7
“Seven generations ago someone was praying for us. We are the answer to their prayers. We take this responsibility seriously. When you are working with children, it is sacred work. Our children are sacred.”
—Tribal Court Judge (The Judges Journal, Vol. 50, #2, Spring 2011)
“One by one, as the years pass me by, I still find it so amazing that the grief and trauma that I still carry from being separated at birth from my mother continues to follow me around and exposes itself at the most inconvenient times. I feel like my heart and spirit is that of a gypsy where although I physically stay in one place, my soul keeps wandering around searching and gets so lost….. I often stuff it back into its compartment but at times it just creeps out with no warning and slaps me upside the head and I am forced to confront the emotions time and time again. I don’t know that I will ever actually organize this all within myself and find a place of comfort and peace with it all.”
—Janey Martin Hart, Red Lake Ojibwe Split Feather Adoptee, 2011 (sent to Trace)
“…Lorraine ‘Punkin’ Shananaquet, a healer and a member of the Tribal Council of the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians, said the echoes of the grief, pain and loss continue across the generations. ‘My muscle and my blood remember things.’ She said the day of remembrance could bring emotional, mental, spiritual and physical healing as Native people struggle to regain their language, family, culture and ceremony.’”
(Source: Tribe remembers boarding school era, begins healing in Michigan, www.morningsun.com)
“As in this ancient story, as throughout all of human history, and in my deepest family traditions, the ultimate gift of story is two-fold; that at least one soul remains who can tell the story, and that by recounting of the tale, the greater forces of love, mercy, generosity and strength are continuously called into being in the world… the telling of a story is considered an essential spiritual practice… Tales, legends, myths and folklore are learned, developed, numbered and preserved the way a pharmacopoeia is kept. A collection of cultural stories, and especially family stories, is considered as necessary for long and strong life as decent food, decent relationship and decent work. The life of a keeper of stories is a combination of researcher, healer, linguist in symbolic language, teller of stories, inspiratrice, God talker and time traveler…”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., award-winning writer, psychoanalyst, human rights organizer and adoptee, from her book THE GIFT OF STORY