Just Trying to Escape the Pain

 My cardiologist recommended that I start taking one baby aspirin every day because of a sluggish artery and angina. I didn’t give it much thought until I took it out of the package and held the plastic bottle in my hand. My mind immediately zipped back to a time when I was 4 or 5 years old.

I remember kneeling on the top of the sink when I dropped the glass bottle in the sink. I don’t remember climbing up there, but I remember the yummy orange taste of the baby aspirin as I chewed a handful of it. My mom would give me an aspirin when I skinned my knee, and so, I associated it with pain, even though they tasted so good. 

That day, I was feeling a pain that I couldn’t explain to my mother because it partly included her. I had been up late, crying in bed as my parents yelled at each other in the living room, 10 feet from my bedroom door. The next day, my head hurt, but my heart hurt, too. I didn’t want my mother to know that I had heard them. Honestly, I was afraid of her. I was afraid that she would yell at me, like she had with my dad, and blame me for listening. Then, I remembered the orange-flavored baby aspirin.

When the glass bottle fell into the sink, it didn’t break, but it did make a lot of noise. I immediately heard my mother outside of the bathroom door, “Kathy? Kathy, what are you doing?”

“Nothing,” was not the right answer.

“Kathy, open this door now!” she yelled from the other side of the locked door. 

Shakily, I scrambled down from the counter and opened the door without thinking to shut the cabinet door or grab the empty bottle from the sink.

She immediately put two and two together and we were on the way to the hospital to have my stomach pumped.

I wouldn’t call it a suicide attempt, but I was trying to escape the pain, the emotional pain as much as the physical pain of a dysfunctional household. It would be the first of many attempts to escape the pain.

To Be or Not to Be - Native Enough

 Bristol Bay Campus Land Acknowledgement: We honor the indigenous people of the Yu’pik, Dena’ina, Sugpiaq, and Unangan that have given their land for the education of their people. We recognize the Curyung Tribe of Dillingham whose land the main campus resides on. We recognize the indigenous tribes of Unalaska, Saint Paul, Togiak, New Stuyahok, and King Salmon for their contributions.

It has become common practice for every University meeting to begin with a verbal Land Acknowledgement.

I attended a webinar last week called “Beyond Land Acknowledgement.” We had been discussing this very topic in our weekly Bristol Bay Campus meetings about how to not let our reading of the Land Acknowledgement at the beginning of every meeting become rote, which I think it has become. My anticipation for the webinar was that it would provide meaningful conversation and perhaps even some practical suggestions about how to make our Land Acknowledgement have greater depth and sincerity. That is not where the conversation between the four indigenous speakers went. Instead, it veered off down the road of blame and even making fun of white Americans who, in one speaker’s words, think it’s cool to claim Native American status on college applications because they figure that they must have a Native American great grandmother or someone kin to that in their family tree. That’s when I left the webinar.

As one-eighth Blackfoot (my daughters, at one-sixteenth, even have enough quantum to live on a reservation), I take exception to that. No, I have never lived on a reservation. No, I do not have a tribal identification number. No, was not raised with Blackfoot traditions or culture. Finally, no, that does not make me less Native American than the obviously mixed-race man who was making those comments in the webinar.

This week, for my “Images of the North'' graduate literature class, we read The Right to be Cold by Sheila Watt-Cloutier. Even though my story is much different from Watt-Cloutier, whose children are equally as indigenous (or unindigenous, however one chooses to look at it), as I am, I commiserate with her struggle of not looking native enough. Breaking through those stereotypes, and even using them to her advantage, she was able to make great strides for her people as well as for people around the world. As for myself, for the previous three semesters, I was taking courses toward my PhD in Indigenous Studies at UAF but was feeling that I wasn’t native enough to continue down that path and stay true to my own background, which I’m very proud of and felt that it was being belittled. For that reason, I have switched directions in my studies. Will I go back? I don’t know. However, I will continue to make Climate Change a focal point in all courses that I teach, and I will continue to impress upon my students the importance of local, indigenous knowledge as we move forward into an uncertain future for our state and our planet.

Because I don’t have a tribal identification number, since my grandfather opted to live “white” rather than be moved to a reservation, which meant giving up all current and future government and tribal benefits for himself and his descendants, I have never been able to claim that status on a college or job application. So, that webinar speaker who made those claims does not know what he’s talking about, and in my grandfather’s words, “Never judge a man before you’ve walked a moon in his moccasins.”