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Quick Write of Fleeting Thoughts


Solitude, Change & Identity

It has occurred to me lately that I have been so immersed in a healing pattern of life that I've forgotten the tapping of my own voice... so with all good things, begins with storytelling.


I spent a lot of time in my mid-20's thinking about my identity. Part of this was due to going to school in state universities in South Dakota, where I was keenly aware of my skin being brown every time I stepped into a classroom. That didn't bother me, due to my confidence in my skill set area of English.

My love with words began with my great-grandfather's words to me as a young child, "Education is the key to beating the White man at his own game. Learn to speak English better than him."

Great-grandmother Carrie Roubideaux-Bordeaux, after listening to me tell her every fact I could recite about dinosaurs when I was only 6 years old at her kitchen table, smiled at me, laughed lightly, and replied, "Indians knew that."

This was reenforced by my paternal grandmother, Vesta Colombe, who though not a drop of Native blood in her, was a warrior in my mind for having the courage to marry a 1/2 Sioux man in the 1930's. She, along with raising a brood of 9 of her own and a few of their friends along the way, was a school teacher. She arrived at one of the first special education classroom on our reservation and took children from beds, put them in chairs and surrounded them with art, and love, and activity. 

I remember once being taken to Grandma Vesta's work as a very small girl, and after watching her students' popsicles dripping down on their bibs as they happily ate away; I was tapped hard on the shoulder and told, "Stop looking at them that way. They're no different than you."

So much shapes who we all are. I have always been so aware of what others were doing around me, and yet find myself identifying as a bit "odd" as I traverse through this middle part of my life.

There are so many life events that we never speak of. Perhaps we have so much to say sometimes that we keep to ourselves because we know that our emotions, thoughts, and feelings are so intense that it might swallow someone up if he or she is unprepared to digest what we have been thinking about.

But in healing, for my own life, I have been trying to seek a balance. Yet, I have become so quiet in my written words that I don't really know anymore what I am saving some of my thoughts for. There is a fear of giving away my formal writing because right now it belongs to me and only me.  I acknowledge that no matter what we write in the fictional character's lives through the pages of our typed words, it is challenging for me as an author to try and keep from unknowingly attaching my identity to my characters, and to keep them fictional. The fear is that of misinterpretation and false exposure.

Being half of one culture; and the half of another has not made me whole. Yet, I am not fragmented; I am just an observer who has become too self-aware and sometimes unwilling to encourage real human interaction. And in my 20's, I did find a solution to this pattern of thinking that led to self doubt.

I imagined one day myself as a little girl of about six. I saw myself doing my favorite thing, which was riding my bike around my then small hometown of no more than seven hundred people. I was happy to be alone, to feel the wind, to peddle around, and avoid the streets where the ankle-biting dogs down one street would be found. I take myself back to the imaginary photo of me, with my one pant leg rolled up on the right side, standing outside of one of my best friend's houses with my bike leaning against my left leg as I kept ahold of the handlebars. I was just standing there (maybe in my favorite terry cloth shorts and matching tank top, and so-awesome 1981 headband), asking myself if I should go knock on the door and invite my friend to come ride bike with me. It took all of 1 second to decide that I was fine on my own, and I remember jumping back on my bike, and peddling away.

This one memory is deeply rooted in the acceptance of my own identity. I was a free child. I most often made choices as a very young person to keep to myself and have always enjoyed my own company. Solitude is part of my core identity. 

Change begins with me

I do a lot of work in change, but I've come to an understanding that my own development and change must parallel things I do outside of my home. There are always those cycles that we inherit that need work. Right now, I am keen at identifying those that don't suit my life or my philosophy of being at peace with those around me, and I've simply given myself the permission to let go. But it is through identifying things I don't like about others, that I really examine myself thoroughly about.

Another aspect of change is to seek beauty often; for when you are as critical of a thinker as I can be, you begin to see the world through a filter of "what if," and "it should be," or "I should become." It's been a physical exercise of mine to appreciate the freedom of the moment, to speak out loud of thanks and gratitude, and to find two good things around me for each thing that I consider "bad." This too heals me.

Writing about thinking

These are the thoughts that I have been carrying with me for the past week: 1) My identity and my voice and the validity or invalidity of me telling my own story; 2) the "Me Too" Movement was not 100% "Me Too"; and 3) Some plants are made to struggle in their growth process so that they will strive and become stronger plants.

Driving along the road here on the Rosebud, between what is called "Meyer's Trailer Court" by those of us in my generation and older, I caught a listen to a public radio show hosted on the local Tribal radio station. I'd long missed the title and was only about ten minutes from home, but I heard a young girl from the Navajo Nation speaking about film making. She had many messages and points to think about but what resonated with me was the fight in her voice which claimed a right to be an indigenous artist who should be invited to be a credited, integral part of filmmaking projects, rather than to be asked to be a "cultural advisor." 

Through her experiences, I felt a sisterhood in my own experiences as a writer in collecting and managing my material for the books on my own experiences at Standing Rock, the movement. I don't want to capture a glimpse of my life, nor brand my own experiences as the Pan-Native American experience either. I have goals and plenty of material, but the colonized brain keeps asking me, "Who would really want to read a book these days? And who, begging further, wants to hear your story?"

While I value the work of all allies of Indigenous peoples, I too feel excluded from conversations about myself and my own people. Throughout my life, I have seen that the allies to my worlds are valuable and necessary, yet do not always include me as a valuable member of that thought community. It is as though it does really take a different lens outside of the gritty one that comes off of the Reservation, for "the outside" to want to try and "understand" the "Indian experience."

I could write another column on why my brain leads to colonized thinking, but I will just say that I try to recognize my thinking patterns when they are corrupted, and make all attempts to re-indigenousize my thinking. (This is where I have been, and am just needing that small catalyst to move me forward. I do have a time constraint coming, and that always served well in grad school, so 'here's here' to the hope of a finished project in a tight time frame.)

#Me Too or the "Me Too" Movement on social media was very unsettling to me. I fully support the movement and the voice of victims of sexual violence to advocate for the rights to not be violated. I have nothing but positive things to say of in support of the movement itself.

The experience, however, for some people who are survivors of sexual violence are so terrifying that they will never identify with anything that will "out them" as a survivor. So, every time I hear a reference on media about #MeToo, I wince just a little bit, because I know so many women who cannot for reasons of their own, Tweet, Post, Blog, or Insta their story because they are still afraid of reliving, or even acknowledging, that abuse.

When I heard via a different show-or-another that I was watching or listening to in the past week, a statement about plants was very impressionable. It was said that if the particular plant on the show (I can't remember what it was) were to be made to struggle, that it would become stronger and the struggle would yield a better result. 

Wow. Now, I am Native, mind you, but in that moment, I had serious bonding with plants.

In closing, this is not meant to be a serious writing today, nor one for my career. It was an old fashioned exercise in the use of written word. Stay grounded, my friends and God bless you all, including all of our allies in and around, "Indian Country."

Follow me on Twitter @ColombeLynne or Like my page on Facebook Lynne M. Colombe, author - Wopila!




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