Details

Storyteller: Marcie
Tribe: White Earth Band of Ojibwe
Created: 2018
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Transcript: A common misconception is the assumption that god created flowers on a higher plane than dirt…or say, tornados 

Because of early nurturing by my parents and culture I was able to survive and then thrive into the person I am today. My mother was raised in a logging camp by her father and then sent to boarding school. She ran away in 7th grade. A small thin girl, 12 years old, running from South Dakota to northern Minnesota in an age of no cell phones, Google, or interstate highways. She was a force, a whirlwind. Without being parented herself, she never had the opportunity to learn a parenting skillset. Alcoholism. Violence. Poverty. And a state system that in the 1950s was removing children from Native homes at an alarmingly high rate. Some reservations had removal rates as high as 60%.

Struggle is my first, last and middle name
I am the heat mirage shimmer
An untouchable illusion
I didn’t ask to be alone
To rise above the heat

When I started first grade I was placed in a foster home. From day one I had to learn to duck and dodge physical, sexual, spiritual and emotional abuse. This continued for twelve years. The day I graduated high school I returned to my father’s home where he showed me a telegram from Montana stating that my mother had died three days earlier. So began my journey home.

I went searching for you
In suicidal hazes
Alcohol induced rages and lonely Indian blues songs
Sometime, sorrow consumed my soul

What has been a constant in my life is a spiritual grounding that has always been with me, protected me, guided me. I never doubted that my parents loved me, wanted me. And I have always known the spirits who walk along side me. I began to make sense of the craziness of my life during the early years of the American Indian Movement and when in my American Indian studies classes I read books like God is Red by Vine Deloria and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Floyd Westerman and Buffy St. Marie sang our liberation songs. I got to spend time around spiritual elders like the Crow Dogs, Eddie Benton Benai, and Phillip Deere.

I am woman, I have been torn from my roots and the seeds of my being strewn across the countryside. I have replanted my soul and am struggling to break ground. I have pulled together my life-giving forces and am nurturing them in the glow of the first quarter moon.

I think I grew back into myself after having my own children and making the decision to never do anything that would lead to my losing them to the foster care system. I quit all alcohol and drugs. I focused on being a parent with the mantra of ‘first of all do no harm’ recognizing that I too, had grown up without a good parenting skillset.

I am the soil from which all things grow. The seeds of all the nations are carried in my womb. My children are the seventh generation of the treaties and the trees are too precious to be made into paper and ink fades in the winds and waters of time.

My life today is very good. I am surrounded by family I love and who love me. I create by writing. I attend our traditional ceremony. The presence of unhealed historical trauma impacts me as I see our community hurt by the cycle of trauma - both external like the high number of missing and murdered women and also how we ourselves continue to behave in so many dysfunctional ways. My intention for us would be that we could begin to see that we are more resilient than our trauma.

Genocide removed our flesh and blood until all that’s heard – if you stop to hear – are the songs of elders rising from the homeland
And children waiting to be born, singing ancestral victory songs.