Lakota

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.

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.

Value and virtue

Hoyekiyapi, , , Leave a comment

“There were two Indians who were asked to speak on a panel. One was a man who decorated himself with beadwork, wore a fringed leather jacket had his hair in braids. He talked a lot about all the good he had done and all the noteworthy things about himself. The second Indian was a woman. She wore a skirt and suit coat and had her hair done nicely. She talked about the struggles and the triumphs of her community, she praised the people who had made a difference in it and acknowledged her elders who helped her along the way. Now, most of the white people in the audience thought the man had done a better job in his presentation, but the Indian people in the audience all knew the woman was the one who lived her values as an Indian person. She dressed to respect her audience, didn’t place demands on them by being the center of attention and spoke about her community, not herself, because Indian people who are raised in the culture understand they’re only part of a part of the community, not the center of it.”

I’d first heard that story when from an elderly Dakota man who spoke to my class at the Oscar Howe Native American Summer Art Institute over 15 years ago. While the man’s name has faded from my memory, the story remains. It’s the first time I’d ever heard the values, by which, I was raised be communicated so succinctly. While I’m sure every Native who’s ventured out into the world can imagine examples of those kinds of people and may even be tempted to name them, the principles are universal for us. We’ve run across the self-important and the grandiose who like to make themselves the embodiment of all things Native, but for every one of those people, we know someone who may fit our own stereotype of who we’re supposed to look like as Native people, but their behavior and conduct tells us all we need to know about their upbringing.

After two days in a work retreat, the common theme of values, both individual and shared came up and played an important part in the work we do. In my personal assessment, my top five values were: spirituality/faith, helpfulness, ethics, knowledge and creativity. Anyone who knows me would be not be surprised that spirituality and faith were my top value. I express it, at this point in my life and going forward, through Catholicism. It’s a philosophical framework that helps me not to understand god – because god is too immense for my human mind to comprehend – but to direct myself in a helpful way to making life just a little more bearable for others.

I write a great deal about my mother because she was the first witness to faith that I remember. She, too, was able to reconcile her Catholic faith with Wolakota as expressions of the same faith in a higher power that saw her, and our ancestors, through some of the worst times in our personal and collective histories. Within two generations, our way of life was wiped out, our relatives killed and our children taken and assimilated into white American culture. What her father, my grandfather, and she were able to do was to see what good could be applied in such a tumultuous and genocidal time.

What I don’t often talk about is the culture, in which, I grew up. It’s not out of shame or remorse or lack of understanding but out of respect. The story about the two Indian speakers reminds me that it’s not enough simply to talk about one’s culture; one has to demonstrate and illustrate the knowledge of that culture. I grew up in a conservative worldview, not in terms of policing other peoples’ behavior, but in guiding our own behavior in the world.

We don’t boast about our accomplishments, we don’t present ourselves disingenuously to the world for the sake of appearance, we don’t wear our identity on our sleeve for attention and we don’t share what others are unwilling to hear. We protect what is precious to us and we demonstrate our values by how we conduct ourselves through our virtues: generosity, wisdom, fortitude and courage.

There are days I miss the stories and the lessons that I grew up with, there are days I miss my aunties and my uncles who sat around the dinner table or the fire pit, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and reminiscing. That is what grounded me in my culture, hearing Lakota not just in the language but in the poetry of the thought and philosophy of my people; men poked fun at the proud, women gasped and sighed at the selfishness of the assimilated and we kids argued and chased one another around.

The genuine joy we have now is that our wisdom, our stories and our ethics carry on because we live in an age where what wisdom one generation has remembered and gathered can be passed to each successive generation without the fading of memory or dimming of detail. When times get hard, I watch the interview with my mother that my relatives at Sinte Gleska University gathered before she died. And when I need to remember the full perspective on my culture, I get to hear my late Uncle Albert White Hat talk once more.

In revisiting these loved ones, the longing to be with them again is replaced with the gratitude for how they demonstrated how to live, how to conduct ourselves and how to make manifest our virtues and to live our values.

Mountain View

(My dad and mom at Chief Iron Shell’s grave in St. Francis, S.D. in May of 2007.)