Best King Ever - sometimes you get lucky decolonializing

When S was three, she became obsessed with King Tut after seeing this picture in a magazine.  For months, she would cry herself to sleep because he was dead and had been the "best king ever."  We read every book about Egypt, we learned about mummies and pyramids and all the gods and godesses.  We drew pictures of Egypt and made life size sarcophoguses.  One of these we still get out at winter solstice and hang on the door with a Santa hat. 

We made death masks - I still remember Joel telling S that she could not put the death mask of king tut on her sister and very confused and unhappy baby.  We played barbies who went to the afterworld to ask for their souls back and ask hard questions of Anubis about who they were letting into the afterworld (I will do a post later about how we gave in on barbie with some shame.)

We made a barbie sized temple of osiris and dolls of the gods.  The temple even got a washing machine and barbie made osiris do the laundry telling worshipers that "he can't come out and listen to your prayers right now.  Osiris needs to finish his chores."  The temple is awesome and we still use it as our shrine for the ancestor pictures for the solstices.

At the time it was just a weird interest, but unintentially it was a powerful support when we came to moving our family towards a more metis/aboriginal way of life and thinking about the world.  It also helped with decolonialization.  S learned about Ancient Egypt long before she learned about Christianity.  When she did learn those ideas and stories she was positioning them in a world view that started from pre-christian times and could appreciate the stories for how they fit into a much longer time scale and drew from much older themes.

I learned that the bible was true.  Those stories were true.  That nothing else was true.  It never stuck me as weird that you ate the body of christ and drank his blood. That a world dominated by men, where women were shameful and carriers of sin was the norm. She saw them as another story of blood sacrifice and symbolism from a patriarchal period.  While some people were quite worried about how this child would grow up not knowing about the bible she seems to have done quite fine.  She gets some of those stories as part of the stories that proceeded them and linked into the larger collective myths of redemption and creation.

When we wanted to come together in a circle as a family, talking about our ancestors and learning from the collective wisdom of our people, that was all natural to her.  By supporting her interests we never meant to position our child as a follower of Osiris, but by leaving her early world open to her she got a chance we never had, to see the world a little bit more clearly without the lens of christianity. I learned not to be afraid to leave things open and see where they lead you us.