One Hundred Years of Dirt Quotes

“To understand a person, you must understand his father. This is true of Rodney and it is true of myself, too. Ours is a trauma passed from one generation to another, family heirlooms that are bequeathed by the living. There is an emotional and financial poverty that flows from these wounds.”
― Rick Morton, One Hundred Years of Dirt

“One of the most astonishing examples of this comes from a study in 2014 of the Överkalix people of northern Sweden who were kind enough to make incredibly detailed records of births, deaths, family lines and stores of food stretching back centuries. The cycles of feast and famine allowed researchers Marcus Pembrey, Richard Saffery and Lars Olov Bigren to track generations of children who were born in surplus or deficit, and here’s the rub: for boys, their grandfather had the ability to shave thirty-two years off their average life span, even after other socioeconomic factors were taken into account, if he had lived through a boom year with plenty of food. These grandfathers were passing down their genes, sure, but their genes were already set in stone when they experienced famine. What the study, published in the Journal of Medical Genetics, revealed was that they were also passing down their experiences. Incredibly, when the study was expanded, the researchers found that grandmothers who had been starved of nutrients while in the womb passed on a significantly greater risk of early death to their granddaughters”
― Rick Morton, One Hundred Years of Dirt

“Tragedy is a snake upon the continent, undulating through the thousands of years. The dispossession of Aboriginal people came first, blunt and traumatic, followed by the self-inflicted wounds of families like my own in places already well-versed in suffering. They were a grain of sand pushed aside by the belly of the serpent; a speck among countless others that gave the earth its raw, red hue. My father escaped”
― Rick Morton, One Hundred Years of Dirt