been doing with their lives since we last sat together?

And what memories are we creating now?

Because there is another part of this that keeps becoming more important to me:

We are somebody's ancestors too.

One day, if our names are remembered, we will be the people somebody else is trying to understand.

What are we passing forward on purpose?

This may be the question at the center of everything for me.

Remembrance is not only about looking backward.

It also gives us a chance to decide what moves forward.

Families carry things that deserve to continue.

Recipes.

Stories.

Names.

Photographs.

Values.

Songs.

Ways of gathering.

Ways of caring.

Humor.

Creativity.

Faith.

Ritual.

Craftsmanship.

Hospitality.

Community responsibility.

And there are other things we may decide do not need to continue simply because they are familiar.

Inherited expectations.

Roles that no longer fit.

Silence around things that need language.

Relational patterns that keep everyone stuck.

Ideas about who we are supposed to be that no longer belong to us.

For me, honoring the ancestors does not mean copying everything that came before me.

It means understanding enough to make a more conscious decision about what I carry.

That is where remembrance becomes responsibility.

This is part of my spiritual practice

My spiritual practice does not always look like formal worship.

Sometimes it looks like prayer.

Sometimes it looks like sitting quietly.

Sometimes it is a candle, tea, incense, a book, or a journal.

Sometimes it is being outside and noticing the moon.

Sometimes it is listening to birds in the morning.

Sometimes it is watching a squirrel do squirrel things.

Sometimes it is painting.

Sometimes it is studying history.

Sometimes it is sitting with a question long enough for my understanding to change.

And during October, some of that attention turns toward the ancestors.

I may read.

I may visit somewhere connected to history.

I may sit with family photographs.

I may study the life of someone who is not part of my biological lineage but who represents part of the collective history I belong to.

I may learn something that changes how I understand myself.

The practice does not have to look exactly the same every year.

I do not need it to.

What Call of the Ancestors is not

Because I created this for myself, I also want to be clear about what I am not claiming.

Call of the Ancestors is not Hoodoo.

It is not Día de los Muertos.

It is not an established African spiritual tradition.

It is not a religion.

And participating in it does not require someone to believe that deceased relatives are literally communicating with them.

Those traditions and beliefs deserve to be understood within their own histories and communities.

This is simply my personal October observance and spiritual practice.

Other people may recognize pieces of their own traditions or experiences in it, and that is fine.

But I don't need to place my practice underneath somebody else's tradition for it to have meaning.

Collective belonging matters too

Another reason this practice matters to me is this:

I have not traced my entire genealogy.

I hope to do more of that eventually.

But I refuse to believe that I must know every name behind me before I am allowed to know that I belong somewhere.

Sometimes we begin with the collective.

I can learn about Black Americans living during a particular period even if I cannot yet identify exactly where my own family was.

I can learn what people were experiencing.

What laws shaped their lives.

What work they performed.

What communities they built.

What they celebrated.

What they resisted.

What they created anyway.

That gives me context.

And context has helped me understand myself many times throughout my own growth.

Sometimes understanding what shaped the people who came before us helps us understand what shaped us.

That is part of Soulful Growth too.

Call of the Ancestors is still growing

I do not have a rulebook for this.

I do not want one right now.

I want to let the practice grow as I grow.

Maybe one year I will spend October reading.

Another year I may travel to places connected to my family or collective history.

Maybe I will attend an event.

Maybe I will visit a museum.

Maybe I will spend more time with living relatives.

Maybe I will create art.

Maybe I will sit quietly with a candle and remember.

The point is not performance.

The point is attention.

To remember.

To become curious.

To study.

To reconnect.

To tell the stories we can still tell.

To recover the humanity that history sometimes flattens.

To spend time with the people who are still here.

And to think carefully about what kind of ancestor I am becoming.

For now, that is what Call of the Ancestors means to me.

Remember the people.
Learn the stories.
Tend the living relationships.
Choose what we carry forward.

And then keep living.

A note on perspective

Call of the Ancestors is a personal spiritual observance created and practiced by Whitney Inez. The reflections in this article represent my lived perspective and developing interpretation. When future articles explore specific historical events, people, religious traditions, laws, or professional theories, I will distinguish those claims from my personal interpretation and support them with appropriate historical and scholarly sources.

References

Because this article introduces my own developing spiritual practice rather than teaching an established historical or professional framework, its primary content is lived perspective and interpretation. Specific historical topics referenced only generally here will be researched and cited in the individual articles where I explore them in depth.