Ash Wednesday: Seeing Ralph

Hoyekiyapi, , Leave a comment

It took me 40 years to understand my part in my relationship with my father. Frankly, I think I was mostly a mystery to him most of the time. It probably wasn’t easy parenting a child who was quiet in public and so loud in private, the contradiction must have been confusing.

I heard on the radio today how engaging teenagers about their day was a good way of staying curious. So much of parenting is akin to programming a new device, the frustration comes around understanding that we are the young ones’ first lens on how to make sense of the world; we often get judgmental when their opinions diverge from our own. So staying curious—asking about a child’s day—helps to be open to how they’re living their life.

My Ate would regularly ask me how my day at school went, mostly about what I learned. At one point in my childhood, I cracked him up with the reply “one plus one equals two.” It was the kind of ridiculous humor he liked, so I’d give that as my standard answer when I couldn’t think of anything.

But as I got older, he was put out and would get insistent, “Hey! I’m serious! What did you learn today?” and I’d shrug my shoulders or I’d think of the most outstanding thing, but mostly I’d shrug.  

He loved the idea of education. Mostly because, I suspect, he finished school in the late 1940s with an eighth grade education, perfectly sufficient for the circumstances at the time. The system, in which he survived, was designed to turn him into a farmer if he was insistent on continuing to live and stand in the way of colonization. But he rebelled and obsessed about education. He would receive a certificate in mechanics from United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, North Dakota in the 1970s before he came home with my mother to tend to family matters.

He wanted me to be educated, in fact he would brag about my report cards to his closest friend who, in turn, would call me “professor.” I had always interpreted this as the reason why my father wanted to know what I learned in school each day, a way to hold me accountable beyond what the teachers would gush in conferences. But he wanted a relationship with his confusing, backward child, when it got urgent, I got the hour-long lessons that began with, “Let me tell you something,” or “Come here.”

Today, I thought of him trying to stay involved in his child’s life. Not an easy thing for a cagey, sullen, emotionally volatile teenager with a non-boozy social life on a rural South Dakota tribal nation. My teenage selfishness denied us the opportunity to have a deeper, genuine relationship. I didn’t want to be bothered at the time.

After I came out, we skated quietly around each other, his heartbreak at the idea that he wouldn’t have any more grandchildren (a false, heterosexist attitude at the time and in retrospect, an understandable gap in information) and my heartbreak over the idea that I would be considered a disappointment the rest of my life. But we found repair in my consistency and willingness to put our family first through the financial and living sacrifices I made at the time.

So Ash Wednesday is the day I give myself permission to feel like absolute shit. It’s the biggest day of the year where my Christian practices allow me to accept the reality that I am, indeed, a flawed human being. The rest of the year, I get to be sovereign, Indigenously brilliant, joyful, wrathful and free. But on this day, I get to confront myself in my errant ways, I get to apologize and to literally beat my chest three times. It is restorative to be that kind of honest with myself.

I thought of my father and the relationship I denied both of us from an early age. Psychologists would say that, being a child who didn’t know any better, I didn’t know any better and can hardly blame myself. But there is something falsely comforting in that analysis. It’s why my recovery program is useful to me in these times. Holding myself accountable for tending to relationships is my growth work because my mind-centered way of life inherently forgets that others in their emotional beauty have perfectly valid feelings, about how I do or don’t interact. The possibilities that open up are multiplied when I open myself up to curiosity. May I find joy in curiosity this Lent.

Hello 2023 // Goodbye 2022

HoyekiyapiLeave a comment

Omaka Teca Oiyokipi, Mitakuyapi! / Happy New Year, my relatives!

It has been one whole minute since my last offering and I’m grateful to you all for sticking with me through this wild ride! When I started my Substack, it was mostly as a place to publish some ideas that had fully formed, baked, and were decorated. As I’ve learned, that takes more time than I actually have in a given day. But that does not mean I am deterred.

Writing is what I have come to love to do as an adult in the world. It’s a choice I made in my teens to be a journalist and while I’ve gained a lot of expertise in media of storytelling, writing is where I feel most at home. But in 2023, I have resolved to write more often. “In Media Rez” is a play on the phrase, “In media res,” or “in the middle of things,” and is a narrative structure I fell in love with in the mid-2000s as a student who was trained to think in a linear fashion.

But, as I’ve learned in these 40 years, so much of what we do and consume is perpetually unfinished in the mind of the creator and we dive in where we can to find some sense of belonging. So I thank you again for being patient as I find where I belong.

2022 was a formative year in Indian Country and here are some important things that stood out to me:

In Media Representation

“Reservation Dogs” finished its second season and gave us many iconic moments that made us laugh, made us hold our breath, and made us cry. Its creator Sterlin Harjo was also out front on the national stage last year, discussing how the show came to be and what it means to Indigenous people throughout the country and across Turtle Island. It’s also launched the musical career of Oglala Lakota recording artist Mato Wayuhi.

The cancellation of “Rutherford Falls”  was a hard one to take this year, mostly because series was co-created by Diné screenwriter and filmmaker Sierra Teller Ornelas and starred Lakota actor and writer Jana Schmieding. What makes me grateful personally is that “Rutherford Falls” was released four months before Reservation Dogs and proved early on that Indigenous women-led comedy could sustain itself independently.

The wild success of “Prey” and, once again, an Indigenous woman led role played by Amber Midthunder marked a turning point in how Indigenous people are portrayed in media.

Too often, we are seen as someone’s problem to be solved. That narrative is so pervasive that any time I—or, indeed, any one of my relatives, friends, or colleagues—talk about where we’re from, there inevitably follows a deep sigh, or a rush to comfort or congratulate us for not living on the reservation anymore. Soon follows a discussion about poverty, addiction, and just what can be done?

The answer I have started giving and is illustrated in all of these representations is simply: we have all we need to solve our own “problems” and, in fact, our biggest problem is that our sovereignty continues to be eroded by paternalistic views that we are unable to govern ourselves. The solutions are simple: honor the treaties. Most folks are stunned to learn that the United States and its colonies continue to violate any number of treaty obligations and that when we, as tribal nations, undergo a crisis, it is most commonly rooted in being historically marginalized and purposefully under-resourced by governmental agencies that are legally obliged to honor their promises

—

The War at Home

Over the last four weeks, South Dakota has endured wave after wave of winter storms brought on by the long-term effects of climate change.

It became so bad that relatives back home had to wait for days to dig out, find supplies and in some locations, for power to be restored. The cost in the Rosebud Sioux Tribe was six lives. While the official record from the office of the governor is that Kristi Noem was ‘on the case,’ the word from home is that it took every tribal official cajoling her office and essentially threatening legal action if she didn’t commit to the bare minimum in mobilizing the South Dakota National Guard to provide road-clearing services.

This all harkens back to this summer when a friend in Sioux Falls was left to find creative ways around fallen tree limbs in the city and after the summer derechos when Mayor Tenhaken essentially said that emergency services did not apply to such situations.

Effectively, these basic breakdowns in government—by Republican design—are still in play in the quiet effort to continue the culling of Indigenous and marginalized groups in states like South Dakota. One wonders what, short of a law license, the U.S. Department of Justice, or a creative application of any “Yellowstone” episode storyline, one can one do?

—

What Can We Do?

For now, we can offer our financial support to the family of one 12 year-old Sicangu child who died as a result of being unable to access emergency services.

“Honor was a 6th grader at Sapa Un Catholic Academy in St. Francis, SD. Honor was an outgoing and very friendly young man. He loved spending time with his family and playing sports with his many friends. He was looking forward to playing on the Sapa Un basketball team after the holidays. He and his friends enjoyed playing their online games also. Honor’s passing is such a shock and tragedy for our family and friends. Honor has five siblings who miss him dearly.”

DONATE HERE: https://www.gofundme.com/f/pfmvsq-12-yr-old-died-tragically-in-sd-blizzard

What I’m Up To

I’ve started working for a group called Tending The Soil as the Development Director and it is filling my cup with the rewards of seeing determined advocates for working class Black, Latiné and People of Color in Minneapolis.

“Tending the Soil is a coalition of Minnesota organizations led by people of color that organize in working class communities of color. We are the ones who tend the soil to remove the toxins of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism and nourish our communities to grow justice, self-actualization, autonomy, and collective communities. We exist to lift up the voices of society’s most marginalized members, and we stand in deep solidarity with one another.”

—

Partnerships

When I’m not off the clock, I’m still working in my consultancy and one of my clients has given me so many opportunities to clarify my professional direction in guided facilitation and intercultural development and care. Two of the partners I’ve worked with definitely deserve a highlight here:

Heather Keeler | Two Feathers Consulting LLC

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Consulting for Education, Health Care, and Other Professional Settings: Representation matters.

I grew up in spaces where no one looked like me–from teachers in my classrooms to my school administrators to the people I encountered in health care settings. My passion in life is to make sure no one feels as excluded as I have.

Donavan Begay Poster | INfidelity

“A New Voice In Minnesota”

Tune in to INfidelity where Donavan, a Diné Transwoman shares her stories and lifts Transgender voices that are unheard and face erasure.

—

On The Radio

Finally, for anyone who knows me well, I’ve had a love of radio for as long as I can remember. Whether it was KINI back home, KILI in Pine Ridge, NPR’s All Things Considered at the end of the work day when we would drive home from Rosebud to Upper Cut Meat, radio has been a medium that captures my imagination.

That being said, in 2020, I joined the Fresh Fruit Collective on KFAI here in Minneapolis and began hosting the fourth Thursday shows (7 p.m., Central) after challenging myself to try something new. While I’m still on the air on the fourth Thursdays, all my work earned me a spot as the Friday host of AM Drive: Grand Entry on KFAI.

I designed Grand Entry as the show at the intersections of Indigenous and Queer identity on the radio. It’s a music show that features artists who are primarily Indigenous, Queer (and both) as well as other people of color. I also do my best to include news, guests and perspectives from those communities as often as I can, but I’m always open to guests who I might not know about!

If you have a relative or friend who’s creating or getting things done in the Queer or Indigenous community, send me an email at grandentrykfai@gmail.com!

—

2023 Resolutions

There’s so much more for me to write, but I’ve spent most of my end-of-year vacation preparing myself to actively pursue my creative endeavors. But so far, I have resolved the following:

  • Complete my first manuscript by June
  • Bead more (one item a month)
  • Read more (one book a month)
  • Use my state parks pass more
  • Listen to what my body is telling me
  • Keep better care of my body
  • Create more routines in my daily life
  • Spend intentional, quality time with friends (not just quantity time)
  • Finish my will (just in case, nothing is wrong)
  • Reconnect with my Sicangu relatives here in Minneapolis

I hope that what endeavors you choose this year will be rewarding and fill your spirit and not deplete it. I’m excited to share more of my work here in the next 12 months!

Talk more soon!

An Idea, not An Ideal

HoyekiyapiLeave a comment

At the end of “The Madness of King George,” the previously-waylayed monarch regains his sanity (albeit briefly in the historical context) to deliver the last few lines: “The king is himself again. We must try to be more of a family. There are model farms now, model villages, even model factories. Well, we must be a model family, for the nation to look to.”

There is a weight that comes with any kind of leadership, in this age, we conceptualize it as a liability under law. What do our leaders know (or don’t know) and when do they know (or when don’t they know it) and who is responsible?

One need only look at the slippery slopes that Donald Trump is currently, joyously, slipping downward into his invisible escape hatch to understand that leadership can be stained with the bile and grotesqueries of this age.

Indigenous children continued to be harvested and abused, queer people continued to be persecuted and killed, and all the while working class people in Canada, Australia, and other parts of the Commonwealth of Nations suffered during this past 70-year reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

Being under the crown was no guarantee of being treated with dignity or nobility for many, in fact the condition of being subjects of a monarch often mean that justice was elusive. Or mostly elusive until those nations made for independence of some sort and even then, the persecution then continued behind closed doors.

Yet under that crown are humans. Mostly, as is our wont in this postmodern age of academic-like deconstruction of empathy and kindness, we distance ourselves from the humans under that crown for the sake of our own sanity. We ask ourselves, “Are they divine?” “Are they human?” “Are they special?” “Are they dull?”

Yes, is the answer, to all of it.

So those royals align under that crown to protect themselves and we lionize and demonize them in the same breath, and we all forget their humanity and our own in the process. We become rabid purists craving something so radically different that we will say and do anything to those means. We think of them as a talentless and costly vestige of a dead empire and the inspiration for a nation of millions to look upward toward.

In Wolakota, we are taught to stay humble and to remember that we are common people, we are all relatives, no better, no worse. It was strange to see that the descendants of those first royalists saw us as monarchists as well. They called us the “aristocrats of the plains” but never understood that we shared power and deferred to those with the greatest character and even when they knew that fact, they still called us “noble.”

Even in this miscommunication between the languages of philosophy and politics, there may yet be some wisdom in what it takes to lead, even when the world demands a fall.

It is not enough to simply be against things a whole life long. It is exhausting and takes one to the depths of a soul and changes one to believe that just because one does not see hope, that there is no hope to be had. One must be for something to keep the world going, one must inspire the best in others. One must find a renewal within oneself to carry others in their hard times and one’s own.

There is a story of Maza Ponkeska that was both told to me and written down in some volume. “We were also called The Orphan Band because Iron Shell took in widows and orphans,” my mother would tell me. “One time, they were moving camp and they came up on this grandmother who had been left by a rock. He asked her why she was just sitting there and she told him, as she started crying, ‘I’m too old and can’t walk, I asked them to leave me behind.’ Iron Shell picked her up and put her on his horse and told her that she was his responsibility now and she wouldn’t ever have to worry.”

That is the family ethic I was born into and it’s the family ethic I try to encourage in my relatives as best I can, mostly by example. Ours is to provide if we can. If we can’t, we find others who can, that is what it is to be in the Aske Gluwipi Tiospaye.

As for me, I am a staunch loyalist to an idea. I will uphold an idea with everything I have until someone tells me to let it go. I question everything and everyone about whatever it is that I take up in this life to ensure it survives, that it wants to survive. This is the gift I have to offer my family and my family of friends, and I apply it in the service of some sense of justice or structure to keep our descendants going in their hard times. We speak our hopes for them into the winds they face down the path.

In my days, I’ve made a study of power and while I don’t fully comprehend its myriad, changing nature in its totality, I see its shape. My family reminds me of the power we have and the responsibility that comes with it and in that awareness, it’s hard to see others handle power so poorly.

To simply deny one’s power is lazy. We see it all the time in the white people who openly profess their shame and hatred for whiteness (not just supremacy, but for all aspects of whiteness) to the point where they feel justified in taking on another (non-white) culture to distance themselves from their whiteness. It is far more useful and inspiring to see our counterparts in their power exercise it wherever they can for the good.

As someone who has had negligible access to any kind of meaningful, permanent, or influential forms of power—being born male and using masculine gender for most of his life, even when it was the most disgusting thing I had to do—it sits sourly in my mouth when I see others deny their ability to work with the power they have.

Every other man who stays silent; every other Christian who shrugs and says, “I have to live with these people, so I don’t make waves”; or every other white person who believes the best thing they can do with their privilege is resign from it; they all disappoint so totally that one can taste the mediocrity and find oneself thirsting for any ounce of courage in the house.

What they who have power, and do not use it in any way, never learned about it is that it’s never an ideal time, it’s never an ideal situation, it’s never an ideal person, it’s never an ideal circumstance. One simply has to move in the faith of conviction that we will be supported when we ask for that support.

Monarchy is an ideal, much like the police state, slavery, capitalism, Christian hegemony, and nationalism, that isn’t just evil, they all deny us the ability to see the Other as human. We, the poor, see the royals as inhumane, the police see Black and Brown people as animals, Christians see unbelievers as devoid of the presence of god in need of saving and people of reason see people of faith as idiotic.

All of these systems plot together to swindle us of our greatest asset: love.

On the prairies of South Dakota, I grew up watching British comedies on Saturday night on South Dakota Public Broadcasting because it was the only thing to watch when the wind was up. I was introduced to Anglophilia. I know the stories they tell themselves about themselves. In my middle age, I love a good story and I appreciate the good ones they gave the world, but along with my decolonization comes a caring shelving of all that and a deep breath as I embrace new things.

May the god of the universe hold close those who loved her and give them comfort and may her sins be cause for her reconciliation with god. May we all seek for something new in uncertain times with courage.

May we divest, decolonize, live up to our ideas, not our ideals, and may we never forget to pray for one another.

Move

HoyekiyapiLeave a comment

In my recovery program, one of my favorite adages is to let go and let god. As someone who grew up idolizing Bea Arthur, I replaced it with, “Let go and let Maude.” Sometimes, my higher power is a headstrong white woman from the 1970s, sometimes, she’s the god of Abraham, sometimes, she’s my mother, and sometimes, my higher power is 

Over my years, I’ve observed this cycle of change that’s hard for me to process, because I always want to analyze what went wrong. I am hard-wired to believe that change is bad and needs a cause so that change is preventable. Conversely, most of my work in my life has been to instigate change, going so far as to work for a presidential candidate whose slogans were “HOPE” and “CHANGE.” As a human being, I’m riddled with contradictions.

The lie I tell myself is that if one thing is true, it’s inverse cannot be allowed to be true. In movement work, we use Tema Okun’s Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture, to highlight this as Either/Or Thinking and One Right Way. 

I learned it early on when I was taught about the Christian God of Abraham, how it is really a trinity but still one. Then I was taught that thinking about the trinity like we Lakota people think of our Great Mystery as four beings in one was incorrect and if we accept the reality of our own faith was on equal footing with the God of Abraham, then the Christian dogma of one, true, infallible god was inherently not true. 

Where I apply that in non-religious terms is that I tell myself the lie that if I don’t have a movement home in one place, that either I am not useful to movement work or the movement I served no longer exists. That too, is a remnant of white supremacy culture thinking. 

In my life, I’ve been part of more organizations and campaigns than I care to remember (that’s what my resume and CV are for). What I’ve learned to be true about all of them is that they ebb and flow, and a good chunk of the time, some of them end. In a scarcity mindset, I’ve seen grown people turn into surly adolescents who want to know who to blame for a failure, as if attributing the feeling justified the hurt (Right to Comfort, anyone?). 

The good movement work continues right where it starts: in people. 

In my days, I’ve been a queer organizer, I’ve organized for political causes and candidates who were queer, Black, brown, women, and transgender folks. I’ve been on boards of directors and advisory committees who served LGBTQ, Indigenous and recovery communities and environmental causes and mayoral campaigns. I was an executive director of a community newspaper, I’ve been a managing editor of a tribal newspaper. I’ve been a communications director, a storyteller, a graphic designer, a videographer and even a copy editor from time to time. 

In so many words, I have seen a lot of aspects of movement work and the thing that I’ve come to see as true is that none of it is ever static or unchanging. The institutions that do not change are the ones that lose constituency and relevance over the course of time. 

But the greatest liability that movements have are when people do not change. This is not to say that movement elders are unnecessary. Most of the time, they truly have earned the right to be intractable and intransigent, every movement needs an elder who knows where the bodies are buried and who did the digging. But being willing to change tack and adjust strategy is a good sign of every thriving movement and we see them in their elders. It’s something I aspire to be in the fullness of my own years.

In these times, however, I find myself remembering that flexibility and change are what’s asked of me to effect change wherever I am. It’s not that I’m unafraid, fear rules my inner child, but I remain willing to confront what is asked of me and embrace a willingness to change myself as a result. I must move.

Hair

HoyekiyapiLeave a comment

The first time I heard my ina find a blond hair on her laundry, I thought a snake had come into our house. “Hun-hun-hi!” she cried as she sorted out the laundry. I asked her what happened and all she could do was stammer as she pulled the long, blond strand from her clothes.

When she collected herself after hanging out the laundry, she told me, “Someone put their medicine on me. I don’t know if they meant it or not, but whenever you find other people’s hair on your clothes, you have to throw it away as fast as you can before their medicine gets on you.”

In Lakota culture, hair is an integral part of our identity. It takes on a significance because when our grandparents and ancestors were taken to boarding schools, their hair was unceremoniously cut and continued to be cut. Radical activists generally give the explanation that hair is generally a cultural significance; some go as far as to encourage scientific beliefs about the physical relationship of Indigenous people and our hair. But for my mother’s family, hair has always been about spiritual medicine, one’s own power and the invitation of the power of the spirits to intercede into our world, depending on how one’s own medicine was used in this world.

It’s why we cut most of it at the death of a loved one, to both mark that someone important has made their journey into the next world and to mark that our medicine is impacted by the loss. My kaka would often get after his daughters and son if they left brushes and combs on the table, saying in Lakota, “Don’t do that, we eat here, don’t share that with everyone.” He knew that hair, even in its fallen form, was still something that had power over people.

My ate, a barroom brawler from the dirty old school, he encouraged my brother and I to keep our hair short, “So they don’t have anything to grab you by.” He grew up scrapping and fighting his whole life, surrounded by poor, resentful, white ranch hands in the small Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana towns near where he was a migrant farm and ranch laborer. Long hair was a liability, not as any cultural signifier, but a liability to his personal safety for when, not if, he got into trouble being Indigenous while working.

In these modern times, Indigenous folks play with our hair in different ways. A more innovative Jingle Dress dancer with a new style of dancing and a new hairstyle (AJ Douglas Bear) recently left the powwow circle because they were bullied because they broke from tradition in a new way.

Wanting to honor the sacrifices of our ancestors is a noble goal, always. For those of us of the seventh generation, our parents, grandparents, great grandparents and ancestors lived through unimaginable horrors at the hands of colonizers. Where we fail at honoring them is by adopting the Us vs. Them mindset of the colonizers. Tribalism is instinctual for many of us, whoever doesn’t belong might be a threat to our safety. But we never would have survived without new ideas and new traditions; when the Lakota were at our worst in the late 19th century, it took a Paiute holy person (Wovoka) to give us the Ghost Dance, which in turn, rallied our spirit of resistance.

Culture is change and it is animate, it moves and it looks different from age to age. In my 40 years, much of what I grew up with has changed. Whether it’s the way people sing, the way they speak Lakota, or the way they pray, so much has changed from when I was a boy. Rather than lamenting and decreeing it bad, I learned to embrace change. I remembered that our medicine comes from within, it’s evidence in the outside world is myriad, and its genius and glory is that it adapts from age to age to help us survive.

For that, I am grateful.

Little Lodge

HoyekiyapiLeave a comment

Today, Pope Francis landed in Canada to begin what he calls a “penitential pilgrimage,” to apologize for the Catholic Church’s abuse of Indigenous children. I think of my mother and my mother’s family in these times.

Little Lodge

In my mother’s family, we have been practicing Christians in the Episcopal and Catholic Churches for four generations. When my grandparents decided to marry, Grandma Susan Standing Bull asked Grandpa Issac Iron Shell to convert to Catholicism (he and his father, Grandpa Arnold Iron Shell were Episcopalians) and he did. I think of this first act of love as the power of the women in my family.

All of the women in my family have been women of faith, regardless of the expression, it is a strength I draw from in my own hard times. Part of our story is the amount of sacrifice that each generation made for the successive one. As I’ve been diving into my family story recently, my brother reminded me that of the family land that we have, my Grandfather Isaac “gifted” 160 acres to the Catholic Church, upon which, they built two country churches.

He also agreed to become a Catechist for the church, meaning that he would witness and teach his relatives in Wososo Wakpa, Upper Cut Meat, Iron Shell Flats, about the church and “help” them in their conversion journeys. Effectively, he brokered the official winning of souls to Christ, while still keeping the secrets of our ceremonies hidden from the Indian agents and the Church officials. Of all the discipline it takes in this life to keep multiple secrets hidden for the protection of children in the face of the church and state, I admire my grandfather most in this respect.

The trade-off was the implicit understanding was that my mother, my aunts (and as many as our extended family as could be protected in this arrangement of land and souls) were not to be physically or sexually assaulted during their time at the St. Francis Mission boarding school. It didn’t protect them completely.

My mother shared few moments of her psychological abuse with me before she would get physically agitated and say, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore, OK?” But of the few moments she shared, in as dispassionate and dissociated as I’ve ever seen my mother, she recounted how, one day when her class was being overly rambunctious and disruptive, the nun marched them to the furnaces. There, another nun produced a sack full of kittens they showed to the children. And as soon as the children reached out to touch them, the nun threw them into the furnace where they heard the kitten screaming.

Horrified, I asked why they had done this. My mother took a deep breath and replied, “Because they could. And they wanted to show us what they could get away with. They wanted to show us that they could get away with murder so that we’d be afraid of them and do what they told us to do.”

When I turned 17 years-old, my friends at school were seemingly all hitching up with a church for confirmation. It surprised me because up until that point, our church attendance could best be described as “sporadic,” or perhaps more intentionally, “as needed.”

My Aunt Linda Quick Bear’s family were Episcopalians and my father loved his sisters so much that he—a man who hated the high church expressions so much because it reminded him of Catholicism—became an Episcopalian, and my mother and I were along for the ride. Mostly, it was a monthly family obligation whenever Fr. Leslie Campbell would come to Corn Creek and we’d all make a day of it, church in the morning, then the feed immediately after and if it was a holiday, an evening gathering for kids (usually a movie or singing).

As it became clearer to me that I should make a decision, I asked my mother. The Episcopal Church was still in a good enough shape where they could be discriminating in who they let into their ranks, but the Catholics would take anyone. I asked my best friend and she said it seemed easy enough to get confirmed.

So I sat next from my mother at dinner one night and said, “Mom, I don’t want to offend you. I was thinking about getting confirmed as a Catholic, just because that’s what you baptized me as. I know what the Catholics did to you, so I don’t want to do anything that might hurt you.”

Before I could finish, she put her crochet work down and said, “That’s mine. Don’t make it yours. The Catholics did what they did to me, they didn’t do it to you. You have to make up your own mind. Don’t make it yours.”

In the subsequent years whenever I’ve talked about my faith journey and speak on that part, other Christians are both confounded and amazed. Mostly, I hear about the grace that my mother extended to her abusers and how she had the spirit of the lord with her. Mostly, I think she didn’t want another angry son raging at the world.

When I think of that moment, I think of how she liberated me from the prison that the Church tried to put us into. She had protected me—like Grandpa Isaac had protected her—from the worst that the church had to offer. She and my father, had kept me safe from religious indoctrination. They allowed me to ask questions, to make up my own mind and, in my father’s case, taught me how to be an iconoclast so that the pressure of reverence held only as much power over me as I allowed it.

It is part of my story that I was baptized because of a promise my mother made to the God of Abraham. When I was born, I had a nuchal chord, meconium poisoning and it didn’t look good from the start. I spent weeks in an incubator in the hopes that whatever damage was done to my newborn brain would be minimal. And so it was, for the most part. But as I lie in the nursery at Sacred Heart Hospital in Yankton, S.D., my mother promised the God of Abraham that if I survived unscathed, she would promise me to his Son’s cause.

And so it passed to be so.

I was baptized Alfred Terrance after her favorite uncle and St. Alfred the Great, my brother as my godfather, my cousin Gayla as my godmother and to hear my mother tell it, I was having none of it. “You tore the pages out of Fr. Gill’s prayer book and cried the whole time,” she’d giggle.

I resisted from the beginning. But I also know how to keep a promise.

In the years since I was confirmed as John Barnabas (after St. John the Baptist, on whose feast day I was born—and sadly, on whose feast day the recent Supreme Court decision regulating the lives of people with uteruses was released—and St. Barnabas, on whose feast day, my oldest sister died), I have received The Call to minister to god’s people on several occasions. The most hilarious—to me—was on the day of my mother’s funeral, the circumstances of which, were in line with my beloved mother’s dry wit.

The Catholic Church and I have a rich, complex, rewarding, abusive, forgiving, hurtful, loving relationship. We both stare at each other across the Lord’s table certain that the other will blink first. I stay as an observant and faithful servant of our Lord Christ to be the reminder to the institution of its constant errant nature, that in order to hold onto power, it will dehumanize Indigenous people and perpetrate unspeakable horrors upon us.

And I will stay and continue to be in communion with Christ because in the fray of our raging at each other, wherein the hurt on both sides continue to hurt the other, I listened to the message of Christ in the Gospels. It is with rare certainty that we can ever truly know what’s true and I am constantly filled with doubt.

But if we hold true to the Gospels, Christ understood and preached that not all great things get to stay forever, that sometimes, they need to be destroyed. And that we are blessed when we humble ourselves enough to admit when we’re wrong and to change our judgmental ways. Because the glory of god isn’t in works of art or buildings of stone; the glory of god is in how we uplift each other, atone for our sins by amending our behavior.

The Catholic Church defines sin as the acts that separate us from the God of Abraham, his Son Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit (the Holy Trinity). The same church teaches us that because we are One in Christ, siblings in faith, that god is present in us and in each other. Therefore, any act that separates us from one another is a sin.

When we interpret laws to strip women and people with uteruses of their right to see to their own health needs, we have separated ourselves from one another. When we cage Black and Brown immigrant children at the border because we hold their parents in contempt for fleeing wars while giving a pass to white children refugees fleeing the same, we have separated ourselves from one another. When we allow the state to kill Black people without consequence every time, we have separated ourselves from one another. When we choose to alienate queer people by calling our transgender siblings less than who they are and stoking fear of them, we have separated ourselves from one another. When we believe the lies of an unloved man and commit heinous acts because it speaks to our innermost fear of being unloved, we have separated ourselves from one another.

And when we erase Indigenous people from the history of the world and think of us as an artifact of the past without feelings, fears, hopes, aspirations and dreams, we have separated ourselves from one another.

The Catholic Church has much to atone and apologize for in the coming years, decades, and centuries. And it will not look like it did in the past, it will change, it will break in some places and it will grow in others. But ultimately, if it doesn’t not demonstrate change and correct the mistakes of its past, it will be condemned to repeat them until it fades into the dusts of time.

I think of my Great-Grandfathers Arnold Allen Iron Shell, Jacob Standing Bull, my Grandparents Susan Agnes Standing Bull-Iron Shell and Isaac Francis Iron Shell, my parents Lorraine Iron Shell-Walking Bull and Ralph High Horse-Big Owl-Walking Bull, my brother Ralph James, myself, and one baptized nephew as the occupants of the Little Lodge.

In our family tradition, the story has been passed down to us that after the four days and four nights that our spirits travel onto the next world, we come upon a high ridge line. We climb that ridge line and beyond, as far as the eye can see, there are all our Indigenous ancestors there, living as they lived here in this life, all of one experience. It was told to us that when our times come, we descend from that ridge line into the camps where we are welcomed home by our ancestors.

When my time comes, I know I will find the Little Lodge of my Catholic ancestors who did all they could to ensure the survival of the next generation in the oppressive face of the U.S. government and the Catholic Church. There I will hear all their stories and learn more than I know. We will see all our relatives again, but in that Little Lodge, I will understand why this world was so awful to us and I will be reconciled to the love they had for us.

And for that, I will be grateful.

Becoming the “rich” Urban Indian

Hoyekiyapi, , , Leave a comment

Being Indigenous in this age is to be a contradiction, it is to be both anachronistic and the most relevant identity in this country.

We are the original stewards of this land, yet our grandparents and great-grandparents were not considered citizens of this country and our governments fight for every acre we must recover to exercise our sovereignty. Our dances and social rituals from centuries past are the creative platform to launch Tik Tok stars. Our stories of otherworldliness is now on streaming from your favorite network.

We are at the intersections of contradictions and we explore what that means on a daily basis.

When I left my beloved Sicangu Makoce, it was to escape political retribution for my words and opinions. As the managing editor for the tribal paper, I wrote opinions that—while technically and legally correct—were considered too confrontational. It has generally been my lot in life to be the one who causes folks discomfort. I question everything and I am generally not satisfied, even when I have my answers because the answers are generally based in mercurial emotion and their logic is less than obvious to me.

In 2012, Rosebud elected its own Donald Trump when it elected Cyril “Whitey” Scott whose populist campaign slogan was simply, “I WILL do something.” As it turned out, he had many things he was intent on doing. This is not a deposition, I don’t write this to be vengeful, just a writing of my experiences in the world for people to learn from and possibly gain a new perspective on power, the exercise thereof, and how it impacts tribal communities.

The popular complaint among college-educated, reservation-raised Indigenous folks is that we’re told from the time we begin to learn is that it’s important to go off and get an education so that we can come back and help our people. When we do, we come back and we’re rejected because of nepotism or we’re rejected because our education taught us the value and worth of our expertise.

My personal blessing is that I never finished my degree. When I was in my third year, my father thought he was dying and called me saying, “I’m not going to make it too much longer, babe, I want you to come home and take care of me.” By the Spring, I was in a full mental health crisis but my father would live another four years. It was my intention to finish my education, but time, work, bills, capitalism, obligations and life put themselves firmly in between that plan and me. I have little regrets, especially when I see the plight of my contemporaries who continue to be saddled with debt.

My other personal blessing is that I am a diligent worker. I have found work and volunteer opportunities simply by showing up, buckling down, and getting things done. It is a lesson both my parents—along with their education obsession—imparted to me. It’s offered me, in combination with the three years of a bachelor’s degree education, multiple different opportunities that I think I would have previous thought were beneath me. There is a new freedom and happiness in being humble enough to take an hourly job even when I know the proper use of the semicolon; it also offered me new perspectives on challenges that my master’s degree-possessing colleagues might not often see.

But then came our own narcissist president who abused his office. To me, he was never anything more than a nuisance. He would call me into his office (an office I’ve known since my boyhood when my father would just show up to the tribal office unannounced and get waived in by President Alex Lunderman for a bull session that could last hours and countless cigarettes) to tell me that “other people were talking about what [you] are doing.” On one occasion, he told me that the council was ready to cut funding for the paper because of what I had written and the compromise was that he had to personally review and approve every issue that went out.

As an editor, my mind only flashed to the logistical hold-ups of getting a paper printed and delivered on time without much oversight to begin with. Bothersome and tedious but not intimidating. I asked around to council members I knew and trusted, even the ones I didn’t, and they all said that the paper had never come up once, that he was lying. Again, bothersome and tedious but not intimidating.

This continued in the fall of 2012 and into the winter of 2013 until, exasperated that I wasn’t intimidated by him, threatened my job. My boss Rose Cordier—the director of the Business Office at the time and the former, and to date only, woman Vice President of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe—had to step in to remind the president that he had authority to fire her, but not me.

While he relented, by the time an opportunity to run a community newspaper—completely independent of any government—in Minneapolis came about and I took it. “Whitey” Scott would go onto be ousted by the tribal council and banned from running for office ever again. My plan was to relocate my mother, my nephews and niece, to Minneapolis for a few years so we could find respite from the politics of home. That didn’t happen.

In February of 2014, my mother was in surgery and coded, her heart stopping. They revived her, putting her into a coma to preserve her brain function. It would take four months of medical rehabilitation, arguing with the Indian Health Service as to which facilities to put her into (their original plan was to place her in a facility in Montana where we knew no one, but with prayer and pestering, we found her a path to come to Saint Paul).

Then, on a fine day in mid-June, I walked into her room in Bethel Care Center to find her gone, only to be told by the charge nurse that her lung had collapsed and she was rushed to St. Joseph’s Hospital. No one thought to call me. We would go between St. Joseph’s to treat her acute conditions to a step-down facility behind the Minnesota State Capitol building called Bethesda and back again. She would ultimately succumb to sepsis in August of 2014. So many of my plans were left incomplete.

No amount of education could prepare me for the role life would have me play, an inheritor, an executor, a power of attorney for two adults, a steward, a manager, a person left to make the decisions. I never wanted any of it, but it was all mine to navigate and I did the best I could with what wits my parents left me.

It’s hard not to see the contradictions of my people. We seek for permanence in an ever-changing world. We try to police and define culture and tradition but we ignore how that culture and tradition changed over time. We ask our children to save us from ourselves and when they return, we deride their choices and call them terms to make them seem more like the colonizer. We have ceremonies and cry over our lost generations but when they return, we call them “urban” and complain that they’re taking resources away.

Back home, we have this belief that if one chooses to live off the reservation, it must be because they’re rich, or they think they’re better than us. There was a time that, even as I wrote opinions encouraging my tribal nation to think ahead seven generations, I saw and sympathized with that point of view. And then, I remembered all of my Aske relatives who had to leave because they could find no support at home. Life in the city is no easy task, in fact, it’s more frightening because, depending on where were find ourselves, there’s not the same safety net of relatives to rely on. The wages are higher, but so is the cost of everything else.

As I found my footing in the city, making friends and finding allies, I began to prosper enough to where I could take care of my family in new ways. And because of the way I was raised, I learned never to boast about anything and leave others to guessing because it’s no one’s business how my family takes care of its business. I was brought up to respect the sovereignty and autonomy of others and to be a support and ally, not another devil’s advocate. It’s a way of living that is increasingly rare and I can only credit my tiospaye for bringing me up this way.

Walking in the urban setting with my first education of waunsila for my relatives is its own contradiction. We are a people of contradiction. But I don’t think too badly of that understanding, as a winkte/Two-Spirit who navigates spaces between genders, it’s become second-nature to understand the things that others cannot, or will not. But also, Maza Ponkeska was many things in his life, itancan, ambassador, Tokala, but most notably, a heyoka, a contrary. It is in our family to be contrary to what others—in their great “wisdom”—think we should be.

As someone who was raised in the same dirt that my great-great-great grandfather collapsed into when he escaped the Blue Water Massacre, I know where my body will lie when my time comes to leave: the same place it grew up. It’s my hope that by the time my urban bones are rested in the Iron Shell Flats, my people will have learned how to celebrate one another and value every education they gain in the world.

For that, I will be grateful.

An Update on English nomenclature for Indigenous people

Hoyekiyapi, Leave a comment

Dear Comrades,

I write in the language of the church that came to indoctrinate my ancestors and separate us from our creator by way of making us believe our connection to the divine was somehow errant to begin with; generally speaking, I don’t have an opinion on English words to describe us.

When I was growing up, we allowed ourselves to be called “Sioux” because it was easier than trying to teach non-Lakota people how to properly address us and to take on their guilt. After a time, we came to a capacity to be able to teach non-Lakota people about us, whether by pride, reclamation, or revitalization, however it came to us, we did it.

The term “tribe” is one that I have the least feelings about. It’s an English word first recorded in 1200 in Middle English, derived from the Old French, “tribu,” which itself was derived from the Latin “tribus” meaning any three divisions of Roman people. It is of the oldest colonizer and generally of little interest to me.

Added to this, the fact that our Jewish comrades have long been affiliated with the concept of tribes as they have had to navigate Christian-dominated spaces. When I had my first conversation with a Jewish, Indigenous ally from the American Indian Movement days, he reminded me that his people used to ask one another if new people were MOTs (“Member of the Tribe”).

But white supremacy is like mercury through one’s fingers, it will slip through wherever it can. If we give non-Indigenous folks a pass whenever they use phrases like “tribe” to describe their “chosen family” (also, a good phrase that’s open for use from the queer community), then it plants itself deeply within our communities to give itself power. This is evidenced by the fact that non-Indigenous people have openly and brazenly used the words “spirit animal” to talk about their charms and “powwow” to talk about their meetings right in front of me with impunity.

With all the stories now being told about this country, both its de jure and de facto foundations in colonization, genocide, slaveholding, Christian dominion, I’ve come to appreciate the dogged determination in disrupting and redirecting narratives whenever the opportunities arise.

Say “charm,” “guide,” or “petronus” when you mean a spiritual or otherworldly avatar or guide; say “gathering,” “meeting,” when you mean a summit of people for an intentional purpose; and say “friends,” “(chosen) family,” or my personal, ominous favorite, “cabal” when you mean a collection of people important to you.

Yours in solidarity so long as the language of the colonizer will allow,

Hoyekiyapi.

Union

Hoyekiyapi, , , Leave a comment

A fundamental question that has come up ever since the draft opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—and even back further into awakening of the state-sanctioned murder of Black and Indigenous people—is: do we even want to be in a union anymore?

It seems to not be working. For anyone. Conservatives want a civil war where they will triumph to establish their city on the hill—a new Jerusalem—to be able to own and kill Black and Indigenous people and allow women to die as child factories. Progressives want a utopia, a place where the state protects all rights and when that fails, they want to burn it all down. Both are symptomatic of a belief that perfection, and even the pursuit of such, is achievable; that there is a “right” way of being. It’s of colonization.

Being Indigenous and understanding my culture has helped me to understand not just that not everyone thinks the same way, but that space is made for those who disagree so vehemently that they must depart. It’s the principle of sovereignty to us. One belongs to a family or network of families with their own rules and protocols of behavior, one is selected to serve in societies and groups entrusted with the common tasks for the service of the community. But if one could not sublimate their own, individualist, desires to be in service to the greater good of the whole, they were invited to leave.

We didn’t demonize people, we didn’t reject them, we didn’t make a moral judgment. Sometimes, they held on until they could be with a new group of people, a new ospaye, a new tribe. And we missed them, but we understood they had to follow their own paths.

Colonization fucks everyone up. Back home today, if one seeks for a new life, there is a resentment that they left, even if they were encouraged to do so in order to get an education, experience and to come home to share knowledge. We have internalized the white Christians’ misbelief in what it is to belong. We have become afraid of rejection instead of celebrating each other’s visions of creating something new.

Legally speaking, one of the reasons why states are not allowed to secede from the union is, in large part, the reunion after the Civil War. In the 1869 case, Texas v. White, the Supreme Court ruled that a state cannot unilaterally secede from the union, that Texas had—in fact, never—seceded from the union. It made the union binding for the sake of a national identity. Practically speaking, the coastal states that experience hurricanes, floods and the western states that experience droughts and fires need a centralized union to seek financial relief and federal resources to rebuild.

But it is still a question worth asking with follow-ups. Do we want to be in a union? Can we practically survive as a loose alliance of sovereign states? Or can those smaller states with little to no resources then fall prey to authoritarians and despots? One parallel is the breakup of the Soviet Union, another part of the world obsessed with empire.

To have been radicalized as young as I was in the cause of tribal sovereignty means that I’ve had time to look to the rest of the world in order to see the patterns that repeat and to interrupt them when they become a threat. We’re living in the reality of a world leader who is desperate to reclaim what once was and in his wake is the war in Ukraine. If the United States falls, will we give birth to our own Putin in two decades’ time who will insist in recreating the false glory days of the American empire?

As with all things of the colonizer, I look to the British to see how they’re managing decolonization. Last year, Barbados, a member of the Commonwealth of Nations (a former colony of the United Kingdom) removed Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state and affirmed its status as a republic. And while there are elements within the UK that bemoan the loss of the empire, pining for the days when any white British national could travel to warmer climates in the cold months and insist the locals speak only English, the Commonwealth has come to function beyond a ceremonial state.

Its members do not need to be former British colonies (Gabon and Togo, former French colonies, have been admitted) and while many of its members bristle at the continued connection to the ultimate colonizer, its common interests outweigh even the most lackluster leadership. Secretary General Patricia Scotland held onto her leadership role in the most recent meeting of the heads of Commonwealth nations (CHOGM) despite a strong challenge from Jamaica’s foreign minister Kamina Johnson Smith.

What is possible without a continued union is more profound and wildly possible than what seems to be in front of us. From my perspective, I think of the Battle of Greasy Grass, where my ancestors defended ourselves against an invader who refused to listen to reason and abide by the treaties we signed with his government. That victory for us happened because we understood that while, yes we are stronger together, we are only as strong as our people are free.

Do we even want to be in a union? It’s a question worth asking.

Hard to Kill

HoyekiyapiLeave a comment

In my branch of the Aske Tiospaye, we have a story that was passed down to us from the days before colonization. This relative is listed as having ultimately died in 1891 and this is the story as it was told to me by my parents.

Okte Sica (Hard to Kill) was a daring person in life, he would tease bison into coming after him and find ways to survive without getting trampled. He would hide in tree stumps, running up into trees or run the bison off the edge of a high hill.

When his time came, the family and the encampment were saddened to lose such a relative who faced fear and won. As is our tradition, they mourned him for four days and four nights while his spirit made the journey into the next world. We also burn the possessions of the dead so that they can make their journey without having any physical ties to this world. But as they began burning his otter skin braid coverings, he came back to life.

He told our relatives what he had seen. He walked and walked and walked for four days to the west until he saw a high ridgeline where the sun set. He began climbing the ridge and when he got to the top, as far as he could see, there were camps of people stretching on forever. Some lived in tipis, some lived in smaller dwellings and some lived in “boxes.” He was ready to join them when he heard otters screaming from behind him. When he realized it was his favorite pair of otter skin braid coverings, he woke up in this world.

He would go on to live for several more years before passing away, again, after passing his story of what he’d seen onto us.


What I think of when I remember this story is all the questions I had for my parents. How much longer did he live? How did he walk for four days without getting hungry? How could he tell it was four days? Did the sun ever rise? Were the “boxes” that he saw houses? How high was the ridge? How could he hear otter skins crying if they were already dead?

My parents, patient as they could be, smiled and spoke the truth, “I don’t know. This is the story that was told to us by Okte Sica. That is all we get to know.”

I think as a child, I craved the certainty of knowing what comes next, at every step in life. What will they think about me at school? What college will I get into? What will I study? Will I be a success? Will I be a failure? Will anyone care what I do? Why do I do this to myself? How can I stay true to my values? How do I provide for my family? Can I do this? It is human to have questions and to find comfort in answers, it shields our fragile psyches from the unpredictability of the world and the universe as a whole, if even for a moment.

Most times, we simply require an assurance and witness to our concern and fear, to know that we’re not alone in our uncertainty. It’s why Okte Sica reminds me that there are keen insights into the next stage of life but they are few and far between. And rather than interrogate them for veracity and quantifiable data points—because that’s simply another expression of the existential angst of not knowing—my challenge is to accept the gift of witness, to receive and believe what has been handed down to me without being impertinent, shaking the box and asking how much it cost.

The comfort I take from this story is also the concept that no matter how alone we think we are, someone has gone ahead to make a path for us whichever way we travel. Where I find inspiration and hope in the end of this life is what I do not know, in my own unknowing. What does happen when we climb down the other side of that ridge to join the camps of our relatives?

As an Aske of the Sicangu Lakota Oyate of the Oceti Sakowin, I think back to all the stories, histories and traditions of my people and I know we’re received by songs, cries and trills of celebration. It used to be said that when two friends or relatives were separated across time or distance, when they saw each other again, they would simply place their hands on each other’s hearts to express their joy at seeing one another again.

I think of an entire, infinite camp of relatives and ancestors who have been watching us and taking care of us and I think of how many hands will be extended to us when we see them again. How many trills will be given? How many whoops will be cried? How many songs will be sung? How many beats of the drum will guide our feet?

Like my parents, I do not know. But I suspect that it is enough to sustain a spirit in this world and the next. That hope is what is undying.