Two years ago today, the world stopped. The songs had been sung, the prayers had been prayed, the sage had been smudged. There was nothing more to do except stop time. My mother had come to the end of her life and there was nothing to be done but let her go.

In those last moments, I whispered my thanks in her ear. The nurse disconnected her from the ventilator and she continued to breath for five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes. And somewhere after her thirtieth minute, she took her last breath. I watched as the color left her face, as her fiercely independent spirit left her body, her once-laboring body stopped moving and we cried together, my niece and my nephew.

I can’t tell you what time she died. I can’t tell you how long we stood at her bedside holding her body. When time stops at these moments, all you have is that moment when you understand the world you knew ceases to exist, there is nothing but that absence

Those moments test a faith. When I was younger, I was so assured that god did not exist, that there was no heaven and no hell and when we die, we die. It was a time in my life where I experienced great pain and it was the only answer I had to escape the pain of religious theories that sought to make me conform. When I entered into recovery for my alcoholism – and even today, years down the road – I would say that my concept of god or a higher power was agnostic at best. All I could see were arbitrary rules set down by madmen millennia ago.

There’s a line from the movie “Children of God” by Kareem Mortimer that has always stuck with me. “When you die, your heart stops, but your brain keeps working. In those moments you dream. That dream lasts forever and ever.” While I subscribe to a working faith and two religious traditions today, I’m never sure that there’s a god, an afterlife, all I have is the witness of my ancestors who came before me. I’ve discarded the arbitrary rules when they impede my search for understanding without prejudice. In those moments before death, I have come to understand that regardless of the answer, the passing of a life is a sacred moment and attending to it is a blessing.

In that moment, though it broke my heart to let go, I knew I had to set her consciousness at ease. All the prayers prayed, all the songs sung, if she could hear me at all, I had to release her without regret. So I whispered my thanks. “Thank you for being the best mom. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for showing us love. You go home now. Don’t cry for us, we will survive. You showed us how to live. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

All we have at the end of our lives, if we’re fortunate, is our memories. I had done what I could do to ensure she was well-cared for, she did not die in agony, she did not die in violence, she did not die alone. All I could do was be present for her and remind her as best I could that her life was meaningful, full of love and brought joy to everyone who met her. I sat with her for days beforehand, recounting every memory we had shared together as mother and son. I recalled every story she told me of her life and the lives of her parents and her grandparents. I sat and let all the stories of her memories come to me as best I could before falling asleep.

In the past two years, I’ve sat with her memories still. I tell and retell them to myself so they will continue to exist, so that she will continue to exist and my ancestors will continue to exist. If I have children, I will pass those stories of memories onto them. If god wills my life in another direction, I will commit them to my brother’s children. This is how we as Lakota people have always existed and how we continue to exist.

As my life has changed since those days, I have come to understand the value and virtue of compassion, presence and empathy. For the first year, some thought I should just move on and let go, that my mourning was tedious and reduced my monetary value in the world. Others offered their best sympathy but could not bring themselves to share in those moments of deepest sorrow. And some stood and accompanied me as I sorted my mind and my heart.

The ones who were present without question are the ones who will stay with me. They are the ones who have shared the memories of my mother and my ancestors. In them, a part of her lives on. And in that, there is a joy and a comfort. They will know of a life they never lived. They will carry on someone who was the center of an entire universe when she lived and she will never be dead.

Even though I never know what is beyond death, I know she continues to dream. When my final breath comes, I will continue to dream. And there we will all be in that wonderful moment of reunion in our dreams and our memories, together again, whole and unbroken.

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As my mothers’ casket was being loaded into the hearse after her funeral Mass, one of the Jesuits pulled me aside and said, “I don’t know if this is appropriate, but when the Spirit moves you, you speak. After seeing how you were able to honor your mother and engage people in her faith, I think that – if you’re not in a committed relationship – you should seriously consider the priesthood.”

I thanked him for his words and cracked a half-smile thinking, “Hehe, good one!”

But after all the dust had cleared, the priest’s words rang in my head for several months. After the 2015 New Year I met with the late Fr. Mike Tegeder, the priest in Minneapolis who worked closely with the Native American community and who administered the last Sacrament of the Sick to my mom, and he spoke candidly and openly about discerning my vocation and pointed me in the direction of some helpful priests and religious people.

I began spiritual direction in January of this year. It sounds more formal than what it is: I meet once a month with a Jesuit working at St. Olaf Catholic Church in downtown Minneapolis for 30 to 45 minutes; I ask pressing questions and he generally tells me I’m asking the right questions. The timeframe I set for spiritual direction was a year. By January 2017, I’ll be preparing myself to seek permission to apply to the Society of Jesus, by late spring/early summer of next year, I’ll have an answer and so far, things have been going according to plan.

But it’s not just my plan.

When I got sober and entered into recovery, I took it seriously (this is not my first time at the rodeo). There was a lot of work I had to do so that I wasn’t seeking solutions to my problems in my addictions; I had to surrender to my higher power and meet life on life’s terms, which, is never an easy prospect even if you’re not an alcoholic or addict.

Politically and culturally, I’m left of center and progressive. In addition, my family – as a Lakota tiospaye – has a complicated relationship with Catholicism and Christianity in general. So there are many, well-reasoned and true, factors for me to reject Catholicism and Christianity, given its institutional approach to colonizing my people to say nothing of how it regards LGBTQ people like me. All that is good, right and true.

But the thing about being sober is you accept the will of a power higher than your own desires, politics, and even your own convictions. My mind, quick, full and intelligent as it may be, can reason anything out logically, even my own self-destruction. That higher power is the thing that brought me from the misery of my addictions, at the brink of self-destruction, to sobriety and being of service to my fellows in recovery and in the world. It is the one thing that keeps me sane and sober, even if I never understand how.

So I accepted the realities of my life. I have a wealth of experiences and understandings that can be useful to others. I have gone through the challenges of burying my parents before my 33^rd birthday. I have a capacity for compassion and caring. And I have professional skills that can benefit institutions for the good.

Of course, I have always thought I would have a husband and a family of my own to take care of and love. I have always thought that my life would be filled with the joy that comes with meeting someone, growing together, supporting one another and building a life together. I have always thought I would die surrounded by those loved ones.

The reality is that none of those things have come to pass. In fact, the exes and experiences I’ve had illustrates to me that god has pointed my life in a direction of service. Some folks tell me I’m still very young (and I am) and I should wait for the right guy to come along and be patient. That can be as true as my discernment for the priesthood as well.

What I do know is that life is very short and it goes by so quickly. Having the perspective that I’ve been given, I also know that I have a desire to dedicate my life to a greater purpose; it very well could be family, I very well could meet the man of my dreams and set off into a house filled with kids, dogs and frantically coordinating schedules during basketball, football or volleyball season. It could also mean that the church has need of my experiences and perspectives to make it more inclusive, more welcoming, or more defined about how it approaches the vast diversity of god’s people.

All these things can be true. What I know is that wherever I go, I have a responsibility to make the world a slightly better place than when I came into it. I generally think that’s serving a will and a power greater than my own and I think that’s generally for the good.

When I was 19 years-old, at the urging of my high school art teacher, I attended a summer art program that was designed for Native students to expand and formalize their artistic education. When I returned, there was a freezing quiet in the house. I went to my room to settle back in and before too long, my father knocked on my door and said he wanted to go out to our old country house to talk. When I asked him what we were going to talk about, he said simply, “some good things and some bad things.”

Coming out gay was three years away for me and my own, internal time line was chugging along comfortably with the buffer of an entire decade. When I finally did, it was after I had created some emotional distance and personal independence from my family so that, should the worst happen, I would be able to support myself on my own.

This being the attitude I adopted toward coming out, it terrified me to think that my father – who never formalized nor set specific time aside to discuss anything with me – was now going to discuss “some good things and some bad things” with me. I panicked and feared they had somehow found out while I was gone that I was gay. But, being the obedient son that I was, I prepared myself for any possibility that the evening would bring.

We drove the 15 or 20 miles to our old place in relative silence. That summer, I was in my Moby phase in full swing so “Play: The B-Sides” was my constant companion.

As we pulled into the back approach to the house I’d grown up in and had nothing but happy memories, with brief interludes when my brother would chase me around in a Halloween mask he named “George,” I wondered why such ceremony. We sat in the fire pit where the oinikaga used to stand, long since withered away from time and disuse. He began by reciting his life story, or a particular version that I had heard enough to know from memory.

My father had always characterized himself as a “throwaway baby.” While he was a gregarious man who knew how to make people laugh, he was still a man of deep feelings. The circumstances of his birth were such that his mother was unable to name his biological father nor could she care for him for very long after he was born. Raised by a cadre of family members from one phase of life to the next, the closest woman he considered a mother was not the woman who gave birth to him.

He made his way in the world picking potatoes, busting broncs, fixing fence and generally supporting the infrastructure of the Western world that had sprouted up among our people. While he retained his sense of sovereignty in every sense of the word, he could read, write and speak English to an eighth grade degree. Eventually, he found my mother. And while the words “love” and “you” were never spoken between them in our house – at least not as far as I could remember and not in English – they made a life together.

As the saga continued, my attention drifted to the oncoming dusk. My favorite memories of childhood are of wandering around that back yard, sometimes in the tall grass, just as sunset approached and the sky went from a washed out baby blue (particularly in the summer) to deep and rich shades of indigo and violet with iridescent gold slats of sunlight. When I tuned back in to my father, he began telling me a new story: the circumstances of my birth. This was not a story I had heard before, especially not from him nor my mother, come to that.

While the details don’t matter much anymore, the message was that I was a bastard child but that my father loved me, regardless and had always considered himself my father. To that point, I could not remember my father crying, which is why this news seemed all the more compelling, causing me to stifle my oncoming tears.

The car ride home was swift and silent. No more words were exchanged between us. The only sound was the subtle beating rhythm of “Running” from the stereo. It crystallized my sentiments at the time, all I wanted to do was run; run far away from this moment, back to my father, not this confused man who had taken his place.

The next week, I raged at both my parents, silently at first. Then, after a night spent at a friend’s house where I sobbed uncontrollably and he made good efforts to empathize, I came home to question my mother. She talked circuitously for a brief period, giving her account of the life between she and my father. When I forced the issue, asking if he was really my father, she told me about the fight they had had while I was away, studying art. It was an incident that took both of them and my brother, back to their early days of resentment, fear and anger. The answer to my question was explained simply as, “your dad isn’t well in the head.”

Throughout the years, patterns of depression and mania – never too extreme – but enough to cause significant strife now and then, began to emerge. When he was going well and strong, we held onto our hats, did as he told us because he didn’t want to say it twice and lived by the concept of always having our boots on, ready to go. When he was low, he still worked, ate and cared for us, but it was always with a somber silence when he reflected on better times.

For years, I resented my father, planning always to have his blood drawn in his last moments for me to test his paternity; a way of showing him that I could be as cold as he wanted me to be to face the world. But with time and love, those thoughts slipped away. I saw him reinvigorated in his late great-grandfatherhood, confident in the prosperity of his family. Gone were the days of the man who was fire and ice from one moment to the next. He prepared us as best he could for the trials of life and seemed to make his peace with that.

The night before he died, my nephew and I welcomed him, fresh off his first plane trip. He hugged and kissed me, whispering, “my babe,” in my ear. The next morning, he died of a heart attack while I was at work. The days and weeks that followed were filled with moments of numbness and rage.

Ultimately, when I examined the life he’d led, the family he’d started, the wife he’d shared his life with and the legacy of two surviving sons and four strong, healthy grandchildren and two great-granddaughters with another on the way; I understood his complexity. He was not exactly as he appeared to the world, nor was he as he envisioned himself to his family; he had his faults, but his virtues of love. I saw his humanity span his 75 years, the lessons he taught and the joy he helped to create; the moments of laughter, the quiet presence and the begrudging care he’d give, just this once (over and over again).

As I get older and experience life on life’s terms, finding ways to provide for the ones I care about, I am able to apply the hard lessons with more insight to the inner workings of others and expand my capacity for understanding.

I look at my index fingers for guidance. They are slightly blunted, exactly like my father’s – so unlike the other digits on my mother’s hands – and they point the way forward. They point always to a place of love and compassion, even in the worst of times when I want to feel nothing, or nothing but hatred; then, I remember my father and move ahead into directions only he can see now.

 

The story was told to me this way:

In the late 1960s, my mother was a dispatcher and jailer matron at the Rosebud BIA Police Department, she saw people come and go through for any number of various reasons. She had seen and met my father at powwows in the summers and something was there, but she knew he was married with a son, so she let it be. Then, dad got divorced. They began talking more in social settings; back then for the fear my mother had of her parent’s wrath, there was no casual hooking up, she was a Catholic Lakota winyan and conducted herself as such.

My father was a ranch hand, working various jobs between Rosebud and Wyoming but tended to land in his old stomping grounds of Norris, Blackpipe and Corn Creek. But, being a man of limited means, he didn’t have a car or any reliable transportation to visit mom in Rosebud. So his plan was simple: get drunk, start a fight and get thrown in jail. During his times in jail, he and mom would talk and get to know one another.

It’s a sweet story in it’s own, strange way, but both of them never denied the circumstances of how they eventually got together. On May 4, 1970, they made it official and married. They had good years and they had bad years. Sometimes, they drank, sometimes, they were sober; sometimes they traveled the country and other times, they stayed in Upper Cut Meat.

My brother likes to call me the “sunshine babe” now because on his reflection, after I was born, our parents became the pillars they were in life. I didn’t know them as young people, I could never imagine either of them as anyone else than loving, caring parents and good relatives. But that didn’t exclude the tough years. Some years, they fought, some years, they threatened each other with divorce. And when Native people fight, it can be with heart and soul and when we fight with the people we love, it can be an icy plain of resentment, rooted in deep hurt.

But despite all the fights, all the anger, all the resentment and all the grudges and they still stood together for 37 years until my father’s death in 2008. Even afterward, my mother considered herself both a widow and a married woman. Their gifts to my family were simple: love and fortitude.

I never understood why they stayed together and for a time, I even asked if my mom would consider a divorce. She would think about it and eventually come back with, “I took vows.”

While I was off at college, I would come home on breaks to find they shared a bed again after 15 years or so of sleeping in separate beds. By that time, they were in their 60s and it was sweet. They had come to love each other once more.

And that’s what I remember most about them: their ability to reconcile from a place of love. Even though we may not say the words, as Lakota people, we demonstrate our love by the things we do for one another. We feed each other when the other is hungry, we shelter each other and we laugh together.

I’m most grateful for the things my parents gave. Sometimes I talk about them like they were a museum exhibit, but in some ways they were. In a time and place where people “got together” without being married, they made their commitment official. In times when emotional separation would have ended other marriages, they let one another have their space and time (sometimes, over years) and found a way back to one another.

While I limit how much thinking I do about how they’re spending their afterlife, I look back at the time they had here and consider that their perpetual and spiritual existence. They continue to stand in my mind together as examples of what can be achieved if only we find love and compassion at the base of our lives.

“Your dad collapsed and he’s unresponsive, we need to go.”

My mom, to me on April 11, 2008

Like my mother, in times of extreme stress or emergency, I go into delayed reaction. ‘What is most pressing now is what’s important; we can deal with emotions later.’ The first time she told me about this was when she told me how she was shot at while she was a matron and radio dispatcher at the Bureau of Indian Affairs jail back home in Rosebud in the 1960s. An officer was toying around with his gun and it went off, grazed the chair she was sitting in and made a whole in the wall. She simply walked over to him, grabbed his sidearm, said, “give me that, it’s not a toy,” and locked it up. Later that night, she lost it when she realized how close she came to being shot.

She told me to drive to my brother’s house while she took the passenger seat. I knew it wasn’t good because mom always drove whenever she was able. In the minutes that followed, she began sobbing while all I could do was keep an eye on the road, holding her hand while we barreled out from Reno proper to the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony’s Hungry Valley housing, about 15 miles away. When we arrived at my brother’s house, the looks on the faces of our family were telling. I followed her in and we saw my father’s body on the floor, shirt open with plastic wrappers around him where the EMTs had tried to resuscitate him.

The minutes passed like days as we sat by his body. To see such a mighty oak of a man felled called into question everything I knew about the world. The night before, he had disembarked his first plane from Rapid City to Reno, kissing and hugging us in greeting, smiling and happy to see us all. That day, he was simply gone, leaving behind a fragile, empty shell. All I could do was to hold his lifeless head in my hands and kiss his cold forehead before sobbing. The tears came then and did not stop for years.

Fathers and sons are one of those mysteries about human nature that we try to solve from one generation to the next. Fathers do the best they can to prepare their sons to be honorable men in the world while doing less than honorable things to ensure their children’s future. A son can reject his father while simultaneously needing his father’s approval and validation. Society constructs its own expectations of fathers and sons and both try to find the middle ground between what everyone else expects and what is manageable for them. There are too many important things left unspoken and too many trivial things passed between the two.

Above all else, my father only wanted to love his family and for his family to love him. As an arrested alcoholic and someone who probably suffered from bipolar disorder, that made life difficult at times for him. In my early years, I only knew the sweet man of blessed memory, the father who loved, the father who hugged, the father who provided and affirmed. In my young adulthood, the disapproving and angry father returned, always expecting and pushing for more. It wasn’t until his final years that the sweet man returned and we could be reconciled from years of bitterness.

In his rage and anger, he told me I wasn’t his son, that I was the product of my mother’s imagined infidelity. In a drunken stupor, I told him in Lakota that I was gay, and he said I broke his heart. But in the high steppe of northern Nevada, we would be reconciled when one day he said simply that he loved me and was always proud of me. All was forgiven, all was in the past and we had no more bitterness between us.

Though the process of understanding my father as a human being took years after his death, there isn’t much about his character that surprises me. Mom would tell me about him as a young man, how he was a swift and nimble Grass Dancer before he became a Traditional Dancer in his 50s and 60s. She would tell me about how they first met at the Rosebud Fair Wacipi; while she wanted to talk more with him privately, her parents being the Lakota parents they were, refused to let her out of their sight and he respected that tradition, which stood out to my grandfather. Conversely, she also told me about how, in his own sweet, misguided way, without a car or horse to see her, he would get drunk and start fights in Norris just so someone would call the cops on him. He would then be hauled the 30 miles in a squad car, booked and put in the jail where she worked as a matron and radio dispatcher.

It would be six years of separation before my mother would go to join him. During that time, she told me about how she missed being able to tell him things she’d seen and done during her day that reminded her of him or that he’d find funny, and she missed his laughter and his smile.

On this day, in that infinite moment between life and death, it’s my hope that there exists a place where my father and my mother are sitting at the table, drinking coffee and tea, talking again of good things, seeing relatives again and surrounded by all that makes up love. It’s my hope to join them one day, when the time is right for me, and I can tell my father how proud I always was of him.

“When it was already dawn, Jesus was standing on the shore;
but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus.
Jesus said to them, ‘Children, have you caught anything to eat?’
They answered him, ‘No.’
So he said to them, ‘Cast the net over the right side of the boat
and you will find something.’
So they cast it, and were not able to pull it in
because of the number of fish.
So the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord.’”

Today’s Gospel reading focuses on how after the Resurrection, Christ appeared to His closest followers – who didn’t recognize Him – and in their grief and fear of persecution for continuing to preach the message, for whom and which the messenger was killed. Going back to what they knew best (fishing), they wanted regress to what life was like, before what happened. It’s what we all do as human beings; when we experience the pain of loss, trauma or just change in general, we harken back to the bygone days of when things used to be more prosperous, at least in our memory.

We do this in most aspects of our lives. Some of us espouse more conservative ideals that, somehow, life seemed easier in years past. We start traditions to associate with happy memories or we double-down on political or religious leaders who promise a return to the old ways.

In Lakota culture, we still have this deep desire to return to our traditional ways of life. It stems from the prime injustice of colonization, having been hunted down, our relatives killed in front of us, being forced onto reservations, converting to a foreign religion and being punished for violating American rules imposed on us without our individual consent. When I was growing up in the 1980s, my reservation began seeing a renaissance of sorts of traditional teachings. In 1978, Congress had passed the Indian Religious Freedom Act that decriminalized our traditional religious worship and sought to destigmatize cultural practices centered on language and social gatherings. I was fortunate in that I grew up in a time when I understood my parents and their relatives as they conversed in Lakota, when my lullaby was the rhythmic pounding of a powwow drum and I understood god and the spiritual universe around me in a Lakota worldview.

But by that point, the damage had been done. Generations of people were touched by historic trauma, still ashamed to speak their own language or engage in our religious practices. My family was still largely half Christian and half traditional. While I grew up understanding Lakota, I was shamed by others in my community for speaking in the feminine dialect (because of their Christian indoctrination that the gender binary was absolute and god’s will) and English became my primary mode of expression.

So in very real ways, I understand where the roots of conservatism take hold. We construct a world we hope will last for eons and when they fail to respond well to change, those constructed worlds are shaken, some are destroyed and we seek a return to that hope of what we had wanted. But where the wisdom of my people’s past carries through is being at peace with the reality that we’ve always adapted to change, we survive, adapting while holding true to what guides us: faith, family and interconnection.

In more narrow terms, as human beings, we do so enjoy going back to the past. There are genuinely good memories there where the people, places and things we loved live in infinite memory.  From time to time, I will remember my parents, old friends and ex-boyfriends who’ve passed or gone away from me. And then, I romanticize the past, of how loving they were, how affirming they were and how perfect they were. And I get sad. I become involved in my sadness to the point of obsession, questioning what could have been done to keep them here, keep them alive, keep them happy or keep them loved.

But that’s no way to live my life. Recently, I was recalling to a friend my last romantic entanglement and how it ended a friendship and sent me flying away from the people and places that were associated with that person. Almost a year later and I’m able to be a little more objective about the whole situation because I can say, with some certainty, that that person didn’t actually care about me because he did uncaring, unkind and self-centered things without ever even thinking they were impacting me and I willingly subjected myself to it because I sought for some form of security, no matter how torturing it was for me.

And that’s human, too. We subject ourselves to torturous behavior in the hopes that someday, somehow, we will be rewarded. And when that fails, when we’re harmed by change, be it political, religious, societal or personal, we run into the night and want everything behind (institutions, people and places) smashed into oblivion.

But that, too, is no way to live our lives.

In my limited experience, peace, serenity and consciousness come from being able to forgive the past and people in it while going forward into the newness of each day.  When I find myself dwelling in the past, I pray. It’s never a formal prayer or a structured prayer. When I dwell on the past, I ask god to take it from me to preserve it in god’s infinite nature, knowing that god can take care of the people, places and institutions in my memories far better than I ever could. I trust in god to take care of the people I loved and to set me forth on doing something new.

Christ told his followers by the shore to try something new as they fished and it just so happened that when they tried something new, their rewards were a manifest bounty. Then, He asked them to look after his people. Our charge as people of faith is to trust in the power that is to provide us with a new direction every day, to rise up resurrected each day, committed to the purpose of taking care of one another.

Recent uproars in Indian Country of comedian Ralphie May’s years-old tirade about Natives, vis-à-vis his anger on “Dances With Wolves” winning the 1991 Academy Award for Best Picture over “Goodfellas,” have brought to light the reality that many Native people in the United States live with on a daily basis.

While many who’ve come to defend or support his comments as simply comedy or a joke and media outlets have generally characterized his rant as “anti-Native,” it’s important to read and hear what was actually said, regardless of context.

“Fuck a bunch of Indians, I’m sick of hearing about —we’re supposed to boo-hoo over goddamn Indians when shit was 120 years ago, fuckin’, get over it. Nobody fuckin’ 150 years ago is making you drink now. Fuckin’ dry up you bunch of fuckin’ alcoholics and go get a real fuckin’ job. Cut that fuckin’ hair, Bon Jovi cut his, you should cut yours, this shit is done, son. That shit is done. Fuck you, bunch of Indians. Fuck the Indians. I’m sorry, I’m sorry they as a group never made it to the Bronze Age, I’m sorry they never invented the motherfuckin’ wheel, I’m sorry, boo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. Boo-fuckin’-hoo. Fuck the Indians. Maybe if they had done some of that shit, maybe we wouldn’t have taken their country with three smallpox blankets and a bag of beads. Fuck a bunch of Indians, fuck ‘em.”

Ralphie May

So beyond any shock value, his tirade – cloaked in comedy and defended as taken out of context and added to by his protestations that he hates on everyone – is indicative of white fragility. When he says, “we’re supposed to boo-hoo over goddamn Indians when shit was 120 years ago,” it shows us that the guilt of genocide, conquest and the continued, measured effects of colonization (yes, up to and including alcoholism) is something that registers as a historical injustice.

The frustration he might feel at having to have sympathy for Native people is ineloquently expressed as, “get over it.” The worldview that allows him to espouse the notion that those with the bigger guns win and are therefore are ordained by some authority to have dominion over the less advanced, is precisely the same worldview that directly affects most people of color in this nation.

This is the attitude that Indigenous people face every day, whether we live on our reserved lands that remained after treaty violations or outright illegal seizures or out in the world that was imposed upon us. When not properly addressed or processed, it leads to what we have come to understand as historic and inter-generational trauma. Personally speaking, I know this human wasn’t addressing me directly and I can file it away under my “Ignorant Jackass Making Money Off Racism” and go on with my day. But I’m one of the privileged goddamn Indians who’ve been fortunate enough to understand how to process my own emotional baggage. Not all of us are that privileged, precisely because we’re told every day to “get over it.”

The only thing I can say for Ralphie May is that either he knows exactly what he’s doing by making money off of his ignorance, hatred and white fragility or he truly is that ignorant, hateful and fragile. Just be aware that when it comes to people of color throughout this nation who might seem angry or reactionary, this is a prime example of the white nonsense we have to deal with on a daily basis, whether spoken or unspoken.

What encourages me is knowing that despite all of this being true, I come from a long line of Lakota who have borne worse in their living days. What encourages me is knowing that despite all of this being true, my family continues on from one day to the next. When I look at my nieces, nephews and their children, I know they’ll face similar challenges in their lives, but they have the strength within them, passed down by their great-grandparents, grandparents and parents to live with greater purpose than someone who spews such ignorance.

Every Good Friday, I’m inevitably reminded of my Grandma Jessie Quick Bear. She was my father’s adopted aunt, but in Lakota kinship, because she helped raise him, she was his mother as well and was the closest person I had to a living grandmother.

When I was a child, my parents and I would go to the Stations of the Cross in Corn Creek Community on Good Friday. My Aunt Linda (his adopted sister) and my Uncle Francis were Episcopalian and for many years, we were active in that church, though I never took any sacraments – other than communion – in it. We would walk the gravel road from St. Paul’s just outside of Norris to St. Thomas in Corn Creek. Father Campbell led us as the young men of the community took turns carrying the cross, stopping 14 times to mark the path of Jesus to the Crucifixion.

Grandma Jessie, even in her 70s, would walk as far as she could with her cane, along the gravel road. Only one year do I remember her not being able to complete the whole walk and she was more than frustrated that she couldn’t. Most years, we’d help her into the van when she got tired and only when she was very worried would Aunt Linda start yelling at Grandma Jessie to get in the van and she’d start yelling right back at Aunt Linda.

Grandma Jessie’s favorite phrase to shout at her biological grandchildren was “nahun he” meaning “are you listening?” Inevitably, my cousins would stop whatever shenanigans they were up to and do as she instructed them in Lakota. Being yelled at by your elders in Lakota society was a prospect no Lakota child ever wants to face. Only disrespectful children refused to listen to what an elder tells them. It’s a value that serves me to this day.

It goes beyond the Western value of doing as you’re told because of some rigid, hierarchical expectations based on superiority or inferiority. It’s a value of genuinely respecting our elders because they had lived to an age of wisdom that some of us – who don’t listen – ever get to experience. So when an elder asks you if you’re listening, you listen.

On this Good Friday, I listened to what god had to say; not just in scripture or The Passion, but in where god guided my thoughts and my prayer. As we venerated the cross that represented how our savior died for us, even though He asked for it to pass Him by, we sang “Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world.” It was a profound experience that – as people of a certain faith – we shared in, attempting to (perhaps in vain) atone for our collective sin that led to such an event. We also shared in uplifting the cross, doing our best to remember that even though we share a collective responsibility in the death of our savior, we also are bound to listen to His teachings and enact them in the world around us.

In what wisdom we can glean from the gospels, we learn of how people (when gathered in groups) can submit absolutely to fear and anger. When human beings gather, we have the ability to condemn others to unjust death. In what wisdom we can glean from the gospels, we learn of how the artificial structures of power and office are meaningless in the presence of truth. In what wisdom we can glean from the gospels, we learn that even when we suffer at our own hands, we have the example of how to forgive and to trust and to commend our life to god’s care.

In all of this on Good Friday, I remembered my Grandma Jessie when she asks “nahun?!” and  in what wisdom I can glean from her examples, my parents examples and my spiritual examples, that I and we – as human beings – are capable of tremendous injustice, but we are also capable of extraordinary love.

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.