Shasta, hoping for clarity but also longing for a taste of Native American perspective, so lacking from my Native American life. In desperation I sign up for a Lakota-style vision quest in Mt. Before this point in my development, I thought I had escaped patriarchal trauma, but it slowly begins to reveal itself through the stripping. For a feisty, ambitious young woman under the impression that she is fierce, independent, and on a mission, this layer of dismemberment is probably the most painful. These clichéd metaphors are intended to sidestep the boring and mundane details of daily lackluster life. This quickly develops into a full-blown attempt to keep my head above tumultuous waves, and when this fails, I sink to the bottom, swallowed by the depths of a dark night of the soul. Before long, I am struggling for direction, frantically treading water. My research ideas are rejected (however, I am offered the option of pursuing a male professor’s research ideas instead, which I politely decline and then find myself increasingly ostracized and unsupported). In my first year of graduate studies, it creeps in slowly and overtakes me in a disorienting fog that I never saw coming. A good girl, I swallow my patriarchal lessons whole.ĭismemberment continues as aspirations and drive are stripped away. With certainty, I am confident this is an ideal approach to life. And perhaps narrow-minded, which I translate as hyper-fixated on lofty goals. I enter doctoral studies as a perfectionistic, driven 24-year-old. Initially, it is an ecstatic self- homecoming. With heaves of daring determination and a willingness to sever ties and leave all my friends and family, I finally arrive in California. A westward call whispered its beckoning since I was about eight years old. The choice clear, either become a submissive housewife like my mother or shape myself into an accomplished professional. I share my story with the hope and intention that it will serve others on parallel paths of re-membering.Ģ006. The demanding journey required much: 20+ years of Jungian analysis, countless hours weeping and screaming in Holotropic Breathwork sessions, lots of dreamwork, late night conversations with wonderful friends, notebook after notebook of journaling, a degree in women’s spirituality, another degree in transpersonal psychology, and countless prayers and ceremonies. The following story is told in bits and pieces of lived experience, woven together through blood, breath, prayer, and ritual. Dismemberment helps, but re- membering is essential. When the weapon is seeded as a self- activating force through generations of oppression, hatred, and abuse, it is particularly insidious. Like internalized racism, internalized disempowerment serves to break one down from the inside out. With time, I realized this inherent self-mistrust was inaccurate and unnecessary. I did not realize this lack of external answers was habitually turning me to look inward instead. I tried to find answers everywhere but ran into endless locked doors. Re-membering would be largely a solo journey. I knew something was terribly off in her words and actions, but it would take many years to gain understanding. Thankfully, I have always been rebellious and headstrong. “Mama, what should I put on the tests for race? White? Native American? Other?” Truly perplexed, I asked this after my first day of standardized testing in elementary school. These things were bad and would earn you a nonstop, one-way ticket to eternity in hell. Right up there with pagan (generally pronounced with a spat). Being Native American was taboo in our household. Ever strategic, she chose my father for his pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. Her dark skin, obsidian eyes, and raven-blue-black hair she regarded as an abomination, a curse. I was not allowed to go near the Catholic church, not that I felt particularly called to visit.īoth parents were disconnected in various ways from ancestral roots, but it was more explicit and malicious on my mother’s end. Not only was there was no goddess at home but none in the entire town, except perhaps a brief glimpse of her in the Catholic church, a fact my Pentecostal mother considered repulsive and heretical. Incarnating into a home devoid of goddess, I was born in 1982 into a fundamentalist Christian family in rural Tennessee to a Native American mother and a father of English, Irish, and Welsh descent.
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