Every Palm Sunday for a few years now, I’ve been moved to tears when we sing “Jesus, remember me when you come into Your kingdom.” It brings to mind my father and his faith. His faith was simpler than mine; where he had absolute faith in the sacred powers of the world around him, I only had fear; where he believed in the living divinity of Jesus Christ, I could only question; and where I found judgment and rejection, he found only trust and love.

Like my mother, he practiced and had belief in both traditional Wolakota practices and Christianity, though he thought combining them was disrespectful to both. What I remember most about him were his hands. They were amazing, strong but hewn by hard work and full of veins and scars. Those scars included corresponding marks on his palms and the back of his hands. He told me he was born with them and he thought that in a life before, he was one of the criminals crucified with Jesus. I never knew if he was trying to pull one over on me or if he did have them from birth.

He would say that he was probably Gestas (the criminal that Christian tradition tells us mocked Jesus). But the way he lived his faith and in his later years, when heart attacks, arthritis and other infirmities humbled his bravado, I thought of him more as Dismas (the one who repents and asks Jesus to remember him).

As my spiritual director advised me, I have begun deepening my relationship with Christ. I scarcely know how to achieve such a thing outside the confines of directed prayer (Mass, confession, the Rosary, Morning Prayer and meditation, etc.). That’s not because I don’t have faith I don’t believe, but because in hearing Christ’s message (as I understand it), I try to live the set of values that drive what I do, as outlined by Christ: justice, mercy, compassion and love.

All the objective arguments go through my head whenever I consider Jesus Christ. There are no surviving Roman records of a radical rabbi put to death in that time frame. And, even if there were, we might not ever truly know more than what that record might show. Many regional, ancient cultures had similar mythology of a human savior born of a god, delivered by a virgin. And of course, the gospels were recorded centuries after the noted events in the life of Christ. All those things are true and correct. So what good is my faith in Christ if it is born of dubious origins and has been used by flawed, power-crazed human beings to oppress the vulnerable?

It’s the message of Christ is what my religious relationship is founded on, not the human messengers and human institutions of Christ. Humans are flawed, humans are faulty, and humans get things wrong, even when it comes from a place of love.

The love from the divine is perfect and eternal. It’s not simply a nice fairytale we tell ourselves to be comforted in hard times, it’s experiential and subjective to be sure, but it has lit the way for millions of human beings from the beginning of our sentience, perhaps even before. Love from the divine asks nothing but gives everything, including what we as human beings are unable or unwilling to give because of our own hurt, distrust and character defects. It offers us eternity.

What we build as human beings crumbles. In the fullness of time, we are forgotten as societies rise and fall again. Most of us will be forgotten by our own as they pass on. As my parents’ contemporaries grow older and as some have passed on, I find myself understanding more the working aspect of the divine. Whereas when I was younger, angry and petulant, I thought that since god did not conform to my expectations and my will, there was no god. Then, I became a nihilist, not only rejecting the value of god, of self, but rejecting the value of others. Thankfully, in surviving addiction, depression and suicide, I’ve come to understand that light exists in the world and while I may not always understand it, I don’t have to.

I’ve come to think of the people in my life as stars in my own universe. Sometimes, they burn brightly and are momentary, sometimes they shine long enough for me to find my way and very few times, they hold me in their orbit long enough for me rely on them and they replenish my spirit. When I lose someone I care about or love, I commend them to the care of god. God’s ability to care and love them beyond my meager ability is absolute and unceasing. They become stars in god’s universe, each perfect and long-lasting with god’s care.

From age to age, god never ceases to gather a people to itself (or so the Eucharistic prayer goes). What that helps me to understand is that the greatest ideals of humanity are embodied in the divine from one era to another. There is a reason why mercy, compassion, justice and love continue to be themes throughout human existence, because it’s to what we aspire, even in the fullness of our own inhumanity.

So as my Lenten reflections focused on the absence of people and things in my life, I’ve come to respect and cherish the gifts that god gives, whether they’re a phone call, a text message or a good conversation with someone I care about. Those moments will live forever in the mystery of god and they will be a guide post for me to deepen my relationship with Christ as I remember all those who go into His kingdom.

An aspect of my life that has been crucial to forming this version of myself that I don’t often talk about is being in recovery. In the program that I work, anonymity a founding principle, not because of shame nor stigma, but to avoid the conflation of recovery with any sense that the individual is entitled to full credit and thus, feed the ego.

That being said, recently, I was asked to tell my story. It got me thinking about the principle of carrying a message of recovery and in my former profession (journalism) there are many who were open about their own recovery in a humble fashion, the most notable I appreciate is the late David Carr. Many have written memoirs about their experiences of recovery, some to their detriment, some to be a source of experience, strength and hope for those struggling with their own recovery.

While my own story is as long as it is boring and tedious, in recent weeks, I’ve been reminded of practicing gratitude as an essential part of my program of recovery. Because when I start to forget that I’m not the center of the universe, I start to go back into old behaviors that leave me restless, irritable, discontent and most of all, angry. And for too many years, I was too angry and that hindered my progress in being a full human being.

The component of being grateful isn’t to marginalize or dismiss any actual challenges I face in my life, but it’s to help me understand the fullness of the journey I’ve made this far. There’s a saying that has always stuck with me, “It doesn’t matter how far down the road I go, I’m still three feet from the ditch.” It’s meant to keep us humble, knowing that life is a tricky exercise, always ongoing, always challenging and always fraught with the potential to search for instant gratification.

Sobriety as it’s regarded in programs of recovery has changed my life for the better. For many years, I was angry, bitter and resentful. I was angry at god for putting me through what I considered constant and unfair challenges: making me brown in a society that lives in the supremacy of whiteness; making me gay in a world that doesn’t even begin to fathom the arbitrariness of the sexual or gender binary; and making me believe in a god that would allow contradiction. I was bitter that because of my skin color, my culture, my faith, my body size, I would always be considered less than equal in the gay community. I was resentful that my brain worked differently from others, constantly wanting love and affection from people who didn’t respect me as a human being; and resentful that at such a young age, the family I loved fell apart around me.

In these last few years, I have experienced a change in my life that helps me to understand that all my anger, bitterness and resentment only ever hurt me. Sobriety has helped me to understand that I am not at the center of the universe and that I’m not even at the center of my own universe. I’ve come to accept that in order to be free of all these, I have to accept that life happens as it’s going to, that I have no control, nor should I seek to control people, places and things around me. I’m no longer the most important person in the world and that has helped me to be there for my dying mother, wipe the tears of my nephews and nieces and to be present for my friends as they go through their challenges: it’s no longer about me, it’s about other people.

Of course, my daily experiences are nowhere near that level of spiritual cognizance. Most days, I’m working under low lights, waiting for the next bright flash to happen. I have my challenges in sobriety, just like anyone else. When my sponsor relapsed this summer and then, a good friend this winter, I knew what was happening, the missed calls, the midnight texts, the proclamations of love, the last-minute cancellations with convoluted excuses and outright lies. It took all I had not to break down and to join with them in their sorrow, wanting to share with them in their misery.

But there in was how sobriety had helped me to understand that I am only as useful to god and to other human beings as I can be because my program helps me to understand people, places and things in their complications. Sobriety has helped me to understand that no one and nothing is wholly righteous or wholly evil. We all exist in modes of complexity that are both confounding and miraculous at the same time.

At my lowest points, I will spend days at a time with only myself and god. I ask god why I am the way I am and why things are the way they are. And god never answers, truth be told, god’s days of angels and burning bushes are so far behind us that to seek those answers are foolish. These days, when god speaks, it speaks in action, in demonstration and in opening doors where only I had seen walls before. It shows me that without action, my best thinking, my best prayer and my best intentions are meaningless.

Because my old behavior is to indulge my resentment, my anger and my bitterness, I work my recovery again. I meet new people, I make new friends and I strengthen the bonds between the people who honestly care about me. And in those actions of connecting and reconnecting, I am put into a place of joy and reminded that while I’m not the center of the universe, I don’t need to be, because in recovery, others are more important and when I hurt, I trust that god (as I understand god) will not let me wither away or sink too far into despair.

This world is full of hatred, anger and rage. As human beings, when we succumb to our darkness, we do more damage to one another than anything in nature ever could. But when we open the door to one another in hope and love, we can do far more good for one another. Because truth be told, all we ever have is the day in which we currently exist. There’s no justice in rehashing the past and there’s no security in making grandiose plans for the future, there’s only today and the people in it who care for us and who strengthen us.

In recovery, I’ve come to appreciate living from day to day and being there for others when they call for me, just as I call for them. In recovery, I’ve found a place I belong from one moment to the next, free from worry and regret, free from anger, hate and remorse. In recovery, I’ve found love and it affirms me.

 

My father was born on this day in 1933 at Yellow Thunder Camp. He was brought into a world where he spoke only Lakota, slept under the stars, traveled by horse or wagon and the connection to the origins of our people were ever present. When he was six months-old, he was adopted in the hunka ceremony and raised by George Big Owl and Lorene Sleeping Bear in Corn Creek. When he was still a child, Grandpa George gave him the name Hoyekiyapi (Calls for Him) in honor of a fallen comrade from World War I.

As the story goes, Grandpa George’s kola was pinned down during a battle in a foxhole and was wounded but George was not able to attend to his friend. Throughout the night, his friend called to Grandpa George, calling his name. Early the next morning, when the shooting had subsided, Grandpa George was able to get to his friend’s foxhole, only to find him dead from his wounds. To honor his friend’s memory, he gave my father the name.

(It’s a name my father gave to me when I was 11 months-old. The old traditions tell us that we’re not to use our Lakota names in public, but in this age when our names carry such history and weight, the only honor I can give to my father and his memory is to pass on the story of his name.)

As his life continued on, my father had more challenges than one should. He always regarded his life as one of hard work that, if he had had the proper education, might have been slightly more prosperous. But in the long run, it formed him into a complex person riddled with contradictions and confusions, who always strove to do the next, right thing.

My friends and I recently saw “The Revenant” and everything about it is well done. The rhythm of the film, the cinematography, the score, the acting, the directing is all compelling. The story, however, was simple. It’s about a father who does everything he can to ensure his son is cared for, can stand in the world and, ultimately, attempt to dispense justice.

In the film, at one of the turning points, the father is unable to help his son when danger comes. He is literally paralyzed by a broken body. As the danger comes to its full and ugly fruition, the father can only sit by helpless, unable to move. It reminded me of my father’s third lesson to me: “I’m not always going to be here.” In his later life, my father was crippled by multiple heart attacks, arthritis and congestive heart failure. Whenever I would do something young and stupid, he would ultimately come to bail me out but not before lecturing me and reminding me that he was an old man.

In the film, the white father tells his son (who is half white and half Pawnee) after a tense moment, “They don’t hear your voice! They just see the color of your face. You understand?” That was a striking moment, perhaps for most Native people in America. My father’s second lesson to me was that others only ever saw me as a dirty Indian. And their hatred could not and would not change that fact.

Those two lessons stick with me even to today. While my days of holding resentments are mostly finished, I’m reminded by the virtue of the life my father lived that others do not see me as a human being, they see me as a thing, a savage or any other combination that demeans my whole personhood. And there’s nothing I can or need to do about changing other peoples’ minds about that fact, other than stay true to myself.

This past Sunday, the Gospel reading was the Parable of the Prodigal Son. It’s the one wherein Jesus gives the example of a young son who wants to be cut free from his family to live his life unabated and free from his father’s influence. In the story that Jesus tells, a son can reject a father, put entire worlds between them, but the bond of parenthood is such that a father will always be joyful when he sees his son again. “But now we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.”

In my life, I rejected my father on a few occasions. It was never enough to drive us apart completely, but it put distance between us. In my petulance, I judged my father harshly, I thought he was too ignorant or too cold to understand my life. In reality, he grieved for me, that I could ever be away from him because in his life, all he ever sought was the love of his parents, it was the only thing he wanted to be affirmed in: love.

In my father’s first lesson is where I find my greatest joy: remembering that he loved me. All the other lessons would be useless without this first lesson. My earliest memories are of playing with my father, him chasing me around the house, catching me, tickling and kissing me on the cheek while saying, “My sweet, sweet, beautiful, baby.”

The last time I saw my father was after he went on his first plane trip from South Dakota to Reno. My nephew and I ran to greet him and he hugged and kissed both of us. The last night he was on earth, I said goodnight and he hugged and kissed me again and said, “Goodnight my baby, I love you.”

Even in these days when I don’t ever know what is certain, what is right or what is true, I can look back on everything my father did to strengthen me. Complex as he was and hurtful as he could be, I know he wanted to strengthen me for the world that will change around me, just as it changed around him. He began from the starting place of love.

And for that, I am grateful.

When I interviewed for a position last fall, the interviewer asked me to name a privilege I had in the world. The first, true thing I could say was that I was a man. Apparently, no other male applicant had even considered this a privilege worth mentioning and she was pleased that I was cognizant of this fact.

In Lakota culture, we are taught that women are the backbone of our society. Women carry the children, women make the home and women have a source of strength that has seen our people through lifetimes of bitter defeat, agonizing loss and inspiring survival. Our culture also has a legacy of listening to our elders when they impart their wisdom. In my life, most of those wise elders have been women. They are the ones who’ve not only created and nourished our culture, but who keep us safe and secure in affirming ourselves from day to day.

“Remind yourself every morning, every morning, every morning: ‘I’m going to do something, I’ve made a commitment. Not for yourself, but beyond yourself. You belong to the collective. Don’t go wandering off or you will perish.”

Rosalie Little Thunder, Sicangu Lakota

Our culture also emphasizes the distinction of women, neither in terms of inferiority nor superiority, but in their unique roles and abilities within our society. As my Uncle Albert reminds us in his book, the greatest respect and honor we can give to women is to understand that they do not need us to guide them in how they prosper and thrive.

“In our culture women set their own guidelines, their own rules. They discipline their own members. If a woman breaks their code, they women’s society will discipline her. In the same way, if a man breaks the men’s code, then the men’s society will discipline him. There are certain areas in which women do not allow the men to participate. Women have a lot of medicine specific to them. They have some physical needs that are different from men’s and specific medicine to address those needs, and men do not have any participation in this knowledge. Men are never taught about these medicines. The women handle it all themselves.”

Albert White Hat, Sr., Sicangu Lakota

Lakota society – and indigenous societies in general – thrive as well as we did without the need for a patriarchal system enforced with religious and political control because we knew that while living in the world is challenging enough, we don’t need to start stratifying our own and pitting ourselves against one another. It’s a quality, in which, most Native cultures find strength. As we continue to retrace the steps of our ancestors that have been washed away through colonization, we still have guide posts that remind us we are on the right path.

“If you look at who you are today as women, what are the rights that you have – especially our white sisters. Where did that come from? About 20 years ago, feminist historians began to have the eyes to see where suffragists like Matilda Joslyn Gage, Anthony, where they got their ideas from about women’s equality. It was from the Iroquois nation because the majority of those suffragist women had been adopted by the clan mothers. So they began to get their ideas about women’s rights and they adopted many of their ideas about women’s equality from those clan sisters from the Iroquois nation.”

Tillie Black Bear, Sicangu Lakota

What I’ve learned in my short years is that I appreciate the role of women in our society more than ever. Whether they lead, encourage, foster discussion or challenge our status quos, women are the backbone of any society. Their place is where they see best fit to be, without judgment, without second-guessing and without disparagement.

As an externally-identified cisgender male, my privilege is best put to use by listening, doing what’s asked and only offering my own experience only when it’s asked. Our society as it stands now is designed for my benefit, not for women, so it’s my responsibility to ensure that women have every opportunity to be heard and granted the same respect to come to their own conclusions and actions. I can certainly disagree, but simply because I may, that does not mean women’s roles, responsibilities and opportunities are mine to dictate.

In terms of identifying as a Two Spirit, what I can draw strength from is the best understanding that both men and women in the culture, in which, I grew up have cultivated over the years. While I can take from those understandings, wisdom and experience, I can also pass them on wherever I go.

Ultimately, what strengthens me is knowing my tiospaye. My father’s mother did what she needed to ensure her son’s survival in the world, including letting him go to his hunka relatives and aunts and uncles. My mother and her mother were the keepers of generations of tradition, knowledge and wisdom that was delivered to only a few of my cousins and I. In those acts of courageous love and ordinary duty, I know who I am, where I come from and where I’m going. The confidence I carry with me is built on the teachings of my grandmothers.

And for that, I am grateful.

Very recently, I was honored to add my name to an open letter (“This Land Was Made for Decolonized Love”) to Indian Country about the damaging opinions of some Oglala Lakota elders who spoke out against marriage equality on the reservation. The whole of the piece can be read on the first news site that offered it a place: Dakota Free Press.

This subject is a complex issue in Indian Country, to be sure. The compounding oppressions can be difficult for non-Natives to understand, particularly in an American society where our collective consciousness guides us more in the direction of justice over oppression. It seems common sense that the first nations of this continent should align with the recent gains of all LGBTQ Americans’ right to marry.

We still battle our own, internalized oppression in many ways. As tribal nations, we who are citizens have layers of genocide, colonization, enforced religion, abuse, alcoholism and addiction that compound our experiences as human beings to deconstruct. As a writer much more talented than I once wrote about our fights said, “How do you keep fighting these smaller injustices when they are all from the mother of all injustices?”

Indeed. In these times, as Native people in this country, we find ourselves in positions where the institutional, political and individual racism, discrimination and remnants of termination have far-reaching effects. Every proposal has been brought forth from well-intentioned but misguided U.S. senators who tried to make us farmers to churches that believed once we accepted Jesus we would prosper to business leaders who claim monopoly in a closed economic system would surely bring prosperity. In all their various iterations, these proposed solutions to the problems that face Indian Country have all been attempted and all have failed.

The basis of these proposals are flawed because they are not solutions from within tribal nations, like their predecessors of conquest, they have all been ushered in from white, Christian America.

“We write this statement to honor all of our elders and ancestors. Some were viciously abused inside colonial institutions that were anti-woman, anti-child, and homophobic. Boarding schools, designed to kill our cultures, were filled with sexual abuse and torture. The system of individual land allotment tore our ancestors apart, denigrated extended family systems and collective landholding. Government-led Christian missions and Indian agencies further obliterated our spiritual and cultural identities with laws about how to marry and when, and with whom to have sex. Government-aided churches tried to force us to accept their rigid, unforgiving notions of love and relationships.”

Growing up on the reservation, my parents and hunka parents would speak of the process of how I would marry, with the implication being that I would marry a woman. When I came out to them, the talk of my marriage and their grandchildren faded away. While I love and honor my parents deeply, I have to understand that they struggled with how to reconcile the parts of their worldview that were colonized by years of Catholic and Protestant Christian dogma with the reality of having a gay son. It took me years of recovery to work through the anger and resentment I felt in their heartbreak (as my father called it) of seeing their son as a full human being.

And I was fortunate.

I was not disowned, I was not rejected and I was not called upon to repent or convert. It was because on some level, at least my mother understood that what mattered more was demonstrating to her son that a parent’s love is unconditional.

When I came out, we shared a moment that I’ll never forget, tears in our eyes and she said simply, “you’re my son and there’s nothing you can do to make me stop loving you.” And there is nothing more Lakota than loving your children at all stages of their lives. That is the moment that demonstrated what decolonizing an indigenous mind looks like. She had been able to overcome years of abuse, religious indoctrination, addiction and fear and it had taken her forward to wisdom when she became winuhcala.

“We write this statement as a reminder that the foundations for this change were set long ago … ‘marriage’ – as we know it today: between two people as a state institution – never existed historically in Lakota society … Our views on romance respected individuals’ sexuality and were far more advanced when compared to today’s conservative Western standards.”

When I speak of privileges, I’m fortunate that I can count my parents’ acceptance and love as my own privilege. It prepared me for a world where I am continually denigrated for my skin color, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, educational background, faith affiliation and size. There is nothing that makes a child as strong as knowing their parents loved them as fully as mine did me. And in that, some day, I hope to pass on the value of decolonizing our minds to the next generation of Sicangu Lakota, be they my own children or my relatives.

While we as Native people continue the process of reclaiming our political, spiritual and cultural sovereignty, we cannot ever afford to exclude those of us who identify as LGBTQ/Two Spirit. We are diminished when we reject one another based on flawed thinking. As a people whose spirituality of being good relatives survived war, famine and colonization, we can no longer afford to employ the divisions put upon us by our oppressors.

As my mother taught me as a child, when we venture too far from camp, whether it’s to gather, hunt or play, we risk losing the sacred spirit that dwells within ourselves. We must always call our spirits back to us. As she called out for me as a child, “Alfred hek’u! Wan unglape!” Indian Country must call out for its LGBTQ/Two Spirit relatives once more to come back, we are going home.

We must be careful to recognize ongoing colonial harms and remedy them in culturally-appropriate ways when we have the power to do so. In this case, too, it is possible to fight for more just and healthy relations, this time among humans. Our own tribal histories provide the path. After all, we are all related, not just some of us. Mitakuye Oyasin.

When I met with my spiritual director last week, I had told him about my spiritual and religious life in under an hour (no small feat). His observation: “You seem to be able to carry a lot of tension within you.” My response was that the only tension I feel these days is external tension, internally, I’ve reconciled a lot (being a practicing Catholic, practicing and understanding my traditions, having doubt and being rational, being queer, being pro-choice, etc.). A lot of that credit goes to my mother.
When I first asked her about my being confirmed in the church, I did so with the belief she would be offended and tell me that I was a horrible son to even consider such a thing. After all the psychological and emotional abuse she and her sisters had in the mission school, I almost wanted her to excuse my interest in deepening my Catholicism. But instead, she said a remarkable thing: “That’s mine, don’t make it yours. I had to do a lot of work to forgive them for what they did to me. So don’t make that yours.”

On two fronts, it taught me valuable lessons. The first was that she had taken personal responsibility for her own emotional welfare and the second was that beautiful things happen when you do hard work. In a time and place where we were surrounded by inter-generational trauma manifest in alcoholism and addiction, we all would have been justified in losing ourselves to our fear, regret, guilt and shame, but she recovered.

The second part of forgiveness is one with which, everyone struggles. At certain points in my life I’ve thought of it in terms of “I’ll forgive but I won’t forget,” or, more cynically, it’s terribly convenient to institute a belief system where you can be excused any crime because “Jesus” or because “forgiveness.” But having gone through my own forms of recovery, I’ve understood what my mom meant: resentments that remain unexamined and nurtured only hurt the person holding them. The best process of acceptance is to understand that we do not control our own lives, no matter how much we think we do or how much we think we’re entitled to control them. Life happens, deal with it on its own terms.

When it comes to the Christian/Catholic bit, the thing I appreciate is Jesus. My doubt, reason and rationale allow me to entertain the very real possibility that Jesus didn’t exist at all, or if he did, he’s probably an amalgamation of new people and new ideas at the time and what made it to the written form could very simply be a fraud. Yes, all those things can be true and so can the faith from which it all springs.

It’s human nature to hope, to love and to dream, it’s what makes us individually and collectively valuable. The hopes, love and dreams that repeat themselves in our experiences over time is what’s inspiring, that generations of humans have all had a shared experience of the best of us keeps me going. And so, I think of myself as a Christian, as a human, as Lakota, as queer, as a relative and all those things can be embodied in my experience of Christ.

I understand not everyone’s experiences are like mine and I don’t blame anyone one bit who’s been hurt by organized religion who calls for its downfall, that’s human too. But when we hate more than we love, when we fear more than we dream and when we despair more than we hope, we lose that part of our humanity that drives us to do good things for one another. And I don’t think we could live our lives as well as we do some days if we don’t have those.

A constant theme in discernment for me is how to live, gracefully, at the intersections of many faith experiences.

Today’s Gospel reading was Luke 4: 21-30. The summary is basically that Jesus was preaching in the synagogue, saying that prophecies were being fulfilled and the congregants asked him for proof of his divinity. Seeing where they were going, Jesus said “no prophet is accepted in in his own native place” and quoted scripture as a justification for not performing miracles in front of them, which was a way of saying ‘hell with you, I don’t need to show you my I.D.’ Now, objectively, that crowd was absolutely justified in its anger because reading it, I cock my head to the side, squint and think, ‘now that’s pretty slick, Jesus, what else can you obfuscate?’

The joy that red flag brings me is knowing that for all my church-going, I haven’t checked in my ability to reason. I have doubts and I accept them and they help me to understand the context of human nature. Now, if Jesus did exist and this account was written by a human, I get to be fairly certain that the author got to rewrite history. But, we believe the Gospels and scripture to be true and the Word of God. So where does some snitty little person like me get to doubt the Word of God?

So the one thing I like to rely on is the catechism’s teaching about the nature of God: God is eternal, infinite, incomprehensible and ineffable. Incomprehensible and ineffable give me great comfort in faith, believe it or not, because it means that paradox also gets to exist in the incomprehensible and the ineffable. So when I read about Jesus doing a quick song-and-dance after being called out on some miracle-working, I get to live in that doubt, because the Word of God – like god – is paradoxical. What registers clearly to me as fairly fraud-laden behavior can be true because my faith in god is based in my inability ever to truly know god fully. And who would want to, all argument would cease; or it would all continue with all sides being right (though archconservative Catholics would say I was entertaining subjective truth or worse, relativism, rather than objective truth).

But the part of the scripture that I appreciate is the last part, where the crowd goes to throw him off a cliff for being so cavalier about their need for proof. He walks away and continues His ministry.

As a Sicangu Lakota who was raised in Wolakota and the church, I’ve made my peace with being able to stop giving a care about what other people think of my faith. I have relatives who are archconservative Catholics and Born-Again Christians who have told me I need to accept Christ fully in my heart by voting against marriage equality and being washed in the blood of some lamb at the nearest Republican Party headquarters.  Conversely, I’ve also been told by former American Indian Movement leaders that I’m not a ‘real Indian’ because by embracing Christ’s message of love and understanding it in terms of being a good relative, I’ve abandoned or rejected so-called ‘Red Ways.’ Being raised by traditional parents, I don’t know what these pan-Indian terms are because I grew up with the faith practice that my Lakota ancestors practiced for generations without the need to conflate them with other tribal traditions in the need to overcompensate for any lack of cultural knowledge.

What those of us who live our spirituality and religion as genuinely as we can in Native communities do know for sure is that sovereignty isn’t just a buzz word that tribal council candidates use to get elected. Sovereignty is a way of living our lives where we’re free to practice – without seeking validation by outsiders – what faith resonates with us, whether it’s Wolakota, Catholicism, paganism or Buddhism.

When my mother died, I carried out her wishes for her wake and funeral just as she wanted me to do it. We honored her with song, as the women in my family trilled each time my mom’s name was sung, and we said the Rosary before the funeral Mass where we processed to the Four Directions Song. During this, one of my favorite cousins pulled me aside and said, “If grandma were still alive, I think you’d be her favorite because you’re doing everything she would have wanted.” To hear that was a greater comfort than I can express, because it wasn’t just kind words, it was the moment of connection from my cousin who grew up with my grandparents (who both passed before I was born) to me and my brother’s children. It was a moment where the infinity of god existed by witness of one, small Native family’s journey of faith through centuries.

Though those are moments of subjective truth, they exist in the objective one that god’s nature is indeed ineffable and incomprehensible. So god threw me a moment where I can understand that connection a little deeper, if only for a moment.

“Once Iron Shell, as headman, was among the last to leave the old village site during a move to a summer camp location. As he and his family proceeded they came to aforlornly ancient woman sitting alone with food and water near by. ‘What is the reason you sit here, Grandmother?’ the headman inquired.

“’I’m old and worthless,’ replied the old woman. ‘My son can no longer care for me, so I shall sit here to die.’

“’But that is not right,’ said Iron Shell. Arranging her upon a travois with her meager bundles, he made her a member of his procession.

“When Iron Shell’s party reached the new camping site, he led the old woman on the travois to her son’s lodge. It was a poor family, for they possessed only one horse. Iron Shell called upon the son, saying, ‘Here is your mother.’ And pointing to the horse and travois, he said, ‘Here is a horse for her. Don’t you ever again leave her like that.’ And the son was glad. As long as the old woman lived, the son dragged his mother from camp to camp.”

The Sioux by Royal B. Hassrick

Growing up with a family legacy of leadership isn’t exactly what most people think it is, at least not in Western society. In America, we equate leadership with politics, business or faith and we fall back on the models of George III or even Caesar Augustus. We hold up patriarchs who are either completely pious in public or who eschew material wealth in favor of being seen as “of the people.” That paradigm is rooted in the Western concept that there are social strata to be honored.

In pre-contact Lakota society, leadership was a meritocracy. It was gifted by the consent of the families to those who demonstrated genuine compassion to everyone. It was generally a lifetime appointment, but it was not absolute and it was not hereditary by any means. If the next generation of a leader’s family demonstrated the same values that the previous generation enshrined, leadership would be granted and if they didn’t, the service position was given to those who demonstrated it with their actions.

As a child, I was told many times that I was descended from chiefs, with the implication being that my ethics had to be in keeping with our families’ values. Those values generally went along the lines of generosity, bravery, fortitude and wisdom. As a modern Lakota society, we’ve increased those values to include concepts like humility, perseverance, respect, honor, sacrifice, love, truth and compassion. Personally speaking, I hear my father’s laughter along with the mocking phrase, “hoh, ece!” when I think of 12 virtues, as opposed to the four I grew up with; I have a hard enough time keeping track of where I put my keys, much less adding eight more concepts to my belief system. My personal belief is that so long as I practice the four, the others follow in time.

Knowing that the legacy of my ancestors and my parents was one of being a good relative to all beings helps me to understand my place in the world. There was a time when my ambitions exceeded my talent and my skill and when I realized that, it was a hard fall. But what reflecting back on how my parents, their siblings and cousins, were raised has given me reminds me that I’m not the center of the universe. The connections between others, the beautiful chaos and random order of events that governs the physical world and the source of it all – call it what you like – is what’s at the center of the universe.

Throughout the years, I’ve deconstructed my systems of belief, my religious affiliations, my experiences of reality through thought, consideration, hypotheses and even addiction, to try to make sense, to make order of it all. The problem I’ve had was going through the ashes of what burned away and wanting to keep them intact and ignoring what withstood my own self-will and attempts to control life and remained. This is the paradox of being human, we ignore what’s obvious for the sake of what’s comforting and even then, not all of us do it in the same way. But what remains is the faith, ignore it as I may have tried, it’s what sustained my ancestors and it’s what has sustained me.

Looking back on the stories from six generations ago, I often wonder if my ancestors ever had any inkling of the changes that were coming. According to family history, they did, when one of them sought a vision, but we don’t know how explicit his vision was because of the human error involved in communicating those stories across time. But even without explicit knowledge of conquest, battle, war, famine, death, rape, conversion and assimilation, their values and their virtues endured seven generations. It makes me ponder the things that I could never conceive of and how my descendants will survive and thrive in the face of it all.

The answers are complex but inform me that when I live with generosity, bravery, fortitude and wisdom, the legacy I leave is one of hope, joy and gratitude for those who follow after me.