Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life

Where to Begin

If I were standing in front of you at this moment, I would begin with an apology for speaking in front of my elders. I don’t yet speak the Dakota language; I’m too young in terms of life experience and too ignorant of Native culture to have earned the right to address my community. To write this book has meant a long struggle to understand why I feel compelled to speak and what story I have to tell. This is what I have to offer: a personal perspective on what it means to transform generations of trauma experienced by American Indian people throughout this country. In this book are personal stories of Native people I have encountered in the past ten years who have demonstrated a deep commitment to the work of personal transformation. They are engaged daily in the never-ending struggle to overcome the legacy of our history. While their work takes them in many different directions, from teaching to preaching, I have found their individual efforts inspiring. As a mixed-blood Dakota mother and grandmother, I feel a responsibility to speak about the issues that have affected the cultural identity of my own family. My mother’s family survived three generations of boarding school but at great cost to our cultural knowledge and identity. When my mother left the Holy Rosary Boarding School on the Pine Ridge Reservation , she chose to turn away from her community and the past. Like many other descendants of boarding school students, I grew up in a white school that buried the true history of events like the 1862 Dakota War and the boarding school system. 5 Where to Begin 01_Layout 1 6/6/2011 10:18 Page 5 6 Beloved Child When I was a teenager, my mother told me a story of being left at Holy Rosary for two years when she was fourteen. When she came home to Rapid City, South Dakota, for a surprise visit, she found her house empty, her family gone—they had moved in search of work. In the few words she used to tell me this story, her tone calm and matter of fact, I felt something shift from her life to mine. I drew it in like a breath, felt it attach to my heart in a way that would shape the direction of my life. This one story was the culmination of experience from generations in my family, just as a single seed contains the history of what has happened on the land. Throughout our lives, we are taught, shaped, scarred, and strengthened by the stories we are told, the stories that we live, and the invisible legacies that help shape who we become. When these stories are silenced, as has happened to many generations of Dakota people, when the history is ignored, then we are unconscious witnesses to the past. When a generation cannot reconcile their experience, it becomes a legacy for their children and their grandchildren, who inherit the raw, unfinished work of their ancestors. As we slowly wake to the reality of genocide in this country and in the state of Minnesota, the question becomes how to live with the consequences of this history, how to pursue justice, and how to raise beloved children without the devastation of suicide, alcoholism, depression, and poverty that has haunted Native people for the past several hundred years. For each person interviewed, I asked the same question being asked throughout Indian Country today: how to heal from the historical trauma that is a consequence of our unacknowledged history. While tribes and communities are investing deeply in programs to help preserve the language and the elders’ knowledge as well as programs that deal with the devastating consequences of generations-long trauma, the struggle to recover must also occur on a personal level. Each and every one of us carries this legacy; unacknowledged, it manifests as rage, as internalized racism, as self-destruction through alcohol and drugs. Transforming this toxic legacy is perhaps one of the greatest struggles we will encounter in our time on this earth. This work requires us to 01_Layout 1 6/6/2011 10:18 Page 6 Where to Begin 7 absorb what has been described as a “soul wound,” taking it deep into our individual and collective spirits, draining the toxins, absorbing the teachings , and turning this energy back into the world to help our community...