Finding Myself, Trying to Learn the Dance

Spending the night finding myself. It always seems to happen when I listen to the Meditation music on my Pandora. Sometimes I feel outright robbed. I know it is silly and there is no one person to get mad at, but once in a while I have to sit there and wonder why do I have to look so hard without guidance to 'find myself?' I am half Eskimo. My mom is from Norton Sound and I think that is pretty damn awesome. I love my less than averageness. And lately I have been looking into the more spiritual part of that culture. Let me tell you, it is such a hard and solitary task. There is information out there, but pulling it together is an arduous task. I am a very spiritual person. And not tooting my own horn, but I have been exposed to a lot of different Christian beliefs. I have a basic understanding from some pretty interesting angles, and I love to learn. But I got curious about what spiritualism and religion would of been like for my Great-Great grandparents and the people before them. What would they have felt as a connection to each other, the powers that control the Earth and Spirits around them? What would of their connection been to the land and the animals on it? That's the hard questions. I have been trying to find and read books written prior to 1920 to get a feel for how half of my genetic make up would of lived as a spiritual people. A lot of what I am looking for was 'cleansed' by the reigning religious beliefs of the area. They (the priest, nuns and teachers) came in and wanted nothing but to help the poor and unknowing, to help them find the love and enlightenment that they believed was in the best interest of the people. How can anyone really fault them? They felt in their own hearts the love and good they were doing, I actually think that is great. What is sad is the fact that they felt they had to 'erase' anything they deemed pagan or heathen. And that is the sad loss. Spirit beliefs and being one with the land is such a big subject. It's an interesting point of view to say the least. I love it. But do I really have an idea of what people from my family's neck of the woods spiritual beliefs would of been? Some of the information lumps the Canadian Inuit, Russian Eskimo and Yup'ik (Southern Alaskan Eskimos) ideas with other areas of Alaska. I am sure it was such a foreign concept to the first European or Russian observers that it was hard for them to see the fine lines of division between one group and the next. I won't judge. But I do wish I could of had a better connection with those before me. I wish I could ask them the deep questions of why things are the way they are. And how I can best serve myself and others as I plod along in this existence? Maybe I am looking for someone to tell me what my dreams mean and how I can keep feeling like a properly behaved human? It really does not matter why I am looking for answers to these questions and the millions of others. What matters is the connection I feel I have with my family and ancestors, I suppose. Those who came before me are the ones who created the sculpture I see in the mirror every morning, whether I had met them or not. They are the ones who taught their son's how to provide for the family, or the daughters on how to care for the young. They were the stepping stone for what I am today. I don't really question if I am worthy to walk among the living Earth, I just would like to know the steps to this dance sometimes, to make it more beautiful than it is.