On Truth

Photo by Taras Chernus on Unsplash
I crave to stop bearing all the wounds
Of this place on my own narrow body.
But I also want to be a person who stays,
who goes on feeling anguish
where anguish is due…”
Barbara Kingsolver
In the autumn of 2018, one year after a Navajo police officer sent me a missing persons flyer and asked, “What do you feel from this?,” I met with a female elected Representative of the Blackfeet Tribe in Montana. I hoped that a Native American woman in a position of power would be willing to help me with information I had regarding a sex trafficking network within the Native American and First Nations communities across the continent. I wanted her to help me in a way that no tribal, local or federal government agency had in the year I had been steeped in what I call The Fuckery.
Her response was to suggest that I write a novel because “even if you change everyone’s name, they’ll know that you are talking about them.” Coming on the heels of the discussion about how white people have historically created fictionalizations, changing names of people and places to accommodate their own story of colonization and decimation, I was floored. She had not heard herself speak and chose not to hear me speak any more. “You are a voice for the voiceless,” she had said mere moments before. Yet she did not want to hear and I did not have the courage to shout, “They have voices! They are speaking and crying out! This is real and true horror that needs no fiction to add to the drama!”
What follows is not fiction. As these pages develop, some names may be changed to protect a few people and the timeline has been condensed. The rest is as true as the breath you draw.
True things are often hard sometimes; hard to wrap the head around and for the heart to acknowledge. I recognize that and honor it when others’ head and hearts can’t comprehend truths of ‘things best forgotten’. Women are told that a lot. “Best to forget” the rape, the incest, the bruised thighs and blackened eyes. These, among the many, many, things that someone else has decided is ‘best’ cannot be forgotten. They live in our cells and sinew.
It is one of the reasons that I do this work, all my work, with the foundational principle of truth.
Someone once told me regarding the healing work: “Folks see that you have not agenda but healing, however that comes. They see one without guile and ruthlessly loving. These qualities are mighty rare.” This isn’t different than that.
What I share within these pages is the truth as it’s been told to me. I’m limited in my capacities to fact-check so I’m left with choosing, “I don’t know,” when I don’t and not embellishing anything that comes through. For the same reasons I’ve chosen the past fifteen years to not use click-bait or fear-based marketing, to participate in performative ceremony, and go onto radio shows that like to manipulate listeners into, “Buy more! (To be more spiritual!)”
It’s hard to speak truth to power when the power structures and underneath their shaded shelter don’t want to hear it and don’t want it told. Not only do institutions proverbially circle the wagons to protect themselves, so do individuals. In My Secret is Safe with Your Secret, I talk a bit about that.
I speak now of truth (though I’ve done it before in different ways) because I’ve recently been reminded how fickle the reception of truth is. I’ve learned again how, when examination of truths reveals what’s underneath superficial calls for righteousness and a red hands over mouths: identity, fear, historical trauma combined with current abuses of women by institutions of power, and organized crime, truth becomes a thing to avoid. Especially when it’s delivered by someone who exists outside the ‘rules of the game’. I’m a white woman whose Medicine Way isn’t limited to ceremony, sex, tribe or language. My Way is not ‘between two worlds’—it’s knowing that there aren’t two. The Medicine is the truth: the highest expression of love that falls outside of how it’s supposed to be, these myths around what love and truth and beauty and grace and god and gardens of eden.
Around this time last year, I spoke with a respected woman from Ft. Berthold who is esteemed for her work with journalism and indigenous communities. The initial conversation was about a long-dead, fairly famous woman welcomed. In the work related to the long-dead woman in question, then and now, I'm trusted, despite my whiteness. However, what opens doors and questions regarding this particular dead woman & history, slams it shut when we begin talking about those murdered in the modern era.
When she attempted to reengage me this past spring, I replied,
“I’m going to pass on talking about _____. Until people are willing to listen to the truth is about the many
hundreds of remains of "less important" women buried in unmarked, unhonored places and help me bring
them home, then I don't want to expand any more energy. Nothing has changed from before: if she wants to
come home bring her home…”
In the summer of 2017, just as my work around MMIW was beginning, though I didn’t know it, an old Cree man said to me (because he did know it):
“Don’t say anything to anyone. I cannot tell anyone who you are or why you are here. You must keep you
mouth shut, not even share your prayers with anyone. When you give your prints in a sweat, hold your tongue.
Do not say what you are praying for or who you are to be working with. Say nothing. Hold everything inside.”
Behind those old Man’s words were deeply held fears passed down by those who ‘taught these things’. There was a time, not as long ago as many may think, that holding everything inside is what kept individuals alive and communities intact; when the threat of the ‘savage’ accessing the powers that be and to Be as they were meant to meant death for those who spoke allowed, sang and danced with the rhythm of the heart of all that is. Those who taught these things were also taught by others who tried desperately to erase families from their own identities, histories, stories and, for some, existence.
To be someone who hears prayers, to whom prayers are delivered, and be told, “You must keep you mouth shut, not even share your prayers with anyone,” is quite the thing.
My prayer is the same I one I prayed in early 2021 when I sent a letter to about 500 elected leaders in Indian Country across the continent:
“These women and girls are more than an acronym, hashtag, photo-op, or muse for artistic expression. They
may not be drawing breath but their voices are carried by the wind and sand, waters and winged ones to me.
Help me bring them home and prevent another generation from meeting the same fate.”
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This is for those who have been disappeared into a darkness that is right in the midst of our lives; for the Ariel Begays, Misty Rain Bedonies, Ashley Loring-Heavyrunners and Jermaine Charlos across the continent and the world. And, for the little girl with a pink flower in her hair. They have voices, they pray prayers. Those prayers have been heard. Their prayers, brought by bones whistling on the wind, have been heard. This is the answer to those prayers. This is their call for justice.
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