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Kathleen O'Brien Blair's Page
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Profile Information
- Tell us a little about yourself
- I would like to connect and correspond with Native Gaelic Traditionalists & Tradition Bearers, as well as Celtic Studies & Gaelic Cultural Studies academics in the Hearthland of Ireland, and the Diaspora. All Tradition Bearers of material or oral and folk custom welcome.
I'm a writer, researcher, family genealogist, housewife, gardener, animal lover, environmental advocate, knitter-together of people and ideas, Truth-speaker to power, Gadfly, Renaissance-woman, veteran of both the United States Marine Corps and the United States Air Force (1980's), and First Groupie to my husband Frank Blair.
My husband Frank Blair is an IT manager for a sportswear company in Portland, OR, an arkwright, silversmith, and musician. The song selections here are all on his CD's and there is a link to his squarespace page in my links section.
Both of us were bred and born in Missouri, moved to Oregon 4 years ago, and wouldn't think of going back.
My father's people are the O'Briens, O'Hallorans, Dohertys, O'Reillys, McCleans, Shannons, Walkers, Holmes (the last three were Plantation)
- What's your Irish link?
- Great grandparent/s
- What's your first language?
- English
- What does your Irishness mean to you?
- My closest Irish immigrant ancestor is Cornelius O'Brien, my g-grandfather, who appears in the Highbridgeville, Westchester County area of New York, in what is now The Bronx, in 1850. He and his parents hailed from County Clare. He married Mary O'Halloran in 1872 in Connecticut and died in 1894 in Hartford, CT.
Being an American of Irish extraction means bringing the Traditions of all of my ancestors - both Gaelic (and Brythonic on my mother's side) - into the American experience as my dowry and contributing them to the marriage that makes what Bob Dylan called "old weird America."
To do this I pick up and re-employ the Traditions of my Gaelic ancestors in the art of everyday life. The oral culture (source tales, music, prayers, poems, genealogies, Land mnemonics, language, etc) *are* the Liturgy; the daily & seasonal folk and civic customs of both family & community (cross-roads dances and Céilí, horse-races, planting & harvest, Pattern Days, etc) *are* the Ritual, of Gaelic Traditionalism and its Diasporal iteration as well.
I work every day to simply pick it back up and re-employ it in my daily life. There is nothing to reconstruct, reconstitute, revive, or otherwise "re-paganafy." The culture comes down to us by direct and mimetic transmission, as the Palimpsest that it is: living, whole, intact, vibrant, functional, and viable in the truly biological sense of that term. It contemplates a tripartite, culturally unique, cosmology that at once transcends and encompasses its pre-Christian, Christian and post-Christian expressions, as an embedded uniquely cultural religiosity that is not fungible from the cultural whole.
The only authority on the Gaelic cultures are those cultures themselves. The Gaelic cultures of the Hearthland of Ireland (as well as Scotland, Man, Galicia and Asturias) - and the Tradition Bearers thereof - are the living Witness Trees to which to refer back and from which to plot the course forward. They lay down the living Holy Template and replenish the Well from which to drink. The Gaeilge (Gàidhlig in Scotland) then is the liturgical language of Gaelic Traditionalism and is being picked back up and re-employed in the Diaspora for that reason.
The core of Gaelic Traditionalism is The Family (derbhine - tuath) at The Hearth, and their familial & contractual/Sacred Marriage relationship to The Land upon which they dwell and from which they derive their living. This applies to city dwellers as well as country dwellers. The Land is mnemonic device for the history of The People and holds within it the Nativity of Place that defines those People on that Land.
This has been the definition used by Clannada since 1991 and was formulated in consultation with three essential collaborative groups: Tradition Bearers and Gaelic Traditionalists in the Hearthlands of Ireland and Scotland, academics in various areas of Celtic Studies, and Tradition Bearers among some American Indian Nations. It was those AmerIndian Tradition Bearers who suggested that European-descended Americans would benefit from re-employing the living Traditionalism of their own ancestors, rather than simply try to pick elements of AmerIndian religious practice as a substitute. In many of the modern AmerIndian Nations those of their Peoples who are picking up and re-employing the traditions of their ancestors and ancestral ways, are called Traditionalists, and it was they who suggested that the word Traditionalist combined with the ethnic descriptor such as Gaelic, (or Brythonic) would be a good way for those of us in the Diaspora, to name that cultural activity.
Thus it was at that juncture in 1991, that the term Gaelic Traditionalist and Diasporal Gaelic Traditionalist (and the Brythonic cognates) entered the American lexicon as terms of art. When I encountered this terminology in late 1991, it perfectly described the approach all these generations of my family had been taking and transmitting at the family dinner table.
- What interests would you like to share with other people
- Tradition Bearers, cultural anthropology of the Gaelic Cultural Tradition, gardening & permaculture, history, music, among many others.
- Do you have a website or club that you want to let others know about?
- Frank Blair - Music Art and Beyond http://fblair.squarespace.com/welcome/ and http://www.myspace.com/fblair
Maldon Meehan http://seannosdance.com/
Clannada http://clannada.org/
Clannada Public List http://groups.yahoo.com/group/clannada2/?yguid=204508370 (no anonymous subscriptions)
Irish Culture and Customs http://www.irishcultureandcustoms.com/
Genealogical Forum of Oregon Irish Interest Group http://gfo.org/intgrp/irish.htm
The O'Brien Clan http://www.obrienclan.com/
BookCrossing http://www.bookcrossing.com/home
Comhairle Na Mumhan http://www.munsterdancing.com/
Tonn Nua http://www.tonnnua.com/aboutus.htm
Favorite Quotes
"The English language brings out the best in the Irish. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter. They hurl it at the sky like a paint pot full of rainbows, and then make it chant a dirge for man’s fate and man’s follies that is as mournful as misty spring rain crying over the fallow earth." - T E Kalem
"What's the point of being Irish if the world doesn't break your heart?" - John F. Kennedy
"People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors." - Edmund Burke -1790
"Men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time. - Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797)
"What's the point of being Irish if the world doesn't break your heart?" - John F. Kennedy
"People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors." - Edmund Burke -1790
"Men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time. - Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797)
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Éirin go Brágh
I just went around collecting bugs in matchboxes and fishing for crawdads in White Aloe Creek.
Honestly, one of us has to have been adopted.
-Caroline
PS: Hey, Kaki - what the hell does 'plantation' mean in reference to the Holmes line? It congers an image in my mind of Basil Rathbone (and -did you know he was Margaret Mitchells' first pick for Rhett Butler?).
i my
Would really love to meet you if you get to Hartford.
There are a few good Irish pubs in the area among others.
I do intend to get started on the book next month. Right now I am swamped - long hours at work and my daughter's wedding the beginning ot May. After the wedding things should start to get back to normal around here - if there is such a thing as normal in my life.
Thanks for the link to here on Clannada. I really enjoy all your posts to the group and have learned a lot from you over the last few years. Look forward to meeting others through this site.
Dana
This was a fascinating read. I simply had no idea about any of this material. What was particularly interesting what the intervention of the AmerIndians and how they refocussed a community back onto itself. I'm gonna start investigating all this fascinating stuff.
Karl