Navigating racial divides has been a lifelong endeavor and has been one of the most instructive tools in my learning or leaning toward a more mature sense of justice. Racism and its effects have always played a role in my life. I grew up in two vastly different places: Prince George’s County, Maryland, right on the border with Southeast Washington, D.C., and Central Mississippi. Summers were spent in Mississippi and the rest of the year, unless my mother was too ill to care for us, was spent in Maryland.

    In PG County, I surrounded by a sea of brown-skinned people from all over. There were African-Americans, Africans, Asians from the entire continent, Islanders and those from other Americas. Mississippi was not. In Maryland, it was impossible to not have brown and black friends. In Mississippi, it was absolutely impossible.  In Maryland, no one used the n-word, coon, Chink, and more without the very real threat of a very real ass-kicking, and I talked funny because of my thick Southern accent. In Mississippi, I talked “too black” and the racial slurs above and others like ‘jungle monkey’, ‘Mammy’, and ‘tar baby’ were regularly used by everyone, everywhere, including my uncles who preached the ‘good word’ on Sundays but apparently couldn’t sustain that ‘good’ the entire seven days a week.

    I watched my parents remain silent as their family members used those words to describe my friends and neighbors. Now, they weren’t talking about people I knew, of course, but as a kid, when adults were talking about one Black person, my mind and heart went to those I actually knew. I don’t know if I was merely following my parents’ lead or if I, too, was just as afraid to say anything to my parents as they were to their own. I did know I needed to keep my mouth shut about it around the other adults, and I did. It was excruciating. I knew at the very core of me, it was wrong and after one experience with a paddle in the first grade (because Mississippi did corporal punishment in schools. I got the paddle with holes in it.), I knew it was not safe to challenge it.

    As a youngster, I lived with feeling that my silence implied I was a racist just like they were. I’d  return to Forest Heights filled with shame and the fear that others would see it, like there was a branded R on my forehead. It wouldn’t last, of course, because kids being kids, we just got back into our groove.

    Before I entered the sixth grade, my parents decided that the Fairfax County (VA) school system was where my brother and I needed to be. We crossed the Woodrow Wilson bridge into the bastion of Whiteness that Annandale, Virginia, was at the time. My first day, I cried. I cried because, there, I talked funny in the ‘too black’ way with a Southern accent, I was gangly as hell and was surrounded by varying shades of white and pink, without a hint of any other ethnicity. Until I was sent to the principals’ office because I couldn't stop crying. Mr. Rucker, a dark-skinned Black man made me feel like I hadn’t actually landed on another planet and that everything would be okay. He didn’t make fun of my talking and offered comfort when the whiteness around me may as well have been wearing sheets.

    Now that may seem a little overboard, something a twelve year old girl wouldn’t know a thing about but no one grows up 25 miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, without knowing the Klan. I knew about Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, long before Mississippi Burning appeared on the big screen. I had wondered if my grandparents or uncles had participated in something like that or if they would gladly join if the opportunity presented itself. No one in my family wore white robes in front of me, although it would not have surprised me then, nor would it surprise me now. The last time I had any contact with extended family was in the mid-90s when I went to go visit my favorite cousin.

    I waited in the living room while he was getting dressed for work. We hollered back and forth down the hallway and he walked out, head to toe in blue. He asked me what I thought of his monkey suit and I must have looked at him funny because to me, a monkey suit is a tuxedo and a police uniform is certainly not that, and he responded with a grin, “It’s a monkey suit because it gives me permission to beat monkeys!” His meaning was clear. His police officer uniform gave him carte blanche to beat people, not every people but Black people. And he was proud of it, grinning. I nearly puked.  At the time I'd been dating for several years an African-American man and my cousin, brought a fear I hadn't seen to the fore in years. I fled. And I didn't say anything. I just ran.

As a professional adult,  in the mental health and criminal justice fields, interactions with racists and systemic racism are less like the whiplash of childhood and more like the slow burn of, “Are you fucking kidding me?”  I've listened to cops, judges and therapists talk like my dad. During the last conversations with my father in 2015, I couldn’t help but wonder if he could hear himself when he said things like Detroit is in such a sorry state because, essentially, “Blacks just don’t know how to work or maintain things” and when he learned that I was in the area, not to see him, but to meet with a Choctaw alikchi, or medicine man, he informed me that “things would be so much better for Indians if they would just assimilate” and that he gave regularly to an organization that would help them do just that. My father is an 80 year-old physicist who, despite growing up in Mississippi, worked and socialized, with people from all over the globe. This was how he thought of them while he was spending time alongside them.

    Although I didn’t know that when I was younger, it confirmed for me things I’d wondered about as a youngster; what my parents thought as they listened to their families speak without saying anything and then returned to those with whom they worked and shared community with.

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Clearly, I walk the world as a white woman; as a white woman who works with brown-skinned Ancestors. It’s often awkward when I show up in communities looking for people related to a particular Ancestor or group of them. The openness of the interaction and potential for relationship has, so far, been largely depends on the age of the person I’m with or the dramatic nature of my appearance. If I’m bringing someone back to their native mother and land after they were ‘adopted’ forty years prior, there’s no denying the spiritual nature of the unfolding. If, though, I just show up driving through a reserve, some feel intruded upon and distrustful of a white woman who claims relationship with their Ancestors.

Sometimes, though, the interaction has moved beyond the surface long before I arrive. “I thought this day would come after I hung up my bow,” or “I knew you were coming,” even when they don’t know me. Mostly, though, the reaction is fear and anger, divided by generational lines. Those older than 80 are more open, as are those under the age of eighteen. Between 18 and 80, though, lie a middle ground that requires learning to dance with each other, slowly. "Why is it that my Ancestors come to you? You’re not an Indian!"

No, I’m not an Indian though those in Sioux country see me as Lakota or Nakoda, a few Choctaw who study my face and call me brother, spiritual and other folk connect me directly to Dine; “I see all of those around you and all of those within you.” However, most cannot see me the way their Ancestors do. Wovoka walks with me because he saw me ages ago, Sitting Bull, Washakie, Poundmaker, Crowfoot and more walk with me because they see me, too. However, their breathing kin do not, though there are exceptions who can’t wrap their head around it, because I’m not supposed to be; to be real, to be this way.

So I walk with brown-skinned Ancestors. In fact, don’t just walk with them, I work at their direction , I’m alive because they protect me, and heal because they have taught me the medicine. Yet I cannot, with the most pressing issue at hand, cannot connect with their kin in the way that is most useful.

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Other challenges in presenting work like this are steeped in myths. In this unfolding, the primary challenge is that people who experience the world in the way I do are generally not believed, even in Indian Country. Working with Ancestors and the natural world in the manner I do is deemed impossible, the stuff of fantasy or insanity, or relegated to the "uncivilized" people who are "not developed" or just need to be "saved." 

 

The idea that there is an inherent human supremacy or primacy in the universal order of things (and it’s attendant subdivisions and hierarchies) is a fallacy that, for millennia, held the promise of ‘advancement’ for people and now threatens the lives of the ‘advanced’. We are not separated from anything; we are not individuals separated by species or death, there is no separate ‘nature’; we are nature and the elements within it are in communion, and relationship with each other at all times. Our opposable thumbs do not bring with them an inherent superiority. I cringe at the use of the word ‘spirit’ because, it too, implies something that is outside of us, and separated from the boundaries of our skin, our mental processes, and how we experience the world.

I communicate with Beings others cannot see and with those seen but identified as inanimate or animal and are incapable of communication. Ancestors, angels and Others don’t reside on different planes or dimensions; God is nowhere and everywhere and tiny bits of him are not sowed (or sewed) within people; all or a special few. In my way of being, even as the living God or expression of The One, or Consciousness, breathing humans are not the center of the universe and our needs or desires do not bestow the favor of a God, The Gods or the fates or the chosen spiritual flavor of the day.

This way of experiencing and expressing the world is not comfortable for most people. It’s been considered the way of the ‘uncivilized’ and ‘heathen’ since before the Enlightenment said it was so. On this continent, it was a way of being that was beaten, stolen, murdered, raped and legislated out of existence from Native Americans by European colonizers as they plowed across it. A white woman working with Indigenous Ancestors faces additional layers of suspicion, prejudice and fears borne by the history of her own ancestor’s attempts at eradication, assimilation and appropriation of Indigenous people on this continent.

Coupled with this are the beliefs about historical and modern slavery. Our own government, despite having access to the data that states otherwise, purports that slavery does not happen here, to American or other citizens in modern North America. To most outside of government, because it is not seen here, it is not our problem. It occurs "over there”; relegated to undeveloped countries, where we think people are valued less and it’s commonly accepted that government and law-enforcement officials there operate "extralegally" as if, by virtue of being American, our agencies are incorruptible. Multiple non-profit organizations whose mission is to ‘rescue’ trafficking victims are here in the United States. They raise their money here but operate in other places on the globe from Central and South America to across South Asia.

When facing history’s repeating of itself, there is an added element of falsehood that still says, as America was becoming what she is today, Europeans were the only ones who traded in slaves. There is a missing and murdered indigenous women's awareness campaign with the slogan "human trafficking is not traditional". In fact, it is. The phenomenon of human trafficking, particularly that of children and women from Indian Country, is entwined in the histories of indigenous peoples all over, including those in North America. That we’ve put them ‘out of sight, out of mind’ physically, educationally, and historically does not help modern victims, perpetuates the roles of traffickers and law enforcement, and negatively impacts those rescued who are not believed or cannot find resources for healing and recovery in their communities.

Long before the Spanish flooded Mexico and other Europeans made it to the mainland of what is now the United States and Canada, indigenous peoples stole women and children for labor, for sex, and for trade of goods–to other tribes and then to the Spanish, French and English. We can’t approach the healing of communities or eradication of the modern practice without understanding the larger and historical context.  The methods of abduction and modes of travel may have changed but the basics remain the same; exploitation of vulnerable communities and individuals, the routes used to transport, and sale to the highest bidder for the maximum profit.
Andrés Reséndez’s work called The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, from which I’ll be quoting heavily, traces the historical movement of Indian slavery across the Caribbean and North America. It’s a fascinating, mind-numbing and heart-breaking accounting of how so many communities were decimated, not just by the diseases that we are told about in history lessons but by the theft and sale, particularly of women and children.

 

He begins with this:
 

“The beginnings of this other slavery are lost in the mists of time. Native peoples such as the Zaptocs, Mayas, and Aztecs took captive to use a sacrificial victims; the Iroquois waged campaigns called “mourning wars” on neighboring groups to avenge and replace their dead; and Indians in the Pacific Northwest included male and female slaves as part of the goods sent by the groom to his bride’s family to finalize marriages among the elite. Native Americans had enslaved each other for millennia, but with the arrival of Europeans, practices of captivity embedded in specific cultural contexts became commodified, expanded in unexpected ways, and came to resemble the kinds of human trafficking that are recognizable to us today.”

 

Along with the attachments we collectively have of history as we know it, or want to know it, is the idea that this way of experiencing the world, this way of being in communion with all things is that the capacity to do so belongs to a particular group of people or a specific ‘type’ of person within that group. That is not true. This way has no ownership in the same way that sage has no owner, that ‘medicines’ or ‘the medicine’ are not owned, and that Ancestors are not bound by the rules or lineages we confine our own selves to. These themes are echoed as more people try to become ‘spiritual’ by attaching to what they are presented with as truth.

For this reason and others, I actively choose not not use language associated with what is largely known as metaphysics, new-age or common spirituality. To me the nature of that language is one of conformity, a way of being ‘in’ while, on the surface, appearing to challenge established religions and atheism. It is, in my view, merely another religion that has been coopted to reflect more of a marketing strategy than sharing of truths or creating space for other truths or exploration outside a limiting framework. My nature is to move beyond the boundaries of that or any uniformity. What I speak of here is beyond the language of ‘psychic’ and is grounded in my understanding and knowledge of relationships with the visible and invisible worlds that is somewhat understood or at least recognized in the Western world as shamanism.

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