Details

Storyteller: Maria
Tribe: Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe
Created: 2018
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Transcript: My mother’s parents were French Canadian, Irish and German. My Father's father is from the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. My father’s mother was French Canadian and grew up on a small farm outside of Dayton MN. My paternal grandmother delivered my father in 1925 and gave him to her mother Emily who was only able to care for him for the first two and half months of life and brought my father to the city where he was placed in an infant orphanage in Saint Paul. At the age two and half, my father was transferred to a larger orphanage in Minneapolis where he lived for the next 13 and half years and experienced severe physical, emotional and sexual abuse. My father was so strong and resilient always seeing the glass half full with his life experiences. My father would begin his own healing journey in his sixties. My father was taken from the orphanage at the age of 15 years and lived in a family setting for the next two years. When my parents decided to marry, my mother’s family did not want my mother to marry my father. I was born in 1953 on the West Side of Saint Paul, MN, the oldest of 7 children. My father had served in World War II and was now drafted in the Korean War and was not present for my birth. My mother and I lived with my maternal grandparents for the first 16 months of my life. My mother and I moved to Washington DC in 1954 to join my father. We lived there till 1957 and then moved to an army base in Landstuhl, Germany. During the time in Germany, there were still bombed buildings left and bullet shells in the ground from World War II and we would dig them up and play amongst the bombed buildings. I was sexually molested while living on the military base; that began to have a negative impact my behavior as an adolescent. My family returned to Saint Paul MN in 1962 and this was the first time I saw segregation. On the military base, we all lived as one. My father was not connected to his Native American culture, therefore it was not practiced in my home growing up, but my parents instilled that we had a responsibility to stand up and make changes for human rights through their example. My mother had severe anxiety, which caused her to not want to leave the house at times and I became her right hand at home by the age of 7 years. I have great admiration for her being able to find the strength each day to get up and start a new day. Not fitting in either culture was hard as a teenager and a young adult with no a sense of belonging in either world. I began to practice my culture when I started my own healing journey age the age of 34 years after being diagnosed with lupus and leaving a marriage that was filled with domestic violence. Western medicine was not able to make me well. I began to meet women in the community and they became my sisters. They offered me love, friendship and a safe place to begin my healing journey. They brought me to ceremony and taught me cultural practices that healed me physically, emotionally, spiritually and mentally. Without these life ways, I may not have lived. An old spirit visited me and showed me how to weave ribbon and make a dress for dancing, which became part of my medicine. My two sons were my greatest teachers, they taught me unconditional love and the sacredness of life. They also started their own healing journey, one through dance and the other through music. I remarried and our family grew with another son, and daughter and eight grandchildren. For 28 years I have worked for the community. The experience has given me gifts beyond measure and I am humbled to be of service.

Prevention and healing is in our culture and our traditional life ways. Through returning to our teachings and ceremonies, my life was brought into balance and I began to come back into my body after being fragmented from abuse. Life is a healing journey with many lessons of beauty and pain. We are fully supported by the spirits that guide us each day, our ancestors and those that walk beside us in this life. During each phase, new sisters come into my life bringing support, love and compassion. I belong to a women's drum group, the Ogichi Daa Kwe council. Learning the language through songs has been transforming. We are a manifestation of a dream from the beginning of time. In doing our own healing work we are healing ourselves, our ancestors and the future – the string of lives.