Apple, Twist, Candy Cane: Part Two
It’s 2021, and I’m in the first-ever Native American Civil Rights Seminar. I’m one of the few who’s not Diné, and I’m one of the few not graduating within a year, but we form a community nonetheless. A community where we laugh and cry together. As Dr. Draper said, “Being angry and crying alone is depression. Being angry and crying together is Ceremony.” Our crying ceremonies become lifesaving as I learn for the first time of the atrocities committed by members and leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints against Natives. The Bear River Massacre. The Mountain Meadows Massacre. The Indian Placement Program—which undeniably does have multiple reports of only good, but we cannot deny that some families were abusive and took advantage of their fostered Native child(ren). I wonder how the entire Northwest Band of the Shoshone Nation could convert to a church whose leader was the reason US troops were sent to their lands—that fateful morning when they killed, raped, and mutilated over 400 Shoshone. Even infants. How can the university we attend be named after that same church leader, Brigham Young?
I wonder how I can remain in a church that denies or dismisses these atrocities as “part of God’s Plan,” when the God I have come to know is all-loving. The only thing I can reason is that God is all-loving, but His people are not.
Am I one of those people?
It’s 2024, and I think I’ve seen it all. The usual microaggressions, the “No, where are you REALLY from?”s, the RMs speaking Spanish at me, and the most hurtful: “You only got into BYU because you’re Brown”—dismissing my years getting As and Bs at an impossibly competitive high school and the hours working on and revising my BYU application essays. I even thought I’d seen the worst from professors: worshiping Christopher Columbus like a god, justifying his raping and enslaving and slaughtering of Natives as punishment for bad Lamanite behavior, and even a professor saying, “We can see how some people thought Andrew Jackson was helping the Natives.” By forcing them out of their land?
That’s until, one day, my Physical Science professor pauses in the middle of our lecture on gravitational force to mumble something, tell us it was Navajo, and tell the students who served Spanish-speaking missions that they were lucky because they learned a beautiful and useful language and can communicate with others. But he… He learned to speak some Navajo on his mission.
“What use is that? No one speaks Navajo, not even the Navajo!” He laughs, and the whole lecture hall laughs with him, except for me. I want to yell. I want to scream. I want to throw my two-pound textbook at his face. But all I can do is pack my backpack and storm out as my face gets flushed with anger and tears, and I think, “How can he say that?” I know people who speak Navajo. I know people who wish they could speak Navajo because that is the language of their people! I wish I could speak the language of my own people, Amskapi Pikuni. But I cannot because this White man’s ancestors, and mine, made sure that Natives could not speak their languages.
I cry to my American Indian Studies professor, Mike Taylor. I cry to my husband. And I cry with my new Native Rights Seminar class.
Crying is Ceremony.
I think about crying and ceremony a lot on our Seminar trip to Oklahoma. I cry because I miss my husband and my cat, and I’m scared of being so far away from them, and what if I can’t eat any food we get, and what if everyone hates me and everything goes wrong? But I love most of the food we get (mostly the frybread), and everyone seems to tolerate my awkwardness.
As for Ceremony, we meet with members of the Cherokee Nation and learn how to make a sweat lodge out of willow branches. I learn that a sweat lodge ceremony is for being cleansed by sweating and praying out your worries. What goes in a sweat stays in the lodge and is taken by Creator so that you can leave feeling clean, hopeful, and able to move forward in your healing journey. Before learning this, we bless ourselves four times with the cedar. I am mostly thinking about not messing up since I have never done this and lose count, but I feel honored to participate, and I let the smoke take as much anxiety as I can bear to let go of so Creator can hold it instead.
At the Muscogee Nation, we meet the Chiefs, Attorney General, Director of Child and Family Welfare, Tax Director, and Chief of Police. We learn of their celebration at the passing of the McGirt Case on the day they call Sovereignty Day. We learn that many of them participate in both their Tribal Stomp Dance Ceremony and their Christian church. They see no division between the two as they both connect them to Creator and their ancestors. They do not deny the harm that Christians have inflicted on Natives through colonization, but they hold on to the belief that their God is the all-loving Creator, and that ceremony comes in many forms.
Church is Ceremony.
At the First Americans Museum, I leave the video room to escape the sounds of war. I walk forward as if pulled by a force not my own and come face to face with tiny boots. “Children as young as two years old were taken from their families and placed at the Haskell Institute,” the plaque reads. I tear up as I think of my niece and nephews, and when they were two and small enough to fit in these tiny boots on display. I think of my grandfather and great-grandfather at Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota, far away from their home in Browning, Montana. I think of my mother, wondering why my grandfather refused to teach her Blackfeet, why he vehemently commanded that she was never to step foot in a Catholic church. I think of my fellow Native women presenting our families’ stories at academic conferences. I think of the audience member who talked of a Palestinian woman told to forget the trauma of her family’s past. She wrote in a journal, “I do not regret remembering.” By remembering this pain and telling our stories, we ensure that whatever baby wore these shoes will never be forgotten. By acknowledging the intergenerational trauma and telling our stories, we begin our intergenerational healing.
Storytelling is Ceremony.
It's April 2024, and the sun is finally coming out. My little White sister is tanner than me from her trip to Brazil. My skin that changes with the seasons is still pale from the winter sky. I look at myself and the other members of our class with pale skin. I think of the Cherokee and the Muscogee and the Sac and Fox tribes with pale skin. We may not be seen as Native. But it runs in our blood. I have a certificate to prove it. But I think of my future children, who will be paler than me and may even have blue eyes. They will not qualify for the certificate that White men forced my people to create—requiring Natives to keep a pedigree like dogs or horses, showing who belongs and who doesn’t. But I know that this certificate is not what makes me Native. It is my ancestors whose blood runs through me, whose spirits visit me in my darkest times and remind me through my mother’s words that I am a Strong Native Woman like my grandmothers before me. That I have a Creator who loves me. I have Mother Earth, who sustains me. I have prayer, tears, laughter, and writing as my ceremonies. I have an all-loving God and His son who died for me. This God’s people may have issues with who I am and what I say, but I have a duty to my people. I may not know all of our traditional ways, but I am an advocate for my people. I am a storyteller of my family. I am Christian. My skin might be pale, but my blood runs red. Like the blood running through me from my ancestors, I am Native.