Abstract: Indigenous sacred places persist through time. Contemporary suburban and urban spaces might obscure their visibility, devalue ancestors embedded in ground, and enforce erasures. Dedicated memory and insistent practice in the ongoing Indigenous Nations along the Algonquian Atlantic recover and raise ancestors. These are not solitary acts; rather, protecting and activating sacred places requires collective, intergenerational advocacy. In this autoethnographic essay, I interweave memory, experience, and research to record and promote a full awareness of urban lands as Native lands, sacred lands. The Piscataway sovereign home along the Potomac River, sometimes called the United States’ national river, is sacred in breadth and depth. This river place is sacred as a time-transcendent portal to ancestors, to an interrelated life source, and to ourselves.
Gabrielle Tayac (Fri,) studied this question.