In my goals for the new year, I’ve been decent about sticking to my running routine. It’s a spare hour a day when I am forced to be in my body, keeping my steps in time to the beats of my favorite drum groups and focus on my breathing. It’s in that focus where I start to feel trapped.

The Omicron surge led the City of Minneapolis to renew its mask mandate and my gym is complying. I know I’m the only one in the place when I go late in the evening but I keep my mask on. I’ve noticed my breaths getting shorter with a mask on, it’s not like at the beginning of the pandemic when I breathed easy through the layers of fabric of my specially-designed mask. And I begin to wonder if I have long-term symptoms.

By this point, my steps become off-beat and my panic starts me coughing. I cough when I’m anxious, it’s a remnant of my days as a smoker when I could just blame the manifestations of my anxiety on the physiological effects of smoking, another manifestation of my anxiety. And by the 20-minute mark, I start gagging and not focusing on my breathing.

I’m reminded of the former roommate who brought COVID-19 into my house, how angry I still am at him for making a decision on my behalf. For traveling to the exurbs and the far-flung parts of western Wisconsin where mask mandates were loose at best. I even joked when he brough back baked goods from his misadventures, “Oh good, you bought us COVID!” Three days later we were sick.

And I am back in my body, angry and going at 9 miles an hour, close to my regular pace a decade ago. I’m angry. I’m pissed off at all the white people who make decisions for me, who have always felt no compunction or second thought about making a decision for me … for my parents, for my grandparents, for ancestors.

And I’m back in rhythm with the music. The dry throat is gone. The coughing has stopped. I feel my breath in regular pulses again.

Both my parents struggled to breathe in their final years, the result of a lifetime of smoking away their anxieties, too. They were frustrated with their bodies for breaking down. In the exhaustion, they’d apologize for being burdens to us, that their bodies just weren’t listening to them anymore. I got angry back at them, “STOP TALKING LIKE THAT, YOU’RE NOT A BURDEN, CHEE.” And we’d all start laughing at our self-pity.

I’m angry because the people who continue to spread this virus have no clue how precious a breath can be. They don’t know how we fight for every breath at the end. They’ve never seen their parents—the people who gave them life and took every effort to preserve their children’s’ lives—fight to the end for every breath. They’ve never held their parents’ lifeless bodies after the last breath has left them. I’m angry at those people who make decisions about how many breaths we get to take. I’m angry at the people who don’t see that it’s not just their breaths that they’re trying to control because they think COVID is going to mild for them, so to hell with everyone else.

My breathing returns to normal as I begin my cool down. I have not removed my mask out of fear. I know my body will fight to keep going. I trust it implicitly. We don’t get to judge who gets to breath because of our fear.

Vulnerable empathy

My father used to say, “Don’t ask for people to pray for you, you ask the medicine people to pray for your health. You never know who’s praying for what for you, they could be praying for you to be dead. Don’t ask strangers to pray for you.”

In deconstructing my own, internalized colonization, I got very good at not being vulnerable. It wasn’t because I was afraid anyone would use it against me, but because I quickly saw how other (mostly white) people were receiving my vulnerability. They were using it as an excuse to re-center themselves in my life.

After my mother passed in my first year of recovery, an older, white, gay man would see me at meetings and ask how I was doing. He disclosed that his own mother had died a few short years before mine and made it a point to reach out. After some time and repeated “I’m fine” responses, he’d put his hand on my shoulder, look me in the eye and say, “But how are … REALLY?” After a few more “Really, I’m fine” responses, I opened up and told him how alone and guilt-ridden I’d felt; having to be in charge of picking the day the woman who gave birth to you is taken off life support will do a number on you.

Then, after opening up and expressing my feelings in a public space where any stranger could hear, he squeezed my shoulder and said, “Well, you shouldn’t feel like that because … “ and the rest of what he said droned away because all I could hear was the rush of blood to my ears and my heart rate quickening. I felt like yelling, “WHY THE HELL ARE YOU ASKING HOW I’M ‘REALLY’ FEELING IF ALL YOU’RE GOING TO DO IS DISMISS MY ‘REAL’ FEELINGS?” Then, I tuned back in long enough to hear him talking about how he just had to let his own mother go, keeping calm and carrying on.

In moments like that, it suddenly dawns on me how many times this has happened before. How my vulnerability got shot down by dismissive attitudes who were simply trying to impose this worldview on me. Then, once that objective failed, they’d quickly pivot back to themselves. It’s one of the reasons why when I work with someone in mourning, I only talk about myself when asked and I do my best to listen to what’s being said, not sympathizing but empathizing and doing so without retraumatizing myself.

Even so, I’ve learned not to share too much with strangers. The phrase, “misery loves company” is a truism in my world. All I need to do is go onto one of the virtual spaces I’m involved with to see how one miserable person only elicits more unreconciled pain from unhealed people and before too much time has passed, that collective pain turns into anger, not to anyone in particular, but a general, unresolved, unreconciled anger. “Words are medicine” is what my mother told me once, “You can use them to heal or you can use them to hurt. Be careful.” But after a certain point, I tend to become numb from all the little cuts I experience from the white people in the world and the other Black and Brown folks who have to deal with those same white people, too.

So, I open up when and where I find my healing. It’s not for public consumption, it’s for me to go back out into the world to do what I need to do. It’s a very Lakota worldview that we need to be alone to receive our more profound wisdom or healing. Collective spiritual healing is best done when intention is clear and shared, because if 100 people gather in ceremony and just one person is praying contrary to the collective will, it becomes evident very quickly. So, I find my healing with my creator in private and meaningful ways.

It’s also very off-putting for white folks I interact with to not have access to my most personal thoughts and deepest feelings. I recognize that. I’ve also gotten very practiced at not letting their desire to control how I interact with the world not take priority with good boundaries, even though my brownness codes boundaries, privacy and mental health as “secretive,” “closed,” or “hurtful.”

So I have to recognize that white folks in the world are in mourning for their sense of control. So I sit, I don’t sympathize and I empathize without retraumatizing myself.

Recently I saw this article about the beader who shot to success because Whoopi Goldberg wore her medallion on The View. She received orders and inquiries from all over. Unfortunately, the story was about how she failed to fulfill those orders.

While I would never presume to speak on behalf of an entire people, economic experience nor cultural background, what it did get me thinking about was how no one ever prepared me for success because no one (except my parents, of course) ever planned on me succeeding. Over the course of my 20s and early 30s, what I knew about success was that it never happened to me.

As living indigenous people, we tend to be written off by everyone else either by virtue of a living tragedy, cautionary tales of alcoholism, addiction and poverty, or by uninformed folks as greedy leeches who simultaneously steal government money while also collecting vast wealth at casino doors. There are, of course, variations on a theme but everyone in American society thinks we’re a problem to be solved or a problem too vast to be solved, but we’re never thought of as an asset to this society.

It took recovery from my own addictions to help me even begin to grasp the idea that I had a positive benefit in the world. It took me another five years in recovery to start using my experience in navigating successes, failures and status quos to leverage my identity as a disruptor and change agent.

Now success to me looks like making an impact (whether short or long term) and challenging pre-conceived notions of how we even define success. For the beader in Canada who is stalling for time, rearranging the truth and using every story in their story box to deal with the rush of admiration that no one prepared her for, my deepest empathies go out.

It’s hard to live as an indigenous person in a society that is committed to erasing us, putting us under glass or eradicating us. We never have enough patience with each other, we have plenty of criticism for one another and when our struggles are received with silence, it seems like we’re alone in the world.

When we internalize the reality that we are deserving of success, joy, love and compassion … and that our fellow indigenous folks are too, our healing journey has just begun.

Good Friday brings back memories every year, most of them good, some of them cause the tears to begin until they stop with the thought, “it is done.”

Growing up on the Rosebud Reservation and going to Episcopal Church services in my formative years meant that we walked on Good Friday as we observed the Stations of the Cross. The usual route was between St. Paul’s just outside of Norris township all the way to St. Thomas in Corn Creek Community. In the 1980s and 90s on the reservation, there was a movement for sobriety, wellness and healing so there were many run/walk/ride events we attended. But Good Friday was different because of Grandma Jessie Quick Bear.

She was my father’s adopted maternal aunt who spoke only a few phrases in English but all of us grandkids who grew up speaking Lakota understood her when she began commanding everyone to their chores. She was the entirety of her generation: faithful, forthright, modest and unyielding. Her frame was never more than five-foot-six but her voice filled a room (which, she did so sparingly). She dressed in dark blue dresses with pockets and in the winter, she wore a dark blue scarf, a thick coat and only slightly thicker stalkings than her summer wear. And she walked.

Well into her 70s by the time my parents joined up with the Episcopalians, Grandma Jessie made it a point to walk the entire route of the Stations of the Cross. Her feet trudged on the gravel at a steady pace and we walked with her, never leaving her behind. Only once did she ever sit in the van on Good Friday and that was only because we took the route coming from the north of Corn Creek where there were hills.

Lakota women, and women in general, form my faith.

“Mary was the first Christian” was the phrase I heard in catechism class at St. Thomas More Newman Center in Vermillion my freshman year of college and I knew exactly why all the women in my family were women of faith who formed my own. It is their fortitude that sees us through the worst times in our lives.

When we hear toward the ending of the Gospel reading on Good Friday, “And bowing his head, he handed over the spirit,” we kneel and we mark the moment of pure loss. Christ died. All of the hopes and dreams for a heaven on earth that His disciples died in that moment; from our flawed, human perspective, in any case. All the miracles, all the teachings, all the protest of the unjust, all of it was given up in that moment. We all lost in that moment.

It’s hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t watched someone die in front of them what power that moment holds. As my mother’s last day came, I knew we had to give her over to her parents, her grandparents and to her savior. But I did not want to give up one more minute. I prayed, I meditated, I talked, I listened but nothing prepared me for the moment when I had to make the decision to surrender her to the source from which, she came. But I did.

When someone’s spirit leaves their body, their last breath exhaled, you see all that they were leave the world you know. You see the color drain from their face. You see all the muscle movement cease. You hear the heart stop beating. And all the hopes, all the miracles, all the teachings, all the protest of the unjust is lost in that moment. And you want everything to stop: time, joy and love. You want it all to stop and go away because anything else existing other than the solemnity and weight of one less life in the world is an affront to that life. And so we can grasp how Mary, Peter and the other apostles felt in that moment when their brother, teacher and savior died.

But of course, life does not stop. My mother was good at reminding me of this when I needed an honest kick in the pants over my own self-pity. She always offered hope when she would tell me, “we’re survivors.” And when I ponder her wisdom, turning it around like a stone in my hand, I understand now that she never meant “we” as in she and I, she meant it in terms of our family and our people.

Being raised in oppression and colonization, I’d gotten used to the concept of life being hopeless and just an entire series of challenges to be endured until the end. It never occurred to me that there could be anything other than the fight and the struggle. And then, I got sober.

Sobriety helped me to fully accept the faith of my parents and grandparents and all my other ancestors. At times of the year like this, it manifests itself in Christian Catholicism. In the summer, it comes out as prayer during the wiwang waci (sun dance). But what I’ve learned is that hope is what faith offers that can be of greatest use.

We hope.

When Easter Sunday comes, we celebrate how Mary Magdalene discovers the empty tomb; we announce the Resurrection. Our sorrow from Good Friday and the Easter Vigil is washed away in the miraculous. It reminds us as people of faith, that no matter how we define it, death is only ever a pause, or a journey into the next state of being. This is something Lakota people have known since long before we encountered the Christian missionaries who thought they were introducing a new concept to our wealth of knowledge.

What we celebrate this weekend is not some commercialized or corrupted notion; we celebrate the victory of continued life. Those of us who have lost greatly and dearly know the pain of loss; whether it’s a loved one, a job, a vocation, a campaign, our homes, our culture, our ways of being, we know what it is to lose. But what the Resurrection reminds us of is that nothing is ever truly lost, so long as we remember that tomorrow is a new day with possibilities unforeseen. We are not god, we do not control the universe, we do not even control our own lives but we have hope.

Our faith is proof of hope restored, it heals and it provides for us when we cannot provide for ourselves. That’s something Grandma Jessie knew, my mother knew and it’s something I’ve carried with me over the years. It’s one of the greatest gifts they gave me: hope.

A person is smart, people are dumb. We are animals like any other in god’s creation and when we get together and are incited by our worst fears, we make stupid decisions.

This point is clearly illustrated in the Lord’s Passion, read every Palm Sunday in most Catholic Churches. We begin by exalting the Son of God, laying down for Him the palms so that his feet might never touch the ground and by the end of the Mass, we have killed Him. We are animals who make stupid decisions.

In Catholicism, we think in terms of we in most everything we do. It is the collective, though every generation of the faithful is not legally nor morally responsible for acts reported two millennia ago, we understand that by our very nature, we have a responsibility to bear some ownership in the killing of our savior. There was about 1,962 years between the reported birth of Christ and when we stopped blaming our Jewish relatives in faith for that, but the Spirit was slow to act (though it took a holocaust for us to recognize that).

We read the Passion every Palm Sunday to remind ourselves of the conflicting nature of humanity. We don’t do this to guilt or shame ourselves, but to depart with the questions of why we are worthy of salvation and redemption. What is it about us that is valuable enough to keep our god from damning us all to hell? The question’s answer is one so simple that it causes every atheist I’ve ever had an in-depth conversation with get up and leave the table. The answer is love.

God loves us. Even when we refuse to believe or have not been witnesses to its mercy, it continues to love us. Even when we organize ourselves by strength of physicality, perceived dominance of melanin or by access to material wealth, god still loves us. Even when we put to death the lives sent to us by god so that we may glean some more profound understanding of how to live, god still loves us.

Jesus Christ was murdered by the state. Once again, Jesus Christ was murdered by the state. In the eyes of the contemporary powers at the time, He committed the crime of blasphemy and while Pontius Pilate washed his hands of the affair, what remains is that Roman soldiers flogged Christ, Roman soldiers marched Him to Golgotha and Roman soldiers nailed Him to the cross until He commended His soul to God and gave up His breath.

The state is broadly defined as the government, the territory and the people. There again is our responsibility in all of this, the state killed our savior and we are part of the state. We can have all the laws, constitutions, fire power and rights we want, but when you boil it down, we’re still scared animals who will do away with the most revolutionary ideas that threaten our complacency.

And still, god loves us.

My father, who was both Christian and traditional Lakota, used to show me these scars on his palms. He told me he was born with the scars. My father also knew how to tell a story you’d swear was true until he started laughing at your foolishness. But he would simply say, “I was born with them. I think maybe I was hanging next to Jesus.”

He was a man of deep faith, he also lived in fear of the state. Whenever we’d travel off the reservation, I was told to sit still and not say anything if we were stopped by the police. He took extraordinary measures to travel the roads not patrolled by the police and we traveled at night. To this day, especially when the police are empowered to end black lives without accountability, I still avoid the police at all costs. The state killed my savior, the state kills black people, the state imprisons the free and the state does so without thought or remorse for its actions.

Yet I, as a citizen, am part of that state. It is why my savior’s commands come first and foremost: love one another, do good work, comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Whatever privilege I have in the world (being a cisgender man who identifies in practice as a Christian) must be used to affect change for those on the margins. Because there is where my savior lives, with the outcast, with the fringe and with those who have been harmed by the very institution started in His name.

Those of us who believe are empowered in these days; we who believe are empowered to act to protect those being targeted, profiled, imprisoned, interrogated, detained, beaten, attacked and hated. We are empowered, particularly in these days of the Holy Week, because we know we are right to defend those without power; because we who hold some power show our love by sharing that power. And that is what Christ commanded us to do: to love.

It’s a blessing to know that my theology was shaped by the women in my life. The first person who taught me how to pray was my mother and we prayed the Rosary. When I asked what heaven was, she told me that it was a beautiful place where we were one with god and my grandmother was there.

As a child of pragmatically devout Catholics – who adopted their devotion to spreading The Word among their fellow Sicangu so the nuns and priests would leave their daughters unmolested and without physical scars of abuse – my mother acknowledged her privilege throughout her life, but also recognized she and her sisters did not escape unharmed. What she taught me at 17 when I asked if she would be offended if I sought confirmation was a lesson I did not learn until I entered recovery from alcoholism and addiction: take what you can and leave the rest.

What she took from Catholicism was a surrender to the divine that gives hope in the darkest of times. What she gave me was a foundation of respect for women that has guided me, although not without struggle, through difficult times. This year, I bounced up the steps to the Basilica of St. Mary again, hearing the drums of the Aztec dancers. I walked in to see them circling the statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe. As they processed, we all sang “Quien es esa Estrella?” and by the verse that translates, “We are your children, you are our mother; Look at us, our Lady, do not abandon us,” I knew that centuries of tradition in elevating the divinity of women in my culture and in other indigenous cultures was truly right and just.

The second woman who formed my theology was the White Buffalo Calf Woman. In our Lakota traditions, she is not just a savior, but a power that gave us a connection to the prayer life we practice now. In a time of great need, she told a hunter to prepare a place for her at camp. He told us she was coming and during her visit, she gave us the gift of the cannunpa (the pipe) and taught us how to make use of this in our prayer. When she left, she demonstrated to us her divinity by changing form into the buffalo as she left camp.

In a time of need, La Virgen appeared to the descendant of the Aztecs and offered a message of hope. She reminded us all that she was indeed our mother and that she would always be there for us. In Catholic theology, we venerate Mary because in order to give birth to the son of god, one must be perfect and without sin. She is the one who makes our faith, our hope and our salvation possible. It was with this knowledge of faith that my Grandmother Susan was a Marian and my mother Lorraine was a Sodalist. It is why I do my best to honor the place of women not just in faith communities, but in life.

As men, we make it oppressive for women in the world. If you need an example, simply look at the results of the last U.S. presidential election (that was the one were a former First Lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State lost to a narcissistic megalomaniacal confidence man). But despite it all, they continue to give us life and encouragement when things are at their worst. They continue, despite pains and oppression that would level any man, to lead us to our better angels. Beyond the elevation of one woman, I can never grasp my church’s obsession with barring women from leadership; I can never understand why the men who lead my church need to be hit in the face with the voice of god almighty before they’ll include women in all aspects of faith and secular life.

As I stood, watching the other brown faces leading the procession of La Morenita, I was moved again to tears. It will be the brown faces who grew up like I did who will bring about the change we so desperately need in our faith life. It will be the faces of women who will guide us to justice, hope and compassion. Why do I believe that to be so? Because they’ve been the only ones who have ever taken us there before.