What's in a name?

While googling an Irish rugby team, I stumbled upon the actual spelling of my name - the one my mother gave me.

It was long since I had known that the name "Kerry" was synonymous with "the black sheep."

That is certainly the role I played in my family.

My mother thought her mother was Irish,  but now it's looking more like her mother was born in Ireland because her earlier Scottish ancestors had heeded the call to the Contention of Ulster in 1608, while being cleared off the Scottish Highlands to make way for agriculture and exclusively noble deer hunting, and, most significantly, to displace Irish people from their own farmlands in the northern reaches of Ireland and introduce a kind of ecocidal, British (Roman) commercial agriculture in their place.

It was hard for me to learn the true history of my fairly recent origins. "Recent," in that, the name I'm tracing only goes back 400 years - the people I know now have names that go back 6,000 years, to the last flood. That is to say, where I grew up is the well-remembered ancestral territory of the Secwepemc. 

My name, Kerry - or Ciarrai - comes from the lad whose father fled Ireland in the flight of the Lords. Ciar was his name, and he went down to the southwest of Ireland, maybe to lick his wounds, maybe to survive the British conquest in displaced defeat. The place where he came to live was called Ciarrai - Kerry - the "ai" or "y" being added to the name since that tail referred to the place where the subject lived.

So, I realized, I was named for a man who fled his homeland for survival, was displaced by Imperialism, yet was so well-recognized that the place he fled to was named for him. 

Ciar-ai (Kerry) is the place where Ciar lived.

I don't live anywhere now. I guess the legacy of displacement has come down to me along with the name.

I feel sorry for having a name that was stolen,

and not even understood.

I feel sorry for living on lands and waters that were stolen,

and having no opportunity to return them, 

since I'm just a black sheep - 

ignored and dismissed.

I feel angry

that humanity has somehow divorced itself, my family among it, 

from the world that we have the rare privilege of belonging to, and tries instead to own it from a place of detachment.

And still there are many ways to live beautifully and peacefully and in reciprocity, although it may sometimes involve making a flotilla to blockade the dredging of an inlet for more oil tanker traffic.