Greetings beloveds!
My name is noah mcdonald, sometimes lovingly referred to as Mupuhkik, short for Mupuhkik wunne, by my partner in her language, Nipmuc. The name started as a joke to make fun of my encyclopedia-esque lectures that seemed to happen at any time and in whatever setting. Mupuhkik Wunne best translates to “a good head” or could be interpreted as a way to say someone is smart. I’ve always had a deep interest in non-fiction reading and could be found with my head deep in a book since a very young age. While I enjoyed sports and games as much as the next kid, more often than not I found myself better understanding the world through my intimacy with land, animal beings, and books than I did through people.
I grew up in rural Ohio on a 25 acre homestead where my parents kept chickens, sheep, an orchard and a large garden. In contrast to our neighbors’ corn and soybean fields our land, my parents let the land transition to meadows and bushes. That regrowing made for an incredible landscape – a recovering landscape – that nurtured my imagination, learning, and exploration. While I don’t feel the need to uplift education as the sole shaper of my intellectual identity (schooling accounts for most of the things we need to unlearn), I will mention that I have a B.S. (lol) in Biology and Religious Studies from Guilford College in Greensboro, NC.
I am interested in seeing the worldview offered by western science on ‘equal terms’ with indigenous sciences, cosmologies, and epistemologies. I seek to craft a story using my own genealogy and lineages to do deep dives into the ‘past’ and understand the origins of global imperialism and its practices- ecocide, patriarchy, colonization, and racial capitalism. Storytelling is the most important thing we do as humans and it is the means by which we construct and interact with the world we inhabit. Our stories form our truth and shape the reality we inhabit. In a sense, the blog will be a story of who I am and is attempting to communicate the world I live in. It will help detail how I have transitioned from a secular world deeply rooted in European exceptionalism and supremacy to one with a (relatively) clear understanding of how the present has come to be.
My fathers family has been living in the same region of North Carolina – the Upper Cape Fear – since at least the 1760s. It is currently unknown when and where most of our ancestors arrived in North America. Two ancestors are confirmed to have been born in Africa and came to North Carolina through Virginia. We are likely Yoruba, Igbo, BaKongo, with some contributions from Senegambia, unknown Native people, and the British. My father is the 3rd youngest siblings of 10 and was raised by my grandmother Martha McDonald. My grandfather and grandmother sharecropped tobacco. When my grandfather died when my father was 3, my grandmother continued sharecropping tobacco in order to keep our family together, and was able to purchase a plot of land and built a home in Holly Springs NC.
My mother’s family is middle-class Irish Catholic from central New Jersey. She grew up the 3rd oldest with 7 siblings. My mother’s paternal side are descendants of settlers from northern, southern, and eastern England, Alsace, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Most of them came over in the 17th century and lived across the coastal Northeast from NJ north to Boston. Her maternal side came from County Roscommon in Connacht and the city of Youghal in County Cork, Munster during the Famine. While I grew up with the comforts of a middle class childhood, my parents ways worked their way into the middle class navigating a myriad of challenges.
I’ve started this blog in hopes of having an outlet for the reflections I have on the research I’ve spent my whole life doing. While I can’t promise I’ll stay in any particular lane in my writing, I am most often interested in history and narrative perspectives that relate to my own ‘identity’ and shape the world I live in. Most of my posts will be focused on constructing a picture of the lives of people living in pre-colonial and Contact-Era Eastern Woodlands, West and Central Africa, and Britain and Ireland. I hope to utilize my family’s story to ground a shared narrative of how the hell we got to the place we are today.
With gratitude,
noah
noahpedia 